The Omega Expedition (28 page)

Twenty-Three

Alice

A
nother hand, no bigger than Christine’s, gripped my sleeve. “This way,” said a female voice.

I hadn’t seen the woman on the screen, so I couldn’t visualize a face to fit the clutching hand. It pulled me half a dozen paces forward, then to the left. I moved clumsily through another doorway, bumping my shoulder as I went.

When the woman had activated the light switch I saw that we were in a room no bigger than a cupboard. In fact, it actually seemed to be a cupboard, albeit a large one.

We were surrounded by storage racks, some of them crammed and some of them empty. The shelves had numbers on, which appeared to have been stenciled on the gray plastic in black paint. As in the cells and the room into which the cells opened, everything seemed unbelievably old. There were more rivet heads visible as well as hexagonal bolt heads. Most, but not all, of the packages stowed on the occupied racks looked much more recent. The ones that didn’t seem to constitute fresh stock looked very old indeed, stylistically speaking, but they weren’t showing much sign of dilapidation or decay.

The woman who was reaching up to test the damage done to my nose was fully matured, but there was no way of telling how old she might be. Her hair was dark and her complexion had a peculiar bluish tint. Her eyes were blue, but a darker shade than I had ever seen before. She was wearing a smartsuit; it wasn’t fashionably cut, by the standards of my time, but it looked — at least to my uneducated eye — far more like the ones commonly worn in the twenty-second century than the one I’d been fitted with on Excelsior.

“Hold still,” she said, as she rolled back my left sleeve and wrapped something around the bare forearm. It was an elastic bandage made of some kind of smart fabric, connected by bundles of artificial nerves to a box. I didn’t feel anything, but I guessed that it would send feelers into my arm to test the blood pressure.

“It’s my face that needs the treatment,” I pointed out, ashamed of the thickness of my voice and roughness of pronunciation.”

“It’s already been reset, albeit crudely,” she told me. “I’ll put a dressing on it to reduce the swelling and apply local anesthetic, but there’s not much I can do at present to compensate for the blood loss. I don’t have repair nanobots ready to hand — it’ll take until tomorrow, at the earliest, to produce an emergency supply. Fortunately, the blood loss doesn’t seem to have been too bad. The spill looked worse than it was.”

She showed me the dressing she intended to apply. It just about qualified as smart, but it was a kind that had virtually disappeared in my time, even in parts of the world where nobody had decent IT or worthwhile medical insurance.

“That isn’t going to do much for the pain,” I complained.

She picked something up from a nearby shelf and handed it to me. It was a plastic bottle containing pills — perhaps twenty of them.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Codeine,” she told me.

“Codeine! That’s antediluvian. What the hell is this place?”

“We hadn’t expected you to start trying to kill one another as soon as you woke up,” she countered, drily. Her tone changed, though, as she kept talking. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to serve as an example, to warn the others to look after themselves — and one another — a little bit better. If I had something ready to hand I’d give it to you, but I don’t. All that’s presently in the stores is pre-nanotech medical apparatus — whose evolution, as Mortimer Gray will doubtless be pleased to explain to you, virtually petered out as soon as the first IT suites came on to the market. I can get something better, but it’ll take time. Quiet now.”

I shut up while she applied the dressing and unwrapped my arm, but as soon as the local anaesthetics in the patch of synthetic skin began to kick in I was able to concentrate my attention much more effectively.

“I don’t suppose you’d consider telling me who you are and what the hell you’re playing at?” I said, trying to sound conciliatory. “Whatever war you’re fighting, I’m not involved. I only just got here.”

“I’m sorry you got caught up in this,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “We know that it’s not your fault, and that you can’t begin to fathom the situation. I wish I could explain, but we’re involved in delicate negotiations, and I’ve been forbidden to disclose anything that might affect their outcome. I hope I’ll get permission to explain what’s going on in the near future, but we’ll all need to be patient.”

“So why not let us go on sleeping?” I asked.

She actually bit her lip a little as she suppressed the impulse to answer. It seemed to me that she was very unhappy about her own situation, whatever it was. She was just a pawn, no more in control of the bizarre kidnapping than I was — or she was putting on a good act. She couldn’t stop me talking, though, so I made my own guess — hoping, of course, to be able to deduce something from her reaction.

“If you don’t want to talk to us,” I said, “and it appears that you don’t, you must want to observe us — listen in on our conversation, see how the accusations fly. You want to know how Lowenthal and Horne react.”

She remained stubbornly silent.

I changed tack. “Okay,” I said. “How about helping me out by offering me a few hints as to what I ought to ask Lowenthal and Horne, in order to help both of us get what we want. What kind of a war is it that we’ve stepped into?”

That was a better move. It made her pause, to consider the offer. There
were
things she wanted to know about Lowenthal and Horne. When I used the word “war” her expression darkened a little, but I couldn’t be sure what the change signified.

While she thought it over I scanned the racks, trying to pick up clues as to what might be in the packages — especially the ones that looked as if they had been here long before the pirates moved in. Unfortunately, almost all the labels I could see were numbers and meaningless jumbles of letters. Everything was identifiable from the outside, but only if you knew the code. There were only a handful of real words, and all but one of those were etched on the more recent packaging. A lot of those packs — upwards of fifty — allegedly contained manna or water, just like the packs that were stacked up in the room into which the cell doors opened. The only interesting word that I could see on any of the ancient plastic wrap had been scrawled on a piece of sealing tape in ink.

The word was
CHARITY
.

“We’re not fighting a war,” the woman said, eventually. “We’re trying to prevent one. I wish I could guarantee that no harm will come to you, but I can’t. What I can say is that you’re safe while you’re here. My companion and I don’t mean you any harm, and we’ll protect you as best we can.”

There had been just the slightest hesitation before she pronounced the word “companion,” but I didn’t have time to wonder what it might mean. My attention was caught and held by the ominous elements of the statement.

I figured that she wouldn’t answer if I asked straight out who did mean me harm and how likely they were to get the opportunity to do some, but I thought I might get somewhere by making a few more guesses, trying to provoke a less ambiguous reaction.

“The war you’re trying to prevent must be the one between Earth and the Outer System,” I said, avid for the slightest sign of confirmation or contradiction.

“It’s not as simple as that,” was all she said at first. After a moment’s hesitation, though, she went on. “There are more sides here than you can probably imagine, Mr. Tamlin.”

That was patronizing. She didn’t know anything about the scope of my imagination — but I wasn’t about to take umbrage now that I had a chance to get somewhere. “Personally, I think Lowenthal’s just a foot soldier,” I said, talking rapidly in the hope of making the most of my fragile opening, “but he’s probably working for the same people who handed down the instructions to Excelsior. They have to think the big basalt flow was sabotage, intended to upset the balance of power. They must intend to redress the balance, as soon as they figure out a way to do it. Whether or not Titan was responsible for blowing up North America, the Titanians must have been expecting retaliation, and they have control of the traffic. My guess is that Lowenthal’s masters needed bait: something to provide cover for a sizable delegation to go out to Titan. They knew that Titan wouldn’t be able to resist Zimmerman. He’s the only man with a big enough name to trigger a show
and
a contest. Maybe Christine and I were just trial runs, but maybe not. I think you flushed my IT along with Lowenthal’s and Horne’s because you didn’t know what the sisterhood might have incorporated into it. How am I doing?”

“It’s really not as simple as that,” she said, shaking her head ruefully. She hadn’t given me the slightest indication that I’d scored any hits along the way. “I certainly can’t blame you for trying to figure it all out, Mr. Tamlin, but I can’t help you while our own negotiations are still ongoing — the situation is difficult and the information is extremely sensitive. The present situation’s not of our choosing, but we have to deal with it as best we can. If we get safely to where we’re hoping to go, you’ll have to be told what’s going on, but nothing’s settled yet and there are factions involved in the discussion who still want everything kept quiet. I shouldn’t be talking to you at all, but we don’t want anyone dying on us if we can help it. Please tell your companions to remain calm, and patient.”

My offer to act as an agent provocateur appeared to have fallen on deaf ears, at least for the time being. I wondered whether there might be an opportunity for me to get a little way ahead of Lowenthal and Horne in the new game, if I played my cards right — but I knew I’d have to prove my usefulness before our captors would even consider letting me in.

“What’s your name?” I asked her, abruptly.

“Alice,” she said. She hadn’t hesitated — but she didn’t add a surname.

“And you’re just a foot soldier, like Lowenthal?”

“I’m not a soldier at all,” she said, coldly. “I’m doing everything I can to ensure that it doesn’t come to soldiering — because if it does, we might all be doomed. Maybe the evil day can only be postponed, but even if that’s the case, we still have to gain what time we can. We need it.” I got the impression that this speech wasn’t just addressed to me. Others were listening in — and she had already told me that the present situation wasn’t one she’d engineered, or even anticipated.

“Who’s
we
, exactly?” I asked.

“All of us,” she said. “We all need time.” For just an instant, she seemed to be about to add something else, but she thought better of it. I couldn’t tell whether or not she’d intended me to see the hesitation, or what conclusion she’d intended me to draw. I knew that “all of us” might only mean everybody locked in the interior of this mysterious and seemingly ancient artifact, or some larger but limited population, or even all the various posthumankinds.

“According to the history I’ve read, there hasn’t been a single war during the thousand years I’ve been away,” I told her. “Mortimer Gray seems to think that such childish things have been put away for good, now that everybody has a proper respect for the value of human life — because true emortals don’t take risks of that crazy kind.”

“Gray’s wrong,” Alice said, flatly. It sounded as if she had strong views of her own on that particular topic. “The Earthbound might have stood still for a long time, but they haven’t changed. Perhaps they can’t — not any more.” Now she felt that she
had
said too much, although she hadn’t really said anything at all. She became suddenly impatient. “You’d better go back now,” she said.

“How old are you?” I asked, refusing to budge. I’d snatched the question out of midair, spurred on by desperation to get something more, however slight. The only thing she’d so far shown any willingness to talk about was herself.

She hesitated, and this time she was definitely seized by a genuine uncertainty. She couldn’t quite bring a lie to bear in time to stop the truth tripping off the tip of her tongue.

“Older than you,” she said.

It wasn’t an answer I had expected, but I was quick enough to follow it up. “How much older?”

Again she hesitated, and again she decided to shame the devil, although she didn’t actually answer the question I’d asked. “I was frozen down in 2090,” she said, “and revived three hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a couple. It can be done, if that’s one of the things you want to know. Our kind can adapt, become emortal, and get a life. You can find a place in the scheme of things too, Mr. Tamlin, if they’ll only give you the chance.”

She was trying as hard as she could to be kind to me, I realized. There was an element of fellow feeling in her determination to help me, because she’d gone through what I was going through herself — except, maybe, for the feeling of betrayal. I took note of the fact that she was now talking about a “they” as well as, or instead of, the “we” she’d referred to before. I decided that it was time to start playing along, and let her steer me back toward the cupboard door.

“Thanks,” I said, touching the dressing on my nose but not meaning that alone.

“You’ll be okay,” she assured me, also not meaning my nose. “You really have to go now. You can tell the others that we really are trying to help and protect them. We’ll do our best to make sure that no harm comes to you.”

I wished that she sounded more confident about that. I was grateful that she had taken the trouble to patch me up, albeit crudely, and I wanted to acknowledge the fact. I also thought that it might be a wise move to offer her something in return, in order to tighten the bond between us. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what I had that would constitute a worthwhile offer. I settled, for some reason I couldn’t fathom even at the time, on a trivial personal confession.

“Alice is a curiously reassuring name,” I told her, as I paused in the doorway. “I’ve always had a thing about names, including my own. Tam Lin was a man who was kidnapped by fairies, and served their queen as a lover and champion while generations went by on Earth. In the end, he got back again — thanks to a young woman — but he came perilously close to being sent to Hell in the interim. I hope I’ll be as lucky.”