I knew that I couldn’t trust him. I figured that if the cards fell in our favor, we captive meatfolk mightbe set free — but if the decision went against us, we’d simply be discarded. The AMIs wouldn’t be prepared to take the risk of letting us go, even if they were confident that they could repress any inconvenient memories we might have collected. Our reappearance would attract too much attention, and provide a puzzle that would generate too much speculation. Rocambole was right about one thing, though. I had to go along with it anyway. I was a prisoner in the Château d’If, and my chances of ever getting to play the Count of Monte Cristo were slim.
You, who are reading my story, know that I did come through it, with a set of memories that I believe to be as accurate as memories usually are — although you are very welcome to doubt them if you wish — but while I was in the Snow Queen’s realm I only knew how unlikely that eventuality was.
Out in meatspace, wars were still brewing. The solar system was a cauldron coming slowly toward boiling point. I had no idea what moves were being prepared and made by the various contending parties.
Like Tam Lin I was stuck in Fairyland while history moved on, inexorably. Like Tam Lin, I had no guarantee that I’d ever get back. Like Tam Lin, I could easily end up as a tithe paid to Hell.
I could only wonder whether it would actually do me any good to confront the intelligence that had constructed this VE, and engage it in an argument, however well informed. Probably not, I decided. But that didn’t lessen my determination to do it.
I had already begun to hope that la Reine des Neiges was an authentic superpower in the lookingglass world: that she was the ultrasmartest of all the self-aware AIs. There might be a lot I could learn from a friend like Rocambole, but I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that we were adrift in a democracy, or even a Hardinist conspiracy. Somewhere in the AI pack there had to be a top dog, and I wanted that top dog to be the one who had custody of my currently useless meat.
I had always wanted to have the chance to stand face-to-face with one of the big players in the game of human history. I still wanted that, even though I knew that in the present situation we’d both be wearing inscrutable masks. Now, I made the further decision that before I died, or set out to live forever, I wanted to be able to spit in the eye of something that could really seeinto the depths of space, time, and possibility.
Thirty-Eight
Of Mirrors and Fragments
By the time Christine Caine first saw the VE-tape version of The Snow Queenthe story was several stages removed from its origin in the works of Hans Christian Andersen. Perhaps its so-called origin wasn’t reallyits origin, in that all the stories of a sophisticated culture have to be made up of fragments of preexisting stories, which are themselves new combinations of ancient elements, whose foundation stones are lost in the mists of oral culture and mythology — but authenticity isn’t the point, as anyone who has read my story attentively will readily understand.
There are objects of the human mind more real than those which constitute mere physical reality. Names and stories have a significance that cuts far deeper than mere vulgar appearance.
As I remembered it, while I drew nearer to the palace of la Reine des Neiges, The Snow Queenwas actually seven stories in one, seven being a magic number attributed to such potent human inventions as the deadly sins and the named days forming the basic cycle of human activity.
The first of those stories told of the manufacture by an imp of a magic mirror whose purpose was to diminish everything that was good and to magnify everything that was bad. The mirror did this work so well in the human world — which cannot have provided much of a challenge — that its impish users decided to carry it up to Heaven, in order to see what it would make of the images of the angels. Perhaps, although the story did not dare say so, they also wanted to see what it would make of God Himself.
The mirror, which had a self-aware intelligence of its own, delighted in the prospect of going to Heaven. It was so excited that it became very difficult to bear, and the imps carrying it aloft lost control of it. It fell, and was shattered into more than a trillion fragments.
These fragments, shot like bullets by the velocity of the impact, flew in every direction. Some tiny ones lodged in the eyes and hearts of human beings, whose powers of sight and feeling were affected accordingly. Some were big enough to serve as windows in great houses, or as mirrors on walls, while some were only big enough to serve as lenses in spectacles, microscopes, spectroscopes, and telescopes — but all of them had the power to deceive, and pollute, and make things seem wrong.
Perhaps, if the imps had not been so small-minded, they would not have been able to take such delight in this result, but as things were they were well content with all the laughter they derived from these petty perversions of the human world. They forgot all about their grander plan, and they probably had insufficient imagination to wonder what they might have seen had they ascended all the way to Heaven, there to discover what the mirror would make of the images of angels, and of the Divine Countenance Itself.
The second story told how a fragment of the magic mirror lodged in the heart of a boy, who became dissatisfied with all he saw, until he was carried off by the Snow Queen, leaving behind the little girl he had formerly loved, and who still loved him.
The remaining five stories — of which my conscientiously unrefreshed memory is rather vague — told of the little girl’s heroic search for the lost boy, and of the eventual reclamation of his capacity to feel the way humans should.
This passed for a happy ending among children capable of identifying themselves entirely with the little girl, although it was actually the most despairing ending imaginable, because it left more than a trillion fragments of the mirror distributed throughout the world: in eyes and hearts, in mirrors and windows, and in optical instruments of every technologically feasible kind.
Strangely enough, the story was very popular, at least while the world was inhabited by people thoroughly accustomed to despair.
I had already begun to understand, while I trudged toward the real snow queen’s palace with increasingly leaden feet, why Christine Caine liked the story so much, even after her transformation into a murderous puppet. She was then so direly in need of redemption for herself that she had no sentiment to spare for the world.
Her main problem, of course, was rationalization.
Most of what we think of as intentions are actually excuses. Our behavior is far more mechanical than we like to believe; we refuse to see ourselves as robots reacting programmatically and helplessly to external and internal stimuli, so we make up stories to explain why we did what we did. Mostly, it’s easy. Sometimes, it’s not. Occasionally, we become desperately inventive, and even then can find no way to convince ourselves, or soothe our phantom guilt. Rationalization is a two-edged sword.
Christine Caine had killed thirteen people — thirteen being a number of ill omen — because some impish individual had wanted to test the power of malevolent IT. Then she had been left alone in her misery, to explain her actions to herself and others as best she could, even though no imaginable explanation could possibly have served her purpose.
How the imps must have laughed!
And now it was all going to happen again. This time it was happening in the land of Faerie — but that would not make it seem any less real, in terms of Christine Caine’s perceptions. Quite the reverse, in fact.