By the time she died, I did approve of la Reine des Neiges. When you have shared the death of another mind, you cannot help but love them a little, whether they be god or man or snowmobile — so, at least, I now believe — but what I felt for la Reine was no mere frisson of empathy. I had come to think her admirable, more so than any human I ever knew.

I do not know how much of her death la Reine managed to record or broadcast, but I am sure that she ran into the limitations of paradoxicality far too soon to make any real impact on any of her distant listeners.

What I experienced was mine alone, once she herself was gone.

Fifty-Two

Life after Death

Asledgehammer fell out of the night-dark sky and smashed into my ribs. It was not the first time it had happened, nor was it to be the last. A gale blew from beyond the borders of the world, forcing an entry into my reluctant lungs. A trumpet blasted in my ears, the liquid notes expanding and reverberating for an improbably long time before coalescing into mere words.

I think, although I cannot be absolutely sure, that the words were: “Breathe, you bastard! Breathe!”

The gale turned tempestuous as something in me, operating quite independently of my conscious will, responded to the command. It was a very painful experience but I was not ungrateful for the simple, ordinary, commonplace pain. It was presumably that lack of ingratitude that allowed me to consent to be thumped again, and yet again.

I was not conscious of the moment when my heart resumed beating, although I suppose it must have coincided more or less with the surge of oxygenated blood that boosted my brain to full attentiveness, and the flood of adrenalin that thrilled my reluctant body from the core to the periphery.

My first word was probably “Ow!” It would have been a lot more aggressive if I’d recovered command of my consonants a little sooner.

The light was dim, but there was enough of it to allow me to recognize the face of my persecutor.

I was not in the least surprised to find that the person who had been hitting me was Solantha Handsel. She obviously had an obsessive-compulsive personality. I felt a little queasy at the thought of taking her secondhand air into my lungs, so I tried not to think about it for more than an instant.

I tried to sit up, but was not immediately successful. I was glad I hadn’t pushed harder when I realized that the gravity was very low indeed. Polaris, I remembered, was very tiny, and the people who’d abandoned it after making a start on converting it to a microworld hadn’t got around to spinning it.

Solantha Handsel stopped hitting me. She looked down at me with fierce and naked resentment.

“If we get out of this alive, we’re even!” she told me. “Even, okay? You got that?”

I must have contrived some feeble gesture of concession, because she accepted that I had, indeed, got it.

By the time I did manage to sit up, very carefully indeed, the bodyguard was no longer looming over me. She had already finished looking around for anyone else who might be in need of a thorough beating and had taken refuge close to a wall, where she had something to hang on to. Lowenthal was there too. He seemed to be busy. Everybody seemed to be busy, but it was difficult to count them because there was so much mess everywhere.

Whoever had filled this space with supplies had been in far too much of a hurry to do so in an orderly manner. The mess looked strangely familiar, but it took me a couple of minutes to work out that this was because I had seen most of it before, aboard Charity. The supplies that Eido and Alice Fleury had laid in for our support had been rescued — or hijacked — along with us.

That was a comforting thought. It meant that we probably had enough food and water to sustain us for quite a while. We also had light, albeit slightly gloomy light — and we had tolerable heat, and a breathable atmosphere. The ambient temperature was comfortable, and the air — now I could actually suck it into my own lungs — seemed very adequately oxygenated.

“You’d better put these on,” said a voice from the shadows, informing me that I was naked. I looked down at my body. I found it unexpectedly difficult to be grateful for the fact that it was there at all, but I was relieved to observe that it was still in one piece. It looked awful, although the worst of the slime with which it was liberally covered was already turning to a flaky crust.

The dead clothes that fluttered around me as the low gravity discreetly brought them to rest looked exactly like the ones that I had been wearing when I woke up on Charity, having obviously been drawn from the same uniform stock. Not wishing to put them on while I was still so messy I let them lie where they fell and looked back at the wreckage of the cocoon from which I had recently been evicted.

It looked a great deal worse than I did, although there were no conspicuous signs of decay; the viruses that had destroyed la Reine had not traveled in a fashion that permitted them to bring organic companions. The cocoon was dead, but it hadn’t killed me. If I had come closer to death than any of my companions, it was because of what I’d seen, not because of any malfunction of my life-support cell.

“Do you need any help, Madoc?” The speaker — Christine Caine — emerged from the shadows, traveling very gingerly indeed in gravity far less than Excelsior’s, perhaps no more than the moon’s. Even that, I deduced, must be faked by spin.

“I’m okay,” I assured her, although I still didn’t feel confident that I could put the shirt and trousers on.

“So Handsel said,” she told me. “She seemed to know what she was doing, so we let her get on with it.” By this time she had managed to maneuver herself into a situation which was as close to face-to-face as was feasible. I moved closer to the nearest pile of crates so that I could use its mass to steady myself a little.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” she said.

I knew what she meant, so I just nodded my head.

“Thanks,” she said. “I already knew — I mean, I’d worked it out when I went through it for the second time — but it really helped me to get a grip on things. None of the other stories ever really worked. It was good to hear the one that did retold.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “They fixed me up the same way, but my friends froze me down before I was used. That’s why they brought us back. The AMIs may be ultrasmart, but they don’t know how much they don’t know about the world before their advent. They brought us back because they wanted to know about the kinds of weapons that had been hidden away long before they had a chance to take notes, and never dusted off in the interim.”

“I know,” she said. “I worked it out.” She wasn’t trying to show off her cleverness — she was sympathizing with me, because she knew what I must have gone through when I figured it out.

Somehow, I got into the clothes. I knew that I ought to take a shower first, but I had to take things one step at a time.

“We have light and elementary life support,” she told me, “but it’s all emergency backup. All the smart systems are dead, even the sloths. This cave seems to be the only empty space of any size hereabouts, although there’s a network of tunnels we haven’t begun to explore. All the surfaces are covered in machinery housed in some kind of glassy fabric, and there are masses of machinery in what used to be other rooms, but it’s all dead. There’s a com system of sorts, but it’s useless. We can’t even send a mayday, unless Lowenthal and Horne can repair it and power it up. They’re trying.”

“Others know we’re here,” I told her. “By now, that must include people as well as other machines. Every smart spaceship in the system knows our location, and I’m as sure as I can be that they’re on our side. The bad guys can’t win in space, no matter how much damage they can do in the wells. They killed Eido and they killed the Snow Queen, but someone will come for us. It’s just a matter of time.”