I wondered how much it mattered, and to whom. I wondered, too, how flattered I ought to be that Mortimer Gray and Michael Lowenthal were at least prepared to pretend an interest in me.

“Lowenthal must be one of the oldest of the emortals,” I remarked, judiciously.

She took the bait. “He is. He has a well-deserved reputation for careful dealing.”

“He’s not just a UN functionary then — he’s a key member of the Inner Circle?”

“The Zaman Transformation was an Ahasuerus project, initially,” Davida observed, again coming at my question from a tangential angle, “but the whole Foundation was Earthbound then, and the terms of our operation were controlled externally. Michael Lowenthal was one of the very first generation of true emortals — but he wasn’t one of ours.”

There was nothing faint about her meaningful emphasis, but I wasn’t sure how much she was trying to imply. I wondered if she had known, even before I mentioned it to Christine Caine, that I had been instrumental — albeit in a veryminor capacity — in tying Ahasuerus down in the days when the entire Foundation was a loose cannon rolling around PicoCon’s well-scrubbed deck. In a world of emortals, I realized, people might hold grudges for a very long time. Davida Berenike Columella was never going to say it in so many words, but the people behind her were probably still at odds with the people behind Michael Lowenthal, and might be for a long time to come.

“So the people in the outer system probably wouldn’t give a damn about any of us,” I said, to make sure I was keeping up with the news, “except for the fact that the Earthbound dohave an ax to grind — for which reason, the outer system folk might want to throw a monkey wrench in the works. You only give a damn about Adam Zimmerman, so you don’t care whether either the two ships takes Christine and me off your hands, although you’ll be very pissed off indeed if Zimmerman elects to go too.”

Davida paused before answering, perhaps needing to consult her friendly neighborhood data bank as to what a monkey wrench was or what being pissed off involved. Then, speaking rather grudgingly but with all apparent honesty, she said: “There are a great many people in the outer system who regard Adam Zimmerman as a hero and a bold pioneer. The delegates aboard Child of Fortunemay regard him as a kindred spirit, at least potentially. If he were to ally himself with one or more of their most cherished causes, they might have reason to be delighted. Lowenthal must know that too.” I realized then that she wasn’t just trying to keep me informed — she was talking to me like this because she was trying to work through a few uncertainties of her own.

I thought about that for a moment, then said: “You don’t have a clue which way he’s going to jump, do you? Neither does anyone else.”

“Adam Zimmerman is, admittedly, something of a mystery to us…as he is to anyone born in this era.”

“But perhaps not to me,” I pointed out, grasping the opportunity to restate my own case for further involvement in the scheme of which I had unwittingly become a part, “or even to Christine Caine. Is that why Lowenthal took the trouble to talk to me? He must think — rightly — that I might be better placed to get through to Zimmerman than you, or him, or his rivals from Titan. So why hasn’t anyone working for the other side contacted me yet?”

“Are you certain that they haven’t?”

I figured that I’d have been told if there were any more messages waiting, so I couldn’t see what she was getting at for a moment. Then I did.

“But Gray’s Earthbound, like Lowenthal,” I said, when I had twigged. “Why would he be playing for the other side?” Thinking back, I realized that he hadn’t actually said that the “association of academic interests” he supposedly represented was Earthbound.

“Gray’s as thoroughly Earthbound as anyone in his attitudes,” Davida agreed. “But he has some very influential friends on the frontier. I know of no reason why you shouldn’t take his offer of employment at face value — but I doubt that the representatives of the World Government would be prepared to trust Mortimer Gray to act in what they see as Earth’s best interests. He saved Emily Marchant’s life in the Coral Sea Disaster, and she’s used him as a propaganda tool before.”

I hadn’t a clue who Emily Marchant was, but I figured that I could look her up. I certainly intended to investigate Michael Lowenthal. The plot of which I was a part seemed to be thickening around me, and I didn’t know whether to be glad or annoyed. Christine Caine, I supposed, would reckon it one more blessing to count or one more irony to chuckle at, but I was as different from her as I was from Adam Zimmerman. If my assistance proved to be a tradeable asset, that might be to my advantage — but if my interference were to be reckoned a possible nuisance by Michael Lowenthal or anyone else, that might place me in peril. Having already served a sentence of a thousand years plus for misdemeanors I couldn’t even remember, I figured that I could do without any disadvantages or prejudices hovering over the inception of my second slice of life.

I had to educate myself quickly, but it wasn’t going to be easy to work out what I needed to know, if everyone who offered to help me had their own vested interests — however slight — to look after.

“Thanks,” I said to Davida Berenike Columella.

“You’re welcome,” she replied, the phrase falling from her tongue as if she’d never used it before and did not expect ever to need its like again.

Twelve

The Temptations of Paranoia

Throughout my former life I had always taken pride in maintaining a level of paranoia appropriate to my various professions. As I began my second span, however, I was acutely conscious of the fact that I had not been paranoid enough to anticipate that I might end up in the cooler, or that once I was there my custodians — not to mention my friends — would allow me to languish indefinitely. Knowledge of this failure, I must admit, made me a trifle oversensitive to the direr possibilities implicit in my new situation. The research that I contrived to do during the next few hours of wakefulness was guided by a fervent desire to figure out why my hosts might be lying to me.

I knew, of course, that there was a possibility that Davida Berenike Columella was telling me the truth and nothing but, but it seemed safer and wiser to work from the opposite assumption. If there really were thousands of corpsicles stored in a gargantuan coffin ship somewhere in the Counter-Earth Cluster, I reasoned, the probability that Christine Caine and I just happened to be the nearest contemporaries of Adam Zimmerman was slight. If we weren’t his nearest contemporaries, then we must have been selected for awakening on different grounds — and even if we were, there were still question marks hanging over the matter of our revival, and Adam Zimmerman’s too.

Why here? Why now?

I was prepared to accept that Excelsior really was an Ahasuerus Project, and that the trustees of the Foundation really might have decided that the time was now ripe for it’s mission to be completed, but that didn’t seem to me to be an adequate explanation for either the place or the time. It would have been easy enough to send Zimmerman’s SusAn chamber back to Earth, so that he could wake up at home, and just as easy to ship specimens for trial runs along with him, in the unlikely event that there were no sleepers on the surface of sufficient antiquity.

It seemed to me that it would have been even easier for the current directors of the Foundation to continue the policy of procrastination that they appeared to have been following for twelve hundred years. Even in my day there had been rumors to the effect that the technology of emortality that Zimmerman had craved already existed, but that the incentive for the Foundation’s directors to postpone the day that would make them effectively redundant was too great to encourage any policy but one of indefinite delay. Davida had already told me that the decision didn’t “seem to have been unanimous” — so how had it crept through now in the face of manifest opposition, when it must have failed to do so a thousand times before?