The Omega Expedition (8 page)

Surely, if that had been the case, I’d have remembered it.

Anyway, no one in the world could have expected me to serve more than ten years in the freezer for treasonous sabotage. The only way I could have been removed from society for any longer than that — let alone a thousand years — was by falling victim to treasonous sabotage myself.

In other words, if what the strange child was telling me was true, then someone like me must have been hired by someone like Damon Hart — or Damon Hart’s new masters — to obliterate the record of my conviction and imprisonment.

It couldn’t be true. It had to be a joke.

It didn’t seem to me to be very funny, but I figured that I had no alternative, for the time being, but to play along. Even though it had to be a VE melodrama, I had to play my part as if it were real.

What alternative was there? Even if the conviction that it was all a fraudulent game turned out to be wrong, it would make a convenient psychological defense against the horror of the truth. Even if I really were in the far future, it would be best to remain in denial a little longer. I had always been a highly skilled denier, and a devoted guerilla warrior against the excesses of truth. Why else would Damon Hart have hired me so frequently to do his dirty work?

“Would you believe me if I told you that I’m an innocent man?” I said to the wonderful child. “The unfortunate victim of a miscarriage of justice.”

“Given that your tone seems to indicate that you don’t believe it yourself,” she replied, “no.”

“So why bring me back?” I asked, entering into the spirit of the game. “If I really have been in the freezer for a thousand years and more, why bring me back
now
?”

“It was a trial run,” she told me, brutally. “We were uncertain that we could revive individuals who had been in stasis for so long without their having suffered considerable side effects — not merely loss of memory but irredeemable deterioration of personality.”

“My personality’s okay,” I was quick to assure her, although I was equally quick to doubt it. “Except for this sense I have of not quite being myself,” I added, after a pause for thought, perhaps a little too scrupulously. Then, after a further pause, I asked: “Why me?”

“It seems you were one of only two long-term prisoners accepted into the Foundation’s care in times past who were put into SusAn within two hundred years of Adam Zimmerman,” she said. “When we interrogated our records you emerged as the second most obvious candidate for the trial. Perhaps I should say that, although we shall continue to investigate the extent of the mental side effects you have suffered, we are reasonably content with the way the trial has worked. We’ll need to form a better estimate of the extent of your loss of memory, but your coherency is reassuring. Your feeling of not being quite yourself may be a result of the IT we’ve installed. It would be helpful if you’d try to remember as much as you can. The records suggest that the loss of memory suffered by early revenants from SusAn was usually limited to a few days preceding their vitrification, and was often temporary.”

“I’ll do my best,” I promised, knowing that I’d have to do it for my own sake. Even if this whole thing were an illusion, I’d need to recover all the memories I could recover as soon as possible. “Apart from the lost memories, you reckon I’m okay?”

“So far as we can ascertain,” she said, judiciously. “We discovered some residual nanomachines bound to your bones and the glial cells of your brain whose intended function is mysterious, but they appear to be inactive. They’re probably vestigial — a side effect of the particular cryoprotective system used on your body. There’s no trace of similar contamination in the second trial subject, nor in Adam Zimmerman’s body.”

I set aside the matter of the puzzling “contamination” for further contemplation at a future time. Assuming that this whole conversation must be a kind of test, there were easier points to be scored.

“So you’re bringing Adam Zimmerman back,” I said, casually, in order to prove that my memory hadn’t been completely shot to bits. “Are you what’s become of the Ahasuerus Foundation? Has it taken you this long to conclude that you’re capable of fulfilling your mission statement?”

“You know about the Ahasuerus Foundation,” Davida Berenike Columella observed, unnecessarily. It was an obvious prompt.

“Damon Hart and I had some dealings with the Foundation,” I confirmed, obligingly. She obviously expected more detail, and it seemed wisest to accentuate the positive side of my dealings. “Mostly with a woman named Rachel Trehaine,” I added. “We helped her out a few times, and she did as much for us — you might be able to check that in your records.”

She didn’t reply to that immediately. I inferred that our conversation was being closely monitored, and that someone somewhere was making haste to trawl the records for any mention of Rachel Trehaine.

I figured that I was going to have to try to stand up eventually, so I took advantage of the momentary lull to make my tentative move.

I probably swayed a bit, but I didn’t float away or flail my arms about in an unnecessarily comic fashion. I guessed that the gravity must be about three-quarters Earth normal — easy enough to get used to, I supposed, with a little care and practice.

But why, I thought, would anyone rig a VE to simulate nonstandard gravity?

The two chairs had been set three paces apart, so there was a considerable gap to cross before I could reach out and touch the wonderful child, but I took my time over it and couldn’t have seemed particularly clownish.

She read the intention immediately, and flinched.

She didn’t protest and she didn’t move, but her eyes told me that she was scared. Now
she
was the one being subjected to a test.

I didn’t know exactly why, but the sight of that fear, innocently manifest in her childlike eyes made me suddenly apprehensive. For the first time, I became anxious.

What am I, in her eyes?
I wondered.
What have I become, in the space of a thousand years, that I should seem so terrible?

Three

Madoc the Monster

I
had known even before I got up that touching the wonderful child wouldn’t prove anything. If I were as ingeniously cocooned as I might be, with clever IT supporting every aspect of an illusion, nothing would prove that my experience was real — but the terrified expression on Davida Berenike Columella’s face looked genuine, all the more so because she was struggling so hard to control it.

I hesitated, trying to gauge the situation more accurately.

It seemed to me that she didn’t want to be afraid, but that she couldn’t help it. Even if we weren’t in a VE, there was probably nothing much I could do to hurt or damage her, but she still couldn’t help her reaction. After all, if we weren’t in a VE, then I was presumably a monster out of the distant past, who had been committed to a term of indefinite imprisonment for a crime so dreadful that it had been expunged from the record. She had no reason to be certain that I wasn’t a homicidal maniac.

But I reached out and touched her face anyway.

Maybe I
was
a monster.

The touch was gentle and brief; her relief when I took my hand away was as palpable as her anxiety had been.

“How old are you, really?” I asked, speaking softly.

“Two hundred and twenty years,” she told me.

“And you’re not speaking through some kind of sim? You really look like this, in the flesh?”

“Yes,” she said.

If she was telling the truth, I realized, I was a stranger in a very strange land. More must have changed in a thousand years than I could ever have anticipated. It was an uncomfortable thought — but I was Madoc Tamlin, the spiritual descendant of one man who had been chained to a rock of sacrifice to fight the six champions of an alien land and one who had come back to Earth from Faerie, in spite of all that the Queen of the Fays had done to keep him and send him to hell.

I retreated to my chair, still moving gingerly. I sat down again, but I perched myself more stiffly and alertly than the posture I had been given when I was allowed to awake.

“Does
everybody
look like you now?” I asked.

“Only in Excelsior,” she told me. “There are a great many human races. Some still look like you.”

I was now in a state of psychological disarray, and I had to marshal my thoughts before I could frame another question. When my kind come crashing out of denial we tend to flip to the opposite extreme.
No game
, I thought.
All real. A thousand fucking years. Some human races still look like me. Others obviously don’t. Who did this to me? Why?

“Where’s Damon?” I asked, a little more harshly than I intended.

When she didn’t reply I amplified the request. “Damon Hart. Biological son of Conrad Helier, reared by his father’s accomplices in crime. Late recruit to the Hardinist Cabal, breaking his surviving foster mother’s rebellious heart. Don’t tell me
he
’s not in your records, alive or dead.”

“He’s dead,” said Davida Berenike Columella, after pausing to consult her inner resources. “Everyone who was alive in your time is dead, except for a handful of individuals preserved, as you have been, in Suspended Animation. According to the available data, Damon Hart is not one of those. We can’t be absolutely sure, because there are other repositories, but all the customary evidence of death is in place.”

That was what they had said about Conrad Helier. Even Damon had believed it, until he learned better. I knew how easily “all the customary evidence of death” could be faked, even in the twenty-second century, because it was a business I’d dabbled in more than once — but that wasn’t the issue my distraught mind seized upon.

“
Everyone?
” I echoed. “What about the escalator to emortality? We all thought that the lucky ones, at least, would get to live forever.”

“The technologies of longevity available in your time were inadequate,” she informed me, flatly. “Nanotechnological repair and somatic rejuvenation had inbuilt limitations. The first true technologies of emortality didn’t come into use until the twenty-fifth century. They required the extensive genetic engineering of fertilized egg cells, so the first emortal human species had to be born to that condition. The oldest currently living individuals who have been continuously active were born in the two thousand four hundred and eighties.”

“When did Damon die?” I asked, not bothering to add the word “allegedly.”

She obviously had a covert data feed whispering incessantly into her inner ear. “In the year two thousand five hundred and two,” was the prompt answer.

Three hundred years! He’d left me where I was for
three hundred years
of his own protracted lifetime. Why hadn’t he used his authority and influence to get me out? What on Earth had I done to deserve that kind of neglect?

“All I ever did was hack into a few data stores,” I said, my voice no more than a whisper. “Steal a little information here, delete a little there, reconstruct a little here
and
there. I was working for the government, for God’s sake. The
real
government, not the elected one. I really am innocent, by any reasonable standard. I never killed anyone, or even hurt anyone much who wasn’t asking for it.”

“Can you be certain of that?” my interlocutor asked, still probing.

“Yes,” I said. “I
am
certain. I’ve lost a few memories. I can’t remember August twenty-two zero-two, let alone September. In June and July I was working for Damon,
with
Damon. Not just working — playing too. Having a good time. Planning a little espionage. Nothing heavy, just run-of-the-mill low-level skulduggery. We weren’t even outlaws by then. We were on the inside, rubbing shoulders with the elite, playing in the big boys’ game, by their rules.
I never killed anybody
. I would remember. I remember what I did, what I was. Even if they’d added in every last one of all the things I could have been charged with in my youth but never was — all the burglary, the smuggling, the dealing, the tax evasion, the so-called pornography, and all the rest of that penny-ante crap — they couldn’t have put me away for more than twenty years.
Why on Earth would they throw away the fucking key?
”

Davida Berenike Columella didn’t know the answer. Either she figured that I needed a little time to come to terms with it or she was avidly watching for signs of mental breakdown, because she kept quiet, letting me run with the train of thought.

I realized that there was a certain contradiction in what I’d said. Damon and I
had
been playing the big boys’ game, by their rules. We’d been playing in a pool where “a little espionage” and “low-level skulduggery” were no longer a matter for slapped wrists. We’d been playing in a pool where people took their secrets seriously.

Even so, a thousand years was an extremely long time to be hidden away. Why hadn’t Damon been able to find me? Why hadn’t he been able to get me out?

Suddenly, the stars outside the fake window didn’t seem so bright or so lordly. They seemed confused, lost in a darkness that they couldn’t quite obliterate even though they were massed in their trillions.

I knew that they weren’t all stars. Some of them were galaxies. The universe was full of galaxies, a hundred billion or more, but it was also full of darkness and emptiness.

Raw space, so the theorists of my time had said, was full of seething potentials — particulate eddies beyond the surface of the void, ever-ready to erupt into tangibility — but the sum of all that infinite activity was
nothing
.

And wherever the potential
was
manifest — wherever there was something instead of nothing — there was still, if measured on any scale responsible to the true size of the universe,
almost
nothing.

I existed. At least, I had to suppose so. But so what?

I felt that I had an obligation to pull myself together. After all, I seemed to be the first ambassador from the world of mortal men ever to be entertained in Excelsior.