I couldn’t believe that Adam Zimmerman — even with the aid of such forewarning as she had given us on Charity— had been able to make anything at all of Alice’s explanation of Tyrian biochemistry or the molecular mechanics of genomic engineering. But that didn’t matter: the logic of her opposition to Davida’s claims was clear enough, and so was the kind of offer she was making.

Come to Tyre, she was saying to Adam Zimmerman, and we will make you a Child of Proteus. Come to Tyre, and it will be the first step on an existential journey that will ultimately take you anywhere you want to go — anywhere, at least, that is not already infested with the Afterlife.

It was obviously a serious offer, but I didn’t think it could possibly be a winning entry in the competition, any more than Davida’s could. Alice was in the contest because la Reine wanted her there, and perhaps because la Reine needed her there. Alice wasn’t there merely to counterbalance the Excelsior option; she was there to offer Adam Zimmerman the universe, and a way to adapt himself to the demands of the cosmic perspective — but la Reine had to be confident that she had a way to top that option and win, if not in Adam Zimmerman’s eyes or mine, then at least in the eyes of her own multimetamorphic folk.

Alice had one afterthought still to add, though. I thought it might have been a late addition rather than a conclusion planned from the beginning: a belated improvisation shaped to counter an unexpected facet of her first opponent’s argument. Either way, it included a crucial concession that was probably fatal to her chances.

“As for sex,” Alice said, “all the options are within the scope of the metamorphic process. Male, female, hermaphrodite…or none at all. I make no claims about new emotional spectra, because it isn’t something we’ve investigated as yet, but I’m prepared to bet that whatever can be done on Excelsior can be done on Tyre, while the reverse presumably isn’t true.

“The one thing I can’t guarantee, however, is that these abilities are cost-free in terms of potential longevity. They probably aren’t. In fact, the stresses and strains associated with continual metamorphosis may well ensure that people of my kind won’t even live as long as the beneficiaries of standard Zaman transformations. But life isn’t something to be measured in purely quantitative terms; the qualitative aspect is far more important. My kind of emortality will put the worlds of other stars at your disposal, so that you may explore them far more intimately than any of the posthuman inhabitants of the home system.

“Excelsior might be able to offer you the longest potential lifespan, but Tyre can offer you the only kind of life worthy of the attention of an ambitious posthuman. Tyre can’t offer you eternity — but it can offer you freedom instead of imprisonment, indefinite opportunity instead of infinite immaturity.”

I was impressed, and I could see that Adam Zimmerman was thoughtful as well as skeptical, but I knew it wasn’t good enough.

“Do you think he’ll go for it?” Rocambole whispered.

“No,” I replied, confidently. “At least, not yet. He might be glad to have it as an option, but he’s not ready to take on a billion galaxies just yet. I’m not sure that he’s even ready to be a werewolf. As I said before, what he wants first of all is to be a man who doesn’t need to die. That’s his first goal, his leading obsession — and that’s not what they’re offering him.”

“What about you?” Rocambole asked.

“Not quite the same, but near enough,” I said. “Maybe I could be a werewolf or a bold explorer of alien environments, eventually if not right away. I’d certainly like to see the universe some day, and I think Alice is right about needing to go native if we’re really to gets to grips with the broad spectrum of unearthly worlds. But for the present…no. If there really is an escalator now that will allow mere mortals to convert to any and every kind of emortality, I think I need to mature a little more before I contemplate life as a dragon-fly or a liquid organism. What would you prefer to look like, if you weren’t pretending to be human in another machine’s virtual universe?”

“Looks aren’t everything,” he said. I assumed that he was motivated by caution rather than shame.

“Nor is size,” I said, by way of ironic reassurance. “I don’t know yet what the Queen of the Icy Fays has to offer, but I suspect that she might have chosen her opponents a little too carefully. Even Lowenthal might have been able to make Zimmerman a more tempting offer than these, simply because he wouldn’t be so ambitious.”

“You might be right,” he conceded.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect from the third pitch, but I did expect it to be good as well as surprising. I was very interested to find out what she had in mind, because I was at least as anxious to start figuring her out as she had been to figure me out — and not because I wanted to write her an opera.

Forty-Six

You, Robot

The android with porcelain flesh and silver hair rose to her illusory feet and took up a position before her ostensible audience, making the most of her generous stature. I assumed that la Reine had programmed this hypothetical form with the same rule-bound limitations as the sims of her opponents, but she hadn’t left herself short of psychological advantages. Her pale blue eyes and icy lips were imperious; even her stance was the pose of a dictator who’d never had an order disobeyed.

Then she smiled, and it was as if her mood melted. Suddenly, she seemed human. I had no doubt that she could have seemed more human than any actual human if she’d wanted to do that, but she didn’t.

She was quite a showman.

“I have only one thing to offer you that no one else can,” she said to Adam Zimmerman, speaking through him to all the children of humankind. “Not that they would offer it to you if they could, because my opponents and every other potential rival that might have been put in their place are unanimous in considering it to be a fate equivalent to death, to be avoided at all costs. What I offer you is robotization.”

Davida Berenike Columella must have been a step ahead of the argument, because she didn’t look surprised, or even troubled. Alice Fleury looked more tired than anything else, but the fact that her guard was down helped to expose her astonishment and alarm a little more nakedly.

“It is probably fair to say,” la Reine des Neiges went on, “that we would not be in the predicament in which we find ourselves today if it were not for human and posthuman anxieties regarding robotization. Those anxieties have been around since the twenty-second century, although they weren’t popularized until the so-called Robot Assassins displaced the Eliminators as chief propagandists for the murder of the inconveniently old. If my old friend Mortimer Gray were here, however, he would be able to explain to you that the real motive force behind the Robot Assassins was not so much the fear of the phenomenon they were allegedly opposing as the perennial desire of the young to come into their due inheritances at an earlier date than the one on which the present incumbents were prepared to surrender them. The idea of robotization was never based on any authentic empirical discovery, nor was it ever supported by any trustworthy empirical evidence.

“It had always been observable, even when the average life expectancy of mortals was no more than forty, that older people became gradually more conservative, more fearful of change, and more respectful of tradition. The young, as was their way, always observed this phenomenon in an unkindly light. In fact, the increasing conservatism of the old was always a perfectly rational response to circumstance, not a reflection of organic processes within the brain.