The Omega Expedition (26 page)

I knew that the AI wasn’t going to admit anything, no matter how accurate my guesses were, but I was hoping that it might somehow give itself away.

In the event, all it said was: “I don’t know.”

It sounded just about pathetic enough to be true, although I told myself sternly that it was still unbelievable.

The stars in the background became suddenly brighter again, but it was too late. The void was closing around us, and the stars were confined within a shrinking circle. The utter darkness of that vile mouth was swallowing us up, as if it were indeed some kind of space warp that could take us farther away from home than we could ever imagine.

“I know what’s going on,” I said to the AI, defiantly. “I may be a mere mortal, but I’m not an idiot. You can’t make me —”

That was it. I didn’t feel dizzy and I had no other plausible indication of being anasthetized. It was as if I were simply switched off, like a program interrupted in the running by a sudden power cut — but I had already given up my suspicion that I really was nothing but a sim runing in cyberspace. Perhaps paradoxically, the harder I had tried to insist that everything else was fake, the more securely I had fallen into the trap of believing that I, at least, was real.

Part Two

Worlds In Parallel

Twenty-One

Normal Conditions

I
woke up again lying on my back in pitch darkness. My awakening was troubled by the uncatchable fragments of decaying dreams and the harassment of many discomforts. My head was throbbing; my kidneys were aching; my stomach was queasy.

I had had worse hangovers, but not for a thousand years. I felt awful. I knew that I shouldn’t feel as awful as I felt, because I knew that I shouldn’t be
able
to feel as awful as I felt, and that made the fact doubly disturbing. I felt as if my insides had gone to war to settle their positional disputes, and that the conflict had inflicted considerable damage on all of its participants. It might not have been so bad had I still been weightless, but gravity had returned with a vengeance. I weighed more now than I had before I stepped into the pod that had carried me to the Titanian spaceship.

If a pod
had
carried me to the Titanian spaceship.

If, in fact, I had ever been in Excelsior at all.

Now that I weighed the same as I had throughout my first lifetime I had to ask myself whether it was believable that I’d ever left Earth at all. I had to wonder whether Excelsior, Davida Berenike Columella, Christine Caine, and Adam Zimmerman might have been aspects of an improbable illusion, and whether I might now be waking up for real. I had to face the possibility that all the necessary questions were going to have to be asked all over again.

Paranoia assured me that I could only feel as bad as I did if this were real, and
everything
else had been false.

The darkness didn’t become any less absolute as the bleary eyes I had forced open attempted vainly to adjust to it. I reached up to touch my face with my right hand. My fingertips and my chin felt familiar — far
too
familiar, in fact. I didn’t seem to be wearing a smartsuit and I had a week’s worth of beard growth.

I touched my chest then, and found that I was wearing a shirt: a
dead
shirt. Even in 2202 I wouldn’t have been seen dead in a dead shirt. I only had to flex my leg muscles to confirm that I was also wearing lightweight trousers, and that I was sandwiched between a single sheet and a lumpy mattress.

Shit
, I thought.
First a thousand years forward in time, then a couple of hundred years back
. The way I felt told me that any IT I might be wearing was no ultrasophisticated product of the thirty-third century, or even the twenty-third. I didn’t seem to have any pain control at all.

I told myself that it wasn’t so bad. I had been naked before, save for dead clothes, and devoid of significant IT. I reminded myself that I was a Madoc and a Tamlin: a supremely adaptable hero, ready for any twist of fate. I told myself that my new situation wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I was in the dark, and I was in some slight discomfort, but I was alive and whole and quite compos mentis. Things could have been a lot worse. I just had to get stuck into the task of finding out where I was, and making the best of my circumstances.

I reached out an experimental hand. There was nothing within easy reach above me, although I fancied I could hear the sound of breathing from that general direction. I groped about in other directions. The mattress I was lying on was set on a ledge, apparently plastic. There was a wall to my left and another a couple of feet from my head. I had to roll on to my side to touch the floor, but I seemed to be only a meter above it. I sat up in bed. The extra reach enabled me to ascertain that there was indeed another bunk above mine. That was slightly reassuring; wherever I was, I didn’t seem to be alone.

When I had maneuvered my feet to the floor I was able to stand up, though not as easily as I could have wished. My feet were bare, but the floor wasn’t uncomfortably rough or cold. It felt like plastic. I couldn’t tell by feeling it with the soles of my feet whether the plastic was organic or whether it had been gantzed out of twentieth-century waste.

There was an inert body lying on the upper bunk, whose dimensions I didn’t explore in detail because it seemed more sensible to let whoever it was continue sleeping. I touched a sleeve, though, which suggested that my sleeping companion was wearing dead clothing just like mine. The person in question didn’t seem to be sleeping very easily, but the body didn’t stir when my fingers brushed the back of the hand that was projecting from the sleeve. It was a small hand, not very hairy. I was prepared to accept that it was probably a female hand, but I refused to jump to the conclusion that it was Christine Caine’s. If it turned out to be Christine Caine’s, that would mean that everything I’d experienced had been real — more of it, at any rate, than I wanted to hang on to — and that something terrible had happened to
Child of Fortune
.

I felt for a belt and found that my dead trousers were elastic-waisted. The shirt was ill-fitting and buttonless, severely functional. I knew that if I really had been divested of the kind of smartsuit and internal technology that I’d worn on Excelsior I must have been asleep for a long time. It wasn’t the work of a couple of hours to strip that kind of equipment away.

If, on the other hand, I was fresh out of the freezer…

I needed to take a piss, quite urgently.
That
was a feeling I hadn’t had for a very long time, no matter where or when I was.

I only had to stretch a little to locate the far wall of what I’d already begun thinking of as a cell. The space in which I was confined was only a couple of meters wide. It wasn’t much more than three meters long, but there was a sub-chamber in one corner. Once I’d found the handle the screen moved aside easily, and I began to fumble about the interior, hoping that it was some kind of bathroom facility. There was a showerhead and a drain, and some other kind of fitment that I couldn’t immediately identify but might have been some kind of toilet. I wasn’t about to engage with any puzzles; the drain was good enough for me.

When I was able to get back to investigating the geography of the space that now confined me it didn’t take me long to find the door at the farther end, or the handle that opened it.

I didn’t expect the handle to turn, but it did. I heard the latch disengage. I hadn’t encountered a door like that in years; it was the sort of door that one only found in buildings abandoned during the Crash: a door constructed in the twenty-first-century, or even earlier.

The twenty-first-century door opened outwards, not quite silently.

The area outside the cell was as dark as the inside. I nearly set out to cross it, but figured that it was wiser and safer to grope my way along the wall, one step at a time. I moved to the left, because the open door was blocking the way to the right. The wall felt like plastic, just like the door and the handle.

I couldn’t have gone more than five meters before I came to another door. That one had a handle, too. It turned easily enough, and the door wasn’t locked.

Gently, without making more than the minimum amount of noise, I swung it open and moved carefully around it.

The fist that hit me in the face seemed to be astonishingly well aimed, considering the total darkness. I presume that it was the knuckle of the middle finger which smashed into my nasal cartilage.

The snap was audible.

I was hurled backwards, swept unceremoniously off my feet by the momentum of the punch. I was in too much pain already to take much notice of the jarring as my coccyx, elbows, shoulders, and head made violent contact with the floor.

I tried to swear, but the pain was so intense that the reflexive explosion turned the word into something half way between a gasp and a yell.

Lights came on abruptly, dazzling me.

I clutched at my broken nose with both hands, feeling the warm blood gush out into my palms, soaking the sleeves of my shirt.

I had been stabbed more than once in my early days on the streets, before I acquired the kind of IT that rendered such wounds more tolerable, but that had been a long time ago. I had been cossetted by good IT for more than twenty years — give or take a hypothetical thousand — and the pain of my present injury was probably worse, even on an objective scale, than any inflicted upon me during my misspent youth. It was horrible.

When my eyes began to adjust to the brilliant light they were full of tears, which had to be blinked way before I could hope to see where I was or who had hit me. There was no thought in my mind of reprisal, or even of evasive action in the face of further danger. There was just the pain, and the fear that whoever had hit me might take a second shot.

It didn’t make me feel any better to see that the face peering down at me seemed more puzzled than angry, with perhaps the faintest hint of regret.

It was the face of Solantha Handsel.

Somehow, I was able to take note of the fact that she was staring at her own hand in utter bewilderment, and I had enough presence of mind to leap to the conclusion that it wasn’t the discovery that it was me she had hit that had puzzled her. Her regret wasn’t apologetic: she was amazed and slightly upset by the fact that hitting me had made her own hand hurt. She hadn’t had the dubious benefit of my upbringing. She’d
always
had good IT, and hadn’t ever worn dead clothes. If I was unprepared to find myself in this condition, she must be in a much greater state of shock.

Even so, it was me that had taken the punishment. She might have hurt her hand, but she hadn’t broken her nose.

By the time Michael Lowenthal’s lightly bearded face had appeared beside the bodyguard’s I had found the energy and ability to swear. I took abundant advantage of the opportunity, but I didn’t forget to look around. I felt that I had to try to keep up with the news, even though I was in sore distress.

The room we were in wasn’t vast, but space was at a premium because it was so extensively cluttered with boxes and equipment. There was a folding table propped against one ceiling-high stack of boxes, and a whole pile of folding chairs beside it. If I’d tried to cross the room rather than making my way along the wall I’d probably have tripped, scraping my shins and bruising my limbs — but at least I wouldn’t have broken my nose.

The ceiling seemed a little low. It looked to be a mirror image of the floor, gray and plastic. The walls were gray too, although they seemed to be fitted with an abundance of equipment and hatches, as well as a superabundance of doors with handles. Everything was plastic, except where gleaming metal showed through. Some of the bits of gleaming metal looked like the heads of rivets. Other bits looked like screwheads.

Even in buildings deserted during the Crash I’d almost never seen rivets or screwheads. Rivets and screwheads were pre-Gantz, and pre-Gantz was practically pre-civilization. It wouldn’t have been quite as strange if they’d been rusted, but they weren’t. They looked new. Maybe not brand new, but new enough.

I finally managed to turn the stream of my curses into a coherent sentence, which was: “Have you any
idea
how much this hurts, you stupid bitch?” The pronunciation came out all wrong, because my nose was flooded by the blood that I was still spilling, but the meaning seemed to get across.

Solantha Handsel shook her head ever so slightly, to signal that she hadn’t a clue, even though her own hand was throbbing. I hoped that she’d broken the knuckle, but the perfunctory way she was shaking it suggested that she hadn’t.

The bodyguard should have been the one to check the damage she’d inflicted, but when my head sagged back on the floor the face that came into view, upside down, was Niamh Horne’s. It was she who finally managed to get the protective hands away from my nose so that she could inspect the damage.

“Do you want me to try to straighten it?” she asked.

Like an idiot, I must have mouthed “yes.”

The cyborganizer reached out to press the broken cartilage back into position, and I found out what
real
pain was like.

I fainted.

Twenty-Two

Injury Time

B
y the time I came round someone had put a pillow under my head and draped a cold damp cloth over my nose. The bleeding seemed to have stopped, but I didn’t dare move in case it started again. My vision was blurred, but I could see that at least half a dozen standing figures were gathered about my supine form. They were arguing.

“How was I supposed to know who it was?” Solantha Handsel was complaining. “It was dark. How was I supposed to guess that his IT had been stripped? I hadn’t even registered the fact that
my
IT had been stripped. It wasn’t my fault.”

I took some small comfort from the fact that nobody seemed to be in agreement with this judgment — not even Michael Lowenthal.