The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [36]
“Either way,” I said, “it might be wise not to take anything for granted. I think they’ll want to take a good long look at us anyway. Whatever we may think of ourselves, to them we’re the next best thing to reanimated Neanderthals. Adam Zimmerman has his sainthood to keep him warm, but we don’t. Quite the reverse, in fact. We might have to handle our situation very carefully — and it won’t be easy.”
“Are we being watched?” she wanted to know.
“All the time,” I assured her. “Monitored inside and out. So far as I know, they can’t overhear our private thoughts, but nothing else is secret.”
If appearances could be trusted, that thought disturbed and distressed her more than any she’d so far come across. Her gaze flickered as her pale blue eyes looked toward the window, then up at the ceiling and round the walls, then back at me.
“Shit,” she murmured. Then she composed herself again. “Lousy view,” she remarked.
“It was supposed to be a slice of home,” I said. “It’s long gone — blown to smithereens, so they say.”
“The whole Earth?”
“Just America — but the whole ecosphere had a catastrophic fit and had to be regenerated.”
She didn’t seem to think that the destruction of America was an issue worth pursuing. “Who’s they, exactly?” she asked.
I told myself that the fact she was taking everything so calmly was a compliment to the IT the microworlders had installed in her brain — but I knew that if that was true for her it ought to have been true for me, too. I wasn’t taking everything calmly. My tranquilizing IT obviously wasn’t programmed to kick in until I got badly steamed up; a certain amount of inner turmoil was permitted, presumably because the people observing us found it interesting.
“You’ll see them soon enough,” I said. “I ought to warn you that they’re very weird. Apparently, there are lots of people around who look pretty much like you or me, but there are lots who don’t. It so happens that this particular microworld is run by people who don’t.”
“So what do they look like?”
“Children. Little girls. They’re genetically engineered for a particular kind of emortality — programmed to stop growing and maturing at nine or ten, before puberty sets in. I assume that their brains keep changing as they learn. That’s probably why they do it. They must be hoping to preserve their brains in a better-than-adult state.”
“Neoteny,” she said.
I was somewhat surprised that she knew the word. One tends to think of crazy serial killers as undereducated individuals. “That’s right,” I conceded. “We’re neotenic apes, sort of, so I guess they figured that neotenic people were the next evolutionary step forward. If you think that’s weird, wait till you see pictures of fabers and cyborganizers.”
“But there are still people like us around?”
“People who look like us,” I corrected her. “Engineered for emortality, and lots of other cute tricks. We’ll have visitors of that kind in a couple of days. There’s a spaceship en route from Earth, and another heading in from the Jovian moons, although the people it’s carrying are mostly Titanians. They’re coming to welcome Zimmerman, of course, but they can hardly refuse us invitations to the party. There’s a historian with the Earth delegation, apparently, who’s as keen to talk to us as he is to pay his respects to Zimmerman. There’s also a UN rep, who probably answers to the Secret Masters as well as the not-so-secret ones. You don’t have to worry about that, but I might. I used to work for the organization.”
“The megamafia?”
“No, the real organization. I was instrumental in putting their brand on a few mavericks — including the Ahasuerus Foundation, whose corporate descendants include our present hosts. I helped to stitch up Conrad Helier too.”
“The man who saved the world,” she said, stressing the difference between the reputation that Conrad Helier had enjoyed in her time and the reputation that Adam Zimmerman had had.
“One of the men who made sure that the world needed his kind of saving,” I corrected her, drily. “His record became a great deal more controversial