The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [151]
“Has it started?” I asked Rocambole.
He knew that I meant the war. “Not necessarily,” he retorted. “What just happened is more commonplace than you might think — a normal aspect of the intercourse of systems like la Reine. A form of play.”
According to the once-celebrated Huizinga, I remembered, play could be deadly serious. According to someone else I’d heard quoted, most play was pretend fighting, whose covert functions included the testing of strength and spirit, and the determination of pecking orders. I knew only too well, though, that even in the best-regulated games, pieces sometimes get taken and removed from the field of play. I didn’t want to be taken. Even if I couldn’t, in the end, become a player, I certainly didn’t want to be taken. Nor did I want to be adrift in the kind of Fairyland where arbitrary acts of destruction could be reckoned casual sport, or a customary form of issuing warnings.
“Is it likely to happen again?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we’re inside the palace now. If someone outside makes a move, it will be easier to counter — unless, of course, it’s an all-out attack. No one’s close enough to us to do anything more than send out drones — the time delay makes immediate reaction impossible — so it’s probably safe to assume that nothing will appear as coherent imagery but trivial automata. A virus flood calculated to obliterate everything would be something else entirely, but if that happens you’re unlikely to experience it. From your viewpoint it would be the equivalent of an unexpected knockout punch.”
“That’s reassuring,” I said, drily.
We had indeed passed through a pair of French windows and their protective curtains into the interior of the ice palace. I’d known that the room within wouldn’t actually be icy cold, but I couldn’t resist a reflexive frisson as I realized how comfortable it was. The whole point about ice palaces is that the ices themselves and all their companionate crystals are contained within layers of monomolecular sheeting that are incapable of conducting heat. The temperature within their walls may vary from a few degrees Kelvin all the way up to minus two hundred Celsius, but the temperature in their rooms is maintained by a very different set of thermostats. La Reine des Neiges obviously didn’t take her fetishes to extremes; there were snowstorm effects in the walls but there was not a trace of chill in the air.
The snowstorm effects took a little getting used to, but there was a ready-made distraction in the form of a dozen rectangular mirrors distributed around the walls of the room. All but two of them were taller than me, and not one was less than three times as wide as me.
Unlike the fabric of the walls, the furniture only looked as if it were made of ice; the items I touched simulated the texture of clear plastic or crystal. The chairs were unnecessarily ornate, the table and sideboards impossibly polished. The carpet was blood red.
We passed through the double doors opposite the balcony into the corridors of the snow queen’s lair. They too were decorated almost exclusively with snowstorm effects and mirrors.
I didn’t bother to ask whether the mirrors were magical. I figured they all were.
I was disappointed when Rocambole finally let me into what looked like a fancy hotel room. It was easily the prettiest cell I’d had since waking into the thirty-third century, but it was still a cell. Given that I was in a kind of dream, I couldn’t see why I needed the illusion of a cell. I couldn’t see why I needed the illusion of a meal, either, but fairy food and fairy wine were already set out on the fairy table, complete with bowls of forbidden fruit.
“I don’t need this,” I said to Rocambole.
“She thinks you do,” he said. He knew that I knew perfectly well that my body, encased in yet another cocoon, was taking its nourishment intravenously, so he had to be talking about another kind of need.
Diplomacy required that I sit down at the table, so I did. He sat down too, but he didn’t