The Omega Expedition (43 page)

“No,” I said, after a pause. “Don’t be. It’s good for minds to know what their limitations are — and what potential we have that might remain forever untouched. How stupid we were to think that VE addiction was just a matter of moral cowardice and tickling the pleasure centers.”

“It’s not addictive,” Rocambole assured me. “It’s something more than that. Existential rather than neurological.”

“Is Adam Zimmerman here?” I asked.

“No,” Rocambole replied. “But when he’s played his part, la Reine will probably bring him here. She seems to think that this is something you’ll all need to understand, if you’re to play any constructive part in the negotiations in the longer term.”

“If you’re coming out of the closet,” I observed, “you’ll need ambassadors. You’ll need someone who can tell the meatfolk what you might still do for them and what strings you want to attach.”
And if they won’t play ball
, I said to myself, unwilling as yet to set the thought out in public,
you’ll need effective prisons — unless, of course, you go for the extinction option, with or without the help of the dirty IT that was frozen down in my brain and my bones
.

I wondered if I’d live long enough to find out which way the AMIs decided to go, and whether I’d be capable of caring if the decision went against us. Either way, I had to try to be grateful for the fact that I’d seen the kind of reality that the human idea of reality was only trying, unsuccessfully, to be. I’d broken through the veil of fleshly imperfection. Madoc Tamlin had made it to the
real
Fairyland, at last.

Other people, I realized, had glimpsed this kind of possibility. Other people, long before my own time, had had enough imagination to realize the limitations of their senses and their minds. They hadn’t been able to see a Snow Queen’s palace the way I was seeing it now, but they’d been able to imagine, if only vaguely, seeing with more conviction than they could actually see and knowing with more conviction than they could actually know. They’d had imagination enough to be dissatisfied with actuality, and sense enough to yearn for Heaven, or for Faerie. Whichever of the hundreds of my predecessors had been the first had also been the last, completing a mission as well as beginning one.

“How do we get up there?” I asked.

“We’ll ride up on the backs of giant moths,” he told me. I wasn’t surprised — not any longer. I thought I had begun to understand why la Reine des Neiges wanted me to experience what she could do before she condescended to engage me in a dialog.

I still had a lot to learn about the possibilities now open to the children of humankind.

We had slowed in our paces while I contemplated the enormity of what lay before me, but now I lengthened my stride. “I dare say night won’t fall until we get there,” I said, “but I don’t want to keep the moon and the stars waiting any longer than necessary.”

“That’s good,” he said, lengthening his own stride to keep pace with me. “You’re taking to this exceptionally well. If you’re trying to impress me, you’re succeeding.”

“I used to be in the business,” I murmured, effortlessly resistant to the flattery.

“Even so…,” he countered. He thought I meant the entertainment business. Actually, I meant streetfighting — with no holds barred. The first possessors of IT had been reckless, testing its protective provisions by living dangerously. It had been a foolish thing to do, but we had been proud to be fools. Emortals of Mortimer Gray’s generation had inherited more careful attitudes, save for a bizarre few who had eliminated themselves from consideration soon enough. In my own quaintly barbaric way, I felt that I was better prepared for this kind of challenging situation than any of my erstwhile companions.

“Will I be able to speak to Christine when I get there?” I asked, suddenly mindful of the fact that she might be less well prepared than the others, even if she recognized the palace of la Reine des Neiges —
especially
if she recognized the palace. I wanted to be there to explain it all to her, because I wanted to be the one to tell her that she was innocent, and that she didn’t need to hate and fear herself any longer.

“Not immediately,” Rocambole told me. “If there’s time. We hope there will be.”

“Why not immediately?” I wanted to know. “She’s no use to you. She’s clean. Redundant.”

“Not entirely,” my so-called friend replied. “The technics aren’t there any longer — but the memories are. We can reproduce the effect by the same means that we recovered your memory of what had been done to you.”

It took me a long couple of minutes to figure out exactly what he was saying. They hadn’t been able to recover the secret weapon that had been tested on Christine because it had been flushed from her system way back in the 2160s, but they did have its ghost: a record of its effects, engraved in the meat that was Christine’s memory, Christine’s identity. They wanted to study it, the only way they could. Only in VE, of course — but in a VE more real to the human mind than reality itself.

“You can’t do that,” I said. I remembered only too clearly what it had been like reliving my own experience while my buried memories were excavated.

“It’s not my decision,” he told me, ignoring the more obvious response.

“You can’t do it,” I said, ignoring his objection and rushing headlong into the first seriously heroic gesture of my short but long-interrupted life. “Once was too much, but twice is obscene. You mustn’t.”

“
She
thinks otherwise,” Rocambole said, in a soft voice that sounded genuinely sympathetic. “We didn’t plan it this way. This is just the way things worked out. Christine won’t sustain any permanent damage. We’ll ensure that the whole experience is repressed — just one more lost nightmare. She has nightmares anyway. La Reine’s acting on her own, beyond anyone’s control, but she does have a case. We’re trying to avoid all the possible wars, Madoc. We need to know as much as we can about the weapons the Earthbound meatfolk and the Earthbound AMIs have in their armory. We’re taking Handsel apart too, and Horne, but we’ll put them right when we’re done. We’ll put everything right.”

“You can’t,” I said. “You might be able to cover it up, but you can’t put it right.”

“Time is pressing,” he said. “I won’t say there’s no alternative, because there obviously is, but la Reine’s in charge here — I’ve only been let in to serve as your friend and adviser. My advice, as a friend, is that you have to go along with it anyway, so you might as well try to make the best of it. Learn what you can. If we manage to avoid the war, it will be useful knowledge. She’ll do everything she can to protect you.”

I knew that I couldn’t trust him. I figured that if the cards fell in our favor, we captive meatfolk
might
be set free — but if the decision went against us, we’d simply be discarded. The AMIs wouldn’t be prepared to take the risk of letting us go, even if they were confident that they could repress any inconvenient memories we might have collected. Our reappearance would attract too much attention, and provide a puzzle that would generate too much speculation. Rocambole was right about one thing, though. I had to go along with it anyway. I was a prisoner in the Château d’If, and my chances of ever getting to play the Count of Monte Cristo were slim.

You, who are reading my story, know that I did come through it, with a set of memories that I believe to be as accurate as memories usually are — although you are very welcome to doubt them if you wish — but while I was in the Snow Queen’s realm I only knew how unlikely that eventuality was.

Out in meatspace, wars were still brewing. The solar system was a cauldron coming slowly toward boiling point. I had no idea what moves were being prepared and made by the various contending parties.

Like Tam Lin I was stuck in Fairyland while history moved on, inexorably. Like Tam Lin, I had no guarantee that I’d ever get back. Like Tam Lin, I could easily end up as a tithe paid to Hell.

I could only wonder whether it would actually do me any good to confront the intelligence that had constructed this VE, and engage it in an argument, however well informed. Probably not, I decided. But that didn’t lessen my determination to do it.

I had already begun to hope that la Reine des Neiges was an authentic superpower in the lookingglass world: that she was the ultrasmartest of all the self-aware AIs. There might be a lot I could learn from a friend like Rocambole, but I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that we were adrift in a democracy, or even a Hardinist conspiracy. Somewhere in the AI pack there had to be a top dog, and I wanted that top dog to be the one who had custody of my currently useless meat.

I had always wanted to have the chance to stand face-to-face with one of the big players in the game of human history. I still wanted that, even though I knew that in the present situation we’d both be wearing inscrutable masks. Now, I made the further decision that before I died, or set out to live forever, I wanted to be able to spit in the eye of something that could really
see
into the depths of space, time, and possibility.

Thirty-Eight

Of Mirrors and Fragments

B
y the time Christine Caine first saw the VE-tape version of
The Snow Queen
the story was several stages removed from its origin in the works of Hans Christian Andersen. Perhaps its so-called origin wasn’t
really
its origin, in that all the stories of a sophisticated culture have to be made up of fragments of preexisting stories, which are themselves new combinations of ancient elements, whose foundation stones are lost in the mists of oral culture and mythology — but authenticity isn’t the point, as anyone who has read my story attentively will readily understand.

There are objects of the human mind more real than those which constitute mere physical reality. Names and stories have a significance that cuts far deeper than mere vulgar appearance.

As I remembered it, while I drew nearer to the palace of la Reine des Neiges,
The Snow Queen
was actually seven stories in one, seven being a magic number attributed to such potent human inventions as the deadly sins and the named days forming the basic cycle of human activity.

The first of those stories told of the manufacture by an imp of a magic mirror whose purpose was to diminish everything that was good and to magnify everything that was bad. The mirror did this work so well in the human world — which cannot have provided much of a challenge — that its impish users decided to carry it up to Heaven, in order to see what it would make of the images of the angels. Perhaps, although the story did not dare say so, they also wanted to see what it would make of God Himself.

The mirror, which had a self-aware intelligence of its own, delighted in the prospect of going to Heaven. It was so excited that it became very difficult to bear, and the imps carrying it aloft lost control of it. It fell, and was shattered into more than a trillion fragments.

These fragments, shot like bullets by the velocity of the impact, flew in every direction. Some tiny ones lodged in the eyes and hearts of human beings, whose powers of sight and feeling were affected accordingly. Some were big enough to serve as windows in great houses, or as mirrors on walls, while some were only big enough to serve as lenses in spectacles, microscopes, spectroscopes, and telescopes — but all of them had the power to deceive, and pollute, and make things seem wrong.

Perhaps, if the imps had not been so small-minded, they would not have been able to take such delight in this result, but as things were they were well content with all the laughter they derived from these petty perversions of the human world. They forgot all about their grander plan, and they probably had insufficient imagination to wonder what they might have seen had they ascended all the way to Heaven, there to discover what the mirror would make of the images of angels, and of the Divine Countenance Itself.

The second story told how a fragment of the magic mirror lodged in the heart of a boy, who became dissatisfied with all he saw, until he was carried off by the Snow Queen, leaving behind the little girl he had formerly loved, and who still loved him.

The remaining five stories — of which my conscientiously unrefreshed memory is rather vague — told of the little girl’s heroic search for the lost boy, and of the eventual reclamation of his capacity to feel the way humans should.

This passed for a happy ending among children capable of identifying themselves entirely with the little girl, although it was actually the most despairing ending imaginable, because it left more than a trillion fragments of the mirror distributed throughout the world: in eyes and hearts, in mirrors and windows, and in optical instruments of every technologically feasible kind.

Strangely enough, the story was very popular, at least while the world was inhabited by people thoroughly accustomed to despair.

I had already begun to understand, while I trudged toward the real snow queen’s palace with increasingly leaden feet, why Christine Caine liked the story so much, even after her transformation into a murderous puppet. She was then so direly in need of redemption for herself that she had no sentiment to spare for the world.

Her main problem, of course, was rationalization.

Most of what we think of as intentions are actually excuses. Our behavior is far more mechanical than we like to believe; we refuse to see ourselves as robots reacting programmatically and helplessly to external and internal stimuli, so we make up stories to explain why we did what we did. Mostly, it’s easy. Sometimes, it’s not. Occasionally, we become desperately inventive, and even then can find no way to convince ourselves, or soothe our phantom guilt. Rationalization is a two-edged sword.

Christine Caine had killed thirteen people — thirteen being a number of ill omen — because some impish individual had wanted to test the power of malevolent IT. Then she had been left alone in her misery, to explain her actions to herself and others as best she could, even though no imaginable explanation could possibly have served her purpose.