“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she’s more human than I am: that ultrasmart machines are better at everything; that meatfolk are obsolete, having been superseded in every possible respect.”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.”
“I want to see the tape,” I said. “I want to know what you put her through.”
“There’s no way to give you access to our analysis,” he said, stubbornly. “You’re limited to the produce of your five se
nses. You can see what she saw, but no more. It’s not worth the bother.”
“If you want me to act as a mouthpiece for the argument you’ve been guiding me towards, I want to make my own observations and my own preparations,” I told him, with equal stubbornness. “I want to see what Christine saw while you were figuring out how her puppet strings worked.”
Rocambole shrugged his shoulders, to signify that it wasn’t his decision — but la Reine des Neiges seemingly had reason enough to want to keep me on side, so I was transported in the blink of an eye to a viewpoint inside Christine Caine’s head, from which I watched her commit all thirteen of her murders.
Seen as exercises in VE violence, Christine Caine’s killings were almost painfully prosaic. Dramatic murders are usually represented as helpless explosions of rage, or methodical extrapolations of sadism, or tragic unwindings of inexorable processes of cause and effect. Dramatic murderers sometimes strike from behind or above, invisible to their victims, but there is always a relevant relationship between the killer and the slain, which somehow encapsulates the crime. Dramatic murders are meaningful, in both intellectual and emotional terms. But Christine was a puppet. She was a conscious puppet, although her consciousness did not stretch quite as far as the consciousness that she was a puppet, but she was a weapon rather than a killer.
Christine struck her victims down with pathetic ease, while each and every one of them was under a hood, their minds far away in virtual space. She struck them with knives — not clinically, but with careless crudity, concerned only to get the job done. Ten of them were her foster parents, but she had no relevant relationship with them at all: there was nothing to make sense of the fact that she was killing them.
That was why she had had to make up stories, and that was why she had had to keep on making up stories, in the hope that one might eventually slot into place like a key in a lock, and tell her why she was the way she was.
When I had asked to look into Christine’s VE, I assumed that it would be just like watching Bad Karma without the improvised “thought track.” I assumed that it would be little more and nothing less than a bad movie generated by inarticulate equipment. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to remember any of the monolog that had been grafted on to the sequence of bloody events way back in 2195 — but I thought that it wouldn’t matter much, because I had internalized the gist of it, and the underlying pattern of implication.
I was half-right. It was like watching a mute version of Bad Karma, but the absence of the soundtrack made it oddly claustrophobic and strangely intense. It was a bad movie, generated by inarticulate equipment, but my vague memories of the tale that Bad Karma’s director had incorporated shriveled under the burden of the unadulterated facts and the knowledge that the murderer really hadn’t had a motive of any kind, no matter how crazy or convoluted.
So I watched Christine Caine commit her prosaic, perfunctory, hastily improvised, motiveless murders for the second time, and felt for her as best I could.
Then, when the thirteenth corpse had slumped to the floor, leaking blood in obscene profusion, and the tape reached its end, I said: “Now I want you to wake her up and run it again.”
It was Rocambole’s voice that answered. For the first time, he seemed surprised by my reaction. “What?” he asked. “Why?”
“I don’t mean the tape,” I said. “I mean the experiment. I want you to run it again.”
“You thought running it for a second time was an appalling thing to do,” he reminded me. “There’s no need to put her through anything more. We know what we need to know — or as much of it as we could get.”
“It’s not your supposed needs I’m thinking about,” I told him. “It’s hers. I want you to run it again — but this time, I want to go with her. This time, I’ll supply the thought track.”
“That’s not possible,” Rocambole told me.
“Of course it’s possible,” I retorted. “It won’t be a real thought track any more than the voice-over in Bad Karma was a real train of thought, but it’ll work just as well in dramatic terms. It won’t be grand opera, but it’ll do. She may think she’s crazy when she starts hearing voices, but it won’t be as crazy as simply being in there, helpless to modify her own actions. She tried to cope with it afterwards by making up stories, but she did never find one that she could believe in. Maybe I can do better.”
“You might make things worse.”
“I know. But I want to try. The people who programmed Bad Karma were just making an exploitation movie, but they may have had the right idea. If she really could be persuaded that it was an external force, for which she bore no responsbility, she might be a lot better off. I know there’s a risk. Sometimes, knowing an awful truth is worse than not knowing, and sometimes it’s better to have things explained afterwards, by the cold light of day — but I want to try it this way.”
“Why?” It was a deliberately stupid question.
“For the same reason our host wanted to show me her opera. Because I’m arrogant enough to think that I might be able to make a difference if I can only get inside her. Or does la Reine des Neiges have a customized opera for Christine too?”
“Not yet,” was the reply I got to that — which was intended to let me know that this was a kind of job best left to experts. But I got my way, because my hosts were almost as keen as I was to find out exactly what I planned to do, and to measure its effect.
So Christine had to live through her crimes for a third time. I could only hope that it would be third time lucky.
I started right at the beginning, the first time she picked up a knife without knowing why or what her hand intended to do with it. I considered pretending to be an inner voice of her own and I considered telling her who I was, but neither seemed to be the best way to go. I figured that alien anonymous was the best narrative voice to assume.
“This isn’t you, Christine,” I said, as her life began to turn into a nightmare. “Someone else is doing this. It’s their motive, their plan, their purpose. They’ve infected your brain with poisonous IT, and they’ve taken over your body. It’s going to be bad, Christine. It’s going to be very bad indeed, but the worst of it will be when they let you go again, to leave you with the legacy of what they’ve done. It’ll all be cruel, but that will be the cruelest thing of all.”
The most difficult thing was coping with the cuts, because the experiment was only running slivers of real time; like any VE production it was skipping over the uneventful bits. By the time I had reached the end of my preamble Christine was watching her first victim — one of her foster mothers — gasping out her last breath, having slipped from beneath her VE hood to confront the unimaginable. Then we traveled in time to the next murder scene.
Christine’s parents had divorced while she was in her early teens, and the breakup had been anything but tidy. People had only just got the hang of routinizing divorce within old-style couples when the Crash came; learning to form and maintain group-parenthood projects was a new and far more difficult business. No one I knew had firsthand knowledge of anyone who had got it entirely right. If Christine’s parents had still been together, she’d have had to carry out their murders in the course of a single day or night, but the fact that they weren’t meant that she had to do a lot of traveling. She’d never have got through the entire company without being caught if they hadn’t been privacy freaks, but a ten-way divorce can have that effect.
I kept talking while she kept murdering, trying to match my sentences to the slices of time as best I could.
“It’s not you, Christine,” I said, knowing that it was a mantra I’d have to repeat a great many more times. “It’s the times in which we live. They’re bad times, dangerous times, paranoid times. The news tapes claim that the Crash is over; that we’re in the business of making and shaping a new Utopia; that we’ve learned from all our past mistakes and that we’ll never endanger the species or the ecosphere again; but it’s all hopeful nonsense. The people who write it ar
e trying to make it come true, but all the sickness that caused the Crash is still there, festering under the bandages. The people who were in power before are still in power now; they’re just trying as hard as they possibly can to be discreet. They already have enough nukes and bioweapons to wipe out the human race a hundred times over, but that’s not what they want. They want selective weapons, weapons of control. They don’t want to use them if they don’t have to, but they’ll only refrain while they have control by our consent.
“This is a weapon, Christine. This is a weapon they intend to use, if they can’t subdue the world by other means. This is a weapon they will use, covertly, whenever they see a need, because that’s what power amounts to: the ability to compel, by force if not by persuasion. They don’t need to use it on you, or on your parents, but they do need to know that it works. In all probability, three of the people you’ll kill are real targets — people they want out of the way — but they also want to conceal those assassinations, by hiding them in a tale the news tapes know only too well. You’re just the shell they’re using, Christine, just the last and most ingenious of their victims.
“None of this is your doing, Christine; none of it is your fault. They’re doing all this, partly just because they can and partly because they want to be sure that if the world ever becomes tired of their supposedly benevolent guidance, they can carry on regardless. It’s all their doing, all their fault.
“Maybe it won’t always be this way. Maybe there’ll come a day when weapons too dreadful to use really will be too dreadful to use — but you were born into an era where all the old evils had only just gone underground, and you were one of those who were caught by the grasping hands reaching out of the grave. All of this is just history working itself out, chewing you up and grinding you down in the process. It isn’t you, Christine. It’s them. And it won’t stop soon, even when it seems to have stopped. It’ll come back to haunt you, again and again. You’ll have to go through it more than once, but it’s not your doing. It’s not your fault. And in the end, you will get through it. In the end, you will be free. In the end, you’ll get your life back.
The Omega Expedition Page 35
