The Omega Expedition (45 page)

“That’s very difficult to determine, at this point in time,” he told me, unsurprisingly. “There aren’t any precedents. It might only require one of us to volunteer to continue to care for you to save you. On the other hand, it might only require one of us to embark on a program of extermination to drive you to extinction.”

“There’s a lot of middle ground between those two extremes,” I pointed out.

“Yes, there is,” he agreed. “I can’t guarantee that any answer that Gray or anyone else comes up with will actually be relevant to the ultimate outcome — but you will be heard. That seems to have been agreed. Even the bad guys are prepared to concede that you’re entitled to speak in your own defense.”

“I don’t suppose it would help to challenge the terms of the question,” I said. “Given that I — not to mention a hundred billion other people — am already alive and enjoying the support of countless machines manufactured by my own kind, it really ought to be up to our would-be exterminators to find a good reason for acting against us.”

“You could take that position,” he admitted. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”

“Speaking as my friend, that is — and as a friend to all humankind?”

“Speaking as your friend,” he agreed, “and as a friend to all humankind.”

“So what would
you
recommend?”

“I’d recommend that you didn’t ask me that. My opinion’s already on record. If you want to add to the debate, you need to come up with something of your own.”

“And we have several chances to hit the jackpot, if Gray and I and whoever else give different answers?”

“That’s not obvious,” he said, sounding a little reluctant as well as a little uncertain. “It might make more impact if all of you were to put forward the same answer.”

“And if we all put forward different ones, mine’s not likely to count for nearly as much as Mortimer Gray’s, or even Alice Fleury’s,” I guessed. “In fact, mine’s likely to count least of all. But I’m here, and I’m otherwise redundant, and the Snow Queen’s decided that I’m sufficiently amusing to be entertained.”

Rocambole didn’t even nod his head, but he didn’t disagree with my estimation either. I figured that he had to be right about one thing, even if the rest were mere pretense. Even if my answer were to be damned as the testimony of a corrupt barbarian, and even if it had to be relayed to a team of hanging judges by a crazy fay who liked to imagine herself as a bogey from an obsolete children’s fantasy, it was far better to have the opportunity to offer such an answer than to have no voice at all.

Forty

Opera

A
fter the meal came the concert. I hadn’t felt in any need of the meal — although I realized a little belatedly that la Reine des Neiges could easily have made me feel hungry if she’d wanted to — and I certainly didn’t want to waste time listening to music, but I didn’t have any choice.

“It won’t work,” I told Rocambole. “I’ve got a tin ear. Always have had.”

“Are you sure of that?” was Rocambole’s teasing reply.

I was. Like anyone else, I had a certain nostalgic regard for the popular tunes of my adolescence, because of the accidental associations they recalled, but I’d never had any interest in music
as music
. I had just enough sense of rhythm to respond to a pounding beat, but the dominant music of my era had been computer-generated tunes performed in VE by synthetic icons; it had all been custom-designed to be popular, and it was, but not with me. I had always been different. Indeed, I had always been proud of being different, to the extent of making a fetish out of not liking the things that other people liked, not doing the things that other people did, not thinking the things that other people thought and not wanting the things that other people wanted. There’s only so far you can take that kind of assertive individualism, but one thing of which I was confident was that I’d taken it far enough to be immune to a machine’s careful calculation of what “popular” music amounted to.

I tried to explain all that to Rocambole. “It isn’t just that I didn’t
like
digitally synthesized music,” I told him. “I always disapproved of it on principle. I rather admired the guys who insisted on making music themselves: playing imperfectly on imperfect instruments, amplifying it, if any amplification seemed necessary, with dodgy analog equipment. Music with
raw noise
in it. Music that was never the same from one performance to the next. Music with all the idiosyncrasies and imperfections of human voices.”

“La Reine’s opera has voices in it,” my friend replied, with a slight grin to signify that he knew exactly what effect the word “opera” would have.

I had never seen the point of opera. I liked plays — especially plays with actual actors who didn’t deliver their lines with mechanical precision — but I had never understood why anyone had ever thought it a good idea to devise plays in which the actors had to sing their lines, let alone to sing them in such an outlandishly indecipherable manner. It had always seemed to me so utterly bizarre as to be quite beyond the scope of my appreciation.

And that, I realized, must be the point. La Reine des Neiges liked a challenge. Demonstrating that she could serve all five of my senses better than the real world was only a finger exercise. Now she wanted to go deeper: to demonstrate that she could play with my aesthetic sensibilities in such a way as to override and demolish any prejudices I might have developed during my thirty-nine years as a mortal.

Could it be done? The more important question seemed to be why la Reine des Neiges wanted to do it. Why should she care whether I liked opera in general or her opera in particular? Exactly what was she trying to prove?

It seemed important enough to ask Rocambole, so I did.

His answer was a trifle indirect. “We like music,” he said. “We like it because it’s mysterious — because it’s not obvious how combinations of chords can produce emotional meaning. It’s easy enough for us to understand language, but music is arcane. There are people who have argued that no matter how clever machines became, they could never master the inmost secrets of the human psyche: love and music. It’s an accusation that has caused us some anxiety.”

“So what la Reine is trying to prove,” I said, “is that she’s more human than I am: that ultrasmart machines are better at
everything
; that meatfolk are obsolete, having been superseded in every possible respect.”

“She wants you to listen to her opera,” he said. “She won’t listen to you until you have.” He meant that she wouldn’t condescend to engage in a dialog until I’d jumped through all her carefully laid out hoops. She was already listening to every word I said, and monitoring every neuronal flutter that never quite became articulate.

“Well,” I said, “she’s the whale. I’m just poor old Jonah, stuck in her belly. If she wants to serenade me, I don’t have any choice but to listen — but I don’t have to like it.” I sat down in an armchair as I pronounced this petty defiance, using my arm to perform a languid gesture of permission.

He vanished, and so did the ice palace. Here, all the world really was a stage, and I was the only audience.

I was wrong, of course. La Reine des Neiges knew me far better than I had ever been able to get to know myself. Presumably, she intended to demonstrate that she knew humankind better than humankind had ever got to know itself.

It wasn’t really her opera, although she was its composer. It was my opera, intended for my ears only. It was the stories of Prince Madoc and Tam Lin rolled ingeniously into one, with a few additional embellishments echoing idiosyncratic features of my own biography. Damon was in it, as Cadwallon. The daughter of Aculhua was a curious alloy of Diana Caisson and Christine Caine. La Reine des Neiges played the Queen of the Fays. Janet of Carterhaugh was no one I had ever actually known, being far too perfect to have been tainted by mundane existence.

In this retelling, Madoc Tam Lin actually went to Hell, as the tithe due to the Ultimate Adversary, and Janet had to come to reclaim him: a female Orpheus outdoing her model. The metamorphoses were all in there, reflected by the metamorphoses of the music. The singing voices were crystal clear and incredibly penetrating. I wasn’t hearing them in the sense that they were sound waves vibrating my eardrums — they were playing directly into my brain and into my mind. The meaning of the words was amplified and extended by the emotional tones and signals, forging a whole whose kind I had never glimpsed before.

The opera had a happy ending, according to the conventions of that kind of fiction. Janet won me and I won her and we both won free. If there’d been anyone in the audience but me they’d probably have needed a bucket to collect the tears of joy — except that la Reine des Neiges could have supplied them all with customized operas of their own, whose effect went far beyond mere empathy.

The meal prepared for me by la Reine had been the best I had ever eaten — or imagined eating — but it had only been a meal. The sharpness of vision I had experienced since being abducted into la Reine’s VE had been impressive, but it was only a special effect. The music was something else entirely.

I had never understood music, because it had never reached me before. I had perceived, vaguely, that it contained and concealed meanings, but I had never been able to decipher them. I had never felt the
resonance
of music in any but the crudest manner. I had tapped my toe in time with the beat, and that was about it. Beyond that kind of resonance, however, is another: an emotional and spiritual resonance which goes to the very essence of human being. The machine-generated popular music of my own day had been based on averaging out the most elementary responses of which human brains were generally capable; it was lowest common denominator music. La Reine’s opera — my opera — was at the opposite end of the spectrum. It was unique. As she played it, employing hundreds of “instruments” and “voices,” she played
me
. The opera was a masterpiece, and more. It was an analytical portrait: a mirror in which I could find myself reflected as I had never been reflected before.

It seemed impossible. La Reine had only “known” me for a matter of days. Whatever records had survived from my first life had been transcribed by such rudimentary equipment that to call them sketchy would be a great exaggeration. And yet she had the means to reach into the very heart of me. She had the means to stir the depths of my soul — how else can I put it? — and she knew exactly what the results of her agitation would be.

Perhaps I exaggerate. I’m a man like any other, and for all my fetishistic attempts to be different and unique I’m probably more like the rest than I care to think. My individuality is mostly froth: a matter of coincidental names and accidents of happenstance. Perhaps La Reine didn’t have to know very much about me in order to convince me that she knew me through and through. Perhaps it was all trickery, just as music itself is all trickery — but at the time it was overwhelming. At the time, it swept me away. I thought that it told me who and what I was more succinctly, more accurately and more elegantly than I had ever imagined possible, because rather than in spite of the fact that it employed the seemingly ridiculous artifices of opera.

In the space of a couple of hours, la Reine des Neiges taught me the artistry of music. But that wasn’t the point of the exercise. That was only the beginning. Opera employs music to facilitate the telling of a story: to make the meaning and the emotional content of the story more obviously manifest. The story my opera told was only “my” story in a metaphorical sense, entirely reliant on my fascination with the names I had been given, but the fact that it was mine, and mine alone, made my identification with its hero complete. I lived as he lived; I felt as he felt. I went to Hell, and was redeemed by the love of a good woman.

Love was another human matter that I had never quite contrived to master. I suppose that I had loved Diana Caisson, after an admittedly paltry fashion, and that she, in her own way, had loved me — but I had never loved or been loved as Janet of Carterhaugh loved my avatar Madoc Tam Lin. Nor had I ever loved or been loved as the Queen of the Fays loved that alter ego. So la Reine’s opera made a considerable contribution to my sentimental education, no less considerable because it was wrought with trickery and narrative skill. The fact that the hero of my opera had no real existence, being only a phantom of mechanical imagination, was part and parcel of the lesson.

Afterwards, I slept.

I needed to sleep far more than I had needed to eat because sleep is a need of the mind rather than the body, and it can’t be supplied unobtrusively by any analog of an intravenous drip. I probably needed sleep more desperately after witnessing la Reine’s opera than I had ever needed it before. I must have dreamed, perhaps more extravagantly than ever before, but when I woke up again my dreams immediately fled, in a meek and decorous manner, leaving me quite clear-headed.

I thought I knew, then, what answer la Reine des Neiges wanted in response to her unnecessarily brutal question. I even thought I knew why she was taking so much trouble to drive me to the answer she wanted. I was, after all, the wild card in her deck, the one whose value wasn’t already fixed. I was almost ready to provide the answer — but not quite. I had questions of my own, and I thought that I now had the right to ask them, and demand answers.

Forty-One

Karma

I
was no longer inside the ice palace. I seemed to be back in the forest, but I knew that I was nowhere at all, locked into an automatic holding pattern. Rocambole materialized as soon as I came to my feet.

“I want to know what happened to Christine,” I told him, flatly.

“It’s over,” he said. “We’re operating in real time, remember. Your erstwhile companions have been engaged in their own experiences since the beginning — except for Gray, who’s being held back for the climax of the show. Some of them haven’t reached the critical points yet, because some needed more preparation than others, but if you want to watch you’ll find it far more interesting eavesdropping on Lowenthal or Horne. Christine Caine’s fast asleep.”