James P. Hogan - The Immortality Option

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The Immortality Option

James P. Hogan

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are

fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

form.

A Baen Book

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

ISBN: 0-7434-7163-6

Cover art by David Mattingly

First printing, October 2003

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Typeset by Bell Road Press, Sherwood, OR

Production by Windhaven Press, Auburn, NH

Printed in the United States of America

Acknowledgment

This is to thank Hans Moravec of the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, for

his help and fascinating thoughts on minds, machines, and where they could all be leading. And

for some very enjoyable company.

Dedication

To June, Yvette, and Lucy

YOUR CALL IS IMPORTANT TO US. . . .

"I would not advise attempts at deviousness," Mormorel warned. "We have artisans well skilled in

methods of persuasion."

Thirg nodded his metal head toward the high priest and the king. "The truth is that I shall remain

free however heavily you weigh this body with irons and chains, while both these eminences stand

captives of their own delusions," he said. "For who can force me to believe that which I choose not to?

Their treasures in guarded vaults produce only anguish for fear of their loss. But can anyone steal the

knowledge that is wealth to me, that I share openly with any? It is impossible.

"There are those humans who, like thee, can prosper only by the coerced labor of others. And

there are humans like I, who would see all of Robia follow Carthogia into freedom. Now call they

inquisitors if thou wilt. There is nothing more that can be added."

Eskenderom was radiating purple. "What manner of impudence impels such to speak thus of a

monarch! To the acid vats with them!" he raged.

But a thoughtful gleam had come into Frennelech's imagers. "Methinks the Lifemaker has consigned

these three into our hands for a purpose. We shall have our vengeance, yes. But let it be a public

spectacle that will mark the moment that begins the triumph or our reascendance!"

Mormorel took up the theme. "Yes! Consign them to the reduction furnaces. Then shall the people

see the Enlightener's false faith perish in the same ignominy as their Enlightener."

"Let's do it now, then, Eskenderom ordered, "before any miracle workers from the sky can

intervene this time."

Standing beside Thirg, Groork's metal knees were almost buckling. There was only one hope now.

With his secret transmitter he sent out once again the signal to the humans. And received once again:

"SORRY, NOBODY HERE RIGHT NOW. LEAVE MESSAGE AFTER BEEP."

BAEN BOOKS by James P. Hogan

Also in this series:

Code of the Lifemaker

Inherit the Stars

The Genesis Machine

The Gentle Giants of Ganymede

The Two Faces of Tomorrow

Thrice Upon a Time

Giants' Star

Voyage from Yesteryear

The Proteus Operation

Endgame Enigma

The Mirror Maze

The Infinity Gambit

Entoverse

The Multiplex Man

Realtime Interrupt

Minds, Machines & Evolution

Paths to Otherwhere

Bug Park

Star Child

Rockets, Redheads & Revolution

Cradle of Saturn

The Immortality Option

Martian Knightlife

The Legend That Was Earth

The Anguished Dawn

Prologue

By the second decade of the twenty-first century the nations of Earth, while as prone as ever to the

localized squabblings that would probably be a part of the human scene for as long as humanity endured,

had receded from the specter of global doomsday that had tied up entire industries of creative talent and

stifled vision for over fifty years. After a period of indecision while governments absorbed the new

realities and former defense-satiated contractors searched for a new direction, the leading-edge

technologies that the years of confrontation had stimulated became the driving force of a revitalized,

multinational space program.

An early object for further investigation was Titan, the giant moon of Saturn, perpetually cloaked in

high-altitude clouds of red-brown nitrogenous oxides. The first probe to attempt a surface survey was

the EuropeanDauphin , which arrived in 2018. Data acquired previously from astronomical

observations and the probes sent to the outer planets in the 1970s suggested surface conditions close to

the triple point of methane, raising the intriguing possibility that it might exist as a gas in the atmosphere

and in its liquid and solid phases on the surface, thus playing a role comparable to that of water on Earth.

Some scientists speculated that the hidden surface of Titan could consist of methane oceans and

water-ice continents covered by nitrogenous hydrocarbon soil precipitated from the upper atmosphere,

with methane rain falling from methane clouds formed below the aerosol blanket. It was even possible

that radioactive heat released in the interior might maintain reservoirs of water that could escape to the

surface as ice "lava" and perhaps provide a fluid substrate for mountain building and other tectonic

processes.

And, indeed, radar mapping by theDauphin orbiter revealed vast oceans, islands, continents, and

mountains below the all-enveloping clouds, the details of which were published and caused widespread

excitement. The public account, however, left out the highly reflective objects—suggestive of huge

metallic constructions—which in some cases extended for miles, along with the glimpses of strange

machines transmitted back by theDauphin 's short-lived surface landers.

The Europeans shared their knowledge of what was presumed to be an advanced alien culture only

with the Americans, who at that time were alone in possessing a large, long-range craft in a sufficiently

advanced stage of development to follow up on the discovery. This was the pulsed-fusion-drivenOrion ,

the development of which had been partly funded by a private consortium centered on the General

Space Enterprises Corporation (GSEC) specifically for manned exploration of the outer planets.

Launched, crewed, and managed operationally by the newly formed North Atlantic Space Organization

(NASO), theOrion mission to Titan departed two years later.

In addition to NASO personnel, the mission included scientists from a wide range of disciplines,

linguists and psychologists because of the prospect of encountering some form of intelligence, and a

force selected from elite American, British, and French military units to afford a measure of protection,

since the probable reaction and disposition of that intelligence were unknown. In this age of mass culture

the GSEC directors were mindful that any future policy toward Titan that they might consider beneficial

to their interests would need strong public support to be viable. Accordingly, at their instigation, the

mission also included a major celebrity from a field that the antiscience reaction of recent times had

endowed with significant public influence, which GSEC hoped to be able to exploit to its advantage: the

super-"psychic," Karl Zambendorf. Along with him went the team of assistants that accompanied him

everywhere.

What the mission found on Titan was more astonishing than anything that even the most fanciful

interpreters of theDauphin data had imagined. Below the cloud cover, Titan was inhabited by a living,

evolving biosphere of machines. Sprawling tangles of self-reproducing industrial technology proliferating

out of control extended across huge tracts of the surface. And roaming around this mechanical "jungle"

were various kinds of freely mobile machines that apparently formed part of a weird yet apparently

functional ecology.

The only explanation the bemused Terran scientists could conceive was that it had all somehow

mutated from an automated, self-replicating industrial complex set in motion by some alien culture long

before. What alien culture? Where were they now? What had gone wrong? Why Titan? Nobody had

answers.

But perhaps the most amazing find of all was that this unique form of life had evolved its own

bizarre brand of intelligence. The scientists dubbed the beings the Taloids, after an artificially created

bronze man in Greek mythology. They were an upright, bipedal species of self-aware robot that wore

clothes, tamed and reared mechanical "animals," grew their houses from pseudo-vegetable cultures, and

worshiped a mythical nonmachine machine maker, which they reasoned must have created the first life.

They saw the miles of proliferating machinery as "forests" and quarried ice to build their cities. As nearly

as could be approximated, the Taloid culture was comparable in its level of progress to Europe's at the

time of the Renaissance; accordingly, the Terrans dubbed the Taloids' geographic political groupings

after the medieval Italian city-states.

In terms of advancement and productive potential, the technology running wild all over Titan

surpassed anything that existed on Earth. The backers of theOrion mission quickly realized that whoever

could gain control of that potential would cease to have any effective competition on Earth, commercially

or politically. Therefore, just when the Taloids were beginning to challenge the old feudal tyrannies and

experiment with more liberal ways of governing their affairs, the mission's GSEC-backed leaders

adopted an interventionist policy aimed at keeping the traditional rulers in power as local puppets to run

the intended neocolony.

Public opinion back on Earth was misled by distorted accounts of what was going on, and for a

while the future of the Taloids looked bleak. But then, more by accident than through any deliberate

design, Zambendorf and his crew became the instigators of a new "religion" that swept through the

Taloid nations, causing them to throw out the old, authoritarian powers and their teachings, and hence to

reject the intervention of the powers from Earth that were trying to prop up the old system.

The resulting exposures became the subject of an international scandal, causing GSEC to be

relieved of its control and NASO to assume full command of the Titan mission. The GSEC

representatives and associates left ignominiously with theOrion when the time came for it to return to

Earth. Zambendorf and his team, however, remained as part of the mixed complement of NASO

personnel, scientists, and a small military detachment left behind to carry on the work at Titan until the

arrival of the newly completed Japanese shipShirasagi, due five months after theOrion 's departure.

The Psychic Who Valued Reason

According to the computers that provided a rudimentary translation between English and the strings

of ultrasonic pulses via which the aliens communicated, the Taloids called it a river. And, indeed, its

functions were comparable to those of a river: It flowed through the forest, attracting and sustaining life;

it brought nutrients down from distant sources; and it carried away the debris, detritus, and wastes that

were inevitable products of life in action.

In reality, the "river" was an immense conveyor line rolling through miles of machines and assembly

stations, all thumping, whining, pounding, and buzzing on either side beneath an overhanging canopy of

power lines, data cables, ducting, and pipes. The river came from more thinly mechanized regions,

forming gradually out of the mergings of lesser transfer lines serving local material-processing centers and

clusters of parts-making machines. Farther down it broadened, fed by incoming tributaries bringing ever

more complex subassemblies and recycled parts. These flowed onward to fabrication centers lower

down, which included the assembly sites for the peculiar machine "animals" and, at a number of

specialized locations, for the Taloids themselves. And finally, everything that had not been utilized—

components rejected by the sorting machines, substandard assemblies, unwanted pieces and parts

picked up by the roving scavenger machines—was consumed in reduction furnaces and recovered as

elementary materials for reprocessing.

The waste and inefficiency were enormous. In some places masses of jammed and defunct

machinery stood in idle decay, partly dismantled by the scavengers. Piles of nuts, bolts, strands of wire,

cuttings, and stampings covered the ground everywhere like a layer of forest humus. Entire lines of

design died out, while others appeared in their place. But amid it all, as with the carbon-chemistry variety

of life that had taken possession of distant Earth, the common thread that bound them all together as

descendants from the same remote ancestral event managed somehow to sustain itself and endure.

It was like trying to find your way through a General Motors plant in diving gear with the lights out,

Dave Crookes thought, perspiring and cursing inside his dome-helmeted extravehicular suit as he

clambered over a gap in a line of pumping stations thick with hydraulic-line couplings. The Taloid in the

lead—known as Franklin among the Terrans—waited a couple of paces ahead, while Armitage, the

military escort assigned to the party, held aside a web of cables hanging like vines from the supports of a

rotor housing dimly outlined in the gloom above. The party included an escort more as a matter of form

than from any real need for protection against anything. And the troopers were always happy to get

away from the base and see something new outside.

The beam from Crookes's flashlamp revealed pipes running across concrete foundations ahead,

with steel pillars and a construction going upward. To the left of the construction, cables radiated away

from an arrangement of protruding columns of stacked disks that looked like the insulators of a power

transformer. On the right, a pile of scrap overflowed from a recessed space beneath the concrete

foundation. A spindly six-legged machine that had been rooting with its tapered snout around the base of

the pile scampered away into the darkness.

"Watch yourself above, to the right," Armitage's voice warned through the speaker in Crookes's

helmet.

There was a piece of pipe sticking out with a valve on the end. "I see it," Crookes acknowledged.

The voice of Leon Keyhoe, the signals specialist accompanying Crookes, came over the circuit.

"How much farther to the tower? This is getting to be like an obstacle course across Osaka." Keyhoe

had put on weight during the voyage out from Earth with theOrion, and he sounded breathless even in

Titan's low gravity. Being cooped up in the base at "Genoa" for most of the time since the ship's

departure over two months previously hadn't helped matters.

"By my reckoning we should be practically there," Crookes answered.

"Men!" Amy Rhodes exclaimed as she followed Crookes over the wall of hydraulics couplings.

"Just no spirit of adventure, that's your problem. No wonder it took thousands of years for Earth to get

explored." Deigning to step down, she jumped the four feet from the top casing to the steel mesh plates

covering the ice below.

Crookes turned away to resume following Armitage and Franklin. Behind Rhodes, Keyhoe heaved

himself up and paused to wheeze for a moment before lowering himself down the other side of the

obstacle. He was followed by "Charlie Chan," the Taloid bringing up the rear, so called on account of

the golden hue of his metal hands and the facial parts not covered by his rough black hat and clothes of

what looked like tire tread and woven wire.

The closest they had been able to land the flyer had been about half a mile back, among the

remains of some kind of derelict construction beside the main conveyor line running through the area.

The flyer's two-man NASO crew and the party's other military escort had remained to guard the craft—

necessary, since certain types of Titan's metal-searching animals had developed a liking for Terran alloys

—while the scientific party continued the rest of the way on foot.

The "tower" was in fact little more than a protuberance of girder frames capped by a circular

platform, standing thirty feet or so above the general level of the structures in the vicinity. What made it

interesting to communications engineers like Crookes and Keyhoe were the shapes on top that pictures

from low-flying reconnaissance drones had revealed, suggestive of communications antennas. The

pictures were low-resolution infrared, however, which made positive identification difficult, and no actual

transmissions had been detected. Hence, the only way to find out for sure what the shapes were had

been to go there and look.

If the whole Titan scene was indeed a result of some vast, alien, self-replicating industrial operation

gone wrong, as supposed, it seemed likely that it would originally have used radio communication. A

number of scattered and intermittent transmission sources existed, seeming to support such a conjecture,

and some of the Taloids possessed what appeared to be a residual reception capability by which they

could, on occasion, "hear" the transmissions. Traditionally, these latter were considered by the Taloids to

be mystics who interpreted voices from the deity.

The prevalent opinion among the Terran scientists was that radio had formed the primary means of

communication early on in the alien project but had become impracticable for some reason after the

whole scheme messed up. So the system had reverted to the backup communication modes that the

aliens would surely have provided if they had been any kind of engineers at all, and the isolated signals

still being picked up were simply a remnant of something that was in the process of dying out. Thus, the

scientists reasoned, there ought to be "fossil" radio facilities, recognizable in form but no longer

functional, such as antennas, like vestigial limbs, still being built the way they always had been but no

longer capable of doing anything. Verification of the prediction would go a long way toward advancing

the theory. Hence the expedition to the "tower" in the part of Titan the Terrans called Genoa.

It was all a long way and very different from Denver. Crookes had signed up as one of the

mission's scientists in the aftermath of a divorce to get away and find freedom in totally new surroundings

for a while before returning to begin a new life. And he had done so in an unexpected way. On the face

of it, "freedom" seemed a strange way to describe life in the confines of Genoa Base, lived according to

the strict code of NASO's offplanet regulations. But the sense in which the word meant more to him was

the release from the worldly obligations of bills, mortgages, departmental budgets, and dreary social

chores, and the ability to concentrate in the company of his intellectual peers on the mysteries of Titan

and the Taloids without distraction. For once in his life it was the job of others to take care of all the

necessary things that didn't interest him, letting him enjoy the things that did—even if that it did entail

blundering around in mechanical jungles, encased in a claustrophobic EV suit.

Whatever had stood on the concrete foundation was gone. A line of supports carrying pipes now

crossed the area above a pair of rectangular pits, one containing reciprocating machinery driven by gear

trains, the other half-filled with a stagnant liquid, probably methane. A pair of thick, vertical stanchions,

with a partly solid metal wall filling the space between, rose out of the clutter to support an arrangement

of girders and platforms above. Armitage's hand lamp picked out more braces and structural ties above

that. Consultation with a map sketched from the reconnaissance pictures showed that they had reached

the tower.

Franklin pointed at the box attached to Crookes's belt. At the same time a red light on it began

flashing, indicating that it was receiving high-frequency Taloid sonic pulses. Crookes unclipped the

"transmogrifier"—a much improved version of the device he and Keyhoe had improvised after the first

Terran-Taloid contact, though the name they had given it then had stuck—and touched a button with a

finger of his gauntlet to interrogate. The message on the miniature screen read: okay terran (climb trees?)

own back world-place?

Crookes nodded and switched in the channel of his suit radio that was set to the transmogrifier

frequency. "Sure. We do it all the time." The device emitted an inaudible stream that Franklin seemed to

understand.

i first lead if is good. taloids (used to/talk with?) forest.

"Fine."

"Why don't I go next after Franklin?" Amy Rhodes's voice said in Crookes's helmet. Her tone of

voice wasn't so much a suggestion as a demand. Technically, Crookes was in command of the party,

and it seemed to rile her; her attitude had been belligerent ever since they had set out. He shrugged

inside his suit and made a nonchalant face.

"Sure. Go ahead." He caught Armitage's eye behind the face piece of his helmet. The soldier raised

his eyebrows and turned away. It wasn't something that was worth getting into an argument over.

A platform resembling a catwalk spanned the gap between the two stanchions about ten feet above

where the group was standing. There was no access ladder, but Franklin reached the platform without

much difficulty, climbing first to a run of hoses topping a line of cylindrical tanks, and from there up a

series of stays and struts that provided holds. Amy followed, making a show of gliding on her feet and

using her hands lightly for balance like a rock climber. Armitage went next, moving solidly and

unhurriedly, and then Crookes. After a short delay and more huffing over the intercom circuit, Keyhoe

appeared from the shadows below, with Charlie Chan following immediately behind.

They could now see beneath the tower over an incomplete section of the wall. Instead of the

derelict lower levels they had expected, they found themselves looking down onto a fast-moving

conveyor carrying an assortment of assemblies and components, which from its direction would join the

main "river" not far from where the flyer was parked. Whatever installation had once existed in the base

of the tower was gone, and a subsequent phase of construction had seen the conveyor run straight

through where it had stood, leaving the skeleton of the former structure, with its tower above, straddling

the banks like a bridge.

From where they now stood, there was no easy way farther up. The pillars at the right-hand end of

the platform supported banks of switchgear boxes that gave moderately easy access for the next twenty

feet or so, but the structure above was stark and bare, with little prospect of much to stand on. The

center section held nothing but the support frame for the upper platform, high above them and way out

of reach. That left only the pair of I-section girders standing cornerwise to each other at the left-hand

end and forming a vertical right-angle channel about three feet wide on each side. Crookes and the

others moved to that end and inspected it with probing flashlamp beams. The channel carried runs of

heavy cables secured at intervals by fastenings that could, in a pinch, serve as a makeshift ladder.

Awkward but not impossible, Crookes thought. After about thirty feet the channel reached the frame

beneath the upper platform, and from there on the rest would be easier. Franklin was already

experimenting, driving his straightened steel fingers between the cables like a wedge and walking himself

up on his toes until he found a stance.

Hell, this is supposed to be a scientific investigation, not a display of heroics, Crookes thought. One

rip in a suit at Titan's surface temperature would be lethal. Why risk it? They could be back with the right

equipment in a matter of hours.

Amy seemed to read his mind—or, more likely, the expression through his faceplate. "Oh, I'll go,"

she said in a tone of exaggerated weariness, making it sound as if he were suffering a failure of nerve. "I

led the Eiger a couple of years back. This is a cinch. I'll take a line up that you guys can hook on to."

Armitage's sigh came heavily over the intercom circuit, but he said nothing.

Dave Crookes reflected later that that would have been the time to settle things. He should have

pulled rank right then and declared that they were going back to the flyer, and that was final. The French

had a phrase,esprit de l'escalier, which could be roughly translated as "staircase wisdom": the feeling

that practically everyone experiences from time to time of belated realization only when halfway down

the stairs and on the way out of the building, after the interview is over, of what oneshould have said. Or

sometimes it happens ten seconds after putting down the phone.

But the way the situation felt to Crookes at the time was that making an issue out of it would have

been overly defensive in just the kind of way the taunt was intended to provoke. Keyhoe was giving him

a ready out if he needed one, holding both hands up protectively and shaking his head inside his helmet

in a way that said emphatically, "Not me. No way!" But Crookes moved a couple of paces back and

swung the beam of his lamp past Franklin, who was already six feet above their heads, and followed the

channel upward to pick out the rest of the proposed route.

"It's what we came here for," Crookes said, making his voice matter-of-fact. "Okay, Leon can give

us some light from down here. Charlie Chan had better stay with him. The rest of us can go take a look."

He looked at Amy and couldn't resist adding, "Okay, if you want to play mountaineer, you go first."

Amy uncoiled a line from the gear they had brought with them and treated Crookes and Armitage

to a minilecture on safety procedures. Then she set off, bracing a foot on each side of the channel and

finding handholds among the cable restraints. The others watched as her legs, her backside, and the

bottom of her pack receded upward in the light from their lamps, with Crookes holding the trailing line

clear from obstructions. Then her voice over the intercom announced that she was at the platform and

was securing herself. She pulled in the line; Crookes called to let her know when it was taut, and then

followed.

There really wasn't a lot to it. The EV gauntlets afforded a good friction hold between the cables in

the same way Franklin's Taloid fingers had, and there were more brackets and bolts to stand on than

had been visible from below. Macho-jerk men could be a pain, Crookes reflected as he moved upward,

falling quickly into a rhythm. But macho-jerk females were worse to deal with. No sense of how much

force was appropriate; they went for the throat over trifles.

He joined Amy and Franklin on the upper platform and clipped himself to a loop she had made

around a brace. Then Crookes brought up Armitage, who appeared a couple of minutes later, his M-37

slung along the side of his backpack. They stood up and surveyed the surroundings.

The four figures and the parts of the structure immediately around them stood out white in the light

of the beams being directed from below. All around, the daytime twilight of Titan—about as bright as a

moonlit night on Earth—showed the jungle of metal shapes extending away in every direction, highlighted

intermittently in places by bursts of sparks and flashing electric arcs. The platform itself formed a terrace

ten feet or so wide around a central superstructure continuing upward to the circular base visible in the

reconnaissance pictures, which supported the antennas. The superstructure looked as if it should have

been rectangular. However, two of its sides were missing, leaving the terrace on the far side as two

narrow strips at right angles forming an exposed corner projecting precariously into space. Girder

lattices sloped up to the circular base at an easy angle and would be no problem to climb.

"Well, this is my department," Crookes announced. "Let's see what we've got."

He began picking his way up the nearest lattice, using the cross-trusses as a ladder. Franklin came

after him, while Armitage watched from the platform below and provided light. Amy wandered off to

explore the far side of the terrace.

A parabolic dish and a helical antenna shared the base with what looked like part of a rhombic

array, as well as other forms that Crookes was unable to identify. The first odd thing that struck him was

that none of them possessed any electrical connections. They were mechanical assemblies only. Then he

noticed that even the mechanical constructions were incomplete. Parts of the mounting for the parabolic

dish, vital to allow it to rotate and elevate, were absent. Instead, the mechanism had been welded,

rendering it totally immobile.

He was, indeed, looking at what they had suspected: a collection of fossils. Somewhere long in the

past the instructions for making them operable had been lost, but a vestige of the form had remained.

Whatever machines had erected this place had followed blindly directions contained in the blueprints

passed down, possibly for millions of years, from the unknown origins from which the strange landscape

below and all around him had sprung. As he gazed at the shapes, he wondered how long they had stood

like this, staring mutely upward, waiting for messages they could never hear. And how many similar

generations before them? . . .

Less than a scream, a short, sharp cry of alarm cut through the silence in his helmet. Then, almost in

the same instant, he heard Keyhoe's voice from below: "What was that?"

And Armitage: "Oh, Christ!"

Crookes moved to the edge of the antenna base and held on to a mast to look down. Armitage

was on one of the projecting sides of the terrace, scanning the area below with his lamp, while Franklin

stood a few feet away, pointing downward with frantic stabbing motions—it was daylight to the Taloids.

The red light on the transmogrifier at Crookes's waist was flashing. There was no sign of Amy. A few

seconds later Crookes saw the light of her flashlamp as it was carried away on the conveyor below.

Whether she had slipped or a part of the structure had given way beneath her, nobody ever knew.

From the catwalk where he had stayed with Keyhoe, Charlie Chan saw her fall, and he was back down

to the floor level and through a gap in the wall to the conveyor line before those above had exchanged

another word. But quick as he was, there was no trace of her when he got there. Crookes radioed the

crew of the flyer, who switched on floodlights to watch for her at the larger conveyor, but nobody was

sure if the tributary joined it upstream from where the flyer had landed, or down.

In any case, they saw nothing.

Wearing a maroon robe, with a towel hanging loosely around his neck, and carrying his toilet

articles in a plastic bag, Karl Zambendorf came out of the men's shower room in the Terran base on the

outskirts of the Taloid city called Genoa and made his way along the corridor leading back to his cabin.

The original base, built from prefabricated parts brought by theOrion, had been extended since then by

the adaptation of materials from Titan itself. With its mesh floors, its utilitarian fittings, and the starkness

of its metal walls barely relieved by ubiquitous cream-yellow and lime-green paint, it was cramped,

sweaty, smelly, and stuffy; but to those who had been its occupants through the two months since the

Orion 's departure, its oasis of light, warmth, and companionship, in the minus-180°C cold of Titan's

cloud-covered darkness 800 million miles from Earth, evoked feelings of fondness and security that only

their visions of home itself could match.

Zambendorf's cabin was a standard two-man NASO affair with twin bunks, a small desk with

chair and computer terminal, a hand basin and utility worktop, and a toilet through a narrow door at the

rear. Otto Abaquaan, who shared it with Zambendorf, was elsewhere. Zambendorf replaced the towel

and other things he was carrying and finished dressing.

He was in his early fifties, somewhat portly but with an erect bearing, his graying hair worn

collar-length and flowing, bright eyes and hawklike features made all the more patriarchal by a pointed

beard that he whitened for effect. austrian psychic picked for naso mission, the headline of one of the

prominent East Coast dailies had blared before the mission's departure, while the host of New York's

most popular Saturday night talk show had introduced him as "the man who reads minds, foretells the

future, sees without the senses, and makes the impossible happen routinely. The walking enigma that

scientists the world over are at a loss to explain."

The official reason given for including Zambendorf in the mission was that because he was a

popular cult figure, his presence would help popularize space and hence advance GSEC's longer-term

interests. The faithful naturally believed that the authorities had at last recognized Zambendorf's telepathic

abilities as genuine, and he was being sent as Earth's principal ambassador.

In fact, Zambendorf himself hadn't been sure of the real reason until after theOrion 's arrival at

Titan. GSEC was interested in the fabulous industrial capacity spread over the moon's surface. If even a

fraction of that potential could be organized and directed to profitable ends, Earthly competition would

effectively cease to exist. And it hadn't taken GSEC long to find support in Washington and the capitals

of Europe, where others were quick to note that a commercial monopoly of such dimensions would

confer virtual world domination politically as well. But the success of their plan would depend to a large

degree on creating favorable public opinion. Zambendorf was a world celebrity with high emotional

appeal and hence could influence public opinion. So "owning" Zambendorf—an unlikely eventuality,

given his personality and disposition, but that was the way corporate minds thought—and associating

him with Titan in the public mind would create a powerful means for steering official policy regarding

Titan in whatever direction GSEC might find it expedient to desire. But ironically, Zambendorf and his

team had played the biggest part in causing that scheme to come undone.

While Zambendorf was buttoning his shirt, the door opened and Otto Abaquaan came in. He was

an Armenian, handsomely lean and swarthy, medium in height, with a droopy mustache, thick eyebrows,

and deep, brown liquid eyes that moved lazily but missed nothing.

The two men had met almost twenty years previously in Germany, when Abaquaan had been

working a stocks and bonds swindle. Overconfident after three months of easy pickings from wealthy

dowagers, he had failed to check out Zambendorf thoroughly enough before selling him a portfolio of

phony certificates. Only when Abaquaan's contact man was arrested and Abaquaan himself was forced

to flee the country hours ahead of the police did he discover that Zambendorf had seen through the scam

and paid in phony money. But Abaquaan had displayed a masterful style, and after administering the due

comeuppance, Zambendorf had tracked him down again later to recruit him as a working partner.

Zambendorf had no word corresponding to "can't" in his vocabulary and was optimistic about

everything; Abaquaan, by contrast, worried. Which was just as well, since somebody had to be realistic

about the difficulties inherent in the schemes Zambendorf dreamed up in his enthusiasm and attend to all

the details if the schemes were to be made workable. Their opposition of temperaments suited them to

each other admirably, and Abaquaan had become the first of the strange mix of individuals who had

gravitated into Zambendorf's orbit over the ensuing years.

Abaquaan propped himself on the chair by the narrow writing desk. "I was talking to one of the

troops who were over in Padua," he said. "It's beginning to sound as if Arthur's guys are right—there's

some kind of a fundamentalist revival movement being fanned up over there. The old days were better

and all that kind of stuff. There could be more trouble brewing if it catches on."

"Padua," situated on the far side of an ice and rock desert from Genoa, where the Terran base was

situated, had been the scene of the failed intervention attempt by the mission's politicians. "Arthur" was

the Terrans' name for the Taloid leader of Genoa. He had evicted the old feudal-style regime and formed

a liberal breakaway state before the arrival of theOrion, and his followers were the most receptive of all

the Taloid nations when it came to comprehending and absorbing the new Terran sciences.

Zambendorf began combing his hair and beard in the mirror above the washbasin. "Oh, something

like it was bound to happen sooner or later," he said airily. "In physics rapid changes in anything

invariably give rise to forces that oppose the changes. Social laws are no different. History is full of

examples of reactions against change that some people found too sweeping. But it's all evolution, Otto.

You can't stop it."

Abaquaan was a pragmatist. Philosophical observations on the nature of evolution were not among

the habits that had characterized his life. "Five dollars to a dime says that Henry's behind it," he said. "I

never believed that he'd just go away. And he won't have any problem getting backing out there."

The Terrans had given the Taloids somewhat arbitrary names. "Henry" was the deposed king of

Padua, who had gone into exile along with most of the former nobility and high clergy after Zambendorf

had accidentally created a new cult of brotherhood and nonviolence that had toppled the official religion.

Zambendorf turned from the mirror and took a red woolen cardigan from a hook on the back of

the door. "Oh, I have no doubt that reason will prevail in the end," he assured Abaquaan. "You know,

Otto, I used to be cynical about the ways of things, too. But it is true that the mellowness of advancing

years reveals the world in a more agreeable light. Or maybe it's the new perspective that one acquires of

the universe, contemplating Earth from this distance. You really ought to try making the effort to adjust to

it. I feel revitalized: able to face the future with complete, unswerving confidence."

Abaquaan had been hearing something like this about once a week for nearly twenty years. It still

filled him with the same forebodings. He turned his eyes briefly toward the ceiling. "Confidence, Karl, is

what you feel when you don't understand the situation."

Zambendorf heard something like that about a dozen times a week. He picked up his watch from

the shelf where he had left it when he had gone to take his shower and checked it as he slipped it back

on his wrist. "Anyway, it's about time," he said "Is Drew ready in the mess?"

Abaquaan had returned from checking the situation in the general personnel messroom. "He's

there," he confirmed, nodding. "You're all ready to go."

Demonstrations of Zambendorf's powers had become a welcome feature of life at Genoa Base.

The scientists were particularly intrigued, and one or two of them were wavering on the verge of

becoming believers. This evening a spectacular event had been scheduled to put Zambendorf to the test

yet again.

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TheImmortalityOptionJamesP.HoganThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©by1995JamesP.HoganAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBookBaenPublish...

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James P. Hogan - The Immortality Option

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