The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [79]
I slept for eight hours. If I dreamed I didn’t remember the dream — and I realized, when I woke, that I hadn’t had a single memorable dream since I’d woken up in the future. The readiest explanation of that not very remarkable fact was that the high-powered IT that the sisterhood had installed in my head was keeping my mind tidy. The most disturbing possibility was that while “I” thought “I” was sleeping “I” had actually been switched off, dropped into some kind of artificial coma or consigned to electronic oblivion. I decided to cling to the nicer hypothesis.
Davida finally got in touch shortly after breakfast, but Adam Zimmerman still hadn’t asked to meet me. I had to put up with the next best thing, which was an invitation to join the great man on a tour of Niamh Horne’s super-duper spaceship. I accepted with alacrity.
Any lingering hope I might have entertained of seeing more of the microworld vanished when yet another pod grew out of the wall, avid to embrace me. When I stepped into it the fleshy interior hugged me so tightly that I didn’t even notice the gradual easing of the pseudogravitational attraction until it spat me out into the ship — at which point I would have floated helplessly away if the floor hadn’t grabbed the soles of my feet.
I’d got to the point where it was nice to see any kind of open space — but any elation that might have accompanied the discovery that I was in a real corridor was offset by the terrible sensation of weightlessness. My IT, like Christine
Caine’s, had edited out my capacity for panic, but it had no provision for me to feel good about the things that might have panicked me.
There was quite a crowd awaiting me, but Mortimer Gray was the only one who seemed to care whether I needed help. Once he had ascertained that I had never been in zero-gee before he took up a position beside me, ready to steady me as I took my first faltering steps into the brightly lit interior of Child of Fortune. I had to focus on my internal organs, which seemed to be taking advantage of their newfound opportunities by rearranging themselves.
“It’s okay,” Gray told me. “Your IT will help you adapt if you let it. All you have to remember is to move slowly and deliberately until you get the hang of it, and always to keep one foot on the floor. The floor’s as smart as the fabric of your suit; together they’ll keep you right way up and on track.”
“I suppose you do this all the time,” I said, through teeth that were only slightly gritted.
“Hardly ever,” he assured me. “But I’ve lived on the moon, which isn’t so very different. It was a long time ago now, and the conscious memory’s exceedingly hazy, but the body has a memory of its own. The autonomic reflexes soon come back. Just relax.”
I decided to accept my discomfort as evidence of the fact that I wasn’t just a mechanical simulation, and that everything I was experiencing was really happening. I told myself that if I really was going to live for a thousand or a hundred thousand years I’d probably be spending a great deal of time in zero-gee, given the size of the universe and the ratio of nothingness to substance.
Fortunately, we had a few minutes’ grace before the party was finalized by Christine Caine’s arrival. She made ten. Lowenthal and Handsel were there, but not de Comeau or Conwin. Davida was stationed to one side of Adam Zimmerman, Niamh Horne to the other. There was one other humaniform cyborg, whose feet were on the “floor,” plus a faber cyborg whose four limbs were all arms — one of which was lazily extended to the webbing that dressed the “vertical” walls.
Nobody volunteered to introduce me to Adam Zimmerman, and I didn’t feel sufficiently confident of my footing to stride across the eight meters that separated our stations and offer to shake his hand. He must have looked me up and down while I was still confused, but he had looked away by the time I was capable of meeting his gaze. We both watched Christine Caine emerge from her pod.
She was just as awkward as I had been, and Gray was