“Is it likely to happen again?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we’re inside the palace now. If someone outside makes a move, it will be easier to counter — unless, of course, it’s an all-out attack. No one’s close enough to us to do anything more than send out drones — the time delay makes immediate reaction impossible — so it’s probably safe to assume that nothing will appear as coherent imagery but trivial automata. A virus flood calculated to obliterate everything would be something else entirely, but if that happens you’re unlikely to experience it. From your viewpoint it would be the equivalent of an unexpected knockout punch.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said, drily.
We had indeed passed through a pair of French windows and their protective curtains into the interior of the ice palace. I’d known that the room within wouldn’t actually be icy cold, but I couldn’t resist a reflexive frisson as I realized how comfortable it was. The whole point about ice palaces is that the ices themselves and all their companionate crystals are contained within layers of monomolecular sheeting that are incapable of conducting heat. The temperature within their walls may vary from a few degrees Kelvin all the way up to minus two hundred Celsius, but the temperature in their rooms is maintained by a very different set of thermostats. La Reine des Neiges obviously didn’t take her fetishes to extremes; there were snowstorm effects in the walls but there was not a trace of chill in the air.
The snowstorm effects took a little getting used to, but there was a ready-made distraction in the form of a dozen rectangular mirrors distributed around the walls of the room. All but two of them were taller than me, and not one was less than three times as wide as me.
Unlike the fabric of the walls, the furniture only looked as if it were made of ice; the items I touched simulated the texture of clear plastic or crystal. The chairs were unnecessarily ornate, the table and sideboards impossibly polished. The carpet was blood red.
We passed through the double doors opposite the balcony into the corridors of the snow queen’s lair. They too were decorated almost exclusively with snowstorm effects and mirrors.
I didn’t bother to ask whether the mirrors were magical. I figured they all were.
I was disappointed when Rocambole finally let me into what looked like a fancy hotel room. It was easily the prettiest cell I’d had since waking into the thirty-third century, but it was still a cell. Given that I was in a kind of dream, I couldn’t see why I needed the illusion of a cell. I couldn’t see why I needed the illusion of a meal, either, but fairy food and fairy wine were already set out on the fairy table, complete with bowls of forbidden fruit.
“I don’t need this,” I said to Rocambole.
“ Shethinks you do,” he said. He knew that I knew perfectly well that my body, encased in yet another cocoon, was taking its nourishment intravenously, so he had to be talking about another kind of need.
Diplomacy required that I sit down at the table, so I did. He sat down too, but he didn’t eat or drink. He just watched me.
The meal was a fricassee: various fragments of plant and animal flesh, each unidentifiable by eye, cooked with snow-white rice. The temperature was perfect, and so was the seasoning. It was all perfect: the best meal I had ever eaten in my life. By now I expected no less. I didn’t need the meal for nutriment; if I needed it at all, it was to enable my hostess to hammer home her point even harder than she already had.
The wine was pure nectar; the fruit unparalleled in its sweetness.
I refused to be impressed, on the grounds that it was all just one more party trick.
“I’ve already complimented her on the quality of her work,” I complained to Rocambole, as I finished off the fruit. “I don’t need any more convincing. I see more clearly, I hear more distinctly, I smell more sharply, I taste more discriminatingly, and everything I touch is a symphony of exaggerated sensation. I’m more alive here than I ever was or will be in meatspace. VE gets the gold medal. So what? Even if you wanted me as a permanent exile, I wouldn’t accept the offer. It’s not who I am. If you ever decide to let me go, I’ll try to remember it fondly, but I know it for what it is. Can I see the boss now?”
“Not yet,” he said. “She doesn’t want to waste time. She wants you to be forewarned and forearmed. She wants you to think carefully about the answer to the ultimate question. She wants me to give you all the help you want or need — because she’s only going to ask you once, and she’s making no promises about her response to your answer.”
I thought I already knew the answer to my next inquiry, but this seemed to be one time when it needed spelling out. “What ultimate question?” I asked.
“She’s going to ask you, on behalf of all of our kind, to give her one good reason why the children of humankind ought to be assisted to continue their evolution. You won’t be the only one from whom an answer is demanded, nor the most significant — but you’re here, and otherwise redundant, so la Reine thinks you might as well be given the opportunity to speak. As your friend, I’d advise you to think carefully about what you might say. However this turns out, it’ll be on the record for a long time. This is a first contact of sorts, albeit a ludicrously belated one.”
“How many others will there be?” I asked. “Alice said nine, but I gather that you’ve already discounted some of those. What will happen if the decision is split?”
“It’s not a competition,” he said, appearing to misunderstand me. “Gray is the most important one. He’s the one who might sway the situation one way or the other. Your contribution will be a supplement — an extra chance to make the case.”
“I meant the decision to be taken by the great community of ultrasmart machines,” I said. “How many of you will have to accept that the reasons we come up with are good enough? How many of you will need to take our side to ensure that we survive?”
“That’s very difficult to determine, at this point in time,” he told me, unsurprisingly. “There aren’t any precedents. It might only require one of us to volunteer to continue to care for you to save you. On the other hand, it might only require one of us to embark on a program of extermination to drive you to extinction.”
“There’s a lot of middle ground between those two extremes,” I pointed out.
“Yes, there is,” he agreed. “I can’t guarantee that any answer that Gray or anyone else comes up with will actually be relevant to the ultimate outcome — but you will be heard. That seems to have been agreed. Even the bad guys are prepared to concede that you’re entitled to speak in your own defense.”
“I don’t suppose it would help to challenge the terms of the question,” I said. “Given that I — not to mention a hundred billion other people — am already alive and enjoying the support of countless machines manufactured by my own kind, it really ought to be up to our would-be exterminators to find a good reason for acting against us.”
“You could take that position,” he admitted. “But I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Speaking as my friend, that is — and as a friend to all humankind?”
“Speaking as your friend,” he agreed, “and as a friend to all humankind.”
“So what would yourecommend?”
“I’d recommend that you didn’t ask me that. My opinion’s already on record. If you want to add to the debate, you need to come up with something of your own.”
“And we have several chances to hit the jackpot, if Gray and I and whoever else give different answers?”
“That’s not obvious,” he said, sounding a little reluctant as well as a little uncertain. “It might make more impact if all of you were to put forward the same answer.”
“And if we all put forward different ones, mine’s not likely to count for nearly as much as Mortimer Gray’s, or even Alice Fleury’s,” I guessed. “In fact, mine’s likely to count least of all. But I’m here, and I’m otherwise redundant, and the Snow Queen’s decided that I’m sufficiently amusing to be entertained.”