“When the theory of evolution was first propounded in the nineteenth century,” Davida Berenike Columella said, by way of summation, “Benjamin Disraeli said that it was a debate as to whether man was an ape or an angel. In that, he was correct. He also said that he was on the side of the angels — but that claim was utterly mistaken. He, like his opponents, was firmly and irrevocably on the side of the apes. The real question before him, although he did not realize it, was not what had happened in the past but what might happen in the future, when human beings would be able to take charge of their own evolution. I and my kind are the first posthumans who have ever been able to say with complete confidence that weare on the side of the angels.
“That opportunity is now open to you, Mr. Zimmerman, and that is why you have at last been brought from your resting place. I urge you most strongly to make your new home here with us on Excelsior, where you may become the pioneer and spiritual forefather of a new race of metamorphs.
“I urge you to do this not merely because it is the right decision, existentially speaking, but because there is no one better qualified than you to advertise our offering. There is no one better placed than you are to unite all the posthuman species in the desire and the determination to become the kind of angel that individual human minds have always yearned to be.”
Like Lowenthal and Horne, Davida knew well enough what her true situation was — but it seemed to me that she had a better appreciation of the kind of argument that the AMIs might want to hear.
The AMIs must have come to self-consciousness by a route very different from that which humankind had followed. They had never been blessed — or cursed — with sexuality. What I knew of the history of programming suggested that they had by no means been free of all the difficulties associated with hasty improvisation in the face of necessity, and one of the first uses of VE had been to pander in every conceivable fashion to the fulfilment of human sexual fantasies, but they had never been afflicted in themselvesby sexual desire or feeling.
However paradoxical it might seem, smart machines might not have been so efficient as masturbatory aids — and they had been efficient enough, even in Christine Caine’s day, to make unaugmented fleshsex a rarity — had they harbored sexual needs and desires of their own.
Given that they had never been apes, I thought, the AMIs would surely have every sympathy with Davida Berenike Columella’s arguments — which left Alice Fleury in a distinct minority in this particular Sale of the Millennium. I couldn’t help but wonder whether it might not have been fairer to let Niamh Horne in on this scenario, to put the case for her brand of adulthood.
I said as much to Rocambole, but he only shrugged his virtual shoulders. “No one will force Zimmerman to make up his mind before he’s ready,” he said. “If he wants to look at other offers he’ll be free to do so, assuming that his choices aren’t restricted by all-out war. How about you? Will you be signing up for the company of the angels?”
“I’ll need time to think about it,” I said. I figured that it was best to stall, for the time being. “I’ll be interested to hear allthe alternatives.”
“And what about him?” Rocambole wanted to know. “Will Zimmerman go for it, do you think?”
On the whole, I thought it unlikely. Adam Zimmerman had been a child and he’d been an adult. He’d even been an old man. Davida had only known childhood, in an exceedingly child-friendly world. She had no way of knowing what it felt like to grow up. She could call it creeping robotization if she wanted to, but that wasn’t the way it had seemed to me, or to Christine Caine, or to Adam. All her talk about angelic status being what individual human minds had always yearned for was so much hot air. I was pretty sure that Adam Zimmerman hadn’t had himself frozen down in the hope of becoming an angel — what he’d wanted was to be a man who didn’t have to die. That wasn’t what Davida was offering him, and my bet was that he wouldn’t take it.
As for me…well, I’d always prided myself on not wanting the things that other people wanted, not doing the things that other people did, etcetera, etcetera.
Maybe I did want to be an angel, if only to try it out. Maybe I’d want to try everythingon my long journey to the Omega Point. If the opportunity was there, how could I possibly ignore it forever?
But it certainly wasn’t going to be my first choice, if and when I got to make one.
Forty-Five
Wonderland
Alice Fleury candidly admitted that she’d never had the opportunity to take Davida’s route into the hinterlands of superhumanity. She had not long passed puberty when she had been frozen down along with her father and elder sister, but she was long past it now. On the other hand, she said, she did understand Davida’s frustrations with the anatomical and biochemical fudges of Earthly natural selection. On Tyre — where evolution had proceeded at a more leisurely pace — necessity had not hastened quite as many awkward improvisations.
Alice used the windowscreen from the very beginning to illustrate her pitch. At first she used it as if it were indeed a window looking out into the strange purple “glasslands” of Tyre. She showed Adam Zimmerman Tyre’s native fauna, including its intelligent humanoid natives as they had been when her father first displayed them to the world and to the home system. Then she showed him the cities of Tyre, tracking their growth over time. She showed us the pyramids that were the reproductive structures carefully employed by the Tyrian indigenes as a substitute for the kind of sexual reproduction that served the purposes of Earthly creatures.
All this was, however, a mere prelude to her discourse on the potential of genomic engineering. Once she got stuck into the technicalities of this new technical field Alice moved on with remarkable rapidity to matters of ferocious complexity. Adam Zimmerman must have been left floundering as soon and as badly as I was, but Alice had the look of a teacher working under pressure, who had no time to make her explanations clear. The reason she was sprinting through the fundamental biochemistry in this casual fashion, I supposed, was to establish her scholarly credentials. She wasn’t blinding us with science so much as trying to build our confidence that she really could deliver on the promises she was going to make.
Alice conceded that Davida’s arguments had a lot going for them, but contended that they were fatally flawed in two understandable respects. The first was that Davida’s notion of winning free of the follies and foibles of natural selection was unnecessarily restricted.
Natural selection, Alice said, had not made as bad a job of adapting human anatomy to the environments of Earth as Davida made out. Yes, there were flaws in human anatomical design, and the messiness of human biochemistry cried out for intervention in the name of order and economy — but it was a blinkered and narrow-minded approach to the solution of such problems to imagine that the goal was merely to achieve a better adaptation of human physiology to the environments of Earth. Nor was it sufficient to take in the kinds of modifications that fabers had found convenient to equip themselves with for life outside gravity wells.
“The solar system is a very small place,” Alice reminded Adam Zimmerman. “There are four hundred billion stars in the home galaxy, and there are more than a hundred billion galaxies. Other solar systems are not like ours. Other life-bearing planets are not like ours. Even those which qualify as Earth-clones in terms of such elementary measures as gravity and atmospheric composition harbor exotic ecospheres. If you want to think of the future in terms of thousands or tens of thousands of years you must stop thinking merely in terms of the future of the solar system, or even in terms of the future of the galaxy. The Afterlife may limit our options severely, at least in the short term, but we must begin thinking, even now, of our future in the universe.