“The shock,” I told him, drily, “is in being remembered. Everyone tells me that I’ve been lucky, because there are so many more possibilities open to me nowadays.”
“That’s true, of course,” he conceded, “but I can understand why you might think you’ve paid a heavy price for the privilege. To be separated from everyone and everything you knew, and not even to know why…it must be difficult. You’ll adjust, though. Michael and I belong to the last generation raised by mortal parents, so we understand loss a little better than the generation which came after us. We’ve also lived through major catastrophes — the Coral Sea Disaster, the North American Basalt Flow — so we have a better understanding of grief and its associated emotions than we might have expected or wished for. You and I aren’t so very different, even though you’ve yet to decide which particular form of posthumanity to embrace. You’re very young, by our standards. In time, you’ll adapt fully to the new Earth, no matter how strange it may seem at first. By the time you’re my age…”
“I haven’t made up my mind whether to go to Earth,” I told him, figuring that it was about time I interrupted. “May I ask you a question about something that’s been troubling me?”
“Of course,” he said, with all the enthusiasm of an authentic sucker.
“Why does Michael Lowenthal have a bodyguard with him?”
Unfortunately, Mortimer Gray’s act was no act. He laughed, as if at a simple misunderstanding. “Solantha isn’t a bodyguard,” he assured me, blithely. “Cyborganization is mostly a matter of fashion, on Earth at least. Life in the outer system requires a degree of functional cyborgization, but it’s purely a matter of aesthetics at home. Did you think he was worried about meeting Christine Caine?”
“No,” I said. I figured that I might as well go all the way, given that he didn’t seem to be taking me seriously. “I wondered whether he was worried about meeting Niamh Horne, and the possibility of war breaking out between Earth and the Outer System.”
Gray seemed genuinely puzzled. “Where did you get that idea from?” he asked. “Humankind hasn’t had a war since…well, before you were born. Emortals don’t fight wars — they have too accurate a notion of the value of life.”
“You don’t think blowing up North America and plunging Earth into nuclear winter counts as an act of war?” I said, feigning astonishment. “In my day, most people thought that every stomach upset was probably the first shot in the next plague war.”
Mortimer Gray stared at me, seemingly anxious as well as puzzled. “I suppose that must have been the case,” he said, cautiously. “But things have changed. Mores, attitudes, habits…everything is different now. I can’t believe that the Basalt Flow was the result of a deliberate act of sabotage. There are political conflicts within the solar system, but we all understand that our only hope of beating the Afterlife is to work together as a community of species. Do you know what the Afterlife is?”
“I read up on it,” I confirmed. “I understand the argument that a common threat makes it necessary for potential enemies to work together — but I’m not convinced. In my day, as you presumably know, there was a school of thought which held that social contracts were only reliable because men were mortal and prey to pain. In a world of true emortals with efficient IT, the theory went, there could be no effective sanctions forcing people to fulfill their obligations and keep their promises. One corollary of the theory was that a world of emortals would be more prone to conflict, not less.”
He found the notion too alien to be threatening. “But the truth is exactly the opposite, as history has proved,” he protested. “People who might live for a very long time in the company of their peers have very powerful reasons for honoring their obligations, because there’s no way to escape the consequences of failure. We have to deal honestly with one another, because we can’t afford the consequences of being exposed as liars, let alone the consequences of violent behaviour. You really need to understand that, Mr. Tamlin — and I’m sure you will, given time.”
I would have taken more comfort from his words if he’d glanced sideways at Christine Caine while he was closing his argument, but he didn’t. He kept right on looking me in the eyes as he pronounced words like “liars” and “violent behavior.” He wasn’t scared of me — he would have thought the suggestion that he might need a bodyguard absurd — but he wasn’t laboring under any delusion that I was a man like him. When he said that he and I weren’t so very different, he was talking about a narrow range of emotional responses, not about the extent of our evolution beyond Neanderthal brutality.
“So there isn’t going to be a war?” I said, meeting his gaze squarely.
“No,” he said, flatly. I couldn’t tell whether he was so definite because he was genuinely convinced, or because he desperately wanted to believe it. Paranoid as I was, I favored the latter hypothesis. In any case, I thought it best to change the subject.
“You said that I’ve yet to decide which particular form of posthumanity to embrace,” I reminded him. “I don’t suppose anyone cares what decision I make — but Adam Zimmerman must be a different proposition. Lots of people must be interested in his decision, given that he had to change the course of history in order to give himself the chance to make it.”
“People are interested, of course,” Gray said, a little warier now of where the conversation might be heading, “but not as much as you might suppose. Adam Zimmerman didn’t actually changethe course of history. If he hadn’t done what he did, someone else would have. The timing might have been slightly different, but the eventual result would have been the same.”
“Is it just Adam Zimmerman,” I asked, genuinely interested in the question, “or don’t you believe in pivotal individuals at all? Would the eventual result have been the same if Conrad Helier had been an early casualty of the plague wars — or if you hadn’t saved Emily Marchant’s life in the Coral Sea Disaster?”
He raised his eyebrows in frank astonishment. “We can all make a difference, Mr. Tamlin,” he said. “It’s because so many of us can that none of us has the power to change everything. I do hope you’ll consider the offer of employment I made — you might be even more useful to us as a window into the past than we had hoped. An account of your personal history would be fascinating.”
It was supposed to be a compliment, but I couldn’t take it that way. He was telling me that I appeared to be an even freakier freak than his friendly neighborhood zookeepers had imagined. No matter how smart I tried to seem, I realized, I would always be a monkey doing tricks. Nobody was ever going to think that I might have anything to contribute to the understanding of the world as it now was. For a moment, I almost pitied Adam Zimmerman.
“There’s nothing hi about my story,” I told him. “It’s essentially lo — and for the moment, quite lost.”
He frowned, unable to see the joke for a few moments. Then he got it, and tried to contrive a weak smile. I couldn’t blame him for his lack of amusement. Some jokes are best kept private.
“Even so,” he said, “we’d be very interested. You’re a unique resource, whose experiences will be even more interesting in juxtaposition with those of your companions.”
All three of us were unique, even though we were in the same boat, because we’d come from different eras: we made up quite a goodie bag for a historian. There were thousands more of us still to be thawed, but every one would be unique from Mortimer Gray’s point of view.
“I’ll think it over,” I assured the historian. “I’ll come back to you when I have more questions.”
I wanted to talk to Solantha Handsel, but I didn’t get the chance. The party was already winding down — over, it seemed, almost as soon as it had begun — because Michael Lowenthal had decided that he had had enough, and that it was time to let the sisterhood whisk him away.