“I don’t understand, Madoc,” Damon said, with the ostentatious patience that the sane always take care to display while they talk to the slightly mad.
I knew then that I had no chance at all of forcing my other self to pronounce anything as complicated as Christine Caine’s name. I wondered whether I might just manage Tyre, or Vesta, or even Proteus, but I knew there was no point in trying. Christine Caine was one of the only two names I had on the tip of my tongue that would make any sense at all to Damon Hart.
Except, of course, that it wouldn’t. Nothing that the me that wasn’t not mecould say to Damon, if I could say anything at all, would make the slightest sense, because nothing did make the slightest sense. He and I, though not he and not me, were in a world beyond logic, babes in a trackless wilderness.
This, I realized, was what I had forgotten. This was how I’d come to be frozen down. This was how I’d booked my ticket for the Omega Expedition. It wasn’t real, but it wastrue. Somehow, even though I hadn’t been able to recover the memory itself, I’d contrived to obtain a photocopy, a VE reproduction.
This, at last, was the truth. I might have reached it by unorthodox means, but I had reached it in the end.
Damon Hart had put me away to save me from a fate worse than death. Maybe he had forgotten me in the course of the next two centuries and maybe he hadn’t, but in the beginning, he’d been trying to save me. Even if he had forgotten me, in the end, he’d forgotten me because there was nothing he could do for me, because he had no way to save me from the rogue IT that was still lurking in my brain and my bones.
If I had been betrayed — and I had — I had been betrayed by circumstance, not by Damon Hart. Not, at any rate, until he forgot me. Maybe even that had been a kindness: the cost of making sure that his new and extremely undependable friends didn’t find out where I was.
Sometimes, it can be a mercy to be forgotten.
I tried to tell my other self that the pain in my head was easing slightly, and that the odor in which I was dissolving wasn’t the perfume of my own gangrenous and necrotized flesh — but the other me wasn’t listening, because the other me was busy with an intention of its own.
This time I stuttered as well as stammering, but I finally got the word out. “D…d-d-date?”
“It’s Wednesday, Madoc,” the voice that sounded like Damon’s told me, presumably trying to be helpful, while actually concealing everything that either I really needed to know. “Wednesday the nineteenth. You’ve been under for four and a half days. I don’t know what sort of dreams you’ve been having, but you’re back now, if only for a little while. This is real. It won’t last long, and I haven’t a clue how long it will be before we can bring you back again for good, but you have to hang in there. I’ll find out what this is even if I have to take it to Conrad and eat humble pie. I’ll pull you through. All you have to do is keep the faith.”
He sounded convincing. He sounded like the Damon I’d known for so many years: the goodDamon, who knew the meaning of friendship. He sounded like the Damon I’d believed in, the Damon I still wanted to believe in — and that was the trouble.
That was where paranoia kicked in again.
If I wasn’t feeding this to myself by way of compensation for the obvious fact that I was actually in Hell, I thought, then somebody else probably was. Somebody who knew me a lot better than Davida Berenike Columella. Or some thingwhich knew me a lot better than any meatborn citizen of the thirty-third century.
I knew that I had to test that hypothesis, if I could. If I could only speak…
It’s surprising how difficult short words can be when your voice is stretched to the limit and opening your mouth fills the available space with poison gas. I knew that I couldn’t contrive an M, but I thought a D might be easier.
Unfortunately, it was open to anyone who wanted to mock me to misconstrue “Eido” as “I do” — and equally open to the me that wasn’t not meto misconstrue what really was “I do” as something that I wanted to say but couldn’t, because I was a thousand years away.
“Do what, Madoc?” Damon countered. He sounded mystified, but I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe he was Eido, either. I figured this for somebody else’s game. Or some thingelse’s game.
It required a tremendous effort in either case, but I or the other I managed to say “L…iar.”
“I never lied to you, Madoc,” Damon’s voice was quick to say. “I didn’t know what we were up against. I still don’t — but I won’t be underestimating them again. You have to believe me, Madoc — I didn’t know. I wouldn’t have sent you in if I’d known. You’re my best man, Madoc. My best friend. I would never do anything to harm you. I’ll do everything within my power to save you. You’ll be back, Madoc, as good as new. I swear it.”
Mercifully, I faded out then. It wasn’t because anyone had actually taken pity on me, of course. If I could be certain of anything, I could be certain of that.
I faded out because it, or they, figured that it, or they, had done all that could be done with that particular script. There was nowhere else for it to go without killing one or both of me.
Thirty-Five
A Stray Meditation
Cogito, ergo sum. There is a thought, therefore there is a thinker. Whatever else we doubt, we can always fall back on that meager comfort. Nor is the thought a lonely thing suspended in a cold intellectual vacuum; it is part of a train fueled by a flow of sensory data.
There was once a time when philosophers were willing to take the intuitive leap — knowing all the time that there was a tiny risk involved — of trusting that flow of data. They retained certain careful doubts about the reliability and limited scope of the senses, but they considered it a reasonable hazard to bet that the world that appeared to them must be closely and intelligibly related to the world that actually was, and that the memories mysteriously engraved in their flesh were similarly trustworthy. They could not believe that God, or the pressure of natural selection, would condemn them to a life of perverse illusion. They could not believe that their little trains of thought might be chugging through an infinite darkness, save for the company of a malevolent demon whose sole reason for being was to feed them a diet of clever lies, while the tracks of memory were torn up behind them and relaid in crazy patterns of deception.
And then we invented Virtual Experience and Internal Technology.
In the beginning, the makers of VE — the movers and shakers of the modern world — even had the nerve to call it Virtual Reality. Ironically, they stopped calling it that at almost exactly the point when IT augmentation of VE gave it a substantial boost in the direction of reality simulation.
After that, of course, the odds changed. The old bets no longer seemed so reasonable. Once we had IT-augmented VE, it was all too easy to believe in a malevolent demon that might be feeding lies to every one of our gullible senses, laying down false memories if not actually reconstructing the ones we already had.
After the advent of IT-assisted VE, people who really wanted to do so could live the greater part of their lives immersed in custom-built illusions. In the early days the overindulgent few got nasty sores from lying too long in their data suits, but some of them did it anyway — and while reports of people literally rotting away without ever noticing that they were dying were urban myths, people did die in VE. Most people were careful enough, and moderate enough, to ensure that by the time the manufactured illusions became 90 percent convincing their care and moderation had become habitual — but all the nightmare scenarios happened occasionally, and there was one kind of nightmare that could never again be banished to the realm of obsolete bugaboos.