Everybody did.
In the new world into which Id now been delivered, everybody already had, although every single one of them was still entitled to further changes of mind. I hadnt made any such choice. Nor had Christine Caine or Adam Zimmerman.
That, I thought, had to be one of the things in which the invisible monitors observing our every word and action were most interested. For one reason or another, if only out of simple curiosity, they might even care about the decisions we would make.
Eight
Lilith
Maybe you could go all the way to the Omega Point, I said to Christine Caine, carefully steering our collaborative flight of fancy down to Earth or at least to Excelsior. Maybe its the only tourist trip worth taking, if were condemned to be eternal tourists. Unfortunately I doubt that SusAn technology is perfectible. It might take ten or a hundred reps, but the time would surely come when wed turn into deep-frozen dead meat. I dont know the percentages, but the sisterhood could probably hazard a guess. My bet is that the vast majority of the people frozen down before and after us didnt even make it this
far and Im not just talking about the ones who got out on their due release dates, or the ones who melted during accidental power cuts, earthquakes, and supervolcanic eruptions.
Were real freaks, Christine. Thousand-to-one shots. Maybe million-to-one shots. Adam Zimmerman got here because every possible effort was extended to make sure that he did; we just happened to survive the great freezer lottery. My guess is that everybody who embarks on that kind of Omega Expedition is bound to die long before they reach their destination.
But what about the other kinds? I added, purely for my own consideration.
Christine Caine got to her feet then, balancing herself in a deliberate fashion. It didnt take her long to build up the confidence required to walk and once shed walked around the room, trailing her fingers along the seemingly featureless walls, she didnt waste any time before taking the next step. She threw herself forward into a somersault, and when she landed on her feet she threw herself into another, glorying in the lift and the slowness of the arc.
Then she came unstuck, and collapsed in an ungainly heap. She laughed, as if the fall had given her almost as much pleasure as the safely completed somersaults.
Trust your clever IT, I told her, knowing that I had no reason to feel envious but not quite succeeding in controlling my resentment at the way she was coping with her unexpected situation. Itll adjust your reflexes to the three-quarters Earth-gravity if you let it. Just dont try to think too hard about what youre doing.
This isnt a VE, she said, smugly. Im no sim. Im alive and Im out.
And youre still a homicidal maniac, I was unable to prevent myself adding: albeit a harmless one. Theyve rigged internal censors to stop you doing anything nasty, but the whole point of the trial run was to put you back together exactly the way you were.
She didnt like that at all, but she seemed more hurt than angry. You dont know shit about the way I was, she retorted.
I repented my recklessness. No, I dont, I admitted. In fact, I may have entirely the wrong idea about it. If I remember correctly, you gave the police half a dozen contradictory explanations of what you did but only one stuck fast. There was a VE tape about your case. Everybody my age hooked into it. It was pure fiction, but it colored everybodys understanding.
That made her pause for thought. Some sort of psychoanalysis? she asked.
Not exactly. A reconstruction of your murders, putting the user into your viewpoint. There was a whispered voice-over that passed itself off as your internal stream-of-consciousness. It was called Bad Karma .
Why? I wasnt sure to what extent she was offended by the whole idea, as opposed to the mere title.
Because it tried to explain what youd done in terms of camouflage: hiding your true self within a series of alternative personalities, all of which masqueraded as invaders from the past. According to the script, the multiple personalities locked you into what the writer called a karmic ritual : the reenactment of an event so unbearable that you had tried to distance it from your present self by projecting it into a hypothetical pattern of eternal recurrence.
She stared at me as if I were the one that might be mad. It was fiction, I added. Pornography, of a sort.
I want to see it, she said. She was no longer in a laughing mood, but I couldnt tell what sort of a mood had taken its place. She was fearful, but in an odd way. There was something in her reaction to the memory of her crimes with which my empathetic imagination couldnt get to grips.
They dont have it, I told her. Not here, at any rate. The sisters reckon that a few copies might have been exported from Earth before the last ecocatastrophe, but they dont know if it was ever adapted to run on modern equipment. Gray the historian from Earth might be able to locate one, if anyone can.