The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [67]
He must have known that I was fishing. “We don’t have a copy of it, I’m afraid,” he assured me. “Mortimer may be able to turn one up. He spends a lot of time in the mountains — even more than he used to, now that their contents have been even more extensively trashed than they were before. We do, however, have copies of some of your old tapes, along with other data. All discarded by publicly accessible datastores, I fear. It seemed very unlikely to the custodians of our history that the items in question would ever be required again.”
“But you squirreled it away regardless,” I said. I tried to maintain a light tone as I said: “I don’t suppose you know why I was put into SusAn in the first place? I seem to have mislaid the memory.”
He didn’t seem surprised by the question — but he did seem slightly suspicious, as if he didn’t believe that I’d lost the memory and didn’t mind my knowing it. “That’s an intriguing mystery,” he said, blandly. “We don’t have any record of your conviction for a crime. As I said, our financial records show that your existing credit was seized to pay for the upkeep of your frozen body. Damon Hart neglected to make any provision for that purpose — but that was probably a genuine oversight.”
I couldn’t believe that he’d use a phrase like “probably a genuine oversight” unless he intended to imply the opposite, or that he’d have mentioned Damon Hart at all unless he too was fishing for information. In which case, I deduced, he probably didn’t have the faintest idea why I’d been put away — although he was certainly interested in finding out.
“I suppose I ought to be glad that I was looked after so well, even though my credit ran out,” I said. “I seem to have slept through at least two major disasters — I do hope that I haven’t been revived on the eve of a third.”
He didn’t laugh at that suggestion. “This is a far better world than the one you left behind, in terms of the existential opportunities it presents,” he assured me. “We’ll be happy to help you in any way we can to adapt yourself to it, if that’s your wish.”
“Did you know Damon Hart personally?” I asked, abruptly.
“Slightly,” Lowenthal admitted. “It’s not surprising that he never mentioned you in conversation, but I can’t find any reference to you in the files he left behind. It’s almost as if someone deleted you from the record of his life — and from all the other records to which he had access.”
It was obvious that he didn’t mean “almost as if” at all, and that he thought the someone in question must have been Damon.
“It must be easy enough for a person as unimportant as me to be forgotten,” I said, trying to match his bland tone. “Damon was my friend for twenty years, but he lived for three hundred more after I was frozen down. He must have become a completely different person. I expect he forgot about such trivialities as my upkeep long before he died.”
“Perhaps so,” Lowenthal agreed, insincerely. I took note of the fact that although Solantha Handsel seemed perfectly relaxed she was still within arm’s reach, and the way she occasionally glanced at me was neither unwary nor incurious. If Lowenthal knew more about me than he was prepared to say, or even if he merely had more cause to be suspicious than he was prepared to reveal, what he knew or suspected seemed to be enough to put him on his guard.
“I understand that the delegation from the Outer System will be here soon,” I said, mildly. “I’m looking forward to meeting them — all the more so now I’ve seen your cyborganizer.”
“I’m looking forward to it too,” Lowenthal assured me. I didn’t believe him. Solantha Handsel seemed to be about to say something — perhaps to deny that she was a cyborganizer in the strictest sense of the term — but she shut up as soon as it became clear that her boss had more to say.
“To be perfectly frank,” Lowenthal