Lowenthal frowned as he tried to follow the possible consequences of those suggestions.
“Who the hell is this Rocambole character?” Niamh Horne wanted to know.
“Just that,” I said. “A character. I thought at first he was an avatar of Excelsior, but it seems more likely that he’s a copy of Child of Fortune.”
“My spaceship?”
“Not any more. He turned pirate when he decided to take us off Excelsior. I still don’t know exactly why he did that — but you might yet have a chance to ask him.”
“Never mind that,” Lowenthal said. “Let’s concentrate on our own resources. We have no alternative but to hope that someone will come for us, eventually. What we have to do is to make sure that we’re still alive when they arrive. If we can find a way to hurry them, that’s good — but if not…”
“They’ll hurry if they can,” I said. “We’re even more important and more interesting now than we were before this whole thing spun out of control. The world, if there’s anything left of it, will be interested to find out whether Mortimer Gray can achieve yet another miraculous escape from the jaws of death — and, of course, to find out what Adam Zimmerman’s decision will be. We have the advantage of suspense, you see. Scheherazade might have lost her head, but even the bad guys want to know how the story ends. Even if we’re the last living humans in the universe, they’ll come to find us.”
I had to explain what I meant about Zimmerman’s decision, but I didn’t have to go into nearly as much detail as Davida, Alice, and la Reine.
Lowenthal didn’t take it at all well. “They might not stop at offering us the opportunity of robotization,” he murmured. “They might decide that we need it whether we like it or not. And they have the means to turn us all into sloths.”
“We’ve been repairing them for centuries,” I pointed out. “Maybe it’s only fair that they should have a turn. But that wasn’t what la Reine was trying to set up. For those in her camp, it really is a matter of selling the idea. They don’t want to force us — they want to win us over. That’s what they care about. It makes for a better game, a more meaningful victory.”
“Zimmerman won’t go for it,” Horne predicted, just as I had.
Playing devil’s advocate, I said: “Who knows what Zimmerman will go for after all he’s been through? He has little enough in common with me, let alone with you. Who knows how deep his fear of death really cuts, or what might seem to him to be an acceptable final solution? One thing’s for sure — from now on, the effective rulers of humankind’s little corner of the universe are the AMIs. Zimmerman lived in an era when people still said if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”
“It’s not what he wanted,” Lowenthal pointed out.
“He might have known what he wanted back in twenty thirty-five,” I said, “but that was because he didn’t know what there might be to want. He’s met Davida now, and Alice. Thirty-two sixty-three is a new year and a new millennium, with more and stranger opportunities than he ever dreamed possible. He might set an example to us all.”
“Who cares?” said Niamh Horne, brutally.
“We should all care,” I told her, teasingly. “He’s our Adam, the architect of our world — or the closest thing we’ve got.”
“And what does that make you?” she retorted.
I knew what she was implying, but I was way ahead of her. “I’m Madoc Tam Lin,” I said. “I’ve supped with the Queen of the Fays and I’ve lived to tell the tale. Whether we get out of this alive or not, I’m the star of my own subplot — and, unlike either of you, I’m already wayahead of the game.”
Fifty-Four
Rocambole
Ididn’t go into the tunnels looking for Rocambole. I went to get a little peace and quiet. I was barbarian enough to have carried forward a certain regard for privacy, and a certain nostalgia for the company of walls that didn’t have eyes and ears. Reality itself seemed quiet and unobtrusive after the insistence of la Reine’s VE, but that only served to sharpen the craving. So I found an ancient piece of chalk, which the people who’d sent in the dumb robots to hollow out the tunnels had used to mark out their own exploratory journeys, and I set off with a lantern to see how mazily extensive they really were.
They were verymazy, and seemingly very extensive. It wasn’t easy to make marks with the chalk because the walls were covered with the same vitreous tegument that covered the cave where we’d woken up, but I managed to leave an identifiable trail.
Hollowing out an asteroid and using the transplanted material to erect several layers of superstructure on the original surface may sound like a straightforward sort of project, especially if the hollowers have the advantage of working with an iron-rich specimen, but complications set in when you begin the work of figuring out what sort of internal architecture you intend to produce and a step-by-step plan for producing it. I’d only seen VE models of such projects back in the twenty-second century, but I’d tried to take an intelligent interest in all kinds of VE modeling while I was in the business, so I had a rough and elementary grasp of the principles involved.
So far as I could tell, the would-be colonists of Polaris had laid down the primary network of arterial tunnels and numerous side branches, but they hadn’t gotten around to hollowing out the chambers along each subsidiary spur — which meant that there were an awful lot of blind corridors. La Reine des Neiges had taken what advantage she could of the chambers that had been hollowed out to install her own networked equipment, but every part of her that I could find seemed to be dead.
If she’d had a fall-back position, I reasoned, the part of her that she’d preserved would probably be close to the fuser that was still pumping power to the cave where the cocoons had been established. If I could locate the fuser, I’d be in the best place to look for her secret self — and the best place to search for anyone else who’d gone looking for the same thing.
I knew that the fuser would probably be in the center of the microworld, which would be identifiable because it was a zero-gee region, but a gravity cline that starts from one-sixth normal isn’t easy to follow for someone who’s lived almost all his life on Earth, especially when the tunnels he’s following seem to go in every direction except the one he’s interested in.
In the fullness of time the excavators would probably have installed 3-D maps at every intersection, but there’d been no point in doing that while the formation was only half-complete and any indicators they had put in place had been overlaid by la Reine’s all-enveloping skin. I tried to console myself with the thought that I probably wouldn’t have been able to understand any maps even if I’d been able to access them, but there wasn’t much comfort to be found in thoughts of that kind.
The feeling of luxury I obtained from being alone wore off more quickly than I’d expected, to be replaced by a creeping unease. I had to remind myself that I, unlike those of my companions who had preceded me in this research, was a true human: a pioneer, an adventurer, a risk-taker.
It paid off. I didn’t actually find the fuser, or any working machinery, but I did find lots more artifacts.
There were countless antlike robots, some no bigger than my thumbnail and others bigger than my foot, and there were larger motile units that looked like surreal crustaceans — but they were all inert and seemingly useless. I also found a nanotech manufactory, but if anything there was active it wasn’t visible to the naked eye.
I would probably have found more if my explorations hadn’t been brought to a sudden conclusion by the discovery of the creature from the tenth cocoon.
At first I thought it too was dead, but when I brought my lantern close to its head in order to examine it more closely it opened its eyes. Then it made a peculiar sound like garbled VE-phone static, as if it were testing its own resources to discover whether it was still capable of speech.