Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Twenty-Three

Alice

Another 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 werethings 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 anda 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 hadsaid 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.”

Oddly enough, my fascination with my namesake was something I’d only ever mentioned to one other person – not, as it happened, Damon Hart, but Diana Caisson.

“You have to go back now,” was all she said in reply, as she shoved me out into the darkness. “I’ll try as hard as I can to get permission to tell you everything, but I daren’t go ahead without. The situation’s too tricky.”

“It’s okay,” I told her. “I dare say we can make up a few stories of our own in the meantime.”

Twenty-Four

Charity

Ihad gone into the darkness a victim, but I came back as the only man who had met the enemy. I was the new star of the show.

“They don’t seem to have the medical facilities to fix us up properly, so we’d better be extra careful in future,” I told the others when they crowded round me, putting on a display of being concerned for my welfare. “This dressing is early twenty-first century and the anesthetic is beginning to wear off already. These are codeine – that’s an ancient morphine precursor.” I showed them the bottle of pills, but didn’t mention what Alice had said about maybe having something better available tomorrow.

“I didn’t know it was you,” Solantha Handsel said, yet again. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I know,” I said. “It could have been anyone. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.”

“What did you find out?” Niamh Horne cut in. “Where are we? Earth?”

“There is absolutely no possibility that we’re on Earth,” Lowenthal was quick to say. “They’re simulating Earth-gravity for deceptive purposes. How could anyone on Earth have the knowledge necessary to hijack a Titanian spaceship?”

“How could anyone else?” the cyborganizer came back.

All of which deflected sufficient attention away from me to let me shuffle through the crowd, heading for the door of the cell from which I’d emerged. “My head’s pounding and I’ve lost more than a litre of blood,” I muttered, harshly. “I have to lie down.”

That helped to refocus their attention. “Tell us what you found out first,” Lowenthal said, in what might have passed for a polite tone if he’d been a better actor.

I decided to keep my hand hidden, for the time being, on the grounds that the few cards I held might look a bit more impressive when I’d worked out how best to play them.

“I didn’t find out anything much,” I told him. “She says she wants to tell us everything but needs permission – she wouldn’t say from whom. She says she’s trying to protect us, but won’t say from whom. She says that she’s trying to prevent a war, but reckons I don’t have the imagination to understand who might be fighting it or why. The only solid fact I know is that her name’s Alice.”

“Alice?” Lowenthal queried, with an almost imperceptible sneer of disbelief, as he tried to get around me so that he could block my path to the doorway.

Surprisingly, Christine Caine stepped casually into hispath and practically shoved him out of my way. “As in Wonderland,” she said. “Madoc needs to rest. You can all leave him alone until he feels better, okay?”

It was sheer amazement rather than politeness or caution which kept Solantha Handsel from felling Christine with a casual blow of her fist, but Lowenthal was much quicker on the diplomatic uptake. He turned on Niamh Horne as if she were the one making difficulties. “Christine’s right,” he said. “There’s no hurry. Madoc needs time to recover. We can save all the questions till later. I think we ought to eat, if we can figure out how to work this antique equipment. Do you know how to do that, Christine?”

“Figure it out for yourself, asshole,” was her reply to that ploy. She shepherded me into the cell and shut the door behind her. “Are you okay?” she asked, anxiously, as I climbed back into the lower bunk. “You did lose a lot of blood – and pills aren’t going to help.”

“I’ve bled before,” I told her. “Thanks for that.”

“We freezer vets need to stick together,” she told me. I hoped fervently that it was true. I understood why she was trying to forge an alliance. She was as fearful as the rest of us, although she didn’t want to make her terror too obvious, and she knew only too well that she was the remotest outsider in our little company.

She came closer, and leaned over so that her head was only a few centimeters from mine. “Are they listening in on us?” she asked.

“Of course they are,” I murmured. “No matter how ancient this place is, or how recently our captors moved in, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to wire it for sound. Unfortunately, the pirates are probably the only ones listening in. We can’t know for sure that they flushed out allour IT, or why, but they wanted to make as certain as they could be that none of us was carrying bugs capable of signaling our whereabouts to the outside world. Horne’s external implants may have all kinds of talents we don’t know about, but my guess is that our friendly neighborhood kidnappers are the only ones who can hear us.”

She nodded. “So who’s our friend and who’s our enemy?” she wanted to know. “Just give me your best guess,” she added, as an afterthought.

“I wish I knew,” I said.

Perhaps there was something in my tone that I hadn’t intended to put into it, or perhaps she wanted to do her level best to convince herself. At any rate, her eyes narrowed slightly and she said: “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not dangerous. Not to you.”

“We freezer vets need to stick together,” I reminded her. “If you do feel an overwhelming urge to kill someone…”

It wasn’t a sensible move to try to make a joke out of it. I knew that it wasn’t a joke, and so did she – but old reflexes can be hard to control. She couldn’t contrive a laugh, but she managed to keep on smiling. “Are we in any worse trouble now than we were before?” she wanted to know.

“That’s a good question,” I muttered. “Probably, but possibly not. If the enemy of our enemy is our friend, we probably have a few friends somewhere – but until we figure out who our enemies are, we won’t know where to look for them.”

“Lowenthal and Horne don’t seem to like us any better than they like one another,” she observed. “They don’t even seem to like Adam Zimmerman, although they came a long way to welcome him home.”

“True,” I said. “But something happened back on Excelsior when they first came face to face. That was when Horne started talking about somebody playing somebody for a fool. They don’t trust one another and they don’t trust Davida. Bringing us here doesn’t seem to have been part of Alice’s plans – I got the impression that she’s as much a victim in this as we are, although she and some mysterious companion are trying very hard to be players. I think the hidden players let us wake up because they want to see how Horne and Lowenthal carry their quarrel forward – which is something we need to be interested in too, if we’re to have any chance of figuring out what we’ve been caught up in. All we can be sure of is that whatever plans the sisterhood and Lowenthal’s bosses might have had for us have gone up in smoke. Lowenthal’s not going to like that – bureaucrats always panic when things go awry around them, because they know they’ll have to carry the can whether they were at fault or not.”

“Who actually gave the order to bring us out of the freezer, do you think?” she asked. She’d obviously been doing some hard thinking along lines not dissimilar to the ones I’d been following.

“I don’t know,” was the only reply I could offer her. “I thought at first it had to be Lowenthal’s people, because I thought Ahasuerus had to be in the Cabal’s pocket, no matter how much they might pretend to be a law unto themselves. I’m not so sure now – but whoever originated the order to wake Zimmerman, they didn’t do it for his benefit, let alone ours. No matter what conditions he laid down when he launched the Foundation, they’d have let him rest in peace forever if their hand hadn’t been forced. Now he is back though, and everyone knows it, he’s valuable. He may be the has-been to end all has-beens, but he’s still a potent symbol of the world that was parent to this one. If waking him up was system-wide news, the news that he’s been kidnapped will generate even bigger headlines. If Alice’s Wonderlanders wanted attention, they’ve got it – but if this really is a hijack, Niamh Horne’s people will stop at nothing to find out who stole their beautiful spaceship. When they do, the thieves will have hornets buzzing at them from every direction. Given that they already seem to be arguing among themselves, this business could get verymessy.”

Christine nodded. “Anything else I should know?” she asked.

Now it was my turn to hesitate. I knew that I couldn’t trust her, no matter how hard she was working to build a common cause between us, but there were things I couldn’t figure out, and she had lived through an earlier period of history. I dropped my voice even lower to say: “What kind of people were being frozen down in twenty ninety, do you think? In those days, you had to be a murderer, right? Or a volunteer?”

“I guess so,” she said. “Why?”

“Alice says that she’s older than us,” I whispered. “That means she was in the freezer for more than seven hundred years – maybe as long as eight – before they fished her out three centuries ago. It’s the only real clue I’ve got as to who snatched us, and I can’t make head nor tails of it. That and charity.”

“What?”

“Charity. I was in a storage unit. Most of the stuff stowed in there was newly imported, but some wasn’t. The only word I could make out on the old stuff was charity.”

I didn’t really expect a response, but I saw her eyes light up with inspiration. There was nothing false or grudging about the smile that creased her face now. “Shit,” she said. “Is thatwhere we are?”

I put my finger to my lips immediately, fearful of whatever listening devices the Wonderlanders had planted. “Very softly,” I said, meaning the way she had to whisper it in my ear. “And don’t tell the others just yet. First, we need to figure out whose side we’re on.”

She had just enough time to tell me what Charity was before the knock on the door sounded. It seemed more apologetic than insistent, so I nodded to indicate that she should let the visitor in.

She opened the door cautiously, then stood back to admit Mortimer Gray. He was carrying a bowl, a spoon, and a water bottle, all of them molded in plastic – but not the uninspiring gray stuff that made up the walls. The bowl and spoon seemed to my admittedly uneducated eye to be modern. The water bottle was unsealed.

“It’s only flavored gruel, I’m afraid,” he said. “Guaranteed nutritionally adequate for your kind, however – and we managed to master the microwave oven, so it’s warm without being desiccated.”

“What about me?” Christine wanted to know.

Gray was too polite to answer, so he just gestured with his full hands to remind her that he only had two of them.

She went out, nursing her secret fondly. She closed the door behind her, with ostentatious carefulness.