Free The Omega Expedition by Brian Stableford Page A

little time to come to terms with it or she was avidly watching for signs of mental breakdown, because she kept quiet, letting me run with the train of thought.
    I realized that there was a certain contradiction in what I’d said. Damon and I had been playing the big boys’ game, by their rules. We’d been playing in a pool where “a little espionage” and “low-level skulduggery” were no longer a matter for slapped wrists. We’d been playing in a pool where people took their secrets seriously.
    Even so, a thousand years was an extremely long time to be hidden away. Why hadn’t Damon been able to find me? Why hadn’t he been able to get me out?
    Suddenly, the stars outside the fake window didn’t seem so bright or so lordly. They seemed confused, lost in a darkness that they couldn’t quite obliterate even though they were massed in their trillions.
    I knew that they weren’t all stars. Some of them were galaxies. The universe was full of galaxies, a hundred billion or more, but it was also full of darkness and emptiness.
    Raw space, so the theorists of my time had said, was full of seething potentials — particulate eddies beyond the surface of the void, ever-ready to erupt into tangibility — but the sum of all that infinite activity was nothing .
    And wherever the potential was manifest — wherever there was something instead of nothing — there was still, if measured on any scale responsible to the true size of the universe, almost nothing.
    I existed. At least, I had to suppose so. But so what?
    I felt that I had an obligation to pull myself together. After all, I seemed to be the first ambassador from the world of mortal men ever to be entertained in Excelsior.
    “Why ninety-nine?” I asked, as calmly as I could. “Why did you start the calendar over?”
    “The Christian Era had ended long before that system of counting was abandoned,” she said. “On Earth, the new calendar was belatedly introduced after the Great North American Basalt Flow — year one was the first year of the so-called Gaean Restoration. The microworlds in Earth orbit adopted the convention because we all share the same year. Different systems apply on the inner worlds and the outer satellites, and in the more distant microworld clusters.”
    I saw a chance to rack up a few more marks in the big test by guessing what the “Great North American Basalt Flow” must have been.
    “So the Yellowstone Supervolcano finally blew up again,” I said. “Every umpteen million years, regular as clockwork.” It would have been even more impressive if I’d been able to remember the exact term of its periodicity.
    “The magma chamber that ruptured was located in the former Yellowstone National Park in the United States of North America,” she confirmed, after a brief fact-check pause. “It had been closely monitored ever since the Coral Sea disaster of 2542, and was thought to be under control. The recriminations and accusations are still unsettled, at least on Earth itself.”
    That was an intriguing remark. “You mean somebody let it off deliberately ?” I asked. “Somebody blew up North America and plunged the whole planet into nuclear winter?”
    That required a slightly longer data feed, perhaps to translate the term “nuclear winter.” Eventually, she said: “The majority opinion is that the eruption was an accident caused by a malfunction of the systems securing the magma chamber. There are, however, factions which believe that the systems were sabotaged — they differ in their hypotheses as to who might have been responsible and why.”
    I didn’t need a data feed to interpret “Gaean Restoration” for me. A major basalt flow must have begun with an explosive release of gas and ash into the air, fouling the atmosphere for years. The ecosphere must have suffered a tremendous die-back — but when the dust had settled and the poison gases had been neutralized, the human survivors must have set about the business of