She didnt answer that one either. She might have thought so before, and if she had she probably still did but Niamh Horne and I had succeeded in piercing her innocence with a tiny sliver of doubt.
Well be starting the final phase of the procedure soon, she said. Ill let you know, so that you can watch through the window. Thats what everyone else will be doing. Not only here, but everywhere just as soon as the light reaches them. Were expecting an audience of millions, perhaps billions. It might have been a freak of chance that brought you here, but youll be in a privileged position.
What she was trying to say was that Id be in the front row of a red hot show. Even if I was just a trial run, my number having been thrown up by the lottery of fate, Id get to see history in the making at point blank range.
I knew that I ought to be grateful for that. I knew, too, if Adam Zimmerman did request or require company of his own kind on his grand tour of the modern world, I might have cause to be grateful that I was the nearest thing to his own kind that Excelsior had to offer. It wasnt just that Adam Zimmerman and I shared the same mortal blood; given the opportunity, Id have tried to steal the world too. I figured that I was entitled to my front row seat at the big event, perhaps more so than Niamh Horne, or Mortimer Gray, or even Michael Lowenthal.
Good luck, Davida, I said to Davida Berenike Columella, knowing that she was the one who would have to carry the can if anything went wrong with
Zimmermans awakening.
Thank you, Madoc, she said, with all apparent sincerity.
Eighteen
Adam Zimmermans Awakening
Ihadnt fully realized what the process of awakening a corpsicle involved, although I was dimly aware that there were probably yucky bits that any sane person would be more than glad to sleep through. Everybody in my day had referred to SusAn, with casual flippancy, as freezing down, as if it were merely a matter of popping someone into a powerful refrigerator, but everybody had known that there was a lot more to it. I suppose wed all been slightly afraid of it even those of us who were determinedly law-abiding. Who can ever be sure that the weight of the law will not descend upon him?
At any rate, like most men of my era, Id never bothered to research the topic in detail. It wasnt until I watched the later phases of Adam Zimmermans revivification that I was able to reconstruct my own experience in my imagination.
Zimmerman had been put away by means of a slightly less complicated and much less streamlined process than the one that must have been applied to me, but he had to come back through all the same stages. Watching as much of it as I did made me feel distinctly queasy, because I fooled myself into remembering similar things being done to me. I was profoundly glad that by the time I was invited to tune in, most of the slow work had already been done.
I now know and am capable of shuddering at the thought that after Id been put into an artificially induced coma my metabolic activity had been quieted even further, until all the DNA in my cells had wrapped itself up snugly and all the mitochondria had fallen idle. Only then had the first stage of temperature depression begun, to facilitate the vitrification process that would work outwards from the soft organs and inwards from the the gut and skin. Not until the vitrification was complete and uniform had my body temperature been lowered, by very careful degrees, all the way from minus seven degrees Celsius to seven degrees absolute and even then there had been a further stage of encasement in a cocktail of ices not so very different from the stuff of which comets are made.
That was what I had gone through in order to get to my present destination: a journey to the dark land of the dead, whose fairy queen had far more in common with Christine Caines cold-hearted Snow Queen than Shakespeares Titania or Spensers Gloriana.
By the time Davida Berenike Columella put the operation on the screen, Zimmermans corpsicle had been out of its icy cocoon for some time. The temperature of the vitrified body had already been raised to minus seven Celsius so that nanobot-aided devitrificaton could begin. What Davidas multitudinous audience watched was the final stage of the long process, which would turn Adam Zimmermans protoplasm from glassy gel to membranously confined liquid.
A host of nanobots delivered enthusiastic progress reports regarding the miraculous state of Zimmermans individual cells, but everyone knows that nanobots are constitutionally incapable of seeing the big picture, so no one took their reportage to imply that the whole system would click into gear automatically.
The most crucial phase of the awakening would be the one that would ease Zimmerman from physical inertia into controlled coma, rebuilding brain activity from the bottom up. That would turn effective death into dreamless sleep, then into the kind of sleep that could sustain dreaming. The nanobots couldnt measure the subjective component of a dream; some part of the emotions associated with it, and all of its imagery, were forever beyond their reach. The external sensors collated their information, assuring the operators and watchers alike that all was well at the physiological level, but there was an inevitable margin of uncertainty that kept us all on edge while the long minutes ticked by.