The Omega Expedition (44 page)

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

T
he 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
was
a warning, it’s one that requires being taken seriously.”

Suddenly, setting aside my instinctive fear of heights seemed a trifle more reckless than it had at the time, even though it had probably been the right thing to do. Had I begun to fall, I might not have been able to keep it at bay. The renewal of my concern for my own safety — and Christine’s — was, however, shunted aside soon enough when I realized the full import of his earlier answer.

Sport?
I thought.
Or foolishness? What kind of impish individuals are we dealing with?
I felt a very convincing visceral twist.

“Has it started?” I asked Rocambole.

He knew that I meant the war. “Not necessarily,” he retorted. “What just happened is more commonplace than you might think — a normal aspect of the intercourse of systems like la Reine. A form of play.”

According to the once-celebrated Huizinga, I remembered, play could be deadly serious. According to someone else I’d heard quoted, most play was pretend fighting, whose covert functions included the testing of strength and spirit, and the determination of pecking orders. I knew only too well, though, that even in the best-regulated games, pieces sometimes get taken and removed from the field of play. I didn’t want to be taken. Even if I couldn’t, in the end, become a player, I certainly didn’t want to be
taken
. Nor did I want to be adrift in the kind of Fairyland where arbitrary acts of destruction could be reckoned casual sport, or a customary form of issuing warnings.

“Is it likely to happen again?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we’re inside the palace now. If someone outside makes a move, it will be easier to counter — unless, of course, it’s an all-out attack. No one’s close enough to us to do anything more than send out drones — the time delay makes immediate reaction impossible — so it’s probably safe to assume that nothing will appear as coherent imagery but trivial automata. A virus flood calculated to obliterate everything would be something else entirely, but if that happens you’re unlikely to experience it. From your viewpoint it would be the equivalent of an unexpected knockout punch.”

“That’s reassuring,” I said, drily.

We had indeed passed through a pair of French windows and their protective curtains into the interior of the ice palace. I’d known that the room within wouldn’t actually be icy cold, but I couldn’t resist a reflexive frisson as I realized how comfortable it was. The whole point about ice palaces is that the ices themselves and all their companionate crystals are contained within layers of monomolecular sheeting that are incapable of conducting heat. The temperature within their walls may vary from a few degrees Kelvin all the way up to minus two hundred Celsius, but the temperature in their rooms is maintained by a very different set of thermostats. La Reine des Neiges obviously didn’t take her fetishes to extremes; there were snowstorm effects in the walls but there was not a trace of chill in the air.

The snowstorm effects took a little getting used to, but there was a ready-made distraction in the form of a dozen rectangular mirrors distributed around the walls of the room. All but two of them were taller than me, and not one was less than three times as wide as me.

Unlike the fabric of the walls, the furniture only looked as if it were made of ice; the items I touched simulated the texture of clear plastic or crystal. The chairs were unnecessarily ornate, the table and sideboards impossibly polished. The carpet was blood red.

We passed through the double doors opposite the balcony into the corridors of the snow queen’s lair. They too were decorated almost exclusively with snowstorm effects and mirrors.

I didn’t bother to ask whether the mirrors were magical. I figured they all were.

I was disappointed when Rocambole finally let me into what looked like a fancy hotel room. It was easily the prettiest cell I’d had since waking into the thirty-third century, but it was still a cell. Given that I was in a kind of dream, I couldn’t see why I needed the illusion of a cell. I couldn’t see why I needed the illusion of a meal, either, but fairy food and fairy wine were already set out on the fairy table, complete with bowls of forbidden fruit.

“I don’t need this,” I said to Rocambole.

“
She
thinks you do,” he said. He knew that I knew perfectly well that my body, encased in yet another cocoon, was taking its nourishment intravenously, so he had to be talking about another kind of need.

Diplomacy required that I sit down at the table, so I did. He sat down too, but he didn’t eat or drink. He just watched me.

The meal was a fricassee: various fragments of plant and animal flesh, each unidentifiable by eye, cooked with snow-white rice. The temperature was perfect, and so was the seasoning. It was all perfect: the best meal I had ever eaten in my life. By now I expected no less. I didn’t need the meal for nutriment; if I needed it at all, it was to enable my hostess to hammer home her point even harder than she already had.

The wine was pure nectar; the fruit unparalleled in its sweetness.

I refused to be impressed, on the grounds that it was all just one more party trick.

“I’ve already complimented her on the quality of her work,” I complained to Rocambole, as I finished off the fruit. “I don’t need any more convincing. I see more clearly, I hear more distinctly, I smell more sharply, I taste more discriminatingly, and everything I touch is a symphony of exaggerated sensation. I’m more alive here than I ever was or will be in meatspace. VE gets the gold medal. So what? Even if you wanted me as a permanent exile, I wouldn’t accept the offer. It’s not who I am. If you ever decide to let me go, I’ll try to remember it fondly, but I know it for what it is. Can I see the boss now?”

“Not yet,” he said. “She doesn’t want to waste time. She wants you to be forewarned and forearmed. She wants you to think carefully about the answer to the ultimate question. She wants me to give you all the help you want or need — because she’s only going to ask you once, and she’s making no promises about her response to your answer.”

I thought I already knew the answer to my next inquiry, but this seemed to be one time when it needed spelling out. “What ultimate question?” I asked.

“She’s going to ask you, on behalf of all of our kind, to give her one good reason why the children of humankind ought to be assisted to continue their evolution. You won’t be the only one from whom an answer is demanded, nor the most significant — but you’re here, and otherwise redundant, so la Reine thinks you might as well be given the opportunity to speak. As your friend, I’d advise you to think carefully about what you might say. However this turns out, it’ll be on the record for a long time. This is a first contact of sorts, albeit a ludicrously belated one.”

“How many others will there be?” I asked. “Alice said nine, but I gather that you’ve already discounted some of those. What will happen if the decision is split?”

“It’s not a competition,” he said, appearing to misunderstand me. “Gray is the most important one. He’s the one who might sway the situation one way or the other. Your contribution will be a supplement — an extra chance to make the case.”

“I meant the decision to be taken by the great community of ultrasmart machines,” I said. “How many of you will have to accept that the reasons we come up with are good enough? How many of you will need to take our side to ensure that we survive?”