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Kunohara shook his head wonderingly. "So however it is constructed, Jongleur has been programming it in some way for perhaps three decades. As though teaching it to be human." He frowned, considering; his strange mood seemed to have abated, at least for the moment. "He must have gained something by both mimicking and using human consciousness as the root of his system."
"That's right!" Paul said urgently. "God, I had nearly forgotten. This man Azador—Renie and !Xabbu met him, too—he told me that the system used the brains of children, Gypsy children, and also . . . what did he call them? The unborn?" The memories were dim, distorted by his dreamlike experiences on the island of Lotos. "Why do you seem so surprised?" he asked Kunohara, who was looking at him very oddly. "We knew they were using children somehow—that's what brought most of these people here in the first place."
Kunohara realized he was staring and made a show of poking the fire. "So this is what they have constructed, then? A sort of net of linked human brains?"
"But what does 'unborn' mean?" Florimel seemed to be struggling to hold down anger. "Stillborn children? Aborted fetuses?"
"We have only hearsay from . . . from the person Jonas mentioned," Kunohara said. "But it would not surprise me if the most basic array of neural nodes were unimprinted brains of that sort, yes." He shrugged liquidly. "The South American, Klement, he made his fortune in the black market for human organs."
"Chizz that those old sca
"It is a horrible idea," scowled Florimel. "Horrible. But why would they need living children, too? Why would they need to take someone like Renie's brother, or . . . or my Eirene?"
"Matti, too," T4b said. "Just a poor little micro—didn't scuff no one."
"Hard to know," said Kunohara. "Perhaps they derive some different value from a more developed brain."
"How do they do it anyway?" Florimel demanded. "You can't just suck someone's mind out like a vampire stealing blood. This place is madness on top of madness, but it still has rules. It still exists within the real universe of physics. . . ."
"I want to ask Mr. Kunohara another question." Martine's quiet but firm voice shut Florimel off like a faucet. "You have said that we know all we need to know about you, but I'm not certain I believe that. If nothing else, there are still the riddles you set for us. Why? And what did they mean?"
Kunohara looked at her coolly. It was interesting and a little depressing, Paul thought, to see how quickly the owner of this particular world had sized up Martine as his most formidable challenge, relegating Paul and the others to bystander status. "In my own way, I tried to help. I am a meddler, I suppose, and thus not the perfect type to be a hermit, after all. You came crashing through my world as i
"So you taunted us with riddles." Martine sat back, her face bland. "Dollo's Law and . . . what was the other? Something Japanese. Kishimo . . . something."
"Kishimo-jin." He nodded his head.
"Oh! I remembered what Dollo's Law is," Florimel said suddenly. "It took a long time to come back to me, but I remember it from university biology now. It is something about evolution not going backward—but I still can make no sense of why you should say it to us."
"Life does not retreat." Kunohara closed his eyes and took a sip of his drink. "Evolution does not go backward. Once a certain complexity has been reached, it is not undone. The parallel is that it will tend to become more complex—that life, or whatever self-replicating pattern you choose, will only grow more complicated."
"School?" T4b groaned. "School, is this? Six me now, save me pain."
Martine ignored him. "So what are you saying?"
"That the system is growing more complex than even the Brotherhood had wished. I had suspected that in some way the operating system was evolving, might perhaps be developing a consciousness," He took another sip. "It appears I was a few decades late in noticing."
"And the other little . . . riddle?" Martine's voice seemed unusually harsh to Paul. Kunohara might not be the most charming of men, but he had rescued them and given them shelter, after all.
"Kishimo-jin. A monster, an ogre—a creature out of a Buddhist fairy tale. She was a demon who devoured children, until the Buddha converted her. Then she became their special protector."
"Even with an explanation," Martine said dryly, "we are still puzzled. By a monster that devours children, you are alluding to the Other? What does this tell us?"
Kunohara smiled slightly, apparently enjoying the give and take, Paul thought that although the man might not like people, he did seem to like sparring. "Let us consider what you have told me. Yes, this system eats children, you could say. But have you failed to notice how obsessed it is with children and childhood in all forms? Have you not met, as I have in my travels through other simulations, the childlike figures who do not seem to belong in the worlds in which they are found?"
"The orphans!" Paul almost shouted. When he discovered everyone was looking at him, he cleared his throat. "Sorry. That's my name for the ones like the boy Gaily I met in two different simulations. They're not ordinary people like us—they don't know who they are outside of the simulation. When I was with Orlando and Fredericks, we wondered if they might be something to do with the children in comas."
"The Lost," Martine said quietly. "Like homeless souls, they were. Javier heard someone he knew."
"T4b," he corrected her, but his heart wasn't in it. "Heard Matti. Too far crash, that was."
"In any case, the operating system—the Other—does seem obsessed with such things, does it not?" Kunohara looked to Martine. "Children, and things of childhood. . . ."
"Like children's stories." Blind Martine could not return his gaze, but she clearly acknowledged his serve. "You spoke to the others about that. That there was some kind of . . . story-force at work. Some shaping force."
"You said a 'meme,' " Florimel said. "I have heard the word but do not know it."
"Perhaps we are looking at that meme even now," their host said. "Perhaps I have invited it into my house."
It hurt Paul to see Martine suddenly look so pale. "Don't play games with us, man," he said. "What do you mean by that?"
"A meme," Martine said faintly. "It is a word that means a kind of . . . idea-gene. It is a theory from the last century, brought up and argued many times over. Communism was such a meme, some would say. An idea that reproduced itself over and over in human consciousness, like a biological trait. Eternal life would be another—a meme that has kept itself alive admirably, over hundreds of generations . . . as witness the Grail Brotherhood and their obsession with it."
"Speed me," T4b said grumpily. "This bug-knocker saying that someone here is a Communist? I thought those were all like sixville, dinosaur-type."
"Mister Kunohara is suggesting that I, along with the others in that long-ago experiment at the Pestalozzi Institute, may have infected the Brotherhood's operating system with the idea of stories—that we have given this fast-evolving machine a notion of causality based on things like the Brothers Grimm and the fairy tales of Perrault." Martine put her fingers to her temples, pressing. "It is possible—yes, I can admit that it is possible. But what does it mean for us?"
The drink was agreeing with Kunohara for the moment—he looked sleek and satisfied. "It is hard to say, but I think the evidence is everywhere. Look at the things that come up again and again in your experience—look at the way you have been helped and prompted by this apparition which you tell me is Jongleur's daughter. Whatever she is, she is clearly tied closely to the Other, and she appears to you again and again, like a . . . what would be the word from your French tales, Ms. Desroubins? Like a fairy godmother. Or an angel, as Jonas puts it."