Then, when the thirteenth corpse had slumped to the floor, leaking blood in obscene profusion, and the tape reached its end, I said: Now I want you to wake her up and run it again.
It was Rocamboles voice that answered. For the first time, he seemed surprised by my reaction. What? he asked. Why?
I dont 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. Theres no need to put her through anything more. We know what we need to know or as much of it as we could get.
Its not your supposed needs Im thinking about, I told him. Its hers. I want you to run it again but this time, I want to go with her. This time, Ill supply the thought track.
Thats not possible, Rocambole told me.
Of course its possible, I retorted. It wont be a real thought track any more than the voice-over in Bad Karma was a real train of thought, but itll work just as well in dramatic terms. It wont be grand opera, but itll do. She may think shes crazy when she starts hearing voices, but it wont 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 Karma were 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 theres a risk. Sometimes, knowing an awful truth is worse than not knowing, and sometimes its 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 Im 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 isnt you, Christine, I said, as her life began to turn into a nightmare. Someone else is doing this. Its their motive, their plan, their purpose. Theyve infected your brain with poisonous IT, and theyve taken over your body. Its going to be bad, Christine. Its 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 theyve done. Itll 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.
Christines 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 Christines parents had still been together, shed have had to carry out their murders in the course of a single day or night, but the fact that they werent meant that she had to do a lot of traveling. Shed never have got through the entire company without being caught if they hadnt 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.
Its not you, Christine, I said, knowing that it was a mantra Id have to repeat a great many more times. Its the times in which we live. Theyre bad times, dangerous times, paranoid times. The news tapes claim that the Crash is over; that were in the business of making and shaping a new Utopia; that weve learned from all our past mistakes and that well never endanger the species or the ecosphere again; but its 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; theyre 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 thats not what they want. They want selective weapons, weapons of control . They dont want to use them if they dont have to, but theyll only refrain while they have control by our consent.