The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [156]
Forty-One
Karma
I was no longer inside the ice palace. I seemed to be back in the forest, but I knew that I was nowhere at all, locked into an automatic holding pattern. Rocambole materialized as soon as I came to my feet.
“I want to know what happened to Christine,” I told him, flatly.
“It’s over,” he said. “We’re operating in real time, remember. Your erstwhile companions have been engaged in their own experiences since the beginning — except for Gray, who’s being held back for the climax of the show. Some of them haven’t reached the critical points yet, because some needed more preparation than others, but if you want to watch you’ll find it far more interesting eavesdropping on Lowenthal or Horne. Christine Caine’s fast asleep.”
“I want to see the tape,” I said. “I want to know what you put her through.”
“There’s no way to give you access to our analysis,” he said, stubbornly. “You’re limited to the produce of your five senses. You can see what she saw, but no more. It’s not worth the bother.”
“If you want me to act as a mouthpiece for the argument you’ve been guiding me towards, I want to make my own observations and my own preparations,” I told him, with equal stubbornness. “I want to see what Christine saw while you were figuring out how her puppet strings worked.”
Rocambole shrugged his shoulders, to signify that it wasn’t his decision — but la Reine des Neiges seemingly had reason enough to want to keep me on side, so I was transported in the blink of an eye to a viewpoint inside Christine Caine’s head, from which I watched her commit all thirteen of her murders.
Seen as exercises in VE violence, Christine Caine’s killings were almost painfully prosaic. Dramatic murders are usually represented as helpless explosions of rage, or methodical extrapolations of sadism, or tragic unwindings of inexorable processes of cause and effect. Dramatic murderers sometimes strike from behind or above, invisible to their victims, but there is always a relevant relationship between the killer and the slain, which somehow encapsulates the crime. Dramatic murders are meaningful, in both intellectual and emotional terms. But Christine was a puppet. She was a conscious puppet, although her consciousness did not stretch quite as far as the consciousness that she was a puppet, but she was a weapon rather than a killer.
Christine struck her victims down with pathetic ease, while each and every one of them was under a hood, their minds far away in virtual space. She struck them with knives — not clinically, but with careless crudity, concerned only to get the job done. Ten of them were her foster parents, but she had no relevant relationship with them at all: there was nothing to make sense of the fact that she was killing them.
That was why she had had to make up stories, and that was why she had had to keep on making up stories, in the hope that one might eventually slot into place like a key in a lock, and tell her why she was the way she was.
When I had asked to look into Christine’s VE, I assumed that it would be just like watching Bad Karma without the improvised “thought track.” I assumed that it would be little more and nothing less than a bad movie generated by inarticulate equipment. I knew that I wouldn’t be able to remember any of the monolog that had been grafted on to the sequence of bloody events way back in 2195 — but I thought that it wouldn’t matter much, because I had internalized the gist of it, and the underlying pattern of implication.
I was half-right. It was like watching a mute version of Bad Karma, but the absence of the soundtrack made it oddly claustrophobic and strangely intense. It was a bad movie, generated by inarticulate equipment, but my vague memories of the tale that Bad Karma’s director had incorporated shriveled under the burden