“How old are you?” I asked, refusing to budge. I’d snatched the question out of midair, spurred on by desperation to get something more, however slight. The only thing she’d so far shown any willingness to talk about was herself.
She hesitated, and this time she was definitely seized by a genuine uncertainty. She couldn’t quite bring a lie to bear in time to stop the truth tripping off the tip of her tongue.
“Older than you,” she said.
It wasn’t an answer I had expected, but I was quick enough to follow it up. “How much older?”
Again she hesitated, and again she decided to shame the devil, although she didn’t actually answer the question I’d asked. “I was frozen down in 2090,” she said, “and revived three hundred and fifty years ago, give or take a couple. It can be done, if that’s one of the things you want to know. Our kind can adapt, become emortal, and get a life. You can find a place in the scheme of things too, Mr. Tamlin, if they’ll only give you the chance.”
She was trying as hard as she could to be kind to me, I realized. There was an element of fellow feeling in her determination to help me, because she’d gone through what I was going through herself — except, maybe, for the feeling of betrayal. I took note of the fact that she was now talking about a “they” as well as, or instead of, the “we” she’d referred to before. I decided that it was time to start playing along, and let her steer me back toward the cupboard door.
“Thanks,” I said, touching the dressing on my nose but not meaning that alone.
“You’ll be okay,” she assured me, also not meaning my nose. “You really have to go now. You can tell the others that we really are trying to help and protect them. We’ll do our best to make sure that no harm comes to you.”
I wished that she sounded more confident about that. I was grateful that she had taken the trouble to patch me up, albeit crudely, and I wanted to acknowledge the fact. I also thought that it might be a wise move to offer her something in return, in order to tighten the bond between us. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what I had that would constitute a worthwhile offer. I settled, for some reason I couldn’t fathom even at the time, on a trivial personal confession.
“Alice is a curiously reassuring name,” I told her, as I paused in the doorway. “I’ve always had a thing about names, including my own. Tam Lin was a man who was kidnapped by fairies, and served their queen as a lover and champion while generations went by on Earth. In the end, he got back again — thanks to a young woman — but he came perilously close to being sent to Hell in the interim. I hope I’ll be as lucky.”
Oddly enough, my fascination with my namesake was something I’d only ever mentioned to one other person — not, as it happened, Damon Hart, but Diana Caisson.
“You have to go back now,” was all she said in reply, as she shoved me out into the darkness. “I’ll try as hard as I can to get permission to tell you everything, but I daren’t go ahead without. The situation’s too tricky.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I dare say we can make up a few stories of our own in the meantime.”
Twenty-Four
Charity
Ihad gone into the darkness a victim, but I came back as the only man who had met the enemy. I was the new star of the show.
“They don’t seem to have the medical facilities to fix us up properly, so we’d better be extra careful in future,” I told the others when they crowded round me, putting on a display of being concerned for my welfare. “This dressing is early twenty-first century and the anesthetic is beginning to wear off already. These are codeine — that’s an ancient morphine precursor.” I showed them the bottle of pills, but didn’t mention what Alice had said about maybe having something better available tomorrow.
“I didn’t know it was you,” Solantha Handsel said, yet again. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I know,” I said. “It could have been anyone. There’s a lesson in that for all of us.”
“What did you find out?” Niamh Horne cut in. “Where are we? Earth?”
“There is absolutely no possibility that we’re on Earth,” Lowenthal was quick to say. “They’re simulating Earth-gravity for deceptive purposes. How could anyone on Earth have the knowledge necessary to hijack a Titanian spaceship?”
“How could anyone else?” the cyborganizer came back.
All of which deflected sufficient attention away from me to let me shuffle through the crowd, heading for the door of the cell from which I’d emerged. “My head’s pounding and I’ve lost more than a litre of blood,” I muttered, harshly. “I have to lie down.”
That helped to refocus their attention. “Tell us what you found out first,” Lowenthal said, in what might have passed for a polite tone if he’d been a better actor.
I decided to keep my hand hidden, for the time being, on the grounds that the few cards I held might look a bit more impressive when I’d worked out how best to play them.
“I didn’t find out anything much,” I told him. “She says she wants to tell us everything but needs permission — she wouldn’t say from whom. She says she’s trying to protect us, but won’t say from whom. She says that she’s trying to prevent a war, but reckons I don’t have the imagination to understand who might be fighting it or why. The only solid fact I know is that her name’s Alice.”
“Alice?” Lowenthal queried, with an almost imperceptible sneer of disbelief, as he tried to get around me so that he could block my path to the doorway.
Surprisingly, Christine Caine stepped casually into hispath and practically shoved him out of my way. “As in Wonderland,” she said. “Madoc needs to rest. You can all leave him alone until he feels better, okay?”
It was sheer amazement rather than politeness or caution which kept Solantha Handsel from felling Christine with a casual blow of her fist, but Lowenthal was much quicker on the diplomatic uptake. He turned on Niamh Horne as if she were the one making difficulties. “Christine’s right,” he said. “There’s no hurry. Madoc needs time to recover. We can save all the questions till later. I think we ought to eat, if we can figure out how to work this antique equipment. Do you know how to do that, Christine?”
“Figure it out for yourself, asshole,” was her reply to that ploy. She shepherded me into the cell and shut the door behind her. “Are you okay?” she asked, anxiously, as I climbed back into the lower bunk. “You did lose a lot of blood — and pills aren’t going to help.”
“I’ve bled before,” I told her. “Thanks for that.”
“We freezer vets need to stick together,” she told me. I hoped fervently that it was true. I understood why she was trying to forge an alliance. She was as fearful as the rest of us, although she didn’t want to make her terror too obvious, and she knew only too well that she was the remotest outsider in our little company.
She came closer, and leaned over so that her head was only a few centimeters from mine. “Are they listening in on us?” she asked.
“Of course they are,” I murmured. “No matter how ancient this place is, or how recently our captors moved in, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to wire it for sound. Unfortunately, the pirates are probably the only ones listening in. We can’t know for sure that they flushed out allour IT, or why, but they wanted to make as certain as they could be that none of us was carrying bugs capable of signaling our whereabouts to the outside world. Horne’s external implants may have all kinds of talents we don’t know about, but my guess is that our friendly neighborhood kidnappers are the only ones who can hear us.”
She nodded. “So who’s our friend and who’s our enemy?” she wanted to know. “Just give me your best guess,” she added, as an afterthought.
“I wish I knew,” I said.
Perhaps there was something in my tone that I hadn’t intended to put into it, or perhaps she wanted to do her level best to convince herself. At any rate, her eyes narrowed slightly and she said: “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m not dangerous. Not to you.”