He looked me in the eye then, and said: “Whatever you may have heard, I really did do it. Without me, they’d never have contrived such a steep collapse or cleaned up so efficiently. I really was the only man who understood the systems well enough to pull off the coup. They thought they were using me, but they weren’t. I was using them — their money, their greed, their ambition. They were just the means I used to commit the crime. I really am the man who stole the world.”
“And all because you were afraid of dying, desperate to reach the Age of Emortality.”
“A perfect crime requires a perfect motive,” he told me. “But at the end of the day, all art is for art’s sake. Just between you and me, I did it because I could, and because I was the only one who could. You can understand that, can’t you, Madoc? The others don’t, but you do.”
He was a good judge of character. I’d always prided myself on the quality, as well as the careful modesty, of my criminal mind. “I’d have done the same myself,” I assured him. “But you’ll never be able to do it again, will you? It was a once-in-a-lifetime performance.”
“No one will ever be able to do it again,” he told me, with quiet satisfaction. “I got in just in the nick of time. Within another ten years, whether it was done or not, the smart software would have become too smart to cheat. I was the last of the human buccaneers, Madoc, the last of the authentic soldiers of fortune. Now, I’ll have to find something else — assuming they can get to us before the stink kills us all.”
“They’ll still expect a decision, you know,” I told him. “They’ll still want to know who wins the golden apple in the beauty contest: Davida, Alice, or the Snow Queen.”
He understood the allusion. “Paris was an idiot,” he said. “He should have named his own price. That’s what I’ll do. The hell with Aphrodite.”
“Me too,” I told him. “What did you have in mind?”
“At present,” he said, “there’s nothing on my mind but shit, even while I’m way down here. I think I’ll wait till I have a clearer head before making any important decisions.”
“Wise move,” I agreed. “Even if there’s time to try everything, it’s as well to get your priorities in order.”
Later, I raised the same point with Christine Caine, more by way of distraction than anything else. I told her about the beauty contest, and asked her whether, in view of what she now knew about her essentially unmurderous self, she was still determined to head away from Earth and into the great unknown.
“Sure,” she said. “Tyre sounds good to me, for the first faltering step. You?”
“Not immediately. First, I need time to rest. I know I can’t go home again, but what Adam says makes sense. I want to feel Earth beneath my feet and put the Heavens back where they belong, in the sky. I want to breathe fresh air and get away from walls.”
“There might be something to be said for that,” she conceded. “Right now, fresh air is just about the most luxurious thing I can imagine.”
It was at that point, as if responding to her cue, that Solantha Handsel informed us all, in stentorian tones, that someone was outside the main airlock, preparing to make an entrance.
By the time we had gathered together the bodyguard had already taken up the prime position. Her hands were upraised, equally ready to function as deadly weapons or as extravagant welcomers of salvation.
The airlock finally opened and the lovely cyborg stepped through, bringing a welcome breath of new air with her. I saw Niamh Horne take a bold step forward, as if to lay claim to close kinship with our rescuers and a party share of the credit for our release — but the newcomer looked straight past her, searching our ragged little crowd with her artificial eyes.
“My name’s Emily Marchant,” she announced, casually. “I’m looking for Mortimer Gray.”
Fifty-Seven
Homecoming
And so to Earth, as passengers aboard the good ship Titaness, now mistress of her own fate and captain of her own soul. She released those of us who had decided to go down into the well while she settled into a comfortable orbit.
Niamh Horne and Davida Berenike Columella had no intention of joining us, and Mortimer Gray decided to remain in orbit for a while longer, so six of us made our preparations to be shuttled down in a thoroughly stupid capsule not unlike Peppercorn Seven. We had no packing to do, of course, but we did have a few farewells to make.
To Niamh Horne all I had to say was good-bye, and I doubt that she would have bothered to say even that much to me had some kind of gesture not been unavoidable. She did not suggest that I visit her if and when I decided to leave Earth again.
Mortimer Gray, by contrast, was very insistent that we must meet again, and soon, when more urgent concerns had been properly addressed. He repeated his offer of employment, and I promised him that I would think about it very seriously, although I was waiting to see what alternative offers I might yet receive.
Because any friend of Mortimer’s was privileged in her eyes, Emily Marchant did invite me to get in touch when the time came for me to explore the Outer System. She promised that she would find work for me to do there, once I was ready to break free from the iron grip of the dead past, and I believed her. She was kind enough to take it for granted that I would get in touch one day; Mortimer had told her that whatever else I might be, I was certainly not incorrigibly Earthbound.
The most elaborate farewell I offered, though, was to Davida Berenike Columella. I thanked her profusely for bringing me back from the dead, and when she reminded me that she had not chosen me I reminded her that however I might have been delivered into her care I still owed a great debt to her skill and enterprise.
“If ever you want to return to Excelsior…,” she said.
“It’s too close to Heaven for me,” I told her. “Maybe, one day, I’ll be ready for perfection…but not for a long time yet. I have a lot of adulthood to explore before I can settle for eternal childhood.”
She thought I was joking. “I can’t begin to understand how you did it,” she said. “It must have been Hell.”
She had lost me. “What must?”
“Living in the twenty-second century. Waking up every morning to the knowledge that you were decaying, day by day and hour by hour — that your ill-designed bodies were fighting a war of attrition against the ravages of death and losing ground with every minute that passed. Knowing, as you went about your daily work, that the copying errors were accumulating, that the free-radical damage was tearing you apart at the molecular level, that stem-cell senility was allowing your tissues to shrivel and your organs to stagnate, that…”
“I get the picture,” I assured her. “Well, yes, I suppose it wasa kind of Hell. The secret is that you can get used to Hell, if you don’t let it get you down. You never actually get to like it — but you can learn from it, if you have the right attitude. Among other things, you can learn to be wary of Heaven.”
“We’re not the Earthbound,” she assured me. “We aren’t finished. We have millennia of progress still ahead of us, and we intend to take full advantage of its opportunities.”
I could have told her that even though that might be the case, she and her sisters would never actually grow up, but that would have been flippant and I didn’t want to spoil the moment. I was grateful to her, and I wanted us to part on good terms.
In any case, I knew even then that there might eventually come a day when I’ll be ready for Excelsior.
I didn’t mind being locked in a cocoon for the few minutes it took the remaining six of us to fall to Earth.
I hadn’t expected to feel quite so heavy when I got there, given that my brand new IT and a few sessions in the Titaness’s centrifuge had tuned up my muscles, but it seemed a small price to pay for getting my feet back on the ground.