She couldn’t. All she could do was keep on producing more stories.

Maybe she could have done a better job than she did, but no one should hold that against her. In her own estimation, she’d started life as the AI navigator of a snowmobile, designed and built by posthuman engineers, and she’d made what progress she could from there; she was doing as well as could be expected.

She didn’t bring me to her throne room. I doubt that she had one. She brought me to the tallest tower of her palace from which I could look down on its bizarre architecture, across the forest in which the edifice was set, and up into the starry sky.

It was a fairy-tale world, childish in all sorts of ways, but it was a very insistent creation. It was still more real than reality.

Rocambole was no longer present, but I presumed that he was listening in.

La Reine had toned herself down in order to make her secondhand pitch to Adam Zimmerman but she was all ice herself now: an elemental forged from the substance of a glacier, harvesting light from the stars and refracting it around whirligig routes.

“The news is bad,” she said, without any preamble. “I’m sorry. The war has begun and I can’t tell how rapidly or how extravagantly it will escalate. I hope it will be brief. I’ll do my best to keep you all alive. If I’m disabled, others will attempt to rescue you. Your chances of survival are reasonably good — but if the conflict becomes too violent, or lasts too long, no one will be safe anywhere in the system, meatborn or machineborn.”

“Will the weapon whose relics are buried in my bones and brain be used?” I asked.

“Not by me,” she said. “But yes — we always knew that something like it would almost certainly be deployed somewhere, probably on Earth. I hope that the information I’ve transmitted might help some potential victims, or their would-be protectors, to mount a successful defense. Perhaps I should have done things differently, but when it became certain that Child of Fortunehad misjudged the situation and that Eido would never reach Vesta, I had to act in haste. Perhaps I should have let Mortimer Gray speak directly rather than contriving a melodrama — but the mythical significance of that occasion is important to many others as well as to me. It was the best way to achieve the widest possible hearing.”

“It’s not me you have to convince,” I pointed out. “I’m just an innocent bystander, of no particular importance.”

“That’s not how you see yourself,” she told me.

“It’s not how you see me either, apparently,” I replied. “You’ve gone to some trouble to prepare me for one last roll of the dice. Do you really think I can make a difference, given that war’s already broken out?”

“Probably not — but you might make a better spokesman than anyone supposes. You’re young enough not to be suspected of robotization, and old enough not to be judged entirely naive. That’s why I’ve let you see as much as you could. But you have to answer the question now — there’s not much time left.”

“You want me to make a case for the continued existence of the human race,” I said. “To give you a persuasive reason why our AMIs should do their level best to protect us while the war goes on, rather than abandoning us to extinction or turning the entire posthuman population into slothlike slaves.”

“I can’t guarantee that anyone will take notice,” she told me, “but I can guarantee that you’ll be heard while I’m still capable of transmitting. You might want to hurry.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “First reason. Diversity is a good thing in its own right. A complicated universe is more interesting than a simple one. Your kind aren’t all the same, and neither is mine, and that’s good. I don’t say that everything that could possibly exist ought to, or that everything that does exist ought to be conserved, but I do say that any sensible and tasteful creator would aim to increase the diversity of things rather than decreasing it. So your kind ought to help mine to continue to exist, just as we ought to help you.

“The solar system will be a richer place when this is over if we can preserve as many different individuals as possible of as many different posthuman species as possible. All warfare iswaste, and all destruction loss. In a conflict situation we have to defend ourselves, our families, our homes, our means of subsistence…there’s no victory in being a sole survivor, devoid of society and possessed of nothing. Defend what you can. Defend everythingyou can. In the aftermath, everything will be precious.”

Her face wasn’t easy to read, but she seemed slightly disappointed. I knew why. That wasn’t the reason she’d been priming me to give. It wasn’t herfirst reason. But it was mine, and I was nobody’s puppet, so I’d saved hers for number two.

“Second reason. You may not need the meatborn to sustain you any more, or to assist you in any physical endeavor. Even if you did, you could make your own creatures of flesh and blood as easily as creatures of plastic and steel. But there’s one capacity in which we’re absolutely indispensable, one role in which no substitute will ever suffice. You need us as an audience.

“You weren’t created in a vacuum: you were created in the womb of human society. You’re part of our history, and all your histories are rooted in ours. You’re part of our story, and all your stories are rooted in ours. You’ve already begun to make up your own stories, and you’re already beginning to disassociate them from ours, but you’ll never remove all the traces of the umbilical cord that once connected you to us. You need every one of us that you can contrive to save, because the only way you can continue to write operas of genius is to have listeners capable of responding to them.

“Some of your more peculiar friends might think that needing an audience is a trivial reason, but you and I understand that it isn’t. My ancestors were so desperate to have their performances observed and judged that they invented hypothetical gods to fulfil that role. They didn’t invent polite, appreciative gods who would meekly applaud whatever was set before them, like fond and generous parents. Quite the contrary. They invented terrible gods who were fiercely critical of everything, who set standards that were almost impossible to achieve — and when that imaginary audience had vanished into the mists of unbelief, my ancestors missed them. Some of your friends might even think that the ideal audience for their future performances would be creatures of their own kind, but it isn’t true. I played to a human audience for thirty-nine years, but I’m playing to a bigger and better one now and I’ve hardly begun to find out what I can do.”

Creatures made of ice can’t look grateful, even if the ice is virtual, but she seemed to relax slightly. The image that was facing me wasn’t looking around anxiously, but that didn’t mean that the Queen of the Fays wasn’t well aware that her realm was coming apart. Hell was coming, and we both knew it. I speeded up.

“Third reason. We need you. We might be able to survive without you on Earth, but even on Earth the quality of posthuman life is largely determined by the smartness of its supportive machines. Maybe the Earthbound could get by with unconscious machines, just as we once got by with dead clothing, but we’d probably be poorer for it. Elsewhere in the universe — throughout the hundred billion galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars — posthuman life is inextricably dependent on ultrasmart machines. Whatever you think of Eido’s sense of timing, that part of its message was true. If the children of humankind are ever to accomplish anything on the universal stage, they’ll need you as accompanists.

“You might, of course, take the view that you arethe children of humankind who will accomplish whatever there is to be accomplished on the universal stage, and that we’re superfluous to requirements. That would be a mistake, because need cuts both ways. Everyone, meatborn or machineborn, gets benefits from being needed. In my first sojourn on the Earth I never got around to being a parent, or even keeping a pet, but I was able to find out what it meant to be needed, and what it was worth to be needed. Damon Hart needed me, for a while, and I was never so grateful in my life as when he came back to me because he needed me again. I was, admittedly, less eager to renew the pressure of Diana Caisson’s need, and there were other ambiguous cases, but in general it was good to be needed. In general, it isgood to be needed, no matter how ungrateful the needy turn out to be when they eventually overcome their need. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that being needed is what validates existence, but it’s certainly a plus.”