The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [68]
“I haven’t made up my mind,” I told him. “Maybe I’ll wait to see what Adam decides. And Christine, of course. We true humans may need to stick together for a while, until we figure out exactly what’s what.”
He condescended to laugh at that — and having made whatever point he had intended to make, he passed on, leaving me to face the curiosity of Mortimer Gray.
“I’m delighted to meet you,” the historian said, with what seemed like touching honesty after Lowenthal’s practiced diplomatic manner. “It’s not often one has the opportunity to meet a witness to history as remote as yours.”
“There are thousands more just over the way,” I reminded him. “Although you might need to let some of them lie for a few decades more, until they ripen to the appropriate remoteness.”
He actually blushed. “I’m sorry,” he said, just as honestly. “Michael told me what happened to you. It must be a terrible shock, to have been forgotten like that.”
“The shock,” I told him, drily, “is in being remembered. Everyone tells me that I’ve been lucky, because there are so many more possibilities open to me nowadays.”
“That’s true, of course,” he conceded, “but I can understand why you might think you’ve paid a heavy price for the privilege. To be separated from everyone and everything you knew, and not even to know why…it must be difficult. You’ll adjust, though. Michael and I belong to the last generation raised by mortal parents, so we understand loss a little better than the generation which came after us. We’ve also lived through major catastrophes — the Coral Sea Disaster, the North American Basalt Flow — so we have a better understanding of grief and its associated emotions than we might have expected or wished for. You and I aren’t so very different, even though you’ve yet to decide which particular form of posthumanity to embrace. You’re very young, by our standards. In time, you’ll adapt fully to the new Earth, no matter how strange it may seem at first. By the time you’re my age…”
“I haven’t made up my mind whether to go to Earth,” I told him, figuring that it was about time I interrupted. “May I ask you a question about something that’s been troubling me?”
“Of course,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of an authentic sucker.
“Why does Michael Lowenthal have a bodyguard with him?”
Unfortunately, Mortimer Gray’s act was no act. He laughed, as if at a simple misunderstanding. “Solantha isn’t a bodyguard,” he assured me, blithely. “Cyborganization is mostly a matter of fashion, on Earth at least. Life in the outer system requires a degree of functional cyborgization, but it’s purely a matter of aesthetics at home. Did you think he was worried about meeting Christine Caine?”
“No,” I said. I figured that I might as well go all the way, given that he didn’t seem to be taking me seriously. “I wondered whether he was worried about meeting Niamh Horne, and the possibility of war breaking out between Earth and the Outer System.”
Gray seemed genuinely puzzled. “Where did you get that idea from?” he asked. “Humankind hasn’t had a war since…well, before you were born. Emortals don’t fight wars — they have too accurate a notion of the value of life.”
“You don’t think blowing up North America and plunging Earth into nuclear winter counts as an act of war?” I said, feigning astonishment. “In my day, most people thought that every stomach upset was probably the first shot in the next plague war.”
Mortimer Gray stared at me, seemingly anxious as well as