was here, alive and out. Oh look were ahead of the game already. How many more do you need?
Im still trying to figure that out, I told her, stubbornly. When I have the total, Ill weigh it against the downside.
Theres no downside in what youve said so far, she judged, accurately enough. The downside would have been not waking up at all. If appearances can be trusted, were past that. Its a new start, Madoc. All profit. You shouldnt complain about the cards youve been dealt, when the wonder is that theres been a fresh deal at all. If youre unhappy with the company at the tablewell, who else was there to choose from? When you said all my body cavities, you did mean thatwell, of course you did. Am I a virgin again, or is that too much to ask?
She was putting on an act again, making believe that she was the kind of person who murdered people for fun. It rang completely false. Whatever her motive had been, I thought, she seemed exceedingly uncomfortable with it but how, in that case, had she racked up thirteen victims?
I think were pretty much the way we were when we folded our last hands, I told her, not trying very hard to enter into the spirit that she was trying to import into the conversation. Were experimental specimens, remember.
Adam Zimmerman never heard of me, she observed. He never saw your slanderous tape. He doesnt know me fromEve.
That made me laugh. It wasnt uproarious, but it the first honest laugh Id contrived in a thousand years and I was surprised by the lift it gave me. It was a very feeble and very obvious joke, but it showed that she understood something of the magic of names.
Before Eve there was Lilith, I murmured. I was talking to myself, but she heard me.
I saw that one too, she said, sourly.
It took me a moment or two to figure out that she must be referring to yet another VE tape not a kiddies classic, this time. She knew about Lilith the demon, Lilith the baby killer, so she knew that I wasnt being nice, or funny.
Somehow, I said, hopeful of saving the situation, I dont think finding a mate will be the first thing on Adams agenda. Hell be the most famous man in the solar system: the hottest news since the supervolcano blew North America to Kingdom Come. The Messiah from the twenty-firsthell, he must have been born in the twentieth century. He may be an animal in the zoo for a while, but theyll move Heaven and Earth to rehabilitate him. Im not so sure theyll make as much effort for us, even if a little of his celebrity rubs off on us.
On the other hand, said Christine Caine, the most notorious mass murderer in the galaxy, if he were to die
Her tone made it obvious to me that she was joking, in much the same blackly comic vein as my crack about Lilith. If she meant anything by it at all, she meant that just because wed been successfully revived, there was no guarantee that Adam Zimmerman could be. He, after all, had been forced to employ SusAn equipment of a considerably more primitive kind than ours, at least for the first phase of his long journey. She must have known, though, that what would be obvious to me might not be as obvious to all the other listening ears, and that it was just about the least diplomatic thing she could possibly have said.
That had to be at least part of the reason why she said it, given that she was still putting on her act but I wished she hadnt.
I wished she hadnt because I knew full well that there was no one in Excelsior, and perhaps no one in the entire solar system, who wouldnt think of Christine Caine and Madoc Tamlin as two of a potentially despicable kind.
Nine
You Cant go Home Again
Where do you go to first, when youre a thousand years away from the world you grew up in but VE simulations of every environment in the solar system and quite a few beyond it are available to you?
You try to go home, of course. Not to find it, because you know full well that you wont, but to prove to yourself that it no longer exists, and that something else has taken its place.
In Peter Pan , one of those ancient VE adventures that Christine Caine had undertaken several times before she became a full-time mass murderer, theres a scene in which the eponymous character one of three elective protagonists, if my memory serves me right flies back to the nursery from which he had fled years before. He finds the window locked, and when he looks through it he sees his mother nursing a new baby son: a replacement who seems far more contented and far more appreciative of his circumstances than he ever was. The implication
is that, unlike Peter, the new kid will one day achieve the adulthood that his predecessor was determined to avoid. On the other hand although most members of the target audience probably didnt think that far ahead the new kid might end up a lost boy too, with nowhere to go but Neverland.
I knew all that before I asked to see the Earth.
I thought I was sufficiently detached, and sufficiently adult, to be prepared for anything.
I had expected the hood Id called for to grow out of the back of my armchair but it didnt. It materialized from the rooms ceiling. It was nothing like the clumsy devices Id used in my own time, being slightly reminiscent of a cobweb drifting down on the end of a thread of spidersilk. When it settled over my head it was hardly tangible; I didnt even feel it on the surfaces of my eyeballs which was actually the surface of the part of my suitskin overlying my own conjunctiva.