In the end, the compromise was that the talks would be held in an Outer System ship in Earth orbit. Given that sort of buildup, its hardly surprising that they werent going very well. Then they stalled completely, interrupted when Mortimer who was quietly going about his own mysterious business contrived to fall through the Arctic ice cap in a snowmobile. He ended up at the bottom of the ocean. There wasnt a submarine near enough to reach him before the damaged vehicle imploded, and it would have taken
more than the combined might of half a dozen planetary civilizations to keep Emily Marchant from repaying the debt she thought she owed her favorite father figure. If there hadnt been a state-of-the-art Jovian atmosphere diver way out of its usual stamping ground, hed have been fish food, but there was and she broadcast the rescue to everybody in the universe. Mortimer didnt know that his heart-to-heart with a snowmobile driver was being overheard by anyone, let alone the whole damn world, so he just let it all out. It was maudlin and toe curlingly cute like one of those ancient kid-trapped-in-a-well race-against-time melodramas but the audience loved it.
It was quite a publicity coup, in its way, all the more so because Julius Ngomi had known Mortimer since he Mortimer, that is, not Julius was a little boy. But thats all it was: a publicity thing. A great big heart-warming show. It changed the mood of the conference but it didnt help the contending parties to settle any of the real issues, and may even have prevented us from knuckling down to serious business with the ultimate effect that the important issues remain unsettled to this day. If Emily Marchant is behind this present pantomime, and it runs according to the same script, it might turn out to be the nine-day-wonder rescue story to end all nine-day-wonder rescue stories but its not going to help at all.
Emily has nothing to do with this, Mortimer Gray said, quietly.
I could see that Lowenthal had made a big mistake. Mortimer didnt appreciate the way hed told the story, but Lowenthal would probably have got away with the maudlin and the toe curlingly cute if he hadnt turned his sarcasm on Emily Marchant. Even I could tell that Emily was a subject about which Mortimer Gray was exceedingly touchy and I could tell, too, that whatever chance Lowenthal had had of being let in on the current results of Grays ruminations had just gone up in smoke. I wondered, briefly, whether that might be partly my fault for setting such a bad example, but I realized soon enough that there might be another reason for Mortimer to keep silent. If he had guessed who was behind our kidnapping, he had to ask himself very seriously whose side he was on and so far as I knew, there might be a million reasons why he didnt want to be seen to be taking Michael Lowenthals or Niamh Hornes. Or Adam Zimmermans. Or, of course, mine.
So who has ? said Niamh Horne, impatiently.
Im not sure, was Mortimer Grays exceedingly careful reply, so measured youd have needed a nanometer to appreciate its precision. I imagine that theyll tell us, when they want us to know. In the meantime, it might be best to take what Mr. Tamlin says, about the need to prevent a war, very seriously indeed.
That would be easier to do, Niamh Horne opined, if this whole business werent such a farce. The tape they fed us during the supposed emergency aboard Child of Fortune was bad enough, but building a set to persuade us that were aboard the lost Ark is even worse.
Is it a set? Lowenthal was quick to ask. Did you see anything out there to prove that were not on the lost Ark?
No, the cyborganizer admitted. But I wasnt able to get out of the corridor. Alice seems to be bedded down in a cell even smaller than ours, and theres no sign of any companion. If the indicators on the locks can be trusted, were sealed in an airtight compartment surrounded by vacuum. What does that imply?
It might imply that our captors are a little short of vital commodities like heat and atmosphere, Gray put in. Or that they love playing games. Or both. Did you ever read a twentieth-century philosopher called Huizinga, Mr. Zimmerman?
Adam Zimmerman looked slightly surprised, but Davida had obviously done a first rate job of getting his memory back into gear. Johann Huizinga, he said, after a slight pause. Homo ludens . Yes, I believe I did a long time ago.
Mortimer Gray waited for him to elaborate, and nobody else was impatient enough, as yet, to interrupt with a demand for a straighter answer.
As I remember it, Zimmerman said, equably, Huizinga contested the popular view that the most useful definitive feature of the human species was either intelligence as implied by the term Homo sapiens or use of technology, as implied by the oft-suggested alternative Homo faber . He proposed instead that the real essence of humanity was our propensity for play , hence Homo ludens . He admitted, of course, that
some animals also went in for play on a limited scale, just as some were capable of cleverness and some were habitual tool users, but he contended that no other species took play so far, or so seriously, as humankind. He pointed out that there was a crucial element of costume drama in our most earnest and purposive endeavors and institutions in the ritual aspects of religion, politics, and the law and that play had been a highly significant motive force in the development of technology and scientific theory. Other vital fields of cultural endeavor, of course, he regarded as entirely playful: art, literature, entertainment. Presumably, Mr. Gray, youre trying to make the point that games can be very serious, and that the most fateful endeavors of all war, for example can be seen, from the right perspective, as games.