The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [42]
“On the other hand,” said Christine Caine, the most notorious mass murderer in the galaxy, “if he were to die…”
Her tone made it obvious to me that she was joking, in much the same blackly comic vein as my crack about Lilith. If she meant anything by it at all, she meant that just because we’d been successfully revived, there was no guarantee that Adam Zimmerman could be. He, after all, had been forced to employ SusAn equipment of a considerably more primitive kind than ours, at least for the first phase of his long journey. She must have known, though, that what would be obvious to me might not be as obvious to all the other listening ears, and that it was just about the least diplomatic thing she could possibly have said.
That had to be at least part of the reason why she said it, given that she was still putting on her act — but I wished she hadn’t.
I wished she hadn’t because I knew full well that there was no one in Excelsior, and perhaps no one in the entire solar system, who wouldn’t think of Christine Caine and Madoc Tamlin as two of a potentially despicable kind.
Nine
You Can’t go Home Again
Where do you go to first, when you’re a thousand years away from the world you grew up in but VE simulations of every environment in the solar system — and quite a few beyond it — are available to you?
You try to go home, of course. Not to find it, because you know full well that you won’t, but to prove to yourself that it no longer exists, and that something else has taken its place.
In Peter Pan, one of those ancient VE adventures that Christine Caine had undertaken several times before she became a full-time mass murderer, there’s a scene in which the eponymous character — one of three elective protagonists, if my memory serves me right — flies back to the nursery from which he had fled years before. He finds the window locked, and when he looks through it he sees his mother nursing a new baby son: a replacement who seems far more contented and far more appreciative of his circumstances than he ever was. The implication is that, unlike Peter, the new kid will one day achieve the adulthood that his predecessor was determined to avoid. On the other hand — although most members of the target audience probably didn’t think that far ahead — the new kid might end up a lost boy too, with nowhere to go but Neverland.
I knew all that before I asked to see the Earth.
I thought I was sufficiently detached, and sufficiently adult, to be prepared for anything.
I had expected the hood I’d called for to grow out of the back of my armchair but it didn’t. It materialized from the room’s ceiling. It was nothing like the clumsy devices I’d used in my own time, being slightly reminiscent of a cobweb drifting down on the end of a thread of spidersilk. When it settled over my head it was hardly tangible; I didn’t even feel it on the surfaces of my eyeballs — which was actually the surface of the part of my suitskin overlying my own conjunctiva.
I could move my head easily in any direction, but I was no longer looking out into my cell. The “place” I was in was recognizable as a VE holding pattern, but there were no menus written in blood-red upon its walls, waiting to be pointed at by my index finger. All my oral requests had to be fed through an invisible listener hooked into Excelsior’s nervous system.
First I asked for a live feed from an orbiting satellite, so I could look down on my homeworld from above.
There was a time delay of several minutes while the signal made its way across the hundred-and-eighty-six-million-mile gap, taking a dogleg route to avoid the sun, but it was still “live,” relatively speaking.
There was a lot of cloud, but not so much that I couldn’t see that the colors