The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [29]
Davida Berenike Columella didn’t seem to be as frightened by this news as she had been of my casual gesture, but I was physically present and Christine Caine wasn’t.
“She won’t be able to harm anyone,” the wonderful child told me.
If that remark was supposed to be reassuring, it missed by a mile. I guessed immediately that if Christine Caine wasn’t going to be able to hurt anyone when they woke her up — and it seemed that nothing I’d said had troubled that assumption — then neither could I. Which meant that they hadn’t, after all, put me together exactly as I’d been before. They’d taken precautions.
“You’re installing some kind of IT in her head,” I guessed, still talking about Christine Caine because I didn’t want to talk about myself. “Something that will stop her if she runs amok.”
“We can do that,” the wonderful child confirmed, ambiguously.
That was when I saw — clearly, I thought — that Christine Caine would be resuming her life as an animal in a zoo: a specimen to be observed, and wondered at. And I understood, too, that I had just contributed to that fate by robbing her of her last hope of not being recognized for what she was, and her last hope of being able to make a new start.
I didn’t know exactly how old Christine Caine had been when they’d put her away, but I knew that she wasn’t much more than twenty. In terms of elapsed time, I was no more than twice her age; Davida Berenike Columella was ten times as old, although she looked no more than nine.
From the viewpoint of those who had brought us back into the world, I realized, Christine Caine and I were alike, no matter how slight my unknown crimes might have been compared to hers. Whatever they had done to her, and whatever they intended to do to her in future, they must have done and would also do to me. I too was a creature in a zoo: a representative of an extinct species, resurrected by ingenuity into a world of which I knew nothing.
I knew, because I had had dealings with the Ahasuerus Foundation a thousand years before, that the people of Excelsior were bringing Adam Zimmerman back because they intended to make him emortal. Even to Rachel Trehaine, in the 2190s, Adam Zimmerman had been a great hero, one of the founders of the modern world order. The Hardinist Cabal, or whatever rump of it still remained, could hardly help thinking of him in much the same light, given that he had played such a vital role in the economic coup that had launched their inexorable climb to world domination. This world presumably had a place ready made for Adam Zimmerman — if not a throne, a pedestal. But what did it have for Christine Caine, or for me?
I concluded then that whatever debt of gratitude I owed Davida Berenike Columella and her people for bringing me back to life, they were not my friends. It was not a happy thought, but it was not a crushing discovery either.
I had always prided myself on being tough, on being able to adapt myself to adverse circumstance. I knew that I could be tough now. I knew that I could be tougher than I had ever been before, because I — unlike Damon Hart, it seemed — had managed to keep my place on that imaginary escalator while everyone else I ever knew had lost their footing.
If all this was real, then I really had ridden the tide of opportunity into a world where emortality was for everyone, or almost everyone — including, I hoped, the animals in the zoo. I knew that I might have to be careful, and clever, and cunning, but I had been all those things before — and the people of Excelsior seemed to have put me back together very nearly as I had been before.
If there’s a game to be played here, I thought, whether in reality or a VE drama, then it has to be won. I understood that from the very start. I had understood it all my life, and I could see no reason to change my mind, no matter what miracles had transformed the world during the millennium I had lost, while