The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [48]
How, I wondered, did all this information need to be factored into my own personal situation? What difference did it make to me?
It was too soon to tell.
I thought, for a little while, that I had seen what Ice Palaces might be when I had seen Amundsen City and its immediate neighbors, but if I hadn’t had so much else to think about I would have realized that the palaces of the world capital’s satellite towns could only be trial runs for something much more adventurous and grandiose. It was better that I make the mistake, though, because learning to wonder is something we have to do again and again, no matter how long we live or how long we sleep between our intervals of active thought. We always think that we can do it perfectly well, but there’s always another realm beyond the one we can imagine, and another realm beyond that, and so ad infinitum.
Cocooned in my VE nest on Excelsior, while my virtual self was on Earth, wondering at the world that had replaced my own, I had only just begun to realize how many other worlds there were — and I had not yet begun to discover what marvels they might contain.
I had so much more to see, so much more to discover — and wherever I started, the journey of discovery would be a very long one. For a journey like that, I would need the kind of lifetime with which this world could equip me — but would my need be sufficient to guarantee that I got it? I could not help returning to that anxiety: the idea that I might have been brought to the threshold of eternity only to be turned away, because I was not Adam Zimmerman. I could not believe that I was a convicted murderer either, but I knew that appearances were against me.
I had lived in an era when the Eliminators were big news. I had never been one of them, but I could hardly help applying their slogans to my own case. Was I “worthy of immortality” — or, more correctly, of emortality? Whether I was or not, could I persuade my new hosts that I was, if the need to do so arose?
I had, of course, asked to see any and all references to myself that Excelsior’s data bank could obtain, but the pickings were so sparse that a lesser man might have despaired. To have accomplished so little, and made so slight a mark upon the world, seemed a very meager reward for my efforts — except that I could not believe for a moment that the scarcity of information was accurate. If my patient monitor was not intervening as a censor, then the available records must have been wiped. When? By whom? And above all — why? What had I done to deserve my curiously ambiguous fate? And why, exactly, had my wayward fortunes taken their newest, and strangest, direction?
I had to find out, if I could — and if I couldn’t, I had to do my best in spite of the burden of ignorance. I had to do something, to live up to my name. I was Madoc Tamlin, after all: a ready-made hero of legend. I was not a victim to be exploited, not a pawn to be played with, not a fool to be manipulated. One way or another, and despite every disadvantage, I knew that I had to take charge of the script of my own future life. That thought dominated my consciousness while I waited, with gathering impatience, for Adam Zimmerman’s return.
Eleven
The Politics of Temptation
I might have delved deeper into the inexhaustible well that was the sum of Excelsior’s mechanically stored knowledge had I not been interrupted by the news that there were two personal calls waiting to be downloaded. I had not expected mail, and I certainly had not expected items of mail to arrive in such profusion as to have to form a queue — even a queue of two — so the news was subtly exciting.
I didn’t take the calls immediately, partly because I wanted to think over what I’d already learned and partly because the notification of their arrival reminded me how long I’d been in VE. I was almost certainly safe to continue, given that the hood I was using was so