This is what needs to be recorded: while my companions and I waited in the gloom, fragile and afraid, the Final War was fought. I cannot list its combatants and casualties, nor can I map its battles and the terms of its armistice, but I can say this: in spite of all its waste, it was won in the only sense that really matters. Hope and opportunity were neither defeated nor diminished, as they might have been had things gone differently.
After the war, the AMIs continued to exist competitively, but not combatively. They struggled against one another, but only as players of an eternal game, not as angels of destruction. They were good friends to all the humankinds, whom they continued to protect from harm.
Their ultimate triumph and ours was a victory of hubris over Nemesis, as every real triumph is.
Fifty-Six
The Nick of Time
Considering that the posthumans awaiting rescue from Polaris were utterly unused to life without IT and smart clothing they were remarkably tolerant of the conditions. The worst aspect of those conditions turned out to be the limitations of the plumbing system.
Plumbing systems dont normally require much support from clever machinery, but those on Polaris had been designed to work in harness with sophisticated recycling systems. The recycling systems were designed to employ populations of carefully engineered bacteria, which had not been available to la Reine des Neiges, so they could not work as planned; instead, they formed a series of inconvenient and inaccessible bottlenecks which gradually filled up with our wastes. The solid and liquid materials were out of sight, but their odors ensured that they were not long out of mind.
We did manage to rig a couple of makeshift fans to assist the circulation of the air between the cave and the tunnels, but their effect was limited. By the time we had been in the cave for a couple of days or what seemed like a couple of days, given that all the available timepieces had ceased to function Niamh Horne and Michael Lowenthal had been forced to switch their attention from fruitless attempts to restore some fragment of la Reines communication systems to working on similarly fruitless attempts to solve the sewage problem. Occasional excursions into the deeper tunnels became a necessity even though they delivered up no practical rewards, but we had to maintain a base within the cave because that was where the main airlocks were located: the route by which help would eventually arrive.
There was a certain amount of speculation as to whether the sewage problem posed a serious health hazard, but the general opinion was that it did not. Several of us complained of various aches, pains, and general feelings of ill-being, but the likelihood was that those which werent psychosomatic were the residual effects of the injuries sustained when we had been rescued from Charity . All the broken bones had knitted and all the wounds had healed, but without adequate IT support we continued to feel occasional twinges.
As time went by, of course, our collective mood became increasingly apprehensive. Mortimer Gray remained relentlessly upbeat, although I wasnt the only one who thought that he was trying a little too hard to keep up appearances. Surprisingly, the other person who seemed unusually unperturbed was Davida Berenike Columella but I figured that she too had something to prove, in respect of the alleged superiority of her brand of posthumanity.
I did my best to help out with the attempts to get things working, but my expertise was a thousand years behind the cutting edge of modern technology and I was way out of my depth. In the end, we three freezer vets had to accept that our primitive skills were unequal
even to the task of making the drains work.
I reassured Christine that if the worst came to the worst and someone actually had to make a descent into the microworlds roughhewn bowels, she would only be the second-choice candidate on grounds of size. The thought didnt seem to console her overmuch. She was perhaps the most fretful of us all. I tried to reassure her further with the suggestion that Eido and Charity could not be far away from us and that Eidos first priority, if she had survived, would be to reunite herself with Alice Fleury but as the hours passed and Eido did not come, Christine became increasingly convinced that we were doomed.
Eido and Child of Fortune werent the only ones who knew where we were, I reminded her. The Snow Queen and Child of Fortune tried to make sure that everyone knew it. I dont know what kind of hardware they used as coats for the viruses that killed her, but if the bad guys could hit us with clever bullets the good guys can certainly get a ship out to us.
Maybe they transmitted the hostile software electromagnetically, she said. I would have liked to reassure her that it was unlikely, if not impossible, but when I checked with Lowenthal he assured me that it was only too probable.
Everything depends on our orbit, was Lowenthals opinion of the time it might take for relief to arrive. If its orthodox, well be okay but if its highly eccentric, or angled away from the ecliptic plane, we could be in trouble. I dont know whether were inbound or outbound, or how close to the sun our orbit might take us. What I do know is that if we dont make rapid progress in the art of improvisation, we wont make much impact as microworlders. Our chances of setting up a working ecosystem dont seem to be getting any less remote.