The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [202]
She died knowing that her death was an act of rebellion and an act of love: that it served a purpose, not in the lofty sense of making history, but in the modest sense of helping to preserve someone she valued for one more hour, or one more day, or one more lifetime. It was, of course, Mortimer Gray — whose life she had already saved once, a long time ago — who was in the forefront of her mind, but he was not alone. Even I was in there somewhere.
I watched my hands vanish. I felt my eyes follow them. As to what happened to the last vestige of my being that was capable of feeling, I can only speculate. Such is death. Such is the Afterlife.
I survived, of course. How else could I be telling you the story, offering you its explanation, pointing out its moral? My ghost was fully backed up in its native meatware, still capable of discreet withdrawal. But I ended nevertheless, only to begin again.
I am one of those universes that once collapsed upon itself, only to expand in a new primal explosion.
Am I the same man now as I was then, given that I know his history as well as my own, if only as a memory of a memory? Am I the same man as I was when Davida Berenike Columella brought me out of the sleep of centuries, or when Damon Hart put me into it? Yes, and yes — but also no, and no.
Whatever of me was destroyed when the substance of la Reine des Neiges was sublimated was an illusion, a figment of the technological imagination, but there remains a sense in which it was more me than I now am, or ever had been before.
I had decided at one time that I did not like la Reine des Neiges and would never approve of her, but I had repented of that before I shared her death. When she had shown me the opera of my life she had used me as her audience, but she had also allowed me to be my own audience in a way that I had never imagined possible. I had told the AMIs, and any other listeners who might have access to her broadcast, that the AMIs needed us because they needed an audience; I knew that the same argument proved that our need for them was far more desperate. Without the AMIs, we would never be able to know ourselves.
By the time she died, I did approve of la Reine des Neiges. When you have shared the death of another mind, you cannot help but love them a little, whether they be god or man or snowmobile — so, at least, I now believe — but what I felt for la Reine was no mere frisson of empathy. I had come to think her admirable, more so than any human I ever knew.
I do not know how much of her death la Reine managed to record or broadcast, but I am sure that she ran into the limitations of paradoxicality far too soon to make any real impact on any of her distant listeners.
What I experienced was mine alone, once she herself was gone.
Fifty-Two
Life after Death
A sledgehammer fell out of the night-dark sky and smashed into my ribs. It was not the first time it had happened, nor was it to be the last. A gale blew from beyond the borders of the world, forcing an entry into my reluctant lungs. A trumpet blasted in my ears, the liquid notes expanding and reverberating for an improbably long time before coalescing into mere words.
I think, although I cannot be absolutely sure, that the words were: “Breathe, you bastard! Breathe!”
The gale turned tempestuous as something in me, operating quite independently of my conscious will, responded to the command. It was a very painful experience but I was not ungrateful for the simple, ordinary, commonplace pain. It was presumably that lack of ingratitude that allowed me to consent to be thumped again, and yet again.
I was not conscious