I took a mouthful of warm gruel. After the terrible stuff wed been fed on Excelsior it tasted pretty good. Id eaten worse kinds of wholefood in my youth.
He thought over what Id said. I can see how you might reach that conclusion, he conceded, eventually.
Of course you can, I said. Youre a historian. You know what kind of world I come from. What I cant 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 has to figure that the war started ninety-nine years ago, and that hes now in the thick of it. Since Niamh Hornes pet spaceship staged that fake emergency weve all been living in interesting times. I can see how a historian might find a certain delight in that prospect but youve been drafted to the front line, and if I were in your shoes I wouldnt be making any assumptions about other people respecting my noncombatant status.
His eyebrows barely twitched. He reached up reflexively to stroke his fledgling beard. Our captors seem to have neglected to provide shoes, he pointed out, making a feeble attempt at humor. In fact, they seem to be a long way behind the times in all sorts of ways. Do you have any particular reason for suggesting that they might be aliens pretending to be people pretending to be aliens?
Just habit, I told him. I always look for the wheels within the wheels within the wheels. I wouldnt be here today if it werent for a kidnapping. I might never have seen Damon Hart again once hed given up street life if his foster father hadnt been snatched by people pretending to be Eliminators. It turned out to be a convoluted game but the end result of it was that our lives were both diverted on to an entirely new track. It seems that you and I have both carried the lessons of our personal history into our current situation. I knew your mother, you know.
Perhaps I should have saved that particular bombshell for later, but its difficult to keep something like that up your sleeve when the temptation to use it is always there.
What do you mean? he asked, a trifle slow on the uptake.
Your biological mother, I said. Diana Caisson.
Egg donors are of no consequence in our world, he told me, after only the slightest hesitation. The embryos from which were made undergo such extensive engineering that we acquire far more characteristics than we inherit. I may owe a few genetic idiosyncrasies to the particular individuals who provided
the egg and sperm to start me off, but Ali Zaman and all his myriad followers were my true biological parents. I owe everything else that I am to my foster parentsand to Emily Marchant.
So you dont want to know about Diana Caisson? I said. Youre not curious?
Im a historian, he reminded me. Im curious about everything you know about your own world. But we have more urgent matters to consider, do we not?
I was a trifle disappointed, but I figured that if he wanted to play it that way, I could too.
Fair enough, I said. Im curious myself but for me, its all new, and all urgent. Are the Earthbound really as decadent as everybody seems to think? Have you really become a dead weight inhibiting further progress? Is that why someones trying to administer a sharp object lesson to you and Lowenthal and Adam Zimmerman?
He only looked uncomfortable for a moment. After all, I was steering him back to safer ground to his own intellectual territory.
There are people in the Outer System who are fond of trying to make that case, he admitted. Its nothing new I heard little else when I lived on the moon. There are political, ecological, and psychological arguments, but they all boil down to the idea that organisms that are so perfectly adapted to their environment that they never have any reason or inclination to leave it are bound to stagnate. Hard-line cyborganizers and proselytizing outward bounders are both fond of declaring that the only way for emortals to avoid robotization is to pose an infinite series of challenges to their inherited nature, by continually moving into alien environments and never remaining too long in any one of them. But I cant believe that whats happening to us here and now is just an object lesson . Something very strange is happening, and we really do need to examine every clue you obtained, however slight. If you can tell us exactly what the woman said to you, there might be items of information therein whose significance we can see far better than you.
I popped the top of the water bottle and drank deeply. It wasnt until the cool water hit my stomach that I realized how thirsty I had been. Ridiculous as it may seem, Id lived so long with careful IT that I had fallen out of touch with unmodified sensations. It occurred to me to wonder how much worse Mortimer Grays alienation from his body might be.
I suppose there might, I conceded. In fact, there might be details of our surroundings whose significance you can judge far better than I, not to mention details of our physical condition. They seem to have purged our IT, but they werent able to purge Niamh Hornes externals. If anyones still capable of communication with the outside world, its her. Is that why youre expecting Emily Marchant to come rescue us?