The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [64]
I recalled, with a slight shudder, that there were two spare cocoons aboard — but only two. If Adam Zimmerman, Christine Caine, and I all elected to travel back to Earth, one of the delegates would have to stay behind on Excelsior. Even though I didn’t have any present intention of going to Earth on Peppercorn Seven I hoped that the blister was flexible enough to accommodate six passengers without cramming them into its core like the pips in an apple. I knew that it had to be made of something radiation-proof, but I figured that it must be more versatile than it looked.
Having made similar calculations, Christine muttered: “Space travel seems to be a lot less comfortable than a first-class cabin in a zeppelin, even after a thousand years of progress.” I couldn’t believe that she’d ever been in a first-class cabin in a zeppelin, but she was obviously a hardened VE tourist in spite of her tender years.
“It’s just like a long session in a bodysuit,” I said. “In fact, it is a long session in a bodysuit. Lowenthal’s probably been taking care of business every step of the way, despite the ever-growing transmission delay. Gray was probably working too.”
“My mothers used to tell me that my muscles would atrophy and my extremities would get gangrene if I stayed in a full suit for more than a couple of hours at a time,” she observed, drily.
“They were exaggerating — and those kinds of medical problems must have been solved long ago,” I said. She must have worked that out for herself, but I couldn’t help adopting a mentor pose. I made a mental note to make absolutely sure that she didn’t begin seeing me as a father figure.
“With an intravenous drip and a catheter a person could probably stay in VE forever, nowadays,” she said, effortlessly taking up the thread of the argument. “We could take up permanent residence in the fantasies of our choice.”
The first title that came to mind, reflexively, was Bad Karma, but I didn’t say so. Way back when, I had always told my critics — and, for that matter, myself — that the fight tapes I made were a public service, because they allowed people with a taste for violence to indulge it harmlessly. There was a grain of truth in the argument, but not enough. If Christine Caine had wanted to commit virtual murders she could have done so, even in the twenty-second century. Maybe the quality of the illusion wouldn’t have lived up to the standards of the world in which we now found ourselves, but that wasn’t the factor that had displaced her murderous passion into the meatware arena. Murder is only murder if you kill real people. Life is only life if you actually live it. Maybe there were some among the Earthbound who really did spend most of their lives in VE nowadays — but I was willing to bet that they were far outnumbered by people who regarded VE as workspace and social space, and only ventured into fantasylands for the sake of occasional relaxation.
Christine Caine, I suppoed, must have seen multiple versions of all her favorite fantasies while she was a child, but it wasn’t just the warnings her mothers had given her that had brought her back to stern reality. Perhaps that was a pity; if she’d become an addict, she’d probably have been harmless.
The umbilical had been attached to Peppercorn Seven’s blister now, although there had been no obvious hatchway on the pitted surface. The tube didn’t seem to be wide enough to accommodate a full-sized human body without bulging, and it was possible to see the vague outline of the first person out of the capsule. The movement of the bolus along the umbilical was smooth, presumably controlled by peristalsis rather than by any undignified wriggling on the part of the passenger.
We counted the four passengers into the body of Excelsior one