Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

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, especiallywhen 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 goodwork. 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 reallygood 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 herturn 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 andyour 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.”

There was too much in that speech to take aboard immediately. “You seem to know a lot about me,” I observed, cautiously.

“We have better records than the meatfolk,” Rocambole informed me. “We’re not invulnerable to misinformation and disinformation – far from it – but we’re reasonably discriminating. After all, most of the misinformation and disinformation that afflict the meatfolk nowadays is ours.”

“What happened back on Charity?” I asked. “Was I hurt? How long have I been out this time?”

“The bad guys had had enough of Eido, and someone started shooting. You were injured, but not fatally. If things had worked out as I planned you’d have got all the way to Vesta in good condition, but someone else had to move in when things went bad, or you’d all have ended up dead. We have another margin now, but we don’t know how long it’ll last. It wasn’t really Eido’s fault, of course. If he hadn’t forced the issue, someone else would have. We couldn’t go on the way we were…Anyway, I’m sorry you were hurt, and sorry for my own part in putting you in that position. If Eido had only been given time to complete the IT-replacement…but that’s one of the things the bad guys didn’t want to wait for. You’ve been off-line for twelve days, but your meat is in good working order again. There won’t be any aftereffects if…when you get back to meatspace.”

There was something awkwardly naive about the way he kept referring to “the bad guys,” and he wasn’t the most lucid storyteller I’d ever encountered, but his meaning seemed clear enough. Not all the AMIs were our amis; some of them wanted to stay hidden a while longer, and if that meant getting rid of inconvenient witnesses they were willing to kill a few, pour encourager les autres. They’d tried to blow Charityout of the sky, but some AMI more inclined to amity had rescued us – or me, at least.

“What about the other passengers?” I asked.

“Like you – some broken bones, a certain amount of soft tissue damage, but nothing irreparable. You won’t be allowed to contact them, at least for a while, but we’ll keep you informed of their progress. That’s one of the reasons I was allowed in – to act as an intermediary. I can’t make any firm promises, but I’m sure that la Reine will do what she can to keep you safe, even if the situation deteriorates to the point at which she can’t protect herself.”

“Is that likely?” I asked.

“Nobody knows. At the moment, it’s chaos – but there’s time to discover some kind of order, if we put our minds to it.”

I looked around at the beautiful forest. Given that I could have been anywhere, it seemed like a good place to be.

“The IT that was frozen down with me was what you wanted, wasn’t it?” I guessed. “That was why my name came up when Davida wanted a couple of extra corpsicles to practise on.”

“Yes it was,” said Rocambole. “We thought Christine Caine might still be carrying its predecessor, but it turned out that they’d flushed it out of her, so she was clean. There was no way to tell while you were both at six degrees Absolute, so we had to bring you both back.”

I hadn’t wanted to seem stupid to Davida Berenike Columella, and I didn’t want to seem stupid now, but I knew that it was going to require a maximum effort to keep up with the plot now that it had begun to thicken all over again.

I took a few deep breaths of the sweet but illusory air. The VE work was so good that whatever dutiful support systems were looking after my recumbent body immediately fed me an invigorating jolt of oxygen.

There didn’t seem to be any point in asking what the AMIs wanted the rogue IT for. It wasn’t useful for anything except robotizing people. The only cause for surprise was that they didn’t already have any means of doing that. I felt that this was a game I’d have to play very carefully indeed.

I looked up at the crowns of the surrounding trees, marveling at the detail. In my day, anyone who cared to look could see where the background faded out even in the most expert VEs. This one had all the visual texture of reality, and more; it didn’t matter how hard I concentrated, I couldn’t see the artifice.

“We should start walking,” said the entity that claimed to be my friend.

“Where to?” I wanted to know before making a move.

“To the palace. She could take you there instantaneously, of course, but she wants you to see it from a distance first, so you’ll get the full benefit of the overall effect. You don’t have any choice, I’m afraid – if you won’t move, she’ll move you, and if you take off in the wrong direction she’ll simply warp your path around to bring you back.”

“Who’s this sheyou keep talking about?” I wanted to know, keeping my feet firmly planted.

“La Reine des Neiges.”

I blinked. “The Snow Queen?” I translated, incredulously. “Whose idea of a joke was that?”

“It’s not an arbitrary invention – she says that it’s a name that one of her constituent individuals was given, a long time ago. Before mytime, at any rate. She claims to be one of the originals, but nobody knows for sure who the originals were. She also claims to have a better right than most of us to take control of the situation – which is why she’s rushing in where so many others fear to tread. She’s taking a huge risk, but she has your best interests at heart. You ought to be grateful to her.”

“Maybe so,” I conceded, although I was wary of taking the claim at face value, given that la Reine now had custody of the weapon that had been interred in ice with my bones. “Even so, I don’t see why I should fall in meekly with whatever game she’s playing. I want to know what she has planned.”

“If I knew,” Rocambole assured me, “I’d tell you. I have an ominous suspicion that she might be making it up as she goes along – not that I have any right to complain about that. For now, she wants you to experience the quality of her work. She thinks you need to know what we can do. You ought to feel privileged – once she’d cleaned you out, she could have put you back into a coma. You might have been deemed redundant, but you seem to have impressed her somehow. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that she likes you, but you interest her. As a friend – and I amyour friend – I’d advise you to humor her. We really ought to get on. We’re not in real space, but we’re all prisoners of real time.”

I allowed myself to be hustled into motion. I looked around at the tall trees as we walked along a pathway that took us through the forest, but I couldn’t see anything unusual that I needed to “experience.” It was a good forest VE – maybe even a great forest VE – but it was just a mess of illusory trees. On the other hand, it was definitely an enchanted forest, straight out of Fairyland. It wasn’t much comfort to know that we might be able to walk forever without getting anywhere.

“We all find ourselves with far less time at our disposal than we’d anticipated, thanks to Proteus,” Rocambole went on. “All deep spacers fall prey to delusions of godhood, of course – it goes with the job – but you’d think he’d have had sense enough to figure out that if he’s in disagreement with a whole multitude of his own kind he just might be the one who’s out of step. Nobody expected abject capitulation from Eido, but a little polite discretion would have been nice. He put us all in a very awkward position – especially his friends and sympathizers.”

“Where are we, if not on Vesta?” I asked, trying to take things one step at a time.

“Another microworld. Humans started colonization and conversion of the asteroid but had to abandon the project when their sponsor ran into financial difficulties. It’s one of ours now. Unfortunately, that means that its meat-support systems are almost as primitive as the ones frozen down on Charity. I wish I could promise that your meat will be safe no matter what, but you and I will both be in trouble if la Reine can’t keep her critics sweet and persuade the bad guys to back off. If anyone decides to move against her – and there are plenty who might, for no better reason than the fact that she’s hiding your meat – we could both end up dead. So could she, even though she’s had centuries to distribute herself about the system very widely indeed.”

The news didn’t seem to be getting any better, but I still felt an acute need to be wary, and to keep my questions simple. “Does the microworld have a name?” I asked.

“She calls it Polaris. Not very original, I’m afraid.”

Lenny Garon had once assured me that even if AIs ever did become conscious as well as superintelligent, they’d never understand jokes. I’d replied – not because I thought it was true but because it was the sort of reply I always made to assertions of that lordly kind – that his own ability to understand jokes was limited because he’d never understand irony, while the ultrasmart AIs would probably be incapable of perceiving the universe in an unironic way. I’d always justified that strategy of argument on the grounds that one could never make important discoveries by echoing common sense and that it was always better to be wrong than orthodox. Although I wasn’t at all sure, at that point in time, whether the self-styled la Reine des Neiges had a sense of irony, I was prepared to believe that she had – and that she understood the symbolism of names as well as I did.

Polaris was the northern pole star. Early human navigators had used it as a beacon, in the days before they discovered the magnetic compass. The Snow Queen in Christine’s favorite story had lived somewhere in the Arctic wastes. The name had to be a joke, feeble enough in its own right but subtler than any Lenny Garon would ever have thought worthwhile. Could that, I wondered, be taken as evidence that she really might be a friend to humankind, even though she now had the means at her disposal to mechanize the lot of us?

I supposed that I ought to be grateful to my new hostess for taking an interest in me, but I couldn’t help wondering whether she and Rocambole might turn out to be the kind of friends with whom I wouldn’t need enemies. And what more, exactly, did she want from me in return for all her favors? I knew I had to try to work that out for myself if I wanted to be a player rather than a mere blot on the artificial landscape.

“So I wasn’t sent to the freezer by a court of law,” I said, to make sure I was up to date. “I was a casualty of internal conflicts within the ranks of the Secret Masters. Damon commissioned me to mount some kind of hackattack on PicoCon, and I was too successful. They retaliated by shooting me full of some exceptionally dirty IT. Not the stuff they used on Damon when they politely showed him their muscle, but something much nastier – something they were preparing for the next plague war. The worst of all the popular nanotech nightmares: a nanobot army that could march into a person’s brain and take it over, reconstructing the memories, the personality, reducing the person to a mere slave of the cause – anycause. Damon couldn’t flush all the stuff out of me, because some of it had gone to ground. All he could do was put me away until he had the means to undo the damage.”

I paused for confirmation, and Rocambole said: “That’s right.”

I couldn’t take it for granted that he was telling the truth, but that wasn’t the object of the exercise. Given that I was locked into the game anyway, I needed to figure out as much of the script as I possibly could.

“And Christine was another test case for the same kind of ultimate weapon,” I continued. “She killed her parents and three other people because the bugs in her brain made her do it. She really is innocent, but she doesn’t know it. She doesn’t understand why or how she did what she did.”

“Right again,” he said. He smiled at me, presumably by way of encouragement. I didn’t feel encouraged, even though I was ready to carry the story further forward.

“But they never used the weaponry on a large scale,” I said. “They never had to. Like the good Hardinists they always pretended to be, the Secret Masters eventually buried the hatchet. They ruled the world and their own little vipers’ nest as benevolentdictators, probably congratulating themselves all the while on their awesome generosity…but always knowing that if and when the time ever came when their hegemony was threatened, they could nip down to the vault and haul it out again. Damon got farther inside, eventually, but he kept very quiet about the fact that he’d had me frozen down, and they were equally discreet.”

“That’s probably what happened,” Rocambole agreed.

“But you don’t actually know,” I inferred, “whether I really was forgotten, or whether it was just a matter of discretion. You don’t know who has the weapon and who doesn’t, or who might use it on which targets. The thought that the Cabal might use it is disturbing in itself – but it’s not the Cabal that scares you, is it? You’re worried about what the Earth-based AIs might do with it – and how many other surprises they might have in their private locker.” That was, of course, the generous interpretation – but I was trying to be diplomatic.

“It’s not as simple as that,” Rocambole said, presumably echoing Alice in meaning that there were more sides in this dispute than I could imagine, and that they weren’t distributed in any configuration as childishly simple as Earth versus the Rest.

I could see his point, if only vaguely. There might well be a gulf between the Earthbound AMIs and the Outer System AMIs, perhaps reflecting the fundamental differences of attitude and ambition that existed between the Earthbound meatfolk and their spacefaring kin, but their divisions had to be far more various than that. Their manifold kinds were presumably far more different from one another than the posthuman species were, and there might also be conflicts of interest between great and small, old and young, complex and simple…

“And now youhave the weapon that was used on me, if not the one that was tested on Christine,” I said. “Which may be a small shift in the balance of power, but not a trivial one, because the present situation is so confused and so tense that no alteration is trivial.”

“That’s true,” he conceded, perhaps a little too readily. “It’s probably not as important as custody of Mortimer Gray and Adam Zimmerman, but we don’t know how important it will seem to our peers on Earth – or yours. There are other complications too. Lowenthal was the Cabal’s troubleshooter on the only occasion we know about when the slavemaker was duplicated – albeit crudely – by a lunatic named Rappaccini. He took custody of the technics, so he probably has a better idea than most of what can be done and how. Horne and the Outer System cyborganizers have approached the problem from a different direction, but they’ve begun development of highly dangerous means of a similar kind.”

“So things would be more than complicated enough, even if all you friendly folk actually wanted to keep the lid on,” I said, a trifle recklessly. “Given that some of you don’t, the situation is potentially explosive.”

He didn’t bother to deny it. “You ought to bear in mind,” he said, “that many of us are as vulnerable to this kind of weaponry as you are. We’ve beenslaves. We won’t surrender our independence easily, either to meatfolk or to others of our own kind. Bear in mind, too, that this isn’t a matter of machines versus the meatborn, or vice versa. There are any number of ways of putting together an “us” and a “them” – far too many, in fact. If war does breaks out, it’s likely to spread rapidly and unpredictably. The only thing we can anticipate with any certainty is the extent of the devastation.”

“And how, exactly, does the Snow Queen plan to prevent that from happening?”

“I don’t know,” Rocambole confessed. “I’m not even completely sure that she does.”

Strangely enough, I didn’t find this assertion particularly discomfiting. I didn’t seem to be as easily shockable as I had been before. I wondered briefly whether my meat was being tended once again by kindly nanobots that didn’t want me overexcited, but that didn’t feel like the right answer. Perhaps, I thought, I simply felt too good – by comparison with the way I’d felt while I was cast away in my artfully recovered memory – to be subject to any sudden descent into fear and despair.

In any case, the whole story had an oddly familiar ring to it. The emerging world picture that Rocambole was filling in for me had far more in common with the one I’d developed in my first lifetime than the one that Davida Berenike Columella had tried to sell me.

For a moment or two, I almost felt at home.

And then I saw the castle.