The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [78]
“We don’t know that,” I said, feeling a mysterious obligation to be gentle. “I’m just making up stories here. I haven’t even begun to figure out what this is all about.”
“But we’ll find out, won’t we?” she said. It was very difficult to judge her mood, or to figure out how she was extrapolating the notion. “We’ll find out what they expect of us soon enough.”
Adam Zimmerman had been moved to a chair now: a chair very similar to the ones on which Christine and I were sitting. Davida had run through the rehearsal twice and she was sticking to the script. When Adam Zimmerman opened his eyes he would see what I had seen. Would he, I wondered, be as quick on the uptake as I had been? Would he ask the same questions, in the same falsely casual fashion?
I had no idea how big the audience for this big scene was, but I suspected that this would be prime time all over the Earth, no matter whether it was noon or midnight outside. We were all on tenterhooks.
The camera zoomed in on that strangely disturbing face, bringing every line and blemish into clear view.
We all waited for the eyes to flicker open — but the eyes hadn’t read the script. They were sticky, and they couldn’t flicker. Their opening was slow, and seemingly painful. The pupils narrowed as they finally appeared, the mottled brown irises spreading protectively around them. The blood vessels in the whites seemed slightly too red.
For a long time, it seemed that he wasn’t going to speak at all, but he finally slipped into the groove. He had already memorized his script, and twelve centuries of frozen sleep hadn’t eroded that memory.
“How long?” he said.
Davida Berenike Columella told him. We watched his face as the calculator in his head processed the figures.
And then he smiled.
After one thousand two hundred and twenty-eight years, less ten days, Adam Zimmerman smiled like a winner. It was a gambler’s smile: a smile of pure self-congratulation, at a well-judged bet.
I figured that he was entitled to it. So, I suppose, did millions or billions of other viewers.
Nineteen
Child of Fortune
There was more, but so far as I was concerned the rest of it was all anti-climax. I wanted to meet Adam Zimmerman in the flesh. I wanted to be introduced to him, as someone who was like him — as the only person in the entire solar system who was like him, because the only person who might be reckoned more like him than I was didn’t really count.
No such luck. There were plenty of other people who wanted first crack at him, and had the clout to demand it.
For the first time, the room in which I was confined really began to feel like a prison. No matter what opportunities it offered in the way of virtual experience, there was no escape from my impatience. Christine Caine was still with me, but that was no escape either. The game of trying to guess exactly what kind of game we were involved in had gone sour — the point now was to get on with it.
We could, of course, have used the time more productively. We should have. We shouldn’t have wasted a minute while there was so much still to be learned — but the drama on the screen had taken over, and we were too sharply aware of the fact that we had been abandoned in the wings to await a cue that no one was in a hurry to give us.
We ate a couple of meals, neither of which improved to any perceptible degree on the one we had first been offered, and we exchanged a few more speculations as to the nature of the roles we had been recruited to play in Adam Zimmerman’s return, but in the end tiredness demanded that we sleep.
“Eventually,” I told Christine, before we retired to our separate spaces, “they’ll have to let us in. When Zimmerman finds out we exist, he’ll want to meet us.” I couldn’t put much conviction into the claim.
“Sure,” she said. “Hey, Adam, they’ll say, we thawed out a petty criminal and a murderer just for practice — just let us know when you want to get together to chat about old times. How will he be able to restrain his enthusiasm?”
I wasn’t so sure that I was as petty a criminal as I remembered, but