Davida paused before answering, perhaps needing to consult her friendly neighborhood data bank as to what a monkey wrench was or what being pissed off involved. Then, speaking rather grudgingly but with all apparent honesty, she said: There are a great many people in the outer system who regard Adam Zimmerman as a hero and a bold pioneer. The delegates aboard Child of Fortune may regard him as a kindred spirit, at least potentially. If he were to ally himself with one or more of their most cherished causes, they might have reason to be delighted. Lowenthal must know that too. I realized then that she wasnt just trying to keep me informed she was talking to me like this because she was trying to work through a few uncertainties of her own.
I thought about that for a moment, then said: You dont have a clue which way hes going to jump, do you? Neither does anyone else.
Adam Zimmerman is, admittedly, something of a mystery to usas he is to anyone born in this era.
But perhaps not to me, I pointed out, grasping the opportunity to restate my own case for further involvement in the scheme of which I had unwittingly become a part, or even to Christine Caine. Is that why Lowenthal took the trouble to talk to me? He must think rightly that I might be better placed to get through to Zimmerman than you, or him, or his rivals from Titan. So why hasnt anyone working for the other side contacted me yet?
Are you certain that they havent?
I figured that Id have been told if there were any more messages waiting, so I couldnt see what she was getting at for a moment. Then I did.
But Grays Earthbound, like Lowenthal, I said, when I had twigged. Why would he be playing for the other side? Thinking back, I realized that he hadnt actually said that the association of academic interests he supposedly represented was Earthbound.
Grays as thoroughly Earthbound as anyone in his attitudes, Davida agreed. But he has some very influential friends on the frontier. I know of no reason why you shouldnt take his offer of employment at face value but I doubt that the representatives of the World Government would be prepared to trust Mortimer Gray to act in what they see as Earths best interests. He saved Emily Marchants life in the Coral Sea Disaster, and shes used him as a propaganda tool before.
I hadnt a clue who Emily Marchant was, but I figured that I could look her up. I certainly intended to investigate Michael Lowenthal. The plot of which I was a part seemed to be thickening around me, and I didnt know whether to be glad or annoyed. Christine Caine, I supposed, would reckon it one more blessing to count or one more irony to chuckle at, but I was as different from her as I was from Adam Zimmerman. If my assistance proved to be a tradeable asset, that might be to my advantage but if my interference were to be reckoned a possible nuisance by Michael Lowenthal or anyone else, that might place me in peril. Having already served a sentence of a thousand years plus for misdemeanors I couldnt even remember, I figured that I could do without any disadvantages or prejudices hovering over the inception of my second slice of life.
I had to educate myself quickly, but it wasnt going to be easy to work out what I needed to know, if everyone who offered to help me had their own vested interests however slight to look after.
Thanks, I said to Davida Berenike Columella.
Youre welcome, she replied, the phrase falling from
her tongue as if shed never used it before and did not expect ever to need its like again.
Twelve
The Temptations of Paranoia
Throughout my former life I had always taken pride in maintaining a level of paranoia appropriate to my various professions. As I began my second span, however, I was acutely conscious of the fact that I had not been paranoid enough to anticipate that I might end up in the cooler, or that once I was there my custodians not to mention my friends would allow me to languish indefinitely. Knowledge of this failure, I must admit, made me a trifle oversensitive to the direr possibilities implicit in my new situation. The research that I contrived to do during the next few hours of wakefulness was guided by a fervent desire to figure out why my hosts might be lying to me.
I knew, of course, that there was a possibility that Davida Berenike Columella was telling me the truth and nothing but, but it seemed safer and wiser to work from the opposite assumption. If there really were thousands of corpsicles stored in a gargantuan coffin ship somewhere in the Counter-Earth Cluster, I reasoned, the probability that Christine Caine and I just happened to be the nearest contemporaries of Adam Zimmerman was slight. If we werent his nearest contemporaries, then we must have been selected for awakening on different grounds and even if we were, there were still question marks hanging over the matter of our revival, and Adam Zimmermans too.
Why here ? Why now ?
I was prepared to accept that Excelsior really was an Ahasuerus Project, and that the trustees of the Foundation really might have decided that the time was now ripe for its mission to be completed, but that didnt seem to me to be an adequate explanation for either the place or the time. It would have been easy enough to send Zimmermans SusAn chamber back to Earth, so that he could wake up at home, and just as easy to ship specimens for trial runs along with him, in the unlikely event that there were no sleepers on the surface of sufficient antiquity.