The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [80]
Niamh Horne was obviously the one in charge now that we were on her territory, and everyone looked to her to take the lead — which she did with an imperious manner that seemed almost insulting. She swept Adam Zimmerman away with her, and her two cronies moved with effortless ease to form a barrier between the two of them and the rest of us.
We had to move two abreast, and that left Davida looking distinctly spare as Lowenthal and his bodyguard fell in behind the two cyborgs. Gray motioned to me to carry on, obviously figuring that Christine had more need of his support than I did, so I tried to fall into step with the cryogenicist.
“Congratulations,” I muttered. “You brought it off. He looks as fit as a flea.”
It wasn’t an expression she recognized or appreciated, but she acknowledged the compliment anyway, adding: “This is as new to me as it is to you. I’ve never been aboard a Titanian ship before. Not that there’ll be much actually to see. It’s just a minimicroworld, after all.”
“How’s Zimmerman taking it?” I asked, curiously. “He can’t have expected to be away so long.” I diplomatically refrained from asking how pissed off he was at the Foundation’s board of directors for letting him lie so long.
“He’s fine,” she assured me. “Excited. Interested. Delighted.” She didn’t sound like someone trying to convince herself, but the list was distinctly clipped. Unlike me, she was used to operating in zero-gee, so whatever discomfort she was feeling couldn’t have the same cause as mine. Movement wasn’t doing my internal organs any favors; they still seemed to be in dispute with one another as to how to arrange themselves now that they no longer had to fall in line with the dictates of gravity.
I was too far back in the column to hear more than the odd few words of the commentary that Niamh Horne was delivering to Adam Zimmerman — she wasn’t making any strenuous effort to raise her voice — but it seemed to me that Davida was absolutely right about there not being much actually to see. There were brightly decorated corridors. There were multitudinous display screens. There were sphincters opening the way into fixed pods, and blister patches where new pods could be formulated if required. There were suggestive curves and lumps.
On the other hand, there were no instrument panels full of flashing lights, no levers for human hands to pull, no wheels for human hands to turn, no triggers for human fingers to squeeze. I saw no bridgehead, no control room, no recreation area. There were a few crewmen hanging around, who might have been working but were far more likely to be trying to catch a glimpse of Adam Zimmerman, while proudly showing off their own posthumanity. The fabers looked weird enough, and the cyborg fabers even weirder, but they weren’t as ostentatious about their modifications as Solantha Handsel, and the way they looked at me reminded me that I was the alien one, the one who belonged in a cage.
If I’d known more about what I was supposed to be looking at I’d probably have got more out of the excursion, but Adam Zimmerman was getting the sole benefit of the running commentary and Mortimer Gray probably had more interesting information to whisper in Christine’s ear than Davida offered to me. The one thing that was impressed upon me was how big the ship was, and even that seemed to be a kind of statement: an insistence on behalf of the inhabitants of the Outer System that they, not the Earthbound, were the masters of modern technology and the custodians of future progress. But as I looked back at all the posthumans who were looking at me, I began to see something of the complexity of their society.
Even if the Earthbound could be firmly kept in their place, I guessed, the question of how to distribute ownership and control of the solar system’s usable mass wasn’t going to be an easy one to settle. If I really had lived long enough to