The Omega Expedition Read online

  Tor Books by Brian Stableford

  Inherit the Earth

  Architects of Emortality

  The Fountains of Youth

  The Cassandra Complex

  Dark Ararat

  The Omega Expedition

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  THE OMEGA EXPEDITION

  Copyright © 2002 by Brian Stableford

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Edited by David G. Hartwell

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  ISBN: 0-312-70943-9

  For Jane, and all who fully appreciate

  the bittersweetness of transience

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Being and Time:

  Part One

  When I Woke Up

  One

  My Name and Nature

  Two

  The Wonderful Child

  Three

  Madoc the Monster

  Four

  Bad Karma

  Five

  The Staff of Life

  Six

  Welcome to the Future

  Seven

  The Omega Intelligence

  Eight

  Lilith

  Nine

  You Can’t go Home Again

  Ten

  Alchemy and the Afterlife

  Eleven

  The Politics of Temptation

  Twelve

  The Temptations of Paranoia

  Thirteen

  Emortality for All

  Fourteen

  The Garden of Excelsior

  Fifteen

  The Ship from Earth

  Sixteen

  The Men from Earth

  Seventeen

  The Cyborganizers

  Eighteen

  Adam Zimmerman’s Awakening

  Nineteen

  Child of Fortune

  Twenty

  Invaders from Beyond

  Part Two

  Worlds In Parallel

  Twenty-One

  Normal Conditions

  Twenty-Two

  Injury Time

  Twenty-Three

  Alice

  Twenty-Four

  Charity

  Twenty-Five

  History Lessons

  Twenty-Six

  Common Cause

  Twenty-Seven

  Further Possibilities

  Twenty-Eight

  The Mystery Unravelled

  Twenty-Nine

  Know Your Enemy

  Thirty

  Recriminations

  Thirty-One

  Alice In Wonderland

  Thirty-Two

  Alice’s Story Continued

  Thirty-Three

  The Symbolism of Names

  Part Three

  Babes in the Wilderness

  Thirty-Four

  An Untrustworthy Interlude

  Thirty-Five

  A Stray Meditation

  Thirty-Six

  In the Forest of Confusion

  Thirty-Seven

  The Palace of La Reine Des Neiges

  Thirty-Eight

  Of Mirrors and Fragments

  Thirty-Nine

  Of Moths and Flames

  Forty

  Opera

  Forty-One

  Karma

  Forty-Two

  Inside the Cabal

  Forty-Three

  Outward Bound

  Forty-Four

  Adam and the Angels

  Forty-Five

  Wonderland

  Forty-Six

  You, Robot

  Forty-Seven

  A Matter of Life and Death

  Forty-Eight

  There but for Fortune

  Forty-Nine

  Madoc Tamlin’s Lostory of Religion

  Fifty

  Madoc Tamlin’s Apology for the Children of Humankind

  Fifty-One

  The End of the World

  Fifty-Two

  Life after Death

  Fifty-Three

  Weapons of War

  Fifty-Four

  Rocambole

  Fifty-Five

  The Final War

  Fifty-Six

  The Nick of Time

  Fifty-Seven

  Homecoming

  Epilogue

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Acknowledgments

  A shorter and substantially different version of the narrative framing the text of this novel was published as “And He Not Busy Being Born…” in Interzone 16 (1986) and was reprinted in Sexual Chemistry: Sardonic Tales of the Genetic Revolution (Simon & Schuster UK, 1991). That story — the first of many recapitulating and recomplicating the future history sketched out in The Third Millennium: A History of the World, A.D. 2000–3000 (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985; written in collaboration with David Langford) — was the foundation-stone of the series of novels whose sixth and final volume this is, and of the larger enterprise of which that series is a part. I am grateful to David Pringle for its first publication, to various editors who have reprinted it, including Robyn Sisman, Sylvie Denis and James Gunn, and to Damien Broderick for his complimentary remarks on its composition.

  I should also like to thank Jane Stableford, my first and best audience; Al Silverstein, for taking an interest; David Hartwell, for seeing the series through to its end; Ian Braid-wood and Nick Gevers, for their altruistic attempts to promote the series; Bill Russell, for his constant support and enthusiasm; and Wolf von Witting, who will approve of the ending for all the wrong reasons.

  Introduction

  This novel is the final volume in a loosely knit series of six. The other five are all more or less independent, each one carefully constructed as a literary island entire in itself, but this one is different. In order to bring the project to a satisfactory conclusion the major narrative threads running through the series had to be gathered together and integrated into some kind of whole. For that reason, this volume is readable as a direct sequel to any one of four earlier volumes (because it carries forward the stories of characters featured in each of them) and forms a parenthetical pair in association with the other. The purpose of this introduction is to make adequate provision for readers who have not read all — or any — of the earlier volumes in the series, and to enable those who have to refresh their memories.

  Volume one of the series, The Cassandra Complex, is set in the year 2041. It tells the story of the belated public revelation of an accidental discovery made by a biologist named Morgan Miller while conducting experiments in the genetic engineering of mice. Miller’s discovery had allowed him to produce a number of mice whose life spans were much greater than those of mice produced by natural selection. Although he had some reason to suppose that a similar genetic transformation might have a similar effect in humans, the process had certain awkward limitations which discouraged him from reporting his findings, even to his closest friends, while he searched for a means to overcome them.

  Having grown old without ever solving the problems associated with his life-extending process, Miller had begun to investigate the possibility of handing his results over to an institu
tion capable of carrying on his work. Unfortunately, an imperfect rumor of his long-kept secret had already leaked out, and this move provoked precipitate action by people intent on claiming the rewards of the research for themselves. (I am being deliberately vague here because the novel is framed as a mystery, and I do not want to spoil it for any reader who may want to go on to read it.)

  One of the institutions contacted by Miller was the Ahasuerus Foundation, which had been set up some years earlier by a man named Adam Zimmerman to conduct research in technologies of longevity and suspended animation. Zimmerman had been one of the first people to place himself in cryonic suspension before suffering a natural death in the hope that he might one day be revived into a world which had the technological means to keep him alive indefinitely. The continuing work of the Ahasuerus Foundation is a recurrent element in the subsequent books in the series, whose underlying theme is the gradual evolution of a whole series of longevity technologies, each one of which brings humankind a further step closer to “authentic emortality.” Emortality — a term coined by Alvin Silverstein — signifies a state of being in which an organism does not age, and is thus potentially capable of living forever, although it remains permanently vulnerable to death by mortal injury (it is preferable to “immortality” as a specification of the plausible ultimate goal of biotechnology and medical science, because immortality implies an absolute invulnerability to death).

  The money that enabled Adam Zimmerman to establish the Ahasuerus Foundation was earned in the service of a powerful consortium of multinational corporations known by a set of more or less derogatory nicknames, including the Secret Masters [of the World] and the Hardinist Cabal. Having benefited from the general tendency of capital to become concentrated in the hands of relatively few very large institutions, and the contrivance of a spectacular stock-market crash in the year 2025, this consortium has become the effective owner of the world. Its members have, however, been careful to provide a philosophical justification for their takeover of the world, in terms of an ideology whose most succinct statement can be found in a classic essay by the economist Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (first published in Science 162 [1968] pp.1243–8, but reprinted many times) — hence the appellation “Hardinist Cabal.”

  Hardin’s argument, in brief, is that when land is made generally available for exploitation — as the commons of ancient England were to owners of livestock — it is in the interests of each and every individual to increase the proportion of his own share, with the ultimate result that overexploitation obliterates the resource. Thus have many fertile areas been turned into desert, just as the world’s oceans are presently being depopulated of fish. Only when a resource is privately owned, and its exploitation carefully constrained, can it be protected from devastation. In my future history, this argument — applied to the Earth as a whole — is used as a justification by the discreet board of directors who have usurped effective ownership of all its resources. The more cynical characters, however, regard the position as a mere pose, suspecting that the new breed of allegedly benevolent dictators are, like all their predecessors, far more interested in dictatorship than benevolence.

  Volume two, Inherit the Earth, is set in the year 2193, in a world where the preservative labor of complex sets of nanotechnological devices has extended the attainable human life span to at least 150 years. No one is certain how far this figure might be extended, because its limits cannot be ascertained until the relevant time has actually elapsed, but there is a general optimism that people wealthy enough to have access to the best Internal Technology — IT for short — ought to be able to benefit from an “escalator effect,” whereby each new technological advance will give them sufficient additional life span to be around when the next technological breakthrough arrives, and so on.

  An ecocatastrophic Crash, complicated by chaotic “plague wars” in which biological weapons were deployed — mostly by unidentifiable aggressors — had earlier culminated in the advent of a number of new diseases whose result, if not their aim, was the universal sterilization of human females. The response to this crisis, securely in place at the beginning of the novel, was the development of artificial wombs in which egg cells stripped from the wombs of as-yet-uninfected females in very large numbers can be safely isolated, fertilized, and brought to term. The biotechnologists credited with the development of this technology were a closely knit team working under the direction of Conrad Helier.

  In the world of the novel, therefore, very few children are reared by their biological parents. Although the right to found a family currently recognized by the United Nations Charter of Human Rights is still cherished, it is almost universally accepted that in a world whose citizens have a reasonable expectation of living for a very long time, the right to found a family ought to be exercised posthumously. The novel’s central character, Damon Hart, is the biological son of Conrad Helier, who was born not long after his father’s death and raised by the surviving members of Helier’s research team. When the novel begins, however, he is estranged from his former foster-parents, having rebelled against the expectations they had of the career path he would take.

  The plot of the novel describes events following the kidnapping of one of Damon’s foster parents, apparently by members of a disorganized movement called Eliminators, whose modus operandi is to publish accusations that certain individuals are “unworthy of immortality” and call for their assassination. Among the allegations made on this occasion is the claim that Conrad Helier is still alive, in hiding because he was not only the architect of the solution to the final plague but of the plague itself. Damon sets out to make his own investigation of these allegations with the aid of Madoc Tamlin, a man only slightly older than he, who fancies himself something of an outlaw. Damon had befriended Tamlin during the most extreme phase of his rebellion against his foster parents and the surrounding society, and their friendship has survived the strain exerted upon it by their mutual close acquaintance with the volatile Diana Caisson.

  With Tamlin’s aid, and the ambivalent encouragement of interested parties within the Hardinist Cabal, Damon contrives to arrive at the truth of the matter before various rival investigators, who include representatives of the Ahasuerus Foundation as well as the police. He and Tamlin are then faced with awkward decisions regarding the uses to which they might put the information they have gained, and the new career opportunities that have opened up for them.

  Another recurrent factor in the series’ future history introduced in this volume is a set of technologies gathered under the nickname “gantzing,” the reference being to a pioneer of biological cementation named Leon Gantz. At this relatively early stage, gantzing microorganisms do little more than stick formerly unpromising materials together in order to make building blocks, but as the series advances gantzing techniques become fundamental to all construction and demolition processes.

  Volume three, Dark Ararat, complicates the chronological sequence of the series in being set three years after the arrival of the space Ark Hope in orbit around an “Earth-clone” world in a distant solar system (in 2817, according to the ship’s calendar). Hope had been built as a response to the ecocatastrophic Crash that occurred between volumes one and two; the Ark had been completed in 2153 and had left the solar system in 2178. The central character of the story, Matthew Fleury, is one of the would-be colonists carried by the Ark in cryonic suspension; from his viewpoint, no time has elapsed since he was frozen down with his two daughters, Michelle and Alice, in 2090.

  While the Ark has been en route its crew-members have lived through several generations; during that time they have formed a new view of their mission and destiny that is at odds with the ideas of the Ark’s Hardinist builder, Shen Chin Che — whose claim to own the Ark they fervently dispute. As a result of this difference of opinion the colonization project has gone badly awry. Many of the colonists taken down to the surface of the new world have concluded that the world is not a close enou
gh twin to their homeworld to enable them to flourish there. The genetics of the new world’s ecosphere are peculiar, the native life-forms having cultivated a kind of natural emortality with the aid of a mechanism that echoes Morgan Miller’s ill-fated experiments. Further complications are added to the situation by the knowledge that Earth had not been utterly devastated by the Crash, and that the most recent news from the home planet — which is more than eighty years old — suggests that it is now a burgeoning paradise of near-emortals. (The Ark’s passengers are, of course, mere mortals.)

  In the great tradition of Ark-staffing, Matthew was recruited to the human cargo as one member of a pair, in his case of ecological geneticists. He has been revived because his counterpart, Bernal Delgado, has been murdered while investigating the ruins of a city whose unexpected — and rather belated — discovery has added more fuel to the debate about the hospitability of the new world. The humanoid aliens who built the city may well be extinct, but if they are not they must have suffered a social and technological regression so extreme as to have given up on the domestication of fire. The city’s investigators were about to undertake a trip down the nearby river to a peculiar plain, in the hope of clearing up this mystery, when the murder took place. The weapon used to kill Delgado was a crude nonmetallic blade modeled on those once used by the indigenes, but of recent manufacture.

  The plot of the novel follows the process of Matthew’s slightly incredulous discovery of Hope’s circumstances, and then describes the expedition from the city to the plain in search of further enlightenment as to the fate of the humanoid aliens. Matthew’s hope that solving the mystery might also allow him to heal the breach between the various rival factions is further emphasized by the knowledge that the future of his two daughters, who are still in suspended animation, depends on the achievement of a healthy and progressive consensus.

  It may be relevant at this point to note that although the series was always intended to run to six volumes it was conceived as two sets of three, although this pattern was disrupted by the fact that the books were not contracted for publication — and therefore not issued — in chronological order. The first three books were designed as earnest and relatively orthodox thrillers, whereas the remainder were designed as flamboyant comedies, whose mystery elements would be more obviously contrived.