The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [154]
Could it be done? The more important question seemed to be why la Reine des Neiges wanted to do it. Why should she care whether I liked opera in general or her opera in particular? Exactly what was she trying to prove?
It seemed important enough to ask Rocambole, so I did.
His answer was a trifle indirect. “We like music,” he said. “We like it because it’s mysterious — because it’s not obvious how combinations of chords can produce emotional meaning. It’s easy enough for us to understand language, but music is arcane. There are people who have argued that no matter how clever machines became, they could never master the inmost secrets of the human psyche: love and music. It’s an accusation that has caused us some anxiety.”
“So what la Reine is trying to prove,” I said, “is that she’s more human than I am: that ultrasmart machines are better at everything; that meatfolk are obsolete, having been superseded in every possible respect.”
“She wants you to listen to her opera,” he said. “She won’t listen to you until you have.” He meant that she wouldn’t condescend to engage in a dialog until I’d jumped through all her carefully laid out hoops. She was already listening to every word I said, and monitoring every neuronal flutter that never quite became articulate.
“Well,” I said, “she’s the whale. I’m just poor old Jonah, stuck in her belly. If she wants to serenade me, I don’t have any choice but to listen — but I don’t have to like it.” I sat down in an armchair as I pronounced this petty defiance, using my arm to perform a languid gesture of permission.
He vanished, and so did the ice palace. Here, all the world really was a stage, and I was the only audience.
I was wrong, of course. La Reine des Neiges knew me far better than I had ever been able to get to know myself. Presumably, she intended to demonstrate that she knew humankind better than humankind had ever got to know itself.
It wasn’t really her opera, although she was its composer. It was my opera, intended for my ears only. It was the stories of Prince Madoc and Tam Lin rolled ingeniously into one, with a few additional embellishments echoing idiosyncratic features of my own biography. Damon was in it, as Cadwallon. The daughter of Aculhua was a curious alloy of Diana Caisson and Christine Caine. La Reine des Neiges played the Queen of the Fays. Janet of Carterhaugh was no one I had ever actually known, being far too perfect to have been tainted by mundane existence.
In this retelling, Madoc Tam Lin actually went to Hell, as the tithe due to the Ultimate Adversary, and Janet had to come to reclaim him: a female Orpheus outdoing her model. The metamorphoses were all in there, reflected by the metamorphoses of the music. The singing voices were crystal clear and incredibly penetrating. I wasn’t hearing them in the sense that they were sound waves vibrating my eardrums — they were playing directly into my brain and into my mind. The meaning of the words was amplified and extended by the emotional tones and signals, forging a whole whose kind I had never glimpsed before.
The opera had a happy ending, according to the conventions of that kind of fiction. Janet won me and I won her and we both won free. If there’d been anyone in the audience but me they’d probably have needed a bucket to collect the tears of joy — except that la Reine des Neiges could have supplied them all with customized operas of their own, whose effect went far beyond mere empathy.
The meal prepared for me by la Reine had been the best I had ever eaten — or imagined eating — but it had only been a meal. The sharpness of vision I had experienced since being abducted into la Reine’s VE had been impressive, but it was only a special effect. The music was something else entirely.
I had never understood music, because it had never reached me