The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [51]
“Any possibility? You mean he sent a similar message to Christine Caine? Gray too?”
“I think you ought to ask that question of Miss Caine,” Davida said, primly — which seemed to me to be as good as a yes.
“I wonder if they’ll offer her an academic position as a historian, or as a psychiatrist,” I mused, unable to help myself saying it aloud.
Davida ignored the remark. “You are, of course, welcome to remain here if you so wish,” she told me. “You might think that the least attractive option, given that we cannot offer you any possibility of social assimilation — but that might be a good reason for taking it, at least in the short term. We can offer you an interval for careful thought and self-education. Such an interval might prove immensely valuable.”
I could see that there were several layers of implication concealed within that statement, and I took time out to consider how to proceed. It seemed, in the end, most sensible to go back to basics.
“How, exactly, did we come to be here in Excelsior?” I asked her. “Why aren’t the three of us still on Earth?”
“The directors of the Ahasuerus Foundation thought it politic to remove Adam Zimmerman from Earth in the 2540s, following the Coral Sea Catastrophe,” she told me. “Tens of thousands of SusAn chambers were lost at that time, and the moon seemed a much safer environment. The facility in which Zimmerman’s chamber was then held had charge of several hundred other cryonic chambers, some of which were Ahasuerus personnel following in their founder’s footsteps, others — Christine Caine’s among them — having been accepted from correctional facilities following…unfortunate accidents.”
The pause before the final phrase was so profound that you could have flipped a coin into it and never heard the clink.
“You mean that the corpsicles of criminals were popular targets of sabotage or calculated neglect,” I deduced. I had no reason to suppose that the rhetoric underlying Eliminator activity had ever died out, even though it had presumably ceased to be fashionable.
“There were occasional security problems,” was all Davida would admit. “The Foundation was asked to move the government-sponsored chambers of which it had temporary custody along with those for which it had sole responsibility. Eventually, the directors decided that the moon was not the ideal environment either and a specialist microworld was commissioned. In order to make the project economically viable the Foundation offered to take over various other consignments of SusAn chambers from several locations on Earth. It was at that point, I believe, that your own chamber was added to the stock. After several changes of location, the microworld was established in the Counter-Earth Cluster. Excelsior is another Ahasuerus project, and we have all the necessary equipment, so it was the logical base from which to launch the revivification plan.”
“So you sought out the two next-oldest corpsicles for your trial runs,” I recapped. “But you still have hundreds — maybe thousands — of sleepers parked next door.”
“Thousands,” she agreed.
“And who decides when they get to wake up?”
“That’s a matter of some dispute,” she admitted. “Our own position is that the Ahasuerus Foundation has the sole responsibility and authority. The World Government in Amundsen has a different view, but…” She left the sentence dangling.
“But possession is nine points of the law,” I finished for her. “Is that why Lowenthal’s so keen to take us back to Earth?”
“It’s probably a factor.”
“But why should he or anyone in the outer system care who has custody of Christine or me? What interest do they have in us, or in the thousands like us who remain unthawed?”
“The Earthbound have a view on everything,” Davida told me, with a hint of