The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [54]
“Thanks,” I said to Davida Berenike Columella.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, the phrase falling from her tongue as if she’d never used it before and did not expect ever to need its like again.
Twelve
The Temptations of Paranoia
Throughout my former life I had always taken pride in maintaining a level of paranoia appropriate to my various professions. As I began my second span, however, I was acutely conscious of the fact that I had not been paranoid enough to anticipate that I might end up in the cooler, or that once I was there my custodians — not to mention my friends — would allow me to languish indefinitely. Knowledge of this failure, I must admit, made me a trifle oversensitive to the direr possibilities implicit in my new situation. The research that I contrived to do during the next few hours of wakefulness was guided by a fervent desire to figure out why my hosts might be lying to me.
I knew, of course, that there was a possibility that Davida Berenike Columella was telling me the truth and nothing but, but it seemed safer and wiser to work from the opposite assumption. If there really were thousands of corpsicles stored in a gargantuan coffin ship somewhere in the Counter-Earth Cluster, I reasoned, the probability that Christine Caine and I just happened to be the nearest contemporaries of Adam Zimmerman was slight. If we weren’t his nearest contemporaries, then we must have been selected for awakening on different grounds — and even if we were, there were still question marks hanging over the matter of our revival, and Adam Zimmerman’s too.
Why here? Why now?
I was prepared to accept that Excelsior really was an Ahasuerus Project, and that the trustees of the Foundation really might have decided that the time was now ripe for it’s mission to be completed, but that didn’t seem to me to be an adequate explanation for either the place or the time. It would have been easy enough to send Zimmerman’s SusAn chamber back to Earth, so that he could wake up at home, and just as easy to ship specimens for trial runs along with him, in the unlikely event that there were no sleepers on the surface of sufficient antiquity.
It seemed to me that it would have been even easier for the current directors of the Foundation to continue the policy of procrastination that they appeared to have been following for twelve hundred years. Even in my day there had been rumors to the effect that the technology of emortality that Zimmerman had craved already existed, but that the incentive for the Foundation’s directors to postpone the day that would make them effectively redundant was too great to encourage any policy but one of indefinite delay. Davida had already told me that the decision didn’t “seem to have been unanimous” — so how had it crept through now in the face of manifest opposition, when it must have failed to do so a thousand times before?
So far as I could judge, the fact that Adam Zimmerman was being awakened here and now had to imply that the people who were actually doing the work had something to gain. In other words, Davida Berenike Columella and her weird sisterhood — or the people giving them instructions — must want something, and must think that Adam Zimmerman could help them get it. If Christine Caine and I had not been chosen by lot, they must think that we could help them get it too. They must think that we had some special value — or, at the very least, some special significance.
Irritatingly, it was easier to imagine a reason why Christine Caine might be valuable than it was to figure out what special significance I might have.
Christine Caine had killed people, without having anything that could pass for a reasonable motive. If she had been fitted with some kind of fancy IT that could prevent her from doing any such thing again, that same IT was probably able to facilitate her doing it, and perhaps to force her to do it. Christine Caine might, in fact, be a useful assassination weapon, in a day