The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [219]
As time went by, of course, our collective mood became increasingly apprehensive. Mortimer Gray remained relentlessly upbeat, although I wasn’t the only one who thought that he was trying a little too hard to keep up appearances. Surprisingly, the other person who seemed unusually unperturbed was Davida Berenike Columella — but I figured that she too had something to prove, in respect of the alleged superiority of her brand of posthumanity.
I did my best to help out with the attempts to get things working, but my expertise was a thousand years behind the cutting edge of modern technology and I was way out of my depth. In the end, we three freezer vets had to accept that our primitive skills were unequal even to the task of making the drains work.
I reassured Christine that if the worst came to the worst and someone actually had to make a descent into the microworld’s roughhewn bowels, she would only be the second-choice candidate on grounds of size. The thought didn’t seem to console her overmuch. She was perhaps the most fretful of us all. I tried to reassure her further with the suggestion that Eido and Charity could not be far away from us and that Eido’s first priority, if she had survived, would be to reunite herself with Alice Fleury — but as the hours passed and Eido did not come, Christine became increasingly convinced that we were doomed.
“Eido and Child of Fortune weren’t the only ones who knew where we were,” I reminded her. “The Snow Queen and Child of Fortune tried to make sure that everyone knew it. I don’t know what kind of hardware they used as coats for the viruses that killed her, but if the bad guys could hit us with clever bullets the good guys can certainly get a ship out to us.”
“Maybe they transmitted the hostile software electromagnetically,” she said. I would have liked to reassure her that it was unlikely, if not impossible, but when I checked with Lowenthal he assured me that it was only too probable.
“Everything depends on our orbit,” was Lowenthal’s opinion of the time it might take for relief to arrive. “If it’s orthodox, we’ll be okay — but if it’s highly eccentric, or angled away from the ecliptic plane, we could be in trouble. I don’t know whether we’re inbound or outbound, or how close to the sun our orbit might take us. What I do know is that if we don’t make rapid progress in the art of improvisation, we won’t make much impact as microworlders. Our chances of setting up a working ecosystem don’t seem to be getting any less remote.”
Given that we had no functional biotech at all, let alone a nursery full of Helier wombs, our chances of becoming the founding fathers of a new posthuman tribe seemed to me a good deal worse than remote — although I wasn’t entirely sure what Alice Fleury might be capable of, reproduction-wise, if she were forced to extremes.
“If only those SusAn cocoons had been isolated and self-sufficient,” Lowenthal lamented, “we could have woken up when it was all over.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But self-sufficiency is relative. We’d all have died in our sleep within a year, unless we could be taken down to six degrees Absolute.”
“In deep space,” he reminded me, “that’s not so very difficult. It could have been rigged, if Morty’s old friend had bothered to put in the time and effort.” I thought that a trifle ungrateful, given that la Reine had been working under difficult conditions — but Mortimer Gray wasn’t within earshot, so Lowenthal wasn’t guarding his words as carefully as usual.
“So Christine, Adam, and I might have slept for another thousand years,” I said, carrying the flight of fancy forward, “and woken