Read Online The Omega Expedition by Brian Stableford - Free Book Online Page B

detail, and it seemed wisest to accentuate the positive side of my dealings. “Mostly with a woman named Rachel Trehaine,” I added. “We helped her out a few times, and she did as much for us — you might be able to check that in your records.”
    She didn’t reply to that immediately. I inferred that our conversation was being closely monitored, and that someone somewhere was making haste to trawl the records for any mention of Rachel Trehaine.
    I figured that I was going to have to try to stand up eventually, so I took advantage of the momentary lull to make my tentative move.
    I probably swayed a bit, but I didn’t float away or flail my arms about in an unnecessarily comic fashion. I guessed that the gravity must be about three-quarters Earth normal — easy enough to get used to, I supposed, with a little care and practice.
    But why, I thought, would anyone rig a VE to simulate nonstandard gravity?
    The two chairs had been set three paces apart, so there was a considerable gap to cross before I could reach out and touch the wonderful child, but I took my time over it and couldn’t have seemed particularly clownish.
    She read the intention immediately, and flinched.
    She didn’t protest and she didn’t move, but her eyes told me that she was scared. Now she was the one being subjected to a test.
    I didn’t know exactly why, but the sight of that fear, innocently manifest in her childlike eyes made me suddenly apprehensive. For the first time, I became anxious.
    What am I, in her eyes? I wondered. What have I become, in the space of a thousand years, that I should seem so terrible?

Three
    Madoc the Monster
    I had known even before I got up that touching the wonderful child wouldn’t prove anything. If I were as ingeniously cocooned as I might be, with clever IT supporting every aspect of an illusion, nothing would prove that my experience was real — but the terrified expression on Davida Berenike Columella’s face looked genuine, all the more so because she was struggling so hard to control it.
    I hesitated, trying to gauge the situation more accurately.
    It seemed to me that she didn’t want to be afraid, but that she couldn’t help it. Even if we weren’t in a VE, there was probably nothing much I could do to hurt or damage her, but she still couldn’t help her reaction. After all, if we weren’t in a VE, then I was presumably a monster out of the distant past, who had been committed to a term of indefinite imprisonment for a crime so dreadful that it had been expunged from the record. She had no reason to be certain that I wasn’t a homicidal maniac.
    But I reached out and touched her face anyway.
    Maybe I was a monster.
    The touch was gentle and brief; her relief when I took my hand away was as palpable as her anxiety had been.
    “How old are you, really?” I asked, speaking softly.
    “Two hundred and twenty years,” she told me.
    “And you’re not speaking through some kind of sim? You really look like this, in the flesh?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    If she was telling the truth, I realized, I was a stranger in a very strange land. More must have changed in a thousand years than I could ever have anticipated. It was an uncomfortable thought — but I was Madoc Tamlin, the spiritual descendant of one man who had been chained to a rock of sacrifice to fight the six champions of an alien land and one who had come back to Earth from Faerie, in spite of all that the Queen of the Fays had done to keep him and send him to hell.
    I retreated to my chair, still moving gingerly. I sat down again, but I perched myself more stiffly and alertly than the posture I had been given when I was allowed to awake.
    “Does everybody look like you now?” I asked.
    “Only in Excelsior,” she told me. “There are a great many human races. Some still look like you.”
    I was now in a state of psychological disarray, and I had to marshal my thoughts before I could frame another question. When my kind come crashing