The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [158]
I kept talking while she kept murdering, trying to match my sentences to the slices of time as best I could.
“It’s not you, Christine,” I said, knowing that it was a mantra I’d have to repeat a great many more times. “It’s the times in which we live. They’re bad times, dangerous times, paranoid times. The news tapes claim that the Crash is over; that we’re in the business of making and shaping a new Utopia; that we’ve learned from all our past mistakes and that we’ll never endanger the species or the ecosphere again; but it’s all hopeful nonsense. The people who write it are trying to make it come true, but all the sickness that caused the Crash is still there, festering under the bandages. The people who were in power before are still in power now; they’re just trying as hard as they possibly can to be discreet. They already have enough nukes and bioweapons to wipe out the human race a hundred times over, but that’s not what they want. They want selective weapons, weapons of control. They don’t want to use them if they don’t have to, but they’ll only refrain while they have control by our consent.
“This is a weapon, Christine. This is a weapon they intend to use, if they can’t subdue the world by other means. This is a weapon they will use, covertly, whenever they see a need, because that’s what power amounts to: the ability to compel, by force if not by persuasion. They don’t need to use it on you, or on your parents, but they do need to know that it works. In all probability, three of the people you’ll kill are real targets — people they want out of the way — but they also want to conceal those assassinations, by hiding them in a tale the news tapes know only too well. You’re just the shell they’re using, Christine, just the last and most ingenious of their victims.
“None of this is your doing, Christine; none of it is your fault. They’re doing all this, partly just because they can and partly because they want to be sure that if the world ever becomes tired of their supposedly benevolent guidance, they can carry on regardless. It’s all their doing, all their fault.
“Maybe it won’t always be this way. Maybe there’ll come a day when weapons too dreadful to use really will be too dreadful to use — but you were born into an era where all the old evils had only just gone underground, and you were one of those who were caught by the grasping hands reaching out of the grave. All of this is just history working itself out, chewing you up and grinding you down in the process. It isn’t you, Christine. It’s them. And it won’t stop soon, even when it seems to have stopped. It’ll come back to haunt you, again and again. You’ll have to go through it more than once, but it’s not your doing. It’s not your fault. And in the end, you will get through it. In the end, you will be free. In the end, you’ll get your life back.
“There’s no way anyone can compensate you for what’s been done to you, but you will get a second chance. It won’t arrive as soon as you hope or as soon as you dare to believe, but it will come. You’ll get a life, and it will be a life worth living. This is hell, Christine, but hell isn’t what you’ve been led to expect. Hell is something you go through on your way to being rescued. In the end, you’ll come through. This isn’t your doing. It isn’t your fault. There’s no justice to be derived from