The Omega Expedition

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 Hopein orbit around an “Earth-clone” world in a distant solar system (in 2817, according to the ship’s calendar). Hopehad 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 enough 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.

The reasoning behind this scheme was born of the fear that as the world depicted in the series came gradually closer to a Utopian condition, stories set there would be robbed of most of the dramatic impetus that worlds far from the ideal provide in abundance. Utopian fiction has a notorious tendency to be boring, and the demands of melodrama have been a key factor in determining the preference which science fiction writers have for dealing in more or less horrible futures. My hope was that I could compensate for the melodramatic drain inherent in mapping an improving situation by switching to an alternative narrative currency. For bridging purposes, however, Volume four of the series, Architects of Emortalityretains a calculatedly absurd murder-mystery framework in which a genetic engineer specializing in flower design named Oscar Wilde lends his expertise as an aesthetic theorist to the investigation by UN policepersons Charlotte Holmes and Hal Watson of a series of murders signed (pseudonymously) “Rappaccini.”

By 2495, when Architects of Emortalityis set, the limitations of nanotechnological repair as a technology of longevity, even in combination with periodic rejuvenative somatic engineering treatments, have been conclusively shown up. All recent progress has been made in the field of genetically engineered longevity, which had gone through a long period of relative unfashionability as a result of the seemingly insuperable problem of the Miller Effect — although some further progress was made by courtesy of the continued efforts of such diehard adherents as the Ahasuerus Foundation. Another problematic side effect of longevity has also been publicized, although its existence and effects are dubious: the tendency of long-lived individuals to lose their mental adaptability.

The story told in Architects of Emortalitytakes place at a crucial historical juncture, when the last generation of humans who did not receive the longevity-providing Zaman Transformation at the single-cell stage of their development is approaching the limit of their endurance — the oldest of them routinely attaining a life span of 300 years, but not much more — and the first generation ZT beneficiaries are still young. No one knows, as yet, whether the members of the latest New Human Race are in danger of falling prey to robotization. One of the new breed of genetically enhanced emortals, a junior member of the still-thriving Hardinist Cabal named Michael Lowenthal, attaches himself to the Holmes/Watson investigation as an interested observer. He and Wilde become rivals in their attempts to construct hypothetical motives to rationalize Rappaccini’s murders. Although Wilde proves, in the end, to be the better interpreter, it is Lowenthal who actually reaps a profit — on behalf of his masters — by following the investigation to its astonishing conclusion.

The seemingly final conquest of death that is visible to the characters of Architects of Emortalityis fully realized in volume five of the series, The Fountains of Youth. Unlike its predecessor and the present volume, The Fountains of Youthis a comedy bildungsromanrather than a comedic mystery story; it constitutes the autobiography of Mortimer Gray, a member of the New Human Race born in 2520.

When he writes his autobiography, in 3025, Mortimer still expects to live for several more centuries, if not mille

Mortimer Gray’s autobiography records how his determination to write the history of death was actuated by a close encounter of his own, when the cruise ship on which he was taking a holiday was caught up in the Coral Sea Disaster of 2542, when a rift in the Earth’s crust split the ocean bed and spilled out massive amounts of hot magma, causing the sea to boil and sending huge tidal waves to devastate the Pacific Rim. In the aftermath of the disaster Mortimer made the acquaintance of the abruptly orphaned Emily Marchant, whose own determination to make the most of her life was similarly hardened by the misfortune. Emily subsequently becomes very rich, by virtue of extrapolating gantzing techniques to solve the problems of construction in extraterrestrial environments. She is heavily involved in the construction of “ice palaces” on the Jovian and Saturnian satellites — edifices which find an earthbound echo in showpieces constructed in Antarctica, where Mortimer resides while researching the middle part of his project.