The Omega Expedition

She didn’t bother throwing Christine Caine’s name into the ring. She was too busy worrying about the possibility that I might be right.

“How will he feel?” she asked, without even bothering to add a qualification reminding me that my guess could only be a guess. I knew that I had to be succinct as well as confident, provocative as well as plausible.

“Betrayed,” I said, and left it at that.

I assumed that if she could figure out what I meant, she’d probably be able to understand why she might need me. If she couldn’t, then she would definitely need me, whether she understood why or not.

Six

Welcome to the Future

Iwas fairly certain that Christine Caine wouldn’t want to wake up in a sterile room with a window looking out on a star-filled universe. I suggested to Davida Berenike Columella that she and her sisters might like to let Christine wake up in Excelsior’s Edenic garden, bathing in the complex glory of fake sunlight, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They wanted her inside.

Presumably they still wanted meinside too, although they were too polite to say so in so many words. They wanted to take their time about exposing their world to the untender gaze of two supercriminals from the legendary past.

Their idea of compromise was to let me choose the scenic tape that the virtual window would display.

If I’d had the chance to do some serious research before the sisterhood offered me that choice I might have picked the finest ice palaces on Titan, or the AI metropolis on Ganymede, or perhaps a purple forest on the world that home-system people still called Ararat because that was the first name reported back to them — but I knew nothing, as yet, of wonders like that. A little taste of home seemed to be the better bet.

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 seemedlike 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 wasmyself.

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 ma

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.