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 ordinarymortal.

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 knewthat 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 doneanything 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 anyonehave 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.

Surely, if that had been the case, I’d have remembered it.

Anyway, no one in the world could have expected me to serve more than ten years in the freezer for treasonous sabotage. The only way I could have been removed from society for any longer than that — let alone a thousand years — was by falling victim to treasonous sabotage myself.

In other words, if what the strange child was telling me was true, then someone like me must have been hired by someone like Damon Hart — or Damon Hart’s new masters — to obliterate the record of my conviction and imprisonment.

It couldn’t be true. It had to be a joke.

It didn’t seem to me to be very funny, but I figured that I had no alternative, for the time being, but to play along. Even though it had to be a VE melodrama, I had to play my part as if it were real.