The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [220]
“I offered you a job myself,” he reminded me. “The offer’s still open if you want it.”
“And Christine?” I asked.
“Her too,” he confirmed.
“She didn’t want to go to Earth last time I asked.”
“Do you?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “But it might be best for we freezer vets to stick together.”
“Adam Zimmerman will come back with me,” he assured me, with the air of one who’s checked his facts. “he’s not ready for robotization, Tyre, or Excelsior just yet. He wants to come home.”
It occurred to me, when I eventually took my opportunity to make the same check, while we were both hiding out in the tunnels for the sake of a dose of clean air, that Adam Zimmerman and I had never even been properly introduced.
“You can’t go home,” I advised him. “It isn’t home any more.”
“Yes it is,” he told me. “It always will be. No matter how much it changes, it’ll always be home. I know they’ve decivilized Manhattan three times over, but it’ll always be Manhattan to me. It has the air, the gravity, the ocean…and the history. There’s Jerusalem too.”
“Jerusalem’s a bomb crater,” I told him. “The only fusion bomb ever to be exploded on the surface. A monument to suicidal hatred. Even the latest Gaean Restoration left it untouched.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “But it’s still Jerusalem.”
It seemed more diplomatic not to mention the Via Dolorosa. “And the Hardinist Cabal is still grateful for what you did for them twelve hundred years ago,” I said, instead. “We all inherit our history, whether we like it or not.”
He looked me in the eye then, and said: “Whatever you may have heard, I really did do it. Without me, they’d never have contrived such a steep collapse or cleaned up so efficiently. I really was the only man who understood the systems well enough to pull off the coup. They thought they were using me, but they weren’t. I was using them — their money, their greed, their ambition. They were just the means I used to commit the crime. I really am the man who stole the world.”
“And all because you were afraid of dying, desperate to reach the Age of Emortality.”
“A perfect crime requires a perfect motive,” he told me. “But at the end of the day, all art is for art’s sake. Just between you and me, I did it because I could, and because I was the only one who could. You can understand that, can’t you, Madoc? The others don’t, but you do.”
He was a good judge of character. I’d always prided myself on the quality, as well as the careful modesty, of my criminal mind. “I’d have done the same myself,” I assured him. “But you’ll never be able to do it again, will you? It was a once-in-a-lifetime performance.”
“No one will ever be able to do it again,” he told me, with quiet satisfaction. “I got in just in the nick of time. Within another ten years, whether it was done or not, the smart software would have become too smart to cheat. I was the last of the human buccaneers, Madoc, the last of the authentic soldiers of fortune. Now, I’ll have to find something else — assuming they can get to us before the stink kills us all.”
“They’ll still expect a decision, you know,” I told him. “They’ll still want to know who wins the golden apple in the beauty contest: Davida, Alice, or the Snow Queen.”
He understood the allusion. “Paris was an idiot,” he said. “He should have named his own price. That’s what I’ll do. The hell with Aphrodite.”
“Me too,” I told him. “What did you have in mind?”
“At present,” he said, “there’s nothing on my mind but shit, even while I’m way down here. I think I’ll wait till I have a clearer head before making any important decisions.”
“Wise move,” I agreed. “Even if there’s time to try everything, it’s as well to get your priorities in order.”
Later, I raised the same point with Christine Caine, more by way of distraction than anything else. I told her about the beauty contest, and asked her whether, in view of what she now knew about her essentially unmurderous self, she