“Since you last told me that war is unthinkable,” I pointed out, “we’ve been hijacked by people pretending to be aliens — or maybe aliens pretending to be people pretending to be aliens. According to Alice, their reason for doing it is to try to avert a war that might already be inevitable. So I think I can be forgiven for sticking to what seems to you to be an unreasonable conviction.”
I took a mouthful of warm gruel. After the terrible stuff we’d been fed on Excelsior it tasted pretty good. I’d eaten worse kinds of wholefood in my youth.
He thought over what I’d said. “I can see how you might reach that conclusion,” he conceded, eventually.
“Of course you can,” I said. “You’re a historian. You know what kind of world I come from. What I can’t see is how youcould cling to any other conclusion, given our present situation. No matter how firmly the Earthbound are stuck in the mud, Lowenthal has to figure that the war started ninety-nine years ago, and that he’s now in the thick of it. Since Niamh Horne’s pet spaceship staged that fake emergency we’ve all been living in interesting times. I can see how a historian might find a certain delight in that prospect — but you’ve been drafted to the front line, and if I were in your shoes I wouldn’t be making any assumptions about other people respecting my noncombatant status.”
His eyebrows barely twitched. He reached up reflexively to stroke his fledgling beard. “Our captors seem to have neglected to provide shoes,” he pointed out, making a feeble attempt at humor. “In fact, they seem to be a long way behind the times in all sorts of ways. Do you have any particular reason for suggesting that they might be aliens pretending to be people pretending to be aliens?”
“Just habit,” I told him. “I always look for the wheels within the wheels within the wheels. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for a kidnapping. I might never have seen Damon Hart again once he’d given up street life if his foster father hadn’t been snatched by people pretending to be Eliminators. It turned out to be a convoluted game — but the end result of it was that our lives were both diverted on to an entirely new track. It seems that you and I have both carried the lessons of our personal history into our current situation. I knew your mother, you know.”
Perhaps I should have saved that particular bombshell for later, but it’s difficult to keep something like that up your sleeve when the temptation to use it is always there.
“What do you mean?” he asked, a trifle slow on the uptake.
“Your biological mother,” I said. “Diana Caisson.”
“Egg donors are of no consequence in our world,” he told me, after only the slightest hesitation. “The embryos from which we’re made undergo such extensive engineering that we acquire far more characteristics than we inherit. I may owe a few genetic idiosyncrasies to the particular individuals who provided the egg and sperm to start me off, but Ali Zaman and all his myriad followers were my true biological parents. I owe everything else that I am to my foster parents…and to Emily Marchant.”
“So you don’t want to know about Diana Caisson?” I said. “You’re not curious?”
“I’m a historian,” he reminded me. “I’m curious about everythingyou know about your own world. But we have more urgent matters to consider, do we not?”
I was a trifle disappointed, but I figured that if he wanted to play it that way, I could too.
“Fair enough,” I said. “I’m curious myself — but for me, it’s all new, and all urgent. Are the Earthbound really as decadent as everybody seems to think? Have you really become a dead weight inhibiting further progress? Is that why someone’s trying to administer a sharp object lesson to you and Lowenthal — and Adam Zimmerman?”
He only looked uncomfortable for a moment. After all, I was steering him back to safer ground — to his own intellectual territory.
“There are people in the Outer System who are fond of trying to make that case,” he admitted. “It’s nothing new — I heard little else when I lived on the moon. There are political, ecological, and psychological arguments, but they all boil down to the idea that organisms that are so perfectly adapted to their environment that they never have any reason or inclination to leave it are bound to stagnate. Hard-line cyborganizers and proselytizing outward bounders are both fond of declaring that the only way for emortals to avoid robotization is to pose an infinite series of challenges to their inherited nature, by continually moving into alien environments and never remaining too long in any one of them. But I can’t believe that what’s happening to us here and now is just an object lesson. Something very strange is happening, and we really do need to examine every clue you obtained, however slight. If you can tell us exactlywhat the woman said to you, there might be items of information therein whose significance we can see far better than you.”
I popped the top of the water bottle and drank deeply. It wasn’t until the cool water hit my stomach that I realized how thirsty I had been. Ridiculous as it may seem, I’d lived so long with careful IT that I had fallen out of touch with unmodified sensations. It occurred to me to wonder how much worse Mortimer Gray’s alienation from his body might be.
“I suppose there might,” I conceded. “In fact, there might be details of our surroundings whose significance you can judge far better than I, not to mention details of our physical condition. They seem to have purged our IT, but they weren’t able to purge Niamh Horne’s externals. If anyone’s still capable of communication with the outside world, it’s her. Is that why you’re expecting Emily Marchant to come rescue us?”
He frowned to display his disapproval of my unhelpful attitude, but he answered me anyway. “Solantha Handsel is a cyborg too,” he pointed out, mildly. “Given that we started from Earth orbit, Julius Ngomi might be able to obtain news of our difficulties long before anyone on Titan.”
“Who’s Julius Ngomi?” I asked.
“The only member of the Inner Circle to whom I can confidently put a name,” he said, wearily accepting my agenda, presumably in the hope that I would eventually condescend to get back to his. “He’s another man who once suggested to me that the conflicts of interest that were growing up within the solar system couldn’t be settled with mere words and spontaneous bursts of fellow feeling. There are, I fear, people like him on both sides of the current dispute between Earth and the Confederation.”
I put the spoon aside and sipped gruel direct from the bowl. I was beginning to feel better, but I opened the bottle Alice had given me and tipped out a couple of tablets. I used the gruel to wash them down.
“The sort of person who might want to bomb all hell out of Titan?” I suggested. “Partly to punish the people who probably set off the Yellowstone supervolcano, but mainly to let other interested parties know that nobody messes with the cradle of humankind and gets away with it?”
Gray shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nobody’s that crazy — certainly not Julius. When I say that he doesn’t approve of mere words, I don’t mean to imply that he’s a man of violence. He’s a Hardinist through and through. He thinks that ownership and good stewardship are the answers to all human problems. He just wants to settle the question of who owns what. Did you know that there’s a stock market on Titan now?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Do you think he brought Adam Zimmerman out of cold storage to do it again?” I asked, not very seriously.
“Not at all,” he replied, keeping his own tone light. “But I think he mighthave brought Adam Zimmerman out of cold storage to remind us all what a great hero he was, and how his cleverness saved the world from the ultimate ecocatastrophe. If he was the one who gave the order to bring Zimmerman out, he must have intended to use him as an instrument of propaganda — perhaps to help prepare the way for a strictly nonviolent revolution, whose ultimate aim is to install a judiciously extended Cabal as owners and stewards of the entire solar system.”