Why not immediately? I wanted to know. Shes no use to you. Shes clean. Redundant.
Not entirely, my so-called friend replied. The technics arent there any longer but the memories are. We can reproduce the effect by the same means that we recovered your memory of what had been done to you.
It took me a long couple of minutes to figure out exactly what he was saying. They hadnt been able to recover the secret weapon that had been tested on Christine because it had been flushed from her system way back in the 2160s, but they did have its ghost: a record of its effects, engraved in the meat that was Christines memory, Christines identity. They wanted to study it, the only way they could. Only in VE, of course but in a VE more real to the human mind than reality itself.
You cant do that, I said. I remembered only too clearly what it had been like reliving my own experience while my buried memories were excavated.
Its not my decision, he told me, ignoring the more obvious response.
You cant do it, I said, ignoring his objection and rushing headlong into the first seriously heroic gesture of my short but long-interrupted life. Once was too much, but twice is obscene. You mustnt.
She thinks otherwise, Rocambole said, in a soft voice that sounded genuinely sympathetic. We didnt plan it this way. This is just the way things worked out. Christine wont sustain any permanent damage. Well ensure that the whole experience is repressed just one more lost nightmare. She has nightmares anyway. La Reines acting on her own, beyond anyones
control, but she does have a case. Were trying to avoid all the possible wars, Madoc. We need to know as much as we can about the weapons the Earthbound meatfolk and the Earthbound AMIs have in their armory. Were taking Handsel apart too, and Horne, but well put them right when were done. Well put everything right.
You cant, I said. You might be able to cover it up, but you cant put it right.
Time is pressing, he said. I wont say theres no alternative, because there obviously is, but la Reines in charge here Ive only been let in to serve as your friend and adviser. My advice, as a friend, is that you have to go along with it anyway, so you might as well try to make the best of it. Learn what you can. If we manage to avoid the war, it will be useful knowledge. Shell do everything she can to protect you.
I knew that I couldnt trust him. I figured that if the cards fell in our favor, we captive meatfolk might be set free but if the decision went against us, wed simply be discarded. The AMIs wouldnt be prepared to take the risk of letting us go, even if they were confident that they could repress any inconvenient memories we might have collected. Our reappearance would attract too much attention, and provide a puzzle that would generate too much speculation. Rocambole was right about one thing, though. I had to go along with it anyway. I was a prisoner in the Château dIf, and my chances of ever getting to play the Count of Monte Cristo were slim.
You, who are reading my story, know that I did come through it, with a set of memories that I believe to be as accurate as memories usually are although you are very welcome to doubt them if you wish but while I was in the Snow Queens realm I only knew how unlikely that eventuality was.
Out in meatspace, wars were still brewing. The solar system was a cauldron coming slowly toward boiling point. I had no idea what moves were being prepared and made by the various contending parties.
Like Tam Lin I was stuck in Fairyland while history moved on, inexorably. Like Tam Lin, I had no guarantee that Id ever get back. Like Tam Lin, I could easily end up as a tithe paid to Hell.
I could only wonder whether it would actually do me any good to confront the intelligence that had constructed this VE, and engage it in an argument, however well informed. Probably not, I decided. But that didnt lessen my determination to do it.
I had already begun to hope that la Reine des Neiges was an authentic superpower in the lookingglass world: that she was the ultrasmartest of all the self-aware AIs. There might be a lot I could learn from a friend like Rocambole, but I wasnt stupid enough to believe that we were adrift in a democracy, or even a Hardinist conspiracy. Somewhere in the AI pack there had to be a top dog, and I wanted that top dog to be the one who had custody of my currently useless meat.
I had always wanted to have the chance to stand face-to-face with one of the big players in the game of human history. I still wanted that, even though I knew that in the present situation wed both be wearing inscrutable masks. Now, I made the further decision that before I died, or set out to live forever, I wanted to be able to spit in the eye of something that could really see into the depths of space, time, and possibility.
Thirty-Eight
Of Mirrors and Fragments
By the time Christine Caine first saw the VE-tape version of The Snow Queen the story was several stages removed from its origin in the works of Hans Christian Andersen. Perhaps its so-called origin wasnt really its origin, in that all the stories of a sophisticated culture have to be made up of fragments of preexisting stories, which are themselves new combinations of ancient elements, whose foundation stones are lost in the mists of oral culture and mythology but authenticity isnt the point, as anyone who has read my story attentively will readily understand.