Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Three

Madoc the Monster

Ihad 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 wasa 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 everybodylook 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 yearsof 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 andthere. I was working for the government, for God’s sake. The realgovernment, 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 amcertain. 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, withDamon. 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 hadbeen 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 wasmanifest – wherever there was something instead of nothing – there was still, if measured on any scale responsible to the true size of the universe, almostnothing.

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.

“Why ninety-nine?” I asked, as calmly as I could. “Why did you start the calendar over?”

“The Christian Era had ended long before that system of counting was abandoned,” she said. “On Earth, the new calendar was belatedly introduced after the Great North American Basalt Flow – year one was the first year of the so-called Gaean Restoration. The microworlds in Earth orbit adopted the convention because we all share the same year. Different systems apply on the inner worlds and the outer satellites, and in the more distant microworld clusters.”

I saw a chance to rack up a few more marks in the big test by guessing what the “Great North American Basalt Flow” must have been.

“So the Yellowstone Supervolcano finally blew up again,” I said. “Every umpteen million years, regular as clockwork.” It would have been even more impressive if I’d been able to remember the exact term of its periodicity.

“The magma chamber that ruptured was located in the former Yellowstone National Park in the United States of North America,” she confirmed, after a brief fact-check pause. “It had been closely monitored ever since the Coral Sea disaster of 2542, and was thought to be under control. The recriminations and accusations are still unsettled, at least on Earth itself.”

That was an intriguing remark. “You mean somebody let it off deliberately?” I asked. “Somebody blew up North America and plunged the whole planet into nuclear winter?”

That required a slightly longer data feed, perhaps to translate the term “nuclear winter.” Eventually, she said: “The majority opinion is that the eruption was an accident caused by a malfunction of the systems securing the magma chamber. There are, however, factions which believe that the systems were sabotaged – they differ in their hypotheses as to who might have been responsible and why.”

I didn’t need a data feed to interpret “Gaean Restoration” for me. A major basalt flow must have begun with an explosive release of gas and ash into the air, fouling the atmosphere for years. The ecosphere must have suffered a tremendous die-back – but when the dust had settled and the poison gases had been neutralized, the human survivors must have set about the business of regenerating the ecosphere according to their own schemes. This time, unlike any other in the deep prehistory of the Earth, there must have been human survivors, but millions or billions must have died. Millions or billions of emortals.

“Did the Hardinist Cabal still own the planet when it happened?” I asked.

She didn’t procrastinate over the precise significance of the term, although she took the trouble to substitute one of her own. “The people who styled themselves Stewards of the Earth had already lost some of their former power and influence,” she reported, “and the fact that the planet’s balance of trade with the outer system was in irredeemable deficit implied that their decline was irreversible. They probably remain privately convinced that the eruption was sabotage directed at them, perhaps by Earthbound rebels and perhaps by outer system radicals, although their public position is that it was an unfortunate accident. Certain other factions have suggested that the Stewards were the responsible party, and that the effective destruction of the ecosphere enabled them to reestablish a local economic hegemony that they would soon have lost. That seems unlikely, given that the disaster brought about a dramatic increase in imports from the outer system.”

“Do the Secret Masters of Earth know you’ve woken me up?” I asked, trying not to sound too paranoid.

“They have been kept fully informed of our plans and our progress, as a matter of courtesy,” the wonderful child assured me. “The United Nations of Earth will send a delegation to attend the awakening of Adam Zimmerman, as will the Outer System Confederation. If their deceleration patterns proceed according to plan, the ships carrying the delegations will both arrive within a hundred hours’ time.”

“So you’re still going to wake Zimmerman, even though my memory is impaired?”

“Yes. We shall continue to monitor your progress, and if we can find a way to help you recover your lost memories we’ll do it. If Adam Zimmerman suffers similar problems, we’ll counter them as best we can.”

“How’s the second test subject doing?”

“We hope to awaken the second subject in seven hours’ time. Everything has gone well so far, but her state of mind remains to be ascertained.”

“Who is the other trial subject?” I asked, not really expecting to hear a name I knew.

“A woman named Christine Caine,” was the reply I got.

Like most of the other names which figure in this lostory, that one had a tale attached – one which bore a decidedly sinister significance.

Four

Bad Karma

The single most astonishing aspect of my return to consciousness, a thousand years later than could ever have been expected, was that the one thing that tangibly astonished me during that first interview with the child-who-wasn’t-a-child was the sound of Christine Caine’s name. I’d just been informed that I’d missed out on a millennium of human history, including the advent of universal emortality and the temporary devastation of the Gaean ecosphere, and the news that actually threw me way off-balance was hearing that the other person appointed to share my fate – I didn’t, at that time, regard the legendary Adam Zimmerman as a partner in myfate – was the most notorious mass murderer of my parents’ lifetime.

“You mean Christine Caine as in Bad Karma,” I said to Davida Berenike Columella, just in case the name had become fashionable after 2202.

Davida seemed to have no idea what I was talking about, and her data feed obviously wasn’t helping. Apparently, it wasn’t just my record that had been erased.

Again I was seized by the conviction that it had to be a joke. I’d almost given up hoping that it was all a VE drama, but the reference to the most notorious VE drama of my own era seemed too surreal to be anything but contrivance. Except that it wasn’t really a reference, from the viewpoint of Davida Berenike Columella. If appearances could be trusted, she had never heard of Bad Karmaand knew no more about Christine Caine than she knew about me.

I remembered the way that the seeming child had flinched when she realized that I was going to touch her. She’d had no idea who I was. Given that I’d been committed to prison a thousand years before, with the record of my crime obliterated, I might easily have been a mass murderer. As it happened, I wasn’t, although Davida couldn’t be entirelyprepared to take my word for it.

But Christine Caine really was a monster, by all accounts. She was also the subject of the most notorious illegal VE drama of all time – or had been, when “all time” had only extended as far as July 2202.

Suddenly, I was forced to contemplate the exact terms of the “trial run” of which I was now a part.

“You’ve tried to bring me back exactly as I was when I was put away,” I said, by way of clarification. “You wanted to be as certain as you can be that you could do a good job of restoration, because that’s what you hope to do with Adam Zimmerman. So you’ve also tried as hard as you can to put Christine Caine back together exactly as she was when she went into the freezer, right?”

“That’s correct,” the wonderful child agreed.

“And so far as I can tell,” I reported, “you’ve done a reasonably good job on me, save for a few recent memories. Not that I’d be consciously aware of any differences, I suppose, and I haven’t had time to check my other memories as closely as I might, and I really don’tquite feel like myself…but even so, I’m perfectly prepared to accept me as I am. In which case, you might want to take a few extra precautions with Christine Caine.”

“Why?”

“Well,” I said. “For one thing, she was convicted of murdering thirteen people, ten of whom were her adoptive parents. For another, although opinions varied as to the exact nature and extent of her mental illness, nobody doubted that she was barking mad.”

“Did you know her?” Davida Berenike Columella inquired, innocently.

“ Knowher? Of course I didn’t knowher. She was frozen down when I was four years old. But I was in the illicit VE business for a while and I knew all about Bad Karma. I suppose I even wished I’d made it, or had been capable of making it.”

I could tell that Davida had known full well that Christine Caine had been frozen down in 2167, thirty-five years before me. That had been another little test, which I’d obviously passed. But I could tell, too, that she really didn’t have a clue what Bad Karmawas. Classic of early VE or not, it was one work of art that hadn’t stood the test of time. It had been lost – or successfully suppressed.

“ Bad Karmawas a VE drama,” I explained. “Underground stuff, shot circatwenty-one ninety-five. I used to make sex tapes and fight tapes in my youth, some of them far enough out on the edge to be bannable, but nothing like Bad Karma. The visuals were fairly crude – I could have improvised those easily enough without doing serious damage to any of the people that were supposedly carved up by the viewpoint character – but the sound track was something else. It was a whispered voice-over representing the stream-of-consciousness of the murderer whose eyes the user was supposedly seeing through.

“The improvised thought-track provided a theory of sorts as to why Christine Caine had committed the murders. It was partly based on one of several conflicting statements she’d given to the police and various psychiatric examiners after her arrest, but mainly improvised. In those days, even visuals were considered a potentially dangerous medium of consumer/perpetrator identification, but that thought-track kicked off a real moral panic.

“Rumor had it that sensitive users – especially kids – might be taken over by the thought-track, driven mad, and led to commit copycat crimes. The rumors were probably started by the guys who made the tape, for marketing purposes, but they proved a little too effective. There werecopycat crimes, for which the VE mighthave been partly responsible – but you probably know better than I do how crazy those times were. Christine Caine can’t know anything about the VE tape, of course, and she might be a very different person from the one represented in the thought-track – but she did do the murders. If you’ve put her back together exactly as she was when she went into SusAn, you’ve reconstructed a crazy serial killer.”

Davida Berenike Columella didn’t seem to be as frightened by this news as she had been of my casual gesture, but I was physically present and Christine Caine wasn’t.

“She won’t be able to harm anyone,” the wonderful child told me.

If that remark was supposed to be reassuring, it missed by a mile. I guessed immediately that if Christine Caine wasn’t going to be able to hurt anyone when they woke her up – and it seemed that nothing I’d said had troubled that assumption – then neither could I. Which meant that they hadn’t, after all, put me together exactlyas I’d been before. They’d taken precautions.

“You’re installing some kind of IT in her head,” I guessed, still talking about Christine Caine because I didn’t want to talk about myself. “Something that will stop her if she runs amok.”

“We can do that,” the wonderful child confirmed, ambiguously.

That was when I saw – clearly, I thought – that Christine Caine would be resuming her life as an animal in a zoo: a specimen to be observed, and wondered at. And I understood, too, that I had just contributed to that fate by robbing her of her last hope of not being recognized for what she was, and her last hope of being able to make a new start.

I didn’t know exactly how old Christine Caine had been when they’d put her away, but I knew that she wasn’t much more than twenty. In terms of elapsed time, I was no more than twice her age; Davida Berenike Columella was ten times as old, although she looked no more than nine.

From the viewpoint of those who had brought us back into the world, I realized, Christine Caine and I were alike, no matter how slight my unknown crimes might have been compared to hers. Whatever they had done to her, and whatever they intended to do to her in future, they must have done and would also do to me. I too was a creature in a zoo: a representative of an extinct species, resurrected by ingenuity into a world of which I knew nothing.

I knew, because I had had dealings with the Ahasuerus Foundation a thousand years before, that the people of Excelsior were bringing Adam Zimmerman back because they intended to make him emortal. Even to Rachel Trehaine, in the 2190s, Adam Zimmerman had been a great hero, one of the founders of the modern world order. The Hardinist Cabal, or whatever rump of it still remained, could hardly help thinking of him in much the same light, given that he had played such a vital role in the economic coup that had launched their inexorable climb to world domination. This world presumably had a place ready made for Adam Zimmerman – if not a throne, a pedestal. But what did it have for Christine Caine, or for me?

I concluded then that whatever debt of gratitude I owed Davida Berenike Columella and her people for bringing me back to life, they were not my friends. It was not a happy thought, but it was not a crushing discovery either.

I had always prided myself on being tough, on being able to adapt myself to adverse circumstance. I knew that I could be tough now. I knew that I could be tougher than I had ever been before, because I – unlike Damon Hart, it seemed – had managed to keep my place on that imaginary escalator while everyone else I ever knew had lost their footing.

If all this was real, then I really had ridden the tide of opportunity into a world where emortality was for everyone, or almost everyone – including, I hoped, the animals in the zoo. I knew that I might have to be careful, and clever, and cunning, but I had been all those things before – and the people of Excelsior seemed to have put me back together very nearly as I had been before.

If there’s a game to be played here, I thought, whether in reality or a VE drama, then it has to be won. I understood that from the very start. I had understood it all my life, and I could see no reason to change my mind, no matter what miracles had transformed the world during the millennium I had lost, while I was away with the Fays.

“If you’re really going to wake Christine Caine tomorrow,” I said, by way of making my first real move in the game, “I think you’d better let me do the talking. I’m the only one who might be able to make her understand – at least to the extent that I can understand.”

“Thank you for the offer,” said the wonderful child. “We’ll certainly consider it.”

It was her manner more than her choice of words that belatedly tipped me off to the fact that the kind of English she was talking wasn’t her first language, even though it might be a variety thereof. I realized that she might well have learned it in order to talk to me – or to the heroic Adam she considered the true creator of her world.

I knew better than to offer to be the first to talk to him, and told myself that he would probably have far less need of my intercession than poor Christine Caine.

I’m less confident of that judgment today than I was then, but I’m less confident of many things now than I was then. That’s one of the effects of growing ever older, if you do it properly.