“The megamafia?”

“No, the realorganization. I was instrumental in putting their brand on a few mavericks — including the Ahasuerus Foundation, whose corporate descendants include our present hosts. I helped to stitch up Conrad Helier too.”

“The man who savedthe world,” she said, stressing the difference between the reputation that Conrad Helier had enjoyed in her time and the reputation that Adam Zimmerman had had.

“One of the men who made sure that the world needed his kind of saving,” I corrected her, drily. “His record became a great deal more controversial once the whole truth came out — or as much of it as ever did come out. His sainthood never quite recovered from the tarnishing effect of the revelation that he helped start the great plague as well as delivering us from its effects. Not that he ever went on trial, of course, but he had to pretend to be dead to make certain he’d avoid it. You and I were products of an era of dire moral murkiness. Today is very different, so they say. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

“But we’ve done our time,” she said, letting a little anxiety show. “The sheet’s clean now.”

“I doubt that it’ll ever be clean,” I told her, with more bitterness than brutality. “We’re museum pieces now, and it won’t be easy for us to escape the burden of our rap sheets. They’ve already offered to put me back in SusAn any time I want to go.”

She actually laughed at that. “Do you?” she asked, plainly unable to believe that I might. It was another sign of an implicit mental kinship I was both anxious and slightly reluctant to acknowledge.

“No,” I said. “But the offer conjured up some bizarre prospects. Maybe we could make a career of hopping through the future at thousand year intervals, popping out every now and again to give our remoter descendants a fascinating glimpse of the bad old days.”

“We?” she queried.

“Not necessarily together,” I said.

“But it could get lonely otherwise,” she pointed out. “Unless this is the start of a new craze.”

The thought that it might get lonely if we didn’t stick together had occurred to me. That was one of the reasons why I was here, talking her through the awakening. I hoped that Adam Zimmerman might feel the same way, but I wasn’t prepared to bank on it.

On the other hand, the thought that we might be the cutting edge of a new craze had occurred to me too. I hadn’t yet managed to ascertain how many other refugees from the twenty-second century might be lurking in freezers, but I knew that there must be others. The eruption of the Yellowstone supervolcano might have wreaked havoc with any that had been stored on Earth, but there had to be more mortal bodies in the store from which we’d been selected as test subjects.

For the moment, though, Christine Caine was the only link I had to the world that had shaped me. Murderer or not, she was the closest thing to a friend I was likely to find in the Counter-Earth Cluster.

“Wherever we go, and whatever we do,” I told her, soberly, “we’ll be freaks. Our world is gone, Christine. Our species too, all but a few frozen specimens.”

“Good riddance,” she said. “Maybe you really didn’t do anything to justify putting you away, Madoc Tamlin, but I’m already well used to being a freak. Better here and now than there and then. Maybe we should take the offer to go time-hopping, though. If they can fix us up to last the whole trip, maybe we could go all the way to the Omega Point — assuming we’re not already there.”

She was full of surprises. First neoteny, now the Omega Point. I realized that she was testing me, in case I was stupid. I was here to soften her introduction to the all-but-unthinkable, and shewas trying the limits of myability to cope.

I should have laughed, but I didn’t. I thought hard, knowing that I had to get ahead of her if I were to maintain the advantage to which my years and my intellect entitled me.

After all, I thought, if I couldn’t even help my hosts deal with Christine Caine, what hope had I of persuading them that they needed me to deal with Adam Zimmerman?

Seven

The Omega Intelligence

Until Christine Caine mentioned the Omega Point, I hadn’t given very much thought to the question of when and where I might be if I wasn’t when and where I seemed to be. Once she had mentioned it, I realized that I’d taken it for granted that the more probable alternative was that I was much closer to home than I appeared to be. I hadn’t even considered the possibility that I might be much farther away.

The idea that someone was messing with my head had automatically translated itself into the idea that someone akin to the nanotech buccaneers of PicoCon was messing with my head, feeding me a weird science fiction script while I was still in my own historical backyard. The possibility remained, however, that instead of things really being less weird than they seemed, they might actually be even weirderthan they seemed.

The idea of the Omega Point had already gone through several different versions before I was born, but the basic proposition was that somewhen in the verydistant future the gradual spread of organic and inorganic intelligence throughout the universe would have produced some kind of cosmic mind. It was, I guess, an extrapolation of Voltaire’s remark that if God didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent Him.

The Omega Point was the point at which the Absent Creator would finally emerge from the evolutionary climax community of life and intelligence — at which point, philosophers desperate for a God-substitute were wont to claim, the Creator in question would naturally set out to do all the godly things that all the old imaginary gods had been prevented from doing by the inconvenience of their nonexistence. What else, after all, could the Omega Intelligence be interested in, except for omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence? And how else could it serve these ends but by recreating, reexamining, and correcting its own history — a process whose side-effects would inevitably include the resurrection of the entire human race, albeit virtually, and their situation in an appropriate kind of Heaven?

Personally, I had never believed a word of it, but I had lived in a world in which religions far less decorous had been clinging to existence like stubborn limpets, using any and every imaginative instrument to avoid recognizing their absurdity, redundancy, and incapacity to resist extinction.

The only thing fairly certain about the future evolution of intelligence, it had always seemed to me — if one assumed that intelligence had any future at all — was that something, somewhere, and somewhen, would tryto become an Omega Intelligence, or at least to pretend that it was one.

In which case, I thought, after talking to Christine Caine, it might be a mistake to think that the kind of illusion I was lost in was a kind I could easily understand.

If my second lease of life turned out to be a sham, generated by a clever combination of IT and some kind of body suit, its actual temporal location could as easily be long after 3263 as long before. And if I had no body at all, but was in fact the software reconstruction of what some artificial superintelligence thought human beings might have been like, my actual temporal location might be morelikely to be long after 3263 than before.

Christine Caine was right, though. Even if my current temporal location didturn out to be 3263, or year 99 of the newest New Era, and even if I did have my old body back again, only slightly worn away by more than a thousand years in a freezer, I was obviously capable of escaping the prison of time again and again and again. If I wasn’t at the Omega Point yet, I could legitimately regard myself as one step removed from square one, embarked upon the Omega Expedition.