The Omega Expedition (23 page)

“Thank you, Madoc,” she said, with all apparent sincerity.

Eighteen

Adam Zimmerman’s Awakening

I
hadn’t fully realized what the process of “awakening” a corpsicle involved, although I was dimly aware that there were probably yucky bits that any sane person would be more than glad to sleep through. Everybody in my day had referred to SusAn, with casual flippancy, as “freezing down,” as if it were merely a matter of popping someone into a powerful refrigerator, but everybody had known that there was a lot more to it. I suppose we’d all been slightly afraid of it — even those of us who were determinedly law-abiding. Who can ever be sure that the weight of the law will not descend upon him?

At any rate, like most men of my era, I’d never bothered to research the topic in detail. It wasn’t until I watched the later phases of Adam Zimmerman’s revivification that I was able to reconstruct my own experience in my imagination.

Zimmerman had been put away by means of a slightly less complicated and much less streamlined process than the one that must have been applied to me, but he had to come back through all the same stages. Watching as much of it as I did made me feel distinctly queasy, because I fooled myself into “remembering” similar things being done to me. I was profoundly glad that by the time I was invited to tune in, most of the slow work had already been done.

I now know — and am capable of shuddering at the thought — that after I’d been put into an artificially induced coma my metabolic activity had been quieted even further, until all the DNA in my cells had wrapped itself up snugly and all the mitochondria had fallen idle. Only then had the first stage of temperature depression begun, to facilitate the vitrification process that would work outwards from the soft organs and inwards from the the gut and skin. Not until the vitrification was complete and uniform had my body temperature been lowered, by very careful degrees, all the way from minus seven degrees Celsius to seven degrees absolute — and even then there had been a further stage of “encasement” in a cocktail of ices not so very different from the stuff of which comets are made.

That was what I had gone through in order to get to my present destination: a journey to the dark land of the dead, whose fairy queen had far more in common with Christine Caine’s cold-hearted Snow Queen than Shakespeare’s Titania or Spenser’s Gloriana.

By the time Davida Berenike Columella put the operation on the screen, Zimmerman’s corpsicle had been out of its icy cocoon for some time. The temperature of the vitrified body had already been raised to minus seven Celsius so that nanobot-aided devitrificaton could begin. What Davida’s multitudinous audience watched was the final stage of the long process, which would turn Adam Zimmerman’s protoplasm from glassy gel to membranously confined liquid.

A host of nanobots delivered enthusiastic progress reports regarding the miraculous state of Zimmerman’s individual cells, but everyone knows that nanobots are constitutionally incapable of seeing the big picture, so no one took their reportage to imply that the whole system would click into gear automatically.

The most crucial phase of the awakening would be the one that would ease Zimmerman from physical inertia into controlled coma, rebuilding brain activity from the bottom up. That would turn effective death into dreamless sleep, then into the kind of sleep that could sustain dreaming. The nanobots couldn’t measure the subjective component of a dream; some part of the emotions associated with it, and all of its imagery, were forever beyond their reach. The external sensors collated their information, assuring the operators and watchers alike that all was well at the physiological level, but there was an inevitable margin of uncertainty that kept us all on edge while the long minutes ticked by.

Christine Caine was keeping me company again, but she seemed unusually subdued as we sat through the suspenseful phase. I assumed that she was experiencing the same self-centered feelings as me, but when she finally broke her silence with something more than a grunt it was to express astonishment at Zimmerman’s appearance.

“He’s so
old
,” were her exact words.

It was trivially true, of course, but that wasn’t what she meant. I had only been thirty-nine years old when I was frozen down, but it wouldn’t have made much difference to my face if I’d been seventy-seven. People of my generation didn’t suffer from wrinkles, or gray hair, or any of the other traditional appearances of “old age.” We needed elaborate Internal Technology and periodic deep tissue rejuvenation to keep us going even for a mere hundred and fifty years, but the superficial appearances of aging were easier to overcome than the invisible record of intracellular damage and nucleic acid copying errors.

Adam Zimmerman hadn’t had our advantages. He wasn’t
old
, even by the standards of Christine Caine’s day, if one left his millennium in limbo out of the account, but he certainly looked it.

I had seen the superficial signs of old age before. One of my closest associates in the criminal fraternity had worn them almost as a badge of pride. It should not have been a surprise to see them manifest in Adam Zimmerman’s face and figure, but there seemed something not quite
right
about the matter. It would not have been impossible, or even particularly difficult, to apply a little somatic engineering to the texture of the skin while the devitrification procedure was proceeding. Although the whole point of the exercise was to bring him back exactly as he had been when he went into SusAn — save for supportive IT and a very smart suit of clothes — it seemed to me that a certain amount of cosmetic work would not have been inappropriate. No doubt he would make his own decision about that, when the time came to make informed decisions about the particular technologies of emortality that he would adopt, but I couldn’t believe that he would not have relished the prospect of waking up rejuvenated. “It’s mainly a matter of showmanship,” I said to Christine, when I’d thought it over. “They’re displaying him to the whole solar system as a work of art. This is just the beginning of the story. They want all the phases to be visible, to demonstrate the true significance of what they’re doing.”

“Surely they can’t make him one of
them
,” she said.

“I’m certain that they can,” I contradicted her, thoughtfully. “The sisters might even be naive enough to think that he might take that option, when they’ve had a chance to work on him, although I can’t believe that anyone else thinks so. Whatever they offer him — and us — will have to be designed exclusively for mortal use, because everybody born into this world was already engineered for emortality. None of them ever had a choice. All their choices were made for them, by their adoptive parents. This is an unprecedented situation.”

“Why should they care what kind of emortality he opts for?” Christine asked.

“Maybe because they’re still making decisions on behalf of their unborn children,” I guessed. “Maybe they’ve become anxious about whether they’re making the right ones, now that there are so many alternatives to choose from. They’re interested to know what kind of emortality mortals would choose for themselves. Zimmerman is the star prize, because he was the first mortal to go for broke in the quest for emortality, but they may have thrown in a couple of controls to make the game more interesting. There are three of us, so there’ll be a clear majority if the decision is split.”

I realized as I voiced it that the last point was wrong, because there had to be more than two alternatives available, but I didn’t bother to correct myself. Nor did I point out that if Adam Zimmerman’s vote was worth more than either of ours, mine had to be worth more than hers because she was a certified lunatic.

“You make it sound like a game show,” Christine observed. “It’s a lot of trouble to go to for that kind of petty kick.”

“In our day,” I reminded her, “all the hopeful emortals used to spend time wondering how they were going to cope with the tedium once they’d been around for a few hundred years. Maybe these people take their game shows more seriously than you or I can imagine. The children of Excelsior really are children, by comparison with people like Lowenthal — and I’d be willing to bet that it’s people of Lowenthal’s generation who are pulling the strings.”

That had been another preoccupation of the hopeful not-quite-emortals of my own day — which was why I’d produced it so readily in my conversation with Davida. The prospect of the oldest generation remaining in charge
forever
, while the youngest had no possible prospect of inheriting the Earth, had been a popular item of twenty-second-century debate. Nowadays, it seemed, the other worlds of the solar system were all under the dominion of the older generation, even though Titan and Ganymede were still largely icebound and the terraformation of Mars and Venus had hardly begun. If the young wanted to assert their right to the pursuit of property, they already had to look to further horizons, with all the attendant inconvenience of the limiting velocity of light.

Christine was thinking along a different line. “I’m the villain, aren’t I?” she said. “If this is a game, or an improvised drama, I’m not here to make up the numbers — I’m here to be the bad example.”

I turned to look at her, although the drama on the screen was coming toward its climax.

“We don’t know that,” I said, feeling a mysterious obligation to be gentle. “I’m just making up stories here. I haven’t even begun to figure out what this is all about.”

“But we’ll find out, won’t we?” she said. It was very difficult to judge her mood, or to figure out how she was extrapolating the notion. “We’ll find out what they expect of us soon enough.”

Adam Zimmerman had been moved to a chair now: a chair very similar to the ones on which Christine and I were sitting. Davida had run through the rehearsal twice and she was sticking to the script. When Adam Zimmerman opened his eyes he would see what I had seen. Would he, I wondered, be as quick on the uptake as I had been? Would he ask the same questions, in the same falsely casual fashion?

I had no idea how big the audience for this big scene was, but I suspected that this would be prime time all over the Earth, no matter whether it was noon or midnight outside. We were all on tenterhooks.

The camera zoomed in on that strangely disturbing face, bringing every line and blemish into clear view.

We all waited for the eyes to flicker open — but the eyes hadn’t read the script. They were sticky, and they couldn’t flicker. Their opening was slow, and seemingly painful. The pupils narrowed as they finally appeared, the mottled brown irises spreading protectively around them. The blood vessels in the whites seemed slightly too red.

For a long time, it seemed that he wasn’t going to speak at all, but he finally slipped into the groove. He had already memorized his script, and twelve centuries of frozen sleep hadn’t eroded
that
memory.

“How long?” he said.

Davida Berenike Columella told him. We watched his face as the calculator in his head processed the figures.

And then he smiled.

After one thousand two hundred and twenty-eight years, less ten days, Adam Zimmerman smiled like a winner. It was a gambler’s smile: a smile of pure self-congratulation, at a well-judged bet.

I figured that he was entitled to it. So, I suppose, did millions or billions of other viewers.

Nineteen

Child of Fortune

T
here was more, but so far as I was concerned the rest of it was all anti-climax. I wanted to meet Adam Zimmerman in the flesh. I wanted to be introduced to him, as someone who was
like him
— as the only person in the entire solar system who was like him, because the only person who might be reckoned more like him than I was didn’t really count.

No such luck. There were plenty of other people who wanted first crack at him, and had the clout to demand it.

For the first time, the room in which I was confined really began to feel like a prison. No matter what opportunities it offered in the way of virtual experience, there was no escape from my impatience. Christine Caine was still with me, but that was no escape either. The game of trying to guess exactly what kind of game we were involved in had gone sour — the point now was to get on with it.

We could, of course, have used the time more productively. We should have. We shouldn’t have wasted a minute while there was so much still to be learned — but the drama on the screen had taken over, and we were too sharply aware of the fact that we had been abandoned in the wings to await a cue that no one was in a hurry to give us.

We ate a couple of meals, neither of which improved to any perceptible degree on the one we had first been offered, and we exchanged a few more speculations as to the nature of the roles we had been recruited to play in Adam Zimmerman’s return, but in the end tiredness demanded that we sleep.

“Eventually,” I told Christine, before we retired to our separate spaces, “they’ll have to let us in. When Zimmerman finds out we exist, he’ll want to meet us.” I couldn’t put much conviction into the claim.

“Sure,” she said. “
Hey, Adam
, they’ll say,
we thawed out a petty criminal and a murderer just for practice — just let us know when you want to get together to chat about old times
. How will he be able to restrain his enthusiasm?”

I wasn’t so sure that I was as petty a criminal as I remembered, but I certainly didn’t want to make an issue of it.

I slept for eight hours. If I dreamed I didn’t remember the dream — and I realized, when I woke, that I hadn’t had a single memorable dream since I’d woken up in the future. The readiest explanation of that not very remarkable fact was that the high-powered IT that the sisterhood had installed in my head was keeping my mind tidy. The most disturbing possibility was that while “I” thought “I” was sleeping “I” had actually been switched off, dropped into some kind of artificial coma or consigned to electronic oblivion. I decided to cling to the nicer hypothesis.