The Omega Expedition Page 8

  “The ship that’s coming from Earth is a shuttle,” she told me, with just the slightest hint of resentment in her voice. “It has no cargo space, and only six cocoons. The ship from the outer system is much bigger, but the outer satellites produce their food in exactly the same way that we do, using artificial photosynthesis. We didn’t know that this problem would arise, and we’ll try to address it as best we can. We didn’t mean to cause you any distress.”

  Having thought it over while she was speaking I pulled the plate back again and took another forkful. It still wasn’t good, but it was even less offensive than its predecessors.

  “This fancy second skin you’ve fitted me with is already compensating, isn’t it?” I said. “All I have to do is keep shoveling the stuff in, and eventually I’ll get to like it.”

  She didn’t seem certain. “Your internal technology is programmed to compensate for discomfort,” she admitted, “but not to substitute a positive reward. That would be dangerous.”

  I nodded, to signify that I understood the distinction and the reasons for making it. One of the first uses to which experimental internal nanotech had been put was feeding the so-called pleasure areas in the hind brain. That way lay addiction, and severe distraction from the business of living. The systems that had been released on to the market in my day were supposed to be finely tuned to administer pain relief without blissing people out. The masters of PicoCon were firmly committed to the idea that people ought to earn their pleasures.

  Even a dedicated rebel like me could see the sense in that. The only gratification worth having is the gratification of achievement, even if the achievement in question is the mere exercise of good taste.

  I deduced, therefore, that I would get used to the food if I persisted, but I wouldn’t be forced to like it. I wondered how many other aspects of my second lifetime would be subject to the same principle. Perhaps I’d even get used to being a specimen in a zoo — but I certainly wasn’t going to learn to like it.

  I ate a little more, but I really wasn’t hungry. I had other things on my mind.

  “Can I take a look around now?” I asked my captor-in-chief. “Not through the picture-window — I’d like to look at Excelsior itself. The houses and the fields. The real windows.”

  “There are no real windows,” she told me. “Nor any fields. The artificial photosynthetic systems are like big black sails. There is a garden, but it’s sustained by artificial light. You’ll be able to see it tomorrow.”

  There was no point in asking why I couldn’t see it today. I was still under close observation and they didn’t want to let me out of my cage just yet, not even for a stroll in the garden.

  “How about a VE hood and access to your data banks?” I asked. “I’d like to read up on my history.”

  “You only have to ask,” she said. Having seen the way she’d produced a dining table and a plateful of bad food I knew that she didn’t even have to ask. She was IT-linked into a microworld-wide communication system that allowed her to issue commands and initiate semiautomatic responses almost unobtrusively — not just by forming the thought, I assumed, but certainly by means of carefully contrived subvocalizations. I didn’t have that kind of IT. I couldn’t give orders directly to the walls or the window — but if I spoke my requests aloud, someone would overhear, and decide whether or not to turn the request into a command.

  I only had to ask, and anything within reason would be delivered to me…but I did have to ask, and anything my captors thought unreasonable would not be forthcoming. For the time being, the walls confining me would only produce an exit door for Davida Berenike Columella.

  “I could be useful, you know,” I told her. “I was born two hundred years after Adam Zimmerman, from an artificial womb rather than a natural one, but I have a lot more in common with him than you do. By the same token, I have a lot more in common with you than he does. I could be a useful intermediary, if you let me. That might not be why you woke me up, but it’s a definite plus.”

  Secretly, of course, I was hoping that it was one of the reasons they’d woken me up — but I knew better than to take it for granted.

  “Thank you for the offer,” she said.

  For a moment she seemed almost human. I’d been brushed off in exactly that casual manner a hundred times before, though never by a nine-year-old. I knew that I’d have to try harder.

  “I know how he’ll feel,” I told her, flatly. “You don’t. You think he’ll be grateful. You think you’ll be waking him up to tell him exactly what he always wanted to hear: that you can finally give him the emortality he craved. But I know how he’ll really feel. That’s why I’ll be able to talk to him man to man. That’s why I’ll be the only one who can talk to him man to man.”

  She didn’t bother throwing Christine Caine’s name into the ring. She was too busy worrying about the possibility that I might be right.

  “How will he feel?” she asked, without even bothering to add a qualification reminding me that my guess could only be a guess. I knew that I had to be succinct as well as confident, provocative as well as plausible.

  “Betrayed,” I said, and left it at that.

  I assumed that if she could figure out what I meant, she’d probably be able to understand why she might need me. If she couldn’t, then she would definitely need me, whether she understood why or not.

  Six

  Welcome to the Future

  I was fairly certain that Christine Caine wouldn’t want to wake up in a sterile room with a window looking out on a star-filled universe. I suggested to Davida Berenike Columella that she and her sisters might like to let Christine wake up in Excelsior’s Edenic garden, bathing in the complex glory of fake sunlight, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They wanted her inside.

  Presumably they still wanted me inside too, although they were too polite to say so in so many words. They wanted to take their time about exposing their world to the untender gaze of two supercriminals from the legendary past.

  Their idea of compromise was to let me choose the scenic tape that the virtual window would display.

  If I’d had the chance to do some serious research before the sisterhood offered me that choice I might have picked the finest ice palaces on Titan, or the AI metropolis on Ganymede, or perhaps a purple forest on the world that home-system people still called Ararat because that was the first name reported back to them — but I knew nothing, as yet, of wonders like that. A little taste of home seemed to be the better bet.

  I asked for the oldest pre-holocaust footage they had of Yellowstone. Christine had been a city girl, but she must have used a VE hood as much as — or maybe more than — her peers. I thought she might look longingly at trees, wildlife, and geysers.

  I was wrong, but it didn’t matter.

  I watched two of Davida’s sisters — they seemed like sisters, and I hadn’t yet figured out the questions I needed to ask about their real nature — arranging Christine Caine’s sleeping body on the chair just as they must have arranged mine. It hadn’t occurred to me until then that they must have built the chairs specifically to contain us, fitting them to our exaggerated size. To them, we were giants. Christine was no more than one metre sixty, but if she’d been able to stand upright she’d have towered over her handlers to the same extent that I’d have towered over her. To me, ignorant as I still was, she seemed to be not so very unlike them, but to them she must have seemed utterly alien.

  I had no idea exactly how mad she’d be, but that was because I couldn’t get the idea of that wretched VE tape out of my head. If I’d thought about it sensibly, I’d have realized that nobody could commit thirteen murders over a period of years without being able to put up an exceedingly good impression of total normality in between. The walls of her world hadn’t been quite as full of eyes and ears as the walls of mine, and she’d moved around a great deal, but she couldn’t have done what she had done without an exceptional talent for seeming utterly harmless.

  That was what
I ought to have expected, but I didn’t. I wasn’t quite myself yet; I wasn’t even sure that I was myself.

  At the very least, I expected Christine Caine to freak out when she found out what was what. Arrogant idiot that I was, I couldn’t believe that anyone else could react nearly as well as me to the discovery that they’d been locked in a freezer for more than a thousand years.

  I was wrong about that too — but Christine did have the advantage of remembering her trial and conviction. Her memory hadn’t suffered any side effects at all.

  She spent a little longer looking around than I had. She inspected her new suitskin very carefully indeed. It was pale blue, with false cuffs and boots similar to mine, although the sisterhood had stopped short of providing a matching codpiece.

  The suit would have looked better on her if she hadn’t been so thin. She was so emaciated that the surface of the clinging fabric was pockmarked by all manner of bony lumps. She would grow into it, I figured, but it would take time. She was a pretty young woman, seemingly very frail: a picture of innocence. If I hadn’t known the reason for her confinement, I’d have felt even more tender and protective toward her than I did. As things were, I had to remind myself that this was the closest thing to a contemporary I had, and the closest thing to a natural ally.

  She touched her lips, then ran her fingers through her straggly blond hair, pulling a few strands forward so that she could examine the color and texture. She didn’t approve of what she found, but she didn’t seem surprised or offended. Then she made as if to stand up, but changed her mind, presumably undone by the discovery that her weight wasn’t quite right.

  She contented herself with looking me up and down very carefully. I wondered how sinister I seemed, dressed all in black, and wondered whether I might be handsome enough to be mistaken for the Prince of Darkness.

  Fortunately, she must have rejected the hypothesis that she was in Hell without entertaining it for more than a moment. Her first words were: “I hope this thing has a hole I can shit through.” The word rang utterly false. She was trying to sound confident and assertive, but she couldn’t make the pretence work.

  “It doesn’t need one,” I told her, having had time to investigate that particular matter. “It’s an authentic second skin. It lines your gut from mouth to anus, and your other bodily cavities too. The food goes through just as it used to. Fashions have moved on since our day.”

  “Our day?” she queried, exactly as I’d intended her to.

  “I’m like you,” I said, a trifle overgenerously. Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t say anything. I assumed that she was wary of reading the statement the wrong way. “I woke up yesterday,” I added, helpfully. “We’ve been away a long time.”

  “How long?”

  I told her, expecting astonishment.

  When she laughed I thought, at first, that she was hysterical. She wasn’t. She was amused. I knew that she was probably in denial, just as I had been, because she probably felt even less like her old self than I had, but she wasn’t letting it get on top of her. She was playing along, just as I had — but she was better able to laugh than I had been.

  “I guess I’m the record holder,” she said, having taken the figures aboard with sufficient mental composition to note the difference between them. “I always figured that I would be.”

  “Not for long,” I told her, slightly piqued by her composure. “They’ll be bringing Adam Zimmerman back in a couple of days, just as soon as they’re convinced that you and I are as well as can be expected. He’s been away longer than either of us.”

  “Why? What did he do?”

  “You never heard of Adam Zimmerman?” I countered, sighting the intellectual high ground.

  It only required a moment’s thought. “The man who stole the world,” she recalled. “I didn’t realize they’d prosecuted him for that.”

  “They didn’t,” I told her. “He only helped the corpsmen run the scam in order to get enough cash to make sure he’d be taken care of once he was frozen down. He was a volunteer. He didn’t want to die, so he decided to take a short cut to a world where everyone could live forever. He was the first, I think.”

  “Good for him,” she said. Then she paused for further thought.

  “This is all fake, isn’t it?” she said, eventually. “It’s just a clever VE. I’m in therapy, aren’t I? This is some weird rehab program.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  “You don’t think so?”

  “If it’s a VE, they’re trying to fool both of us. I’m not certain that it isn’t — but I do know that we have to work on the assumption that it’s real. I’m Madoc Tamlin, by the way.”

  “So what did you do, Madoc Tamlin?”

  “I can’t remember how or why I got put away,” I told her.

  That wiped the last vestiges of her smile away. She was obviously able to remember exactly how and why she’d been put away. She seemed more frightened than angry, but there was a peculiar quality to her fear that I couldn’t fathom.

  “Lucky you,” she whispered. I got the impression that she didn’t believe in my convenient lapse of memory.

  “It doesn’t seem lucky to me,” I told her. “If I really did do something that pissed someone off enough to put me away for a thousand years, I’d rather like to know what it was. As things are, I can only wonder whether someone was so afraid that I knew something that could hurt him that he worked hard to prevent my release, or whether I was simply forgotten.”

  “It’s still lucky,” she assured me.

  I knew that she was probably right. It had taken me some time to get my head around the idea that being forgotten for so long might have been a lucky break, whether my initial condemnation had been deliberate or accidental, but I could see by now how she might take the view that we’d both been luckier than we could ever have deserved.

  But I still felt betrayed: by time, by circumstance, by my friends.

  “It’s too soon to tell how well off we are,” I told her. “They didn’t bring us back in order to shower gifts upon us. We’re just the trial runs, to make sure that they can bring thousand-year-old corpsicles back with their minds more or less intact. Once we’ve convinced them that we’re as well as can be expected, we’ll be redundant. They may have certain reservations about welcoming us into the company of the emortals.”

  “Why?” she asked, warily. She didn’t know that I knew who she was, and she was prepared to hope that I might not.

  “Because you were a murderer, Miss Caine,” I said, as gently as I could, “And they’ve probably assumed that I must have been one too.”

  “I was found guilty but insane,” she informed me, stiffly. Then she took another pause for thought before saying: “We’re a thousand years down the line. If they can cure death, surely they can sort out a few lousy bugs in the meatware. Their infotech must be foolproof by now. What did you say your name was?”

  “Madoc Tamlin.”

  She shrugged her bony shoulders, but she’d already worked out that she couldn’t possibly have heard of me. “I’m Christine Caine, as you seem to know,” she said. The way she looked at me suggested that she wasn’t entirely sure that I could be familiar with her case, even though I knew her name and what she’d been put away for.

  “I know who you are,” I said, but was quick to add: “I’m probably the only one who knows much more than your name, though. The people who brought us back claim to have lost the relevant records.”

  “Do you think they’re lying?” she was quick to ask.

  “I don’t know what to think. I’m not even sure that we’re what they say we are. Even if we’re in meatspace rather than some super-tricky VE, we might still be sims of some kind.”

  “That’s a little paranoid, isn’t it?” she observed, pitching her voice so that the word paranoid sounded more compliment than insult. “I have this creepy feeling that you might be right, though. I don’t feel like myself.”

  “Nei
ther do I,” I admitted. “Maybe that’s just because we’ve been kitted out with these weird suitskins and internal nanotech that’s ten generations ahead of anything we could have had in our day. On the other hand, it might be because we’re sims or androids: AIs programmed to believe that we’re people who died a thousand years ago.”

  “Why would anyone want to make sims of people who died a thousand years ago?” she asked. I could see that she was working on the problem herself, but I was slightly surprised by the ease of her assumption that if we weren’t who we thought we were then the people we thought we were must be dead.

  “Maybe they’re interested in the outlaws of olden times,” I suggested, wondering what Davida and her sisters thought of the direction the conversation was taking. “Maybe they want to know what made us tick.”

  “I didn’t tick,” she said, her tone becoming oddly distant. “If I’d been ticking, I’d have blown up — or run down. Not a bomb and not a clock, let alone a pacemaker. Silent but deadly. So they said.”

  Not so silent, I thought, once people started hooking into Bad Karma.

  “Either way,” I said, “it might be wise not to take anything for granted. I think they’ll want to take a good long look at us anyway. Whatever we may think of ourselves, to them we’re the next best thing to reanimated Neanderthals. Adam Zimmerman has his sainthood to keep him warm, but we don’t. Quite the reverse, in fact. We might have to handle our situation very carefully — and it won’t be easy.”

  “Are we being watched?” she wanted to know.

  “All the time,” I assured her. “Monitored inside and out. So far as I know, they can’t overhear our private thoughts, but nothing else is secret.”