perhaps a little too scrupulously. Then, after a further pause, I asked: Why me?
It seems you were one of only two long-term prisoners accepted into the Foundations care in times past who were put into SusAn within two hundred years of Adam Zimmerman, she said. When we interrogated our records you emerged as the second most obvious candidate for the trial. Perhaps I should say that, although we shall continue to investigate the extent of the mental side effects you have suffered, we are reasonably content with the way the trial has worked. Well need to form a better estimate of the extent of your loss of memory, but your coherency is reassuring. Your feeling of not being quite yourself may be a result of the IT weve installed. It would be helpful if youd try to remember as much as you can. The records suggest that the loss of memory suffered by early revenants from SusAn was usually limited to a few days preceding their vitrification, and was often temporary.
Ill do my best, I promised, knowing that Id have to do it for my own sake. Even if this whole thing were an illusion, Id need to recover all the memories I could recover as soon as possible. Apart from the lost memories, you reckon Im okay?
So far as we can ascertain, she said, judiciously. We discovered some residual nanomachines bound to your bones and the glial cells of your brain whose intended function is mysterious, but they appear to be inactive. Theyre probably vestigial a side effect of the particular cryoprotective system used on your body. Theres no trace of similar contamination in the second trial subject, nor in Adam Zimmermans body.
I set aside the matter of the puzzling contamination for further contemplation at a future time. Assuming that this whole conversation must be a kind of test, there were easier points to be scored.
So youre bringing Adam Zimmerman back, I said, casually, in order to prove that my memory hadnt been completely shot to bits. Are you whats become of the Ahasuerus Foundation? Has it taken you this long to conclude that youre capable of fulfilling your mission statement?
You know about the Ahasuerus Foundation, Davida Berenike Columella observed, unnecessarily. It was an obvious prompt.
Damon Hart and I had some dealings with the Foundation, I confirmed, obligingly. She obviously expected more detail, and it seemed wisest to accentuate the positive side of my dealings. Mostly with a woman named Rachel Trehaine, I added. We helped her out a few times, and she did as much for us you might be able to check that in your records.
She didnt reply to that immediately. I inferred that our conversation was being closely monitored, and that someone somewhere was making haste to trawl the records for any mention of Rachel Trehaine.
I figured that I was going to have to try to stand up eventually, so I took advantage of the momentary lull to make my tentative move.
I probably swayed a bit, but I didnt float away or flail my arms about in an unnecessarily comic fashion. I guessed that the gravity must be about three-quarters Earth normal easy enough to get used to, I supposed, with a little care and practice.
But why, I thought, would anyone rig a VE to simulate nonstandard gravity?
The two chairs had been set three paces apart, so there was a considerable gap to cross before I could reach out and touch the wonderful child, but I took my time over it and couldnt have seemed particularly clownish.
She read the intention immediately, and flinched.
She didnt protest and she didnt move, but her eyes told me that she was scared. Now she was the one being subjected to a test.
I didnt know exactly why, but the sight of that fear, innocently manifest in her childlike eyes made me suddenly apprehensive. For the first time, I became anxious.
What am I, in her eyes? I wondered. What have I become, in the space of a thousand years, that I should seem so terrible?
Three
Madoc the Monster
Ihad known even before I got up that touching the wonderful child wouldnt prove anything. If I were as ingeniously cocooned as I might be, with clever IT supporting every aspect of an illusion, nothing would prove that my experience was real but the terrified expression on Davida Berenike Columellas face looked genuine, all the more so because she was struggling so hard to control it.
I hesitated, trying to gauge the situation more accurately.
It seemed to me that she didnt want to be afraid, but that she couldnt help it. Even if we werent in a VE, there was probably nothing much I could do to hurt or damage her, but she still couldnt help her reaction. After all, if we werent in a VE, then I was presumably a monster out of the distant past, who had been committed to a term of indefinite imprisonment for a crime so dreadful that it had been expunged from the record. She had no reason to be certain that I wasnt a homicidal maniac.
But I reached out and touched her face anyway.
Maybe I was a monster.
The touch was gentle and brief; her relief when I took my hand away was as palpable as her anxiety had been.