The nanobots were good. The injection itself hurt like hell, but the condition of my nose wouldn’t have allowed me simply to snort the stuff, and the needle got the bots to the site in no time at all. Once there, the pain dwindled away.
“It’ll take an hour or so for the swelling to go down,” she told me. “A couple of hours more to knit the tissues. Don’t get into another fight, though — they’re limited.”
“How much longer will it be before we get to where we’re going?” I asked.
She looked me up and down. I figured that she had to have some kind of private data feed, like the one Davida had had while we were on Excelsior, but I had no way to know how tightly she was confined by orders, or what scope she had for using her own initiative.
“It’s not settled yet,” she told me. “Locations are symbolically loaded — ask Lowenthal and Gray about theirpeace conference experience. However it works out, this showdown will be a defining moment in the history of the solar system and all the different humankinds — perhaps thedefining moment. We have to establish the principle that it ought to take place now before we can determine where and how.”
“I’ve bought you a little extra breathing space” I reminded her. “If I knew what I was fighting for, I might be able to buy you a little more. If you’re prepared to trust me, I’ll try to get whatever information you need from Lowenthal and Horne.” I was feeling a lotbetter, and was entirely ready to be proud of my tactical skill if she decided to reward my quixotic gesture by giving me further clues as to what the hell was going on — but she wouldn’t play.
“I can’t,” she said.
“In that case,” I told her, “I can’t help you. I have to play the game as I see it.”
“So do they,” she said, bitterly. “That’s the problem. They’re very fond of games — and they’re determined to play this one to the end, despite the lack of time. They’re very fond of stories too, so they’ll delight in keeping you in suspense if they can. You might need to remember all that, if things do go awry.” She gave the impression of someone who was trying hard to pass on some good advice under adverse conditions.
“Who the hell are we talking about?” I asked, plaintively.
“They won’t play if we don’t handle it their way,” she said, doggedly. “If it were up to me, I’d tell you everything now — but if it were up to some of them, they’d have kept you in blissful ignorance forever. We all have to compromise. That’s the thought you have to hold in mind, Madoc. We allhave to compromise. If we can’t get together, we’ll alllose — and by lose, I mean die. However crazy this gets, the end is real. It’s all play, all drama…but it’s for real. The cost of losing might be as high as extinction.”
“Which of us was the target?” I asked, figuring that there was no harm in continuing to try. “You can tell us that, at least. Some of us must be innocent bystanders.”
Her expression suggested otherwise, but she decided to stick her neck out. “Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray were the original targets,” she said, still making a show of great reluctance, “but everyone had to compromise even to get this far. It was a victory of sorts, in the end, to hold the list to nine. With any luck, you’ll all get to play your parts — but when the time comes for the deal to be done, Gray’s the one who’ll swing the decision one way or the other. You should tell him that. He needs to be forewarned.”
I hadn’t time to think it over, or even to consider alternative reasons as to why she’d said “nine” instead of “eight”; she was already trying to shove me out of the cupboard and back to the cage. I only had time for one more shot, and I had to improvise as best I could.
“It’s already begun, hasn’t it?” I said. “The war, I mean. Year zero was the first shot.”
“No it wasn’t,” she told me. “The seeds of potential conflict were sown longbefore that — but they have to be prevented from flowering. We have to work things out. We have to arrive at a settlement, without everything turning into the Afterlife.”
Twenty-Eight
The Mystery Unravelled
Iknew that I wasn’t going to be universally popular when I returned to my companions, but I expected that Lowenthal would have smoothed things over. Even if he couldn’t bring himself to believe that I hadn’t simply gone berserk he had to hope that I could turn my explosion into a strategy and find out more by running up moral credit than he and Horne could ever have found out by trying to put pressure on Alice.
On the other hand, I knew that the only way to hold my new position in the pecking order was to lay out something they could get their teeth into, so when I found them waiting to hear from me I knew that I had to make it good.
“Okay,” I said, “Here’s what I’m sure of, thanks to a little help from Christine. We’re aboard one of the Arks that a bunch of Lowenthal’s predecessors built in the late twenty-first century. The idea was to hitch a ride in a bunch of comets that were passing through the system, but one coupling went wrong so only three left the system. This is the fourth. Alice says that she was frozen down in twenty ninety, which would make her a passenger on one of the other three — almost certainly the one that recontacted Earth when it ended up at Ararat. Whoever’s got hold of us probably came from Ararat, but they seem to be engaged in combative negotiations with several local parties. Alice says they haven’t settled on a venue for the show we’ve been snatched to take part in because whatever location they choose will be symbolically loaded — she told me to ask Lowenthal and Gray about their peace conference experience if I wanted that explained.
“The original targets of the kidnap plan were Zimmerman and Gray, but the rest of us got added in as a result of the negotiations, maybe because that’s the way committee decisions always go. The negotiations must have begun before Christine and I were woken up, so it’s possible that we were specifically chosen to be part of this, but it’s conceivable that they just wanted six more bodies to make up an agreed number. The agreed number appears to be nine rather than eight, which might mean that there’s someone else yet to be added in, or that Alice herself is number nine.
“Whatever the story is, it goes back way beyond year zero. I can’t get Alice’s weand theystraight in my mind, but whoever theyare she says they love playing games — which is presumably why they’ll be hanging on my every word just as intently as you are. I suspect that they’ve woken us up to watch us, maybe to see whether we can figure this out but more likely because they want to obtain a better idea of where Lowenthal’s and Horne’s masters stand in respect of the problems that currently afflict the solar system.
“In spite of what I said before, I don’t think anyone intends to torture us, but they do seem to want us in our raw state for now, maybe because they intend to instal some elaborate IT of their own. According to Alice, the stuff I was just given is strictly temporary. Alice reckons that Gray’s the key to the whole affair. She says that he’s the one who might be able to swing the big decision one way or the other, and ought to be forewarned of that responsibility. If we get it wrong, the booby prize might be extinction — but that threat might just be part of the game. In fact, allof this might just be part of the game.”
Having said that, I sat down. I wasn’t tired — in fact, I’d never been so tightly wired without powerful chemical assistance — but I figured that it would be an appropriate way to signal that the floor was open.
Lowenthal had been looking at me, but now he looked at Mortimer Gray. Mortimer Gray was studying the table top intently, deep in thought — or determinedly pretending to be deep in thought.