The Omega Expedition (7 page)

When I underwent the adventure described herein I was not the man I am now. I was a fearful stranger in a world that I had not even begun to understand — but no matter how crippling that disadvantage might be to a historian it is no disadvantage at all to a storyteller of the lower kind. Every tale requires a teller, no matter how impersonal he may pretend to be, and there are tales for which the fearful stranger obsessed by his own petty plight is the ideal narrator.

I have the aid of hindsight now, but I shall try to reserve its additional insights for the occasional sidebar and tell the story itself as it actually unfolded around me and in my mind — or as it
seemed
to unfold, given that I was never able to find the experience entirely convincing while I was in the thick of it.

How did Tam Lin feel, do you think, when he first met Janet of Carterhaugh? He had a reputation as a ghost, and she must have taken him for one at first, but how did he see himself and the world he had forsaken? Must they not have seemed like fragments of a dream, after so long a sojourn in Faerie?

How did Tam Lin recover his sense of the reality of Janet’s world, and his sense of his own reality within it? The ballad does not say, because that is not the function of ballads, whose ambitions are essentially low, compared to the lofty pretentions of history. Ballads engage and provoke the imagination; they do not satisfy it. This is a different kind of lostory, and I must try harder to answer such questions — or at least to point out their relevance — but there will always be something of the balladeer in me, because my name requires it.

This is the way that I imagine it.

When Tam Lin saw Janet, and had his attention
caught
, as if by a fisherman’s hook, she must have seemed to him a glorious mystery, whose solution lay deep within himself. Tam Lin would surely have gone in search of that solution, delving into the depths of his transformed being in search of memories of the world which had such creatures in it. He could not have found them immediately, for the Queen of the Fays had confounded his memory. She had not been willing to wipe it out, because that would have obliterated him — her captive, her prize, her toy — but she had blurred it and hidden a few significant details. Perhaps he struggled to fill in the gap with confabulation, telling himself a tale about how it might have been that he had stumbled out of the world and into Faerie. He probably did — not because he was a natural storyteller, but because he had no other way to approach the problem of separating his new and future self from his Faerie self.

Either way, he would eventually have set aside his confusion, and all the mysteries wrapped up in it.

Tam Lin must have said to himself, in the end: “Well then, no matter what has gone before, or why, I must make a new beginning now. I must seize this opportunity, and all that goes with it. I must focus my mind on the matter in hand, and the future which now awaits me. I must set my course and cling to it, no matter what efforts anyone might make to steal it from me.”

He would not, of course, have used those words — but I would, and I am the storyteller here.

When I woke up and found myself in a place I did not know, I searched for a memory of how I got there, and could not find one. I found nothing but confusion. Everything revealed to me by my new situation added to that confusion.

Other men would doubtless have approached the problem differently, but I was and am a Tamlin, so I approached it as a Tamlin would and should. The name might have been chosen at random, but it exerted its force nevertheless, as names inevitably do.

Two

The Wonderful Child

T
he room in which I found myself was sparsely furnished.

Apart from two reclining chairs upholstered in black there was only a small table whose hexagonal top was finished in something that looked like white marble. The walls seemed to be devoid of tangible equipment, although there was a single broad window and various aggregations of colored symbols, whose meaning I couldn’t decipher.

I knew that the impossibly rich star field visible through the window could not be an actual vista viewed through glass, but that was only one reason to suspect that the whole room was an illusion: an artifact of Virtual Experience.

The star field
had
to be a mere image, so the window had to be a kind of screen. There was no reason why the whole setup should not be an image, so Occam’s razor suggested that it was. The room was, admittedly, far more convincing than any room in any VE tape I had ever seen or worked on, but I knew that what I had seen and done was by no means state-of-the-art. My friend Damon Hart had told me about an experience of his, when one of the people at the heart of PicoCon had revealed a secret VE-technology that employed clever Internal Technology to secure an extremely powerful illusion.

I could not remember what I had been doing immediately before falling unconscious, and could not locate myself in time at all. Although I knew who and what I was, I had no idea how to conjure up my “most recent” memory. I had no idea where I was up to in the unfolding narrative of my life, but I did have a vague feeling that whatever I had been doing before I found myself in the strange room had something to do with PicoCon, and something to do with Damon Hart.

I decided that there was no point in chasing ghosts, and that it would be more sensible to concentrate on things of which I could be certain — but it was a difficult resolution to keep, at first.

I could, of course, be certain of the reality of my own stream of consciousness, although even that seemed rather strange and oddly uncomfortable, but I knew that I couldn’t have the same level of certainty about the reality of the smartsuit I appeared to be wearing. Black was my color, and I could as easily have chosen the false cuffs giving way to the fleshtone hands as the slightly ornate false boots and the slightly exaggerated codpiece, but the fact remained that I certainly hadn’t dressed myself.

I didn’t have any actual memory of waking up. Did that mean that I might still be dreaming? Might it mean that I might not be who and what I thought I was at all?

I licked my lips and scratched the back of my neck — traditional tests to be applied by people who were no longer sure whether they were in the real world or in a VE — but it was more by way of ritual than seeking reassurance. I knew that if I really were locked into a heavy-duty VE cocoon with diabolical nanobots standing guard over all my channels of sensory experience, there was no way I was going to penetrate the illusion by means of such crude and elementary tests.

I had to think my way through my predicament.

With the aid of hindsight, I can now understand that the suspicion that I was locked into a manufactured illusion was an asset. It insulated me against all possible surprises, all possible alarms. Had I not spent so much of my early life manufacturing and doctoring admittedly primitive VE tapes for sale to fans of vicarious sex, violence, and adventure, I might have been a great deal more disturbed by the discoveries I was about to make, but I was better equipped than most to find out what had become of me without experiencing terror or madness.

For a few minutes, therefore, I was content simply to stare at the occupant of the other chair. She looked like a child — female, I guessed, although I wasn’t entirely confident of the judgment — of approximately nine years of age.

Her smartsuit wasn’t as snug as mine, and it was much more brightly colored: intricately patterned in sky blue, lilac and wine red. The way she looked back at me suggested so strongly that she wasn’t what she seemed that I was almost convinced that she had to be an illusion: a visual trick like the star field outside the window.

When PicoCon had attempted to intimidate Damon he had been “taken” to a ledge half way up an impossibly high mountain and interrogated by a humanoid figure whose surface was a mirror. It had been a demonstration of awesome power and an invitation to temptation. Damon had told me at the time that he had remained obdurate in the face of that temptation, and I think he meant it. Alas, he had underestimated the force of his own wisdom and his capacity for compromise; he had eventually given in and joined the ruling elite.

I had always prided myself on having more self-knowledge than my one-time protégé, even when our roles were reversed, and I was prepared to respond to any threat or temptation in a thoroughly realistic manner.

After deciding that the nine-year-old girl was only wearing that appearance, concealing within it something far older, probably artificial and possibly dangerous, I deliberately looked away. I looked out of the “window,” at the star field.

It seemed the obvious thing to do: why else would the window be part of the scene?

All stars look alike, especially when aggregated in their millions, so it didn’t take long to absorb the impression. I was tempted to get up and go to the window, to touch it — and by that touching, perhaps, to reveal its falsity. I had already made enough small movements, though, to inform myself that something was wrong with my sense of weight and balance. I wasn’t sure that I could get up without seeming awkward, and I wasn’t sure that I could walk to the window without stumbling. I had to suppose that if I weren’t stuck in VE I must be some place where the gravity was less than Earth’s — maybe as much as twenty or thirty percent less. That seemed absurd enough to strengthen the hypothesis that I was in a VE — but even in a VE one can easily lose one’s balance.

I didn’t want to appear clumsy. I wanted to offer the appearance of a man in full control of himself: a man who couldn’t be thrown by any combination of circumstances, no matter how upsetting they might have been to an
ordinary
mortal.

So I looked back at the fake little girl, having decided that the sensible thing to do was to open negotiations.

She got there ahead of me.

“How do you feel, Mr. Tamlin?” the little girl asked.

“Not quite myself,” I told her, truthfully. “Is that you, Damon?” It was a hopeful question. If the whole thing was a fake, a petty and purposeless melodrama, then the better possibility was that it had been rigged by a friend rather than an enemy. Perhaps it was my birthday, and Damon had laid on a surprise party in Dreamland.

“My name is Davida Berenike Columella,” the little girl replied. “I’m the chief cryogenic engineer on the microworld Excelsior, in the Counter-Earth Cluster.”

“Wow,” I said, as casually as I could, by way of demonstrating my refusal to be impressed or startled. “The Counter-Earth Cluster. What year is it supposed to be?”

In my day, there had been no cluster of microworlds making its way around Earth’s orbital path on the far side of the sun, although there had been a couple of clusters at Lagrange points much closer to home.

“By our reckoning, this is year ninety-nine,” the child answered. “According to the Christian Era calendar that was in use when you were frozen down, this year would be three thousand two hundred and sixty-three. March the twenty-first of that year, to be exact.”

I wanted to say “wow” again, but I couldn’t muster enough ironic contempt. I swallowed, although there was nothing in my mouth or throat to swallow.

“I seem to have mislaid some of my memories,” I said, less confidently than I would have liked. “Could you possibly remind me of what I’ve been doing lately?”

She nodded her head gravely. “I understand that short-term memory loss was a common side effect of the SusAn technologies in use in your time,” she said. “Our records are incomplete, but it seems that you were frozen down on the third of September twenty-two zero-two, presumably by order of a court.

“
Frozen down?
” I couldn’t help reacting to that as if it were true, but I collected myself quickly enough. It wasn’t entirely impossible that I had ended up in court, and if one added all my petty crimes together, it wasn’t implausible that I might have got a custodial sentence — but I couldn’t remember being arrested, let alone charged and convicted. In any case, even though the fashionable sentence of the day was indeterminate in length — on the grounds that many of those committed to Suspended Animation were “habitual delinquents” from which the public needed and deserved “due protection” — I
knew
that I couldn’t have been convicted of anything that would get me put away for longer than a couple of years. I was utterly convinced that I couldn’t have
done
anything that would have got me put away for more than a couple of years.

Or could I?

Surely I would have remembered carrying out a massacre or blowing up a building full of people.

Then again, I thought, what would
anyone
have to do to justify putting them away for more than a thousand years?

What the child was telling me was that I had been woken up a mere hundred days before my eleven hundredth birthday, having served a term of “imprisonment” of one thousand and sixty years, six months, and a couple of weeks. Even allowing for the fact that SusAn confinement provided no scope for remission on the grounds of good behavior, that seemed a trifle excessive.

I really did think that: “a trifle excessive.” Such was the balanced state of my mind, cushioned by the commanding suspicion that this was all a game, a VE drama.

“What else do you know about me?” I asked the child.

“Very little,” she replied. “Now that you know my name and the date and place of your awakening, you know as much about us as we know about you.” I didn’t believe her. I was sure that it had to be a game, a ploy, a tease — anything but the truth.

“You must know what I was frozen down
for
,” I countered, warily.

“That datum appears to have been erased from the record,” she said. “Do you remember doing anything that might have given rise to a sentence of imprisonment?”

I thought she was mocking me. I remembered a considerable number of trivial offenses. It occurred to me that I might have been convicted of “treasonous sabotage” — which is to say, deleting and falsifying official data with malicious and fraudulent intent. It was a crime I had committed more than once, and for a variety of reasons. So far as I could remember, though, in the years immediately preceding the summer of 2202 I had only done such things while acting according to the requests and under the orders of the Secret Masters of the World — or, more prosaically, Damon Hart. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility that I had been ratted out to the UN Police by my own employers. My arrest and conviction might conceivably have been a sop in the convoluted diplomatic game the Secret Masters still felt obliged to play against the representatives of a World Democracy that had not yet been reduced to absolute impotence. But it didn’t seem likely.