The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [136]
Sometimes, it can be a mercy to be forgotten.
I tried to tell my other self that the pain in my head was easing slightly, and that the odor in which I was dissolving wasn’t the perfume of my own gangrenous and necrotized flesh — but the other me wasn’t listening, because the other me was busy with an intention of its own.
This time I stuttered as well as stammering, but I finally got the word out. “D…d-d-date?”
“It’s Wednesday, Madoc,” the voice that sounded like Damon’s told me, presumably trying to be helpful, while actually concealing everything that either I really needed to know. “Wednesday the nineteenth. You’ve been under for four and a half days. I don’t know what sort of dreams you’ve been having, but you’re back now, if only for a little while. This is real. It won’t last long, and I haven’t a clue how long it will be before we can bring you back again for good, but you have to hang in there. I’ll find out what this is even if I have to take it to Conrad and eat humble pie. I’ll pull you through. All you have to do is keep the faith.”
He sounded convincing. He sounded like the Damon I’d known for so many years: the good Damon, who knew the meaning of friendship. He sounded like the Damon I’d believed in, the Damon I still wanted to believe in — and that was the trouble.
That was where paranoia kicked in again.
If I wasn’t feeding this to myself by way of compensation for the obvious fact that I was actually in Hell, I thought, then somebody else probably was. Somebody who knew me a lot better than Davida Berenike Columella. Or some thing which knew me a lot better than any meatborn citizen of the thirty-third century.
I knew that I had to test that hypothesis, if I could. If I could only speak…
It’s surprising how difficult short words can be when your voice is stretched to the limit and opening your mouth fills the available space with poison gas. I knew that I couldn’t contrive an M, but I thought a D might be easier.
Unfortunately, it was open to anyone who wanted to mock me to misconstrue “Eido” as “I do” — and equally open to the me that wasn’t not me to misconstrue what really was “I do” as something that I wanted to say but couldn’t, because I was a thousand years away.
“Do what, Madoc?” Damon countered. He sounded mystified, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe he was Eido, either. I figured this for somebody else’s game. Or some thing else’s game.
It required a tremendous effort in either case, but I or the other I managed to say “L…iar.”
“I never lied to you, Madoc,” Damon’s voice was quick to say. “I didn’t know what we were up against. I still don’t — but I won’t be underestimating them again. You have to believe me, Madoc — I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have sent you in if I’d known. You’re my best man, Madoc. My best friend. I would never do anything to harm you. I’ll do everything within my power to save you. You’ll be back, Madoc, as good as new. I swear it.”
Mercifully, I faded out then. It wasn’t because anyone had actually taken pity on me, of course. If I could be certain of anything, I could be certain of that.
I faded out because it, or they, figured that it, or they, had done all that could be done with that particular script. There was nowhere else for it to go without killing one or both of me.
Thirty-Five
A Stray Meditation
Cogito, ergo sum. There is a thought, therefore there is a thinker. Whatever else we doubt, we can always fall back on that meager comfort. Nor is the thought a lonely thing suspended in a cold intellectual vacuum; it is part of a train fueled by a flow of sensory data.
There was once a time when philosophers were willing to take the intuitive leap — knowing all the time that there was a tiny risk involved — of trusting that flow of data. They retained certain careful doubts about the reliability and limited scope of the senses, but they considered