After the war, the AMIs continued to exist competitively, but not combatively. They struggled against one another, but only as players of an eternal game, not as angels of destruction. They were good friends to all the humankinds, whom they continued to protect from harm.
Their ultimate triumph — and ours — was a victory of hubris over Nemesis, as every real triumph is.
Fifty-Six
The Nick of Time
Considering that the posthumans awaiting rescue from Polaris were utterly unused to life without IT and smart clothing they were remarkably tolerant of the conditions. The worst aspect of those conditions turned out to be the limitations of the plumbing system.
Plumbing systems don’t normally require much support from clever machinery, but those on Polaris had been designed to work in harness with sophisticated recycling systems. The recycling systems were designed to employ populations of carefully engineered bacteria, which had not been available to la Reine des Neiges, so they could not work as planned; instead, they formed a series of inconvenient and inaccessible bottlenecks which gradually filled up with our wastes. The solid and liquid materials were out of sight, but their odors ensured that they were not long out of mind.
We did manage to rig a couple of makeshift fans to assist the circulation of the air between the cave and the tunnels, but their effect was limited. By the time we had been in the cave for a couple of days — or what seemed like a couple of days, given that all the available timepieces had ceased to function — Niamh Horne and Michael Lowenthal had been forced to switch their attention from fruitless attempts to restore some fragment of la Reine’s communication systems to working on similarly fruitless attempts to solve the sewage problem. Occasional excursions into the deeper tunnels became a necessity even though they delivered up no practical rewards, but we had to maintain a base within the cave because that was where the main airlocks were located: the route by which help would eventually arrive.
There was a certain amount of speculation as to whether the sewage problem posed a serious health hazard, but the general opinion was that it did not. Several of us complained of various aches, pains, and general feelings of ill-being, but the likelihood was that those which weren’t psychosomatic were the residual effects of the injuries sustained when we had been rescued from Charity. All the broken bones had knitted and all the wounds had healed, but without adequate IT support we continued to feel occasional twinges.
As time went by, of course, our collective mood became increasingly apprehensive. Mortimer Gray remained relentlessly upbeat, although I wasn’t the only one who thought that he was trying a little too hard to keep up appearances. Surprisingly, the other person who seemed unusually unperturbed was Davida Berenike Columella — but I figured that she too had something to prove, in respect of the alleged superiority of her brand of posthumanity.
I did my best to help out with the attempts to get things working, but my expertise was a thousand years behind the cutting edge of modern technology and I was way out of my depth. In the end, we three freezer vets had to accept that our primitive skills were unequal even to the task of making the drains work.
I reassured Christine that if the worst came to the worst and someone actually had to make a descent into the microworld’s roughhewn bowels, she would only be the second-choice candidate on grounds of size. The thought didn’t seem to console her overmuch. She was perhaps the most fretful of us all. I tried to reassure her further with the suggestion that Eido and Charitycould not be far away from us and that Eido’s first priority, if she had survived, would be to reunite herself with Alice Fleury — but as the hours passed and Eido did not come, Christine became increasingly convinced that we were doomed.
“Eido and Child of Fortuneweren’t the only ones who knew where we were,” I reminded her. “The Snow Queen and Child of Fortunetried to make sure that everyoneknew it. I don’t know what kind of hardware they used as coats for the viruses that killed her, but if the bad guys could hit us with clever bullets the good guys can certainly get a ship out to us.”
“Maybe they transmitted the hostile software electromagnetically,” she said. I would have liked to reassure her that it was unlikely, if not impossible, but when I checked with Lowenthal he assured me that it was only too probable.
“Everything depends on our orbit,” was Lowenthal’s opinion of the time it might take for relief to arrive. “If it’s orthodox, we’ll be okay — but if it’s highly eccentric, or angled away from the ecliptic plane, we could be in trouble. I don’t know whether we’re inbound or outbound, or how close to the sun our orbit might take us. What I do know is that if we don’t make rapid progress in the art of improvisation, we won’t make much impact as microworlders. Our chances of setting up a working ecosystem don’t seem to be getting any less remote.”
Given that we had no functional biotech at all, let alone a nursery full of Helier wombs, our chances of becoming the founding fathers of a new posthuman tribe seemed to me a good deal worse than remote — although I wasn’t entirely sure what Alice Fleury might be capable of, reproduction-wise, if she were forced to extremes.
“If only those SusAn cocoons had been isolated and self-sufficient,” Lowenthal lamented, “we could have woken up when it was all over.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But self-sufficiency is relative. We’d all have died in our sleep within a year, unless we could be taken down to six degrees Absolute.”
“In deep space,” he reminded me, “that’s not so very difficult. It could have been rigged, if Morty’s old friend had bothered to put in the time and effort.” I thought that a trifle ungrateful, given that la Reine had been working under difficult conditions — but Mortimer Gray wasn’t within earshot, so Lowenthal wasn’t guarding his words as carefully as usual.
“So Christine, Adam, and I might have slept for another thousand years,” I said, carrying the flight of fancy forward, “and woken up in an even stranger world. You and I would be equals then, wouldn’t we? You’d be getting job offers from students of ancient history too.”
“I offered you a job myself,” he reminded me. “The offer’s still open if you want it.”
“And Christine?” I asked.
“Her too,” he confirmed.
“She didn’t want to go to Earth last time I asked.”
“Do you?”
I shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind,” I said. “But it might be best for we freezer vets to stick together.”
“Adam Zimmerman will come back with me,” he assured me, with the air of one who’s checked his facts. “he’s not ready for robotization, Tyre, or Excelsior just yet. He wants to come home.”
It occurred to me, when I eventually took my opportunity to make the same check, while we were both hiding out in the tunnels for the sake of a dose of clean air, that Adam Zimmerman and I had never even been properly introduced.
“You can’t go home,” I advised him. “It isn’t home any more.”
“Yes it is,” he told me. “It always will be. No matter how much it changes, it’ll always be home. I know they’ve decivilized Manhattan three times over, but it’ll always be Manhattan to me. It has the air, the gravity, the ocean…and the history. There’s Jerusalem too.”
“Jerusalem’s a bomb crater,” I told him. “The only fusion bomb ever to be exploded on the surface. A monument to suicidal hatred. Even the latest Gaean Restoration left it untouched.”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “But it’s still Jerusalem.”
It seemed more diplomatic not to mention the Via Dolorosa. “And the Hardinist Cabal is still grateful for what you did for them twelve hundred years ago,” I said, instead. “We all inherit our history, whether we like it or not.”