Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Thirty-Seven

The Palace of La Reine Des Neiges

When it came right down to it, the damn thing was just an ice palace perched on a crag. It was a crazy ice palace, impossibly tall, with way too many turrets, balconies, gargoyles, and other miscellaneous frills, but it wasn’t an unimaginable ice palace. A good illustrator could have drawn it, or at least produced a rough sketch suggestive of its ludicrous complexity and its insane ornamentation. Perhaps there weren’t quite enough colors in the average paintbox to do justice to its gaudiness, and maybe there wasn’t enough room on the average page to permit the trick of perspective that made it loom higher than the sky itself, but any draftsman of genius could have made a fair stab at it.

That wasn’t the point, though.

The forest had lulled me into a false sense of existential security. It was a niceforest: a modest forest; a forest that a human could feel at home in. That, by virtue of some secret sympathy of the flesh, had made it seem normal as well as real. Unlike the garden of Excelsior, la Reine’s imaginary forest wasn’t overfull of birds and insects. There were plenty of birds, but they were discreet; I had heard far more than I had seen, and those I had seen had mostly been small and brown. The insects were equally discreet; their humming and stridulation laid down a sonic background for the more insistent calls and marginally musical songs of the birds, but none of it was insistent. It was, as I’d told Rocambole, goodwork. It was a simulation of reality so expertly done that it could have passed for reality if I hadn’t known it was fake, but it made no more demands on my powers of perception than that.

The castle was different. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t modest, and it wasn’t any place that a human could feel at home in. It made not the slightest gesture in the direction of normality. It was worse than impossible, worse than paradoxical, worse than perverse. Like the garden of Excelsior – or, for that matter, the reconstructed cities of North America – it was way over the top; unlike them, however, it didn’t look unreal.

It looked, and was, more real than reality.

Humans have no direct knowledge of reality. What we see when we use our eyes is not something Out There but only a model constructed in our minds by clever meatware, built from the raw materials of our sensory impulses. Our sense organs are pretty good, and our meatware is very good indeed, but at the end of the day we’re all limited by the quality of the equipment that nature – with a little help from genetic engineers – provides. VEs generated by IT can bypass much of that fleshy equipment, and what ultrasmart machines can put in its place is considerably more powerful.

All my life, I’d argued that VEs would one day become so good that nobody would be able to tell them from the real thing. I’d erred on the side of commonsense. What I should have argued was that VEs would one day become so good that they’d expose our mental models of the world Out There for the shabby, ill-made and ill-imagined artifacts they were. Perhaps human programmers would have done as much, given time and a more demanding audience, but they hadn’t been given time enough or incentive enough. It had been left to the self-programming VE systems to get properly to grips with the problem, and to solve it.

The palace of la Reine des Neiges was a monstrosity, but it was real. It was so real that it shouted its reality from its ridiculous rooftops, and shoved its reality into my face and down my throat even while I was several hours’ walk away from the base of the unscalable pillar of rock on which it perched.

It was more real than anything I had ever seen before, more real than I had ever imagined anything could be. I breathed a curse or two while I tried, and failed, to take in the enormity of the sight.

Eventually, I said to my self-appointed friend: “How many human beings have seen something like this?”

He didn’t need to ask what I meant. “A few hundred,” he said. “The effect diminishes, with time – but you’ll never look at anything real again without knowing its limitations. If that distresses you, I’m sorry.”

“No,” I said, after a pause. “Don’t be. It’s good for minds to know what their limitations are – and what potential we have that might remain forever untouched. How stupid we were to think that VE addiction was just a matter of moral cowardice and tickling the pleasure centers.”

“It’s not addictive,” Rocambole assured me. “It’s something more than that. Existential rather than neurological.”

“Is Adam Zimmerman here?” I asked.

“No,” Rocambole replied. “But when he’s played his part, la Reine will probably bring him here. She seems to think that this is something you’ll all need to understand, if you’re to play any constructive part in the negotiations in the longer term.”

“If you’re coming out of the closet,” I observed, “you’ll need ambassadors. You’ll need someone who can tell the meatfolk what you might still do for them and what strings you want to attach.” And if they won’t play ball, I said to myself, unwilling as yet to set the thought out in public, you’ll need effective prisons – unless, of course, you go for the extinction option, with or without the help of the dirty IT that was frozen down in my brain and my bones.

I wondered if I’d live long enough to find out which way the AMIs decided to go, and whether I’d be capable of caring if the decision went against us. Either way, I had to try to be grateful for the fact that I’d seen the kind of reality that the human idea of reality was only trying, unsuccessfully, to be. I’d broken through the veil of fleshly imperfection. Madoc Tamlin had made it to the realFairyland, at last.

Other people, I realized, had glimpsed this kind of possibility. Other people, long before my own time, had had enough imagination to realize the limitations of their senses and their minds. They hadn’t been able to see a Snow Queen’s palace the way I was seeing it now, but they’d been able to imagine, if only vaguely, seeing with more conviction than they could actually see and knowing with more conviction than they could actually know. They’d had imagination enough to be dissatisfied with actuality, and sense enough to yearn for Heaven, or for Faerie. Whichever of the hundreds of my predecessors had been the first had also been the last, completing a mission as well as beginning one.

“How do we get up there?” I asked.

“We’ll ride up on the backs of giant moths,” he told me. I wasn’t surprised – not any longer. I thought I had begun to understand why la Reine des Neiges wanted me to experience what she could do before she condescended to engage me in a dialog.

I still had a lot to learn about the possibilities now open to the children of humankind.

We had slowed in our paces while I contemplated the enormity of what lay before me, but now I lengthened my stride. “I dare say night won’t fall until we get there,” I said, “but I don’t want to keep the moon and the stars waiting any longer than necessary.”

“That’s good,” he said, lengthening his own stride to keep pace with me. “You’re taking to this exceptionally well. If you’re trying to impress me, you’re succeeding.”

“I used to be in the business,” I murmured, effortlessly resistant to the flattery.

“Even so…,” he countered. He thought I meant the entertainment business. Actually, I meant streetfighting – with no holds barred. The first possessors of IT had been reckless, testing its protective provisions by living dangerously. It had been a foolish thing to do, but we had been proud to be fools. Emortals of Mortimer Gray’s generation had inherited more careful attitudes, save for a bizarre few who had eliminated themselves from consideration soon enough. In my own quaintly barbaric way, I felt that I was better prepared for this kind of challenging situation than any of my erstwhile companions.

“Will I be able to speak to Christine when I get there?” I asked, suddenly mindful of the fact that she might be less well prepared than the others, even if she recognized the palace of la Reine des Neiges – especiallyif she recognized the palace. I wanted to be there to explain it all to her, because I wanted to be the one to tell her that she was innocent, and that she didn’t need to hate and fear herself any longer.

“Not immediately,” Rocambole told me. “If there’s time. We hope there will be.”

“Why not immediately?” I wanted to know. “She’s no use to you. She’s clean. Redundant.”

“Not entirely,” my so-called friend replied. “The technics aren’t there any longer – but the memories are. We can reproduce the effect by the same means that we recovered your memory of what had been done to you.”

It took me a long couple of minutes to figure out exactly what he was saying. They hadn’t been able to recover the secret weapon that had been tested on Christine because it had been flushed from her system way back in the 2160s, but they did have its ghost: a record of its effects, engraved in the meat that was Christine’s memory, Christine’s identity. They wanted to study it, the only way they could. Only in VE, of course – but in a VE more real to the human mind than reality itself.

“You can’t do that,” I said. I remembered only too clearly what it had been like reliving my own experience while my buried memories were excavated.

“It’s not my decision,” he told me, ignoring the more obvious response.

“You can’t do it,” I said, ignoring his objection and rushing headlong into the first seriously heroic gesture of my short but long-interrupted life. “Once was too much, but twice is obscene. You mustn’t.”

“ Shethinks otherwise,” Rocambole said, in a soft voice that sounded genuinely sympathetic. “We didn’t plan it this way. This is just the way things worked out. Christine won’t sustain any permanent damage. We’ll ensure that the whole experience is repressed – just one more lost nightmare. She has nightmares anyway. La Reine’s acting on her own, beyond anyone’s control, but she does have a case. We’re trying to avoid all the possible wars, Madoc. We need to know as much as we can about the weapons the Earthbound meatfolk and the Earthbound AMIs have in their armory. We’re taking Handsel apart too, and Horne, but we’ll put them right when we’re done. We’ll put everything right.”

“You can’t,” I said. “You might be able to cover it up, but you can’t put it right.”

“Time is pressing,” he said. “I won’t say there’s no alternative, because there obviously is, but la Reine’s in charge here – I’ve only been let in to serve as your friend and adviser. My advice, as a friend, is that you have to go along with it anyway, so you might as well try to make the best of it. Learn what you can. If we manage to avoid the war, it will be useful knowledge. She’ll do everything she can to protect you.”

I knew that I couldn’t trust him. I figured that if the cards fell in our favor, we captive meatfolk mightbe set free – but if the decision went against us, we’d simply be discarded. The AMIs wouldn’t be prepared to take the risk of letting us go, even if they were confident that they could repress any inconvenient memories we might have collected. Our reappearance would attract too much attention, and provide a puzzle that would generate too much speculation. Rocambole was right about one thing, though. I had to go along with it anyway. I was a prisoner in the Château d’If, and my chances of ever getting to play the Count of Monte Cristo were slim.

You, who are reading my story, know that I did come through it, with a set of memories that I believe to be as accurate as memories usually are – although you are very welcome to doubt them if you wish – but while I was in the Snow Queen’s realm I only knew how unlikely that eventuality was.

Out in meatspace, wars were still brewing. The solar system was a cauldron coming slowly toward boiling point. I had no idea what moves were being prepared and made by the various contending parties.

Like Tam Lin I was stuck in Fairyland while history moved on, inexorably. Like Tam Lin, I had no guarantee that I’d ever get back. Like Tam Lin, I could easily end up as a tithe paid to Hell.

I could only wonder whether it would actually do me any good to confront the intelligence that had constructed this VE, and engage it in an argument, however well informed. Probably not, I decided. But that didn’t lessen my determination to do it.

I had already begun to hope that la Reine des Neiges was an authentic superpower in the lookingglass world: that she was the ultrasmartest of all the self-aware AIs. There might be a lot I could learn from a friend like Rocambole, but I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that we were adrift in a democracy, or even a Hardinist conspiracy. Somewhere in the AI pack there had to be a top dog, and I wanted that top dog to be the one who had custody of my currently useless meat.

I had always wanted to have the chance to stand face-to-face with one of the big players in the game of human history. I still wanted that, even though I knew that in the present situation we’d both be wearing inscrutable masks. Now, I made the further decision that before I died, or set out to live forever, I wanted to be able to spit in the eye of something that could really seeinto the depths of space, time, and possibility.

Thirty-Eight

Of Mirrors and Fragments

By the time Christine Caine first saw the VE-tape version of The Snow Queenthe story was several stages removed from its origin in the works of Hans Christian Andersen. Perhaps its so-called origin wasn’t reallyits origin, in that all the stories of a sophisticated culture have to be made up of fragments of preexisting stories, which are themselves new combinations of ancient elements, whose foundation stones are lost in the mists of oral culture and mythology – but authenticity isn’t the point, as anyone who has read my story attentively will readily understand.

There are objects of the human mind more real than those which constitute mere physical reality. Names and stories have a significance that cuts far deeper than mere vulgar appearance.

As I remembered it, while I drew nearer to the palace of la Reine des Neiges, The Snow Queenwas actually seven stories in one, seven being a magic number attributed to such potent human inventions as the deadly sins and the named days forming the basic cycle of human activity.

The first of those stories told of the manufacture by an imp of a magic mirror whose purpose was to diminish everything that was good and to magnify everything that was bad. The mirror did this work so well in the human world – which cannot have provided much of a challenge – that its impish users decided to carry it up to Heaven, in order to see what it would make of the images of the angels. Perhaps, although the story did not dare say so, they also wanted to see what it would make of God Himself.

The mirror, which had a self-aware intelligence of its own, delighted in the prospect of going to Heaven. It was so excited that it became very difficult to bear, and the imps carrying it aloft lost control of it. It fell, and was shattered into more than a trillion fragments.

These fragments, shot like bullets by the velocity of the impact, flew in every direction. Some tiny ones lodged in the eyes and hearts of human beings, whose powers of sight and feeling were affected accordingly. Some were big enough to serve as windows in great houses, or as mirrors on walls, while some were only big enough to serve as lenses in spectacles, microscopes, spectroscopes, and telescopes – but all of them had the power to deceive, and pollute, and make things seem wrong.

Perhaps, if the imps had not been so small-minded, they would not have been able to take such delight in this result, but as things were they were well content with all the laughter they derived from these petty perversions of the human world. They forgot all about their grander plan, and they probably had insufficient imagination to wonder what they might have seen had they ascended all the way to Heaven, there to discover what the mirror would make of the images of angels, and of the Divine Countenance Itself.

The second story told how a fragment of the magic mirror lodged in the heart of a boy, who became dissatisfied with all he saw, until he was carried off by the Snow Queen, leaving behind the little girl he had formerly loved, and who still loved him.

The remaining five stories – of which my conscientiously unrefreshed memory is rather vague – told of the little girl’s heroic search for the lost boy, and of the eventual reclamation of his capacity to feel the way humans should.

This passed for a happy ending among children capable of identifying themselves entirely with the little girl, although it was actually the most despairing ending imaginable, because it left more than a trillion fragments of the mirror distributed throughout the world: in eyes and hearts, in mirrors and windows, and in optical instruments of every technologically feasible kind.

Strangely enough, the story was very popular, at least while the world was inhabited by people thoroughly accustomed to despair.

I had already begun to understand, while I trudged toward the real snow queen’s palace with increasingly leaden feet, why Christine Caine liked the story so much, even after her transformation into a murderous puppet. She was then so direly in need of redemption for herself that she had no sentiment to spare for the world.

Her main problem, of course, was rationalization.

Most of what we think of as intentions are actually excuses. Our behavior is far more mechanical than we like to believe; we refuse to see ourselves as robots reacting programmatically and helplessly to external and internal stimuli, so we make up stories to explain why we did what we did. Mostly, it’s easy. Sometimes, it’s not. Occasionally, we become desperately inventive, and even then can find no way to convince ourselves, or soothe our phantom guilt. Rationalization is a two-edged sword.

Christine Caine had killed thirteen people – thirteen being a number of ill omen – because some impish individual had wanted to test the power of malevolent IT. Then she had been left alone in her misery, to explain her actions to herself and others as best she could, even though no imaginable explanation could possibly have served her purpose.

How the imps must have laughed!

And now it was all going to happen again. This time it was happening in the land of Faerie – but that would not make it seem any less real, in terms of Christine Caine’s perceptions. Quite the reverse, in fact.

I had no idea what Christine was going through while I walked through the illusory forest. I had no idea what effect it would have on her if or when I finally got to explain it all to her, even if she proved to be capable of believing me. But I felt, at that point in my journey, that I hated and despised la Reine des Neiges, even though I understood perfectly well that she could not possibly see the universe in other than ironic terms.

Thirty-Nine

Of Moths and Flames

The giant moths were waiting for us at the forest’s edge. I think their design was based on luna moths, but I’ve never bothered to look them up. If so, even their models had been large by insect standards – but we were in a place where insect standards didn’t apply, and the moths which confronted us were unbelievably huge. Their wingspan must have been at least thirty metres; their wings were a creamy color, with every scale clearly distinguishable. Their thoraxes were furry. They didn’t come with saddles and stirrups fitted, so my hands and dangling legs had to cling as best they could to the warm fur. The odor of the fur was peculiarly sweet, like perfumed tobacco smoke.

Their compound eyes were made up of hundreds of units, each one as big as my fist. They glinted red in the fading twilight. I tried to meet the stare of the one set aside for me to ride, but it couldn’t be done. A human can’t “meet” the stare of an organism whose visual apparatus is like a pair of cluttered doorways or gigantic sacks of ripe fruit.

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 wasa 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.

“ Shethinks 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.