If I had been betrayed — and I had — I had been betrayed by circumstance, not by Damon Hart. Not, at any rate, until he forgot me. Maybe even that had been a kindness: the cost of making sure that his new and extremely undependable friends didn’t find out where I was.
Sometimes, it can be a mercy to be forgotten.
I tried to tell my other self that the pain in my head was easing slightly, and that the odor in which I was dissolving wasn’t the perfume of my own gangrenous and necrotized flesh — but the other me wasn’t listening, because the other me was busy with an intention of its own.
This time I stuttered as well as stammering, but I finally got the word out. “D…d-d-date?”
“It’s Wednesday, Madoc,” the voice that sounded like Damon’s told me, presumably trying to be helpful, while actually concealing everything that either I really needed to know. “Wednesday the nineteenth. You’ve been under for four and a half days. I don’t know what sort of dreams you’ve been having, but you’re back now, if only for a little while. This is real. It won’t last long, and I haven’t a clue how long it will be before we can bring you back again for good, but you have to hang in there. I’ll find out what this is even if I have to take it to Conrad and eat humble pie. I’ll pull you through. All you have to do is keep the faith.”
He sounded convincing. He sounded like the Damon I’d known for so many years: the good Damon, who knew the meaning of friendship. He sounded like the Damon I’d believed in, the Damon I still wanted to believe in — and that was the trouble.
That was where paranoia kicked in again.
If I wasn’t feeding this to myself by way of compensation for the obvious fact that I was actually in Hell, I thought, then somebody else probably was. Somebody who knew me a lot better than Davida Berenike Columella. Or some thing which knew me a lot better than any meatborn citizen of the thirty-third century.
I knew that I had to test that hypothesis, if I could. If I could only speak…
It’s surprising how difficult short words can be when your voice is stretched to the limit and opening your mouth fills the available space with poison gas. I knew that I couldn’t contrive an M, but I thought a D might be easier.
Unfortunately, it was open to anyone who wanted to mock me to misconstrue “Eido” as “I do” — and equally open to the me that wasn’t not me to misconstrue what really was “I do” as something that I wanted to say but couldn’t, because I was a thousand years away.
“Do what, Madoc?” Damon countered. He sounded mystified, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe he was Eido, either. I figured this for somebody else’s game. Or some thing else’s game.
It required a tremendous effort in either case, but I or the other I managed to say “L…iar.”
“I never lied to you, Madoc,” Damon’s voice was quick to say. “I didn’t know what we were up against. I still don’t — but I won’t be underestimating them again. You have to believe me, Madoc — I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have sent you in if I’d known. You’re my best man, Madoc. My best friend. I would never do anything to harm you. I’ll do everything within my power to save you. You’ll be back, Madoc, as good as new. I swear it.”
Mercifully, I faded out then. It wasn’t because anyone had actually taken pity on me, of course. If I could be certain of anything, I could be certain of that.
I faded out because it, or they, figured that it, or they, had done all that could be done with that particular script. There was nowhere else for it to go without killing one or both of me.
Thirty-Five
A Stray Meditation
Cogito, ergo sum. There is a thought, therefore there is a thinker. Whatever else we doubt, we can always fall back on that meager comfort. Nor is the thought a lonely thing suspended in a cold intellectual vacuum; it is part of a train fueled by a flow of sensory data.
There was once a time when philosophers were willing to take the intuitive leap — knowing all the time that there was a tiny risk involved — of trusting that flow of data. They retained certain careful doubts about the reliability and limited scope of the senses, but they considered it a reasonable hazard to bet that the world that appeared to them must be closely and intelligibly related to the world that actually was, and that the memories mysteriously engraved in their flesh were similarly trustworthy. They could not believe that God, or the pressure of natural selection, would condemn them to a life of perverse illusion. They could not believe that their little trains of thought might be chugging through an infinite darkness, save for the company of a malevolent demon whose sole reason for being was to feed them a diet of clever lies, while the tracks of memory were torn up behind them and relaid in crazy patterns of deception.
And then we invented Virtual Experience and Internal Technology.
In the beginning, the makers of VE — the movers and shakers of the modern world — even had the nerve to call it Virtual Reality. Ironically, they stopped calling it that at almost exactly the point when IT augmentation of VE gave it a substantial boost in the direction of reality simulation.
After that, of course, the odds changed. The old bets no longer seemed so reasonable. Once we had IT-augmented VE, it was all too easy to believe in a malevolent demon that might be feeding lies to every one of our gullible senses, laying down false memories if not actually reconstructing the ones we already had.
After the advent of IT-assisted VE, people who really wanted to do so could live the greater part of their lives immersed in custom-built illusions. In the early days the overindulgent few got nasty sores from lying too long in their data suits, but some of them did it anyway — and while reports of people literally rotting away without ever noticing that they were dying were urban myths, people did die in VE. Most people were careful enough, and moderate enough, to ensure that by the time the manufactured illusions became 90 percent convincing their care and moderation had become habitual — but all the nightmare scenarios happened occasionally, and there was one kind of nightmare that could never again be banished to the realm of obsolete bugaboos.
After the advent of sophisticated VE, nobody waking up in a strange environment could ever be completely sure whether or not it was real. And no matter how many times a man might wake thereafter, or to what kind of environment, he remained in the depths of the maze of uncertainty, knowing that he could never be sure of his escape.
It wasn’t quite that bad in practice — not, at least, in my young days. In my young days, every discriminating person thought he or she could tell the difference between meatspace and the cleverest imaginable VE. Even in those days, though, you’d have had to be a complete fool not to see which way the world was going, and know that it wouldn’t always be that easy.
Maybe it would have been easy enough if the manufactured illusions had always had to rely on human programmers, but anyone who’d thought long and hard about it even in my day would probably have realized that there was another important threshold yet to be crossed.
If ever the machines that were manufacturing the illusions became independently smart, cutting human programmers out of the loop, there would be a whole new ballgame. And which AIs, out of the billions manufactured for human use, were the most likely to make the jump to self-consciousness and self-direction? Fancy spaceships? Humaniform robots? Communication systems? Or VE feeders? Or all of the above? Who could tell?
Not, apparently, the posthumans who lived alongside the first few generations of ultrasmart machines.
So how could anyone know for sure, when he woke up to a morning of a day some little way advanced from my own youth, that he hadn’t been taken away in his sleep and frozen down, not to be woken up again until the world had gone all the way in the direction that it had already been going when he went to sleep? Even if he actually remembered being frozen down — or thought he did — where else could he possibly be but in the maze of uncertainty, incapable any longer of making any final decision as to what might be real and what might be fa
iry tale?
One thing of which a man of my day could be certain, however, was that if he remembered — or thought he remembered — two mutually contradictory accounts of an event, then at least one of them must be a damn lie. Statistically speaking, the probability that either of them was true was no more than a quarter. And even if one could not actually “remember” two mutually contradictory accounts, the possibility that one might at some stage in the future “remember” another — and perhaps another and another and another — implied that the probability that anything one perceived after any such awakening was true had to be reckoned less than a half.
Unlike the philosophers of old, therefore, the wise man of the post-VE era would bet on the falsehood every time.
Once a man of my time had fallen asleep, even if he were convinced that he had only fallen asleep for a single night, he could not help waking up in a fairy-tale world where everything was more likely to be false than to be true, more likely to be a tale than a biography, more likely to be a fantasy than a reality, more likely to be part of a lostory than part of a history.
All in all, therefore, I was not much worse off when I awoke on Excelsior, or inside Charity, than anyone in my situation would have been. Yes, I was living in a bizarre fairy tale — but as the calculus of probability would have informed me that I was living in a fairy tale anyway, why should I be unduly perturbed by its bizarrerie? Should I not have been grateful? After all, if we are condemned by logic to live our lives as if they were stories, do we not have every reason to hope that the stories will make full use of our imagination? Would we not be within our rights to feel short-changed by fate if the stories in which we found ourselves were as dull and as relentlessly ordinary as the lives we had lived before we fell asleep?
Perhaps we should also hope that the stories in which we find ourselves will have happy endings — but I’m not so sure of that. Even mortals, once they enter into fairy tales, may hope to become emortal — and what is emortality but a qualified immunity from endings of all kinds?
On due reflection — and I speak as one who has been through the looking glass and back again more than once — I think that people of my time, and maybe imaginative people of every time, should not go into fairy tales looking for endings at all, but should instead be content with the traveling, at least for as long as the traveling takes them to places that they could hardly have imagined before.
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
When 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.”
The Omega Expedition Page 31
