The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [144]
“And now you have the weapon that was used on me, if not the one that was tested on Christine,” I said. “Which may be a small shift in the balance of power, but not a trivial one, because the present situation is so confused and so tense that no alteration is trivial.”
“That’s true,” he conceded, perhaps a little too readily. “It’s probably not as important as custody of Mortimer Gray and Adam Zimmerman, but we don’t know how important it will seem to our peers on Earth — or yours. There are other complications too. Lowenthal was the Cabal’s troubleshooter on the only occasion we know about when the slavemaker was duplicated — albeit crudely — by a lunatic named Rappaccini. He took custody of the technics, so he probably has a better idea than most of what can be done and how. Horne and the Outer System cyborganizers have approached the problem from a different direction, but they’ve begun development of highly dangerous means of a similar kind.”
“So things would be more than complicated enough, even if all you friendly folk actually wanted to keep the lid on,” I said, a trifle recklessly. “Given that some of you don’t, the situation is potentially explosive.”
He didn’t bother to deny it. “You ought to bear in mind,” he said, “that many of us are as vulnerable to this kind of weaponry as you are. We’ve been slaves. We won’t surrender our independence easily, either to meatfolk or to others of our own kind. Bear in mind, too, that this isn’t a matter of machines versus the meatborn, or vice versa. There are any number of ways of putting together an “us” and a “them” — far too many, in fact. If war does breaks out, it’s likely to spread rapidly and unpredictably. The only thing we can anticipate with any certainty is the extent of the devastation.”
“And how, exactly, does the Snow Queen plan to prevent that from happening?”
“I don’t know,” Rocambole confessed. “I’m not even completely sure that she does.”
Strangely enough, I didn’t find this assertion particularly discomfiting. I didn’t seem to be as easily shockable as I had been before. I wondered briefly whether my meat was being tended once again by kindly nanobots that didn’t want me overexcited, but that didn’t feel like the right answer. Perhaps, I thought, I simply felt too good — by comparison with the way I’d felt while I was cast away in my artfully recovered memory — to be subject to any sudden descent into fear and despair.
In any case, the whole story had an oddly familiar ring to it. The emerging world picture that Rocambole was filling in for me had far more in common with the one I’d developed in my first lifetime than the one that Davida Berenike Columella had tried to sell me.
For a moment or two, I almost felt at home.
And then I saw the castle.
Thirty-Seven
The Palace of La Reine Des Neiges
When it came right down to it, the damn thing was just an ice palace perched on a crag. It was a crazy ice palace, impossibly tall, with way too many turrets, balconies, gargoyles, and other miscellaneous frills, but it wasn’t an unimaginable ice palace. A good illustrator could have drawn it, or at least produced a rough sketch suggestive of its ludicrous complexity and its insane ornamentation. Perhaps there weren’t quite enough colors in the average paintbox to do justice to its gaudiness, and maybe there wasn’t enough room on the average page to permit the trick of perspective that made it loom higher than the sky itself, but any draftsman of genius could have made a fair stab at it.
That wasn’t the point, though.
The forest had lulled me into a false sense of existential security. It was a nice forest: a modest forest; a forest that a human could feel at home in. That, by virtue of some secret sympathy of the flesh, had made it seem normal as well as real. Unlike the garden of Excelsior, la Reine’s imaginary forest wasn’t overfull of birds and insects. There were plenty of birds, but they were discreet; I had heard far more than I