.XXI.

Nimue’s Cave, The Mountains of Light

He woke up.

He lay there for a moment, trying to understand why that surprised him, but he couldn’t. It was as if there was something he couldn’t quite remember, which was a most unusual experience. He pursed his lips, frowning in thought as he hung a moment longer on the lip of wakefulness, yet nothing would come to him, and he shrugged the question away and opened his eyes. He looked up at a familiar ceiling, hearing the distant sound of waves and the whistles of the palace’s song wyverns through the open window, and a sense of delicious well-being banished his momentary sense of confusion. It was early morning, past dawn but still cool, the sun still low on the eastern horizon. That wasn’t going to last, since the city of Eraystor sat almost directly upon the equator, but this was where he’d grown up. He knew the pulse and pattern of the days, which was why morning had been his favorite time of day since childhood. The world was quiet, still in the process of waking up, and the morning air was like a clear, cool wine or a lover’s caress. He treasured that sensual, caressing freshness almost as much as he did the star-strewn clarity of the breezy night, and he stretched luxuriously before he sat up. He inhaled deeply, filling his lungs to the aching point before he exhaled once more, and climbed out of bed.

He pulled on a robe without summoning any of the servants and opened the glass doors to his private balcony. He stepped out into the morning breeze, feeling it pluck at his hair, and smiled as he saw the tray of melon balls, strawberries, and grapes beside the carafe filled with his favorite blend of apple and grape juice. He stood for several moments, leaning on the rail, looking out over the palace grounds and, beyond them, to the roofs and steeples of Eraystor. He could hear the city beginning to rouse—the sound of voices, the rattle of wagon wheels, the cadence of a Guard sergeant marching his detail off to relieve the night watch. He listened to it, absorbing it, feeling the world coming awake, before he turned to the table and poured himself a glass of juice.

He drank slowly, savoring the taste, then dropped into the rattan chair and reached for the first melon ball. He popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly, and his brow furrowed as he tried again to pin down whatever it was that was, not disturbing, yet somehow … wrong. There was something he should be recalling. Something which would have explained why this restful, peaceful morning seemed … out of kilter somehow.

He swallowed the mouthful of melon and smiled as he recalled the first time he’d heard Merlin use that phrase—“out of kilter”—and asked what it meant. It was a very useful one, actually. A lot of the odd turns of phrase Merlin used with those who knew his secret were that way, and quite a few had started leaking out into the language. It was a gradual process, filtering down from the circle of Cayleb and Sharleyan’s most trusted subordinates and advisors, but it also appeared to be inevitable. That was the way things usually worked, he’d observed. In fact, he reflected, reaching for another melon ball, he’d been discussing that very point only day before yesterday with Rayjhis Yowance. The First Councilor had said—

His eyes flared suddenly wide. No, that couldn’t be right … could it? Rayjhis had said … but Rayjhis was dead. He’d been … been killed. In … in an explosion? But … but if that was true, then what—?

The melon ball crushed in his hand, juice running over his fingers, and he looked down at it, amazed to find his hand trembling. He inhaled deeply, not luxuriously this time, but in something too much like panic, trying to marshal the thoughts crashing around inside his brain. But his mind’s habitual focus failed him. He couldn’t make the jumble of thoughts and impressions make sense, couldn’t hammer them into obedience while he—

“Hello, Nahrmahn,” a voice said quietly, and he whirled in his chair.

He’d never before seen the tall, black-haired, extraordinarily attractive young woman in the bizarre black and gold uniform. He knew that. Yet there was something about those sapphire eyes … about that contralto voice he’d never heard before, almost like a lighter, sweeter echo of another voice.…

“Merlin?” He heard the confusion in his own voice and shook his head. “But … but—”

“I know this is all very confusing,” the young woman who wasn’t Merlin Athrawes said. She crossed the balcony and pulled out the other chair, sitting with the same graceful economy of motion he’d seen out of Merlin so many times. And yet it was indefinably different. Merlin was a man; this person definitely wasn’t.

“You’re … Nimue,” he said slowly, and she nodded.

“Here I am, anyway.” She smiled. It was exactly the same smile he’d seen from Merlin more times than he could count, he thought, but without the dagger beard and the fierce mustachios. And without the scarred cheek, either. “I’m afraid the interface wasn’t loaded with Merlin, though. An oversight.” The smile turned wry. “I forgot Owl isn’t supplied with an overabundance of initiative or intuition. I simply assumed he would’ve adjusted it, and there wasn’t time to fix it after I realized he hadn’t.”

“Here? Interface?” Nahrmahn shook his head. “I … I don’t understand,” he said, and yet even as he spoke, he had the strangest sensation he did understand … and simply didn’t want to admit it to himself.

“Yes.” Nimue/Merlin’s smile faded, and she sat back, regarding him intently. Those blue eyes searched his face with an intensity that was almost unnerving, and her nostrils flared as if she’d drawn a deep breath, steeling herself for something.

“Nahrmahn,” she said, “I owe you an apology. I didn’t really have any right to do this—or even try to do it—without your permission. But there wasn’t time for that, either, I’m afraid. And I didn’t know whether or not it would even work. Or how well it would work, assuming it worked at all. For that matter, I still don’t know.”

“You’re making me a bit nervous … Nimue,” he said, and was relieved to hear it come out in something almost like his normal tone.

“Sorry.” She smiled again, fleetingly. “It’s just … well, the truth is, Nahrmahn, that you and I have something very much in common now.”

“In common?” He cocked his head. “And what would that be?”

“The fact that we’re both dead,” she said quietly.

*   *   *

“So let me get this straight,” Nahrmahn Baytz said, a great many minutes later, sitting back and waving both hands at the balcony, the palace, the sunlight, the quickening noises of the city. “All of this—everything—is inside a computer? It’s not real at all?”

“No, for certain values of ‘real,’ it’s as real as it gets.” Nimue popped one of the melon balls from the plate into her mouth, chewing appreciatively. “By every test you could give it, it’s completely real, Nahrmahn. Too much of that sunlight up there will cause you to turn red as a boiled spider crab. Fall off this balcony, and you’ll be lucky if you only break an ankle. Of course, that’s because Owl’s still in charge of the governors.”

“The governors?” he repeated in a resigned tone.

“The software that controls the parameters. There are some restrictions on what anyone inside the reality can change, but there’s actually quite a bit of elasticity. You can … readjust things in quite a few ways, once you get the hang of it.”

“But for the purposes of this discussion,” Nahrmahn leaned forward over the table, tapping it with an intent fingertip, “it’s not real. It’s a simulation. Obviously a very convincing simulation, but still a simulation?”

“It’s called a virtual reality, Nahrmahn. And it’s a construct, put together out of your own memories and the software’s extrapolations of them, supplemented by data—a lot of it in near real-time—from Owl’s SNARCs. In every sense that matters, it’s just as ‘real’ as you or Merlin Athrawes. But just as ‘Merlin’ exists only in his PICA, what you can almost think of as a mobile virtual-reality module that happens to be capable of interacting with the physical world, you exist only inside this module.”

“But … how?” Nahrmahn folded his arms. “I understand that Merlin is actually, well, you, or at least an electronic recording of you. But that recording was made long before you ever woke up here on Safehold. How did I end up”—he unfolded one arm to wave at the world about them—“here?”

“You remember the explosion?” she asked gently, and his mouth tightened.

“Yes,” he said shortly. “I remember. And I remember holding Ohlyvya’s hand.” He swallowed and closed suddenly stinging eyes. “I remember her crying. And … and I remember you—or Merlin, anyway—turning up.” His eyes opened once more and narrowed. “Turning up with that … whatever it was you put on my head. Is that what caused all this?”

“Yes,” Nimue admitted. “And that’s what I meant when I said I really didn’t have any right to do this without your permission. In fact, I violated at least half a dozen Federation laws by doing it at all, much less without your informed consent. But I wasn’t certain it would work, and … and I wasn’t going to take away any of the time you had left with Ohlyvya trying to explain it.”

“And if you weren’t sure it would work,” he said slowly, “you weren’t about to mention it to her, were you?” Nimue looked back at him without speaking, her blue eyes very dark and still, and he nodded. “No, you weren’t. You wouldn’t’ve given her what might’ve turned out to be false hope.”

“That … was part of it. And another part was that I didn’t know if you’d have wanted me to tell her.”

“Of course I would have!”

“Really?” She cocked her head. “I hoped you would—I hope you still will—but think about it first. Outside this VR module, you don’t have a body anymore. In that sense, you’re even more of a ghost than I am, and you know I’ve never been really certain whether I’m still me or just a pattern of electrons that only thinks it is. I love Ohlyvya, and I might as well admit—if it won’t make you uncomfortable, remembering you only ever knew me as Merlin—that I love you, too. But I can’t guarantee how she’d react if she started hearing your voice from the dead. She watched you die, Nahrmahn. She held your hand, and she wept on your chest, and she buried you. I think she has the strength and heart to understand what’s happened, but I can’t guarantee that, and the human heart can be a very unpredictable thing. And before you rush into anything, you have to understand that Ohlyvya will never be able to visit you here the way I can.”

“Why not?” Nahrmahn asked, watching her closely.

“Because she doesn’t have the neural receptors to plug into the VR net.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.” He shook his head. “I didn’t have any neural receptors, either. In fact, now that I think about it, I distinctly remember your telling us it was the lack of receptors which meant we couldn’t use any of the neural education units in your cave to give us all complete educations.”

“That’s right.”

“But if that’s true, then how in God’s name did you … ‘record’ me in the first place?”

“You don’t have—didn’t have—the receptors, Nahrmahn. The NEATs are designed to impart information, not record it. They’re transmitters, and the human doesn’t come brain-equipped with a receiver. That has to be provided if the NEAT’s going to connect. But the human brain does radiate, if a receiver’s sensitive enough to pick up its transmissions, and that’s one of the things—the most important thing, really, under the circumstances—that headset I used is specifically designed to do.”

“But that’s not all it was designed to do, is it?” Nahrmahn watched her expression even more closely than before. “I’ve had personal experience now to disprove that cliché about your entire life passing in front of your eyes, so pardon me if I find it unlikely I was spontaneously ‘radiating’ all those memories for you just then. And I’ve learned enough about your technology to be pretty sure data had to be flowing both ways if you were going to record something as complex as a human personality and its memories.”

“Well, yes,” Nimue admitted. She drew another deep breath. “You were dying, Nahrmahn. We couldn’t stop that. So I overrode the programming on your bio nanotech and I enabled a tertiary function on the headset. I didn’t have it made specifically for you, you know. I actually intended it for me, but when I ordered Owl to run it up on his fabricators in the cave, he simply duplicated a standard piece of hardware Terran EMT—emergency medical technician—units routinely carried with them. You do remember how I used it to block the pain you’d been feeling?”

“Yes,” he said slowly.

“Well, that was what it was most often used for, its primary function. Its secondary function was to make recordings just like you and me.” She smiled briefly at his expression. “Of course, it was designed to do that using the NEAT connections all Terrans were equipped with—nothing else would give it enough bandwidth to record something so complex under such adverse conditions—but that’s where the nanotech I’ve injected all of you with comes in.” Her smile vanished. “When I activated the headset, Owl used its tertiary function to reprogram the nannies’ base parameters. He needed my authorization to do it, and he couldn’t’ve done it without the headset’s EMT functions, but, to be honest, if you hadn’t already been dying, Nahrmahn, it almost certainly would’ve killed you anyway.”

“Killed me?” Nahrmahn’s nostrils flared. “You mean our nanotech could kill any of us?”

“Yes.” Nimue met his gaze unflinchingly. “Under the right circumstances. As I said, however, Owl couldn’t do it without the headset’s interface and my personal and direct authorization as the nannies’ originator. It’s not some sort of ‘kill switch,’ Nahrmahn; it’s part of the standard package I used as the basis for all of you. And what it’s normally used for is targeted emergency repair of the nerves controlling your vital functions. It’s an emergency medical intervention technique that bypasses destroyed or severely damaged nerves to keep things like a critically injured person’s heart and lungs working until the medical teams can get him into a trauma center.”

“That … sounds reasonable.”

“It is. Unfortunately, it’s a … brute-force approach. It’s a quick-and-dirty, emergency-only technique to be used only in a last-ditch situation, because it requires pretty close to a complete regen afterwards.”

“‘Regen’?” he repeated the unfamiliar word carefully.

“Regeneration, Nahrmahn. In some cases, a complete body regen, which could take up to a couple of years, even with Federation medical tech. In other cases, a more limited regen, affecting only the specific nervous tissue that was, for want of a better term, scavenged to build the bypass.”

“That sounds … unpleasant,” Nahrmahn observed, and Nimue laughed briefly.

“I did mention that I only tried it because you were dying anyway.”

“True. But what exactly does this have to do with how I ended up here?”

He pointed at the balcony’s flagstones.

“The nannies built the receptors we needed,” Nimue said in a flat tone. “And they found the material to build them by scavenging other parts of your brain. They had to do that anyway for me to block the pain, since you didn’t have the receptors someone on Old Terra would’ve had, but it wasn’t easy and they couldn’t do it without inflicting a lot of additional damage. If by some miracle you hadn’t died after all, Nahrmahn, you’d’ve been a complete paralytic afterwards. That’s why I’d never have used it, despite the horrible pain I knew you were in, if there’d been the least chance of your surviving your wounds. But there wasn’t, and I didn’t want to lose you, and that meant Owl and I had to push the nannies even further, because we needed to reach more than just your brain’s pain centers. What we did certainly would’ve killed you in the end, whatever else happened, and, frankly, I didn’t think we’d be able to do it, anyway. Not really—not in the time we had left, and not with how badly the nannies had already burned themselves out keeping you alive until I got there.”

“But obviously they worked after all,” Nahrmahn said.

“Not … entirely,” Nimue replied.

He stiffened, looking at her, and she sighed.

“The connection wasn’t perfect, and we didn’t have a lot of time. Under normal circumstances, there’s a very complete data-checking function in the software and it’s designed to do a thorough, methodical information search. There’s a stupendous amount of storage capacity in a human brain, and especially with the jury-rigged receptors we had, there’s only so much bandwidth. When you combine that with how little time we had, Owl had to disable some of the anticorruption protocols built into the software. He estimates we lost at least fifteen percent of your total memories. Probably a little more, to be honest.”

Nahrmahn stared at her, then picked up his juice glass and drank deeply. Crystal clicked on polished stone as he set the glass back on the tabletop, and he looked down into it for a moment before he looked back up at Nimue.

“Fifteen percent doesn’t sound all that bad,” he observed with a whimsy he was far from feeling at the moment. “Pity I didn’t get to pick the ones I discarded, though.”

“We’ve managed to recover, or reconstruct, at least, quite a bit of it. In many cases, it was fairly straightforward for Owl to fill in the blanks, especially if he could locate a similar memory and borrow from it. But the truth is that there are holes, Nahrmahn, and we can’t know exactly where they are until you hit one of them. According to Owl’s analysis, they’re concentrated in the earlier part of your life. Childhood memories and probably some extending into your adolescence. Some of them are from later, though. I’m sorry, but it was the best we could do.”

“I see.”

Nahrmahn sat back, breathing deeply, looking around the undeniably real world about him, then back at Nimue.

“I see,” he repeated, “but what I don’t see is how you just happened to have this available. Or is this where a PICA’s stored memories live when it’s offline?”

“No.” Nimue rose and walked to the balcony railing, leaning one hip against it, her arms crossed as she looked out over the city Nahrmahn remembered so well. “No, this is more like the VR units the Federation used for R&D. AIs—even the big ones, not the more limited ones like Owl—don’t have anywhere near human-level intuition, Nahrmahn. They’re not very good at making leaps of the imagination. On the other hand, their computational speed is so fast that in many ways it seems as if they’re capable of doing exactly that. But the Federation discovered that if it created virtual personalities of its best scientists or strategists and loaded them into the proper VR matrix, they got the best of both worlds: an AI’s computational speed, since the matrix could be ‘accelerated’—compressed, really—pretty much at will, plus human-grade intuition. They called it ‘hyper-heuristic mode,’ which I understand was a reference to some ancient Old Terran writer.” She shrugged. “The only thing they couldn’t do was carry out real-life experiments inside the matrix. Those had to handled outside the VR, which meant the virtual personalities had to slow down to interface with the world everyone else lived in. But by the same token, it offered a huge multiplication of the talent pool that meant the Federation could assemble a dozen teams, or a hundred, or even a thousand, all consisting of the same virtual personalities, and assign them separate problems to solve simultaneously. That’s one reason we’d managed to close so much of the gap between our capabilities and the Gbaba’s before they punched through and wiped us out.”

“I see. Or, actually, I don’t see, not yet. But I think I’m at least following the explanation.”

“There were some pretty strict restrictions, even when the war was at its most desperate, on what could be done to—and with—virtual personalities. They were more than just programs floating around, and it was absolutely illegal to record anyone for a virtual environment without their permission and a court-certified permit. And the personalities had a legally protected existence, independent of the individuals from whom they were recorded. But the truth is that the entire technology was inherently vulnerable to all sorts of abuses. The Federation did its best to make sure none of those abuses happened, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I suspected some did. For that matter, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to find out the Federation itself was guilty of a violation or two as the situation against the Gbaba went further and further to hell.”

“And do you think it’s possible this”—his right hand made another of those all-encompassing waves—“is what’s actually under the Temple?”

“I’m almost certain it isn’t,” Nimue replied, turning and putting her back against the railing to face him. “I could be wrong, but if there was a virtual personality of one of the archangels under the Temple, I can’t believe it would’ve let things go this far without intervening. I’d like to think it would’ve intervened to prevent the Group of Four from becoming so powerful, abusing their positions so blatantly, in the first place. But even if it didn’t care about that, it certainly would’ve recognized the implications of the Delthak Works and our new steam engines. I suppose it might’ve chosen not to use the Rakurai again as long as there’s a chance the Church can defeat us and reestablish the full rigor of the Proscriptions, but I don’t think so. That kind of … moderation doesn’t seem to’ve been part of the ‘archangels’ thinking. And even if it were, I would’ve expected it to go ahead and strike Charis and probably Chisholm long ago, before the ‘contamination’ could spread to the rest of the planet and it had to kill even more people to burn out the poison.

“On the other hand, it’s always possible there’s a canned virtual personality under there. One that isn’t currently active but can be awakened at need. That could be what Schueler was telling Paityr’s family about in that holo he left them.”

“Why shouldn’t it be currently active?”

“Boredom, mostly.” Nimue shrugged. “There are two ways a virtual personality can lose itself, Nahrmahn. One is by climbing deeper and deeper into its own private reality until it’s not even remotely interested in interacting with the world its original donor lives in. That’s one reason the software of most VR modules contains safeguards preventing the personalities inside them from taking control of all of the simulations’ parameters. Think about it. The ability to completely control every facet of your existence? To reshape the entire world however you want it reshaped? To give yourself whatever superpowers you could conceive of? To satisfy any desire you may ever have felt? Can you imagine a more completely addictive drug?”

“No. No, I can’t,” Nahrmahn said with a small shiver.

“And the opposite side of that coin is boredom. Even immortality can turn into a curse. That’s been a feature of every human culture’s fairy tales and folklore, and it turns out it’s actually true. And with the time compression effect of a VR world, you can get to immortal status awfully quick. That’s one reason virtual personalities would tend to climb ever deeper into realities they could alter at will, to escape too much … sameness.”

She paused, looking away from him for a moment, then turned back to him, her expression serious.

“It goes a little further than that for some people. Some virtual personalities simply can’t handle the knowledge that they’re only recordings of someone else—copies, not the original. So while some personalities become terminally bored, weary, of a ‘pocket universe’ that doesn’t contain anybody else ‘real’ aside from whatever other virtual personalities’ve been loaded to it, others withdraw into themselves and eventually shut down completely. Effectively, they go catatonic and withdraw from the only reality they have because it isn’t really reality at all, as far as they’re concerned.”

“You’re making this all sound remarkably dismal for such a beautiful morning, Nimue,” Nahrmahn pointed out.

“Well, I suspect most of the personalities likely to react that way are probably rather less … resilient than yours,” she said with a small smile.

“I’ll try to take that as a compliment.”

“Good.”

She gave him another smile, then straightened and unfolded her arms.

“I can’t stay a lot longer, Nahrmahn,” she told him. “With my high-speed data interface down, Owl can’t adjust the data transmission speed to let me interface with you when you’re operating on a compressed timescale. Which, by the way, is what you’ve been doing ever since you got here, even if you weren’t awake at the time. Owl’s spent quite a while locating, repairing, and reintegrating your memories. You’ve always been a … complex sort of fellow, and you didn’t get any less complicated in the act of dying.”

“I’m devastated by the thought of inconveniencing you and Owl,” he said politely, and she laughed.

“I’m sure you are. But what that means is that for me to actually come visit you, first, I have to be physically here in the cave, where I can plug into the interface unit. And, secondly, every second I spend in here with you is just as long as a second in the ‘real world.’ Since I’m going to have to get back aboard Empress of Charis without anyone seeing me, I’d just as soon get back while it’s still dark. Which means—”

“Which means you’ll have to be going.” Nahrmahn nodded, managing to keep his expression tranquil. It was harder than he would have expected as he contemplated being left alone in his own private little world.

“Yes.”

Nimue looked at him for a long moment, then walked over and laid a slender hand on his shoulder.

“Yes,” she repeated in a gentler voice, “but I don’t think it’s going to be quite as bad as you may be worried about. First, you’ll have direct, continuous access to Owl. Second, now that you’re ‘awake,’ you’ll also have access to the SNARCs com network. I’d, ah, suggest not suddenly starting to communicate with people without giving me the opportunity to warn them about you, but you’ll be able to talk to people. You just won’t be able to … visit them.”

“Or touch them,” Nahrmahn said very, very softly.

“Or touch them,” she agreed, equally softly. “I’m sorry, Nahrmahn. I wish that weren’t the case, but it is. And that’s one of the reasons I haven’t told anyone else yet, even after Owl told me he’d reached a point at which he projected at least a ninety percent probability of our being able to successfully reintegrate you. You have the right to decide your own fate. I violated your trust in a very real way by recording you at all, but if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have a choice. You’d simply be gone. If that’s what you choose—and, in some ways, I wouldn’t blame you; believe me, if anyone in the universe understands what it’s like to wonder if you’re real or only someone else’s memories, it’s me—that’s your right, too. No one has the moral right to make you stay with us, especially when you’ll be trapped on the other side of an interface no one but me can cross, so if you want to go, all you have to do is tell Owl. And because you have that right, I’ll never tell Ohlyvya or anyone else you exercised that option if that’s what you decide to do. You won’t hurt her a second time, Nahrmahn. Not that way, I promise.”

“But if I tell her I’m still alive—or that this version of ‘me’ still exists … somewhere, anyway—and we can never actually touch one another again, am I going to hurt her anyway? Will she think it’s me, or will I be some abomination, a reminder of the flesh-and-blood man who loved her, but not him? Only his ghost talking to her over a communications link?”

“I don’t know,” Nimue admitted. “I don’t think she thinks of Merlin as someone’s ghost, but the situation’s not the same, and I know it. That has to be your decision, your call. I’ll just say this. I did this, put you in this position and left you with those choices, because you’re important to me. Because … because I’ve lost too many of the people here on Safehold already, and I was too damned selfish to lose another if there was any way at all I could prevent it. But that’s not the only reason I did it. In fact, the other people who love you aren’t the only reasons I did it, either. We still need you—I still need you. We need your insight, and your advice, and—frankly—your sneakiness.”

She smiled faintly as he turned a laugh into a rather unconvincing cough.

“As I say, the choice is yours. Don’t rush to make it, though.” She looked around the morning, gazing out over Eraystor’s rooftops again while the breeze stirred her black hair. “It’s not so bad a world, your memories, and I think you’ll probably find the odd amusement in it. And on the other side of that com link, there are still a lot of people who need you and who’ve come to love you quite a lot. I didn’t ask your permission before I did all of this to you, so instead I’ll ask your forgiveness now. But don’t decide too quickly … either way. If you do decide to stay, decide to tell Ohlyvya you’re here, take the time to think about it first. It will be your voice over the com, Nahrmahn. Be sure it says what you want her to hear.”

“I will.”

He stood, crossing the balcony, standing beside her as the sun rose higher and the breeze freshened.

“I will,” he repeated, and reached out to lay a hand lightly on her arm.

“And whatever I decide, there’s no need to ask my forgiveness,” he said gently, and smiled when she looked down at him. “If you hadn’t done what you did, there wouldn’t be any decisions to make, now would there? And wouldn’t that be boring?”