I made no attempt to get up, but I muttered and stirred, expecting that somebody would take notice and kneel down. They weren’t in any hurry to oblige, but one of them eventually took the hint. It was Niamh Horne again, and I flinched reflexively.
“Sorry about that,” she said. “It seemed to be the right thing to do. I didn’t realize. Sorry.”
Mortimer Gray knelt down with her. Like Lowenthal and Zimmerman, he now had a beard of sorts, but his looked more remarkable than theirs because its dark brown color clashed with his silver hair. “I think you’ll be okay, Mr. Tamlin,” he said. “It looks worse than it is. Very unfortunate, but not mortal.” Not mortalwas easy enough for him to say — even without his IT, he was engineered for emortality at the cellular level. I carefully refrained from touching my nose to investigate how badly out of shape it was.
“Where are we?” I contrived to ask.
“We don’t know,” Gray said. “The simple answer is that we’re in a cluttered room with seven doors. Four of them open into cells like the one you woke up in. The other three are locked. There are several antique wallscreens, but only two control panels, both of which seem to be inactive. Like all the other equipment, they seem ridiculously primitive. The gravity seems to be Earth-normal, but nobody’s ready to conclude, as yet, that we’re on Earth. If it’s not spin, it might be acceleration — but if it’s acceleration, we don’t have any clue where we might be headed. We don’t know how long it’s been since we were aboard the Titanian ship, although it must have taken between eight and ten days to flush our IT, and the growth of our body hair can’t have begun until that process was at least halfway through. The means they used to keep us asleep seems to have been rather crude if the way we feel is a reliable guide. Did you see the thing that seemed to capture Child of Fortune?”
“Yes,” I said, thickly, unable for the moment to say more.
“We don’t believe in it either,” he said, picking up the skepticism in my tone. “Opinions are sharply divided, however, as to what kind of real story the fake was covering up. Accusations have been flowing freely, but I think Niamh and Michael have called a truce for the time being. At least nobody’s suggested that youwere to blame. That gives you an advantage over the rest of us.”
It was obvious that he had not been excluded from the riot of accusations.
“Who stands to gain from taking us prisoner?” I said, thickly but just about comprehensibly.
“We haven’t been able to figure that out either,” Gray said, looking at Niamh Horne — who was obviously suspect number one in everyone’s eyes but her own.
“The greater enigma,” the cyborg said, grimly, “is howsomeone contrived to take us prisoner. Taking control of Child of Fortune’s AIs should have been impossible.”
“Impossible for outside agencies, maybe,” another voice put in — I guessed that it was Lowenthal’s, although it sounded far less smooth than it had before — “but if it were an inside job…”
“If it had been me,” the Titanian snapped back, “I wouldn’t have brought your pet gladiator — and I’d have kept a couple of my own people. I can’t believe that it was anyone on my crew…and even if I could believe it, I can’t believe that they’d bring us to Earth. Only your people would do that. I didn’t think the Cabal had the intelligence, let alone the technics, but I guess you might have sharpened up your act since you accidentally blew North America away and shriveled Garden Earth to mulch. On the other hand, I can’t see how you had the opportunity.” There was a pause while she redirected her attention. “Only youhad that,” she added. I knew that she had to be staring at Davida.
I was beginning to feel left out again, so I decided to sit up. It wasn’t easy, but I managed it. I had to remind myself that I was supposed to be a hard man, a real fighter. I had to tell myself, very sternly, that if we were all equal now, in terms of our clothing and internal resources, then I ought to be vying for leadership of the pack instead of lying flat out and feeling exceedingly sorry for myself.
“You ought to lie down,” Niamh Horne told me. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, and we no longer seem to have the kind of help that we normally rely on to make such losses good.
“I’m okay,” I lied, fighting the dizziness. I could see how much blood there was on the gray floor now, and how much there was on the pale blue sleeves of my dead shirt. My trousers were pale blue too, except where they’d picked up bloodstains from the floor. Everybody’s clothes were pale blue. They had to be uniforms of some kind, although they seemed ridiculously casual as well as inert.
“Better do as she says, Mr. Tamlin,” Solantha Handsel put in, flatly. “I hit you hard. I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was. It could have been a hostile.”
“If I wasn’t a hostile before,” I managed to mutter, darkly, “I am now.” She didn’t seem impressed.
“Come on, Mr. Tamlin,” said Mortimer Gray. “I’ll help you.” He lent me an arm so that I could raise myself from a sitting position to a standing one. I felt faint, and I had to fight hard against the impulse to lie back down again. I’d sat up because I wanted to keep better track of the argument, but the argument had been suspended now while everyone put on a collaborative show of sympathy. Michael Lowenthal seemed very anxious indeed, although he might have been overacting — or he might, of course, have been projecting an anxiety he really felt for himself. Emortal or not, he knew how vulnerable he was without IT assistance.
Mortimer Gray continued to hang on to my arm, to make sure that I didn’t keel over again. When he was sure that I wouldn’t he steered me back toward the door from which I’d unwisely emerged on my exploratory mission, obviously intent on seeing me safety back to my bed. I resisted, but I didn’t have the strength to make the resistance stick. In the end, I decided that I could only benefit from a brief interval of rest, and allowed myself to be guided.
Christine Caine followed us into the cell, with the air of one who thought she had a legitimate claim to the territory. I took that to mean that she hadbeen the person in the upper bunk. I wondered briefly whether I ought to put in for a transfer, but it seemed unlikely that anyone was going to volunteer to trade — not only because no one else would want to share with Christine but also because no one else would want to share with me.
I figured that I had the rough end of the deal. If I had been deprived of my IT, I reasoned, so had Christine. Whatever internal censors the sisterhood had put in place to ensure that she didn’t revert to type were presumably gone. She didn’t look dangerous at the moment, but I had seen Bad Karma.
I lay down in the bottom bunk. Mercifully, the dizziness relinquished its hold on my head almost immediately.
“I’m sorry, Madoc,” Mortimer Gray said, moving toward the door, “but we have to get this sorted out, if we can.”
I was tempted to tell him that he shouldn’t leave me out of the discussion, and certainly shouldn’t leave me alone with a crazy mass murderer, but I didn’t have the energy. I needed time to recover my wits.
“Are you okay?” the crazy mass murderer said, looking down at me. “Do you want me to stay?”
I resisted the temptation to laugh. I tried to shake my head, but it wasn’t the ideal gesture to attempt in my condition.
She stayed anyway. “Do you have any idea what’s going on?” she asked, paying me a compliment of sorts.
“It looks as if we’ve been kidnapped by space pirates,” I said, weakly. “In fact, one way or another, that’s what it amounts to. Whether the pirates are from Earth, or Titan, or Excelsior, or somewhere else entirely, we’re still kidnapped. I expect we’ll find out soon enough what happens next. Maybe we get held for ransom, auctioned to the highest bidder. There’s only one thing I’msure of.”