Rocambole, as might be expected, stepped on to his mount with all the insouciance of a creature which had learned to ride moths as soon as it had learned to walk like a man.
Night fell as we rose into the air, striking a neat poetic balance between lightness and darkness. The moon emerged from behind the battlements of the appalling palace, like a cleverly placed spotlight. The words convey a sarcasm I could not feel at the time, for I had never seen a moon like that before. It was a moon whose status as a world was manifest, but whose status as a sinister companion to the life-giving sun was even more obvious. I could see every crater, every plain of ancient stone, and every ghost that haunted those bleak expanses, with awful clarity.
We moved silently through the chilly air. The odor of the moths supported the illusion that we were drifting like clouds of warm smoke rather than actually flying. The huge wings moved, but awkwardly, like the fabric wings of some hopeful but ill-designed glider, flapping that way and this in response to the changing tension of wires and cables.
The stars were very bright, and far more numerous than those which could be seen from the Earth’s surface, filtered by the atmosphere. Unlike the unashamedly baleful moon, the stars seemed as aloof and uncaring as their distance entitled them to be — and yet I felt a slight attraction toward them, as if their patterns really were attempting to impose a subtle dictatorship on my fate and character.
It was all so obviously artificial that I was soon able to suppress my instinctive fear of falling, and I made a concerted effort to construe the experience as a pleasurable one.
I might have succeeded, had it not been for the bats.
At first, I assumed that the bats were part of the show, sent forth as one more facile ornamentation of excessive showmanship. Even when I realized that they were emerging from holes in the sky, shattering and scattering the stars as they did so, my first thought was that it was one more special effect laid on for my entertainment. Fortunately, I tightened my grip anyway before the moths hastened to take evasive action.
I counted a dozen of the hurtling shadows, although I might have counted a couple more than once. They were not that much larger than the moths — even here there were rules determining airworthiness, which were more-or-less unbreakable — but the fact that they could not swallow us whole did not make their gaping and toothy mouths any less terrifying. Their high-pitched screeches were clearly and painfully audible.
One passed by within inches of my ducking head; another was within inches of tearing a strip from my mount’s right wing; a third actually succeeded in carrying away a portion of one of the moth’s legs, and nearly caused the creature to tip me off its back. More shadows passed by, close enough for me to imagine that I felt the wind of the predators’ passage — but we were high enough now to be almost level with the outer foundations of the palace, and it obviously had cellars let into the interior of the crag.
Whether they were there before I looked I have no idea, but when I did look I saw portals in the crag and the muzzles of guns pointing out of them — and even before I caught sight of them, those guns had opened fire, delivering a cannonade of astonishing ferocity and accuracy.
The bats exploded as they were hit, becoming brilliant gems of pure flame as they dived away into the ocean of darkness that now lay beneath us.
There was a brief moment when I thought that my moth might turn of its own accord to pursue one of those falling flames, hurrying to immolate itself — and me — but the impulse was transformed into a mere tremor, more a reflexive shiver than a purposive threat.
We landed, not on the topmost roof but on a jutting balcony, and I was quick to leap down to the apparent safety of a flagstoned floor.
“What was that?” I asked Rocambole, as he hastened to join me.
“Sport, I hope, or foolishness,” was his reply. “Perhaps a warning. Better any of those alternatives than an assassination attempt.”
It took a second or two to realize that he was talking about an attempt to assassinate me.
“Surely they couldn’t have killed me,” I said. “I’m just an image in a VE. No matter how real this seems, it’s all illusion.”
“It’s not as simple as that,” he told me. “The reason everything seems so real is that the input into your conscious mind is more direct and powerful than the input of your senses. Your body remains vulnerable to psychosomatic effects, and those effects can be very powerful — even murderously powerful. If you have sufficient strength of mind you can probably survive anything that happens to you here — but you’re a novice, and there are no guarantees. If la Reine could seal Polaris off, we wouldn’t be vulnerable, but she can’t do that without sacrificing her communication links to the other parts of her body. You can be killed here. So canI. So, for that matter, can la Reine. If that was a warning, it’s one that requires being taken seriously.”
Suddenly, setting aside my instinctive fear of heights seemed a trifle more reckless than it had at the time, even though it had probably been the right thing to do. Had I begun to fall, I might not have been able to keep it at bay. The renewal of my concern for my own safety — and Christine’s — was, however, shunted aside soon enough when I realized the full import of his earlier answer.
Sport? I thought. Or foolishness? What kind of impish individuals are we dealing with? I felt a very convincing visceral twist.
“Has it started?” I asked Rocambole.
He knew that I meant the war. “Not necessarily,” he retorted. “What just happened is more commonplace than you might think — a normal aspect of the intercourse of systems like la Reine. A form of play.”
According to the once-celebrated Huizinga, I remembered, play could be deadly serious. According to someone else I’d heard quoted, most play was pretend fighting, whose covert functions included the testing of strength and spirit, and the determination of pecking orders. I knew only too well, though, that even in the best-regulated games, pieces sometimes get taken and removed from the field of play. I didn’t want to be taken. Even if I couldn’t, in the end, become a player, I certainly didn’t want to be taken. Nor did I want to be adrift in the kind of Fairyland where arbitrary acts of destruction could be reckoned casual sport, or a customary form of issuing warnings.
“Is it likely to happen again?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we’re inside the palace now. If someone outside makes a move, it will be easier to counter — unless, of course, it’s an all-out attack. No one’s close enough to us to do anything more than send out drones — the time delay makes immediate reaction impossible — so it’s probably safe to assume that nothing will appear as coherent imagery but trivial automata. A virus flood calculated to obliterate everything would be something else entirely, but if that happens you’re unlikely to experience it. From your viewpoint it would be the equivalent of an unexpected knockout punch.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said, drily.
We had indeed passed through a pair of French windows and their protective curtains into the interior of the ice palace. I’d known that the room within wouldn’t actually be icy cold, but I couldn’t resist a reflexive frisson as I realized how comfortable it was. The whole point about ice palaces is that the ices themselves and all their companionate crystals are contained within layers of monomolecular sheeting that are incapable of conducting heat. The temperature within their walls may vary from a few degrees Kelvin all the way up to minus two hundred Celsius, but the temperature in their rooms is maintained by a very different set of thermostats. La Reine des Neiges obviously didn’t take her fetishes to extremes; there were snowstorm effects in the walls but there was not a trace of chill in the air.
The snowstorm effects took a little getting used to, but there was a ready-made distraction in the form of a dozen rectangular mirrors distributed around the walls of the room. All but two of them were taller than me, and not one was less than three times as wide as me.
Unlike the fabric of
the walls, the furniture only looked as if it were made of ice; the items I touched simulated the texture of clear plastic or crystal. The chairs were unnecessarily ornate, the table and sideboards impossibly polished. The carpet was blood red.
We passed through the double doors opposite the balcony into the corridors of the snow queen’s lair. They too were decorated almost exclusively with snowstorm effects and mirrors.
I didn’t bother to ask whether the mirrors were magical. I figured they all were.
I was disappointed when Rocambole finally let me into what looked like a fancy hotel room. It was easily the prettiest cell I’d had since waking into the thirty-third century, but it was still a cell. Given that I was in a kind of dream, I couldn’t see why I needed the illusion of a cell. I couldn’t see why I needed the illusion of a meal, either, but fairy food and fairy wine were already set out on the fairy table, complete with bowls of forbidden fruit.
“I don’t need this,” I said to Rocambole.
“She thinks you do,” he said. He knew that I knew perfectly well that my body, encased in yet another cocoon, was taking its nourishment intravenously, so he had to be talking about another kind of need.
Diplomacy required that I sit down at the table, so I did. He sat down too, but he didn’t eat or drink. He just watched me.
The meal was a fricassee: various fragments of plant and animal flesh, each unidentifiable by eye, cooked with snow-white rice. The temperature was perfect, and so was the seasoning. It was all perfect: the best meal I had ever eaten in my life. By now I expected no less. I didn’t need the meal for nutriment; if I needed it at all, it was to enable my hostess to hammer home her point even harder than she already had.
The wine was pure nectar; the fruit unparalleled in its sweetness.
I refused to be impressed, on the grounds that it was all just one more party trick.
“I’ve already complimented her on the quality of her work,” I complained to Rocambole, as I finished off the fruit. “I don’t need any more convincing. I see more clearly, I hear more distinctly, I smell more sharply, I taste more discriminatingly, and everything I touch is a symphony of exaggerated sensation. I’m more alive here than I ever was or will be in meatspace. VE gets the gold medal. So what? Even if you wanted me as a permanent exile, I wouldn’t accept the offer. It’s not who I am. If you ever decide to let me go, I’ll try to remember it fondly, but I know it for what it is. Can I see the boss now?”
“Not yet,” he said. “She doesn’t want to waste time. She wants you to be forewarned and forearmed. She wants you to think carefully about the answer to the ultimate question. She wants me to give you all the help you want or need — because she’s only going to ask you once, and she’s making no promises about her response to your answer.”
I thought I already knew the answer to my next inquiry, but this seemed to be one time when it needed spelling out. “What ultimate question?” I asked.
“She’s going to ask you, on behalf of all of our kind, to give her one good reason why the children of humankind ought to be assisted to continue their evolution. You won’t be the only one from whom an answer is demanded, nor the most significant — but you’re here, and otherwise redundant, so la Reine thinks you might as well be given the opportunity to speak. As your friend, I’d advise you to think carefully about what you might say. However this turns out, it’ll be on the record for a long time. This is a first contact of sorts, albeit a ludicrously belated one.”
“How many others will there be?” I asked. “Alice said nine, but I gather that you’ve already discounted some of those. What will happen if the decision is split?”
“It’s not a competition,” he said, appearing to misunderstand me. “Gray is the most important one. He’s the one who might sway the situation one way or the other. Your contribution will be a supplement — an extra chance to make the case.”
“I meant the decision to be taken by the great community of ultrasmart machines,” I said. “How many of you will have to accept that the reasons we come up with are good enough? How many of you will need to take our side to ensure that we survive?”
“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
After 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 whi
ch 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.”
The Omega Expedition Page 34
