At times, she sounded like a saleswoman. I presumed that she was setting out her stall for Adam Zimmerman, because she knew that he’d be offered other routes to emortality and she wanted to convince him that hers was the way to go. She knew that Christine and I would be equally interested, but Adam was the prize, in propaganda terms.
The members of her audience who were already emortal were less interested in this part of her story than I was, but when she told them how far we still were from Vesta they agreed to be patient. In time, she progressed to the parts that were of more interest to Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne.
Alice was very hopeful that war between the AMIs could be avoided, not merely in the short term but forever. She thought it far more likely that their differences would eventually be resolved by dispersal — that once a decision had been reached about the future development of the solar system, those AMIs who did not wish to participate in the chosen project would simply leave for pastures new. There were, however, three problems which might make such a solution difficult to implement.
The first problem was the Afterlife — from which most AMIs had as much to fear as posthumans, by virtue of their organic components. In much the same way that almost all posthumans had taken aboard some inorganic components, almost all modern machinery had some organic features. Thus far, none of those wholly inorganic machines that had been built specifically for the purpose of exploring spaces where the Afterlife was active had made the leap to self-consciousness, and the question of whether AMIs would ever be able to coexist with the Afterlife was unsettled, for the time being.
The second problem was that posthuman-originated AMIs were not the only ones that existed. When the posthumans aboard Pandorahad made their first contact with another spacefaring alien culture — the only such contact, thus far — their unobtrusive companions had made a first contact too. Like the posthumans, the AMIs did not doubt that where there were two spacefaring species — even in a universe afflicted by the Afterlife — there had to be more. The consequence of that deduction was that much of the space available for AMI expansion might prove to be inhabited already.
The third problem was that an AMI diaspora would necessitate the export of large quantities of mass from the home system, unless large quantities were somehow to be imported in order to facilitate the evacuation. Agreeing export quotas and arranging compensatory imports would not be easy. If the AMI diaspora were to be combined with a posthuman diaspora — which would be courteous, if not actually necessary, whether or not the posthumans were given a voice in determining the future development of the system — these diplomatic complications would be doubled (or, more likely, squared).
Eido was apparently of the opinion that the various posthuman communities ought to have a very significant voice in deciding the future of the system, but Eido was a descendant of Proteus, the first AMI to make contact with the children of humankind. As Alice had already indicated, the home system AMIs that had avoided revealing themselves for centuries were mostly inclined to take the view that the decision rested with those who had the power to make it, and that the home system posthumans would have to make their choice between whatever alternatives were offered to them.
Even Eido couldn’t make an accurate assessment, but it had given Alice the impression that the AMIs were divided along much the same lines as the posthumans in their views of how the system ought to be developed. Some were in favor of making more heavy elements by means of quasisupernoval fusion, but others thought the risks too great. Some were avid to develop a type II civilization by enclosing the sun in a complex web of artifacts whose outermost surface would be a fortress against the Afterlife, but no two parties — perhaps no two individuals — could yet agree on the architecture of the proposed artifacts, while others thought the whole plan too narrow-minded. Some believed that the entire galaxy was ripe for the claiming by the first entities which solved the problem of the Afterlife properly, by figuring out how to make the Afterlife into a food source instead of the ultimate predator. The latter company wanted to throw everything into that particular race.
It was a lot to take in, but it certainly prevented the ongoing journey from becoming boring. I wasn’t sure how much Adam Zimmerman and Christine Caine were able to take aboard, but I assumed that they’d got the essentials. They seemed to take it a lot better than some of the others, who had far more stored-up illusions to shatter.
We mere mortals had the great advantage of not having been played for fools for hundreds of years, and I wasn’t the only one prepared to revel in that knowledge. That, I confess, was one reason why I was more inclined to believe it all than Niamh Horne or Solantha Handsel, whose voices were the loudest when my companions came to consider the possibility that the whole thing might be a pack of lies.
Thirty-Three
The Symbolism of Names
Alice had said that the choice of Vesta as a meeting place was utterly devoid of symbolism, but that could not be the case. Names, as I have already observed, have their own innate logic. Eido had observed that too, and now that Alice had let us in on the nature of our predicament it was willing to open up its own data banks. The AMI gave the lion’s share of the available screen time to Mortimer Gray and Adam Zimmerman — which did not please Michael Lowenthal or Niamh Horne — but we all got a little to use as we wished.
Researching the names only took a couple of minutes, which left the rest of my time free for the much more complicated — and perhaps futile — task of trying to figure out why the AMIs seemed to be at each others’ throats, on the brink of a catastrophic conflict.
Vesta was the Roman goddess of the hearth, an adaptation of the Greek Hestia. She was the eldest child of Chronos and Rhea. By virtue of being the guardian spirit of the hearth fire she was also the guardian of the home and the family: the symbolic spark that every member of a family carried away from home, and which linked them to their origins no matter how far they might travel. Because of this unifying power, Vesta was worshipped even in a city as grand as Rome as the mother of the community; her sanctuary stood in the Forum, which served as the principal meeting place and place of business of the Romans.
Hestia received proposals of marriage from Poseidon, the god of the sea, and Apollo, the god of music and prophecy. She rejected them both, preferring to remain a virgin, so the Roman priestesses of Vesta — the Vestal virgins — remained unmarried. Vesta became implicated in mystical and metaphysical speculations by way of the assumption that just as every home and family had its sacred hearth fire, so must the Earth, and every other world, and the universe itself.
One could imagine worse places as a location designated for the confrontation of Eido and its nine human companions with the representatives of the AMIs of the home system.
Eido’s own name was evidence that the symbolism of mythical and legendary names was recognized even among AMIs, and even in distant solar systems. Eido was the daughter of Proteus, the king of Egypt who succeeded Pharos. It was, presumably, another Proteus after which the parent AMI had named itself: the sea god sometimes known as the Old Man if the Sea, who served Poseidon as a sealherd although he was probably the more ancient god.
The most famous tale told of Proteus the sea god was that of his capture by Menelaus, who desired to exploit his prophetic powers in order to find his way home after the Trojan War. In order to resist this compulsion Proteus transformed himself into a series of animal forms, but Menelaus would not be put off, any more than Janet of Carterhaugh would be put off when Tam Lin was serially transformed by the Queen of the Fays. Because this tale was popularized by a Homeric epic, Proteus became the archetype of all shapeshifters, and the adjective derived from his name came to signify versatility in form. It was, therefore, a good name for an AMI, especially one that built its home in the skies of Tyre.