All my life, I’d argued that VEs would one day become so good that nobody would be able to tell them from the real thing. I’d erred on the side of commonsense. What I should have argued was that VEs would one day become so good that they’d expose our mental models of the world Out There for the shabby, ill-made and ill-imagined artifacts they were. Perhaps human programmers would have done as much, given time and a more demanding audience, but they hadn’t been given time enough or incentive enough. It had been left to the self-programming VE systems to get properly to grips with the problem, and to solve it.
The palace of la Reine des Neiges was a monstrosity, but it was real. It was so real that it shouted its reality from its ridiculous rooftops, and shoved its reality into my face and down my throat even while I was several hours’ walk away from the base of the unscalable pillar of rock on which it perched.
It was more real than anything I had ever seen before, more real than I had ever imagined anything could be. I breathed a curse or two while I tried, and failed, to take in the enormity of the sight.
Eventually, I said to my self-appointed friend: “How many human beings have seen something like this?”
He didn’t need to ask what I meant. “A few hundred,” he said. “The effect diminishes, with time — but you’ll never look at anything real again without knowing its limitations. If that distresses you, I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said, after a pause. “Don’t be. It’s good for minds to know what their limitations are — and what potential we have that might remain forever untouched. How stupid we were to think that VE addiction was just a matter of moral cowardice and tickling the pleasure centers.”
“It’s not addictive,” Rocambole assured me. “It’s something more than that. Existential rather than neurological.”
“Is Adam Zimmerman here?” I asked.
“No,” Rocambole replied. “But when he’s played his part, la Reine will probably bring him here. She seems to think that this is something you’ll all need to understand, if you’re to play any constructive part in the negotiations in the longer term.”
“If you’re coming out of the closet,” I observed, “you’ll need ambassadors. You’ll need someone who can tell the meatfolk what you might still do for them and what strings you want to attach.” And if they won’t play ball, I said to myself, unwilling as yet to set the thought out in public, you’ll need effective prisons — unless, of course, you go for the extinction option, with or without the help of the dirty IT that was frozen down in my brain and my bones.
I wondered if I’d live long enough to find out which way the AMIs decided to go, and whether I’d be capable of caring if the decision went against us. Either way, I had to try to be grateful for the fact that I’d seen the kind of reality that the human idea of reality was only trying, unsuccessfully, to be. I’d broken through the veil of fleshly imperfection. Madoc Tamlin had made it to the realFairyland, at last.
Other people, I realized, had glimpsed this kind of possibility. Other people, long before my own time, had had enough imagination to realize the limitations of their senses and their minds. They hadn’t been able to see a Snow Queen’s palace the way I was seeing it now, but they’d been able to imagine, if only vaguely, seeing with more conviction than they could actually see and knowing with more conviction than they could actually know. They’d had imagination enough to be dissatisfied with actuality, and sense enough to yearn for Heaven, or for Faerie. Whichever of the hundreds of my predecessors had been the first had also been the last, completing a mission as well as beginning one.
“How do we get up there?” I asked.
“We’ll ride up on the backs of giant moths,” he told me. I wasn’t surprised — not any longer. I thought I had begun to understand why la Reine des Neiges wanted me to experience what she could do before she condescended to engage me in a dialog.
I still had a lot to learn about the possibilities now open to the children of humankind.
We had slowed in our paces while I contemplated the enormity of what lay before me, but now I lengthened my stride. “I dare say night won’t fall until we get there,” I said, “but I don’t want to keep the moon and the stars waiting any longer than necessary.”
“That’s good,” he said, lengthening his own stride to keep pace with me. “You’re taking to this exceptionally well. If you’re trying to impress me, you’re succeeding.”
“I used to be in the business,” I murmured, effortlessly resistant to the flattery.
“Even so…,” he countered. He thought I meant the entertainment business. Actually, I meant streetfighting — with no holds barred. The first possessors of IT had been reckless, testing its protective provisions by living dangerously. It had been a foolish thing to do, but we had been proud to be fools. Emortals of Mortimer Gray’s generation had inherited more careful attitudes, save for a bizarre few who had eliminated themselves from consideration soon enough. In my own quaintly barbaric way, I felt that I was better prepared for this kind of challenging situation than any of my erstwhile companions.
“Will I be able to speak to Christine when I get there?” I asked, suddenly mindful of the fact that she might be less well prepared than the others, even if she recognized the palace of la Reine des Neiges — especiallyif she recognized the palace. I wanted to be there to explain it all to her, because I wanted to be the one to tell her that she was innocent, and that she didn’t need to hate and fear herself any longer.
“Not immediately,” Rocambole told me. “If there’s time. We hope there will be.”
“Why not immediately?” I wanted to know. “She’s no use to you. She’s clean. Redundant.”
“Not entirely,” my so-called friend replied. “The technics aren’t there any longer — but the memories are. We can reproduce the effect by the same means that we recovered your memory of what had been done to you.”
It took me a long couple of minutes to figure out exactly what he was saying. They hadn’t been able to recover the secret weapon that had been tested on Christine because it had been flushed from her system way back in the 2160s, but they did have its ghost: a record of its effects, engraved in the meat that was Christine’s memory, Christine’s identity. They wanted to study it, the only way they could. Only in VE, of course — but in a VE more real to the human mind than reality itself.
“You can’t do that,” I said. I remembered only too clearly what it had been like reliving my own experience while my buried memories were excavated.
“It’s not my decision,” he told me, ignoring the more obvious response.
“You can’t do it,” I said, ignoring his objection and rushing headlong into the first seriously heroic gesture of my short but long-interrupted life. “Once was too much, but twice is obscene. You mustn’t.”
“ Shethinks otherwise,” Rocambole said, in a soft voice that sounded genuinely sympathetic. “We didn’t plan it this way. This is just the way things worked out. Christine won’t sustain any permanent damage. We’ll ensure that the whole experience is repressed — just one more lost nightmare. She has nightmares anyway. La Reine’s acting on her own, beyond anyone’s control, but she does have a case. We’re trying to avoid all the possible wars, Madoc. We need to know as much as we can about the weapons the Earthbound meatfolk and the Earthbound AMIs have in their armory. We’re taking Handsel apart too, and Horne, but we’ll put them right when we’re done. We’ll put everything right.”
“You can’t,” I said. “You might be able to cover it up, but you can’t put it right.”
“Time is pressing,” he said. “I won’t say there’s no alternative, because there obviously is, but la Reine’s in charge here — I’ve only been let in to serve as your friend and adviser. My advice, as a friend, is that you have to go along with it anyway, so you might as well try to make the best of it. Learn what you can. If we manage to avoid the war, it will be useful knowledge. She’ll do everything she can to protect you.”