“Why?” I said, with a smile. “I thought we all got along famously.”

Davida grinned at that, and her face was instantly transformed into that of a realmischievous child. But she knew that it wasn’t entirely a joking matter.

“Whatever those two may think,” she said, “my instructions came through the customary channels, and were quite explicit. It’s entirely possible that there is a dispute within the ranks of the Foundation, but I’ve every reason to believe that the decision was proper and authoritative. If there are problems between the UN and the Confederation, I know nothing about them.” She changed tack abruptly then, and asked: “Why did you make the assumption that Solantha Handsel is Michael Lowenthal’s bodyguard?”

“Because she looks like one,” I told her. “Maybe appearances are deceptive, given the passage of a thousand years, and maybe people nowadays think everything’s just for show, but I’ve seen realbodyguards. The big boys at PicoCon used to take their personal protection very seriously, and it wasn’t the Eliminators they were worried about.”

Davida was enough of an innocent not to catch the implication of the final remark, so I elaborated. “There was still a certain amount of competition for places on the Ultimate Board,” I told her. “Damon didn’t have to kill anyone in order to step into dead men’s shoes, so far as I knew, but some of his colleagues did. In a world where everyone lives for a long time, people with ambition sometimes have to use unconventional measures to make room for themselves. I assume that’s still the case.”

“Not on Excelsior,” Davida told me — but the fact that she’d put it that way suggested that she wasn’t so sure about Earth and the outer satellites.

“It’s only ninety-nine years since a whole lot of shoes fell vacant at a stroke,” I reminded her. “I’m a stranger here, but I can’t help wondering how closely Excelsior is in touch with the rest of the solar system. Personally, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that Michael Lowenthal is more than a little worried about the way things are back home. Wouldn’t you be anxious, if yourworld had recently suffered an accident of that magnitude?”

Davida didn’t answer immediately, but she certainly seemed to take the thought aboard. “Something is going on that I don’t understand,” she confessed. “Somewhere, there’s been a drastic failure of communication. We’ll have to get together with both delegations, to work out exactly who’s been misled, and how…” She broke off then, realizing like Horne before her that these might be matters best not discussed in front of a barbarian refugee from the twenty-third century. “Christine Caine has asked to be allowed to see the interior of the Child of Fortune,” she told me, changing her tone decisively. “I relayed the request to Niamh Horne, who said that she would be pleased to guide a party around the ship — including Mr. Lowenthal and Dr. Gray — as soon as Adam Zimmerman is awake. Would you like to be included?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

Davida nodded. “It should be very interesting,” she observed. “It’s an opportunity I’ve never had myself. The ship that rescued Dr. Gray from the Arctic Ocean must have been similar in kind, but a much older model.” She seemed to be groping toward a point without being entirely clear what it was.

“You don’t actually know whose decision it was to wake Adam Zimmerman up, do you?” I asked her, trying to sound sympathetic.

The way she looked up at me told me that she had begun to doubt it. She and the sisterhood were an Ahasuerus project, not executive directors of the organization. In all likelihood, she had no idea where the real power within the organization was located, or how that power related to the power wielded by Michael Lowenthal’s associates and Niamh Horne’s. When the instructions had come through, she’d been only too glad to obey them, because it had been a great opportunity, and a great honor. She had not interrogated their source — and now she was wondering whether the someone that had been misled, or played for a fool, might be her.

“It really is the right time,” she said, instead of answering the question. “It’s neither too soon nor too late. And his awakening really is a key event in posthuman history, no matter how hard anyone might try to make light of it.”

“You don’t need to convince me,” I told her, although I knew that it wasn’t me she was trying to convince. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time to qualify as a trial run. Didn’t I?”

She didn’t 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.

“We’ll be starting the final phase of the procedure soon,” she said. “I’ll let you know, so that you can watch through the window. That’s what everyone else will be doing. Not only here, but everywhere — just as soon as the light reaches them. We’re expecting an audience of millions, perhaps billions. It might have been a freak of chance that brought you here, but you’ll be in a privileged position.”

What she was trying to say was that I’d 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, I’d 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 wasn’t just that Adam Zimmerman and I shared the same mortal blood; given the opportunity, I’d 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 Zimmerman’s awakening.

“Thank you, Madoc,” she said, with all apparent sincerity.

Eighteen

Adam Zimmerman’s Awakening

Ihadn’t 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 we’d 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, I’d never bothered to research the topic in detail. It wasn’t until I watched the later phases of Adam Zimmerman’s 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 I’d 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.