We landed in Antarctica, on the ice fields outside Amundsen. The cloud cover obscured the sun and sky, but the ice palaces clustered on the horizon couldn’t prevent me from feeling that I’d returned to my roots and reconnected myself with my history.
My hero’s welcome was a trifle muted, but I didn’t mind that. The only individuals who really appreciated the true extent of my heroism were AMIs, who hadn’t yet had time to overcome their habits of discretion. Mortimer Gray would doubtless have fared far better, not just because we might have died on Charityif it hadn’t been for his relationship with la Reine des Neiges, but because he’d been a long-time resident of the Continent Without Nations. He really would have been coming home, in the eyes of his old neighbors — but he wouldn’t have been extrovert enough to take full advantage of his latest wave of celebrity. I filled in for him as best I could.
I didn’t see much of Lowenthal and Handsel in the days following the landing, and Alice Fleury had all kinds of diplomatic duties to fulfill, but those were acquaintances I kept up, in VE if not in the flesh. It was easy enough, in the short term, to stick with Adam Zimmerman. The new messiah wasn’t in any hurry to be rid of us, now that he knew that Christine wasn’t a mass murderer.
Christine and I eventually returned with Adam to the Americas, traveling all the way up from Tierra del Fuego to the isthmus of Panama in easy stages, accelerating our schedule as we came into the north. We might have attracted more attention on our own account if we hadn’t been traveling with him, but playing second fiddle had its compensations as well as fueling a certain envious resentment. All in all, the pluses outweighed the minuses.
Adam was right about the alienating effects of the multiple decivilization of New York, but he was right about Manhattan too. The island’s original dimensions were still just about recognizable within the hectic patchwork of the new continental shelf. When Christine and I headed west, though, Adam chose to go his own way.
“I’ll keep in touch,” he promised.
“I don’t think we’ll have any difficulty keeping track of you,” I assured him. “You’re the kind of wonder that’ll run for years and years. Let us know when you’re finally ready to make the decision that the whole system’s waiting for, so that we can all compare notes.”
Little did I know…
Adam hadn’t given us the least inkling of his long-term plans, if he’d made any at that point. I doubt that he had. I think he intended to take a good long look at the world, and at himself, before he decided what his next step was going to be.
That was the last of my temporary farewells. Christine and I had decided to stick together for a while.
I waited, but in vain, for the call to come that would summon me to the forefront of the ongoing political and economic negotiations between the posthuman factions and the AMIs. I maintained the hope for as long as I could that my conscription had merely been delayed, but in the end I accepted the sad truth.
In spite of all my heroic efforts during the last few minutes of la Reine’s stint as Scheherazade I was not to receive my due. Nobody wanted me for an ambassador, nor even for an expert audience. It was a mistake, I think. I could have been useful to all sides.
Had la Reine survived, it would have been a different story, but the time came when I had to stop hoping for that particular miracle. She had known my true worth, at the end, but she had been the only one who did. I might now be the only one who understands her true worth, even in a world which contains Mortimer Gray, but I hope that I am wrong. She deserves to be accurately remembered, especially by her own kind.
In the end, Christine and I decided to take the jobs that Mortimer Gray had offered us, at least for the time being. Given that we were historical curiosities in any case, and that everyone wanted to hear our story, we figured that we might as well get as much spendable credit as possible for answering questions. It turned out to be harder than we had expected; newscasters only want to know what’s newsworthy, but historians want to know everything, and then some. Inevitably, we both set out to write our own accounts of everything we’d been through.
It really was inevitable that we’d have to writeour accounts, because text retains certain qualities that even the very best VE scripts will never be able to emulate. In a VE you use your eyes as eyes and your ears as ears; it really is virtual experience— but when you read you switch off your other senses and turn your eyes into code readers, retreating into a world of pure thought and imagination. It was that world of abstraction that had shaped and organized our ancestors’ inner lives during the early phases of the technological revolution; it was there that they learned to be the complex kind of being we now call human. It is there that true humanity still resides, even after all this time. It is there that histories and lostories, autobiographies and fantasies, moral fables and contes philosophiques, comedies and cautionary tales all belong — and my story is all of those things, although it is first and foremost a cautionary tale…and a comedy. Although I am not an AMI, and probably never will be, I have no intention of living my life, or reviewing my life, in an unironic way.
“It seems a little silly to be writing an autobiography,” Christine told me, when we set out on our separate labors of love. “Discounting downtime in the freezer, I’m only twenty-three years old. That wasn’t much by the standards of our day — by today’s standards, it’s nothing at all. If it wasn’t for the rash of new births prompted by the war, there’d only be a few hundred people younger than me in the whole world.”
“It’s just the first chapter of a lifelong project,” I told her. “It’s best to start early, because every day that passes consigns a little more of our experience to the abyss of forgetfulness, and turns a few more memories into pale shadows of their former selves. We’re not human any more, and if we want to recollect what it was like to be human, we have to start doing it now. We should, given that we’re two of the most interesting human beings that ever existed.”
“Are we?” she asked, skeptically.
“If we weren’t before,” I said, “we are now. We lived through the aftermath of the last last war but one, and we were in the thick of the last one. Who else can say that?”
“We were innocent bystanders standing on the sidelines,” she pointed out.
“You were an innocent bystander,” I admitted, “but even your innocence had to be proved. I tried as hard as I could to be something more than a mere bystander, and something more than a mere innocent. Maybe I didn’t succeed as well as I could have hoped in my attempts to get involved, but nobody else is going to build up my particular subplot if I don’t. I think I can make myself a littlemore interesting if I try hard. Don’t you?”
She had to say yes.
“We could so easily have been lost,” she said. “I’m glad I had the chance to find myself.”
I remembered wondering whether I owed it to my own kind to be the champion the long sleepers never had: the Moses who would lead them from their wilderness of ice into the Promised Land of Futurity, so that all the murderers and miscreants might have the chance to find themselves. I haven’t done it yet, but I still might. It might be a story worth telling, a drama worth performing.
Christine and I are still together, but there’s no finality in our togetherness. We’ll probably keep company until we find that we no longer have any more in common with one another than we have with our fellow emortals, and then we’ll part, promising to keep in touch. I wouldn’t call that love — but then, I don’t go to operas much, either. Even though I’ve seen and felt what music can amount to, when it achieves perfection, I still prefer the kinds that people make themselves, on obsolete instruments, amplified the old-fashioned way. There are things we all have to learn to appreciate, whether we’re meat or machine; for those of us who don’t happen to find it easy it’s a slow process, but we’ll get there in the end.