Youll see them soon enough, I said. I ought to warn you that theyre very weird. Apparently, there are lots of people around who look pretty much like you or me, but there are lots who dont. It so happens that this particular microworld is run by people who dont.
So what do they look like?
Children. Little girls. Theyre genetically engineered for a particular kind of emortality programmed to stop growing and maturing at nine or ten, before puberty sets in. I assume that their brains keep changing as they learn. Thats probably why they do it. They must be hoping to preserve their brains in a better-than-adult state.
Neoteny, she said.
I was somewhat surprised that she knew the word. One tends to think of crazy serial killers as undereducated individuals. Thats right, I conceded. Were neotenic apes, sort of, so I guess they figured that neotenic people were the next evolutionary step forward. If you think thats weird, wait till you see pictures of fabers and cyborganizers.
But there are still people like us around?
People who look like us, I corrected her. Engineered for emortality, and lots of other cute tricks. Well have visitors of that kind in a couple of days. Theres a spaceship en route from Earth, and another heading in from the Jovian moons, although the people its carrying are mostly Titanians. Theyre coming to welcome Zimmerman, of course, but they can hardly refuse us invitations to the party. Theres a historian with the Earth delegation, apparently, whos as keen to talk to us as he is to pay his respects to Zimmerman. Theres also a UN rep, who probably answers to the Secret Masters as well as the not-so-secret ones. You dont have to worry about that, but I might. I used to work for the organization.
The megamafia?
No, the real organization. I was instrumental in putting their brand on a few mavericks including the Ahasuerus Foundation, whose corporate descendants include our present hosts. I helped to stitch up Conrad Helier too.
The man who saved the world, she said, stressing the difference between the reputation that Conrad Helier had enjoyed in her time and the reputation that Adam Zimmerman had had.
One of the men who made sure that the world needed his kind of saving, I corrected her, drily. His record became a great deal more controversial once the whole truth came out or as much of it as ever did come out. His sainthood never quite recovered from the tarnishing effect of the revelation that he helped start the great plague
as well as delivering us from its effects. Not that he ever went on trial, of course, but he had to pretend to be dead to make certain hed avoid it. You and I were products of an era of dire moral murkiness. Today is very different, so they say. But they would say that, wouldnt they?
But weve done our time, she said, letting a little anxiety show. The sheets clean now.
I doubt that itll ever be clean, I told her, with more bitterness than brutality. Were museum pieces now, and it wont be easy for us to escape the burden of our rap sheets. Theyve already offered to put me back in SusAn any time I want to go.
She actually laughed at that. Do you? she asked, plainly unable to believe that I might. It was another sign of an implicit mental kinship I was both anxious and slightly reluctant to acknowledge.
No, I said. But the offer conjured up some bizarre prospects. Maybe we could make a career of hopping through the future at thousand year intervals, popping out every now and again to give our remoter descendants a fascinating glimpse of the bad old days.
We? she queried.
Not necessarily together, I said.
But it could get lonely otherwise, she pointed out. Unless this is the start of a new craze.
The thought that it might get lonely if we didnt stick together had occurred to me. That was one of the reasons why I was here, talking her through the awakening. I hoped that Adam Zimmerman might feel the same way, but I wasnt prepared to bank on it.
On the other hand, the thought that we might be the cutting edge of a new craze had occurred to me too. I hadnt yet managed to ascertain how many other refugees from the twenty-second century might be lurking in freezers, but I knew that there must be others. The eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano might have wreaked havoc with any that had been stored on Earth, but there had to be more mortal bodies in the store from which wed been selected as test subjects.
For the moment, though, Christine Caine was the only link I had to the world that had shaped me. Murderer or not, she was the closest thing to a friend I was likely to find in the Counter-Earth Cluster.
Wherever we go, and whatever we do, I told her, soberly, well be freaks. Our world is gone, Christine. Our species too, all but a few frozen specimens.
Good riddance, she said. Maybe you really didnt do anything to justify putting you away, Madoc Tamlin, but Im already well used to being a freak. Better here and now than there and then. Maybe we should take the offer to go time-hopping, though. If they can fix us up to last the whole trip, maybe we could go all the way to the Omega Point assuming were not already there.