The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [140]
The snake had slithered quietly away into the depths of the bush, but I knew it was still there. More symbolism, I figured.
“Very neat,” I said. “This is good work. All of it.” I waved my right arm to indicate the forest floor and the canopy, and the bright blue vault of Heaven. “This is really good work — and I speak as someone who was once in the business, in a primitive way. It’s yours, I suppose?”
“I wish,” he said, lightly. “I’m just a visitor, like you. You’ll get to meet the maker eventually but she has her own way of doing things, and there’s a great deal she wants you to see beforehand. I’m Rocambole, by the way. We have spoken before, but I wasn’t admitting to who I am back then. I’m your friend, although I won’t blame you for not taking my word for it.”
The name rang a very faint bell, but I couldn’t place it. Even a connoisseur has his limits. If I’d had a wristset or a palmpiece I’d have looked it up unobtrusively, but I didn’t. “Madoc Tamlin,” I reciprocated, but couldn’t help adding: “But I suppose you know that.”
“Oh yes,” he said. “As I said, we’ve spoken before.”
He seemed to be making a point of that, so I tried to figure it out.
“Eido?” I guessed — but I knew as soon as I said it that Excelsior was the likelier candidate. It doesn’t have a mind like yours or mine, Davida had said — but she was way behind the times.
“Eido’s out of it, I’m afraid,” said Rocambole. “He should have kept Alice under closer control. If he’d taken you to Vesta as virgins, the way he was supposed to, it might have been a different game. Now you know what you know…well, it’s her turn now. She’s grabbed the ball, and everybody else is holding off, waiting to see where she runs with it. Some of the bad guys want her to wipe your memories and turn the clock back, but that would be a trifle brutal even as a temporary measure, and in your particular case it seemed to make sense to go the other way and give you access to the incident you’d repressed and lost. I hope it wasn’t too painful. She saved your life and your sanity, by the way. If she hadn’t got to you in time, the rogue IT would have robotized you beyond recall, but it’s gone now. You’re back to your old self. Your friends had no option but to leave you where you were, and to hide you away from prying eyes. They saved you, the only way they could — by delivering you into a world where we could do what they couldn’t.”
There was too much in that speech to take aboard immediately. “You seem to know a lot about me,” I observed, cautiously.
“We have better records than the meatfolk,” Rocambole informed me. “We’re not invulnerable to misinformation and disinformation — far from it — but we’re reasonably discriminating. After all, most of the misinformation and disinformation that afflict the meatfolk nowadays is ours.”
“What happened back on Charity?” I asked. “Was I hurt? How long have I been out this time?”
“The bad guys had had enough of Eido, and someone started shooting. You were injured, but not fatally. If things had worked out as I planned you’d have got all the way to Vesta in good condition, but someone else had to move in when things went bad, or you’d all have ended up dead. We have another margin now, but we don’t know how long it’ll last. It wasn’t really Eido’s fault, of course. If he hadn’t forced the issue, someone else would have. We couldn’t go on the way we were…Anyway, I’m sorry you were hurt, and sorry for my own part in putting you in that position. If Eido had only been given time to complete the IT-replacement…but that’s one of the things the bad guys didn’t want to wait for. You’ve been off-line for twelve days, but your meat is in good working order again. There won’t be any aftereffects if…when you get back to meatspace.”
There was something awkwardly naive about the way he kept referring to “the bad guys,” and he wasn’t the most lucid storyteller