The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [222]
“I get the picture,” I assured her. “Well, yes, I suppose it was a kind of Hell. The secret is that you can get used to Hell, if you don’t let it get you down. You never actually get to like it — but you can learn from it, if you have the right attitude. Among other things, you can learn to be wary of Heaven.”
“We’re not the Earthbound,” she assured me. “We aren’t finished. We have millennia of progress still ahead of us, and we intend to take full advantage of its opportunities.”
I could have told her that even though that might be the case, she and her sisters would never actually grow up, but that would have been flippant and I didn’t want to spoil the moment. I was grateful to her, and I wanted us to part on good terms.
In any case, I knew even then that there might eventually come a day when I’ll be ready for Excelsior.
I didn’t mind being locked in a cocoon for the few minutes it took the remaining six of us to fall to Earth.
I hadn’t expected to feel quite so heavy when I got there, given that my brand new IT and a few sessions in the Titaness’s centrifuge had tuned up my muscles, but it seemed a small price to pay for getting my feet back on the ground.
We landed in Antarctica, on the ice fields outside Amundsen. The cloud cover obscured the sun and sky, but the ice palaces clustered on the horizon couldn’t prevent me from feeling that I’d returned to my roots and reconnected myself with my history.
My hero’s welcome was a trifle muted, but I didn’t mind that. The only individuals who really appreciated the true extent of my heroism were AMIs, who hadn’t yet had time to overcome their habits of discretion. Mortimer Gray would doubtless have fared far better, not just because we might have died on Charity if it hadn’t been for his relationship with la Reine des Neiges, but because he’d been a long-time resident of the Continent Without Nations. He really would have been coming home, in the eyes of his old neighbors — but he wouldn’t have been extrovert enough to take full advantage of his latest wave of celebrity. I filled in for him as best I could.
I didn’t see much of Lowenthal and Handsel in the days following the landing, and Alice Fleury had all kinds of diplomatic duties to fulfill, but those were acquaintances I kept up, in VE if not in the flesh. It was easy enough, in the short term, to stick with Adam Zimmerman. The new messiah wasn’t in any hurry to be rid of us, now that he knew that Christine wasn’t a mass murderer.
Christine and I eventually returned with Adam to the Americas, traveling all the way up from Tierra del Fuego to the isthmus of Panama in easy stages, accelerating our schedule as we came into the north. We might have attracted more attention on our own account if we hadn’t been traveling with him, but playing second fiddle had its compensations as well as fueling a certain envious resentment. All in all, the pluses outweighed the minuses.
Adam was right about the alienating effects of the multiple decivilization of New York, but he was right about Manhattan too. The island’s original dimensions were still just about recognizable within the hectic patchwork of the new continental shelf. When Christine and I headed west, though, Adam chose to go his own way.
“I’ll keep in touch,” he promised.
“I don’t think we’ll have any difficulty keeping track of you,” I assured him. “You’re the kind of wonder that’ll run for years and years. Let us know when you’re finally ready to make the decision that the whole system’s waiting for, so that we can all compare notes.”
Little did I know…
Adam hadn’t given us the least inkling of his long-term plans, if he’d made any at that point. I doubt that he had. I think he intended to take a good long look at the world, and at himself, before he decided what his next step was going to be.
That was the last of my temporary farewells. Christine and I had decided to stick together