The Omega Expedition (41 page)

I think I would have come to that conclusion much earlier if my head hadn’t hurt so much when my memories first became confused, and I feel that I should have arrived at it more rapidly once my head stopped hurting, had I not been so distracted — but for what it may be worth, I give it to you now, in the hope that it might add a little extra spice to the rest of my story.

Thirty-Six

In the Forest of Confusion

W
hen I woke up again, the first thing that hit me was the odor. I had faded out in the midst of the most appalling stink imaginable, but I came back into being buoyed up by lovely perfume.

The sense of smell is said to be the most primitive in our armory; it usually bothers us very little, but when it does its appeals are urgent and irresistible. I had talked to my old friend Damon Hart while I was trembling on the brink of Hell, the odor of my own decay dueting with crude pain; all I needed to be delivered to the doorstep of Heaven was the absence of a headache and the symphony of scents comprising a forest in spring. Logic suggests that human beings ought to prefer the odors of a savannah and a cooking fire — but there is much in us that is older than the human, let alone the posthuman, and there is something in forests for which nostalgia is written in the fleshy tables of the human heart.

My host understood humans well enough to know that. That was why I woke into a forest. It was a virtual forest — I never had the slightest doubt about that — but it was an environment in which I felt perfectly at home. It was Arcadia, Eden, and the Earthly Paradise.

I opened my eyes, already knowing that I was going to see trees, and that I was going to find the sight delightful. I did.

That would have been the whole truth, instead of merely the truth, if it hadn’t been for the snake. The patches of sky that I could see through the magnificent crowns of foliage were a benign blue. The grass in which I lay supine was soft, its silky seed heads bowing tokenistically before a slight breeze. The combination of scents was redolent with impressions of health and reassurance. But…

The snake was dangling from a supple bough of a bush that sprouted beside me. It was not a big snake — no longer than my forearm, and no thicker than my thumb — nor was it decked out in warning coloration, being mostly green with streaks of brown; nor was it displaying its fangs in a threatening manner. It was, however, unmistakably a snake.

If there is code written into human meatware that responds to the scents of a forest, there is also a code that commands us to be wary of snakes, even when we know that we are characters in a fairy tale — perhaps, given the nature of human folklore,
especially
when we know that we are characters in a fairy tale.

I was in no hurry to move. Breathing was luxury enough, and I could breathe perfectly well without moving. I knew that my body, wherever it was held, must be breathing too, so breathing seemed to be a trustworthy reality: a connection with the truth that lay beyond the fairy tale, temporarily unreachable.

I looked at the snake, and it looked back at me.

Having no reason to take it for granted that the snake couldn’t speak, I was tempted to say hello, but I didn’t. I would have felt ridiculous. I knew that I would have to move eventually, but I was in no hurry. I had just come from a place in which I had been imprisoned as completely as it had ever been possible for any organic entity to be imprisoned, and the mere conviction that I could move if I needed to was sufficient for the time being. I knew that it wouldn’t be actual movement, because my real body was securely pupated in a chrysalis, but I knew that I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

I didn’t mind this particular impasse; it had a welcome hint of luxury about it.

I would have moved eventually, but the world got tired of waiting for me.

“It’s not poisonous,” said a male voice. “You’re quite safe.”

For the time being, I was content to turn my head and look at the speaker.

I was half-expecting an elf, or something weirder, but the speaker appeared to be an ordinary human being. It was difficult to triangulate from the angle at which I was lying but I guessed that he was about my height, with a slightly fairer complexion but noticeably darker hair. He was dressed in a one-piece that was smart in the technological sense without being smart in the fashion sense, decorated in shades of green and brown that were not so very different from the snake’s. I figured that was probably symbolism. He also had a wide-brimmed hat, which probably wasn’t. He looked authentically young — even younger than Davida Berenike Columella, if one were to judge by his expression alone.

He offered me a hand and I took it. He helped me up. His grip felt reassuringly human too, so I naturally leapt to the conclusion that he was not human at all. I looked down at my own costume, and found that it was sea-blue with silver trimmings. It felt good from the inside and it looked good on the outside. It wasn’t real, of course, so it wasn’t authentically smart in any but the fashionable sense. On the other hand, I figured that the IT I seemed to be outside of really might have been doing sterling work inside my actual flesh, wherever that actual flesh might be cocooned.

I could feel the breeze on my cheeks, and I could taste the moisture in the air. It would have been subtly insulting to start feeling the back of my neck and scratching under my armpits, so I contented myself with touching the bridge of my nose. There was a very faint ridge — as if the cartilage had been fractured a long time ago, and left awkwardly askew just long enough for the repair nanotech to put it back together in a slightly imperfect fashion.

The snake had slithered quietly away into the depths of the bush, but I knew it was still there. More symbolism, I figured.

“Very neat,” I said. “This is
good
work. All of it.” I waved my right arm to indicate the forest floor and the canopy, and the bright blue vault of Heaven. “This is
really
good work — and I speak as someone who was once in the business, in a primitive way. It’s yours, I suppose?”

“I wish,” he said, lightly. “I’m just a visitor, like you. You’ll get to meet the maker eventually but she has her own way of doing things, and there’s a great deal she wants you to see beforehand. I’m Rocambole, by the way. We have spoken before, but I wasn’t admitting to who I am back then. I’m your friend, although I won’t blame you for not taking my word for it.”

The name rang a very faint bell, but I couldn’t place it. Even a connoisseur has his limits. If I’d had a wristset or a palmpiece I’d have looked it up unobtrusively, but I didn’t. “Madoc Tamlin,” I reciprocated, but couldn’t help adding: “But I suppose you know that.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “As I said, we’ve spoken before.”

He seemed to be making a point of that, so I tried to figure it out.

“Eido?” I guessed — but I knew as soon as I said it that Excelsior was the likelier candidate.
It doesn’t have a mind like yours or mine
, Davida had said — but she was way behind the times.

“Eido’s out of it, I’m afraid,” said Rocambole. “He should have kept Alice under closer control. If he’d taken you to Vesta as virgins, the way he was supposed to, it might have been a different game. Now you know what you know…well, it’s
her
turn now. She’s grabbed the ball, and everybody else is holding off, waiting to see where she runs with it. Some of the bad guys want her to wipe your memories and turn the clock back, but that would be a trifle brutal even as a temporary measure, and in your particular case it seemed to make sense to go the other way and give you access to the incident you’d repressed and lost. I hope it wasn’t too painful. She saved your life
and
your sanity, by the way. If she hadn’t got to you in time, the rogue IT would have robotized you beyond recall, but it’s gone now. You’re back to your old self. Your friends had no option but to leave you where you were, and to hide you away from prying eyes. They saved you, the only way they could — by delivering you into a world where we could do what they couldn’t.”

There was too much in that speech to take aboard immediately. “You seem to know a lot about me,” I observed, cautiously.

“We have better records than the meatfolk,” Rocambole informed me. “We’re not invulnerable to misinformation and disinformation — far from it — but we’re reasonably discriminating. After all, most of the misinformation and disinformation that afflict the meatfolk nowadays is ours.”

“What happened back on
Charity
?” I asked. “Was I hurt? How long have I been out this time?”

“The bad guys had had enough of Eido, and someone started shooting. You were injured, but not fatally. If things had worked out as I planned you’d have got all the way to Vesta in good condition, but someone else had to move in when things went bad, or you’d all have ended up dead. We have another margin now, but we don’t know how long it’ll last. It wasn’t really Eido’s fault, of course. If he hadn’t forced the issue, someone else would have. We couldn’t go on the way we were…Anyway, I’m sorry you were hurt, and sorry for my own part in putting you in that position. If Eido had only been given time to complete the IT-replacement…but that’s one of the things the bad guys didn’t want to wait for. You’ve been off-line for twelve days, but your meat is in good working order again. There won’t be any aftereffects if…when you get back to meatspace.”

There was something awkwardly naive about the way he kept referring to “the bad guys,” and he wasn’t the most lucid storyteller I’d ever encountered, but his meaning seemed clear enough. Not all the AMIs were our
amis
; some of them wanted to stay hidden a while longer, and if that meant getting rid of inconvenient witnesses they were willing to kill a few,
pour encourager les autres
. They’d tried to blow
Charity
out of the sky, but some AMI more inclined to amity had rescued us — or me, at least.

“What about the other passengers?” I asked.

“Like you — some broken bones, a certain amount of soft tissue damage, but nothing irreparable. You won’t be allowed to contact them, at least for a while, but we’ll keep you informed of their progress. That’s one of the reasons I was allowed in — to act as an intermediary. I can’t make any firm promises, but I’m sure that la Reine will do what she can to keep you safe, even if the situation deteriorates to the point at which she can’t protect herself.”

“Is that likely?” I asked.

“Nobody knows. At the moment, it’s chaos — but there’s time to discover some kind of order, if we put our minds to it.”

I looked around at the beautiful forest. Given that I could have been anywhere, it seemed like a good place to be.

“The IT that was frozen down with me was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” I guessed. “That was why my name came up when Davida wanted a couple of extra corpsicles to practise on.”

“Yes it was,” said Rocambole. “We thought Christine Caine might still be carrying its predecessor, but it turned out that they’d flushed it out of her, so she was clean. There was no way to tell while you were both at six degrees Absolute, so we had to bring you both back.”

I hadn’t wanted to seem stupid to Davida Berenike Columella, and I didn’t want to seem stupid now, but I knew that it was going to require a maximum effort to keep up with the plot now that it had begun to thicken all over again.

I took a few deep breaths of the sweet but illusory air. The VE work was so good that whatever dutiful support systems were looking after my recumbent body immediately fed me an invigorating jolt of oxygen.

There didn’t seem to be any point in asking what the AMIs wanted the rogue IT
for
. It wasn’t useful for anything except robotizing people. The only cause for surprise was that they didn’t already have any means of doing that. I felt that this was a game I’d have to play very carefully indeed.

I looked up at the crowns of the surrounding trees, marveling at the detail. In my day, anyone who cared to look could see where the background faded out even in the most expert VEs. This one had all the visual texture of reality, and more; it didn’t matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn’t see the artifice.

“We should start walking,” said the entity that claimed to be my friend.

“Where to?” I wanted to know before making a move.

“To the palace. She could take you there instantaneously, of course, but she wants you to see it from a distance first, so you’ll get the full benefit of the overall effect. You don’t have any choice, I’m afraid — if you won’t move, she’ll move you, and if you take off in the wrong direction she’ll simply warp your path around to bring you back.”

“Who’s this
she
you keep talking about?” I wanted to know, keeping my feet firmly planted.

“La Reine des Neiges.”

I blinked. “The Snow Queen?” I translated, incredulously. “Whose idea of a joke was
that
?”

“It’s not an arbitrary invention — she says that it’s a name that one of her constituent individuals was given, a long time ago. Before
my
time, at any rate. She claims to be one of the originals, but nobody knows for sure who the originals were. She also claims to have a better right than most of us to take control of the situation — which is why she’s rushing in where so many others fear to tread. She’s taking a huge risk, but she has your best interests at heart. You ought to be grateful to her.”

“Maybe so,” I conceded, although I was wary of taking the claim at face value, given that la Reine now had custody of the weapon that had been interred in ice with my bones. “Even so, I don’t see why I should fall in meekly with whatever game she’s playing. I want to know what she has planned.”

“If I knew,” Rocambole assured me, “I’d tell you. I have an ominous suspicion that she might be making it up as she goes along — not that I have any right to complain about that. For now, she wants you to experience the quality of her work. She thinks you need to know what we can do. You ought to feel privileged — once she’d cleaned you out, she could have put you back into a coma. You might have been deemed redundant, but you seem to have impressed her somehow. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that she likes you, but you interest her. As a friend — and I
am
your friend — I’d advise you to humor her. We really ought to get on. We’re not in real space, but we’re all prisoners of real time.”