misdemeanors you might have committed in the distant past are of no further relevance to anyone alive today, and that we are enthusiastic to make you welcome. We shall be happy to provide you with employment, not in any artificial make-work capacity but as a useful and valued member of society. I look forward to meeting you when the ship docks, and to making provision for your eventual return to Earth. Thank you. His image froze to a still, but didnt disappear.
No stray snowball had dared to interrupt him, although he had help to avoid any such possibility by keeping his message brief.
Personal though these messages were, I knew that they werent private. As soon as Michael Lowenthal had finished, I asked to speak to Davida Berenike Columella. Her image immediately displaced his, but she seemed slightly more incongruous floating outside, partly because the background behind her head was a blank wall.
What was all that about? I demanded, unceremoniously.
She could have been evasive if shed wanted to be, but she didnt. They both want you to go back with them to Earth, she said. Im not privy to their motives, but I suspect that theyre simply being overcautious. Theyre afraid that if they dont obtain your early agreement to return to Earth you might accept an invitation to visit the outer system Titan, perhaps.
Why wouldnt they want me to go to Titan?
They know that Child of Fortune is heading in from the outer system. Peppercorn Seven should arrive first, but only by a matter of hours. Both sets of passengers seem to be treating it as a race, perhaps for no better reason than that each thinks the other might be treating it as a race. Adam Zimmerman is the real propaganda prize, of course but Lowenthal obviously feels a need to be careful not to miss out on any possibility.
Any possibility? You mean he sent a similar message to Christine Caine? Gray too?
I think you ought to ask that question of Miss Caine, Davida said, primly which seemed to me to be as good as a yes.
I wonder if theyll offer her an academic position as a historian, or as a psychiatrist, I mused, unable to help myself saying it aloud.
Davida ignored the remark. You are, of course, welcome to remain here if you so wish, she told me. You might think that the least attractive option, given that we cannot offer you any possibility of social assimilation but that might be a good reason for taking it, at least in the short term. We can offer you an interval for careful thought and self-education. Such an interval might prove immensely valuable.
I could see that there were several layers of implication concealed within that statement, and I took time out to consider how to proceed. It seemed, in the end, most sensible to go back to basics.
How, exactly, did we come to be here in Excelsior? I asked her. Why arent the three of us still on Earth?
The directors of the Ahasuerus Foundation thought it politic to remove Adam Zimmerman from Earth in the 2540s, following the Coral Sea Catastrophe, she told me. Tens of thousands of SusAn chambers were lost at that time, and the moon seemed a much safer environment. The facility in which Zimmermans chamber was then held had charge of several hundred other cryonic chambers, some of which were Ahasuerus personnel following in their founders footsteps, others Christine Caines among them having been accepted from correctional facilities followingunfortunate accidents.
The pause before the final phrase was so profound that you could have flipped a coin into it and never heard the clink.
You mean that the corpsicles of criminals were popular targets of sabotage or calculated neglect, I deduced. I had no reason to suppose that the rhetoric underlying Eliminator activity had ever died out, even though it had presumably ceased to be fashionable.
There were occasional security problems, was all Davida would admit. The Foundation was asked to move the government-sponsored chambers of which it had temporary custody along with those for which it had sole responsibility. Eventually, the directors decided that the moon was not the ideal environment either and a specialist microworld was commissioned. In order to make the project economically viable the Foundation offered to take over various other consignments of SusAn chambers from several locations on Earth. It was at that point, I believe, that your own chamber was added to the stock. After several changes of location, the microworld was established in the Counter-Earth Cluster. Excelsior is another Ahasuerus project, and we have all the necessary
equipment, so it was the logical base from which to launch the revivification plan.
So you sought out the two next-oldest corpsicles for your trial runs, I recapped. But you still have hundreds maybe thousands of sleepers parked next door.
Thousands, she agreed.
And who decides when they get to wake up?
Thats a matter of some dispute, she admitted. Our own position is that the Ahasuerus Foundation has the sole responsibility and authority. The World Government in Amundsen has a different view, but She left the sentence dangling.