Sport, I hope, or foolishness, was his reply. Perhaps a warning. Better any of those alternatives than an assassination attempt.
It took a second or two to realize that he was talking about an attempt to assassinate me .
Surely they couldnt have killed me, I said. Im just an image in a VE. No matter how real this seems, its all illusion.
Its not as simple as that, he told me. The reason everything seems so real is that the input into your conscious mind is more direct and powerful than the input of your senses. Your body remains vulnerable to psychosomatic effects, and those effects can be very powerful even murderously powerful. If you have sufficient strength of mind you can probably survive anything that happens to you here but youre a novice, and there are no guarantees. If la Reine could seal Polaris off, we wouldnt be vulnerable, but she cant do that without sacrificing her communication links to the other parts of her body. You can be killed here. So canI. So, for that matter, can la Reine. If that was a warning, its one that requires being taken seriously.
Suddenly, setting aside my instinctive fear of heights seemed a trifle more reckless than it had at the time, even though it had probably been the right thing to do. Had I begun to fall, I might not have been able to keep it at bay. The renewal of my concern for my own safety and Christines was, however, shunted aside soon enough when I realized the full import of his earlier answer.
Sport? I thought. Or foolishness? What kind of impish individuals are we dealing with? I felt a very convincing visceral twist.
Has it started? I asked Rocambole.
He knew that I meant the war. Not necessarily, he retorted. What just happened is more commonplace than you might think a normal aspect of the intercourse of systems like la Reine. A form of play.
According to the once-celebrated Huizinga, I remembered, play could be deadly serious. According to someone else Id heard quoted, most play was pretend fighting, whose covert functions included the testing of strength and spirit, and the determination of pecking orders. I knew only too well, though, that even in the best-regulated games, pieces sometimes get taken and removed from the field of play. I didnt want to be taken. Even if I couldnt, in the end, become a player, I certainly didnt want to be taken . Nor did I want to be adrift in the kind of Fairyland where arbitrary acts of destruction could be reckoned casual sport, or a customary form of issuing warnings.
Is it likely to happen again? I asked.
I dont know, he admitted. But were inside the palace now. If someone outside makes a move, it will be easier to counter unless, of course, its an all-out attack. No ones close enough to us to do anything more than send out drones the time delay makes immediate reaction impossible so its probably safe to assume that nothing will appear as coherent imagery but trivial automata. A virus flood calculated to obliterate everything would be something else entirely, but if that happens youre unlikely to experience it. From your viewpoint it would be the equivalent of an unexpected knockout punch.
Thats reassuring, I said, drily.
We had indeed passed through a pair of French windows and their protective curtains into the interior of the ice palace. Id known that the room within wouldnt actually be icy cold, but I couldnt resist a reflexive frisson as I realized how comfortable it was. The whole point about ice palaces is that the ices themselves and all their companionate crystals are contained within layers of monomolecular sheeting that are incapable of conducting heat. The temperature within their walls may vary from a few degrees Kelvin all the way up to minus two hundred Celsius, but the temperature in their rooms is maintained by a very different set of thermostats. La Reine des Neiges obviously didnt take her fetishes to extremes; there were snowstorm effects in the walls but there was not a trace of chill in the air.
The snowstorm effects took a little getting used to, but there was a ready-made distraction in the form of a dozen rectangular mirrors distributed around the walls of the room. All but two of them were taller than me, and not one was less than three times as wide as me.
Unlike the fabric of the walls, the furniture only looked as if it were made of ice; the items I touched simulated the texture of clear plastic or crystal. The chairs were unnecessarily
ornate, the table and sideboards impossibly polished. The carpet was blood red.
We passed through the double doors opposite the balcony into the corridors of the snow queens lair. They too were decorated almost exclusively with snowstorm effects and mirrors.
I didnt bother to ask whether the mirrors were magical. I figured they all were.
I was disappointed when Rocambole finally let me into what looked like a fancy hotel room. It was easily the prettiest cell Id had since waking into the thirty-third century, but it was still a cell. Given that I was in a kind of dream, I couldnt see why I needed the illusion of a cell. I couldnt see why I needed the illusion of a meal, either, but fairy food and fairy wine were already set out on the fairy table, complete with bowls of forbidden fruit.