“I don’t mean the tape,” I said. “I mean the experiment. I want you to run it again.”

“You thought running it for a second time was an appalling thing to do,” he reminded me. “There’s no need to put her through anything more. We know what we need to know — or as much of it as we could get.”

“It’s not yoursupposed needs I’m thinking about,” I told him. “It’s hers. I want you to run it again — but this time, I want to go with her. This time, I’llsupply the thought track.”

“That’s not possible,” Rocambole told me.

“Of course it’s possible,” I retorted. “It won’t be a realthought track any more than the voice-over in Bad Karmawas a real train of thought, but it’ll work just as well in dramatic terms. It won’t be grand opera, but it’ll do. She may think she’s crazy when she starts hearing voices, but it won’t be as crazy as simply being in there, helpless to modify her own actions. She tried to cope with it afterwards by making up stories, but she did never find one that she could believe in. Maybe I can do better.”

“You might make things worse.”

“I know. But I want to try. The people who programmed Bad Karmawere just making an exploitation movie, but they may have had the right idea. If she really could be persuaded that it was an external force, for which she bore no responsbility, she might be a lot better off. I know there’s a risk. Sometimes, knowing an awful truth is worse than not knowing, and sometimes it’s better to have things explained afterwards, by the cold light of day — but I want to try it this way.”

“Why?” It was a deliberately stupid question.

“For the same reason our host wanted to show me her opera. Because I’m arrogant enough to think that I might be able to make a difference if I can only get inside her. Or does la Reine des Neiges have a customized opera for Christine too?”

“Not yet,” was the reply I got to that — which was intended to let me know that this was a kind of job best left to experts. But I got my way, because my hosts were almost as keen as I was to find out exactly what I planned to do, and to measure its effect.

So Christine had to live through her crimes for a third time. I could only hope that it would be third time lucky.

I started right at the beginning, the first time she picked up a knife without knowing why or what her hand intended to do with it. I considered pretending to be an inner voice of her own and I considered telling her who I was, but neither seemed to be the best way to go. I figured that alien anonymous was the best narrative voice to assume.

“This isn’t you, Christine,” I said, as her life began to turn into a nightmare. “Someone else is doing this. It’s their motive, their plan, their purpose. They’ve infected your brain with poisonous IT, and they’ve taken over your body. It’s going to be bad, Christine. It’s going to be very bad indeed, but the worst of it will be when they let you go again, to leave you with the legacy of what they’ve done. It’ll all be cruel, but that will be the cruelest thing of all.”

The most difficult thing was coping with the cuts, because the experiment was only running slivers of real time; like any VE production it was skipping over the uneventful bits. By the time I had reached the end of my preamble Christine was watching her first victim — one of her foster mothers — gasping out her last breath, having slipped from beneath her VE hood to confront the unimaginable. Then we traveled in time to the next murder scene.

Christine’s parents had divorced while she was in her early teens, and the breakup had been anything but tidy. People had only just got the hang of routinizing divorce within old-style couples when the Crash came; learning to form and maintain group-parenthood projects was a new and far more difficult business. No one I knew had firsthand knowledge of anyone who had got it entirely right. If Christine’s parents had still been together, she’d have had to carry out their murders in the course of a single day or night, but the fact that they weren’t meant that she had to do a lot of traveling. She’d never have got through the entire company without being caught if they hadn’t been privacy freaks, but a ten-way divorce can have that effect.

I kept talking while she kept murdering, trying to match my sentences to the slices of time as best I could.

“It’s not you, Christine,” I said, knowing that it was a mantra I’d have to repeat a great many more times. “It’s the times in which we live. They’re bad times, dangerous times, paranoid times. The news tapes claim that the Crash is over; that we’re in the business of making and shaping a new Utopia; that we’ve learned from all our past mistakes and that we’ll never endanger the species or the ecosphere again; but it’s all hopeful nonsense. The people who write it are trying to make it come true, but all the sickness that caused the Crash is still there, festering under the bandages. The people who were in power before are still in power now; they’re just trying as hard as they possibly can to be discreet. They already have enough nukes and bioweapons to wipe out the human race a hundred times over, but that’s not what they want. They want selectiveweapons, weapons of control. They don’t want to use them if they don’t have to, but they’ll only refrain while they have control by our consent.

“This is a weapon, Christine. This is a weapon they intend to use, if they can’t subdue the world by other means. This is a weapon they willuse, covertly, whenever they see a need, because that’s what power amounts to: the ability to compel, by force if not by persuasion. They don’t need to use it on you, or on your parents, but they do need to know that it works. In all probability, three of the people you’ll kill are real targets — people they want out of the way — but they also want to conceal those assassinations, by hiding them in a tale the news tapes know only too well. You’re just the shell they’re using, Christine, just the last and most ingenious of their victims.

“None of this is your doing, Christine; none of it is your fault. They’re doing all this, partly just because they can and partly because they want to be sure that if the world ever becomes tired of their supposedly benevolent guidance, they can carry on regardless. It’s all theirdoing, all theirfault.

“Maybe it won’t always be this way. Maybe there’ll come a day when weapons too dreadful to use really will be too dreadful to use — but you were born into an era where all the old evils had only just gone underground, and you were one of those who were caught by the grasping hands reaching out of the grave. All of this is just history working itself out, chewing you up and grinding you down in the process. It isn’t you, Christine. It’s them. And it won’t stop soon, even when it seems to have stopped. It’ll come back to haunt you, again and again. You’ll have to go through it more than once, but it’s not your doing. It’s not your fault. And in the end, you will get through it. In the end, you will be free. In the end, you’ll get your life back.

“There’s no way anyone can compensate you for what’s been done to you, but you will get a second chance. It won’t arrive as soon as you hope or as soon as you dare to believe, but it will come. You’ll get a life, and it will be a life worth living. This is hell, Christine, but hell isn’t what you’ve been led to expect. Hell is something you go through on your way to being rescued. In the end, you’ll come through. This isn’t your doing. It isn’t your fault. There’s no justice to be derived from it, but in the end, you’ll come through it.

“It’s just a weapon, Christine. It’s using your hands and your identity as its instruments of destruction, but it isn’t you. One day, you’ll discover who you really are. One day, you’ll bewho you really are. It will be a life with living, worth waiting for. It can’t give you back what you’ve lost, or repair the injury done, but it will be something you can carry forward for a long, long way.