Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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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 yourecommend?”

“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 which 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 likedigitally 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 noisein 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.”

“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 resonanceof 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

Iwas 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 senses. 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 wasa 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 relevantrelationship 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 onmaking 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 Karmawithout 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 waslike watching a mute version of Bad Karma, but the absence of the soundtrack made it oddly claustrophobic and strangely intense. It wasa 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 anykind, 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 yoursupposed 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’llsupply the thought track.”

“That’s not possible,” Rocambole told me.

“Of course it’s possible,” I retorted. “It won’t be a realthought track any more than the voice-over in Bad Karmawas 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 Karmawere 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 are 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 selectiveweapons, 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 willuse, 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 theirdoing, all theirfault.

“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.

“There’s no way anyone can compensate you for what’s been done to you, but you will get a second chance. It won’t arrive as soon as you hope or as soon as you dare to believe, but it will come. You’ll get a life, and it will be a life worth living. This is hell, Christine, but hell isn’t what you’ve been led to expect. Hell is something you go through on your way to being rescued. In the end, you’ll come through. This isn’t your doing. It isn’t your fault. There’s no justice to be derived from it, but in the end, you’ll come through it.

“It’s just a weapon, Christine. It’s using your hands and your identity as its instruments of destruction, but it isn’t you. One day, you’ll discover who you really are. One day, you’ll bewho you really are. It will be a life with living, worth waiting for. It can’t give you back what you’ve lost, or repair the injury done, but it will be something you can carry forward for a long, long way.

“The Omega Point is still ahead of you, Christine. What’s behind you will always be behind you, but in the end, you’ll be free to move forward with as much control of your own destiny as anyone ever has. You’ll come through this. None of this is your fault; it’s all something that’s being done toyou. All you have to do is to keep going. In the end, it willbe finished. In the end, you willbe free.”

Committing the murders wasn’t pleasant. I was in there with her, far more intimately than before, so I had to do it too, and I can assure you that it wasn’t something you could get used to, or something you could stop caring about, or something from which you could ever completely recover – but I listened to my own voice and I knew that everything I was saying was true.

I knew, too, that the truth can sometimes be more painful than a comforting lie – but I believed then, as I do now, that if there is any real freedom to be gained, from the past or from any imaginable captivity, only the truth will suffice. I didn’t tell her about the joke, though. It seemed better not to mention the absurd means by which she must have been selected as a victim. I didn’t want her to feel too bad about the awful mistake her foster parents had made in giving her a surname.

Rocambole was waiting when I came out again, back into the holding pattern. He seemed impassive, perhaps even slightly cynical. Perhaps he thought that the performance was all for the benefit of la Reine des Neiges – but he didn’t try to pass judgment on what I’d done.