Who the hell are we talking about? I asked, plaintively.
They wont play if we dont handle it their way, she said, doggedly. If it were up to me, Id tell you everything now but if it were up to some of them, theyd have kept you in blissful ignorance forever. We all have to compromise. Thats the thought you have to hold in mind, Madoc. We all have to compromise. If we cant get together, well all lose and by lose, I mean die . However crazy this gets, the end is real. Its all play, all dramabut its for real. The cost of losing might be as high as extinction.
Which of us was the target? I asked, figuring that there was no harm in continuing to try. You can tell us that, at least. Some of us must be innocent bystanders.
Her expression suggested otherwise, but she decided to stick her neck out. Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray were the original targets, she said, still making a show of great reluctance, but everyone had to compromise even to get this far. It was a victory of sorts, in the end, to hold the list to nine. With any luck, youll all get to play your parts but when the time comes for the deal to be done, Grays the one wholl swing the decision one way or the other. You should tell him that. He needs to be forewarned.
I hadnt time to think it over, or even to consider alternative reasons as to why shed said nine instead of eight; she was already trying to shove me out of the cupboard and back to the cage. I only had time for one more shot, and I had to improvise as best I could.
Its already begun, hasnt it? I said. The war, I mean. Year zero was the first shot.
No it wasnt,
she told me. The seeds of potential conflict were sown long before that but they have to be prevented from flowering. We have to work things out. We have to arrive at a settlement, without everything turning into the Afterlife.
Twenty-Eight
The Mystery Unravelled
Iknew that I wasnt going to be universally popular when I returned to my companions, but I expected that Lowenthal would have smoothed things over. Even if he couldnt bring himself to believe that I hadnt simply gone berserk he had to hope that I could turn my explosion into a strategy and find out more by running up moral credit than he and Horne could ever have found out by trying to put pressure on Alice.
On the other hand, I knew that the only way to hold my new position in the pecking order was to lay out something they could get their teeth into, so when I found them waiting to hear from me I knew that I had to make it good.
Okay, I said, Heres what Im sure of, thanks to a little help from Christine. Were aboard one of the Arks that a bunch of Lowenthals predecessors built in the late twenty-first century. The idea was to hitch a ride in a bunch of comets that were passing through the system, but one coupling went wrong so only three left the system. This is the fourth. Alice says that she was frozen down in twenty ninety, which would make her a passenger on one of the other three almost certainly the one that recontacted Earth when it ended up at Ararat. Whoevers got hold of us probably came from Ararat, but they seem to be engaged in combative negotiations with several local parties. Alice says they havent settled on a venue for the show weve been snatched to take part in because whatever location they choose will be symbolically loaded she told me to ask Lowenthal and Gray about their peace conference experience if I wanted that explained.
The original targets of the kidnap plan were Zimmerman and Gray, but the rest of us got added in as a result of the negotiations, maybe because thats the way committee decisions always go. The negotiations must have begun before Christine and I were woken up, so its possible that we were specifically chosen to be part of this, but its conceivable that they just wanted six more bodies to make up an agreed number. The agreed number appears to be nine rather than eight, which might mean that theres someone else yet to be added in, or that Alice herself is number nine.
Whatever the story is, it goes back way beyond year zero. I cant get Alices we and they straight in my mind, but whoever they are she says they love playing games which is presumably why theyll be hanging on my every word just as intently as you are. I suspect that theyve woken us up to watch us, maybe to see whether we can figure this out but more likely because they want to obtain a better idea of where Lowenthals and Hornes masters stand in respect of the problems that currently afflict the solar system.
In spite of what I said before, I dont think anyone intends to torture us, but they do seem to want us in our raw state for now, maybe because they intend to instal some elaborate IT of their own. According to Alice, the stuff I was just given is strictly temporary. Alice reckons that Grays the key to the whole affair. She says that hes the one who might be able to swing the big decision one way or the other, and ought to be forewarned of that responsibility. If we get it wrong, the booby prize might be extinction but that threat might just be part of the game. In fact, all of this might just be part of the game.