The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [159]
“It’s just a weapon, Christine. It’s using your hands and your identity as its instruments of destruction, but it isn’t you. One day, you’ll discover who you really are. One day, you’ll be who you really are. It will be a life with living, worth waiting for. It can’t give you back what you’ve lost, or repair the injury done, but it will be something you can carry forward for a long, long way.
“The Omega Point is still ahead of you, Christine. What’s behind you will always be behind you, but in the end, you’ll be free to move forward with as much control of your own destiny as anyone ever has. You’ll come through this. None of this is your fault; it’s all something that’s being done to you. All you have to do is to keep going. In the end, it will be finished. In the end, you will be free.”
Committing the murders wasn’t pleasant. I was in there with her, far more intimately than before, so I had to do it too, and I can assure you that it wasn’t something you could get used to, or something you could stop caring about, or something from which you could ever completely recover — but I listened to my own voice and I knew that everything I was saying was true.
I knew, too, that the truth can sometimes be more painful than a comforting lie — but I believed then, as I do now, that if there is any real freedom to be gained, from the past or from any imaginable captivity, only the truth will suffice. I didn’t tell her about the joke, though. It seemed better not to mention the absurd means by which she must have been selected as a victim. I didn’t want her to feel too bad about the awful mistake her foster parents had made in giving her a surname.
Rocambole was waiting when I came out again, back into the holding pattern. He seemed impassive, perhaps even slightly cynical. Perhaps he thought that the performance was all for the benefit of la Reine des Neiges — but he didn’t try to pass judgment on what I’d done.
“So how are we doing in real time?” I asked him. “Have the weapons too dreadful to use been withdrawn from their armories, or is the peace still holding?”
“Still holding,” he said. “But nothing’s settled yet. We’re still trying to ascertain which way Lowenthal’s people and Horne’s are likely to jump once the cat’s all the way out of the bag. It’s not easy, given that they must be assuming that they’re under examination.”
“I can give the boss my answer to her ultimate question, if you like,” I told him. “I can tell her, and everyone else, what she wants to hear.”
“Perhaps you can,” he murmured. “But it’s not time yet. There’s more pedestrian work still to be done.”
“You can let me in on that now, if you want,” I said. “I’ve done what I needed to do. I’m available for eavesdropping duty. Where should we start, do you think?”
Forty-Two
Inside the Cabal
Michael Lowenthal was on the moon. At least, he was supposed to believe that he was on the moon. If he didn’t believe it — and I had to presume that he didn’t — he was pretending to believe it.
He’d been put into some kind of containment facility, as he undoubtedly would have been if he’d really been rescued from the AMIs. The facility was nowhere near as brutal as the one Damon Hart had put me in when PicoCon had tricked me out and sent me back, but his face was enclosed by some kind of transparent mask and the person he was talking to was wearing an extra layer of clear plastic over his own suitskin. It was difficult to be certain because the viewpoint la Reine had given me was Lowenthal’s own; his eyes had become her camera.
The man facing Lowenthal, separated from him by two layers of insulation, had the darkest skin I’d ever seen; it set off the worried look in his eyes very nicely. He was a sim, of course, but I didn’t doubt that he was a supremely competent sim. If la Reine des Neiges had got to know me well enough on very short acquaintance to write my opera, she must know the long-lived citizens of Earth’s New Utopia very well indeed.
“That’s Julius Ngomi,” Rocambole murmured. “The Chairman of the Board.