Look to Windward

The Retreat at Cadracet

After a while he turned away from the view. Estray Lassils emerged from a dance at the noisy party — flushed and breathing heavily — and walked with him towards the section of the barge set aside for his reception.

“You’re sure you’re quite happy to meet all these people, Major?” she asked.

“Quite certain, thank you.”

“Well, do say the instant you want to get away. We won’t think you rude. I did some research into your order. You sound quite, ah, ascetic, and semi-trappist. I’m sure we’d all understand if you found our gibbering gaggle tiresome.”

~ Wonder just how much they were able to research.

“I’m sure I’ll survive.”

“Good for you. I’m supposed to be an old hand at this sort of thing but even I find it pretty damn tedious sometimes. Still, receptions and parties are pan-cultural, so we’re told. I’ve never been sure whether to be reassured or appalled by that.”

“I suppose both are appropriate, depending on one’s mood.”

~ Well said, son. Think I’ll go back to hovering. You concentrate on her; this one’s devious. I can feel it.

“Major Quilan, I do hope you appreciate how sorry we are for what happened to your people,” the woman said, looking at her feet, then up at him. “You may all be heartily fed up hearing this by now, in which case I can only apologise for that as well, but sometimes you feel you just have to say something.” She glanced away into the hazy depth of the view. “The war was our fault. We’ll make what amends and reparations we can, but for what it’s worth — and I realise it may not seem like very much — we do apologise.” She made a small gesture with her old, lined hands. “I think all of us feel that we owe you and your people a particular debt.” She looked down at her feet again for a moment, before catching his gaze once more. “Do not hesitate to call upon it.”

“Thank you. I appreciate your sympathy, and your offer. I’ve made no secret of my mission.”

Her eyes narrowed, then she gave a small, hesitant smile. “Yes. We’ll see what we can do. You’re not in too great a hurry, I hope, Major.”

“Not too great,” he told her.

She nodded and continued walking. In a lighter tone, she said, “I hope you like the house Hub’s prepared for you, Major.”

“As you say, my order is not renowned for its indulgence or its luxury. I’m sure you will have provided me with more than I need.”

“I imagine we probably have. Do let us know if there’s anything else you require, including less of anything, if you know what I mean.”

“I take it this house is not next door to Mahrai Ziller’s.”

She laughed. “Not even next Plate. You’re two away. But I’m told it has a very nice view and its own sub-Plate access.” She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “You know what all this stuff means? The terminology, I mean?”

He smiled politely. “I have done my own research, Ms Lassils.”

“Yes, of course. Well, just let us know what sort of terminal or whatever you want to use. If you’ve brought a communicator of your own I’m sure Hub can patch you through, or it’s certainly prepared to put an avatar or some other familiar at your disposal, or… well, it’s up to you. What would you prefer?”

“I think one of your standard pen terminals would suffice.”

“Major, I strongly suspect by the time you get to your house there’ll be one there waiting for you. Ah ha.” They were approaching a broad upper deck scattered with wooden furniture, partially covered by awnings and dotted with people. “And it may well be a more welcome sight than this: a bunch of people all desperate to talk your ears off. Remember; bail out any time.”

~ Amen.

Everybody turned to face him.

~ We must join the fray, Major.

There were indeed about seventy people there to meet him. They included three from the General Board — whom Estray Lassils recognised, hailed and went into a huddle with as soon as was decent — various scholars of matters Chelgrian or whose speciality description included the word xeno—mostly professors — and a handful of other non-humans, none of whose species Quilan had even heard of, who coiled, floated, balanced or splayed about the deck, tables and couches.

The situation was complicated by various other non-human creatures which, but for the avatar, Quilan might easily have mistaken for other sentient aliens but that turned out to be no more than animal pets. All this was in addition to a bewildering variety of other humans who had titles that were not titles and job descriptions that had nothing to do with jobs.

~ Infra-cultural mimetic transcriptioneer? What the hell does that mean?

~ No idea. Assume the worst. File under Reporter.

The Hub’s avatar had introduced all of them; aliens, humans and drones, which really did seem to be treated as full citizens and people in their own right. Quilan nodded and smiled and nodded or shook hands and made whatever other gesture appeared appropriate.

~ I supposed this silver-skinned freak is just about the perfect host for these people. It knows all of them. And knows all of them intimately, too; foibles, likes, dislikes, everything.

~ Not what we were told.

~ Oh, yes; all it knows is your name and that you’re somewhere here within its jurisdiction. That’s the tale. It only knows what you want it to know. Ha! Don’t you find that just a little hard to believe?

Quilan didn’t know how close a watch on all its citizens a Culture Orbital Hub kept. It didn’t really matter. He did know a lot about such avatars, though, he realised, when he thought about it, and what Huyler had said about their social skills was perfectly true. Tireless, endlessly sympathetic, with a flawless memory and with what must seem like a telepathic ability to tell exactly who would get on with who, the presence of an avatar was understandably judged indispensable at every social occasion above a certain size.

~ With one of these silvery things and an implant people here probably never have to actually remember the name of a single other person.

~ I wonder if they ever forget their own.

Quilan talked, guardedly, to a lot of people, and nibbled from the tables loaded with food, all of it served on plates and trays which were image-coded to indicate what was suitable for which species.

He looked up at one point and realised that they had left the colossal aqueduct and were travelling across a great grassy plain punctuated by what looked like the frameworks of gigantically tall tents.

~ Dome tree stands.

~ Ah ha.

The river had slowed here and broadened to over a kilometre from bank to bank. Ahead, just starting to show above and through the haze, another sort of massif was beginning to make itself visible.

What he had earlier assumed were clouds in the far distance turned out to be the peaks of snow-covered mountains strung around the massif’s top. Deeply corrugated cliffs rose almost straight up, bannered with thin white veils that might be waterfalls. Some of these slender columns stretched all the way down to the base of the cliffs, while other, still thinner white threads faded and disappeared part-way down or vanished into and merged with layered clouds drifting slowly across the great serrated wall of rock.

~ Aquime Massif. Apparently this little creek of theirs goes round both sides and straight through. Aquime City, in the middle, on the shores of the High Salt Sea, is where our friend Ziller lives.

He stared at the great folded sweep of snow-settled cliff and mountain as it materialised out of the haze, becoming more real with each beat of his heart.

In the Grey Mountains was the monastery of Cadracet, which belonged to the Sheracht Order. He went there on a retreat once he was released from the hospital, becoming a griefling. He was taking extended furlough from the Army, which allowed such compassionate leave at his rank. The offer of de-enlistment and an honourable discharge, plus a modest pension, had been left open for him.

He already had a batch of medals. He was given one for being in the Army at all, one for being a combatant who’d held a gun, another for being a Given who could easily have avoided fighting in the first place, another for being wounded (with a bar because he had been seriously wounded), yet another for having been on a special mission and a last medal which had been decreed when it had been realised that the war had been the Culture’s responsibility, not that of the Chelgrian species. The soldiers were calling it the Not-Our-Fault prize. He kept the medals in a small box within the trunk in his cell, along with the posthumous ones awarded to Worosei.

The monastery sat on a rocky outcrop on the shoulder of a modest peak, within a small stand of sigh trees by a tumbling mountain stream. It looked across the forested gorge beneath to the crags, cliffs, snow and ice of the tallest peaks in the range. Behind it, crossing the stream by a modest but ancient stone bridge celebrated in songs and tales three thousand years old, passed the road from Oquoon to the central plateau, momentarily straightening from its series of precipitous hairpins.

During the war, a troupe of Invisible servants who had already put to death all their own masters at another monastery further up the road had taken over Cadracet and captured the half of the monks who had not fled — mostly the older ones. They had thrown them over the parapet of the bridge into the rock-strewn stream below. The fall was not quite sufficient to kill all the old males, and some suffered, moaning, throughout that day and into the night, only dying in the cold before dawn the following morning. Two days later, a unit of Loyalist troops had retaken the complex and tortured the Invisibles before burning their leaders alive.

It had been the same story of horror, malevolence and escalatory retribution everywhere. The war had lasted less than fifty days; many wars — most wars, even those restricted to one planet — barely properly began in that time because mobilisations had to be carried out, forces had to be put in place, a war footing had to be established within society and territory had to be attacked, captured and consolidated before further attacks could be prepared and the enemy could be closed with. Wars in space and between planets and habitats of any number could in theory effectively be over in a few minutes or even seconds but commonly took years and sometimes centuries or generations to come to a conclusion, depending almost entirely on the level of technology the civilisations involved possessed.

The Caste War had been different. It had been a civil war; a species and society at war with itself. These were notoriously amongst the most terrible conflicts, and the initial proximity of the combatants, distributed throughout the civilian and military population at virtually every level of institution and facility, meant that there was a kind of explosive savagery about the conflict almost the instant that it commenced, taking many of the first wave of victims utterly by surprise: noble families were knifed in their beds, unaware that any real problem existed, whole dormitories of servants were gassed behind locked doors, unable to believe those they’d devoted their lives to were murdering them, passengers or drivers in cars, captains of ships, pilots of aircraft or space vessels were suddenly assaulted by the person sitting next to them, or were themselves the ones who did the attacking.

Cadracet monastery itself had escaped relatively unscarred from the war, despite its brief occupation; some rooms had been ransacked, a few icons and holy books had been burned or desecrated, but there had been little structural damage.

Quilan’s cell was at the back of the building’s third courtyard, looking out onto the grooved cobbled roadway to the dank green mountainside and the sudden yellow of the gaunt sigh trees. His cell contained a curl-pad on the stone floor, a small trunk for his personal possessions, a stool, a plain wooden desk and a wash-stand.

There was no form of communication allowed in the cell apart from reading and writing. The former had to be conducted with script-string frames or books, and the latter — for those who like him had no facility with the knotting, beading and braiding of script-string — was restricted to that possible utilising loose paper and an ink pen.

Talking to anyone else inside the cell was also forbidden and by the strictest interpretation of the laws even a monk who talked to himself or cried out in his sleep ought to confess as much to the monastery superior and accept some extra duty as punishment. Quilan had terrible dreams, as he had had since halfway through his stay in the hospital at Lapendal, and frequently woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, but he was never sure if he’d cried out or not. He asked monks in neighbouring cells; they claimed never to have heard him. He believed them, on balance.

Talking was allowed before and after meals and during those communal tasks with which it was judged not to interfere. Quilan talked less than the others in the tiered fields where they grew their foods, and on the walks down the mountain paths to gather wood. The others didn’t seem to mind. The exertions made him strong and fit again. They tired him out, too, but not sufficiently to stop him waking each night with the dreams of darkness and lightning, pain and death.

The library was where most studying was done. The reader screens there were intelligently censored so that monks could not fritter their time away on vapid entertainments or trivia; they allowed religious and reference works and scholarly troves to be accessed, but little else. That still left many lifetimes’ worth of material. The machines could also act as links to the Chelgrian-Puen, the gone-before, the already Sublimed. It would, however, be a while before a newcomer like Quilan would be allowed to use them for that purpose.

His mentor and counsellor was Fronipel, the oldest monk left alive after the war. He had hidden from the Invisibles in an old grain-store drum deep in a cellar and had remained there for two days after the Loyalist troops detachment had retaken the monastery, not knowing that he was now safe. Too weak to climb back out of the drum, he had almost died of dehydration and was only discovered when the troops mounted a thorough search to flush out any remaining Invisibles.

Where it showed above his robes, the old male’s pelt was scraggy and tufted with dark patches of thick, coarse fur. Other areas were almost bare, showing his creased, dry-looking grey skin beneath. He moved stiffly, especially when the weather was damp, which was often the case at Cadracet. His eyes, set behind antique glasses, looked filmed, as though there was some grey smoke within the orbs. The old monk wore his decrepitude with no hint of pride or disdain, and yet, in this age of regrown bodies and replacement organs, such decay had to be voluntary, even deliberate.

They talked, usually, in a small bare cell set aside for the purpose. All it contained was a single S-shaped curl-seat and a small window.

It was the old monk’s prerogative to use the first name of those junior to him, and so he called Quilan “Tibilo”, which made him feel like a child again. He supposed this was the desired effect. He in turn was expected to address Fronipel as Custodian.

“I feel… I feel jealous, sometimes, Custodian. Does that sound mad? Or bad?”

“Jealous of what, Tibilo?”

“Her death. That she died.” Quilan stared out of the window, unable to look into the older male’s eyes. The view from the little window was much the same as from that of his own cell. “If I could have anything at all I would have her back. I think I have accepted that is impossible, or very unlikely indeed, at the very least… but, you see? There are so few certainties any more. This is something else; everything is contingent these days, everything is provisional, thanks to our technology, our understanding.”

He looked into the old monk’s clouded eyes. “In the old days people died and that was that; you might hope to see them in heaven, but once they were dead they were dead. It was simple, it was definite. Now…” He shook his head angrily. “Now people die but their Soulkeeper can revive them, or take them to a heaven we know exists, without any need for faith. We have clones, we have regrown bodies — most of me is regrown; I wake up sometimes and think, Am I still me? I know you’re supposed to be your brain, your wits, your thoughts, but I don’t believe it is that simple.” He shook his head, then dried his face on the sleeve of his robe.

“You are envious of an earlier time, then.”

He was silent for a few moments, then said, “That as well. But I am jealous of her. If I can’t have her back then all I’m left with is a desire not to have lived. Not a desire to kill myself, but to have, through having no choice, died. If she can’t share my life, I would share her death. And yet I can’t, and so I feel envy. Jealousy.”

“Those are not quite the same things, Tibilo.”

“I know. Sometimes what I feel is… I’m not sure… a feeble yearning for something I don’t have. Sometimes it is what I think people mean when they use the word envy, and sometimes it is real, raging jealousy. I almost hate her for having died without me.” He shook his head, hardly believing what he was hearing himself saying. It was as though the words, at last expressed to another, gave final shape to thoughts he had not wanted to admit to harbouring, even to himself. He stared through his tears at the old monk. “I did love her, though, Custodian. I did.”

The older male nodded. “I’m sure you did, Tibilo. If you didn’t you wouldn’t still be suffering like this.”

He looked away again. “I don’t even know that any more. I say I loved her, I think I did, I certainly thought I did, but did I? Maybe what I’m really feeling is guilt at not having loved her. I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more.”

The older male scratched at one of his bare patches. “You know that you are alive, Tibilo, and that she is dead, and that you might see her again.”

He stared at the monk. “Without her Soulkeeper? I don’t believe that, sir. I’m not sure I even believe I would see her again even if it had been recovered.”

“As you pointed out yourself, we live in a time when the dead can return, Tibilo.”

They knew now that there came a time in the development of every civilisation — which lasted long enough — when its inhabitants could record their mind-state, effectively taking a reading of the person’s personality which could be stored, duplicated, read, transmitted and, ultimately, installed into any suitably complex and enabled device or organism.

In a sense it was the most radically reductivist position made real; an acknowledgement that mind arose from matter, and could be fundamentally and absolutely defined in material terms, and as such it did not suit everyone. Some societies had reached the horizon of such knowledge and been on the brink of the control it implied, only to turn away, unwilling to lose the benefits of the beliefs such a development threatened.

Other peoples had accepted the exchange and suffered from it, losing themselves in ways that seemed sensible, even worthy at the time but which finally led to their effective extinction.

Most societies subscribed to the technologies involved and changed to deal with the consequences. In places like the Culture the consequences were that people could take back-ups of themselves if they were about to do something dangerous, they could create mind-state versions of themselves which could be used to deliver messages or undertake a multiplicity of experiences in a variety of places and in an assortment of physical or virtual forms, they could entirely transfer their original personality into a different body or device, and they could merge with other individuals — balancing retained individuality against consensual wholeness — in devices designed for such metaphysical intimacy.

Amongst the Chelgrian people the course of history had diverged from the norm. The device which was emplaced in them, the Soulkeeper, was rarely used to revive an individual. Instead it was used to ensure that the soul, the personality of the dying person, would be available to be accepted into heaven.

The majority of Chelgrians had long believed, like the majority of many intelligent species, in a place where the dead went after death. There had been a variety of different religions, faiths and cults on the planet, but the belief system that came to dominate Chel and was exported out to the stars when the species achieved space travel — even if by then it was taken as having a symbolic rather than a literal truth — was one which still spoke of a mythical afterlife, where the good would be rewarded by an eternity of noble joy and the evil would be condemned — no matter what their caste had been in the mortal world — to servitude forever.

According to the carefully kept and minutely analysed records of the galaxy’s more nit-picking elder civilisations, the Chelgrians had persisted in their religiosity for a significant time after the advent of scientific methodology, and — in continuing to cleave to the caste system — were unusual in retaining such a manifestly discriminatory social order so long into post-contact history. None of this, though, prepared any of the observing societies for what happened not long after the Chelgrians became able to transcribe their personalities into media other than their own individual brains.

Subliming was an accepted if still somewhat mysterious part of galactic life; it meant leaving the normal matter-based life of the universe behind and ascending to a higher state of existence based on pure energy. In theory any individual — biological or machine — could Sublime, given the right technology, but the pattern was for whole swathes of a society and species to disappear at the same time, and often the entirety of a civilisation went in one go (only the Culture was known to worry that such — to it — unlikely absoluteness implied a degree of coercion).

There were generally a host of warning signs that a society was about to Sublime — a degree of society-wide ennui, the revival of long-quiescent religions and other irrational beliefs, an interest in the mythology and methodology of Subliming itself — and it almost always happened to fairly well-established and long-lived civilisations.

To flourish, make contact, develop, expand, reach a steady state and then eventually Sublime was more or less the equivalent of the stellar Main Sequence for civilisations, though there was an equally honourable and venerable tradition for just quietly keeping on going, minding your own business (mostly) and generally sitting about feeling pleasantly invulnerable and just saturated with knowledge.

Again, the Culture was something of an exception, neither decently Subliming out of the way nor claiming its place with the other urbane sophisticates gathered reminiscing round the hearth of galactic wisdom, but instead behaving like an idealistic adolescent.

In any event, to Sublime was to retire from the normal life of the galaxy. The few real rather than imagined exceptions to this rule had consisted of little more than eccentricities: some of the Sublimed came back and removed their home planet, or wrote their names in nebulae or sculpted on some other vast scale, or set up curious monuments or left incomprehensible artifacts dotted about space or on planets, or returned in some bizarre form for a usually very brief and topologically limited appearance for what one could only imagine was some sort of ritual.

All this, of course, suited those who remained behind quite well, because the implication was that Subliming led to powers and abilities that gave those who had undergone the transformation an almost god-like status. If the process had been just another useful technological step along the way for any ambitious society, like nanotechnology, AI or wormhole creation, then everybody would presumably do it as soon as they could.

Instead Subliming seemed to be the opposite of useful as the word was normally understood. Rather than let you play the great galactic game of influence, expansion and achievement better than you could before, it appeared to take you out of it altogether.

Subliming was not utterly understood — the only way fully to understand it appeared to be to go ahead and do it — and despite various Involveds’ best efforts studying the process it had proved astonishingly frustrating (it had been compared to trying to catch yourself falling asleep, whereas it was felt that it ought to be as easy as watching somebody else fall asleep), but there was a strong and reliable pattern to its likelihood, onset, development and consequences.

The Chelgrians had partially Sublimed; about six per cent of their civilisation had quit the material universe within the course of a day. They were of all castes, they were of all varieties of religious belief from atheists to the devout of diverse cults, and they included in their number several of the sentient machines Chel had developed but never fully exploited. No discernible pattern in the partial Subliming Event could be determined.

None of this was especially unusual in itself, though for any of them to have gone at all when the Chelgrians had only been in space for a few hundred years did seem — perversely — immature in the eyes of some. What had been remarkable, even alarming, was that the Sublimed had then maintained links with the majority part of their civilisation which had not moved on.

The links took the form of dreams, manifestations at religious sites (and sporting events, though people tended not to dwell on this), the alteration of supposedly inviolate data deep inside government and clan archives, and the manipulation of certain absolute physical constants within laboratories. A number of long-lost artifacts were recovered, a host of careers were ruined when scandals were revealed and several unexpected and even unlikely scientific breakthroughs occurred.

This was all quite unheard of.

The best guess that anyone could make was that it was something to do with the caste system itself. Its practice down the millennia had ingrained in the Chelgrians the idea of being part and yet not part of a greater whole; the mind-set it implied and encouraged had hierarchic and continuant implications which had proved stronger than whatever processes drove the normal course of a Subliming Event and its aftermath.

For a few hundred days a lot of Involveds started watching the Chelgrians very carefully indeed. From being a not particularly interesting and arguably slightly barbaric species of middling abilities and average prospects, they suddenly acquired a glamour and mystique most civilisations struggled over millennia to develop. Across the galaxy, research programmes into Subliming were quietly instituted, dragged out of dormancy and re-energised, or accelerated as the horrible possibilities sank in.

The fears of the Involveds proved unfounded. What the Chelgrian-Puen, the gone-before, did with their still applicable super powers was to build heaven. They made matter of fact what had until then required an act of faith to believe in. When a Chelgrian died, their Soulkeeper device was the bridge that carried them across to the afterlife.

There was an inevitable vagueness associated with the whole procedure that Involveds throughout the galaxy had become used to when dealing with anything to do with Subliming, but it had been proved to the satisfaction of even the most sceptical of observers that the personalities of dead Chelgrians did survive after death, and could be contacted through suitably enabled devices or people.

Those souls described a heaven very similar to that of Chelgrian mythology, and even talked of entities which might have been the souls of Chelgrians dead long before the development of Soulkeeper technology, though none of these remote ancestor personalities could be contacted by the mortal world directly and the suspicion was that they were constructs of the Chelgrian-Puen, best guesses at what the ancestors might have been like if heaven had really existed from the start.

There could, however, be no real doubt that people were saved by their Soulkeeper and did indeed enter the heaven fashioned for them by the Chelgrian-Puen in the image of the paradise envisaged by their ancestors.

“But are the returned dead really the people we knew, Custodian?”

“They appear to be, Tibilo.”

“Is that enough? Just appearing?”

“Tibilo, you might as well ask when we awake whether we are the same person who went to sleep.”

He gave a thin, bitter smile. “I have asked that.”

“And what was your answer?”

“That, sadly, yes we are.”

“You say ‘sadly’ because you feel bitter.”

“I say ‘sadly’ because if only we were different people with every wakening then the me that wakes up would not be the one who lost his wife.”

“And yet we are different people, very slightly, with every new day.”

“We are different people, very slightly, with every new eye-blink, Custodian.”

“Only in the most trivial sense that time has passed during the moment of that blink. We age with every moment but the real increments of our experience are measured in days and nights. In sleep and dreams.”

“Dreams,” Quilan said, staring away again. “Yes. The dead escape death in heaven, and the living escape life in dreams.”

“Is this something else you have asked yourself?”

It was not uncommon, nowadays, for people with terrible memories either to have them excised, or to retreat into dreams, and live from then on in a virtual world from which it was relatively easy to exclude the memories and their effects that had made normal life so unbearable.

“You mean have I considered it?”

“Yes.”

“Not seriously. That would feel as though I was denying her.” Quilan sighed. “I’m sorry, Custodian. You must get bored hearing me say the same things, day after day.”

“You never say quite the same thing, Tibilo.” The old monk gave a small smile. “Because there is change.”

Quilan smiled too, though more as a polite response. “What does not change, Custodian, is that the only thing I really wish for with any sincerity or passion now is death.”

“It is hard to believe, feeling as you do at the moment, that there will come a time when life seems good and worthwhile, but it will come.”

“No, Custodian. I don’t think it will. Because I wouldn’t want to be the person who had felt as I do now and then walked — or drifted — away from that feeling until things felt better. That is precisely my problem. I prefer the idea of death to what I feel just now, but I would prefer to feel the way I do now for ever than to feel better, because feeling better would mean that I am not the one who loved her any more, and I could not bear that.”

He looked at the old monk with tears in his eyes.

Fronipel sat back, blinking. “You must believe that even that can change and it will not mean you love her less.”

Quilan felt almost as good at that point as he had since they had told him Worosei was dead. It was not pleasure, but it was a sort of lightness, a kind of clarity. He felt that he had at last come to some sort of decision, or was just about to. “I can’t believe that, Custodian.”

“Then what, Tibilo? Is your life to be submerged in grief until you die? Is that what you want? Tibilo, I see no sign of it in you, but there can be a form of vanity in grief that is indulged rather than suffered. I have seen people who find that grief gives them something they never had before, and no matter how terrible and real their loss they choose to hug that awfulness to them rather than push it away. I would hate to see you even seem to resemble such emotional masochists.”

Quilan nodded. He tried to appear calm, but a frightful anger had coursed through him as the older male had spoken. He knew Fronipel meant well, and was sincere when he said that he did not think Quilan was not such a person, but even to be compared to such selfishness, such indulgence, made him almost shake with fury.

“I would have hoped to have died with honour before such a charge might be levelled against me.”

“Is that what you wish, Tibilo? To die?”

“It has come to seem the best course. The more I think about it, the better it becomes.”

“And suicide, we are told, leads to utter oblivion.”

The old religion had been ambivalent about taking one’s own life. It had never been encouraged, but different views of its rights and wrongs had been taken over the generations. Since the advent of a real and provable heaven, it had been firmly discouraged — following a rash of mass suicides — by the Chelgrian-Puen, who made it clear that those who killed themselves just to get to heaven more quickly would not be allowed in there at all. They would not even be held in limbo; they would not be saved at all. Not all suicides would necessarily be treated so severely, but the impression was very much that you’d better have an unimpeachable reason for showing up at the gates of paradise with your own blood on your hands.

“There would be little honour in that anyway, Custodian. I would rather die usefully.”

“In battle?”

“Preferably.”

“There is no great tradition of such martial severity in your family, Tibilo.”

Quilan’s family had been landowners, traders, bankers and insurers for a thousand years. He was the first son to carry anything more lethal than a ceremonial weapon for generations.

“Perhaps it’s time such a tradition started.”

“The war is over, Tibilo.”

“There are always wars.”

“They are not always honourable.”

“One may die a dishonourable death in an honourable war. Why should the converse not apply?”

“And yet we are here in a monastery, not the briefing room of a barracks.”

“I came here to think, Custodian. I never did renounce my commission.”

“Are you determined to return to the Army, then?”

“I believe I am.”

Fronipel looked into the younger male’s eyes for some time. Finally, straightening himself in his side of the curl-chair, he said, “You are a major, Quilan. A major who would lead his troops when he wishes only to die might be a dangerous officer indeed.”

“I would not want to force my decision on anyone else, Custodian.”

“That is easily said, Tibilo.”

“I know, and it is not so easily done. But I am not in any hurry to die. I am quite prepared to wait until I can be quite certain I am doing the right thing.”

The old monk sat back, taking off his glasses and extracting a grubby-looking grey rag from a waistcoat. He breathed on the two large lenses in turn and then polished each. He inspected them. Quilan thought they looked no better than when he had started. He put them back with some care and then blinked at Quilan.

“This is, you realise, Major, something of a change.”

Quilan nodded. “It feels more like a… like a clarification,” he said. “Sir.”

The old male nodded slowly.