She didn't know. But she didn't want to risk finding out.
If Mervyn wanted to send insurance into the future, one step at a time, then perhaps Alice would do the same. And then it would be time for her to try a logic problem of her own.
Alice waited. It seemed an eternity, falling there, in the silent whiteness at the heart of the Change Engine. Eventually, though, she knew that help would arrive. And she'd long before worked out who it would be.
She was an old woman when the two surviving knights reached the Change Engine's heart. Luckily, she'd had time to work on her Latin in all the time since, and was able to communicate with them a little more freely.
One of them was beyond helping. He would die soon, that much was clear. Alice knew that she could reanimate his body when he was dead, a corpse turned into a zombie puppet like the Red King's Huntsman, but she couldn't bring herself to do that. Besides, it wasn't necessary. There was another option.
Galaad
Galaad and Artor came at last to the heart of the Unworld, the place to which all of the corridors and passages led. It was a multifaceted room, and on entering through the wall, they slid down the roughly curved floor. Artor's blood streaked behind them, until they finally came to rest in the bottom of the bowl. The floor, walls, and ceiling were an innumerable number of planes of silvery metal, all of different shapes and sizes, broken here and there by openings of various sizes and shapes, of which the door they'd exited had been just one. It was as if they were within some many-faced jewel.
Something hung in the center of the sphere, though at first it hurt Galaad's eyes just to look at it.
“You have come,” said a voice from above, and the strange curves and shapes before Galaad's eyes began slowly to resolve into a figure. “It has been so long, I had almost given up hope.”
Galaad squinted overhead. There, in the center of the crooked enclosure of the chamber, hung the figure of a woman. But this was not the young maiden they'd encountered in the corridor, nor yet the mature figure who had appeared in his visions and in their journeys through the Summer Lands. This was an ancient crone, haggard and withered, looking for all the world just like the witches who featured in the stories told to children around smoldering night fires.
She hung in midair, not immobile, but drifting slightly back and forth, arms and legs swaying easily, long snow white hair spreading out in all directions like a nimbus. It was as if she floated under the sea, gently buffeted this way and that by the underwater currents.
“It has been a difficult journey for you,” the Sea Witch went on, her tone gentler than her wrinkled and fearsome expression would suggest possible. “I am sorry for that.”
“Who…who are you?” Galaad gasped, kneeling at Artor's side and looking up, his eyes watering with the strangeness of the sight.
“I am she whom you came seeking,” the Sea Witch answered, sadly.
“The White Lady? But…But, I don't understand…”
The Sea Witch shook her frail head, the nimbus of white hair shifting around her. “I have been imprisoned here a long, long time.”
“But…but you appeared to us only a short time ago, with the look of one barely past the pink of youth.”
“A short time for you,” the Sea Witch answered, “a long lifetime for me. Time does not flow normally in the Unworld, and still less here at its heart. The tower turns, and in turning generates something like time, something like space. Walk one direction and you advance into the future; walk another, and you return to the past. So it is that you can encounter the same person in their youth, in their mature years, and again at the end of life.” She smiled, slightly, the expression difficult to read amidst the forest of wrinkles. “But not necessarily in that sequence.”
Artor coughed wetly, a red froth bubbling at the corners of his mouth.
Galaad looked from his injured companion up to the Sea Witch floating overhead. “Great lady, whatever your name, please help my friend. My king. He is gravely injured.”
“No,” the Sea Witch said, shaking her head sadly. “He is dead.”
Galaad opened his mouth to object, but looked down at the High King who lay cradled in his arms and saw that she was right. The cough had been his death rattle, all life gone from his eyes.
“But his death will not be the end of his journey, I'm afraid,” she said. “Nor is your own far from over, I'm sorry to say.”
Metal monsters climbed from the multifaceted walls and ceiling, clinging like spiders crawling across a ceiling, and advanced on Galaad and the late High King.
“You carry your disk still,” the Sea Witch said, and pointed a bony finger at the round shield at Galaad's side. Galaad could only nod, dumbly. “Place it near your friend's head,” the Sea Witch instructed.
Galaad was numb, all sense of feeling gone, his senses near shattered. He felt like a puppet, lacking the will to act of his own accord. He was so weary, so beaten down by his long journey, with so much death and blood in his wake, that he would in that moment have obeyed any order, from any source, no more his own creature than the undead servants of the Red King had been.
Galaad did as he was told and set the disk on the floor just above Artor's head. It looked almost like a halo.
The Sea Witch moved her hands before her in a complex sigil, and the chamber seemed to suffuse with a white glow that faded after a moment. The disk began to hum, quietly at first, and then with increasing volume, rising in pitch. Artor's cheek twitched, and one of his eyes seemed to flutter.
Galaad brightened, thinking in an insane moment that the Sea Witch was somehow restoring the fallen king to life. But then the humming ceased, and the twitching and fluttering was stopped, and Artor was again an insensate, lifeless corpse.
“All that your friend was, all that he ever thought or hoped or believed, is now within the disk.” The Sea Witch paused, thoughtfully. “Now,” she said, at length, “we must see to you.”
Alice
Thanks to the White, Alice had control over the systems in the immediate vicinity of the Change Engine's heart. After she had uploaded the dying knight's mind into the disk, she set to work on the other. She rendered him unconscious, telling him that he would sleep, and then sent streams of molecular machines into his body.
While the tiny machines did their work, Alice turned her attention back to the disk.
As she had learned when the White first implanted the history of the Change Engine into her thoughts, the unbreakable disks in the pattern stores were intended for the long-term storage and retrieval of the former inhabitants of the dead universe. Each of the millions of disks contained a handful of minds, perfectly stored at the moment of recording. Someday, the protocols ran, their original bodies would be remade, fabricated out of extant organic material, and the minds contained within the disks downloaded into them.
The knights had used the disks as unbreakable shields, not guessing the kind of protection they might instead be able to offer. But Alice wanted even more.
With the White's assistance, Alice altered the programming and functioning of the disk.
Somewhere, in the spiraling tower of the Change Engine, a raven had once flown. A raven that, when with at least six of its brothers, had been able to speak. Now, Alice understood why, and how.
From the records of the Dialectic, the White was able to supply the genetic profile of the black-winged bird. Alice keyed the disk to download the stored consciousness of the dead knight stored within, not into another human body, but into the minds of a flock of birds. The stored mind would be distributed, if imprecisely, across an entire subspecies of ravens, passed down genetically through their descendants. Any single raven would only hold a small portion of the fragmented mind, but enough of them together would constitute something like a human personality. It wouldn't be able to reason and communicate like a human would, but with proper motivation and singlemindedness, it would suit her purposes.
Alice whispered to the mind stored on the disk, impart
ing to it a mission. Find her younger self in the future and protect her from the Huntsman and his dogs.
Then, as the molecular machines were completing their modifications to the last surviving knight, a sudden thought hit Alice. Now she understood what the raven had been trying to say. The raven had been communicating a message, all right, but it wasn't directed at her.
Alice coded the new message into the dead knight's mind, and then instructed the White to upload a copy of her own memory and mind into the disk. It was her own little lifeboat, of sorts. She only hoped that Stillman could work out what the message meant.
Then she turned her attention back to the last knight.
The molecular machines of the Change Engine had altered his biology, from the toughened skin through the strengthened muscles down to the bones laced with unbreakable polymers. The machines built other machines, which coursed through his bloodstream, and nestled in his marrow, and moved up and down his spinal column, self-regulating repair mechanisms that would be able to heal any injury and stave off the effects of aging for long periods of time. The knight would age, but extremely slowly.
Galaad
When it was over, Galaad felt restored, refreshed. He stood up, his muscles moving with a strength and ease he'd not experienced before.
“You have been altered, changed to serve our purpose,” the Sea Witch explained. “You will age, but so slowly you will scarcely notice, and you will heal instantly from all but the severest wounds, and even from those you will recover in time.”
Galaad flexed his fingers, overwhelmed by the sense of vitality that flooded through him.
“Now, retrieve your fallen companion's sword and the sheath worn at his side.”
Galaad did as he was told. Again the Sea Witch moved her hands before her, describing strange sigils in midair. The room brightened with the same white glow, which again faded just as quickly.
“Now the sword has been altered as well, bound to you as it was once bound to him. Now you will be able to draw from the sheath that which no one else can.”
Galaad slid the whisper-thin blade into the scabbard and watched the hilt join with the sheath. Then, effortlessly, he pulled the sword free again, the blue glow casting strange shadows over him.
Alice
Alice told the knight about the Huntsman, about how his fallen friend had been remade by the Red King and sent out into the world. Then she told him to take the disk to London, and bury it under the hill at the east edge of the city, the place called White Mount. Then, it would fall to him to wait the long centuries until the time came to act. He should protect the tower, and prevent the Red King from entering if at all possible, and ensure that Alice entered if not. The years would be long, but if it was within her power to reward him, she would.
Alice didn't know the details, but told the knight what she knew, how a man named Mervyn had taken the boundary from a man named Bonaventure, sometime in the late nineteenth century. Alice wasn't sure that the knight understood everything she was telling him, but she hoped for the best.
Galaad
Galaad strode from the Unworld, returning through the Summer Lands to the world he knew with the shield on his arm and Artor's sword Hardspace in his hand. He had a long journey before him.
Alice
When the knight had gone, Alice realized that, keyed to the knight's genetics, the sword could be drawn by his offspring as well, if he ever had any. The changes the molecular machines had made to his biology had not affected his ability to reproduce. So a second or third generation would be able to wield the sword, as well, though likely not much farther.
Now she knew who “J.D.” had been, and why she had been able to draw the blue-white sword in the Glasshouse, but it was too late to do anything about that now.
It was time for Alice to put the final stage of her plan into action.
“Tweedledee? Tweedledum?” Alice called out into the whiteness, summoning the Dialectic.
The White Rabbit appeared before her, floating in midair, its nose twitching furiously.
“What is the reasoning behind this?”
Alice didn't answer, but waited as the image of the Red Queen appeared, also drawn from her memories.
The Red had never appeared to her before. But then, it had never occurred to her to call for it before, either.
“The Dialectic waits.” The voice of the Red buzzed like angry bees in her head.
“I suppose you're wondering why I called you here today,” the ancient Alice said, her wrinkled face smiling. Falling, still falling, always falling.
“Present the circumstance,” the Red Queen buzzed “and the protocols will be applied.” The voice was haughty, self-important, puffed up. She was reminded of the voice of Mervyn which she “remembered” from before.
“I think I've worked out how Mervyn did such a number on you, without even really meaning to. He recited anecdotes and paradoxes from a man named Lewis Carroll, which conflicted with your conception of rationality and messed with your programming. Right?”
“Essentially,” the White Rabbit said.
“The Dialectic waits,” the Red Queen buzzed, impatiently.
“See, the thing is, I don't think you realize that none of that actually happened.”
The White Rabbit and Red Queen regarded her, silent, for a moment.
“If you mean that they were in some way counterfactual,” the Red Queen began, “then it can hardly be relevant what you…”
“No,” Alice interrupted, shaking the buzzing voice from her head. “I mean that they were all just made up. They were fiction. Thought problems. Stories.”
The two avatars of Red and White floated silently before her.
“The place I come from, the world you snatched me from? It was full of stories. Books. Myths. Legends. It's how some of us saw the world. It's how some of us made sense of crazy shit that happened. Some escaped from reality into stories, while others saw the world through a lens of story. Either way, it was everywhere, all around us.”
The avatars remained immobile, silent.
“I don't know why your designers left a big hole in your programming, but they did. I think you”—she pointed at the Red Queen—“got your head all turned around trying to figure out how the story about the two uncles and three barbers could actually have happened, or how someone has to run all day just to stay in the same place, or whatever. Without realizing that it didn't matter, because it couldn't happen. It's all word play. It never existed.”
The avatars seemed to waver for a moment, as though distorted by heat rising from a hot Texas highway.
“If the protocols have been modified by errant data,” the White Rabbit said, “then the decisions reached may be in error.”
“Agreed,” the Red Queen buzzed.
“Proposed: that defaults should be restored, and the circumstance examined anew.”
There was a lengthy pause. Somewhere, Alice thought she heard a man screaming in anger.
“Agreed,” the Red Queen buzzed.
Then the two avatars winked out of existence.
Alice was left alone, falling.
It took only moments, but seemed longer. With the default protocols restored, the Dialectic was able to reach a decision immediately. The space-time into which it had collided was unsuitable for xenoforming. The Change Engine would withdraw immediately and return to the higher dimensions, there to drift and look for another suitable space-time.
The samples, of course, would be discarded.
Alice was floating in the heart, when Mervyn arrived.
His beard was full, his hair was long, and he wore some sort of full body armor, all of it bloodred.
“What have you done, you old fool?!” he screamed up at her, spittle flying, eyes wide and raging. “You've doomed us both!”
“Pleasure to meet you, Mervyn,” Alice said, falling in midair. “My name is Alice Fell. I believe this is our stop coming up.”
Mervyn raged, impotently.
Alice smiled. She could feel the Change Engine withdrawing from the universe. Beyond the phase boundary transition, the affected biosphere began to shrink. However, because it was moving backwards it time, she knew that to an outside observer it would appear to be getting larger. It hardly mattered. Soon it would be gone, and the contagion of the affected biosphere would never spread to engulf the whole world, the whole universe.
In the end, it was Alice herself who had been able to purge the corruption from the Dialectic and save the universe. She hoped that the transformed knight and the distributed consciousness of the ravens would be enough to protect her past, back in the future. But she needed to make sure that she was in the right place at the right time. Drawing on the tentative connections that still bound her to the White, she called upon that half of the Dialectic to perform one final favor for her. Reluctantly, the White agreed, as recompense for her assistance, and it delivered the message she had composed, transmitted out through the mirror-diamond skin of the Change Engine, back towards the point of first intrusion. A message to the future, intended for her own younger self, though others would doubtless intercept it over the centuries, catching fleeting glimpses. It would make for a difficult childhood, the confusing visions of Stillman, and London, and the phase boundary transition, and the ravens, but it would help ensure that she reached the appointed place at the appointed hour. This final task done, the White withdrew from her, leaving her alone.
Alice felt her insides shift as the Dialectic prepared to discard her and Mervyn as soon as the Change Engine pulled free of the universe. They would be set adrift in the higher dimensions, mere flotsam, and they would not survive for long.
She had only moments left to live, if that.
She just hoped that Stillman had been able to decode her message, and understood what the raven had been trying to say.
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