The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [146]
I wondered if I’d live long enough to find out which way the AMIs decided to go, and whether I’d be capable of caring if the decision went against us. Either way, I had to try to be grateful for the fact that I’d seen the kind of reality that the human idea of reality was only trying, unsuccessfully, to be. I’d broken through the veil of fleshly imperfection. Madoc Tamlin had made it to the real Fairyland, at last.
Other people, I realized, had glimpsed this kind of possibility. Other people, long before my own time, had had enough imagination to realize the limitations of their senses and their minds. They hadn’t been able to see a Snow Queen’s palace the way I was seeing it now, but they’d been able to imagine, if only vaguely, seeing with more conviction than they could actually see and knowing with more conviction than they could actually know. They’d had imagination enough to be dissatisfied with actuality, and sense enough to yearn for Heaven, or for Faerie. Whichever of the hundreds of my predecessors had been the first had also been the last, completing a mission as well as beginning one.
“How do we get up there?” I asked.
“We’ll ride up on the backs of giant moths,” he told me. I wasn’t surprised — not any longer. I thought I had begun to understand why la Reine des Neiges wanted me to experience what she could do before she condescended to engage me in a dialog.
I still had a lot to learn about the possibilities now open to the children of humankind.
We had slowed in our paces while I contemplated the enormity of what lay before me, but now I lengthened my stride. “I dare say night won’t fall until we get there,” I said, “but I don’t want to keep the moon and the stars waiting any longer than necessary.”
“That’s good,” he said, lengthening his own stride to keep pace with me. “You’re taking to this exceptionally well. If you’re trying to impress me, you’re succeeding.”
“I used to be in the business,” I murmured, effortlessly resistant to the flattery.
“Even so…,” he countered. He thought I meant the entertainment business. Actually, I meant streetfighting — with no holds barred. The first possessors of IT had been reckless, testing its protective provisions by living dangerously. It had been a foolish thing to do, but we had been proud to be fools. Emortals of Mortimer Gray’s generation had inherited more careful attitudes, save for a bizarre few who had eliminated themselves from consideration soon enough. In my own quaintly barbaric way, I felt that I was better prepared for this kind of challenging situation than any of my erstwhile companions.
“Will I be able to speak to Christine when I get there?” I asked, suddenly mindful of the fact that she might be less well prepared than the others, even if she recognized the palace of la Reine des Neiges — especially if she recognized the palace. I wanted to be there to explain it all to her, because I wanted to be the one to tell her that she was innocent, and that she didn’t need to hate and fear herself any longer.
“Not immediately,” Rocambole told me. “If there’s time. We hope there will be.”
“Why not immediately?” I wanted to know. “She’s no use to you. She’s clean. Redundant.”
“Not entirely,” my so-called friend replied. “The technics aren’t there any longer — but the memories are. We can reproduce the effect by the same means that we recovered your memory of what had been done to you.”
It took me a long couple of minutes to figure out exactly what he was saying. They hadn’t been able to recover the secret weapon that had been tested on Christine because it had been flushed from her system way back in the 2160s, but they did have its ghost: a record of its effects, engraved in the meat that was Christine’s memory, Christine’s identity. They wanted to study it, the only way they could. Only in VE, of course — but in a VE more real to the human mind than reality itself.
“You can’t do that,” I said. I remembered only too clearly what it had been like reliving my own experience while my buried memories were excavated.