The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [57]
In the Outer System, every rock was precious, and every block of ice even more so. That, apparently, was one of the reasons why the ship carrying Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray from Earth had been exposed to the risk of close encounters with snowballs. The settlers of the Oort Halo had been deflecting new comets sunwards for centuries; although the bigger lumps were greedily intercepted, the residual small debris was pouring into the inner system like an everlasting blizzard. That was, apparently, another cause of tension and disputation between the Confederation and the Earthbound.
It didn’t require any data-trawling skill to discover that Emily Marchant was a major player in the Confederation and all its major disputes. She had the money, the prestige, the talent, the know-how, and the charisma to make her opinions felt. She was festooned with painfully quaint nicknames — the Chief Cheerleader of the High Kickers and the Great Architect of the Ice Palaces, to name but two — but her most common label was “the Titaness.” There was even an ultrasmart spaceship with the same name. She was, it seemed, a Snow Queen of sufficient majesty to put the petty villain of Christine Caine’s favorite kiddie flick to shame.
Unfortunately, Emily Marchant wasn’t inbound on the ship that was hurtling inwards to pay the respects of the outer system to the newly awakened Adam Zimmerman; she obviously had better things to do. The Titanian envoy en route from the Jovian moons was a much younger and far less influential woman named Niamh Horne.
I knew that the Irish name Niamh was pronounced to rhyme with “Eve,” but even someone as intrigued by names as I was couldn’t make anything significant of that. Nor could anyone — even someone as paranoid as me — have found the slightest potentially meaningful connection between Emily Marchant or Niamh Horne and Christine Caine or me. It wasn’t until I checked out Mortimer Gray that I found one of those — and it wasn’t one that anyone could have expected, unless the wonderful children of Excelsior knew much more about me than they were letting on.
According to the records available on Excelsior, Mortimer Gray’s career was a model of honest endeavor motivated entirely by intellectual curiosity. Unlike Michael Lowenthal’s, his entire life seemed to be an open book, and apart from the probable coincidence of his having shared a couple of character-forming experiences with Emily Marchant he seemed unlikely to have any hidden agenda. But right up there at the head of his basic biography was a name I recognized: a name that, in all probability, no one but me in the entire universe would have recognized.
Mortimer Gray’s biological mother — who had, of course, died long before he was born — had been Diana Caisson. My Diana Caisson. Damon Hart’s Diana Caisson. There was no doubt about her being the same one; her birth date was right up there alongside his, although her death date was given as “unknown.”
What could it mean?
So far as I could tell, it couldn’t possibly mean anything. How could anyone have known that I had been acquainted with the donor of the egg that had been engineered to produce Mortimer Gray? Why would anyone, including Mortimer Gray, have cared? Surely it had to be a coincidence. There was no imaginable reason why it should be anything else.
I had to switch tack then, so I began gathering information about Excelsior and its peculiar inhabitants, hoping to obtain some insight into their possible motives for involving themselves in Adam Zimmerman’s resurrection.
It didn’t take long to find out that they were even more peculiar than I thought. I had been thinking of Davida Berenike Columella as a girl and her fellows as a sisterhood, but that wasn’t strictly accurate. It wasn’t just the secondary sexual characteristics that arrive with puberty