The Omega Expedition (11 page)

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
.”

“Neither 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.”

If appearances could be trusted, that thought disturbed and distressed her more than any she’d so far come across. Her gaze flickered as her pale blue eyes looked toward the window, then up at the ceiling and round the walls, then back at me.

“Shit,” she murmured. Then she composed herself again. “Lousy view,” she remarked.

“It was supposed to be a slice of home,” I said. “It’s long gone — blown to smithereens, so they say.”

“The whole Earth?”

“Just America — but the whole ecosphere had a catastrophic fit and had to be regenerated.”

She didn’t seem to think that the destruction of America was an issue worth pursuing. “Who’s
they
, exactly?” she asked.

I told myself that the fact she was taking everything so calmly was a compliment to the IT the microworlders had installed in her brain — but I knew that if that was true for her it ought to have been true for me, too. I wasn’t taking everything calmly. My tranquilizing IT obviously wasn’t programmed to kick in until I got badly steamed up; a certain amount of inner turmoil was permitted, presumably because the people observing us found it interesting.

“You’ll see them soon enough,” I said. “I ought to warn you that they’re very weird. Apparently, there are lots of people around who look pretty much like you or me, but there are lots who don’t. It so happens that this particular microworld is run by people who don’t.”

“So what
do
they look like?”

“Children. Little girls. They’re genetically engineered for a particular kind of emortality — programmed to stop growing and maturing at nine or ten, before puberty sets in. I assume that their brains keep changing as they learn. That’s probably why they do it. They must be hoping to preserve their brains in a better-than-adult state.”

“Neoteny,” she said.

I was somewhat surprised that she knew the word. One tends to think of crazy serial killers as undereducated individuals. “That’s right,” I conceded. “We’re neotenic apes, sort of, so I guess they figured that neotenic people were the next evolutionary step forward. If you think that’s weird, wait till you see pictures of fabers and cyborganizers.”

“But there are still people like us around?”

“People who look like us,” I corrected her. “Engineered for emortality, and lots of other cute tricks. We’ll have visitors of that kind in a couple of days. There’s a spaceship en route from Earth, and another heading in from the Jovian moons, although the people it’s carrying are mostly Titanians. They’re coming to welcome Zimmerman, of course, but they can hardly refuse us invitations to the party. There’s a historian with the Earth delegation, apparently, who’s as keen to talk to us as he is to pay his respects to Zimmerman. There’s also a UN rep, who probably answers to the Secret Masters as well as the not-so-secret ones. You don’t have to worry about that, but I might. I used to work for the organization.”

“The megamafia?”