“We hope,” she said. She spoke as if she were humoring me, so I knew that some of what I’d said had come across as gibberish. She probably thought that I’d had a bad dream.
I looked down again at the cocoon from which I had been wrenched. It had died while I was nestling in its womb, and it had not had time to wake me before spitting me out. My expulsion had not been an easy birth, and might have been counted a stillbirth if Michael Lowenthal’s faithful servant hadn’t been on hand to force me back to life. The other pods arranged alongside it were in an equally parlous state, but none was sealed and there were no corpses littering the parts of the floor that I could see.
I looked away, satisfied that all was well, but suddenly looked back, having become aware that something was not quite right. I counted the pods, then counted them again.
There were ten. All ten showed every evidence of having disgorged a living body.
“We noticed that too,” Christine confirmed. “The extra man doesn’t seem to be in the cave — but the people who started hollowing out the asteroid dug a lot of tunnels. We can’t tell how far the maze extends. I hope it’s a long way, because that would mean that we have a lot of oxygen to spare, and the carbon dioxide won’t build up too rapidly, even though the recycling equipment is worse than crude. I don’t suppose you have any idea who the extra person might have been.”
“Rocambole,” I murmured. It seemed to be the most obvious jumpable conclusion.
“Who?”
“More likely a what than a who,” I told her. “But that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t take the precaution of equipping himself with the kind of body that could survive…”
That was when it hit me that if Rocambole could do that, la Reine should have been able to do likewise. There were only ten cocoons here, but there was also a maze of tunnels that the optimistic microworlders had excavated before their grand plan went awry.
I had shared la Reine’s death — but she was no mere human. Perhaps…
“Are you all right now?” As ever, it was the solicitous Mortimer Gray.
“I think so,” I said, trying to sound confident. “You?”
“We all got out in good time. Adam and Christine weren’t conscious, but at least they were breathing.”
I looked around for Adam Zimmerman, but I couldn’t see him. Niamh Horne was deep in conversation with Michael Lowenthal and Solantha Handsel, but I couldn’t see Davida Berenike Columella or Alice Fleury either.
Solantha Handsel was examining her hand, apparently anxious that she might have damaged it by hitting me too hard, but she looked up when she became aware that I was paying attention.
“Thanks,” I said.
“You’re welcome,” she replied, stiffly.
“Be very careful,” Gray advised me, as I made ready to move again. “Being able to float like a balloon gives you an impression of lightness, but if you bump into the wall or any of those piles of junk, it’ll hurt. I’ve lived on the moon — it takes a long time to retrain your reflexes. I haven’t found my feet yet.”
“That so-called junk might have to sustain us for quite a while,” I said. “The war was going badly last time I had news.”
“You had news?” he queried.
“Yes,” I said. “You didn’t?”
“No.”
I hesitated for a moment, but only a moment. “I saw it all,” I told him. “Your conversation with the snowmobile — the end of the replay and all of the extension. I saw Alice and Davida make their pitches to Zimmerman too — and the one that was meant to upstage them both. I only caught glimpses of the pantomimes involving Lowenthal and Horne, though. Too much happening at once.”
“Madoc thinks he knows who the tenth cocoon belonged to,” Christine added, taking advantage of the fact that Gray was thinking over what I’d said.
Gray looked at me expectantly.
“The AMI generating the VE laid on a guide for me,” I said. “It took the form of a slightly cartoonish male figure, who called himself Rocambole. He was an AMI too, I think. He said we’d spoken before. At first I took that to mean that he was the central intelligence of Excelsior, but there’s another possibility that seems more likely. There’s also a possibility that the tenth cocoon wasn’t his at all. It might have belonged to the VE generator herself.”
“ Herself?” Gray was confused. He’d always thought of the snowmobile as a he.
“She called herself la Reine des Neiges,” I told him. “The Snow Queen. She’d come a long way since she was a snowmobile. She was a patchwork, but she must have numbered at least one dream machine among her ancestor-appliances. She risked everything to get us out of Charity, but she wasn’t crazy. Maybe she was sane enough to leave herself an escape hatch.”
Gray hesitated for at least half a minute before deciding which question to ask next. When it finally emerged, it was: “Why you?”
“She needed an audience, and I was spare. Once her nanobots had cleaned me out I was redundant. She wanted someone to see the whole picture, and I got lucky. I even got Rocambole.”
“And that’s how you got the news?”
“What news there was. It’s not good. Something killed the Snow Queen — all of her, at any rate, that wasn’t stashed in a pod. She certainly won’t be the only casualty among the AMIs, but it’s the extent of the collateral damage that will determine the time it takes for help to get to us — if help does get to us. Excelsior will probably send help if the sisterhood can contrive any, and any Titanian ship that picked up la Reine’s broadcasts will probably be capable of getting here if its smart systems haven’t been scrambled…but I don’t know what the full extent of the destruction might be.”
Because I was somewhat befuddled the summary of our situation hadn’t come out as clearly as it might have, but Mortimer Gray had been the one who’d originally figured out that the Revolution had arrived. He had already deduced that the Titanian fleet might have fallen victim to a general mutiny.
“Michael and Niamh should be able to get somethingworking,” he assured me. “All the hardware’s there — it’s just the programs that have been reduced to imbecility. Even if we have to send in Morse code…” He broke off, realizing that the ability to transmit wasn’t the crucial factor.
“It’s okay,” I told him — but he wasn’t about to be put off his stride by someone in my condition. After a slight pause he started again.
“If we can just start receiving,” he said, “we can get an update. We can’t be more than a few light-minutes from Earth orbit. Once we know that Earth has survived…” He broke off again, overwhelmed by the enormity of what he was saying.
“Alice thinks Eido will be able to get to us,” Christine put in. “Are you surethat he’s dead?”
I admitted that I couldn’t be certain, but that I couldn’t be optimistic either. Even if Eido hadsurvived the attack from which la Reine had rescued us, Charitywasn’t the most easily navigable of vessels.
Gray was right about floating like a balloon. My next attempt at purposive movement went badly awry and I had to grab hold of a cord that was wrapped around the nearest heap of crates in order to steady myself. I resolved not to set off again until I was sure that I wouldn’t make a total fool of myself.
Mortimer Gray’s attempt to help me brought him a lot closer.
“How did it feel to make contact with your old friend?” I asked. I was fishing. I didn’t know how much he remembered.
“Disappointing,” he said, quietly. “He could have kept in touch.”
“I think she meant well,” I said, rather lamely.
He didn’t seem convinced. In his position, I wouldn’t have been convinced myself. “He — she — didn’t have to do that,” he said. “We could have talked person to person. We could have been open, straightforward. All that trickery…it wasn’t necessary.”
“It was play,” I said. “Drama. Ritual. Sport. They take such things more seriously than we do. It’s something we’re going to have to get used to. You’ve presumably ironed out all the cultural differences that handicapped communication between humans in my day, but you’ve just made contact with a whole family of aliens. They think they understand you, and maybe they’re right — but it’s going to need a hell of a lot of work on your part to understand them.”