The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [142]
“If I knew,” Rocambole assured me, “I’d 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 she’d 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 wouldn’t go so far as to say that she likes you, but you interest her. As a friend — and I am your friend — I’d advise you to humor her. We really ought to get on. We’re not in real space, but we’re 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 couldn’t 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 wasn’t 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 we’d anticipated, thanks to Proteus,” Rocambole went on. “All deep spacers fall prey to delusions of godhood, of course — it goes with the job — but you’d think he’d have had sense enough to figure out that if he’s in disagreement with a whole multitude of his own kind he just might be the one who’s 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. It’s 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 can’t 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 she’s hiding your meat — we could both end up dead. So could she, even though she’s had centuries to distribute herself about the system very widely indeed.”
The news didn’t 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, I’m afraid.”
Lenny Garon had once assured me that even if AIs ever did become conscious as well as superintelligent, they’d never understand jokes. I’d 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 he’d never understand irony, while the ultrasmart AIs would probably be incapable of perceiving the universe in an unironic way. I’d 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 wasn’t 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.
Polaris was the northern pole star. Early human navigators had used it as a beacon, in the days before they discovered the magnetic compass. The Snow Queen in Christine’s favorite story had lived somewhere in the Arctic wastes. The name had to be a joke, feeble enough in its own right but subtler than any Lenny Garon would ever have thought worthwhile. Could that, I wondered,