The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [34]
The suit would have looked better on her if she hadn’t been so thin. She was so emaciated that the surface of the clinging fabric was pockmarked by all manner of bony lumps. She would grow into it, I figured, but it would take time. She was a pretty young woman, seemingly very frail: a picture of innocence. If I hadn’t known the reason for her confinement, I’d have felt even more tender and protective toward her than I did. As things were, I had to remind myself that this was the closest thing to a contemporary I had, and the closest thing to a natural ally.
She touched her lips, then ran her fingers through her straggly blond hair, pulling a few strands forward so that she could examine the color and texture. She didn’t approve of what she found, but she didn’t seem surprised or offended. Then she made as if to stand up, but changed her mind, presumably undone by the discovery that her weight wasn’t quite right.
She contented herself with looking me up and down very carefully. I wondered how sinister I seemed, dressed all in black, and wondered whether I might be handsome enough to be mistaken for the Prince of Darkness.
Fortunately, she must have rejected the hypothesis that she was in Hell without entertaining it for more than a moment. Her first words were: “I hope this thing has a hole I can shit through.” The word rang utterly false. She was trying to sound confident and assertive, but she couldn’t make the pretence work.
“It doesn’t need one,” I told her, having had time to investigate that particular matter. “It’s an authentic second skin. It lines your gut from mouth to anus, and your other bodily cavities too. The food goes through just as it used to. Fashions have moved on since our day.”
“Our day?” she queried, exactly as I’d intended her to.
“I’m like you,” I said, a trifle overgenerously. Her eyes narrowed slightly, but she didn’t say anything. I assumed that she was wary of reading the statement the wrong way. “I woke up yesterday,” I added, helpfully. “We’ve been away a long time.”
“How long?”
I told her, expecting astonishment.
When she laughed I thought, at first, that she was hysterical. She wasn’t. She was amused. I knew that she was probably in denial, just as I had been, because she probably felt even less like her old self than I had, but she wasn’t letting it get on top of her. She was playing along, just as I had — but she was better able to laugh than I had been.
“I guess I’m the record holder,” she said, having taken the figures aboard with sufficient mental composition to note the difference between them. “I always figured that I would be.”
“Not for long,” I told her, slightly piqued by her composure. “They’ll be bringing Adam Zimmerman back in a couple of days, just as soon as they’re convinced that you and I are as well as can be expected. He’s been away longer than either of us.”
“Why? What did he do?”
“You never heard of Adam Zimmerman?” I countered, sighting the intellectual high ground.
It only required a moment’s thought. “The man who stole the world,” she recalled. “I didn’t realize they’d prosecuted him for that.”
“They didn’t,” I told her. “He only helped the corpsmen run the scam in order to get enough cash to make sure he’d be taken care of once he was frozen down. He was a volunteer. He didn’t want to die, so he decided to take a short cut to a world where everyone could live forever. He was the first, I think.”
“Good for him,” she said. Then she paused for further thought.
“This is all fake, isn’t it?” she said, eventually. “It’s just a clever VE. I’m in therapy, aren’t I? This is some weird rehab program.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You don’t think so?”
“If it’s a VE, they’re trying to fool both of us. I’m not certain that it isn’t — but I do know that we have to work on the assumption that it’s real. I’m Madoc Tamlin, by the way.”
“So what did you do, Madoc Tamlin?”
“I can’t remember how or why I got put away,” I told her.
That wiped the last vestiges of her smile away. She was obviously able to remember exactly how and why she’d been