But no one had ever taken up arms on behalf of the existing population of sleepers.

The conveniently forgotten corpsicles had never found a champion willing to campaign for their release — or even for the careful discrimination of those who had never done anything to deserve indefinite sentences in the first place. Without such a champion, it had been easy enough to leave the problem to be sorted out by someone who actually cared.

Even now, when a couple of specimen releases had finally been arranged, it was not obvious that anyone reallycared. Was it incumbent on me, I wondered, to become the champion that the sleepers had never had?

I tucked the thought away for possible future reference; for the time being, I still had to work out exactly what kind of nest of vipers I had been delivered into, and why.

Thirteen

Emortality for All

Ilooked up Emily Marchant before looking up Mortimer Gray, and was suitably impressed.

There were, allegedly, no Hardinists in or behind the Outer System Confederation — but that didn’t mean that questions of ownership and stewardship were irrelevant in the outer system. Nor did it mean that the implications of the Tragedy of the Commons hadn’t yet raised their ugly head. Quite the reverse, in fact. Questions of who might be entitled to do what with exactly which lumps of mass — “lumps” ranging in size from asteroids no bigger than an average hometree to Jupiter itself — seemed to have become measurably more acute during the last few centuries, and the increase had accelerated during the last few decades.

In the Outer System, every rock was precious, and every block of ice even more so. That, apparently, was one of the reasons why the ship carrying Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray from Earth had been exposed to the risk of close encounters with snowballs. The settlers of the Oort Halo had been deflecting new comets sunwards for centuries; although the bigger lumps were greedily intercepted, the residual small debris was pouring into the inner system like an everlasting blizzard. That was, apparently, another cause of tension and disputation between the Confederation and the Earthbound.

It didn’t require any data-trawling skill to discover that Emily Marchant was a major player in the Confederation and all its major disputes. She had the money, the prestige, the talent, the know-how, and the charisma to make her opinions felt. She was festooned with painfully quaint nicknames — the Chief Cheerleader of the High Kickers and the Great Architect of the Ice Palaces, to name but two — but her most common label was “the Titaness.” There was even an ultrasmart spaceship with the same name. She was, it seemed, a Snow Queen of sufficient majesty to put the petty villain of Christine Caine’s favorite kiddie flick to shame.

Unfortunately, Emily Marchant wasn’t inbound on the ship that was hurtling inwards to pay the respects of the outer system to the newly awakened Adam Zimmerman; she obviously had better things to do. The Titanian envoy en route from the Jovian moons was a much younger and far less influential woman named Niamh Horne.

I knew that the Irish name Niamh was pronounced to rhyme with “Eve,” but even someone as intrigued by names as I was couldn’t make anything significant of that. Nor could anyone — even someone as paranoid as me — have found the slightest potentially meaningful connection between Emily Marchant or Niamh Horne and Christine Caine or me. It wasn’t until I checked out Mortimer Gray that I found one of those — and it wasn’t one that anyone could have expected, unless the wonderful children of Excelsior knew muchmore about me than they were letting on.

According to the records available on Excelsior, Mortimer Gray’s career was a model of honest endeavor motivated entirely by intellectual curiosity. Unlike Michael Lowenthal’s, his entire life seemed to be an open book, and apart from the probable coincidence of his having shared a couple of character-forming experiences with Emily Marchant he seemed unlikely to have any hidden agenda. But right up there at the head of his basic biography was a name I recognized: a name that, in all probability, no one butme in the entire universe would have recognized.

Mortimer Gray’s biological mother — who had, of course, died long before he was born — had been Diana Caisson. MyDiana Caisson. Damon Hart’s Diana Caisson. There was no doubt about her being the same one; her birth date was right up there alongside his, although her death date was given as “unknown.”

What could it mean?

So far as I could tell, it couldn’t possibly mean anything. How could anyone have known that I had been acquainted with the donor of the egg that had been engineered to produce Mortimer Gray? Why would anyone, including Mortimer Gray, have cared? Surely it had to be a coincidence. There was no imaginable reason why it should be anything else.

I had to switch tack then, so I began gathering information about Excelsior and its peculiar inhabitants, hoping to obtain some insight into their possible motives for involving themselves in Adam Zimmerman’s resurrection.

It didn’t take long to find out that they were even more peculiar than I thought. I had been thinking of Davida Berenike Columella as a girl and her fellows as a sisterhood, but that wasn’t strictly accurate. It wasn’t just the secondary sexual characteristics that arrive with puberty that “she” and her kind had forsaken; “she” had no ovaries either. Nor had “she” a womb, or a clitoris. It was too late to start thinking of her as an “it,” so I decided that I might as well stick with the pronoun I’d first thought of, but the fact remained that she and all her kind were sexless.

Why?

There was no shortage of information on file to explain the decision to eliminate sex from the design of Excelsior’s inhabitants, although the sheer profusion of that information was testimony to the controversy that must have surrounded the plan.

Apparently, several schools of thought had recently grown up as to the merits of arresting the aging process in different phases. The school that had settled on the position that the ideal age for an emortal was prepuberal had extrapolated the line of thinking a step further, reasoning that if the sexual organs were better left undeveloped it would be better still to eliminate them altogether, liberating valuable anatomical space for useful augmentation within the basic “functionally evolved corpus.”

Taking the research a step farther back into the realm of theory and technics, I soon became lost in specialisms of which I had not the least understanding, but I gradually pieced together a picture of the background against which this strange experiment had been set.

It seemed to me that it all came down, in the final analysis, to the Miller Effect.

Morgan Miller was the twentieth-century scientist who first stumbled upon a technology of longevity: a rejuvenation technique that worked by diverting a mature organism’s reproductive apparatus to the production of stem cells that could enhance the organism’s powers of self-repair dramatically. There were, however, two catches. Firstly, Miller’s method only worked on organisms in possession of the appropriate reproductive apparatus — which is to say, females. Secondly, the relevant power of self-repair enabled the cells in the organism’s brain to recover all the neuronal connections that experience had selectively withered — which is to say that it obliterated memory and learning on a massive scale.

Rejuvenation of the kind that Miller discovered continually restored the innocence of the individual. Mice could cope with that kind of continual loss, because they could learn everything they needed to know to get along as mice over and over again. Higher mammals couldn’t; even dogs rejuvenated by the Miller technique were reduced to helpless imbecility, unable to learn as quickly as their learning evaporated. That was why rejuvenation research in the following century had been concentrated on more selective and more easily controllable Internal Technologies: technologies which my generation were the first to exploit on a wholesale basis.