It didnt require any data-trawling skill to discover that Emily Marchant was a major player in the Confederation and all its major disputes. She had the money, the prestige, the talent, the know-how, and the charisma to make her opinions felt. She was festooned with painfully quaint nicknames the Chief Cheerleader of the High Kickers and the Great Architect of the Ice Palaces, to name but two but her most common label was the Titaness. There was even an ultrasmart spaceship with the same name. She was, it seemed, a Snow Queen of sufficient majesty to put the petty villain of Christine Caines favorite kiddie flick to shame.
Unfortunately, Emily Marchant wasnt inbound on the ship that was hurtling inwards to pay the respects of the outer system to the newly awakened Adam Zimmerman; she obviously had better things to do. The Titanian envoy en route from the Jovian moons was a much younger and far less influential woman named Niamh Horne.
I knew that the Irish name Niamh was pronounced to rhyme with Eve, but even someone as
intrigued by names as I was couldnt make anything significant of that. Nor could anyone even someone as paranoid as me have found the slightest potentially meaningful connection between Emily Marchant or Niamh Horne and Christine Caine or me. It wasnt until I checked out Mortimer Gray that I found one of those and it wasnt one that anyone could have expected, unless the wonderful children of Excelsior knew much more about me than they were letting on.
According to the records available on Excelsior, Mortimer Grays career was a model of honest endeavor motivated entirely by intellectual curiosity. Unlike Michael Lowenthals, his entire life seemed to be an open book, and apart from the probable coincidence of his having shared a couple of character-forming experiences with Emily Marchant he seemed unlikely to have any hidden agenda. But right up there at the head of his basic biography was a name I recognized: a name that, in all probability, no one but me in the entire universe would have recognized.
Mortimer Grays biological mother who had, of course, died long before he was born had been Diana Caisson. My Diana Caisson. Damon Harts Diana Caisson. There was no doubt about her being the same one; her birth date was right up there alongside his, although her death date was given as unknown.
What could it mean?
So far as I could tell, it couldnt possibly mean anything. How could anyone have known that I had been acquainted with the donor of the egg that had been engineered to produce Mortimer Gray? Why would anyone, including Mortimer Gray, have cared? Surely it had to be a coincidence. There was no imaginable reason why it should be anything else.
I had to switch tack then, so I began gathering information about Excelsior and its peculiar inhabitants, hoping to obtain some insight into their possible motives for involving themselves in Adam Zimmermans resurrection.
It didnt take long to find out that they were even more peculiar than I thought. I had been thinking of Davida Berenike Columella as a girl and her fellows as a sisterhood, but that wasnt strictly accurate. It wasnt just the secondary sexual characteristics that arrive with puberty that she and her kind had forsaken; she had no ovaries either. Nor had she a womb, or a clitoris. It was too late to start thinking of her as an it, so I decided that I might as well stick with the pronoun Id first thought of, but the fact remained that she and all her kind were sexless.
Why?
There was no shortage of information on file to explain the decision to eliminate sex from the design of Excelsior s inhabitants, although the sheer profusion of that information was testimony to the controversy that must have surrounded the plan.
Apparently, several schools of thought had recently grown up as to the merits of arresting the aging process in different phases. The school that had settled on the position that the ideal age for an emortal was prepuberal had extrapolated the line of thinking a step further, reasoning that if the sexual organs were better left undeveloped it would be better still to eliminate them altogether, liberating valuable anatomical space for useful augmentation within the basic functionally evolved corpus.
Taking the research a step farther back into the realm of theory and technics, I soon became lost in specialisms of which I had not the least understanding, but I gradually pieced together a picture of the background against which this strange experiment had been set.
It seemed to me that it all came down, in the final analysis, to the Miller Effect.
Morgan Miller was the twentieth-century scientist who first stumbled upon a technology of longevity: a rejuvenation technique that worked by diverting a mature organisms reproductive apparatus to the production of stem cells that could enhance the organisms powers of self-repair dramatically. There were, however, two catches. Firstly, Millers method only worked on organisms in possession of the appropriate reproductive apparatus which is to say, females. Secondly, the relevant power of self-repair enabled the cells in the organisms brain to recover all the neuronal connections that experience had selectively withered which is to say that it obliterated memory and learning on a massive scale.