According to Bad Karma , I pointed out, thats all you were to yourself. Did you ever have the slightest idea why you did it? Or were you making up story after story by way of exploration or distraction?
I got out in the end, didnt I? she said, softly. Im here. Im free. Im never going back. Im a winner. Maybe I did it in order to be put away, to make sure that Id be the one to wake up in Wonderland. Maybe Adam Zimmerman is the one who did it the hard way.
I didnt believe that, but I could see that she wasnt going to tell me anything I could believe.
The woman from the Confederation might not make us an offer, I said, although I didnt believe it. She might think that we belong on Earth, and good riddance to us. We may not have the option of going elsewhere.
I dont think so, Christine replied, serenely confident. While were the only real humans in the universe, everyone will be interested in us. Even if they begin to bring the others back, there wont be enough to go round. Were mortals, Madoc. Were their ancestors. They need us. They all need us, not just the stick-in-the-muds who cling to the Earth. They all need us because theyve all forgotten what we were like, and they all need to be reminded.
I could have objected that Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray seemed human enough, for all their advanced years, but I didnt. I knew what she meant. I knew, even on the basis of my first faltering inquiries, that emortality had not been acquired without cost, and that Lowenthal and Gray were as profoundly different from me, in their own way, as Davidas sisterhood and the cyborganizers.
I could also have pointed out that whatever the reason had been, Christine had thought that the most appropriate thing to do to her own self-appointed ancestors was to murder the lot, and three other people besides. I didnt do that either.
This isnt the Omega Point, Christine, I told her. Its not even a fancy VE. Its just the same old world, with a thousand extra years of history. Its inhabitants may be curious, but they have other things to be interested in that are far more fascinating than us. Theyll lose interest in us soon enough, unless we can find a way to keep some of them on the hook.
I dont run out of stories easily, she said. Do you?
Fifteen
The Ship from Earth
We watched the docking of Peppercorn Seven through the window in my quarters. Davida Berenike Columella wasnt with us; she was part of the reception committee that would bring Gray and Lowenthal through the microworlds mysterious interior to meet us.
The viewpoint from which we watched the spaceships final approach was way out on one of Excelsiors spiny limbs, so we could see a good deal of the microworld as well as the approaching vessel. Id already studied diagrams of its structure, so I was able to make sense of most of the structures I could see.
The docking station was in Excelsiors hub: the zero-gee
core about which the other environments rotated. The hub was the site of the microworlds most advanced AIs and the core of its communication system as well as the anchorage of the artificial photosynthetic systems supplying the stations organics. It also had capacious living spaces of its own, although there were no fabers currently in residence. All that was expectable, but there were a couple of things that the diagram hadnt shown to full advantage: the tentacles and the ice.
Everything on a diagram tends to look rigid and mechanical, but seen through the cameras eye Excelsior seemed much more lifelike. It gave the impression of floating in oceanic space like some kind of weird sea creature: a hybrid of wrack and Portuguese man-o-war, bound to a coral base. Like the man-o-war, it trailed countless slender tentacles that mostly hung loose, except that their resting positions were determined by the movement of the microworld rather than by gravity. When they became active, they moved with lifelike purpose.
Even while the ship was some distance away the tentacles grouped around the mouth of the docking bay were making their adjustments, as if anticipating a meal. The spinning wheel enclosing the weighted components of the microworld was mostly devoid of protective ice, but it had a much smarter surface which presumably had its own ways of dealing with stray dust particles and dangerous surges in the solar wind. It had its own frill of tentacles, but they were much less impressive than the snaky locks of the medusal core.
The coraline part of the ensemble was mostly metals and ceramics, but that wasnt obvious from where we were standing, because the solid and substantial parts of the microworld were encased in cometary ice, which served as an outer shield as well as a resource. The ice hadnt been sculpted in the careful fashion of the ice palaces of Antarctica and Titan, but it caught sunlight and starlight anyway. Refraction sent the rays every which way before letting them out in a fashion that was far from chaotic, although the patterns were accidental and serendipitous.