Lowenthal looked very unhappy, but he didnt have a fall-back position. He was free not to believe her, but he knew hed be a fool simply to assume that what she was saying wasnt true. We could see the bars of our cage very clearly indeed, and if we werent already convinced of their reality, a couple more days without our IT would provide all the evidence we needed.
So why do they continue to support us? Niamh Horne wanted to know. Why havent they wiped us out already, if they have the power and were surplus to their requirements?
Because they want to do the right thing, Alice told her. And its because theyre trying to figure out how to do the right thing that you and I are here.
Do they think this is the right way to go about it? That was Lowenthal diving back in, the expansive sweep of his hand taking in the cells, the clothes we were wearing, and all the primitive poverty of the long-lost Ark.
It was a difficult decision, Alice told him, a slight note of exasperation creeping into her voice. An awkward compromise. This wasnt the way Eido and I wanted to play it but were playing away from home.
Everybody was out of bed by now, and the queue for food was even more disorderly. For once, even Adam Zimmerman was being jostled by lesser emortals.
Christine Caine sat down beside me. Whats going on? she asked, before picking up my water bottle and taking a swig.
It was a friendly discussion, I murmured. Now its the next best thing to a riot. The sensible thing to do I raised my voice as I spoke to take advantage of a temporary lull in the gathering storm of questions and recriminations would be to let Alice tell us her own story, from the beginning. Then well have something solid to chew over.
The lull had only been momentary, but the resumption faded away as the import of my suggestion sunk in. It was the sensible thing to do, given that Alice had now condescended to join us instead of lurking in her own lonely place. It was time to stop running round in circles and listen to a story, not just because there might be a valuable lesson to be learned therefrom, but also because it might be entertaining. I felt that I could do with a little entertainment, now that the effects of the fake alien invasion had worn off.
So Alice told us her story and it was entertaining, as well as containing all manner of valuable lessons.
Thirty-One
Alice In Wonderland
Once upon a time, there was a girl named Alice, who went to sleep in 2090 in order to be stored on an Ark named Hope, and woke up a long time afterwards, into a dream of wonderland
Or so it must have seemed.
Alice had expected, before being frozen down, that she would awake to be reunited with her father, Matthew Fleury, and her sister Michelle. It didnt quite work out that way. Michelle was there, but she was twenty years older than she had been when the two of them had arrived on Hope . Matthew Fleury had been dead for a long time, but he had made his mark on Tyre before he went.
Matthew Fleury had been a celebrity of sorts even on Earth, where he had been numbered among the prophets of doom trying to awaken the worldwide TV audience to the awful magnitude of the ecocatastrophe that was happening around them, but on Earth he had always been a tiny fish in a clamorous ocean. On Tyre, he had come into his own, not merely as a voice but as a prophet. Good luck had placed him on the scene when the first contact between humans and smart aliens had occurred and good judgment had placed a camera in his hand to record the moment for posterity.
Alice, like everyone in the home system, had had to watch that tape knowing that it was a historical artifact: a record of something that had happened a long time ago; the beginning of a story that was now
much farther advanced.
Michelle had explained the reasons why Alice had been allowed to remain frozen for so many years, but Alice had felt betrayed nevertheless first by her father, and then again by her sister. They had very good reasons for excluding her from their own adventures, but it was an exclusion nevertheless, and she felt it as an exclusion, not as the gift that it was always intended to be.
Matthew Fleury had let his daughters remain in suspended animation because he did not want them to wake up until he could make them emortal. He had, of course, intended to be around to welcome them when the moment came, but fate had decreed otherwise. Pioneering is always a hazardous business, especially for mortals.
While the sisters slept, history moved on, at a pace which would have seemed hectic not merely on an Earth that had already embraced emortality but even on a world like Titan, where the pace of pioneering was limited by exceedingly low temperatures and unhelpful raw materials. The only thing that Titan had lots of was ice, which was why Titan became a world of glorious ice palaces. Tyre had air, bright sunlight, and liquid water; Tyre had life , and very abundant scope for assisted evolution. Conditions on its surface had been stable for a long time before humans arrived there but once humans had arrived, change became hectic.