“The Omega Point is still ahead of you, Christine. What’s behind you will always be behind you, but in the end, you’ll be free to move forward with as much control of your own destiny as anyone ever has. You’ll come through this. None of this is your fault; it’s all something that’s being done toyou. All you have to do is to keep going. In the end, it willbe finished. In the end, you willbe free.”
Committing the murders wasn’t pleasant. I was in there with her, far more intimately than before, so I had to do it too, and I can assure you that it wasn’t something you could get used to, or something you could stop caring about, or something from which you could ever completely recover — but I listened to my own voice and I knew that everything I was saying was true.
I knew, too, that the truth can sometimes be more painful than a comforting lie — but I believed then, as I do now, that if there is any real freedom to be gained, from the past or from any imaginable captivity, only the truth will suffice. I didn’t tell her about the joke, though. It seemed better not to mention the absurd means by which she must have been selected as a victim. I didn’t want her to feel too bad about the awful mistake her foster parents had made in giving her a surname.
Rocambole was waiting when I came out again, back into the holding pattern. He seemed impassive, perhaps even slightly cynical. Perhaps he thought that the performance was all for the benefit of la Reine des Neiges — but he didn’t try to pass judgment on what I’d done.
“So how are we doing in real time?” I asked him. “Have the weapons too dreadful to use been withdrawn from their armories, or is the peace still holding?”
“Still holding,” he said. “But nothing’s settled yet. We’re still trying to ascertain which way Lowenthal’s people and Horne’s are likely to jump once the cat’s all the way out of the bag. It’s not easy, given that they must be assuming that they’re under examination.”
“I can give the boss my answer to her ultimate question, if you like,” I told him. “I can tell her, and everyone else, what she wants to hear.”
“Perhaps you can,” he murmured. “But it’s not time yet. There’s more pedestrian work still to be done.”
“You can let me in on that now, if you want,” I said. “I’ve done what I needed to do. I’m available for eavesdropping duty. Where should we start, do you think?”
Forty-Two
Inside the Cabal
Michael Lowenthal was on the moon. At least, he was supposed to believe that he was on the moon. If he didn’t believe it — and I had to presume that he didn’t — he was pretending to believe it.
He’d been put into some kind of containment facility, as he undoubtedly would have been if he’d really been rescued from the AMIs. The facility was nowhere near as brutal as the one Damon Hart had put me in when PicoCon had tricked me out and sent me back, but his face was enclosed by some kind of transparent mask and the person he was talking to was wearing an extra layer of clear plastic over his own suitskin. It was difficult to be certain because the viewpoint la Reine had given me was Lowenthal’s own; his eyes had become her camera.
The man facing Lowenthal, separated from him by two layers of insulation, had the darkest skin I’d ever seen; it set off the worried look in his eyes very nicely. He was a sim, of course, but I didn’t doubt that he was a supremely competent sim. If la Reine des Neiges had got to know me well enough on very short acquaintance to write my opera, she must know the long-lived citizens of Earth’s New Utopia very well indeed.
“That’s Julius Ngomi,” Rocambole murmured. “The Chairman of the Board. A great statesman, by anyone’s standards. We’re hopeful that he’ll be reasonable, but we can’t be sure.” What he meant was that even if the sim they had constructed for the purpose of this dialog responded reasonably to every cue, no one could be absolutely certain that the real man would do likewise — not because the sim wasn’t accurate enough, but because the sim was responding to cues provided by Michael Lowenthal. It was impossible to know how differently Lowenthal would handle his own end of the discussion if he weren’t nursing the strong suspicion that all of this was a sham.
“I’m sorry, Michael,” Ngomi was saying. “We can’t just flush you clean. There’s stuff inside you that we’ve never seen before. We need to examine it carefully in situbefore we can begin dismantling it, let alone replacing it.”
“It’s a mistake to leave the nanobots in,” Lowenthal’s voice told him. “We can’t speak freely while I’m carrying bugs. I don’t care how thick the walls are — the mere fact that they have embedded systems prevents us from being certain that this isn’t being relayed all the way back to the other side.” I couldn’t count the layers of bluff and double bluff contained in that statement.
“I know that, Michael,” Ngomi said, “but the brutal truth is that nobody will be speaking freely to or around you for a long time. You knew the risk when you volunteered to go. It always looked like a crooked deal.”
“It looked like Ahasuerus testing our apron strings, or Excelsior testing theirs,” Lowenthal said, a trifle resentfully. “Who could have imagined that an Outer System ship could go rogue? Who could have imagined that Hope’s people could have progressed to the point of sending missionaries to the home system?”
“It’s our job to imagine things,” Ngomi replied. “We can’t afford to be taken by surprise. You know as well as anyone how easily things can get out of hand if they’re not properly supervised.”
“Not properly supervised?” Lowenthal echoed. “I know you’ve spent centuries perfecting your mastery of understatement, Julie, but we’re talking about Armageddon here. They tried to blow up the world, and we didn’t even know they existed.”
“That’s not strictly true, Michael.”
“You didknow they existed — and you didn’t tell me!”
“I mean that they didn’t try to blow up the world, Michael. Whatever happened was the act of a rogue, and the explosion wasn’t intended to destroy the planet. It wouldn’t have done that even if the rogue’s rivals hadn’t cushioned the blow. The incident should have tipped us off. The casualty figures were always unbelievably low, but we were so secure in our arrogance that we simply took the credit for that ourselves, complimenting ourselves on the efficacy of our own contingency plans. That was foolish. If we’d only treated the lightness of the casualties as a suspicious circumstance, and hadn’t been so hung up on the possibility that Titan or Umbriel might have been behind the explosion…well, it’s easy to be wise after the event. If it’s true that conscious machines have been around for several centuries, that might help us to make better sense of a lot of things.”
“I know. That’s what convinced me that it was true, and not some Outer System disinformation program. Unfortunately, all the vital questions remain unanswered. How many are there? Where are they? Can we identify them? How different are they from us? It might be unwise to take it for granted that they’re as many or as powerful as Alice Fleury implied. If they can turn an Outer System ship there’s probably no way that Titan can hold out against them, but we might, if we could only find a way of purging our systems.”
“We’re probably ninety-nine years too late, Michael,” Ngomi said, softly. “They didn’t blow up the world, but they certainly opened the doorway wide for the importation of a great deal of Outer System hardware. If we had some reliable way of testing for the presence of consciousness or free will, we might be able to judge the magnitude of the problem, but we don’t even have a reliable means of testing one another. The idea of robotization wouldn’t be such a bugbear if we did.”