The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [201]
I had researched the Afterlife, but the notion had not really impacted on my imagination until I shared the demolition and dissolution of Faerie. It was not until I watched a universe decay that I knew the value of mere existence, the heroism of dust.
Because la Reine’s realm had been more insistent in its claim upon the senses and the imagination than the reality I had previously known, my awareness of its devastation was extremely sharp. Although it happened very rapidly, I felt that I saw every star evaporate into the ultimate void, every tree fold itself away into absolute vacuity, every translucent block of every turret and every subtle feature of every gargoyle diffuse into a chaos that was less than space, worse than nothing.
I felt my own decease too, as the same implacable destructive forces worked their way through my apparent body — but there, at least, I was able to fight back with ingenious confabulation. I could not stop the process, but I could reimagine it from the safety of the cocoon in which my meatware was enclosed.
I felt as if my every blood vessel were swelling and bursting, as if every tissue in every organ had acquired the texture of dead leaves and cobwebs, as if every neuron were exploding in a spasm of lightning — but I knew that the body that was dissolving in the virus attack was only an artifact, and that I had another place to be.
It would be misleading to describe the experience as painful, but it was both more and less than pain. In life we never have the opportunity to experience death, although it seems probable that mortals have more than enough of dying, but there are states of being which permit more than life and in some of those states, death itself is perceptible.
It was a privilege. Every experience is a privilege.
It was not merely the physical sensation of my alter ego’s destruction that I felt. I was capable of responsive emotion too. I felt the sadness of my end, the grief of my loss, the misery of my nonexistence — but those kinds of feelings are always larger than we are. That kind of emotion is, after all, a kind of relationship; it requires an object. However sensitive we are to our own plights, we are equally sensitive to the plights of others.
La Reine had taught me music. She had not taught me the other thing that machines were never supposed to master, but she probably helped me bring the latent potential a little closer to the surface of my being. It would be ridiculous to say that I loved la Reine des Neiges, just as it would have been ridiculous to say that my namesake loved his Queen of the Fays, but I could feel for her, and I did.
I mourned her passing.
I was horrified by my own illusory extinction, and terrified by my own illusory passing, but I was also horrified by the unillusory extinction of the universe and I had no choice but to share the terror of the unillusory passing of its creator and animating intelligence. What I felt, in that sense, filled the world.
Everything turned to nothing except my capacity for feeling, which could regress no further than tears and tragedy.
I regretted then that all the reasons I had contrived to voice when la Reine invited me to confront the ultimate question had been drily argumentative. I wondered whether I might have done better had I been capable of being a little more, or a little less, than clever.
Perhaps it was not entirely my regret, and perhaps the tears reflecting the tragedy were not all mine. The Madoc Tamlin which existed at that particular moment, in that particular universe, was itself an artifact of the imagination of la Reine des Neiges. I was part of her, and she was all of me, and more. I was feeling what she was feeling.
It hurt.
I could have wished