The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [37]
“But we’ve done our time,” she said, letting a little anxiety show. “The sheet’s clean now.”
“I doubt that it’ll ever be clean,” I told her, with more bitterness than brutality. “We’re museum pieces now, and it won’t be easy for us to escape the burden of our rap sheets. They’ve already offered to put me back in SusAn any time I want to go.”
She actually laughed at that. “Do you?” she asked, plainly unable to believe that I might. It was another sign of an implicit mental kinship I was both anxious and slightly reluctant to acknowledge.
“No,” I said. “But the offer conjured up some bizarre prospects. Maybe we could make a career of hopping through the future at thousand year intervals, popping out every now and again to give our remoter descendants a fascinating glimpse of the bad old days.”
“We?” she queried.
“Not necessarily together,” I said.
“But it could get lonely otherwise,” she pointed out. “Unless this is the start of a new craze.”
The thought that it might get lonely if we didn’t stick together had occurred to me. That was one of the reasons why I was here, talking her through the awakening. I hoped that Adam Zimmerman might feel the same way, but I wasn’t prepared to bank on it.
On the other hand, the thought that we might be the cutting edge of a new craze had occurred to me too. I hadn’t yet managed to ascertain how many other refugees from the twenty-second century might be lurking in freezers, but I knew that there must be others. The eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano might have wreaked havoc with any that had been stored on Earth, but there had to be more mortal bodies in the store from which we’d been selected as test subjects.
For the moment, though, Christine Caine was the only link I had to the world that had shaped me. Murderer or not, she was the closest thing to a friend I was likely to find in the Counter-Earth Cluster.
“Wherever we go, and whatever we do,” I told her, soberly, “we’ll be freaks. Our world is gone, Christine. Our species too, all but a few frozen specimens.”
“Good riddance,” she said. “Maybe you really didn’t do anything to justify putting you away, Madoc Tamlin, but I’m already well used to being a freak. Better here and now than there and then. Maybe we should take the offer to go time-hopping, though. If they can fix us up to last the whole trip, maybe we could go all the way to the Omega Point — assuming we’re not already there.”
She was full of surprises. First neoteny, now the Omega Point. I realized that she was testing me, in case I was stupid. I was here to soften her introduction to the all-but-unthinkable, and she was trying the limits of my ability to cope.
I should have laughed, but I didn’t. I thought hard, knowing that I had to get ahead of her if I were to maintain the advantage to which my years and my intellect entitled me.
After all, I thought, if I couldn’t even help my hosts deal with Christine Caine, what hope had I of persuading them that they needed me to deal with Adam Zimmerman?
Seven
The Omega Intelligence
Until Christine Caine mentioned the Omega Point, I hadn’t given very much thought to the question of when and where I might be if I wasn’t when and where I seemed to be. Once she had mentioned it, I realized that I’d taken it for granted that the more probable alternative was that I was much closer to home than I appeared to be. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I might be much farther away.
The idea that someone was messing with my head had automatically translated itself into the idea that someone akin to the nanotech buccaneers of PicoCon