Davida Berenike Columella didn’t seem to be as frightened by this news as she had been of my casual gesture, but I was physically present and Christine Caine wasn’t.

“She won’t be able to harm anyone,” the wonderful child told me.

If that remark was supposed to be reassuring, it missed by a mile. I guessed immediately that if Christine Caine wasn’t going to be able to hurt anyone when they woke her up — and it seemed that nothing I’d said had troubled that assumption — then neither could I. Which meant that they hadn’t, after all, put me together exactlyas I’d been before. They’d taken precautions.

“You’re installing some kind of IT in her head,” I guessed, still talking about Christine Caine because I didn’t want to talk about myself. “Something that will stop her if she runs amok.”

“We can do that,” the wonderful child confirmed, ambiguously.

That was when I saw — clearly, I thought — that Christine Caine would be resuming her life as an animal in a zoo: a specimen to be observed, and wondered at. And I understood, too, that I had just contributed to that fate by robbing her of her last hope of not being recognized for what she was, and her last hope of being able to make a new start.

I didn’t know exactly how old Christine Caine had been when they’d put her away, but I knew that she wasn’t much more than twenty. In terms of elapsed time, I was no more than twice her age; Davida Berenike Columella was ten times as old, although she looked no more than nine.

From the viewpoint of those who had brought us back into the world, I realized, Christine Caine and I were alike, no matter how slight my unknown crimes might have been compared to hers. Whatever they had done to her, and whatever they intended to do to her in future, they must have done and would also do to me. I too was a creature in a zoo: a representative of an extinct species, resurrected by ingenuity into a world of which I knew nothing.

I knew, because I had had dealings with the Ahasuerus Foundation a thousand years before, that the people of Excelsior were bringing Adam Zimmerman back because they intended to make him emortal. Even to Rachel Trehaine, in the 2190s, Adam Zimmerman had been a great hero, one of the founders of the modern world order. The Hardinist Cabal, or whatever rump of it still remained, could hardly help thinking of him in much the same light, given that he had played such a vital role in the economic coup that had launched their inexorable climb to world domination. This world presumably had a place ready made for Adam Zimmerman — if not a throne, a pedestal. But what did it have for Christine Caine, or for me?

I concluded then that whatever debt of gratitude I owed Davida Berenike Columella and her people for bringing me back to life, they were not my friends. It was not a happy thought, but it was not a crushing discovery either.

I had always prided myself on being tough, on being able to adapt myself to adverse circumstance. I knew that I could be tough now. I knew that I could be tougher than I had ever been before, because I — unlike Damon Hart, it seemed — had managed to keep my place on that imaginary escalator while everyone else I ever knew had lost their footing.

If all this was real, then I really had ridden the tide of opportunity into a world where emortality was for everyone, or almost everyone — including, I hoped, the animals in the zoo. I knew that I might have to be careful, and clever, and cunning, but I had been all those things before — and the people of Excelsior seemed to have put me back together very nearly as I had been before.

If there’s a game to be played here, I thought, whether in reality or a VE drama, then it has to be won. I understood that from the very start. I had understood it all my life, and I could see no reason to change my mind, no matter what miracles had transformed the world during the millennium I had lost, while I was away with the Fays.

“If you’re really going to wake Christine Caine tomorrow,” I said, by way of making my first real move in the game, “I think you’d better let me do the talking. I’m the only one who might be able to make her understand — at least to the extent that I can understand.”

“Thank you for the offer,” said the wonderful child. “We’ll certainly consider it.”

It was her manner more than her choice of words that belatedly tipped me off to the fact that the kind of English she was talking wasn’t her first language, even though it might be a variety thereof. I realized that she might well have learned it in order to talk to me — or to the heroic Adam she considered the true creator of her world.

I knew better than to offer to be the first to talk to him, and told myself that he would probably have far less need of my intercession than poor Christine Caine.

I’m less confident of that judgment today than I was then, but I’m less confident of many things now than I was then. That’s one of the effects of growing ever older, if you do it properly.

Five

The Staff of Life

The food was awful. It even looked awful, but I managed to keep my hopes up for a few moments longer by telling myself that appearances could be deceptive. Once I had taken the first mouthful, though, there was no further room for optimism.

Davida Berenike Columella was watching me closely, but she wasn’t partaking herself. I knew that I was still being tested, but I wasn’t sure how to pass this one. I wanted to be polite, but I didn’t want to give her the wrong impression, so I lifted a second forkful thoughtfully, hoping that it wouldn’t be quite as bad.

It wasn’t. The stuff was edible, and the first bolus hadn’t set off an emetic reaction in my stomach, so I had to figure that it wouldn’t do me any real harm — but I’d have felt better if I’d known which bit of my tongue was adapting to the taste. I couldn’t take any comfort from the notion that the extra layer of skin that extended into my mouth from my smartsuit might include among its duties the responsibility to conceal the fact that I was eating crap.

While I chewed I made a careful study of the food on the plastic plate. The rice was a peculiar shade of yellow, but practically all genemod rice had been a peculiar shade of yellow in my day, so that wasn’t surprising. Anyway, the worst thing about the rice was that it was bland to the point of tastelessness. It was the sliced vegetables that seemed to be seriously nasty, but I couldn’t work out whether it was the things faintly resembling peppers or the bits with the slightly woody texture that were the worst offenders. The muddy brown sauce was definitely off, but there wasn’t a great deal of that and it was mostly round the edges, so there hadn’t been much of it on either of the forkfuls I’d taken in.

I looked up again at the impossible child, and met her gaze squarely. Other possibilities were occurring to me now.

“You made this especially for me, didn’t you?” I said.

“Yes,” she admitted.

“Using a thousand-year-old recipe and ingredients nobody’s grown as food plants for centuries?”

“It was the best approximation we could contrive,” she told me, apologetically. She’d caught on to the fact that I didn’t like it.

“So why didn’t you just give me whatever youeat?” I wanted to know.

“We have different nutritional requirements,” she told me.

I took this guarded observation to mean that she was genetically engineered not to require vitamins and all the other quirky compounds that real humans had to include in their diet. The implication was that everything I thought of as real food had gone out of fashion centuries ago. In my own day, it had been the world’s poor — who were still exceedingly numerous — who had the dubious privilege of existing on whole-diet “mannas” compounded by machines to supply exactly that combination of amino acids, lipids, carbohydrates, and trace elements that a human body required to keep it going. Now, apparently, such contrivances were the staff of posthuman life. What else, I wondered, had the aged children of Excelsior given up? If they didn’t get their kicks from food, or wine, or sex…