The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [62]
“No, I don’t believe it,” I said. “The writer claimed that it was taken from your own testimony — but that was only one of the stories you told. I don’t remember exactly, but I think there was at least one epic of harrowing child abuse, and at least one item of bad science fiction in which your foster parents had all been replaced by aliens, and a couple more besides. If you’d stuck to the first one, you might have got off, although you’d have needed an extra wrinkle to accommodate the three strays. There were a lot of bad parents around. They were the first generation who had to get used to a new system of parenthood that was radically different from the biological model, and they incorporated all the badness with which the whole damn world was still infected.”
“My foster parents weren’t bad,” she said. “The marriage broke up — smashed to smithereens — but they tried as hard as they could to protect me from all that.” She sounded as though she hadn’t the faintest idea why she’d done what she’d done.
“So why tell the abuse story?” I asked. “Why tell any of the stories, if they weren’t true?”
“I had to tell the stories,” she said, as if it were as simple as that. “They kept coming back for more, and the one thing they couldn’t abide was silence. They probably told themselves that they were wearing me down, waiting for the truth to emerge when I ran out of lies, but they weren’t. They liked the stories. They always wanted more. So do you. You just want a story — and if I give you one you’ll want another, and another. That’s all I am to you: a story.”
“According to Bad Karma,” I pointed out, “that’s all you were to yourself. Did you ever have the slightest idea why you did it? Or were you making up story after story by way of exploration — or distraction?”
“I got out in the end, didn’t I?” she said, softly. “I’m here. I’m free. I’m never going back. I’m a winner. Maybe I did it in order to be put away, to make sure that I’d be the one to wake up in Wonderland. Maybe Adam Zimmerman is the one who did it the hard way.”
I didn’t believe that, but I could see that she wasn’t going to tell me anything I could believe.
“The woman from the Confederation might not make us an offer,” I said, although I didn’t believe it. “She might think that we belong on Earth, and good riddance to us. We may not have the option of going elsewhere.”
“I don’t think so,” Christine replied, serenely confident. “While we’re the only real humans in the universe, everyone will be interested in us. Even if they begin to bring the others back, there won’t be enough to go round. We’re mortals, Madoc. We’re their ancestors. They need us. They all need us, not just the stick-in-the-muds who cling to the Earth. They all need us because they’ve all forgotten what we were like, and they all need to be reminded.”
I could have objected that Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray seemed human enough, for all their advanced years, but I didn’t. I knew what she meant. I knew, even on the basis of my first faltering inquiries, that emortality had not been acquired without cost, and that Lowenthal and Gray were as profoundly different from me, in their own way, as Davida’s sisterhood and the cyborganizers.
I could also have pointed out that whatever the reason had been, Christine had thought that the most appropriate thing to do to her own self-appointed ancestors was to murder the lot, and three other people besides. I didn’t do that either.
“This isn’t the Omega Point, Christine,” I told her. “It’s not even a fancy VE. It’s just the same old world, with a thousand extra years of history. Its inhabitants may be curious, but they have other things to be interested in that are far more fascinating than us. They’ll lose interest in us soon enough, unless we can find a way to keep some of them on the hook.”
“I don’t run out of stories easily,” she said. “Do you?”
Fifteen
The Ship from Earth
We watched the docking of Peppercorn