The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [99]
She opened the door cautiously, then stood back to admit Mortimer Gray. He was carrying a bowl, a spoon, and a water bottle, all of them molded in plastic — but not the uninspiring gray stuff that made up the walls. The bowl and spoon seemed to my admittedly uneducated eye to be modern. The water bottle was unsealed.
“It’s only flavored gruel, I’m afraid,” he said. “Guaranteed nutritionally adequate for your kind, however — and we managed to master the microwave oven, so it’s warm without being desiccated.”
“What about me?” Christine wanted to know.
Gray was too polite to answer, so he just gestured with his full hands to remind her that he only had two of them.
She went out, nursing her secret fondly. She closed the door behind her, with ostentatious carefulness.
Twenty-Five
History Lessons
Christine feels that she ought to look out for me,” I explained to Mortimer Gray, as I sat up and took the bowl. “We’re both way out of our depth here, and she thinks we need to stick together. I think the broken nose brought out her maternal instincts. People used to have those, you know — the plague of sterility didn’t wipe them out overnight.”
Gray nodded, as if he understood perfectly. He put the water bottle down on the mattress and hesitated, waiting for an invitation to remain. I inferred that he’d been delegated to get what answers he could from me, on the grounds that I seemed to be less hostile to him than to the other contenders.
“You don’t seem very worried,” I observed. “Lowenthal, Handsel, and Horne are all putting on a tough act, but underneath they’re as scared as poor Davida, if not as terrified as Christine, Adam, and I. You’re not — or are you?”
“If you’re looking for evidence of a conspiracy between our captors and me,” he said, having obviously decided to speak plainly, “you’re looking in the wrong direction. I’ve been in mortal danger before — twice, in fact. It’s surprising how quickly one learns from such experiences. Admittedly, I hadn’t had my IT stripped out on either occasion, but I was rescued both times by the same person. Somehow, I can’t seem to escape the conviction that all I have to do is wait for her to come and get me again. I know it’s absurd, but that doesn’t prevent me from being grateful for the feeling of security.”
“Emily Marchant,” I said, remembering the research I’d done in what was fast becoming an alarmingly distant past. “The way I heard it, you rescued her the first time.”
“That’s the way others tell it,” he agreed. “But I was there.”
“Emily Marchant is Niamh Horne’s boss,” I observed.
“Not true,” he said. “That’s not the way things work in the Confederation, or on Titan. Emily’s very keen on progress, and that makes her a political animal, but she’s not part of any hierarchical power structure.”
“So it wasn’t her who blew up the Earth?”
His eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t explode at me. “No,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t. You seem to be obsessed with the idea that the solar system is about to be plunged into a war, Mr. Tamlin. Did Alice really tell you that a war is imminent?”
“Since you last told me that war is unthinkable,” I pointed out, “we’ve been hijacked by people pretending to be aliens — or maybe aliens pretending to be people pretending to be aliens. According to Alice, their reason for doing it is to try to avert a war that might already be inevitable. So I think I can be forgiven for sticking to what seems to you to be an unreasonable conviction.”
I took a mouthful of warm gruel. After the terrible stuff we’d been fed on Excelsior it tasted pretty good. I’d eaten worse kinds of wholefood in my youth.
He thought over what I’d said. “I can see how you might reach that conclusion,” he conceded, eventually.
“Of course you can,” I said. “You’re a historian. You know what kind of world I come from. What I can’t see is how you could cling to any other conclusion, given our present situation. No matter how firmly the Earthbound are stuck in the mud, Lowenthal