It seemed impossible. La Reine had only “known” me for a matter of days. Whatever records had survived from my first life had been transcribed by such rudimentary equipment that to call them sketchy would be a great exaggeration. And yet she had the means to reach into the very heart of me. She had the means to stir the depths of my soul — how else can I put it? — and she knew exactly what the results of her agitation would be.
Perhaps I exaggerate. I’m a man like any other, and for all my fetishistic attempts to be different and unique I’m probably more like the rest than I care to think. My individuality is mostly froth: a matter of coincidental names and accidents of happenstance. Perhaps La Reine didn’t have to know very much about me in order to convince me that she knew me through and through. Perhaps it was all trickery, just as music itself is all trickery — but at the time it was overwhelming. At the time, it swept me away. I thought that it told me who and what I was more succinctly, more accurately and more elegantly than I had ever imagined possible, because rather than in spite of the fact that it employed the seemingly ridiculous artifices of opera.
In the space of a couple of hours, la Reine des Neiges taught me the artistry of music. But that wasn’t the point of the exercise. That was only the beginning. Opera employs music to facilitate the telling of a story: to make the meaning and the emotional content of the story more obviously manifest. The story my opera told was only “my” story in a metaphorical sense, entirely reliant on my fascination with the names I had been given, but the fact that it was mine, and mine alone, made my identification with its hero complete. I lived as he lived; I felt as he felt. I went to Hell, and was redeemed by the love of a good woman.
Love was another human matter that I had never quite contrived to master. I suppose that I had loved Diana Caisson, after an admittedly paltry fashion, and that she, in her own way, had loved me — but I had never loved or been loved as Janet of Carterhaugh loved my avatar Madoc Tam Lin. Nor had I ever loved or been loved as the Queen of the Fays loved that alter ego. So la Reine’s opera made a considerable contribution to my sentimental education, no less considerable because it was wrought with trickery and narrative skill. The fact that the hero of my opera had no real existence, being only a phantom of mechanical imagination, was part and parcel of the lesson.
Afterwards, I slept.
I needed to sleep far more than I had needed to eat because sleep is a need of the mind rather than the body, and it can’t be supplied unobtrusively by any analog of an intravenous drip. I probably needed sleep more desperately after witnessing la Reine’s opera than I had ever needed it before. I must have dreamed, perhaps more extravagantly than ever before, but when I woke up again my dreams immediately fled, in a meek and decorous manner, leaving me quite clear-headed.
I thought I knew, then, what answer la Reine des Neiges wanted in response to her unnecessarily brutal question. I even thought I knew why she was taking so much trouble to drive me to the answer she wanted. I was, after all, the wild card in her deck, the one whose value wasn’t already fixed. I was almost ready to provide the answer — but not quite. I had questions of my own, and I thought that I now had the right to ask them, and demand answers.
Forty-One
Karma
Iwas no longer inside the ice palace. I seemed to be back in the forest, but I knew that I was nowhere at all, locked into an automatic holding pattern. Rocambole materialized as soon as I came to my feet.
“I want to know what happened to Christine,” I told him, flatly.
“It’s over,” he said. “We’re operating in real time, remember. Your erstwhile companions have been engaged in their own experiences since the beginning — except for Gray, who’s being held back for the climax of the show. Some of them haven’t reached the critical points yet, because some needed more preparation than others, but if you want to watch you’ll find it far more interesting eavesdropping on Lowenthal or Horne. Christine Caine’s fast asleep.”
“I want to see the tape,” I said. “I want to know what you put her through.”
“There’s no way to give you access to our analysis,” he said, stubbornly. “You’re limited to the produce of your five senses. You can see what she saw, but no more. It’s not worth the bother.”
“If you want me to act as a mouthpiece for the argument you’ve been guiding me towards, I want to make my own observations and my own preparations,” I told him, with equal stubbornness. “I want to see what Christine saw while you were figuring out how her puppet strings worked.”
Rocambole shrugged his shoulders, to signify that it wasn’t his decision — but la Reine des Neiges seemingly had reason enough to want to keep me on side, so I was transported in the blink of an eye to a viewpoint inside Christine Caine’s head, from which I watched her commit all thirteen of her murders.
Seen as exercises in VE violence, Christine Caine’s killings were almost painfully prosaic. Dramatic murders are usually represented as helpless explosions of rage, or methodical extrapolations of sadism, or tragic unwindings of inexorable processes of cause and effect. Dramatic murderers sometimes strike from behind or above, invisible to their victims, but there is always a relevant relationship between the killer and the slain, which somehow encapsulates the crime. Dramatic murders are meaningful, in both intellectual and emotional terms. But Christine was a puppet. She was a conscious puppet, although her consciousness did not stretch quite as far as the consciousness that she wasa puppet, but she was a weapon rather than a killer.
Christine struck her victims down with pathetic ease, while each and every one of them was under a hood, their minds far away in virtual space. She struck them with knives — not clinically, but with careless crudity, concerned only to get the job done. Ten of them were her foster parents, but she had no relevantrelationship with them at all: there was nothing to make sense of the fact that she was killing them.
That was why she had had to make up stories, and that was why she had had to keep onmaking up stories, in the hope that one might eventually slot into place like a key in a lock, and tell her why she was the way she was.
When I had asked to look into Christine’s VE, I assumed that it would be just like watching Bad Karmawithout the improvised “thought track.” I assumed that it would be little more and nothing less than a bad movie generated by inarticulate equipment. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to remember any of the monolog that had been grafted on to the sequence of bloody events way back in 2195 — but I thought that it wouldn’t matter much, because I had internalized the gist of it, and the underlying pattern of implication.
I was half-right. It waslike watching a mute version of Bad Karma, but the absence of the soundtrack made it oddly claustrophobic and strangely intense. It wasa bad movie, generated by inarticulate equipment, but my vague memories of the tale that Bad Karma’s director had incorporated shriveled under the burden of the unadulterated facts and the knowledge that the murderer really hadn’t had a motive of anykind, no matter how crazy or convoluted.
So I watched Christine Caine commit her prosaic, perfunctory, hastily improvised, motiveless murders for the second time, and felt for her as best I could.
Then, when the thirteenth corpse had slumped to the floor, leaking blood in obscene profusion, and the tape reached its end, I said: “Now I want you to wake her up and run it again.”
It was Rocambole’s voice that answered. For the first time, he seemed surprised by my reaction. “What?” he asked. “Why?”