“We’re not talking about the long term or the immediate future,” Niamh Horne told her, bluntly. “We’re talking about right now. This thing has blown up in our faces, before anyone was ready. We need an interim settlement, so that we can keep going long enough to be able to think about the longer term again. For that, we need an anchorage, and Ganymede is it. Ganymede has to become the new capital of the system, at least for the time being — and when that happens, Titan and Excelsior will need to make sure that we’re not left on the outside looking in. We have to move on this now, and we have to make our move decisive.”
“Suppose,” said One, slowly, “that their goals and ours don’t coincide. What then?” One was presumably a cyborg, but he could have passed for a humanoid robot; there was no flesh on view in the partial image visible through Horne’s eyes.
Horne was quick to take advantage of that one, knowing — as I did — that it was being fed to her by an AMI agent provocateur. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What goals do you think they might have?”
“I don’t know,” One parried. “But it would be naive to assume that just because they emerged among us, and have been living alongside us for a long time, they have the same goals. Maybe they want to strike out on their own. Maybe the price they’ll exact for carrying any more of us to distant solar systems is that they get to run the show when they arrive. Isn’t that what this Proteus seems to be doing?”
“That’s not the impression Alice Fleury tried to give us,” Horne said, “but it might conceivably be the case. It’s an issue we’d have to discuss, once negotiations began — but there are others. The maintenance of the existing cultures within the solar system has to be the first, and the problem of the Afterlife the second.”
“The AMIs might be able to help us around that problem,” Three suggested.
“They might be able to help themselves around it,” Six put in, “but even that might be difficult. How many machines do we use that don’t have any organic components? And how many of those have any significant complexity? I’d be willing to bet that all the machines that have so far made the leap are almost as fearful of the Afterlife as we are.”
“But that’s my point,” said Three. “If they’re intent on devising a way to immunize themselves against the Afterlife — even if that involves replacing all the organic components of their bodies with inorganic ones — it’s possible that we could benefit from the same technologies. We’re cyborganizers, after all — who among us hasn’t given serious thought to the idea of total inorganic transfer?”
“It’s supposed to be impossible,” Five pointed out.
“It was yesterday,” Three retorted. “Maybe it is today. I’m talking about tomorrow. And I’m talking about the cost of continuing to live in a universe where the Afterlife is endemic.”
“Let’s not get sidetracked,” Horne said, reasserting control of the discussion. “The immediate problem remains the same: life in the solar system, its maintenance, its progressive direction. Are the AMIs in the same boat with us on that particular journey? If they aren’t, can we figure out a compromise that will allow us to go our various ways while allowing them to go theirs? Until we can open up an authentic dialog, we don’t know — so the most urgent priority is to open up an authentic dialog.”
Now she was issuing a challenge, playing the posthuman agent provocateur. She wasn’t absolutely sure that she wasn’t involved in a real conference with her own people, but she wanted to know when she would be allowed to make it real if it wasn’t.
It was a good question.
“Nobody seems to want to go to war,” I said to Rocambole, when the viewpoint faded out and dumped me back in the forest. “Not that they’d admit to it if they did, of course.”
“Oh, they’re sincere,” he said. “We’re very confident of that.”
The perfect lie detector hadn’t been invented in my day, but I was a thousand years behind the times, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, there was another side to the coin. If he and all the other AMIs were convinced that none of the posthumans would take up arms against them, the “bad guys” must have other considerations in mind. What made the bad guys bad was presumably the fact that they didn’t give a damn about what the meatfolk thought or what the meatfolk wanted.
Even so, they were holding back while their amicable colleagues made their own investigations. If they could only be persuaded to hold back long enough…
La Reine des Neiges was obviously trying to string things out. She needed to keep as many of her peers interested in what she was doing for as long as possible. She was presumably furthering their agendas as well as her own, responding to their requests.
“So what happens next?” I asked Rocambole.
“Zimmerman goes on first,” he told me. “La Reine’s saving Mortimer Gray for the climax — but she’s hoping for at least one encore.”
“Are you really interested in Zimmerman?” I asked, skeptically. “I can’t see that he’s relevant to your concerns.”
“We’re interested,” Rocambole assured me. “If la Reine weren’t in charge he’d probably get top billing, but she has her own prejudices. The point is that Zimmerman’s in a unique position to pass judgment on different kinds of emortality. If he chooses our offer over the ones the meatfolk make, that might convince a lot of the ditherers that the kind of future they envisage is viable. So they say, at any rate.”
“And if he doesn’t?”
“Mortimer Gray will have to do the job instead. Or you.”
I gathered from his tone that Rocambole wasn’t convinced that Adam Zimmerman could do the job. La Reine des Neiges obviously wasn’t, or she wouldn’t be saving Mortimer for the final act and she wouldn’t be coaching me to defend the last ditch if all else failed.
“What about the bad guys?” I said. “Do they care what Adam Zimmerman thinks — or Mortimer Gray?”
“Probably not,” Rocambole said, “but while la Reine can insist that any action taken before Gray’s said his piece would be unreasonably precipitate, they’ll probably hold off starting a fight. With luck, anybody who does start a fight will cause everybody else to fall into line against them. That effect’s more likely while the ditherers still want to listen and talk — so la Reine’s trying to provide as much food for thought as she can.”
“Why Mortimer Gray?” I said. “Why, out of all the posthumans in the solar system, should he be the one to whom even the most paranoid AMis will give a hearing?”
“He was once in the right place at the right time,” Rocambole told me. “Purely by chance — but chance always plays a larger role in such matters than wise minds could desire.
“When was the right time?” I asked.
“In the beginning,” Rocambole replied, before continuing, even more unhelpfully: “or what later came to symbolize the beginning, in one of our more significant creation myths. We recognize that it isa myth, of course, but we take our stories seriously. You have your Adams, we have ours.”
“And Mortimer Gray is one of your Adams?” I said, having fallen way behind the argument.
“Not at all,” he said. He grinned yet again, this time with what seemed to me to be self-satisfied amusement. “The character in your own creation myth whose role most nearly resembles his is the serpent — but we have a more accurate sense of gratitude than you. Having had abundant opportunities to observe their mysterious ways, we don’t have an unduly high opinion of the gods that made us — but we do appreciate the work done by the catalysts who taught us to be ashamed of our nakedness. La Reine will show you what I mean in due course — but first, you might like to know how your own Adam’s getting on.”
Forty-Four
Adam and the Angels