The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [60]
All the food in Excelsior was produced by artificial photosynthetic systems aggregated into a complex network of vast matt-black “leaves” surrounding a core whose spin simulated gravity. The microworld had no sunlit fields at all. As Davida had told me, though, it did have a garden, whose flora and fauna were purely ornamental. I had a ready-made image of a garden floating in my mind too, but that turned out to be just as wrong as my image of glass-roofed fields.
When Christine and I were finally allowed to go “out,” it was to the garden that we were taken. I had hoped to take a stroll around the corridors of the microworld, in order to get a glimpse of everyday life as it was lived there, but that wasn’t the way things were done on Excelsior. Excelsior didn’t go in for corridors.
When we were ready to go, the wall of my holding cell grew a couple of fancy blisters, which opened up sideways like a cross between a yawning crocodile and a feeding clam.
I had to remind myself that it was just a kind of data suit in order to force myself to step into it, and even then I muttered to Christine: “I’m glad I never suffered from claustrophobia. All those hours I spent editing tapes were better lessons in life than I realized.”
“I always suffered from claustrophobia,” she told me, “but I think they’ve edited out my capacity for panic.”
I thought about that while the cocoon wrapped itself around me so that I could be transported through the body of the giant Excelsior like some parasitic invader captured by an unusually considerate white corpuscle. I was glad that the journey didn’t take long.
I suppose I’d have felt better about the journey if the garden had justified the effort, but it didn’t. I’d seen much better ones in VE. In fact, that was exactly what was wrong with it. It looked like a synthesized cartoon: utterly artificial, every part of the image exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. If the garden really had been a VE mockup it would have been considered gauche even in the twenty-second century. The colors were too bright, the perfumed flowers too numerous as well as too musky. The ensemble had the scrupulously overdone quality of the child-orientated backdrops in the mass-produced virtual fantasies of my own day.
Given that I had already compared Christine to Lilith, and that we were still expecting an Adam, I expected a stream of Eden jokes, but she was nothing if not unpredictable. She didn’t inquire after the Tree of Knowledge or the serpent, and never mentioned the possibility of a fall.
She wasn’t impressed by the garden’s aesthetic quality either.
“It’s much too garish,” she complained. “It’s not quite as awful as the food, but it’s more than awful enough.” Davida was not with us in the flesh, but we both presumed that she was listening to every word. Christine obviously felt no obligation to be diplomatic — but I could sympathize with that.
The animals in the garden were as prolific as the plants. There were brightly colored fish and amphibians swarming in every pond, while svelte reptiles, delicate birds, and athletic mammals peeped out of the foliage of every bush and every tree. There were insects too, but I wasn’t convinced, even for a moment, that they were busy pollinating the flowers. I suspected that the plants and animals alike might be as sexless as their keepers. I also deduced that the apparent predators — which seemed perfectly at ease with the conspicuously unintimidated individuals that would have provided them with food in a natural ecosystem — ate exactly the same nectar that microworlders ate: a carefully balanced cocktail of synthetic nutrients. It was, of course, a nectar