“What’s that?” she wanted to know.

“ Thisisn’t a dream,” I told her. “Everything else might have been a trip in a fancy VE, but not this.” I touched my broken nose, very gently indeed. “No matter how preposterous the situation seems, I’m certain now that we’re awake. I wasn’t before, but I am now. And given that this is real, we’re in realtrouble. Whatever game we were playing before, the game we have to play now is trying to figure out how to stay alive.”

“I worked that out for myself,” she assured me, drily. “Is it Zimmerman they want, do you think? Or Lowenthal?”

“I haven’t a clue,” I admitted. “But this place looks as if it’s Zimmerman’s vintage, whatever that implies. Do you have any idea how long we’ve been here? That is, how long has it been since we stepped aboard Child of Fortune?”

“Nobody knows,” she told me. “Horne reckons it must have been at least twelve days. She says the real question is why we’ve finally been woken up. They’re all standing around out there waiting for some kind of contact. Nobody believes that the space battle was real, but nobody can figure out how the ship wastaken over, if it was taken over. You were unlucky — Handsel probably wishes she’d hit Horne while she had the excuse. Then again, Horne probably wishes she’d had a chance to disable Handsel. Do you want me to go and listen in, to see what I can pick up?

It seemed like a good idea, although I didn’t know why she was asking. Maybe it was politeness, because we were cellmates or because I’d been hurt, or maybe she was just the kind of person who needed more reasons than she could provide for herself. “Sure,” I said. “I’ll be okay. I just need a few minutes.”

She went, leaving me to my own devices.

I kept telling myself, over and over, that I had advantages over my fellow prisoners, and not just because I had lived without IT before. I had previous experience of jail cells, and uncontrollable pain. Unfortunately, I was badly out of practice. Telling myself that the broken nose was no worse than injuries I had suffered before didn’t seem to help at all. Telling myself that I still had to go through it whether it was bearable or not didn’t help either.

By the time I had been awake for what seemed like a further hour I had begun to wish that I had never recovered consciousness, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get back to sleep. Lying still with my eyes shut kept the agony to a minimum, but even the minimum didn’t seem tolerable.

It seemed as if a subjective eternity had passed when Christine Caine came back into the cell and put a tentative hand on my arm. I opened my eyes and tried to focus on her face, although moving my head brought new tears to my eyes.

“The woman on the screen says they’re willing to take a look at you, maybe give you something for the pain,” she said.

“What woman?” I asked, dazedly.

“On the screen,” she repeated, patiently. “They’ve opened communications. I’m not sure they wanted to talk to us this soon, but I guess they’re worried about you. If you can get to the far door while the rest of us stay back, they’ll let you through and take a look at your nose. So she says.”

Christine kept her hand on my arm while I maneuvered myself off the bunk, but she didn’t actually help. I managed to stand up without re-starting the bleeding, and stumbled after her as she led the way.

The others just watched. Apart from Mortimer Gray, they didn’t seem unduly concerned about my state of health, although Michael Lowenthal looked as if he were about to say something until the presence of the others inhibited him.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out what he wanted to say. Find out what you can. Don’t tell anyone except me.

Paranoid as I was, I couldn’t quite credit Lowenthal with having had enough foresight to have told his minder to break something in order to create exactly this sort of opportunity.

Adam Zimmerman looked at me in a way that seemed to say there but for the grace of God go I. I couldn’t remember whether it was the first time we had locked gazes long enough for it to count as communication.

When I was left alone in front of the relevant door I heard a distinct click, and then the handle turned. The door swung inward, but the darkness beyond seemed impenetrable. I hesitated, but it had to be reckoned a useful opportunity.

I walked forward into the gloom, which became absolute as the door slammed shut behind me.

Twenty-Three

Alice

Another hand, no bigger than Christine’s, gripped my sleeve. “This way,” said a female voice.

I hadn’t seen the woman on the screen, so I couldn’t visualize a face to fit the clutching hand. It pulled me half a dozen paces forward, then to the left. I moved clumsily through another doorway, bumping my shoulder as I went.

When the woman had activated the light switch I saw that we were in a room no bigger than a cupboard. In fact, it actually seemed to be a cupboard, albeit a large one.

We were surrounded by storage racks, some of them crammed and some of them empty. The shelves had numbers on, which appeared to have been stenciled on the gray plastic in black paint. As in the cells and the room into which the cells opened, everything seemed unbelievably old. There were more rivet heads visible as well as hexagonal bolt heads. Most, but not all, of the packages stowed on the occupied racks looked much more recent. The ones that didn’t seem to constitute fresh stock looked very old indeed, stylistically speaking, but they weren’t showing much sign of dilapidation or decay.

The woman who was reaching up to test the damage done to my nose was fully matured, but there was no way of telling how old she might be. Her hair was dark and her complexion had a peculiar bluish tint. Her eyes were blue, but a darker shade than I had ever seen before. She was wearing a smartsuit; it wasn’t fashionably cut, by the standards of my time, but it looked — at least to my uneducated eye — far more like the ones commonly worn in the twenty-second century than the one I’d been fitted with on Excelsior.

“Hold still,” she said, as she rolled back my left sleeve and wrapped something around the bare forearm. It was an elastic bandage made of some kind of smart fabric, connected by bundles of artificial nerves to a box. I didn’t feel anything, but I guessed that it would send feelers into my arm to test the blood pressure.

“It’s my face that needs the treatment,” I pointed out, ashamed of the thickness of my voice and roughness of pronunciation.”

“It’s already been reset, albeit crudely,” she told me. “I’ll put a dressing on it to reduce the swelling and apply local anesthetic, but there’s not much I can do at present to compensate for the blood loss. I don’t have repair nanobots ready to hand — it’ll take until tomorrow, at the earliest, to produce an emergency supply. Fortunately, the blood loss doesn’t seem to have been too bad. The spill looked worse than it was.”

She showed me the dressing she intended to apply. It just about qualified as smart, but it was a kind that had virtually disappeared in my time, even in parts of the world where nobody had decent IT or worthwhile medical insurance.

“That isn’t going to do much for the pain,” I complained.

She picked something up from a nearby shelf and handed it to me. It was a plastic bottle containing pills — perhaps twenty of them.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Codeine,” she told me.

“Codeine! That’s antediluvian. What the hell is this place?”

“We hadn’t expected you to start trying to kill one another as soon as you woke up,” she countered, drily. Her tone changed, though, as she kept talking. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to serve as an example, to warn the others to look after themselves — and one another — a little bit better. If I had something ready to hand I’d give it to you, but I don’t. All that’s presently in the stores is pre-nanotech medical apparatus — whose evolution, as Mortimer Gray will doubtless be pleased to explain to you, virtually petered out as soon as the first IT suites came on to the market. I can get something better, but it’ll take time. Quiet now.”