What alternative was there? Even if the conviction that it was all a fraudulent game turned out to be wrong, it would make a convenient psychological defense against the horror of the truth. Even if I really were in the far future, it would be best to remain in denial a little longer. I had always been a highly skilled denier, and a devoted guerilla warrior against the excesses of truth. Why else would Damon Hart have hired me so frequently to do his dirty work?

“Would you believe me if I told you that I’m an innocent man?” I said to the wonderful child. “The unfortunate victim of a miscarriage of justice.”

“Given that your tone seems to indicate that you don’t believe it yourself,” she replied, “no.”

“So why bring me back?” I asked, entering into the spirit of the game. “If I really have been in the freezer for a thousand years and more, why bring me back now?”

“It was a trial run,” she told me, brutally. “We were uncertain that we could revive individuals who had been in stasis for so long without their having suffered considerable side effects — not merely loss of memory but irredeemable deterioration of personality.”

“My personality’s okay,” I was quick to assure her, although I was equally quick to doubt it. “Except for this sense I have of not quite being myself,” I added, after a pause for thought, perhaps a little too scrupulously. Then, after a further pause, I asked: “Why me?”

“It seems you were one of only two long-term prisoners accepted into the Foundation’s care in times past who were put into SusAn within two hundred years of Adam Zimmerman,” she said. “When we interrogated our records you emerged as the second most obvious candidate for the trial. Perhaps I should say that, although we shall continue to investigate the extent of the mental side effects you have suffered, we are reasonably content with the way the trial has worked. We’ll need to form a better estimate of the extent of your loss of memory, but your coherency is reassuring. Your feeling of not being quite yourself may be a result of the IT we’ve installed. It would be helpful if you’d try to remember as much as you can. The records suggest that the loss of memory suffered by early revenants from SusAn was usually limited to a few days preceding their vitrification, and was often temporary.”

“I’ll do my best,” I promised, knowing that I’d have to do it for my own sake. Even if this whole thing were an illusion, I’d need to recover all the memories I could recover as soon as possible. “Apart from the lost memories, you reckon I’m okay?”

“So far as we can ascertain,” she said, judiciously. “We discovered some residual nanomachines bound to your bones and the glial cells of your brain whose intended function is mysterious, but they appear to be inactive. They’re probably vestigial — a side effect of the particular cryoprotective system used on your body. There’s no trace of similar contamination in the second trial subject, nor in Adam Zimmerman’s body.”

I set aside the matter of the puzzling “contamination” for further contemplation at a future time. Assuming that this whole conversation must be a kind of test, there were easier points to be scored.

“So you’re bringing Adam Zimmerman back,” I said, casually, in order to prove that my memory hadn’t been completely shot to bits. “Are you what’s become of the Ahasuerus Foundation? Has it taken you this long to conclude that you’re capable of fulfilling your mission statement?”

“You know about the Ahasuerus Foundation,” Davida Berenike Columella observed, unnecessarily. It was an obvious prompt.

“Damon Hart and I had some dealings with the Foundation,” I confirmed, obligingly. She obviously expected more 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 shewas 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

Ihad 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 wasa 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 everybodylook 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 out of denial we tend to flip to the opposite extreme. No game, I thought. All real. A thousand fucking years. Some human races still look like me. Others obviously don’t. Who did this to me? Why?