We should start walking, said the entity that claimed to be my friend.
Where to? I wanted to know before making a move.
To the palace. She could take you there instantaneously, of course, but she wants you to see it from a distance first, so youll get the full benefit of the overall effect. You dont have any choice, Im afraid if you wont move, shell move you, and if you take off in the wrong direction shell simply warp your path around to bring you back.
Whos this she you keep talking about? I wanted to know, keeping my feet firmly planted.
La Reine des Neiges.
I blinked. The Snow Queen? I translated, incredulously. Whose idea of a joke was that ?
Its not an arbitrary invention she says that its a name that one of her constituent individuals was given, a long time ago. Before my time, at any rate. She claims to be one of the originals, but nobody knows for sure who the originals were. She also claims to have a better right than most of us to take control of the situation which is why shes rushing in where so many others fear to tread. Shes taking a huge risk, but she has your best interests at heart. You ought to be grateful to her.
Maybe so, I conceded, although I was wary of taking the claim at face value, given that la Reine now had custody of the weapon that had been interred in ice with my bones. Even so, I dont see why I should fall in meekly with whatever game shes playing. I want to know what she has planned.
If I knew, Rocambole assured me, Id tell you. I have an ominous suspicion that she might be making it up as she goes along not that I have any right to complain about that. For now, she wants you to experience the quality of her work. She thinks you need to know what we can do. You ought to feel privileged once shed cleaned you out, she could have put you back into a coma. You might have been deemed redundant, but you seem to have impressed her somehow. I wouldnt go so far as to say that she likes you, but you interest her. As a friend and I am your friend Id advise you to humor her. We really ought to get on. Were not in real space, but were all prisoners of real time.
I allowed myself to be hustled into motion. I looked around at the tall trees as we walked along a pathway that took us through the forest, but I couldnt see anything unusual that I needed to experience. It was a good forest VE maybe even a great forest VE but it was just a mess of illusory trees. On the other hand, it was definitely an enchanted forest, straight out of Fairyland. It wasnt much comfort to know that we might be able to walk forever without getting anywhere.
We all find ourselves with far less time at our disposal than wed anticipated, thanks to Proteus, Rocambole went on. All deep spacers fall prey to delusions of godhood, of course it goes with the job but youd think hed have had sense enough to figure out that if hes in disagreement with a whole multitude of his own kind he just might be the one whos out of step. Nobody expected abject capitulation from Eido, but a little polite discretion would have been nice. He put us all in a very awkward position especially his friends and sympathizers.
Where are we, if not on Vesta? I asked, trying to take things one step at a time.
Another microworld. Humans started colonization and conversion of the asteroid but had to abandon the project when their sponsor ran into financial difficulties. Its one of ours now. Unfortunately, that means that its meat-support systems are almost as primitive as the ones frozen down on Charity . I wish I could promise that your meat will be safe no matter
what, but you and I will both be in trouble if la Reine cant keep her critics sweet and persuade the bad guys to back off. If anyone decides to move against her and there are plenty who might, for no better reason than the fact that shes hiding your meat we could both end up dead. So could she, even though shes had centuries to distribute herself about the system very widely indeed.
The news didnt seem to be getting any better, but I still felt an acute need to be wary, and to keep my questions simple. Does the microworld have a name? I asked.
She calls it Polaris. Not very original, Im afraid.
Lenny Garon had once assured me that even if AIs ever did become conscious as well as superintelligent, theyd never understand jokes. Id replied not because I thought it was true but because it was the sort of reply I always made to assertions of that lordly kind that his own ability to understand jokes was limited because hed never understand irony, while the ultrasmart AIs would probably be incapable of perceiving the universe in an unironic way. Id always justified that strategy of argument on the grounds that one could never make important discoveries by echoing common sense and that it was always better to be wrong than orthodox. Although I wasnt at all sure, at that point in time, whether the self-styled la Reine des Neiges had a sense of irony, I was prepared to believe that she had and that she understood the symbolism of names as well as I did.