“We freezer vets need to stick together,” I reminded her. “If you do feel an overwhelming urge to kill someone…”

It wasn’t a sensible move to try to make a joke out of it. I knew that it wasn’t a joke, and so did she — but old reflexes can be hard to control. She couldn’t contrive a laugh, but she managed to keep on smiling. “Are we in any worse trouble now than we were before?” she wanted to know.

“That’s a good question,” I muttered. “Probably, but possibly not. If the enemy of our enemy is our friend, we probably have a few friends somewhere — but until we figure out who our enemies are, we won’t know where to look for them.”

“Lowenthal and Horne don’t seem to like us any better than they like one another,” she observed. “They don’t even seem to like Adam Zimmerman, although they came a long way to welcome him home.”

“True,” I said. “But something happened back on Excelsior when they first came face to face. That was when Horne started talking about somebody playing somebody for a fool. They don’t trust one another and they don’t trust Davida. Bringing us here doesn’t seem to have been part of Alice’s plans — I got the impression that she’s as much a victim in this as we are, although she and some mysterious companion are trying very hard to be players. I think the hidden players let us wake up because they want to see how Horne and Lowenthal carry their quarrel forward — which is something we need to be interested in too, if we’re to have any chance of figuring out what we’ve been caught up in. All we can be sure of is that whatever plans the sisterhood and Lowenthal’s bosses might have had for us have gone up in smoke. Lowenthal’s not going to like that — bureaucrats always panic when things go awry around them, because they know they’ll have to carry the can whether they were at fault or not.”

“Who actually gave the order to bring us out of the freezer, do you think?” she asked. She’d obviously been doing some hard thinking along lines not dissimilar to the ones I’d been following.

“I don’t know,” was the only reply I could offer her. “I thought at first it had to be Lowenthal’s people, because I thought Ahasuerus had to be in the Cabal’s pocket, no matter how much they might pretend to be a law unto themselves. I’m not so sure now — but whoever originated the order to wake Zimmerman, they didn’t do it for his benefit, let alone ours. No matter what conditions he laid down when he launched the Foundation, they’d have let him rest in peace forever if their hand hadn’t been forced. Now he is back though, and everyone knows it, he’s valuable. He may be the has-been to end all has-beens, but he’s still a potent symbol of the world that was parent to this one. If waking him up was system-wide news, the news that he’s been kidnapped will generate even bigger headlines. If Alice’s Wonderlanders wanted attention, they’ve got it — but if this really is a hijack, Niamh Horne’s people will stop at nothing to find out who stole their beautiful spaceship. When they do, the thieves will have hornets buzzing at them from every direction. Given that they already seem to be arguing among themselves, this business could get verymessy.”

Christine nodded. “Anything else I should know?” she asked.

Now it was my turn to hesitate. I knew that I couldn’t trust her, no matter how hard she was working to build a common cause between us, but there were things I couldn’t figure out, and she had lived through an earlier period of history. I dropped my voice even lower to say: “What kind of people were being frozen down in twenty ninety, do you think? In those days, you had to be a murderer, right? Or a volunteer?”

“I guess so,” she said. “Why?”

“Alice says that she’s older than us,” I whispered. “That means she was in the freezer for more than seven hundred years — maybe as long as eight — before they fished her out three centuries ago. It’s the only real clue I’ve got as to who snatched us, and I can’t make head nor tails of it. That and charity.”

“What?”

“Charity. I was in a storage unit. Most of the stuff stowed in there was newly imported, but some wasn’t. The only word I could make out on the old stuff was charity.”

I didn’t really expect a response, but I saw her eyes light up with inspiration. There was nothing false or grudging about the smile that creased her face now. “Shit,” she said. “Is thatwhere we are?”

I put my finger to my lips immediately, fearful of whatever listening devices the Wonderlanders had planted. “Very softly,” I said, meaning the way she had to whisper it in my ear. “And don’t tell the others just yet. First, we need to figure out whose side we’re on.”

She had just enough time to tell me what Charity was before the knock on the door sounded. It seemed more apologetic than insistent, so I nodded to indicate that she should let the visitor in.

She opened the door cautiously, then stood back to admit Mortimer Gray. He was carrying a bowl, a spoon, and a water bottle, all of them molded in plastic — but not the uninspiring gray stuff that made up the walls. The bowl and spoon seemed to my admittedly uneducated eye to be modern. The water bottle was unsealed.

“It’s only flavored gruel, I’m afraid,” he said. “Guaranteed nutritionally adequate for your kind, however — and we managed to master the microwave oven, so it’s warm without being desiccated.”

“What about me?” Christine wanted to know.

Gray was too polite to answer, so he just gestured with his full hands to remind her that he only had two of them.

She went out, nursing her secret fondly. She closed the door behind her, with ostentatious carefulness.

Twenty-Five

History Lessons

Christine feels that she ought to look out for me,” I explained to Mortimer Gray, as I sat up and took the bowl. “We’re both way out of our depth here, and she thinks we need to stick together. I think the broken nose brought out her maternal instincts. People used to have those, you know — the plague of sterility didn’t wipe them out overnight.”

Gray nodded, as if he understood perfectly. He put the water bottle down on the mattress and hesitated, waiting for an invitation to remain. I inferred that he’d been delegated to get what answers he could from me, on the grounds that I seemed to be less hostile to him than to the other contenders.

“You don’t seem very worried,” I observed. “Lowenthal, Handsel, and Horne are all putting on a tough act, but underneath they’re as scared as poor Davida, if not as terrified as Christine, Adam, and I. You’re not — or are you?”

“If you’re looking for evidence of a conspiracy between our captors and me,” he said, having obviously decided to speak plainly, “you’re looking in the wrong direction. I’ve been in mortal danger before — twice, in fact. It’s surprising how quickly one learns from such experiences. Admittedly, I hadn’t had my IT stripped out on either occasion, but I was rescued both times by the same person. Somehow, I can’t seem to escape the conviction that all I have to do is wait for her to come and get me again. I know it’s absurd, but that doesn’t prevent me from being grateful for the feeling of security.”

“Emily Marchant,” I said, remembering the research I’d done in what was fast becoming an alarmingly distant past. “The way I heard it, yourescued herthe first time.”

“That’s the way others tell it,” he agreed. “But I was there.”

“Emily Marchant is Niamh Horne’s boss,” I observed.

“Not true,” he said. “That’s not the way things work in the Confederation, or on Titan. Emily’s very keen on progress, and that makes her a political animal, but she’s not part of any hierarchical power structure.”

“So it wasn’t her who blew up the Earth?”

His eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t explode at me. “No,” he said. “It certainly wasn’t. You seem to be obsessed with the idea that the solar system is about to be plunged into a war, Mr. Tamlin. Did Alice really tell you that a war is imminent?”