At first, Matthew told himself that the woman was simply impatient, eager to get through her own program so that she could get on with other new awakeners in other rooms like theirs, but he guessed soon enough that there had to be more to it than that.
The doctor was pressing forward with such iron resolve because she didn’t want to submit to the flood of their questions, and the reason she feared their questions so much was that she was intent on hiding certain items of information from them.
But why?
Matthew’s newly defrosted imagination was not yet up to speed, and his capacity to feel anxiety was inhibited by the drugs he was being fed, but he struggled nevertheless with the spectrum of possibilities.
Assuming that Nita Brownell was acting under instructions from above, someone in authority over her must have forbidden her to tell them the whole truth about their present situation—or, at the very least, must have persuaded her that it was not in her patients’ best interests to be told too much too soon.
It seemed to stand to reason that any news they weren’t being told had to be bad. But how bad could it be?
Seven hundred years, Matthew chided himself, and you wake up paranoid. That’s no way to greet a new world, even for a prophet.
Once it had possessed him, though, it wasn’t difficult to feel that kind of paranoia even while his brain was soaked with tranks. Was the room he and Solari were in too sparsely furnished? Were the machines gathered around their beds a trifle ramshackle? Was Nita Brownell a woman under undue stress, a custodian of secrets that she found uncomfortable to bear?
Perhaps. Perhaps not.
Perhaps, Matthew decided, it was best to concentrate on happier thoughts. The happiest thought of all, surely—the one item of news that could not possibly be bad—was that after seven hundred years, Hopehad reached an Earth-clone world. That was an idea to savor: a new Earth; a new home; another Ararat; another chance.
One, at least, of the New Noah’s Arks had reached its goal.
Shen had done it. Like Moses, he had brought his Chosen People to the Promised Land.
But the paranoia lingered.
Reading between the lines with a suspicious eye wasn’t a kind of game that Matthew relished, but it was one that he could play like a pro. While he did his level best to provide accurate answers to the questions that bombarded him, therefore, he reserved part of his mind to the task of fitting together the bits of information that Nita Brownell did see fit to provide, and supplementing them with whatever he could deduce from an examination of his surroundings.
The basics seemed simple enough. Hopehad arrived in orbit around a planet orbiting a G-type star a billion years older than Earth’s sun. It had an atmosphere and a hydrosphere very similar to Earth’s, and an ecosphere with much the same biomass. So far, so good—but he noticed that Nita Brownell was slightly reluctant to use the word Earth-cloneor to endorse its use. There was some kind of problem there.
There was, apparently, no recent news of the other two Arks that had exited the Oort Halo circa 2180, nor was there any reason to believe that the fourth Ark—the so-called Lost Ark—had eventually contrived to follow in their train. Faithand Couragewere presumably still searching, if they had avoided ecocatastrophes of their own, while Charity, for whatever reason, was still locked in a cometary orbit around the sun. No good news there, but nothing especially terrible either.
If the calculations of Hope’s patient AIs could be trusted—Dr. Brownell called them sloths, but that was a term with which Matthew was not familiar and whose meaning he had had to ask—then Hope’s announcement of its arrival would reach Earth in 2872. If the gleanings of Hope’s equally patient homeward-directed eyes could be trusted, there would certainly be people on Earth to hear the glad tidings, and to be glad on Hope’s behalf. There would be billions of them—and billions more elsewhere in the system. No bad news there.
Earthly scientific progress had, apparently, faltered slightly in the early twenty-second century, but had picked up pace again soon enough. Biotechnology and nanotechnology had made good on some—perhaps most—of their promises. The people of Earth had discovered the secret of emortality, and had reconfigured their society to accommodate emortality comfortably. All good news there. With what the people of Earth now knew at Hope’s disposal—and what was not yet at Hope’s disposal would surely be placed there once Earth’s reply to Hope’s announcement of her discovery arrived, 116 years down the line—the colonists of the New Earth would surely be able to build a New World fit for their own emortal children.
Surely? When presented with that judgment, Nita Brownell’s reply was a calculatedly moderate “probably,” which seemed so weak as to be little better than a “possibly.”
When asked how the doubt arose, Dr. Brownell procrastinated. Matters weren’t as simple as they might appear. Things were complicated. There would be time for explanations later.
There were hints to be gleaned, but it was difficult to judge their relevance.
The failure-rate of Hope’s SusAn systems—or, more accurately, the deep-frozen bags of flesh, blood, and mind they had contained for so long—had been slightly higher and slightly more complicated than had been hoped. Mortality, if strictly defined, had been less than one percent, but kick-starting brains sometimes failed to recover the whole person. About one in four awakeners exhibited some degree of memory-loss: hence the intensive interrogation to which Matthew and Vince Solari were currently being subjected.
The problem afflicting the majority, Nita Brownell told them in dribs and drabs, was restricted to the process by which short-term memory was converted into long-term. Most sufferers had lost less than a couple of days, only a handful more than a week. Most of the lost time could be deemed “irrelevant,” in that it consisted entirely of preparation for freezing down—hours of dull routine spent in the Spartan environment of Lagrange-5 or Mare Moscoviense—or in riding a shuttle to the far side of Earth’s orbit, depending on the timing of the person’s invitation to join the Chosen People. A minority, on the other hand, had lost more than that. Some of the full-scale amnesiacs had recovered all or part of themselves eventually, but some had not.
Matthew and Vince were apparently among the luckier ones—but when Matthew remembered the long, lucid dream he had had while his IT was preparing to wake him, he could not help but wonder whether it had been a close-run thing.
Mercifully, by the time Matthew had wrinkled and worked all this out, Dr. Brownell had established that if either he or Vince Solari had lost anything, it was a matter of hours—irrelevant hours, if any hours out of a human life could be reckoned irrelevant.
Compared with 700 years of downtime, Matthew thought, a few hours might indeed be reckoned irrelevant. He remembered saying au revoirto Alice and Michelle, and that was the important thing. With luck, they would remember saying au revoirto him, when their turn came to be reawakened.
Except that Nita Brownell hesitated for just a fraction of a second over the word when, and that fleeting moment of evident doubt cast a dark shadow over everything she said thereafter. The problems of awakening from SusAn were not the realproblems; they were the problems Nita Brownell was using as a screen to hide the problems that would have to be explained at another time, preferably by someone else. She was a doctor, it was not her job, not her place….
It was too easy to be paranoid, Matthew told himself, as sternly as he could while he was still spaced out. He had come from a bad place, and he had had bad dreams, but he was a winner in the game. He had cast his lot with Shen Chin Che, and he had pulled out a major prize.