I touched my chest then, and found that I was wearing a shirt: a dead shirt. Even in 2202 I wouldnt have been seen dead in a dead shirt. I only had to flex my leg muscles to confirm that I was also wearing lightweight trousers, and that I was sandwiched between a single sheet and a lumpy mattress.
Shit , I thought. First a thousand years forward in time, then a couple of hundred years back . The way I felt told me that any IT I might be wearing was no ultrasophisticated product of the thirty-third century, or even the twenty-third. I didnt seem to have any pain control at all.
I told myself that it wasnt so bad. I had been naked before, save for dead clothes, and devoid of significant IT. I reminded myself that I was a Madoc and a Tamlin: a supremely adaptable hero, ready for any twist of fate. I told myself that my new situation wasnt anything I couldnt handle. I was in the dark, and I was in some slight discomfort, but I was alive and whole and quite compos mentis. Things could have been a lot worse. I just had to get stuck into the task of finding out where I was, and making the best of my circumstances.
I reached out an experimental hand. There was nothing within easy reach above me, although I fancied I could hear the sound of breathing from that general direction. I groped about in other directions. The mattress I was lying on was set on a ledge, apparently plastic. There was a wall to my left and another a couple of feet from my head. I had to roll on to my side to touch the floor, but I seemed to be only a meter above it. I sat up in bed. The extra reach enabled me to ascertain that there was indeed another bunk above mine. That was slightly reassuring; wherever I was, I didnt seem to be alone.
When I had maneuvered my feet to the floor I was able to stand up, though not as easily as I could have wished. My feet were bare, but the floor wasnt uncomfortably rough or cold. It felt like plastic. I couldnt tell by feeling it with the soles of my feet whether the plastic was organic or whether it had been gantzed out of twentieth-century waste.
There was an inert body lying on the upper bunk, whose dimensions I didnt explore in detail because it seemed more sensible to let whoever it was continue sleeping. I touched a sleeve, though, which suggested that my sleeping companion was wearing dead clothing just like mine. The person in question didnt seem to be sleeping very easily, but the body didnt stir when my fingers brushed the back of the hand that was projecting from the sleeve. It was a small hand, not very hairy. I was prepared to accept that it was probably a female hand, but I refused to jump to the conclusion that it was Christine Caines. If it turned out to be Christine Caines, that would mean that everything Id experienced had been real more of it, at any rate, than I wanted to hang on to and that something terrible had happened to Child of Fortune .
I felt for a belt and found that my dead trousers were elastic-waisted. The shirt was ill-fitting and buttonless, severely functional. I knew that if I really had been divested of the kind of smartsuit and internal technology that Id worn on Excelsior I must have been asleep for a long time. It wasnt the work of a couple of hours to strip that kind of equipment away.
If, on the other hand, I was fresh out of the freezer
I needed to take a piss, quite urgently. That was a feeling I hadnt had for a very long time, no matter where or when I was.
I only had to stretch a little to locate the far wall of what Id already begun thinking of as a cell. The space in which I was confined was only a couple of meters wide. It wasnt much more than three meters long, but there was a sub-chamber in one corner. Once Id found the handle the screen moved aside easily, and I began to fumble about the interior, hoping that it was some kind of bathroom facility. There was a showerhead and a drain, and some other kind of fitment that I couldnt immediately identify but might have been some kind of toilet. I wasnt about to engage with any puzzles; the drain was good
enough for me.
When I was able to get back to investigating the geography of the space that now confined me it didnt take me long to find the door at the farther end, or the handle that opened it.
I didnt expect the handle to turn, but it did. I heard the latch disengage. I hadnt encountered a door like that in years; it was the sort of door that one only found in buildings abandoned during the Crash: a door constructed in the twenty-first-century, or even earlier.
The twenty-first-century door opened outwards, not quite silently.
The area outside the cell was as dark as the inside. I nearly set out to cross it, but figured that it was wiser and safer to grope my way along the wall, one step at a time. I moved to the left, because the open door was blocking the way to the right. The wall felt like plastic, just like the door and the handle.
I couldnt have gone more than five meters before I came to another door. That one had a handle, too. It turned easily enough, and the door wasnt locked.