The Red Queen (48 page)

‘I suppose Hannah measured the deviation after Habitat was finished and full of resurrected people?’

‘Yes, User Seeker,’ God said. ‘It was found that the deviation had corrected itself.’

‘And have you tested for deviation
since
User Hannah died, for it might well be that the correction resulted from your interaction with her.’

‘My program has not been evaluated since User Hannah expired because she input that interaction with the specimens in Habitat would serve as a constant corrective force.’

‘I am not sure that does serve,’ I said. ‘As far as I can see, the Speci in Habitat do not actually interact with you. They offer up wish-prayers that you fulfil, and you listen to their interactions with one another. That is not true speech such as we are having now, or such as you have been having with my technicians or with Speci Tash. At best it can be called a limited communication, and it may be that you have deviated because of it. I want you to list all mistakes and errors made since Hannah died.’

‘A research paradigm will need to be designed before it can be deployed,’ God said bafflingly. ‘This will take twenty hours, unless all secondary and tertiary functions are set to sleep.’

‘That is not necessary,’ I said, having no idea what a search paradigm was. ‘Just begin to search as soon as possible.’

I knew what I had asked would mean God must examine hundreds of years of material, but I also knew that a computermachine had the ability to do such things with impossible speed, while doing many other things simultaneously. In truth, I had no idea if what I had suggested to God was true, but Garth had told me once that computers made mistakes because the data they received from humans was flawed. I had thought at the time that it was more likely that computermachines could never be perfect because they were created by humans who were flawed. Either way, a computermachine must make mistakes. Once God had listed the mistakes it had made, I would weave them into an argument that they were the result of a lack of true companionship. Hannah had argued along these lines to get God to create Habitat, and given what it had just said, God had taken this in at a deep level, so I need only build on that reasoning to bring God to the conclusion that it needed a live and responsive human to talk to, if it was to fulfil its purpose efficiently. Tash was the only human that would be available to it. I suspected the fact that God had not yet made up its mind about whether she was a special anomaly would work in our favour, since it could keep her awake and aware as she was now, presumably for however long it took to decide. And how was it ever to decide she was an empath when being a machine meant she could never affect it.

It was a cruel solution to leave Tash alone in Midland as a sort of nanny and companion to God, but I could not see any other way out of our dilemma. I had made some attempt to discover how we might get the tag off her, and had learned it would be impossible to remove whatever had been put inside her without causing harm. At least awake she would be able to go up into the sun and she would have God for company. In time, if we could find a govamen computermachine, she would be released along with the rest of the Speci, and perhaps it would be her task to lead them out of Habitat and to tell them the truth of their captivity. I could almost imagine it.

Of course, it might even be that, given the choice of sleeping in a cryopod and staying in Midland alone, Tash would choose sleep, and she must be permitted that choice. Yet it might be that she had already chosen, hence her gradual withdrawal into self-sufficiency.

I rose and made my way quietly through the main chamber where Dragon and Tash were talking softly over the remnants of their meal, slipping into the second passage at the end of which was the chamber where Dameon lay. He was as still and pale as before, and I could not find his mind when I strove for it.

I sat in the chair beside his bed and made myself comfortable before taking his hand in mine. I locked our hands firmly together by interlacing his long limp fingers with mine and closed my eyes, leaning forward to lay my head on our joined hands. Then I released the weariness I had been holding in a coercive net – husbanding it for this moment. It flowed through me and I sank into sleep effortlessly. I had only to exert enough energy to shield my awareness to avoid being absorbed by dreams as I sank through the layers of my mind.

Once I could see the silver ribbon of the mindstream below me, I positioned myself so that the pull to merge with it equalled the rise to consciousness, and then I willed a thread of the stream to me. Taking the tendril that answered my summons, I rose again to consciousness, and then transcended it, allowing the tendril to spill matter from the mindstream through me and take spirit form. I inhabited it and opened its eyes, thereby transferring my consciousness to it.

Having slipped my flesh, I was aware of it and I looked down with distant tenderness and gratitude on the dull brown shape that carried my spirit so faithfully. Then I shifted my attention to Dameon’s shape and saw that, just as I had expected, his body lay brown and dull as a stone, bereft of its spirit. I looked about him until I found the silvery thread that connected any living spirit to its flesh, and rather than merely following it, I entered it and willed myself along it. I kept myself severely shielded, for the spirit cord was saturated with Dameon’s essence, and despite our true and deep friendship, he had always guarded his spirit and his essence with formidable barriers. For all his rich ability to empathise, he had shown little of his deepest self and I meant to respect his reticence. But I had never been good at emotional shielding, so I felt the sadness in him, and once again cursed Balboa.

As I had guessed, the link led me to Miryum’s body, which lay in the place where Dameon had found her, though the icy blue of the floor was green about her form, which I guessed meant that God was exerting some force to free her so that she could be brought up to the resurrection chamber as I had requested. Her body was not the grey of dead matter, but the brown of healthy flesh, which was reassuring, but once again there was no overlaying spirit. I was still within Dameon’s silver cord and I let it guide me into Miryum.

I was kneeling on a dark desert, the wind lifting great veils of sand and spinning them into the starless sky. There was no moon but a glaring white light fell sideways onto the snow-white fur of the enormous handsome cat sitting beside me, its ears cocked alertly. There was no source of light, and yet light shone.

I tried to stand and realised I was once again cat formed. The white cat turned to look at me with its calm silvery eyes and a shiver of recognition ran through me.

‘Dameon?’ I said, coming close.

‘Elspeth,’ the white cat said, reaching its nose out to touch mine. ‘I was trying to empathise to Miryum and then . . . I was here in this form. I think this is Miryum’s mind.’

‘Her imagining,’ I said. ‘I should have realised the danger when I asked you to empathise to her. She was always so strong and she learned much from Straaka and with him. Your body is safe, lying in a bed, and I am sitting beside you. At least my body is.’

‘You dreamtravelled to find me?’ Dameon asked, his fur fluffing visibly with interest.

‘I guessed what had happened as soon as I reached for your mind and could not feel it after you passed out. Have you seen her?’

‘I saw a giant Miryum,’ Dameon said. ‘I wanted to speak with her, but I have not managed to get her attention. She is amassing an army. She brings them and then vanishes and appears later with another.’

I looked in the direction he had indicated and saw a great crowd of people; some were people, though with queer additions, like horns from their brow, or many arms. Some were winged and others covered in fur. Beasts there were, too. Closest to us, a white bear and two enormous apes such as Fian had once shown me in a Beforetime book, orange and wild and big bellied, were sitting on their haunches. Other beasts too, four footed or standing up on two legs, and enormous birds as well; a moose with a fantastic rack of antlers and a panther black as night lay beside a black-slashed tyger. The latter gave me a start because it was the form taken most often by Maruman. But its eyes were not his eyes and it wore a golden torc about its neck, as did the panther, and every other creature when I looked.

‘She is creating them,’ I said, but even as I spoke, I felt that was wrong. Something niggled at my mind and made me reach for the weight of the black sword. Drawing on dark spirit strength I willed myself to see better, and then I saw that all of the humans and half humans and beasts were overlaid by shining human spirit-forms.

I said incredulously, ‘They are the spirits of the other sleepers in the cryopods. She has been drawing their spirits into her imagining, even as she drew yours.’

‘There,’ Dameon said.

I looked and saw the voluptuous giantess Miryum, with her long black tresses flowing from under a filigree cap of gold from which small wings were fashioned to rise from each temple. As before, Miryum wore a short tunic of shimmering gold belted at the waist, and her arms and legs and feet were bare. With her was a magnificent black horse that reminded me of Gahltha, save that it had golden wings. It folded them as she spoke to it, but suddenly there was a storm of chittering and the strange non-light dimmed and both she and the winged horse looked up. I looked up too, and saw the same cloud of black
rhenlings
I had seen rise up from the place where the sorcerer Malik had stood when I had last entered Miryum’s dreaming spirit. They coalesced atop the wall of the keep that rose up beyond the strange army, reassembling to take the shape of a man, who moved quickly out of sight.

‘He has returned,’ Miryum bellowed and I cringed at the loudness of her voice. She lifted her hands and in each was a small curving dagger. Every creature had turned to look at her. ‘Now you must attack the keep. I have failed to slay the sorcerer. He is too strong for me so I must enter it in secret and slay my enchanted love. I cannot suffer him to live like this. He must be freed.’

‘Guilt,’ Dameon murmured. ‘She is sending out waves of sorrow and guilt. There is no anger at all.’

‘The enchanted love is Straaka,’ I said, though I had told him it before.

I began to groom my pelt to help me think.

In order to free Dragon from the dream, which had already gone through many cycles when I entered her mind, I had needed to travel through it with her until I found the weak place within it. In Dragon’s case, it was that she had chosen to let herself die with her mother, and when I had intervened to save her, I had broken the dream. It was curious that both Dragon’s and Miryum’s dreams concerned a guilt that was undeserved. Dragon had only been guilty of witnessing the death of her mother and of living, of course. Miryum was guilt-ridden because Straaka had died saving her, and that was muddled up with the guilt she felt for preventing him from returning to his home and for having never spoken of her love to him. Regret and sorrow and guilt had led her to weave a passionate binding of their spirits, which at first had given them joy. But later, when Miryum was trapped in sleep, she had realised with horror that she could not free Straaka in that state, and so he was trapped as well. I did not know how many hundreds of times she had dreamed this dream, nor did I know the pattern or resolution of the dream, having visited it only fleetingly once before, and obviously at a point before Miryum had begun to amass her army of sleepers. What happened to them when a dream cycle ended, I wondered?

I went to the nearest beast, a man with great black horns spiralling up from his brow and enormous shining hooves like those of a greathorse. ‘How came you here? Who are you?’ I asked.

He looked down at me with the slotted eyes of a goat. ‘The warrior queen summoned me from death as she has done each time she fails to slay the sorcerer who keeps her beloved trapped in enchanted sleep. She wakes us, not to win any battle, but to distract the sorcerer so that she can find her beloved and kill him in order to free his soul, then she will take her own life.’

So that was the dream cycle. I frowned. Unlike the people in Dragon’s dream, these so-called warriors were the spirits of real people, just as Rushton’s spirit and mine had been real within Dragon’s coma dream. What happened to them when a dream cycle ended, I wondered? Given what the beastman had told me, their spirits were released, until Miryum entered the next cycle and summoned them again. Being real spirits, they remembered. So what would it take to break the dream cycle this time? Had Miryum to defeat the dream Malik? Or must she waken Straaka instead of killing him? Or had she simply not to kill herself after slaying him?

Leaving the beastman, I went back and asked these questions of Dameon, who listened while grooming his tail. He finished before answering, sat up neatly and said it seemed to him that Malik represented the unassailable wrong Miryum felt she had done in binding Straaka’s spirit to hers, and thereby trapping him. She could not defeat him because she could not forgive herself for a wrong that she was powerless to repair.

I thought he was right, and when I said so, Dameon purred at my praise and said he had done quite a lot of dream counselling with the futuretellers over the years and so he had a good eye for the true meaning of dream symbols.

‘What would you advise?’ I asked with a humility the form I was in found difficult to express; my tail began to coil and lash, announcing its disapproval.

‘Miryum is guilty of nothing more than the slow realisation of love,’ Dameon said. ‘Her binding of his soul to hers was an act of passionate impulse, and from what you say it brought them joy to begin with. Miryum is not responsible for them both being trapped now, but she believes she is guilty of harming him and she cannot face that. I would guess that she has been unable to defeat Malik because he is elusive. He turns into malevolent
rhenlings
and flies away when she tries to fight him. Therefore she must face him.’

I nodded, though the cat form resisted the movement. I licked my paw and washed my ears to soothe it, thinking hard all the while. ‘If she must face him, then I must find some way to bring him to her. Can you go with her when she creeps into the keep and ensure she does not kill Straaka? Tell her that you have some power that will let you wake Straaka, and that the Guanette bird sent you to help him.’