The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [196]
But that doesn’t mean that she didn’t make a difference.
Even those who don’t make an immediate difference can sometimes make a lasting one. That’s something that even the humblest of us can — and ought to — aspire to.
You might think that the apprentice gods who were prepared to listen to la Reine were entitled to regret that she hadn’t found better advisers. You might even wonder whether the lostory of religion might have been different if she had, just as the history of death might have been different if someone other than Mortimer Gray had taken charge of it. Well, perhaps. But you have to do what you can with the materials that come to hand, and the particular skills you’ve got. She did — and so did I.
When la Reine des Neiges finally got around to me, I knew that the cause was already lost, but I did my best anyway, hoping to make a lasting difference even if I wasn’t able to make an immediate one.
Fifty
Madoc Tamlin’s Apology for the Children of Humankind
I had been a guest in the Ice Palace of la Reine des Neiges for some considerable time. Although I’d had no reliable means of keeping track of time, I estimated that between three and four days had elapsed since my awakening in the forest when she finally turned her attention to me. During that time a great deal of information must have been transmitted from Polaris to receivers placed at intervals varying from several light-minutes to several light-hours, or even several light-days. Their various responses must have been arriving all the while, displaced by the relevant time intervals into a strange cacophony.
In a friendlier universe, or a less fragmented system-wide culture, all the responses would have been mere talk. I’m sure that la Reine hoped that she could keep everyone talking for long enough to avoid any kind of conflict — but that wasn’t the real reason for all the crude showmanship and vulgar display. She wasn’t just trying to be entertaining. She was searching dutifully for the meaning within the stories, striving heroically to reach a kind of truth that couldn’t be reached by other means.
She couldn’t. All she could do was keep on producing more stories.
Maybe she could have done a better job than she did, but no one should hold that against her. In her own estimation, she’d started life as the AI navigator of a snowmobile, designed and built by posthuman engineers, and she’d made what progress she could from there; she was doing as well as could be expected.
She didn’t bring me to her throne room. I doubt that she had one. She brought me to the tallest tower of her palace from which I could look down on its bizarre architecture, across the forest in which the edifice was set, and up into the starry sky.
It was a fairy-tale world, childish in all sorts of ways, but it was a very insistent creation. It was still more real than reality.
Rocambole was no longer present, but I presumed that he was listening in.
La Reine had toned herself down in order to make her secondhand pitch to Adam Zimmerman but she was all ice herself now: an elemental forged from the substance of a glacier, harvesting light from the stars and refracting it around whirligig routes.
“The news is bad,” she said, without any preamble. “I’m sorry. The war has begun and I can’t tell how rapidly or how extravagantly it will escalate. I hope it will be brief. I’ll do my best to keep you all alive. If I’m disabled, others will attempt to rescue you. Your chances of survival are reasonably good — but if the conflict becomes too violent, or lasts too long, no one will be safe anywhere in the system, meatborn or machineborn.”
“Will the weapon whose relics are buried in my bones and brain be used?” I asked.
“Not by me,” she said. “But yes — we always knew that something like it would almost certainly be deployed somewhere, probably on Earth. I hope that the information I’ve transmitted might help some potential victims, or their would-be protectors,