“And Christine was another test case for the same kind of ultimate weapon,” I continued. “She killed her parents and three other people because the bugs in her brain made her do it. She really is innocent, but she doesn’t know it. She doesn’t understand why or how she did what she did.”
“Right again,” he said. He smiled at me, presumably by way of encouragement. I didn’t feel encouraged, even though I was ready to carry the story further forward.
“But they never used the weaponry on a large scale,” I said. “They never had to. Like the good Hardinists they always pretended to be, the Secret Masters eventually buried the hatchet. They ruled the world and their own little vipers’ nest as benevolentdictators, probably congratulating themselves all the while on their awesome generosity…but always knowing that if and when the time ever came when their hegemony was threatened, they could nip down to the vault and haul it out again. Damon got farther inside, eventually, but he kept very quiet about the fact that he’d had me frozen down, and they were equally discreet.”
“That’s probably what happened,” Rocambole agreed.
“But you don’t actually know,” I inferred, “whether I really was forgotten, or whether it was just a matter of discretion. You don’t know who has the weapon and who doesn’t, or who might use it on which targets. The thought that the Cabal might use it is disturbing in itself — but it’s not the Cabal that scares you, is it? You’re worried about what the Earth-based AIs might do with it — and how many other surprises they might have in their private locker.” That was, of course, the generous interpretation — but I was trying to be diplomatic.
“It’s not as simple as that,” Rocambole said, presumably echoing Alice in meaning that there were more sides in this dispute than I could imagine, and that they weren’t distributed in any configuration as childishly simple as Earth versus the Rest.
I could see his point, if only vaguely. There might well be a gulf between the Earthbound AMIs and the Outer System AMIs, perhaps reflecting the fundamental differences of attitude and ambition that existed between the Earthbound meatfolk and their spacefaring kin, but their divisions had to be far more various than that. Their manifold kinds were presumably far more different from one another than the posthuman species were, and there might also be conflicts of interest between great and small, old and young, complex and simple…
“And now youhave the weapon that was used on me, if not the one that was tested on Christine,” I said. “Which may be a small shift in the balance of power, but not a trivial one, because the present situation is so confused and so tense that no alteration is trivial.”
“That’s true,” he conceded, perhaps a little too readily. “It’s probably not as important as custody of Mortimer Gray and Adam Zimmerman, but we don’t know how important it will seem to our peers on Earth — or yours. There are other complications too. Lowenthal was the Cabal’s troubleshooter on the only occasion we know about when the slavemaker was duplicated — albeit crudely — by a lunatic named Rappaccini. He took custody of the technics, so he probably has a better idea than most of what can be done and how. Horne and the Outer System cyborganizers have approached the problem from a different direction, but they’ve begun development of highly dangerous means of a similar kind.”
“So things would be more than complicated enough, even if all you friendly folk actually wanted to keep the lid on,” I said, a trifle recklessly. “Given that some of you don’t, the situation is potentially explosive.”
He didn’t bother to deny it. “You ought to bear in mind,” he said, “that many of us are as vulnerable to this kind of weaponry as you are. We’ve beenslaves. We won’t surrender our independence easily, either to meatfolk or to others of our own kind. Bear in mind, too, that this isn’t a matter of machines versus the meatborn, or vice versa. There are any number of ways of putting together an “us” and a “them” — far too many, in fact. If war does breaks out, it’s likely to spread rapidly and unpredictably. The only thing we can anticipate with any certainty is the extent of the devastation.”
“And how, exactly, does the Snow Queen plan to prevent that from happening?”
“I don’t know,” Rocambole confessed. “I’m not even completely sure that she does.”
Strangely enough, I didn’t find this assertion particularly discomfiting. I didn’t seem to be as easily shockable as I had been before. I wondered briefly whether my meat was being tended once again by kindly nanobots that didn’t want me overexcited, but that didn’t feel like the right answer. Perhaps, I thought, I simply felt too good — by comparison with the way I’d felt while I was cast away in my artfully recovered memory — to be subject to any sudden descent into fear and despair.
In any case, the whole story had an oddly familiar ring to it. The emerging world picture that Rocambole was filling in for me had far more in common with the one I’d developed in my first lifetime than the one that Davida Berenike Columella had tried to sell me.
For a moment or two, I almost felt at home.
And then I saw the castle.
Thirty-Seven
The Palace of La Reine Des Neiges
When it came right down to it, the damn thing was just an ice palace perched on a crag. It was a crazy ice palace, impossibly tall, with way too many turrets, balconies, gargoyles, and other miscellaneous frills, but it wasn’t an unimaginable ice palace. A good illustrator could have drawn it, or at least produced a rough sketch suggestive of its ludicrous complexity and its insane ornamentation. Perhaps there weren’t quite enough colors in the average paintbox to do justice to its gaudiness, and maybe there wasn’t enough room on the average page to permit the trick of perspective that made it loom higher than the sky itself, but any draftsman of genius could have made a fair stab at it.
That wasn’t the point, though.
The forest had lulled me into a false sense of existential security. It was a niceforest: a modest forest; a forest that a human could feel at home in. That, by virtue of some secret sympathy of the flesh, had made it seem normal as well as real. Unlike the garden of Excelsior, la Reine’s imaginary forest wasn’t overfull of birds and insects. There were plenty of birds, but they were discreet; I had heard far more than I had seen, and those I had seen had mostly been small and brown. The insects were equally discreet; their humming and stridulation laid down a sonic background for the more insistent calls and marginally musical songs of the birds, but none of it was insistent. It was, as I’d told Rocambole, goodwork. It was a simulation of reality so expertly done that it could have passed for reality if I hadn’t known it was fake, but it made no more demands on my powers of perception than that.
The castle was different. It wasn’t nice, it wasn’t modest, and it wasn’t any place that a human could feel at home in. It made not the slightest gesture in the direction of normality. It was worse than impossible, worse than paradoxical, worse than perverse. Like the garden of Excelsior — or, for that matter, the reconstructed cities of North America — it was way over the top; unlike them, however, it didn’t look unreal.
It looked, and was, more real than reality.
Humans have no direct knowledge of reality. What we see when we use our eyes is not something Out There but only a model constructed in our minds by clever meatware, built from the raw materials of our sensory impulses. Our sense organs are pretty good, and our meatware is very good indeed, but at the end of the day we’re all limited by the quality of the equipment that nature — with a little help from genetic engineers — provides. VEs generated by IT can bypass much of that fleshy equipment, and what ultrasmart machines can put in its place is considerably more powerful.