The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [96]
Again she hesitated, and again she decided to shame the devil, although she didn’t actually answer the question I’d asked. “I was frozen down in 2090,” she said, “and revived three hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a couple. It can be done, if that’s one of the things you want to know. Our kind can adapt, become emortal, and get a life. You can find a place in the scheme of things too, Mr. Tamlin, if they’ll only give you the chance.”
She was trying as hard as she could to be kind to me, I realized. There was an element of fellow feeling in her determination to help me, because she’d gone through what I was going through herself — except, maybe, for the feeling of betrayal. I took note of the fact that she was now talking about a “they” as well as, or instead of, the “we” she’d referred to before. I decided that it was time to start playing along, and let her steer me back toward the cupboard door.
“Thanks,” I said, touching the dressing on my nose but not meaning that alone.
“You’ll be okay,” she assured me, also not meaning my nose. “You really have to go now. You can tell the others that we really are trying to help and protect them. We’ll do our best to make sure that no harm comes to you.”
I wished that she sounded more confident about that. I was grateful that she had taken the trouble to patch me up, albeit crudely, and I wanted to acknowledge the fact. I also thought that it might be a wise move to offer her something in return, in order to tighten the bond between us. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what I had that would constitute a worthwhile offer. I settled, for some reason I couldn’t fathom even at the time, on a trivial personal confession.
“Alice is a curiously reassuring name,” I told her, as I paused in the doorway. “I’ve always had a thing about names, including my own. Tam Lin was a man who was kidnapped by fairies, and served their queen as a lover and champion while generations went by on Earth. In the end, he got back again — thanks to a young woman — but he came perilously close to being sent to Hell in the interim. I hope I’ll be as lucky.”
Oddly enough, my fascination with my namesake was something I’d only ever mentioned to one other person — not, as it happened, Damon Hart, but Diana Caisson.
“You have to go back now,” was all she said in reply, as she shoved me out into the darkness. “I’ll try as hard as I can to get permission to tell you everything, but I daren’t go ahead without. The situation’s too tricky.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I dare say we can make up a few stories of our own in the meantime.”
Twenty-Four
Charity
I had gone into the darkness a victim, but I came back as the only man who had met the enemy. I was the new star of the show.
“They don’t seem to have the medical facilities to fix us up properly, so we’d better be extra careful in future,” I told the others when they crowded round me, putting on a display of being concerned for my welfare. “This dressing is early twenty-first century and the anesthetic is beginning to wear off already. These are codeine — that’s an ancient morphine precursor.” I showed them the bottle of pills, but didn’t mention what Alice had said about maybe having something better available tomorrow.
“I didn’t know it was you,” Solantha Handsel said, yet again. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I know,” I said. “It could have been anyone. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.”
“What did you find out?” Niamh Horne cut in. “Where are we? Earth?”
“There is absolutely no possibility that we’re on Earth,” Lowenthal was quick to say. “They’re simulating Earth-gravity for deceptive purposes. How could anyone on Earth have the knowledge necessary to hijack a Titanian spaceship?”
“How could anyone else?” the cyborganizer came back.
All of which deflected sufficient attention away from me to let me shuffle through the crowd, heading for the door of the cell from which I’d emerged. “My head’s pounding and I’ve lost more than a litre of blood,” I muttered, harshly.