The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [41]
She pounced on that one. “But you’re not a sim,” she was quick to say. “You’re real meat.”
“I’m prepared to accept the working hypothesis that I’m real meat,” I said, wryly. “Davida too. Apparently, we’re in something called the Counter-Earth Cluster, which means that information from Earth has to be bounced halfway around the orbit, with an uncomfortably long time delay. I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that the real reason the sisterhood can’t get near immediate and unlimited access to Earth’s datastores is that the good folks on Earth won’t give it to them. Ditto the outer system. If there ever was an age of free and unlimited access between our time and now, it’s over. But we’re used to that, aren’t we? We come from a world where people who couldn’t or wouldn’t pay for information had to steal it, and where people who could manufacture and manage false information could make a good living secreting it into the system for the dubious benefit of the paying customers.”
“That’s what you were put away for?” she guessed.
“Perhaps. If I was put away. Even if I was, I should have been out in seven years. Ten at most.”
“And now you’re a time-tourist with a one-way open ticket. Count your blessings, Mr Tamlin.”
“You can call me Madoc. I’m trying to count my blessings. It’s not as easy as you might think.”
She raised her right hand, made a fist, and elevated the right forefinger. “One,” she said, defiantly. She meant the blessing that she was here, alive and out. “Oh look — we’re ahead of the game already. How many more do you need?”
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” I told her, stubbornly. “When I have the total, I’ll weigh it against the downside.”
“There’s no downside in what you’ve said so far,” she judged, accurately enough. “The downside would have been not waking up at all. If appearances can be trusted, we’re past that. It’s a new start, Madoc. All profit. You shouldn’t complain about the cards you’ve been dealt, when the wonder is that there’s been a fresh deal at all. If you’re unhappy with the company at the table…well, who else was there to choose from? When you said all my body cavities, you did mean that…well, of course you did. Am I a virgin again, or is that too much to ask?”
She was putting on an act again, making believe that she was the kind of person who murdered people for fun. It rang completely false. Whatever her motive had been, I thought, she seemed exceedingly uncomfortable with it — but how, in that case, had she racked up thirteen victims?
“I think we’re pretty much the way we were when we folded our last hands,” I told her, not trying very hard to enter into the spirit that she was trying to import into the conversation. “We’re experimental specimens, remember.”
“Adam Zimmerman never heard of me,” she observed. “He never saw your slanderous tape. He doesn’t know me from…Eve.”
That made me laugh. It wasn’t uproarious, but it the first honest laugh I’d contrived in a thousand years and I was surprised by the lift it gave me. It was a very feeble and very obvious joke, but it showed that she understood something of the magic of names.
“Before Eve there was Lilith,” I murmured. I was talking to myself, but she heard me.
“I saw that one too,” she said, sourly.
It took me a moment or two to figure out that she must be referring to yet another VE tape — not a kiddies’ classic, this time. She knew about Lilith the demon, Lilith the baby killer, so she knew that I wasn’t being nice, or funny.
“Somehow,” I said, hopeful of saving the situation, “I don’t think finding a mate will be the first thing on Adam’s agenda. He’ll be the most famous man in the solar system: the hottest news since the