The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [81]
I hadn’t tried to read up on Mortimer Gray’s theories of history, but I thought I could make a fair guess at Michael Lowenthal’s ideological standpoint, given that he had been born and bred within the Hardinist Cabal. His view had to be that firm distinctions of ownership needed to be made, however inequitable they might be, in order to protect the system’s resources from wastage. His aim had to be the stabilization — maybe even the robotization — of the patterns of resource exploitation, in the interests of building a system that could endure forever, or at least until the Afterlife arrived. There might be a dozen or a hundred different ways of setting up some such stable situation, but there had to be a thousand or a million different ways of destabilizing it, so however many disputes Lowenthal might be embroiled in, Niamh Horne had to be embroiled in a great many more. And no matter how convinced Mortimer Gray might be that the posthuman races had put away the violent habits of their ancestors, I had no difficulty at all imagining those kinds of disputes extending into warfare — even the kinds of warfare that could exterminate whole ecospheres and civilizations.
It seemed to me that we had been walking for a long way before disaster struck, although that might have been an illusion based in the unfamiliarity of the way I was walking.
When disaster did strike, however, it seemed that a certain conspicuously lacking equality was restored. When the lights turned red and the mechanical voice began booming out from every direction, everybody — including Niamh Horne and her cyborg chums — was suddenly thrust into unknown existential territory.
The reaction of the locals strongly suggested that one of the things modern spaceship crews never bothered to practice was lifeboat drill. Their IT was supposed to insulate them against the worst effects of panic, but their immunity was purely physiological and it didn’t inhibit the initial burst of adrenalin that prepared them for fight or flight. They jumped like scalded cats — and if the wildness of their eyes could be believed, the fear that set in thereafter wasn’t about to submit meekly to chemical calming.
Extreme danger! the mechanical voice said, displaying a fine flair for melodrama. All crew and passengers to emergency life support. Immediate response required. All crew and passengers to emergency life support. Extreme danger! Immediate response required.
Nobody seemed to know which way to go. We had been shown preformed pods and generative blisters aplenty, and had stared at them with the dutiful interest expected of interested tourists, even though they looked exactly the same as the pods on Excelsior that served as transportation devices and VE immersion suits — but none of us, including Niamh Horne, knew how to find or manifest the right kind of pod, or to open it. None of us knew which way to run.
I didn’t even know how to run, when the only thing holding me to the “floor” was the floor itself. Fortunately, the floor and the walls did know what to do. They were not only smart, but the kind of smart that didn’t need rehearsals. The real function of the mechanical voice wasn’t to urge us to action but to prepare us to be acted upon.
The corridors, which had seemed to my ungrateful eye to be merely corridors, had abilities that might have been explained to Adam Zimmerman, but came as a complete surprise to me. I wasn’t in any state to notice exactly how they coped with the fact that we had been walking two abreast in our horribly ungainly fashion, but they sorted us out with no difficulty at all. They closed in on us, and engulfed us.
Maybe Niamh Horne and her fellow crew members knew enough to be reflexively grateful for that, but I hadn