That was what I had gone through in order to get to my present destination: a journey to the dark land of the dead, whose fairy queen had far more in common with Christine Caine’s cold-hearted Snow Queen than Shakespeare’s Titania or Spenser’s Gloriana.

By the time Davida Berenike Columella put the operation on the screen, Zimmerman’s corpsicle had been out of its icy cocoon for some time. The temperature of the vitrified body had already been raised to minus seven Celsius so that nanobot-aided devitrificaton could begin. What Davida’s multitudinous audience watched was the final stage of the long process, which would turn Adam Zimmerman’s protoplasm from glassy gel to membranously confined liquid.

A host of nanobots delivered enthusiastic progress reports regarding the miraculous state of Zimmerman’s individual cells, but everyone knows that nanobots are constitutionally incapable of seeing the big picture, so no one took their reportage to imply that the whole system would click into gear automatically.

The most crucial phase of the awakening would be the one that would ease Zimmerman from physical inertia into controlled coma, rebuilding brain activity from the bottom up. That would turn effective death into dreamless sleep, then into the kind of sleep that could sustain dreaming. The nanobots couldn’t measure the subjective component of a dream; some part of the emotions associated with it, and all of its imagery, were forever beyond their reach. The external sensors collated their information, assuring the operators and watchers alike that all was well at the physiological level, but there was an inevitable margin of uncertainty that kept us all on edge while the long minutes ticked by.

Christine Caine was keeping me company again, but she seemed unusually subdued as we sat through the suspenseful phase. I assumed that she was experiencing the same self-centered feelings as me, but when she finally broke her silence with something more than a grunt it was to express astonishment at Zimmerman’s appearance.

“He’s so old,” were her exact words.

It was trivially true, of course, but that wasn’t what she meant. I had only been thirty-nine years old when I was frozen down, but it wouldn’t have made much difference to my face if I’d been seventy-seven. People of my generation didn’t suffer from wrinkles, or gray hair, or any of the other traditional appearances of “old age.” We needed elaborate Internal Technology and periodic deep tissue rejuvenation to keep us going even for a mere hundred and fifty years, but the superficial appearances of aging were easier to overcome than the invisible record of intracellular damage and nucleic acid copying errors.

Adam Zimmerman hadn’t had our advantages. He wasn’t old, even by the standards of Christine Caine’s day, if one left his millennium in limbo out of the account, but he certainly looked it.

I had seen the superficial signs of old age before. One of my closest associates in the criminal fraternity had worn them almost as a badge of pride. It should not have been a surprise to see them manifest in Adam Zimmerman’s face and figure, but there seemed something not quite rightabout the matter. It would not have been impossible, or even particularly difficult, to apply a little somatic engineering to the texture of the skin while the devitrification procedure was proceeding. Although the whole point of the exercise was to bring him back exactly as he had been when he went into SusAn — save for supportive IT and a very smart suit of clothes — it seemed to me that a certain amount of cosmetic work would not have been inappropriate. No doubt he would make his own decision about that, when the time came to make informed decisions about the particular technologies of emortality that he would adopt, but I couldn’t believe that he would not have relished the prospect of waking up rejuvenated. “It’s mainly a matter of showmanship,” I said to Christine, when I’d thought it over. “They’re displaying him to the whole solar system as a work of art. This is just the beginning of the story. They want all the phases to be visible, to demonstrate the true significance of what they’re doing.”

“Surely they can’t make him one of them,” she said.

“I’m certain that they can,” I contradicted her, thoughtfully. “The sisters might even be naive enough to think that he might take that option, when they’ve had a chance to work on him, although I can’t believe that anyone else thinks so. Whatever they offer him — and us — will have to be designed exclusively for mortal use, because everybody born into this world was already engineered for emortality. None of them ever had a choice. All their choices were made for them, by their adoptive parents. This is an unprecedented situation.”

“Why should they care what kind of emortality he opts for?” Christine asked.

“Maybe because they’re still making decisions on behalf of their unborn children,” I guessed. “Maybe they’ve become anxious about whether they’re making the right ones, now that there are so many alternatives to choose from. They’re interested to know what kind of emortality mortals would choose for themselves. Zimmerman is the star prize, because he was the first mortal to go for broke in the quest for emortality, but they may have thrown in a couple of controls to make the game more interesting. There are three of us, so there’ll be a clear majority if the decision is split.”

I realized as I voiced it that the last point was wrong, because there had to be more than two alternatives available, but I didn’t bother to correct myself. Nor did I point out that if Adam Zimmerman’s vote was worth more than either of ours, mine had to be worth more than hers because she was a certified lunatic.

“You make it sound like a game show,” Christine observed. “It’s a lot of trouble to go to for that kind of petty kick.”

“In our day,” I reminded her, “all the hopeful emortals used to spend time wondering how they were going to cope with the tedium once they’d been around for a few hundred years. Maybe these people take their game shows more seriously than you or I can imagine. The children of Excelsior really are children, by comparison with people like Lowenthal — and I’d be willing to bet that it’s people of Lowenthal’s generation who are pulling the strings.”

That had been another preoccupation of the hopeful not-quite-emortals of my own day — which was why I’d produced it so readily in my conversation with Davida. The prospect of the oldest generation remaining in charge forever, while the youngest had no possible prospect of inheriting the Earth, had been a popular item of twenty-second-century debate. Nowadays, it seemed, the other worlds of the solar system were all under the dominion of the older generation, even though Titan and Ganymede were still largely icebound and the terraformation of Mars and Venus had hardly begun. If the young wanted to assert their right to the pursuit of property, they already had to look to further horizons, with all the attendant inconvenience of the limiting velocity of light.

Christine was thinking along a different line. “I’m the villain, aren’t I?” she said. “If this is a game, or an improvised drama, I’m not here to make up the numbers — I’m here to be the bad example.”

I turned to look at her, although the drama on the screen was coming toward its climax.

“We don’t know that,” I said, feeling a mysterious obligation to be gentle. “I’m just making up stories here. I haven’t even begun to figure out what this is all about.”

“But we’ll find out, won’t we?” she said. It was very difficult to judge her mood, or to figure out how she was extrapolating the notion. “We’ll find out what they expect of us soon enough.”

Adam Zimmerman had been moved to a chair now: a chair very similar to the ones on which Christine and I were sitting. Davida had run through the rehearsal twice and she was sticking to the script. When Adam Zimmerman opened his eyes he would see what I had seen. Would he, I wondered, be as quick on the uptake as I had been? Would he ask the same questions, in the same falsely casual fashion?