“Is there nothing you can do?” I asked.

“Nothing,” it admitted.

“It’s a show, isn’t it?” I said, firmly. “It’s just a silly melodrama, intended to confuse us. Where are we going, really? Titan? Earth?”

I knew that the AI wasn’t going to admit anything, no matter how accurate my guesses were, but I was hoping that it might somehow give itself away.

In the event, all it said was: “I don’t know.”

It sounded just about pathetic enough to be true, although I told myself sternly that it was still unbelievable.

The stars in the background became suddenly brighter again, but it was too late. The void was closing around us, and the stars were confined within a shrinking circle. The utter darkness of that vile mouth was swallowing us up, as if it were indeed some kind of space warp that could take us farther away from home than we could ever imagine.

“I know what’s going on,” I said to the AI, defiantly. “I may be a mere mortal, but I’m not an idiot. You can’t make me —”

That was it. I didn’t feel dizzy and I had no other plausible indication of being anasthetized. It was as if I were simply switched off, like a program interrupted in the running by a sudden power cut — but I had already given up my suspicion that I really was nothing but a sim runing in cyberspace. Perhaps paradoxically, the harder I had tried to insist that everything else was fake, the more securely I had fallen into the trap of believing that I, at least, was real.

Part Two

Worlds In Parallel

Twenty-One

Normal Conditions

Iwoke up again lying on my back in pitch darkness. My awakening was troubled by the uncatchable fragments of decaying dreams and the harassment of many discomforts. My head was throbbing; my kidneys were aching; my stomach was queasy.

I had had worse hangovers, but not for a thousand years. I felt awful. I knew that I shouldn’t feel as awful as I felt, because I knew that I shouldn’t be ableto feel as awful as I felt, and that made the fact doubly disturbing. I felt as if my insides had gone to war to settle their positional disputes, and that the conflict had inflicted considerable damage on all of its participants. It might not have been so bad had I still been weightless, but gravity had returned with a vengeance. I weighed more now than I had before I stepped into the pod that had carried me to the Titanian spaceship.

If a pod hadcarried me to the Titanian spaceship.

If, in fact, I had ever been in Excelsior at all.

Now that I weighed the same as I had throughout my first lifetime I had to ask myself whether it was believable that I’d ever left Earth at all. I had to wonder whether Excelsior, Davida Berenike Columella, Christine Caine, and Adam Zimmerman might have been aspects of an improbable illusion, and whether I might now be waking up for real. I had to face the possibility that all the necessary questions were going to have to be asked all over again.

Paranoia assured me that I could only feel as bad as I did if this were real, and everythingelse had been false.

The darkness didn’t become any less absolute as the bleary eyes I had forced open attempted vainly to adjust to it. I reached up to touch my face with my right hand. My fingertips and my chin felt familiar — far toofamiliar, in fact. I didn’t seem to be wearing a smartsuit and I had a week’s worth of beard growth.

I touched my chest then, and found that I was wearing a shirt: a deadshirt. Even in 2202 I wouldn’t have been seen dead in a dead shirt. I only had to flex my leg muscles to confirm that I was also wearing lightweight trousers, and that I was sandwiched between a single sheet and a lumpy mattress.

Shit, I thought. First a thousand years forward in time, then a couple of hundred years back. The way I felt told me that any IT I might be wearing was no ultrasophisticated product of the thirty-third century, or even the twenty-third. I didn’t seem to have any pain control at all.

I told myself that it wasn’t so bad. I had been naked before, save for dead clothes, and devoid of significant IT. I reminded myself that I was a Madoc and a Tamlin: a supremely adaptable hero, ready for any twist of fate. I told myself that my new situation wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle. I was in the dark, and I was in some slight discomfort, but I was alive and whole and quite compos mentis. Things could have been a lot worse. I just had to get stuck into the task of finding out where I was, and making the best of my circumstances.

I reached out an experimental hand. There was nothing within easy reach above me, although I fancied I could hear the sound of breathing from that general direction. I groped about in other directions. The mattress I was lying on was set on a ledge, apparently plastic. There was a wall to my left and another a couple of feet from my head. I had to roll on to my side to touch the floor, but I seemed to be only a meter above it. I sat up in bed. The extra reach enabled me to ascertain that there was indeed another bunk above mine. That was slightly reassuring; wherever I was, I didn’t seem to be alone.

When I had maneuvered my feet to the floor I was able to stand up, though not as easily as I could have wished. My feet were bare, but the floor wasn’t uncomfortably rough or cold. It felt like plastic. I couldn’t tell by feeling it with the soles of my feet whether the plastic was organic or whether it had been gantzed out of twentieth-century waste.

There was an inert body lying on the upper bunk, whose dimensions I didn’t explore in detail because it seemed more sensible to let whoever it was continue sleeping. I touched a sleeve, though, which suggested that my sleeping companion was wearing dead clothing just like mine. The person in question didn’t seem to be sleeping very easily, but the body didn’t stir when my fingers brushed the back of the hand that was projecting from the sleeve. It was a small hand, not very hairy. I was prepared to accept that it was probably a female hand, but I refused to jump to the conclusion that it was Christine Caine’s. If it turned out to be Christine Caine’s, that would mean that everything I’d experienced had been real — more of it, at any rate, than I wanted to hang on to — and that something terrible had happened to Child of Fortune.

I felt for a belt and found that my dead trousers were elastic-waisted. The shirt was ill-fitting and buttonless, severely functional. I knew that if I really had been divested of the kind of smartsuit and internal technology that I’d worn on Excelsior I must have been asleep for a long time. It wasn’t the work of a couple of hours to strip that kind of equipment away.

If, on the other hand, I was fresh out of the freezer…

I needed to take a piss, quite urgently. Thatwas a feeling I hadn’t had for a very long time, no matter where or when I was.

I only had to stretch a little to locate the far wall of what I’d already begun thinking of as a cell. The space in which I was confined was only a couple of meters wide. It wasn’t much more than three meters long, but there was a sub-chamber in one corner. Once I’d found the handle the screen moved aside easily, and I began to fumble about the interior, hoping that it was some kind of bathroom facility. There was a showerhead and a drain, and some other kind of fitment that I couldn’t immediately identify but might have been some kind of toilet. I wasn’t about to engage with any puzzles; the drain was good enough for me.

When I was able to get back to investigating the geography of the space that now confined me it didn’t take me long to find the door at the farther end, or the handle that opened it.

I didn’t expect the handle to turn, but it did. I heard the latch disengage. I hadn’t encountered a door like that in years; it was the sort of door that one only found in buildings abandoned during the Crash: a door constructed in the twenty-first-century, or even earlier.