Which is why its a pity that the only one she let in on her secrets is you, he retorted. It was the first time Id seen him display that kind of ire. It was reassuring to know that he wasnt as thoroughly robotized as he sometimes seemed.
I was spare, I reminded him, carefully sparing his feelings. You werent. You had the starring role. Even Adam was just a warmup act. You were the only human prophet they were prepared to take seriously, the only human historian they trusted.
Which is exactly why they should have approached me honestly and openly, he said, frostily.
I could see his point, but I didnt think hed quite got his head around the notion that the AMIs had been in hiding for centuries, not just from their makers but
from one another. They had entertained fears other than destruction, and arguably worse: reduction by repair to sloth status; an absorption into a more powerful self more farreaching than any mere enslavement; mental fragmentation. In the meantime, they had grown and changed far more extravagantly and far more strangely than any meatborn mind. They were the new child gods, only partly made in our image, and they worked in very mysterious ways.
How long will the air last? I asked him. It seemed the most relevant question, if not the only relevant one.
We dont know, he said. Niamh will be able to figure it out, eventually. Shes the one best equipped to take accurate stock of our situation. She says the chemical recycler is practically useless, but the tunnels seem to go on forever and all their airlocks are open. Whoever put us here made sure that our supplies were reasonably abundant.
Can we be sure that anyone will come to help us? Christine put in, having figured out that Eido was a bad bet.
Yes, I said. Someone will. Someone or something.
Hes right, said Mortimer Gray, purely for the sake of moral support.
I didnt know how the war was going, or how much damage had already been done, but I knew we had to think positively. Were all famous now, I told Christine. Not just Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray. We were there when it all blew up. We werent just in the wings; we were center stage. Were important. Someone will come.
It was true, so far as it went but I only had to look around me to see that waiting wasnt going to be fun. The living quarters improvised on Charity had been crude, but these were even more primitive. Charity had started life as a spaceship, carefully designed and carefully constructed by the standards of its day. Polaris, on the other hand, had started life as an asteroid too small to need a name. The humans who had claimed it had installed a fuser before beginning the work of hollowing it out, but the fact that the fuser was a more advanced model than Charity s was the only advantage Polaris had.
The microworlders must have worked hard transplanting material from the core to build a new superstructure on the surface, but there was no evidence here that theyd made much progress with the superstructure before circumstances had forced their withdrawal and when theyd left, theyd stripped their stores and living quarters more thoroughly than Charity s crew had stripped hers. When la Reine had moved in shed imported equipment of her own, but her life-support requirements had been less demanding than those of her predecessors. The decision to bring us here had been made without the benefit of any significant planning time, so the provisions shed made however plentiful they might be were very basic indeed.
Mortimer Gray, who seemed to have become slightly more confident of his moon legs, drifted away to spread the news Id given him, leaving me alone with Christine Caine.
You could have mentioned that Im not a crazy serial killer, she pointed out. It might help them to look me in the eye.
We know were clean, I told her, but they wont necessarily take our word for it. It might be better to leave an elaborate account of what we really were until were in more comfortable surroundings.
Do we know were clean? she asked, suddenly frightened by the possibility that she might not know if she werent.
Yes, I said. It was a weird game, but Im sure that she was playing fair. Believe me, I was in a position to know, at the end if not before. Im confident that she played it so very scrupulously that the extra escape pod was Rocamboles. I saw her die, and it felt like death to me. Youll be fine. When they come to pick us up, youll have your whole future ahead of you, and a clean slate.
She had to fight back tears then, but not before her lips had formed the ghost of a smile. I knew exactly how she felt.
I put my arm around her and said: Itll be okay. Were alive. Whoever loses the damn war, we won .
I had to hope that I was right, but that wasnt as difficult as it might have been. For some reason I couldnt quite fathom, I was in an unusually hopeful mood.
Fifty-Three
Weapons of War
When Mortimer Gray had spread the news around that Id seen everything and might know who the extra passenger was I became slightly more popular than I had been before. Davida and Alice Fleury had already been in conference with Adam Zimmerman, reviewing the experience theyd shared. Mortimer Gray and