Unfortunately, it still left the difficult questions conspicuously unanswered. Why should Ark dwellers of any sort want to hijack a Titanian spaceship? Why, if they did, would they choose to do it while it was playing temporary host to Adam Zimmerman, Michael Lowenthal, and Niamh Horne, to name but three?
If Alice had returned to the solar system from elsewhere — Ararat being the likeliest contender — then she must presumably have the use of a spaceship that was far more advanced than Charity, which could easily have stayed in the Outer System rather than coming all the way in to Earth orbit…
I knew it had to make sense somehow, but I still couldn’t see how. I was keeping it all to myself because I still didn’t know whose side I wanted to be on — and also because I wanted to put a story together before I let the others in on my secret. If and when I came clean I didn’t want to leave anyone in the slightest doubt that a twenty-second-century mortal was as good a man as any thirty-third-century emortal. In the meantime, the people who had Charitywere running the show. I wanted them to think that they could trust me — that I was willing to cooperate with their desire to keep things dark until they had sorted out their own diplomatic problems.
I didn’t think I owed anythingto Davida Berenike Columella, let alone to Michael Lowenthal or Niamh Horne. If we really were in deep trouble, embroiled in something that might turn into a war, the only loyalty I owed was to myself.
Twenty-Seven
Further Possibilities
While I was trying hard to make my own headway with the puzzle into which I’d been precipitated, the discussion went on around me. At present, Chairman Lowenthal wasn’t making any obvious attempt to control its direction, perhaps because he was locked in his own private struggle to get one up on his rivals.
Adam and Christine had both lived in eras which had looked forward to the possibility of contact with extraterrestrial species, and they both took advantage of Niamh Horne’s recklessness to wonder whether there might not be aliens about whom we knew nothing, who had been keeping tabs on us ever since we announced our existence to the cosmos by inventing radio. Mortimer Gray told them that everything our space probes had reported back to us suggested that complex extraterrestrial life was extremely rare, especially by comparison with the all-conquering Afterlife — but that assurance only brought forth a further string of prevarications.
Was it not stupidly arrogant of us, Christine asked, to assume that the evolution of complexity had never happened at a much earlier state of galactic history? And if it had, was it not perfectly reasonable to suppose that those complex species must have developed technological devices far in advance of ours?
It was left to Solantha Handsel, the professional paranoid, to react to the fact that the hypothesis did not advance the discussion at all. “Whoever or whatever they are,” she asked, impatiently, “what could they possibly want with us?”
“They don’t want you,” Christine Caine responded, with surprising asperity. “The timing tells us, as plainly as you like, that the one they want is Adam.”
“Fine,” the bodyguard snapped back. “So what do they want with him?”
Adam Zimmerman was a picture of perplexity — but when he looked around for an answer to that question his gaze soon settled on Michael Lowenthal.
My nose had begun to hurt again. I needed more codeine — or something stronger.
“I think we ought to get back to the mysterious Alice,” Lowenthal said, smoothly. “She told Tamlin that she was trying to prevent a war. If that’s true, what war is she talking about? And why would kidnapping any of us make the slightest difference to the likelihood of it being fought?”
Nobody replied immediately. It was Niamh Horne who eventually said: “There isn’t going to be a war. The weapons we have are too powerful. No one wants to take the risk.” I wished she sounded more convincing.
“They used to say that in hisday,” I countered, with a nod in Adam Zimmerman’s direction, “but it didn’t stop them.”
“Yes it did,” said Mortimer Gray. “Even the primitive nuclear weapons you had then were used with the utmost discretion — and the ultimate plague war was very carefully fought with nonlethal weaponry. Your warmakers did everything they possibly could to avoid having to deploy the full extent of their firepower. No one within the solar system would ever dream of using fusion bombs, let alone a biological weapon akin to the Afterlife.”
“A fair point,” I conceded. “With an interesting qualification.”
It only took him a minute to catch up. “Are we back to the hypothetical aliens again?” he said wearily — but he knew as well as I did that there were others outside the solar system as well as hypothetical aliens.
“I suppose you didn’t bother to ask her which war she was trying to prevent?” Michael Lowenthal put in.
“I made a few suggestions,” I retorted, “but she didn’t react to any of them. She said things were more complicated than Earth versus the Outer System. I believed her — but I’m in no position to guess how complicated things might really be. That’s your province.”
He wouldn’t play. “I agree with Niamh and Mortimer,” he said, stubbornly. “No one wants a war. No one would be so foolish as to start one.”
I shrugged my shoulders theatrically. “I guess we’ll have to wait until they decide to tell us who they are and what they’re up to,” I said. “But there is one more thing we ought to consider.”
“What?” said Niamh Horne, bluntly.
“I was involved in a kidnap once before,” I said. “Fortunately, I wasn’t the one kidnapped — but I remember it as if it were yesterday. They flushed his IT just as they’ve flushed ours. They did it because they wanted to interrogate him. Personally, I don’t have any information that anyone nowadays would want to extract by force — but if I had, I’d be a little nervous. If any one of you does have any valuable secrets tucked away in your head, I wouldn’t rely on being able to keep them secret for long.”
I could tell that Michael Lowenthal had already thought about the possibility. Niamh Horne was still expressionless. Davida still seemed to be so terrified that she could hardly speak. Solantha Handsel was the only one who looked mortally offended by the suggestion, and it was she who said: “They flushed yours too. Are you so certain that you haven’t got anything they might want to know?”
“Yes,” I said. “And I’m also certain that if there was anything they wanted to know, I wouldn’t try to hold out on them. In my experience, though — and I really do have experience — torturers never settle for what you tell them straight away, even when it’s the truth.”
Maybe it was a seed that would have been better left unsown. Maybe it was what provoked our careful hosts to make their next move. If so, they might have done better to resist the provocation.
The biggest of the wallscreens flickered into life, and Alice’s face appeared. “If Mr. Tamlin would care to make his way to the same door as before,” she said, a trifle impatiently, “and the rest of you would please stand clear, I can now give him something that will further reduce his pain and help his injuries heal.”
In a different context, it wouldn’t have sounded ominous at all. In view of what I’d just been saying, nobody was about to take the offer entirely at face value — but I was the only one who knew how much I could have told the others and hadn’t, so I was perfectly prepared to play along.
“Sure,” I said, rising to my feet without the slightest hesitation. “Whatever you’ve found, it has to be better than codeine. I’m on my way.”
I didn’t know what to expect as I walked towards the door, while my companions obediently held back, but I was looking forward to another opportunity to talk to Alice. I didn’t suppose that she’d answer my questions any less guardedly than before, but I figured that the mere fact of my having a second session closeted away with her would increase my advantage over my fellow prisoners. Even if I couldn’t contrive actually to become an officially designated go-between, I figured, I could at least pretend.