The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [215]
I was distracted then by the light of another lantern, eerily reflected from the glistening walls. For a moment I was frightened, in case it was someone I didn’t know — someone who had been here all along without anyone suspecting. But it was only Mortimer Gray.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, although there was no reason at all why he shouldn’t have been there.
“Following your trail,” he said. “Is that…?”
“The tenth passenger. A life raft for AMIs. If all else fails, try something organic. It didn’t work. She’s dead.”
He looked at me curiously, as if he couldn’t decipher the tone of my voice. He knelt down on the far side of the android’s body and made his own search for signs of life. He found none.
“Is anything working?” he asked.
“Nothing I’ve found so far. I haven’t found the fuser yet. Before she died she said she’d checked it out and found nothing. Why were you following my trail?”
He seemed slightly embarrassed. “It’s not important,” he murmured, presumably meaning that its importance couldn’t compare with the enormity of the fact that someone had just died in my presence. He was an emortal from a world of emortals. He didn’t know that I had run across corpses before.
“There’s nothing we can do,” I reminded him. “What did you want?”
He stirred uncomfortably. “I’ve been thinking about what you said to me. About Diana Caisson. I wanted to ask you…what she was like.”
I was surprised, although I shouldn’t have been. Seeds of curiosity usually germinate eventually, taking advantage of any existential pause.
“She was like her name,” I told him. It was an answer I’d had ready for some time.
“Diana?”
“Caisson.”
He didn’t understand. He’d never taken the trouble to look the word up, perhaps never having realized that it was a word which once had a meaning — several meanings, in fact.
“Among other things,” I told him, “A caisson was an ammunition chest. A box used to store explosives. That was Diana. From time to time, she exploded. She couldn’t help it. It was the way she was. People thought that if only she’d stuck harder at her biofeedback training, or equipped herself with more careful IT, she’d have been more controlled, but the problem — if it was a problem — was deeper than that. It was just the way she was. It had its upside. She could be exciting as well as excited.”
Whatever he had expected, that wasn’t it.
“I’m not like that,” he observed, unnecessarily.
“Quite the opposite,” I judged.
“As I said before,” he added, “I’m the product of an engineer’s genius. It doesn’t matter where the egg and sperm that made me were taken from. Nobody has a biological father or a mother any more — not in any meaningful sense.”
“I don’t believe that it was in her genes,” I told him. “If it had been a matter of crude biochemistry, the IT would have suppressed it easily enough. It was a facet of the world in which we lived — a way of responding to circumstance. It wasn’t something the engineers cut out of her egg when they made you. It was part of her. You’re a different person, in a different world. It does matter that you’re her son, because everything matters in defining who we are — not at the trivial level of looks or responses to stimuli, but at the level of knowing where we fit into the scheme of things. Where we came from, and what we inherit. Inheritance isn’t just a matter of the shapes of chins, the color of eyes, and a tendency to sulk. It’s a matter of history, progress, and meaning. It’s all significant: not just our own names, but the names of everyone connected to us.”
All he said in reply to that, although he was still staring at me curiously, was: “My biological father’s name was Evander Gray.”
“Mine was Anonymous,” I told him. “My mother too. I always envied Damon Hart, although I understood why he changed his own name. That’s part of it too. Differentiation is just as important as connection.”
After a pause, he said: “Is there anything we can do for the android? Do you think Niamh