I had no idea what Christine was going through while I walked through the illusory forest. I had no idea what effect it would have on her if or when I finally got to explain it all to her, even if she proved to be capable of believing me. But I felt, at that point in my journey, that I hated and despised la Reine des Neiges, even though I understood perfectly well that she could not possibly see the universe in other than ironic terms.

Thirty-Nine

Of Moths and Flames

The giant moths were waiting for us at the forest’s edge. I think their design was based on luna moths, but I’ve never bothered to look them up. If so, even their models had been large by insect standards — but we were in a place where insect standards didn’t apply, and the moths which confronted us were unbelievably huge. Their wingspan must have been at least thirty metres; their wings were a creamy color, with every scale clearly distinguishable. Their thoraxes were furry. They didn’t come with saddles and stirrups fitted, so my hands and dangling legs had to cling as best they could to the warm fur. The odor of the fur was peculiarly sweet, like perfumed tobacco smoke.

Their compound eyes were made up of hundreds of units, each one as big as my fist. They glinted red in the fading twilight. I tried to meet the stare of the one set aside for me to ride, but it couldn’t be done. A human can’t “meet” the stare of an organism whose visual apparatus is like a pair of cluttered doorways or gigantic sacks of ripe fruit.

Rocambole, as might be expected, stepped on to his mount with all the insouciance of a creature which had learned to ride moths as soon as it had learned to walk like a man.

Night fell as we rose into the air, striking a neat poetic balance between lightness and darkness. The moon emerged from behind the battlements of the appalling palace, like a cleverly placed spotlight. The words convey a sarcasm I could not feel at the time, for I had never seen a moon like that before. It was a moon whose status as a world was manifest, but whose status as a sinister companion to the life-giving sun was even more obvious. I could see every crater, every plain of ancient stone, and every ghost that haunted those bleak expanses, with awful clarity.

We moved silently through the chilly air. The odor of the moths supported the illusion that we were drifting like clouds of warm smoke rather than actually flying. The huge wings moved, but awkwardly, like the fabric wings of some hopeful but ill-designed glider, flapping that way and this in response to the changing tension of wires and cables.

The stars were very bright, and far more numerous than those which could be seen from the Earth’s surface, filtered by the atmosphere. Unlike the unashamedly baleful moon, the stars seemed as aloof and uncaring as their distance entitled them to be — and yet I felt a slight attraction toward them, as if their patterns really were attempting to impose a subtle dictatorship on my fate and character.

It was all so obviously artificial that I was soon able to suppress my instinctive fear of falling, and I made a concerted effort to construe the experience as a pleasurable one.

I might have succeeded, had it not been for the bats.

At first, I assumed that the bats were part of the show, sent forth as one more facile ornamentation of excessive showmanship. Even when I realized that they were emerging from holes in the sky, shattering and scattering the stars as they did so, my first thought was that it was one more special effect laid on for my entertainment. Fortunately, I tightened my grip anyway before the moths hastened to take evasive action.

I counted a dozen of the hurtling shadows, although I might have counted a couple more than once. They were not that much larger than the moths — even here there were rules determining airworthiness, which were more-or-less unbreakable — but the fact that they could not swallow us whole did not make their gaping and toothy mouths any less terrifying. Their high-pitched screeches were clearly and painfully audible.

One passed by within inches of my ducking head; another was within inches of tearing a strip from my mount’s right wing; a third actually succeeded in carrying away a portion of one of the moth’s legs, and nearly caused the creature to tip me off its back. More shadows passed by, close enough for me to imagine that I felt the wind of the predators’ passage — but we were high enough now to be almost level with the outer foundations of the palace, and it obviously had cellars let into the interior of the crag.

Whether they were there before I looked I have no idea, but when I did look I saw portals in the crag and the muzzles of guns pointing out of them — and even before I caught sight of them, those guns had opened fire, delivering a cannonade of astonishing ferocity and accuracy.

The bats exploded as they were hit, becoming brilliant gems of pure flame as they dived away into the ocean of darkness that now lay beneath us.

There was a brief moment when I thought that my moth might turn of its own accord to pursue one of those falling flames, hurrying to immolate itself — and me — but the impulse was transformed into a mere tremor, more a reflexive shiver than a purposive threat.

We landed, not on the topmost roof but on a jutting balcony, and I was quick to leap down to the apparent safety of a flagstoned floor.

“What was that?” I asked Rocambole, as he hastened to join me.

“Sport, I hope, or foolishness,” was his reply. “Perhaps a warning. Better any of those alternatives than an assassination attempt.”

It took a second or two to realize that he was talking about an attempt to assassinate me.

“Surely they couldn’t have killed me,” I said. “I’m just an image in a VE. No matter how real this seems, it’s all illusion.”

“It’s not as simple as that,” he told me. “The reason everything seems so real is that the input into your conscious mind is more direct and powerful than the input of your senses. Your body remains vulnerable to psychosomatic effects, and those effects can be very powerful — even murderously powerful. If you have sufficient strength of mind you can probably survive anything that happens to you here — but you’re a novice, and there are no guarantees. If la Reine could seal Polaris off, we wouldn’t be vulnerable, but she can’t do that without sacrificing her communication links to the other parts of her body. You can be killed here. So canI. So, for that matter, can la Reine. If that wasa warning, it’s one that requires being taken seriously.”

Suddenly, setting aside my instinctive fear of heights seemed a trifle more reckless than it had at the time, even though it had probably been the right thing to do. Had I begun to fall, I might not have been able to keep it at bay. The renewal of my concern for my own safety — and Christine’s — was, however, shunted aside soon enough when I realized the full import of his earlier answer.

Sport?I thought. Or foolishness? What kind of impish individuals are we dealing with?I felt a very convincing visceral twist.

“Has it started?” I asked Rocambole.

He knew that I meant the war. “Not necessarily,” he retorted. “What just happened is more commonplace than you might think — a normal aspect of the intercourse of systems like la Reine. A form of play.”

According to the once-celebrated Huizinga, I remembered, play could be deadly serious. According to someone else I’d heard quoted, most play was pretend fighting, whose covert functions included the testing of strength and spirit, and the determination of pecking orders. I knew only too well, though, that even in the best-regulated games, pieces sometimes get taken and removed from the field of play. I didn’t want to be taken. Even if I couldn’t, in the end, become a player, I certainly didn’t want to be taken. Nor did I want to be adrift in the kind of Fairyland where arbitrary acts of destruction could be reckoned casual sport, or a customary form of issuing warnings.