Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [3]
The problem afflicting the majority, Nita Brownell told them in dribs and drabs, was restricted to the process by which short-term memory was converted into long-term. Most sufferers had lost less than a couple of days, only a handful more than a week. Most of the lost time could be deemed “irrelevant,” in that it consisted entirely of preparation for freezing down—hours of dull routine spent in the Spartan environment of Lagrange-5 or Mare Moscoviense—or in riding a shuttle to the far side of Earth’s orbit, depending on the timing of the person’s invitation to join the Chosen People. A minority, on the other hand, had lost more than that. Some of the full-scale amnesiacs had recovered all or part of themselves eventually, but some had not.
Matthew and Vince were apparently among the luckier ones—but when Matthew remembered the long, lucid dream he had had while his IT was preparing to wake him, he could not help but wonder whether it had been a close-run thing.
Mercifully, by the time Matthew had wrinkled and worked all this out, Dr. Brownell had established that if either he or Vince Solari had lost anything, it was a matter of hours—irrelevant hours, if any hours out of a human life could be reckoned irrelevant.
Compared with 700 years of downtime, Matthew thought, a few hours might indeed be reckoned irrelevant. He remembered saying au revoir to Alice and Michelle, and that was the important thing. With luck, they would remember saying au revoir to him, when their turn came to be reawakened.
Except that Nita Brownell hesitated for just a fraction of a second over the word when, and that fleeting moment of evident doubt cast a dark shadow over everything she said thereafter. The problems of awakening from SusAn were not the real problems; they were the problems Nita Brownell was using as a screen to hide the problems that would have to be explained at another time, preferably by someone else. She was a doctor, it was not her job, not her place….
It was too easy to be paranoid, Matthew told himself, as sternly as he could while he was still spaced out. He had come from a bad place, and he had had bad dreams, but he was a winner in the game. He had cast his lot with Shen Chin Che, and he had pulled out a major prize.
Earth had not died, but that did not mean that its people had had an easy ride in the wake of the Plague Wars. Earth, in the twenty-eighth century, had the secret of emortality, which the Earth he had left behind had not, so he might yet be a winner twice over, of a New World and a new life. Given that he had awakened from his long sleep with his memories intact, to find Hope in orbit around a life-bearing planet with a breathable atmosphere, what could possibly be wrong? What kind of worm could possibly have infected the bud of his future?
Eventually, Nita Brownell’s dogged interrogation stuttered to an end, and she left her patients to get acquainted with one another. Matthew knew, however, that she would return soon enough. When she returned, she would be more vulnerable to his questions.
“How do you feel?” Vince Solari asked him.
“All things considered, pretty well,” Matthew told him. “Tired and tranquilized.” Turning to face his companion was extraordinarily difficult, but he figured it was worth the effort, if only to say hello.
“When were you frozen down?” he asked.
“Fourteen,” Solari replied, presumably meaning 2114. “I was a late applicant. You were one of the first wave, I guess—the real Chosen People. I was only in my twenties when you went into the freezer, but I guess we’re the same age now, give or take a few months.”
“We might both get to be a lot older,” Matthew observed, remembering that the great pioneers of SusAn technology had encouraged its development in order that they might sleep until their fellows had invented