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 hadn’t read the script. They were sticky, and they couldn’t 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 wasn’t going to speak at all, but he finally slipped into the groove. He had already memorized his script, and twelve centuries of frozen sleep hadn’t eroded thatmemory.

“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 gambler’s 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 didn’t 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 shouldn’t 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 Zimmerman’s return, but in the end tiredness demanded that we sleep.

“Eventually,” I told Christine, before we retired to our separate spaces, “they’ll have to let us in. When Zimmerman finds out we exist, he’ll want to meet us.” I couldn’t put much conviction into the claim.

“Sure,” she said. “ Hey, Adam, they’ll 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 wasn’t so sure that I was as petty a criminal as I remembered, but I certainly didn’t want to make an issue of it.

I slept for eight hours. If I dreamed I didn’t remember the dream — and I realized, when I woke, that I hadn’t had a single memorable dream since I’d 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 hadn’t 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 Horne’s super-duper spaceship. I accepted with alacrity.

Any lingering hope I might have entertained of seeing more of the microworld vanished when yet another pod grew out of the wall, avid to embrace me. When I stepped into it the fleshy interior hugged me so tightly that I didn’t even notice the gradual easing of the pseudogravitational attraction until it spat me out into the ship — at which point I would have floated helplessly away if the floor hadn’t grabbed the soles of my feet.

I’d got to the point where it was nice to see any kind of open space — but any elation that might have accompanied the discovery that I was in a real corridor was offset by the terrible sensation of weightlessness. My IT, like Christine

Caine’s, had edited out my capacity for panic, but it had no provision for me to feel good about the things that might have panicked me.

There was quite a crowd awaiting me, but Mortimer Gray was the only one who seemed to care whether I needed help. Once he had ascertained that I had never been in zero-gee before he took up a position beside me, ready to steady me as I took my first faltering steps into the brightly lit interior of Child of Fortune. I had to focus on my internal organs, which seemed to be taking advantage of their newfound opportunities by rearranging themselves.

“It’s okay,” Gray told me. “Your IT will help you adapt if you let it. All you have to remember is to move slowly and deliberately until you get the hang of it, and always to keep one foot on the floor. The floor’s as smart as the fabric of your suit; together they’ll keep you right way up and on track.”

“I suppose you do this all the time,” I said, through teeth that were only slightly gritted.

“Hardly ever,” he assured me. “But I’ve lived on the moon, which isn’t so very different. It was a long time ago now, and the conscious memory’s exceedingly hazy, but the body has a memory of its own. The autonomic reflexes soon come back. Just relax.”

I decided to accept my discomfort as evidence of the fact that I wasn’t just a mechanical simulation, and that everything I was experiencing was really happening. I told myself that if I really was going to live for a thousand or a hundred thousand years I’d probably be spending a great deal of time in zero-gee, given the size of the universe and the ratio of nothingness to substance.

Fortunately, we had a few minutes’ grace before the party was finalized by Christine Caine’s arrival. She made ten. Lowenthal and Handsel were there, but not de Comeau or Conwin. Davida was stationed to one side of Adam Zimmerman, Niamh Horne to the other. There was one other humaniform cyborg, whose feet were on the “floor,” plus a faber cyborg whose four limbs were all arms — one of which was lazily extended to the webbing that dressed the “vertical” walls.

Nobody volunteered to introduce me to Adam Zimmerman, and I didn’t feel sufficiently confident of my footing to stride across the eight meters that separated our stations and offer to shake his hand. He must have looked me up and down while I was still confused, but he had looked away by the time I was capable of meeting his gaze. We both watched Christine Caine emerge from her pod.

She was just as awkward as I had been, and Gray was still the only one with social conscience enough to help her. He was even polite enough to murmur “excuse me” to me as he moved to do it. I would have helped if I could, but I couldn’t.

Niamh Horne was obviously the one in charge now that we were on her territory, and everyone looked to her to take the lead — which she did with an imperious manner that seemed almost insulting. She swept Adam Zimmerman away with her, and her two cronies moved with effortless ease to form a barrier between the two of them and the rest of us.