I hadnt expected to feel quite so heavy when I got there, given that my brand new IT and a few sessions in the Titaness s centrifuge had tuned up my muscles, but it seemed a small price to pay for getting my feet back on the ground.
We landed in Antarctica, on the ice fields outside Amundsen. The cloud cover obscured the sun and sky, but the ice palaces clustered on the horizon couldnt prevent me from feeling that Id returned to my roots and reconnected myself with my history.
My heros welcome was a trifle muted, but I didnt mind that. The only individuals who really appreciated the true extent of my heroism were AMIs, who hadnt yet had time to overcome their habits of discretion. Mortimer Gray would doubtless have fared far better, not just because we might have died on Charity if it hadnt been for his relationship with la Reine des Neiges, but because hed been a long-time resident of the Continent Without Nations. He really would have been coming home, in the eyes of his old neighbors but he wouldnt have been extrovert enough to take full advantage of his latest wave of celebrity. I filled in for him as best I could.
I didnt see much of Lowenthal and Handsel in the days following the landing, and Alice Fleury had all kinds of diplomatic duties to fulfill, but those were acquaintances I kept up, in VE if not in the flesh. It was easy enough, in the short term, to stick with Adam Zimmerman. The new messiah wasnt in any hurry to be rid of us, now that he knew that Christine wasnt a mass murderer.
Christine and I eventually returned with Adam to the Americas, traveling all the way up from Tierra del Fuego to the isthmus of Panama in easy stages, accelerating our schedule as we came into the north. We might
have attracted more attention on our own account if we hadnt been traveling with him, but playing second fiddle had its compensations as well as fueling a certain envious resentment. All in all, the pluses outweighed the minuses.
Adam was right about the alienating effects of the multiple decivilization of New York, but he was right about Manhattan too. The islands original dimensions were still just about recognizable within the hectic patchwork of the new continental shelf. When Christine and I headed west, though, Adam chose to go his own way.
Ill keep in touch, he promised.
I dont think well have any difficulty keeping track of you, I assured him. Youre the kind of wonder thatll run for years and years. Let us know when youre finally ready to make the decision that the whole systems waiting for, so that we can all compare notes.
Little did I know
Adam hadnt given us the least inkling of his long-term plans, if hed made any at that point. I doubt that he had. I think he intended to take a good long look at the world, and at himself, before he decided what his next step was going to be.
That was the last of my temporary farewells. Christine and I had decided to stick together for a while.
I waited, but in vain, for the call to come that would summon me to the forefront of the ongoing political and economic negotiations between the posthuman factions and the AMIs. I maintained the hope for as long as I could that my conscription had merely been delayed, but in the end I accepted the sad truth.
In spite of all my heroic efforts during the last few minutes of la Reines stint as Scheherazade I was not to receive my due. Nobody wanted me for an ambassador, nor even for an expert audience. It was a mistake, I think. I could have been useful to all sides.
Had la Reine survived, it would have been a different story, but the time came when I had to stop hoping for that particular miracle. She had known my true worth, at the end, but she had been the only one who did. I might now be the only one who understands her true worth, even in a world which contains Mortimer Gray, but I hope that I am wrong. She deserves to be accurately remembered, especially by her own kind.
In the end, Christine and I decided to take the jobs that Mortimer Gray had offered us, at least for the time being. Given that we were historical curiosities in any case, and that everyone wanted to hear our story, we figured that we might as well get as much spendable credit as possible for answering questions. It turned out to be harder than we had expected; newscasters only want to know whats newsworthy, but historians want to know everything , and then some. Inevitably, we both set out to write our own accounts of everything wed been through.
It really was inevitable that wed have to write our accounts, because text retains certain qualities that even the very best VE scripts will never be able to emulate. In a VE you use your eyes as eyes and your ears as ears; it really is virtual experience but when you read you switch off your other senses and turn your eyes into code readers, retreating into a world of pure thought and imagination. It was that world of abstraction that had shaped and organized our ancestors inner lives during the early phases of the technological revolution; it was there that they learned to be the complex kind of being we now call human. It is there that true humanity still resides, even after all this time. It is there that histories and lostories, autobiographies and fantasies, moral fables and contes philosophiques , comedies and cautionary tales all belong and my story is all of those things, although it is first and foremost a cautionary taleand a comedy. Although I am not an AMI, and probably never will be, I have no intention of living my life, or reviewing my life, in an unironic way.