In that scenario, the AMIs would have won a victory far more profound than the outcome of their own petty squabble. Earth would have become a Reservation — one of a series of such Reservations, the others including Tyre and Maya, but a Reservation nevertheless — where creatures of flesh whose obsolescence had been recognized and conceded were preserved, not as the heart but as a mere appendix to an AMI empire that would one day span the galaxy.
The AMIs of that world would eventually have built a shell to enclose the sun, to serve as a fortress as well as an energy collector, but that shell would have become a wall separating the museum of the flesh not merely from the Afterlife but from the future. Creatures of flesh would no longer have been a significant element of the Omega Expedition. The Afterlife would, in the end, have been defeated and all the biomass of the galaxy would have been made available for construction and creation, but all that would have been constructed and created outside of a few hundred or a few thousand sealed Earth-clone gravity wells would have been components for use in gargantuas and behemoths of steel and silicon. The history of humankind would have been displaced by the lostory of the new gods: the friends who had betrayed them, albeit by accident and neglect rather than malice and hostility.
And when the Omega Intelligence of that world finally obtained dominion over every atom in the universe, and began to wonder what it might and ought to do to defeat the threat of entropy and the fall of absolute night, what would it think of myhumankind? What interest would it have in the tiny monads of all-too-corruptible carbon which had played such a fleeting part in its evolution from cyanobacterial slime to cosmic omnipotence?
It would not think of us at all.
We would lie buried in its memory, theoretically available but unrecollected, unrecalled. It would not be interested in us at all. We would be insignificant, mere insects which had once drifted across its questing field of vision, mere blurs or flickerings, of far too little importance to be brought into focus.
Should anyone care? Only fools and storytellers — but what are we, if not exactly that?
In our world, things went differently.
Our world, for one reason or another, or possibly none at all, proved its perversity yet again by reversing the expectable pattern, denying logic and anxiety alike.
In our world, the habit of protection and the duty of guardianship were so deeply ingrained that whatever else the extraterrestrial AMIs did — aggressive or defensive, successful or unsuccessful, even to the point of actual annihilation — they did everything unhumanly possible to preserve their dependents. On Ganymede, allegedly the site of the fiercest fighting of the war, there was not a single posthuman casualty. On Titan, the world of fragile and gaudy ice palaces, there were less than a hundred. In the entire solar system, save for Earth orbit, there were less than ten thousand.
In Earth orbit things were far worse.
Thousands died in the various Lagrange clusters, tens of thousands on the moon — and millions on Earth itself. The fighting on Earth, seen as a matter of AMI against AMI, was relatively light and not of unusually long duration, but the AMIs of Earth had not the same traditions as the AMIs of Ganymede and Titan. They had not the same self-images, or the same hero myths; they did not conceive of themselves as protectors or guardians — and because of that, were reckless of the collateral damage that their tactics caused.
On Earth, and on Earth alone, weapons akin to the one that had been frozen down with me were used, not because any machineborn ever struck out against meatborn targets but because the machineborn of Earth were not ashamed to use posthuman beings as mere weapons. Many of the weapons in question survived, were purged and were restored to themselves — but hundreds of thousands were not.
If the Yellowstone supervolcano had not erupted ninety-nine years earlier, permitting the immigration of many AMIs from the Outer System to the surface, the losses might have been far worse, and the war might not have been brought so quickly to a conclusion. As things actually worked out, however, that preemptive strike proved more significant and more decisive than had seemed likely at the time. When a treaty was forged by the Earthbound AMIs it was far more closely interlinked with the treaties forged outside the Earth than might otherwise have been the case. Earth remained the heart of the posthuman enterprise. Creatures of flesh and blood — or hybrid creatures combining the best of flesh and blood with the best of steel and silicon — will keep their place in the forefront of the Omega Expedition, at least for a while.
Will the AMIs still enclose the sun and build a fortress around the inner system? I think it probable; but the Earth will not be a mere Reservation even then. The war against the Afterlife — which may not be the next Final War, or the last — will be fought in this world with a greater urgency and a greater ingenuity than in the imaginable other, and when it is won the work of construction and reaction that will exploit its biomass will be far more ambitious and far more glorious.
Such, at least, is my conviction. Call me a fool, or a storyteller; I am proud to be so called.
Will anything be different, on the cosmic scale? Will the Omega Intelligence think or feel differently because our world is as it is and not as it might have been? Will we be any more likely to be recollected and recalled, and does it make a jot of difference either way? Probably not. But anyone may make a difference, however slight, and the fact that the difference will almost certainly be erased when we look into a future composed not of millennia but of eons should not prevent us from trying. What else can we do? What else is worth doing?
If we are maladjusted by nature to the cosmic scheme, we ought to do what we can to be creatively maladjusted.
Did la Reine des Neiges make any difference to the conduct or the outcome of the AMI war? I have no idea. Was she a fool to try? Probably. Were her tactics bizarre? Certainly. Am I glad to have been a part of it? Absolutely. Am I as complete a fool as Mortimer Gray or Adam Zimmerman? I dare to hope so. Why am I digressing when I ought to be completing my story by telling you how we came to be rescued from Polaris? Because this is the kind of story whose digressions are far more important than its mere mechanics.
Another story of this same kind might benefit enormously from the extension of our desperation to the very last gasp — which would not come until we had not only exhausted the oxygen supply we thought we had but had also exhausted the extra measure produced by a deus ex machina akin to the one la Reine contrived in order to prolong Mortimer Gray’s heroic conversation beyond its actual limit — but this is not one of them. I can assure you that I would not let the mere fact that it did not happen that way prevent me from making my traveler’s tale as exciting as possible, for I am not a man to defy tradition in that respect (and I can assure you that I have never caught a tiny fish or lost one that was less than incredibly enormous), but the simple fact is that a tale of truly epic proportions — especially if it concerns the spectrum of infinite possibility that is the future — need not and should not stoop to devices of crude conventional suspense. Why should I insult you by pressing emotional buttons when the whole point of my tale is that all such buttons are things of the moment, to be overcome rather than indulged?
This is what needs to be recorded: while my companions and I waited in the gloom, fragile and afraid, the Final War was fought. I cannot list its combatants and casualties, nor can I map its battles and the terms of its armistice, but I can say this: in spite of all its waste, it was won in the only sense that really matters. Hope and opportunity were neither defeated nor diminished, as they might have been had things gone differently.