"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."
"But even if it's true," said Florimel, "even if the operating system is trying to make everything into a little story, the operating system isn't in charge anymore. As far as we know, whatever small independence it had under the Grail people is gone—it has been completely subverted by that murdering swine, Dread." She lifted her hand to her face. "Look at this! I have lost an ear and an eye—even if I survive to return to the real world, I might be half-blind, half-deaf. Even worse, this killer may have insured that there is no cure for my daughter. So it is meaningless to sit here talking about story this and story that. Where is Dread? How do we get to him? Where were we, in that place where the Other manifested itself? You are a landlord in this virtual universe, Kunohara. You must be able to find things out, travel, communicate." She took a deep, ragged breath; when she spoke again, her voice was quieter but no less harsh. "We asked you once before if you meant to help us, and you said you were too afraid of the Brotherhood—you would not risk your life. Well, your life is truly in danger now. So will you help us?"
What seemed to Paul like a very long time passed. A dull glow had kindled behind the mists outside: the sun was rising over Kunohara's imaginary world, although it was still hidden in fog.
"You overestimate me," Kunohara said at last. "My control of my own system is very small now—any abilities I had to manipulate the larger Grail system infrastructure disappeared a day ago, probably at the time the Other was subjugated by our mutual enemy. I still do not know what powers I have left in my own world, but I have certainly lost most of my oversight capabilities. I also cannot simply insert or remove things from the system as I normally could." He turned to Paul. "That is why I could not wipe the mutants out of the system, or even move the whip scorpion to somewhere else. I was forced to use my ability to manipulate weather, an awkward tool at best."
"So what are we to do, then?" Florimel asked, but her voice had lost its edge. "Simply give up? Sit here drinking tea and wait to die?"
"We must understand the system. Without understanding, we are indeed doomed. The Other has created, or at least influenced, the structure of the entire network, and even if this man Dread has somehow taken control over the system, the patterns must remain."
"And what patterns are those?" Martine asked. She had not spoken in a while. She seemed distracted, and tilted her head as though she listened to something the rest of them could not hear.
Kunohara drained his drink and stood up. "Stories. A quest of sorts. And other things, too. Children and childhood. Death. Resurrection."
"And labyrinths," Paul said, remembering. "I thought of that back on Ithaca. Many of the control points, the gateways, things like that—they center around mazes or places having to do with death. But I thought that was just the Brotherhood's sense of humor."