Davida Berenike Columella tried to catch up with them in order to make the introductions, but Lowenthal wouldn’t wait for her. He introduced Gray, although that was hardly necessary, and his two other companions. One of them was a soberly clad male named Jean de Comeau, whose title I didn’t catch because I was too busy concentrating my attention on the one who obviously wasn’t a UN bureaucrat: a female named Solantha Handsel.
Solantha Handsel had enough hardware built into her smartsuit — and probably into her own flesh — to give the appearance of being half-robot. It seemed to me that she might as well have had the word “bodyguard” stenciled on her flat but muscular chest.
It occurred to me that traveling with a bodyguard might be a social status thing — a matter of mere ornamentation — but my paranoia wasn’t prepared to let me make the assumption. Nor was it prepared to write off the cyborg as an item of intimidatory showmanship. What my paranoia said was that if Michael Lowenthal had brought a minder with him, he expected to need minding. Maybe the sisters weren’t as harmless as they seemed, and maybe he was anxious about
Christine Caine’s reputation, but the more worrying possibility was that he had cause to be worried about Niamh Horne’s yet-to-arrive entourage, or that he thought he had cause to be worried about me.
I’m not quite sure how it happened, but while I was busy formulating these thoughts Lowenthal cut me out from the crowd with well-trained expertise and somehow contrived — perhaps with Solantha Handsel’s aid — to establish an invisible cordon sanitairearound us.
“Welcome back, Mr. Tamlin,” he said, smiling broadly. “I understand that you used to work for us.”
“Only as a subcontractor,” I assured him, without bothering to quibble about the use of the word us. “Why, do you think you owe me money?”
He laughed politely. “If we did,” he said, “the compound interest would have inflated it into a tidy sum by now. Unfortunately, we have no record of it, and the credit balance in your own accounts was sequestered long ago to pay for your incarceration.”
“That’s just the accounts you know about,” I told him. I figured that if he wanted to imply that I was seriously poor, I might as well fight back. “It’ll need some serious investigation to find out about the others. Not that I can compete with Christine, of course. She’s got all those royalties owing to her for Bad Karma.”
He must have known that I was fishing. “We don’t have a copy of it, I’m afraid,” he assured me. “Mortimer may be able to turn one up. He spends a lot of time in the mountains — even more than he used to, now that their contents have been even more extensively trashed than they were before. We do, however, have copies of some of yourold tapes, along with other data. All discarded by publicly accessible datastores, I fear. It seemed very unlikely to the custodians of our history that the items in question would ever be required again.”
“But you squirreled it away regardless,” I said. I tried to maintain a light tone as I said: “I don’t suppose you know why I was put into SusAn in the first place? I seem to have mislaid the memory.”
He didn’t seem surprised by the question — but he did seem slightly suspicious, as if he didn’t believe that I’d lost the memory and didn’t mind my knowing it. “That’s an intriguing mystery,” he said, blandly. “We don’t have any record of your conviction for a crime. As I said, our financial records show that your existing credit was seized to pay for the upkeep of your frozen body. Damon Hart neglected to make any provision for that purpose — but that was probably a genuine oversight.”
I couldn’t believe that he’d use a phrase like “probably a genuine oversight” unless he intended to imply the opposite, or that he’d have mentioned Damon Hart at all unless he too was fishing for information. In which case, I deduced, he probably didn’t have the faintest idea why I’d been put away — although he was certainly interested in finding out.
“I suppose I ought to be glad that I was looked after so well, even though my credit ran out,” I said. “I seem to have slept through at least two major disasters — I do hope that I haven’t been revived on the eve of a third.”
He didn’t laugh at that suggestion. “This is a far better world than the one you left behind, in terms of the existential opportunities it presents,” he assured me. “We’ll be happy to help you in any way we can to adapt yourself to it, if that’s your wish.”
“Did you know Damon Hart personally?” I asked, abruptly.
“Slightly,” Lowenthal admitted. “It’s not surprising that he never mentioned you in conversation, but I can’t find any reference to you in the files he left behind. It’s almost as if someone deleted you from the record of his life — and from all the other records to which he had access.”
It was obvious that he didn’t mean “almost as if” at all, and that he thought the someone in question must have been Damon.
“It must be easy enough for a person as unimportant as me to be forgotten,” I said, trying to match his bland tone. “Damon was my friend for twenty years, but he lived for three hundred more after I was frozen down. He must have become a completely different person. I expect he forgot about such trivialities as my upkeep long before he died.”
“Perhaps so,” Lowenthal agreed, insincerely. I took note of the fact that although Solantha Handsel seemed perfectly relaxed she was still within arm’s reach, and the way she occasionally glanced at me was neither unwary nor incurious. If Lowenthal knew more about me than he was prepared to say, or even if he merely had more cause to be suspicious than he was prepared to reveal, what he knew or suspected seemed to be enough to put him on his guard.
“I understand that the delegation from the Outer System will be here soon,” I said, mildly. “I’m looking forward to meeting them — all the more so now I’ve seen yourcyborganizer.”
“I’m looking forward to it too,” Lowenthal assured me. I didn’t believe him. Solantha Handsel seemed to be about to say something — perhaps to deny that she was a cyborganizer in the strictest sense of the term — but she shut up as soon as it became clear that her boss had more to say.
“To be perfectly frank,” Lowenthal went on, seeming to me to be speaking anything but frankly, “it’s good to have an excuse to meet Niamh face to face. All kinds of problems seem to get in the way of people like her traveling to Earth, or people like me visiting Titan. This little party should provide a very valuable opportunity for a frank and informal exchange of views. To be honest, that’s the real reason I’m here — and presumably the real reason for her presence. But that’s not to say that I’m not interested to meet you, and Adam Zimmerman too. My offer of useful employment is perfectly sincere, and I hope that you’ll accept it.”
“I haven’t made up my mind,” I told him. “Maybe I’ll wait to see what Adam decides. And Christine, of course. We true humans may need to stick together for a while, until we figure out exactly what’s what.”
He condescended to laugh at that — and having made whatever point he had intended to make, he passed on, leaving me to face the curiosity of Mortimer Gray.
“I’m delighted to meet you,” the historian said, with what seemed like touching honesty after Lowenthal’s practiced diplomatic manner. “It’s not often one has the opportunity to meet a witness to history as remote as yours.”
“There are thousands more just over the way,” I reminded him. “Although you might need to let some of them lie for a few decades more, until they ripen to the appropriate remoteness.”
He actually blushed. “I’m sorry,” he said, just as honestly. “Michael told me what happened to you. It must be a terrible shock, to have been forgottenlike that.”