All of which was interesting, in its way, but did not seem to be of any immediate help in penetrating the motives of Davida Berenike Columella and her colleagues.
I now had a better understanding of how they fitted into the unfolding pattern of human history, but the questions still remained.
Why here?
Why now?
Why Christine Caine?
Why me?
And why would the suspicion not be quieted that I wouldnt like the answers when I finally worked them out, even if I were fortunate enough to live that long?
Fourteen
The Garden of Excelsior
The artificial worlds of the twenty-second century had been little more than glorified tin cans not quite sardine cans, but near enough. The vast majority had been no farther from the Earth than lunar orbit. Their inhabitants had been understandably enthusiastic to develop their own self-sustaining ecospheres, so I had seen pictures aplenty of their glass-house-clad fields and hydroponic units. I had carried forward the tacit assumption that Excelsior would be equipped with something similar, until Davida Berenike Columella had put me right.
All the food in Excelsior was produced by artificial photosynthetic systems aggregated into a complex network of vast matt-black leaves surrounding a core whose spin simulated gravity. The microworld had no sunlit fields at all. As Davida had told me, though, it did have a garden, whose flora and fauna were purely ornamental. I had a ready-made image of a garden floating in my mind too, but that turned out to be just as wrong as my image of glass-roofed fields.
When Christine and I were finally allowed to go out, it was to the garden that we were taken. I had hoped to take a stroll around the corridors of the microworld, in order to get a glimpse of everyday life as it was lived there, but that wasnt the way things were done on Excelsior. Excelsior didnt go in for corridors.
When we were ready to go, the wall of my holding cell grew a couple of fancy blisters, which opened up sideways like a cross between a yawning crocodile and a feeding clam.
I had to remind myself that it was just a kind of data suit in order to force myself to step into it, and even then I muttered to Christine: Im glad I never suffered from claustrophobia. All those hours I spent editing tapes were better lessons in life than I realized.
I always suffered from claustrophobia, she told me, but I think theyve edited out my capacity for panic.
I thought about that while the cocoon wrapped itself around me so that I could be transported through the body of the giant Excelsior like some parasitic invader captured by an unusually considerate white corpuscle. I was glad that the journey didnt take long.
I suppose Id have felt better about the journey if the garden had justified the effort, but it didnt. Id seen much better ones in VE. In fact, that was exactly what was wrong with it. It looked like a synthesized cartoon: utterly artificial, every part of the image exaggerated almost to the point of caricature. If the garden really had been a VE mockup it would have been considered gauche even in the twenty-second century. The colors were too bright, the perfumed flowers too numerous as well as too musky. The ensemble had the scrupulously overdone quality of the child-orientated backdrops in the mass-produced virtual fantasies of my own day.
Given that I had already compared Christine to Lilith, and that we were still expecting an Adam, I expected a stream of Eden jokes, but she was nothing if not unpredictable. She didnt inquire after the Tree of Knowledge or the serpent, and never mentioned the possibility of a fall.
She wasnt impressed by the gardens aesthetic quality either.
Its much too garish, she complained. Its not quite as awful as the food, but its more than awful enough. Davida was not with us in the flesh, but we both presumed that she was listening to every word. Christine obviously felt no obligation to be diplomatic but I could sympathize with that.
The animals in the garden were as prolific as the plants. There were brightly colored fish and amphibians swarming in every pond, while svelte reptiles, delicate
birds, and athletic mammals peeped out of the foliage of every bush and every tree. There were insects too, but I wasnt convinced, even for a moment, that they were busy pollinating the flowers. I suspected that the plants and animals alike might be as sexless as their keepers. I also deduced that the apparent predators which seemed perfectly at ease with the conspicuously unintimidated individuals that would have provided them with food in a natural ecosystem ate exactly the same nectar that microworlders ate: a carefully balanced cocktail of synthetic nutrients. It was, of course, a nectar that Christine and I couldnt share, because it wouldnt be appropriate to our complex nutritional requirements. In a sense, therefore, we were the only real animals in the garden: the only creatures forged by nature rather than by artifice.
All my suspicions and deductions turned out to be true. Under the crystal sky of Excelsior, even the blades of grass were sculptures, safe from grazing. They didnt even feel right. Everything I touched proclaimed its artificiality to my fingers. The knowledge that my fingers were wrapped in some ultramodern fabric that had probably reconditioned my own sense of touch only added to the confusion.