Christine was
thinking along a different line. Im the villain, arent I? she said. If this is a game, or an improvised drama, Im not here to make up the numbers Im here to be the bad example.
I turned to look at her, although the drama on the screen was coming toward its climax.
We dont know that, I said, feeling a mysterious obligation to be gentle. Im just making up stories here. I havent even begun to figure out what this is all about.
But well find out, wont we? she said. It was very difficult to judge her mood, or to figure out how she was extrapolating the notion. Well find out what they expect of us soon enough.
Adam Zimmerman had been moved to a chair now: a chair very similar to the ones on which Christine and I were sitting. Davida had run through the rehearsal twice and she was sticking to the script. When Adam Zimmerman opened his eyes he would see what I had seen. Would he, I wondered, be as quick on the uptake as I had been? Would he ask the same questions, in the same falsely casual fashion?
I had no idea how big the audience for this big scene was, but I suspected that this would be prime time all over the Earth, no matter whether it was noon or midnight outside. We were all on tenterhooks.
The camera zoomed in on that strangely disturbing face, bringing every line and blemish into clear view.
We all waited for the eyes to flicker open but the eyes hadnt read the script. They were sticky, and they couldnt flicker. Their opening was slow, and seemingly painful. The pupils narrowed as they finally appeared, the mottled brown irises spreading protectively around them. The blood vessels in the whites seemed slightly too red.
For a long time, it seemed that he wasnt going to speak at all, but he finally slipped into the groove. He had already memorized his script, and twelve centuries of frozen sleep hadnt eroded that memory.
How long? he said.
Davida Berenike Columella told him. We watched his face as the calculator in his head processed the figures.
And then he smiled.
After one thousand two hundred and twenty-eight years, less ten days, Adam Zimmerman smiled like a winner. It was a gamblers smile: a smile of pure self-congratulation, at a well-judged bet.
I figured that he was entitled to it. So, I suppose, did millions or billions of other viewers.
Nineteen
Child of Fortune
There was more, but so far as I was concerned the rest of it was all anti-climax. I wanted to meet Adam Zimmerman in the flesh. I wanted to be introduced to him, as someone who was like him as the only person in the entire solar system who was like him, because the only person who might be reckoned more like him than I was didnt really count.
No such luck. There were plenty of other people who wanted first crack at him, and had the clout to demand it.
For the first time, the room in which I was confined really began to feel like a prison. No matter what opportunities it offered in the way of virtual experience, there was no escape from my impatience. Christine Caine was still with me, but that was no escape either. The game of trying to guess exactly what kind of game we were involved in had gone sour the point now was to get on with it.
We could, of course, have used the time more productively. We should have. We shouldnt have wasted a minute while there was so much still to be learned but the drama on the screen had taken over, and we were too sharply aware of the fact that we had been abandoned in the wings to await a cue that no one was in a hurry to give us.
We ate a couple of meals, neither of which improved to any perceptible degree on the one we had first been offered, and we exchanged a few more speculations as to the nature of the roles we had been recruited to play in Adam Zimmermans return, but in the end tiredness demanded that we sleep.
Eventually, I told Christine, before we retired to our separate spaces, theyll have to let us in. When Zimmerman finds out we exist, hell want to meet us. I couldnt put much conviction into the claim.
Sure, she said. Hey, Adam , theyll say, we thawed out a petty criminal and a murderer just for practice just let us know when you want to get together to chat about old times . How will he be able to restrain his enthusiasm?
I wasnt so sure that I was as petty a criminal as I remembered, but I certainly didnt want to make an issue of it.
I slept for eight hours. If I dreamed
I didnt remember the dream and I realized, when I woke, that I hadnt had a single memorable dream since Id woken up in the future. The readiest explanation of that not very remarkable fact was that the high-powered IT that the sisterhood had installed in my head was keeping my mind tidy. The most disturbing possibility was that while I thought I was sleeping I had actually been switched off, dropped into some kind of artificial coma or consigned to electronic oblivion. I decided to cling to the nicer hypothesis.
Davida finally got in touch shortly after breakfast, but Adam Zimmerman still hadnt asked to meet me. I had to put up with the next best thing, which was an invitation to join the great man on a tour of Niamh Hornes super-duper spaceship. I accepted with alacrity.