Look to Windward

A Defeat of Echoes

~ So unterritorial.

~ I suppose when you have this much territory you can afford to be.

~ Do you think I’m old-fashioned to be disturbed by it?

~ No. I think it’s quite natural.

~ They have too much of everything.

~ With the possible exception of suspicion.

~ We can’t be sure of that.

~ I know. Still; so far, so good.

Quilan closed the lockless door to his apartment. He turned and looked out at the floor of the gallery, thirty metres below. Groups of humans strolled amongst the plants and pools, between the stalls and bars, the restaurants and — well; shops, exhibitions? It was hard to know what to call them.

The apartment they had given him was near the roof level of one of Aquime City’s central galleries. One set of rooms looked out across the city to the inland sea. The other side of the suite, like this glazed lobby outside, looked down into the gallery itself.

Aquime’s altitude and consequently cold winters meant that a lot of the life of the city took place indoors rather than out, and as a result what would have been ordinary streets in a more temperate city, open to the sky, here were galleries, roofed-over streets vaulted with anything from antique glass to force fields. It was possible to walk from one end of the city to the other under cover and wearing summer clothes, even when, as now, there was a blizzard blowing.

Free of the driving snow that was bringing visibility down to a few metres, the view from the apartment’s exterior was delicately impressive. The city had been built in a deliberately archaic style, mostly from stone. The buildings were red and blonde and grey and pink, and the slates covering the steeply pitched roofs were various shades of green and blue. Long tapering fingers of forest penetrated the city almost to its heart, bringing further greens and blues into play and — with the galleries — dicing the city into irregular blocks and shapes.

A few kilometres in the distance, the docks and canals would glitter under a morning sun. Spinward of those, on a gentle slope of ridge rising to the outskirts of the city, Quilan could, when it was clear, see the tall buttresses and towers of the ornately decorated apartment building which contained the home of Mahrai Ziller.

~ So could we just go and walk into his apartment?

~ No. He got somebody to make him locks when he heard I was coming. Apparently this was mildly scandalous.

~ Well, we could have locks, too.

~ I think it better not to.

~ Thought you might.

~ We wouldn’t want it to look like I have something to hide.

~ That would never do.

Quilan swung open a window, letting the sounds of the gallery into the apartment. He heard tinkling water, people talking and laughing, birdsong and music.

He watched drones and people in float harnesses waft by beneath him but above the other humans, saw people in an apartment on the other side of the gallery wave — he waved back almost without thinking — and smelled perfumes and the scent of cooking.

He looked up at the roof, which was not glass but some other more perfectly transparent material — he supposed he could have asked his little pen-terminal to find out exactly what it was, but he had not bothered — and he listened in vain for any sound of the storm swirling and blowing outside.

~ They do love their little insulated existence, don’t they?

~ Yes, they do.

He remembered a gallery not so dissimilar to this, in Shaunesta, on Chel. It was before they had married, about a year after they had met. They had been walking hand-in-hand, and had stopped to look in a jeweller’s window. He had gazed in casually enough at all the finery, and wondered if he might buy something for her. Then he’d heard her making this little noise, a sort of appreciative but barely audible, “Mmm, mmm, mmm, mmm.”

At first he’d assumed she was making the noise for his amusement. It had taken him a few moments to realise that not only was she not doing that, but she was not aware that she was making the noise at all.

He realised this and suddenly felt as though his heart would burst with joy and love; he turned, swept her into his arms and hugged her, laughing at the surprised, confused, blinkingly happy look on her face.

~ Quil?

~ Sorry. Yes.

Somebody laughed on the gallery floor below; a high, throaty, female laugh, unrestrained and pure. He heard it echo round the hard surfaces of the closed-in street, remembering a place where there were no echoes at all.

They’d got drunk the night before they left; Estodien Visquile with his extended entourage including the bulky, white-furred Eweirl, and he. He had to be helped from his bed the next morning by a laughing Eweirl. A drenching under a cold shower just about brought him round, then he was taken straight to the VTOL, then to the field with the sub-orbital, then to Equator Launch City, where a commercial flight hoisted them to a small Orbiter. A demilled ex-Navy privateer was waiting. They’d left the system headed for deep space before his hangover started to abate, and he realised that he had been selected as the one to do whatever it was he had to do, and remembered what had happened the night before.

They were in an old mess hall, decorated in an antique style with the heads of various prey animals adorning three of the walls; the fourth wall of glass doors opened onto a narrow terrace which looked out to sea. There was a warm wind blowing and the doors were all opened, bringing the smell of the ocean into the bar. Two Blinded Invisible servants dressed in white trousers and jackets attended them, bringing the various strengths of fermented and distilled liquors a traditional drinking binge required.

The food was sparse and salty, again as dictated by tradition. Toasts were proposed, drinking games indulged in, and Eweirl and another of the party, who seemed nearly as well built as the white-furred male, balanced their way along the wall of the terrace from one end to the other, with the two-hundred-metre drop to one side. The other male went first; Eweirl went one better by stopping halfway along and downing a cup of spirit.

Quilan drank the minimum required, wondering quite what it was all in aid of and suspecting that even this apparent celebration was part of a test. He tried not to be too much of a wet blanket, and joined in several of the drinking games with a forced heartiness he thought must easily be seen through.

The night wore on. Gradually people went off to their curl-pads. After a while, only Visquile, Eweirl and he were left, served by the larger of the two Invisibles, a male even bulkier than Eweirl who manoeuvred his way amongst the tables with surprising adroitness, his green-banded head swinging this way and that and his white clothes making him look like a ghost in the dim light.

Eweirl tripped him up a couple of times, on the second occasion causing him to drop a tray of glasses. When this happened Eweirl put his head back and laughed loudly. Visquile looked on like the indulgent parent of a spoiled child. The big servant apologised and felt his way to the bar to bring back a dustpan and broom.

Eweirl sank another cup of spirit and watched the servant lift a table out of the way one-handed. He challenged him to an arm-wrestling contest. The Invisible declined, so Eweirl ordered him to take part, which eventually he did, and won.

Eweirl was left panting with exertion; the big Invisible put his jacket back on, inclined his green-banded head, and resumed his duties.

Quilan was slumped in his curl-seat watching events with one eye closed. Eweirl did not look happy that the servant had won the contest. He drank some more. Estodien Visquile, who did not seem very drunk at all, asked Quilan some questions about his wife, his military career, his family and his beliefs. Quilan remembered trying not to appear evasive. Eweirl watched the big Invisible go about his duties, his white-furred body looking tensed and coiled.

“They might find the ship yet, Quil,” the Estodien told him. “There may still be wreckage. The Culture; their consciences. Helping us look for the lost ships. It might turn up yet. Not her, of course. She is quite lost. The gone-before say there is no sign, no hint of her Soulkeeper having worked. But we might yet find the ship, and know more of what happened.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She is dead. That’s all that matters. Nothing else. I don’t care about anything else.”

“Not even your own survival after death, Quilan?” the Estodien asked.

“That least of all. I don’t want to survive. I want to die. I want to be as she is. No more. Nothing more. Ever again.”

The Estodien nodded silently, his eyelids drooping, a small smile playing across his face. He glanced at Eweirl. Quilan looked too.

The white-furred male had quietly changed seats. He waited until the big Invisible was approaching, then stood up suddenly in his path. The servant collided with him, spilling three cups of spirit over Eweirl’s waistcoat.

“You clumsy fuck! Can’t you see where you’re going?”

“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t know you’d moved.” The servant offered Eweirl a cloth from his waistband.

Eweirl knocked it away. “I don’t want your rag!” he screamed. “I said, can’t you see where you’re going?” He picked at the lower edge of the green band covering the other male’s eyes. The big Invisible flinched instinctively, pulling back. Eweirl had hooked a leg behind him; he stumbled and fell and Eweirl went down with him in a flurry of crashing glasses and tumbling chairs.

Eweirl staggered to his feet and jerked the big male after him. “Attack me, would you? Attack me, would you?” he yelled. He had pulled the servant’s jacket down across his shoulders and over his arms so that he was half helpless, though the servant anyway did not seem to be putting up any fight. He stood impassively as Eweirl screamed at him.

Quilan didn’t like this. He looked at Visquile, but the Estodien was looking on tolerantly. Quilan pushed himself up from the table they were curled at. The Estodien put a hand on his arm, but he pulled it away.

“Traitor!” Eweirl bellowed at the Invisible. “Spy!” He pulled the servant round and pushed him this way and that; the big male crashed into tables and chairs, staggering and nearly falling, unable to save himself with his trapped arms, each time using what leverage he had from his midlimb to fend off the unseen obstacles.

Quilan started to make his way round the table. He tripped over a chair and had to fall across the table to avoid hitting the floor. Eweirl was spinning and pushing the Invisible, trying to disorient him or make him dizzy as well as get him to fall over. “Right!” he shouted in the servant’s ear. “I’m taking you to the cells!” Quilan pushed himself away from the table.

Eweirl held the servant before him and started marching not to the double doors which led from the bar but towards the terrace doors. The servant went uncomplainingly at first, then must have regained his sense of direction or maybe just smelled or heard the sea and felt the open air on his fur, because he pushed back and started to say something in protest.

Quilan was trying to get in front of Eweirl and the Invisible, to intercept them. He was a few metres to the side now, feeling his way round the tables and chairs.

Eweirl reached up with one hand, pulled the green eye-band down — so that for an instant Quilan could see the Invisible’s two empty sockets — and forced it over the servant’s mouth. Then he whipped the other male’s legs from under him and while he was still trying to stagger back to his feet ran him out across the terrace to the wall and up-ended the Invisible over the top and into the night.

He stood there, breathing heavily, as Quilan came stumbling up to his side. They both looked over. There was a dim white ruff of surf round the base of the seastack. After a moment Quilan could see the pale shape of the tiny falling figure, outlined against the dark sea. After a moment more, the faint sound of a scream floated up to them. The white figure joined the surf with no visible splash and the scream stopped a few moments later.

“Clumsy,” Eweirl said. He wiped some spittle from around his mouth. He smiled at Quilan, then looked troubled and shook his head. “Tragic,” he said. “High spirits.” He put one hand on Quilan’s shoulder. “High jinks, eh?” He reached out and brought Quilan into a hug, pressing him hard into his chest. Quilan tried to push away, but the other male was too strong. They swayed, close to the wall and the drop. The other male’s lips were at his ear. “Do you think he wanted to die, Quil? Hmm, Quilan? Hmm? Do you think he wanted to die? Do you?”

“I don’t know,” Quilan mumbled, finally being allowed to use his midlimb to push himself away. He stood looking up at the white-furred male. He felt more sober now. He was half terrified, half careless. “I know you killed him,” he said, and immediately thought that he might die too, now. He thought about taking up the classical defensive position, but didn’t.

Eweirl smiled and looked back at Visquile, who still sat where he had been throughout. “Tragic accident,” Eweirl said. The Estodien spread his hands. Eweirl held onto the wall to stop himself swaying, and waved at Quilan. “Tragic accident.”

Quilan felt suddenly dizzy, and sat down. The view started to disappear at the edges. “Leaving us too?” he heard Eweirl inquire. Then nothing till the morning.

“You chose me, then?”

“You chose yourself, Major.”

He and Visquile sat in the privateer’s lounge area. Along with Eweirl, they were the only people aboard. The ship had its own AI, albeit an uncommunicative one. Visquile claimed not to know the craft’s orders, or its destination.

Quilan drank slowly; a restorative laced with anti-hangover chemicals. It was working, though it might have worked more quickly.

“And what Eweirl did to the Blinded Invisible?”

Visquile shrugged. “What happened was unfortunate. These accidents happen when people drink freely.”

“It was murder, Estodien.”

“That would be impossible to prove, Major. Personally I was, like the unfortunate concerned, unsighted at the time.” He smiled. Then the smile faded. “Besides, Major, I think you’ll find Called-To-Arms Eweirl has a certain latitude in such matters.” He reached out and patted Quilan’s hand. “You must not concern yourself with the unhappy incident any further.”

Quilan spent a lot of time in the ship’s gym. Eweirl did, too, though they exchanged few words. Quilan had little he wanted to say to the other male, and Eweirl didn’t seem to care. They worked and hauled and pulled and ran and sweated and panted and dust-bathed and showered alongside each other, but barely acknowledged the other’s presence. Eweirl wore earplugs and a visor, and sometimes laughed as he exercised, or made growling, appreciative noises.

Quilan ignored him.

He was brushing the dust-bath off one day when a bead of sweat dropped from his face and spotted in the dust like a globule of dirty mercury, rolling into the hollow by his feet. They had mated once in a dust-bath, on their honeymoon. A droplet of her sweet sweat had fallen into the grey fines just so, rolling with a fluid silky grace down the soft indentation they had created.

He was suddenly aware he had made a keening, moaning noise. He looked out at Eweirl in the main body of the gym, hoping he would not have heard, but the white-furred male had taken his plugs and visor off, and was looking at him, grinning.

The privateer rendezvoused with something after five days’ travel. The ship went very quiet and moved oddly, as though it was on solid ground but being slid around from side to side. There were thudding noises, then hisses, then most of the remaining noise of the craft died. Quilan sat in his little cabin and tried accessing the exterior views on his screens; nothing. He tried the navigation information, but that had been closed off too. He had never before lamented the fact that ships had no windows or portholes.

He found Visquile on the ship’s small and elegantly spare bridge, taking a data clip from the craft’s manual controls and slipping it into his robes. The few data screens still live on the bridge winked out.

“Estodien?” Quilan asked.

“Major,” Visquile said. He patted Quilan on the elbow. “We’re hitching a ride.” He held up a hand as Quilan opened his mouth to ask where to. “It’s best if you don’t ask with whom or to where, Major, because I’m not able to tell you.” He smiled. “Just pretend we’re still under way using our own power. That’s easiest. You needn’t worry; we’re very secure in here. Very secure indeed.” He touched midlimb to midlimb. “See you at dinner.”

Another twenty days passed. He became even fitter. He studied ancient histories of the Involveds. Then one day he woke and the ship was suddenly loud about him. He turned on the cabin screen and saw space ahead. The navigation screens were still unavailable, but he looked all about the ship’s exterior views through the different sensors and viewing angles and didn’t recognise anything until he saw a fuzzy Y shape and knew they were somewhere on the outskirts of the galaxy, near the Clouds.

Whatever had brought them here in only twenty days must be much faster than their own ships. He wondered about that.

The privateer craft was held in a bubble of vacuum within a vast blue-green space. A wobbling limb of atmosphere three metres in diameter flowed slowly out to meet with their outer airlock. On the far side of the tube floated something like a small airship.

The air was briefly cold as they walked through, turning gradually warmer as they approached the airship. The atmosphere felt thick. Underneath their feet, the tunnel of air seemed as pliantly firm as wood. He carried his own modest luggage; Eweirl toted two immense kit bags as though they were purses, and Visquile was followed by a civilian drone carrying his bags.

The airship was about forty metres long; a single giant ellipsoid in dark purple, its smooth-looking envelope of skin lined with long yellow strakes of frill which rippled slowly in the warm air like the mantle of a fish. The tube led the three Chelgrians to a small gondola slung underneath the vessel.

The gondola looked like something grown rather than constructed, like the hollowed-out husk of an immense fruit; it appeared to have no windows until they climbed aboard, making the ship tip gently, but gauzy panels let in light and made the smooth interior glow with a pastel-green light. It held them comfortably. The tube of air dissipated behind them as the gondola’s door irised shut.

Eweirl popped his earplugs in and put on his visor, sitting back, seemingly oblivious. Visquile sat with his silvery stave planted between his feet, the round top under his chin, gazing ahead through one of the gauzy windows.

Quilan had only the vaguest idea where he was. He had seen the gigantic, slowly revolving elongated 8-shaped object ahead of them for several hours before they’d rendezvoused. The privateer ship had closed very slowly, seemingly on emergency thrust alone, and the thing — the world, as he was now starting to think of it, having come to a rough estimate of its size — had just kept getting bigger and bigger and filling more and more of the view ahead, yet without betraying any detail.

Finally one of the body’s lobes had blotted out the view of the other, and it was as though they were approaching an immense planet of glowing blue-green water.

What looked like five small suns were visible revolving with the vast shape, though they seemed too small to be stars. Their positioning implied there would be another two, hidden behind the world. As they got very close, matching rotational speed with the world and coming near enough to see the forming indentation they were heading for, with the tiny purple dot immediately behind it, Quilan saw what looked like layers of clouds, just hinted at, inside.

“What is this place?” Quilan said, not trying to keep the wonder and awe out of his voice.

“They call them airspheres,” Visquile said. He looked warily pleased, and not especially impressed. “This is a rotating twin-lobe example. Its name is the Oskendari airsphere.”

The airship dipped, diving still deeper into the thick air. They passed through one level of thin clouds like islands floating on an invisible sea. The airship wobbled as it went through the layer. Quilan craned his neck to see the clouds, lit from underneath by a sun far beneath them. He experienced a sudden sense of disorientation.

Below, something appearing out of the haze caught his eye; a vast shape just one shade darker than the blueness all around. As the airship approached he saw the immense shadow the shape cast, stretching upwards into the haze. Again, something like vertigo struck him.

He’d been given a visor too. He put it on and magnified the view. The blue shape disappeared in a shimmer of heat; he took the visor off and used his naked eyes.

“A dirigible behemothaur,” Visquile said. Eweirl, suddenly back with them, took off his visor and shifted over to Quilan’s side of the gondola to look, imbalancing the airship for a moment. The shape below looked a little like a flattened and more complicated version of the craft they were in. Smaller shapes, some like other airships, some winged, flew lazily about it.

Quilan watched the smaller features of the creature emerge as they dropped down towards it. The behemothaur’s envelope skin was blue and purple, and it too possessed long lines of pale yellow-green frills which rippled along its length, seemingly propelling it. Giant fins protruded vertically and laterally, topped with long bulbous protrusions, like the wing-tip fuel tanks of ancient aircraft. Across its summit line and along its sides, great scalloped dark-red ridges ran, like three enormous, encasing spines. Other protrusions, bulbs and hummocks covered its top and sides, producing a generally symmetrical effect that only broke down at a more detailed level.

As they drew still closer, Quilan had to press himself against the frame of the little airship’s gondola window to see both ends of the giant below them. The creature must be five kilometres long, perhaps more.

“This is one of their domains,” the Estodien went on. “They have seven or eight others distributed round the outskirts of the galaxy. No one is entirely sure quite how many there are. The behemothaurs are as big as mountains and as old as the hills. They are sentient, allegedly, the remnant of a species or civilisation which Sublimed more than a billion years ago. Though again, only by repute. This one is called the Sansemin. It is in the power of those who are our allies in this matter.”

Quilan looked inquiringly at the older male. Visquile, still hunched over holding his glittering stave, made a shrugging motion.

“You’ll meet them, or their representatives, Major, but you won’t know who they are.”

Quilan nodded, and went back to looking out the window. He considered asking why they had come to this place, but thought the better of it.

“How long will we be here, Estodien?” he asked instead.

“For a while,” Visquile said, smiling. He watched Quilan’s face for a moment, then said, “Perhaps two or three moons, Major. We won’t be alone. There are already Chelgrians here; a group of about twenty monks of the Abremile Order. They inhabit the temple ship Soulhaven, which is inside the creature. Well, most of it is. As I understand it only the fuselage and life support units of the temple ship are actually present. The vessel had to leave its drive units behind, somewhere outside, in space.” He waved one hand. “The behemothaurs are sensitive to force-field technologies, we’re told.”

The superior of the temple ship was tall and elegant and dressed in a graceful interpretation of the order’s simple robes. He met them on a broad landing platform at the rear of what looked like a giant, gnarled, hollowed-out fruit stuck onto the behemothaur’s skin. They stepped from the airship.

“Estodien Visquile.”

“Estodien Quetter.” Visquile made the introductions.

Quetter bowed fractionally to Eweirl and Quilan. “This way,” he said, indicating a cleft in the behemothaur’s skin.

Eighty metres along a gently sloping tunnel floored with something like soft wood they came to a giant ribbed chamber whose atmosphere was oppressively humid and suffused with a vaguely charnel smell. The temple ship Soulhaven was a dark cylinder ninety metres in length and thirty across, taking up about half of the damp, warm chamber. It appeared to be tethered by vines to the chamber’s walls, and what looked like creepers had grown over much of its hull.

Quilan had, over the years of his soldiering, become used to encountering makeshift camps, temporary command posts, recently requisitioned command HQs and so on. Some part of him took in the feel of the place — the extemporised organisation, the mix of clutter and orderliness — and decided that the Soulhaven had been here for about a month.

A pair of large drones, each the shape of two fat cones set base to base, floated up to them in the dimness, humming gently.

Visquile and Quetter both bowed. The two floating machines tipped briefly towards them.

“You are Quilan,” said one. He could not tell which.

“Yes,” he said.

Both machines floated very close to him. He felt the fur around his face stand on end, and smelled something he could not identify. A breeze blew round his feet.

QUILAN MISSION GREAT SERVICE HERE TO PREPARE TEST LATER TO DIE AFRAID?

He was aware that he had flinched backwards and had almost taken a step away. There had been no sound, just the words ringing in his head. Was he being spoken to by the gone-before?

AFRAID? the voice said in his head once more.

“No,” he said. “Not afraid, not of death.”

CORRECT DEATH NOTHING.

The two machines withdrew to where they had hovered before.

WELCOME ALL. SOON PREPARE.

Quilan sensed both Visquile and Eweirl rock back as if caught in a sudden gust of wind, though the other Estodien, Quetter, did not budge. The two machines made the tipping motion again. Apparently they were dismissed; they returned down the tunnel to the outside.

Their own quarters were, mercifully, here on the exterior of the giant creature, in the giant hollowed-out bulb they had landed near. The air was still cloyingly humid and thick, but if it smelled of anything it smelled of vegetation and so seemed fresh in comparison to the chamber where the Soulhaven rested.

Their luggage had already been off-loaded. Once they had settled, they were taken on a tour of the behemothaur’s exterior by the same small airship they’d arrived on. Anur, a gangly, awkward-looking young male who was the Soulhaven’s most junior monk, escorted them, explaining something of airspheres’ legendary history and hypothesised ecology.

“We think there are thousands of the behemothaurs,” he said as they slid under the bulging belly of the creature, beneath hanging jungles of skin foliage. “And almost a hundred megalithine and gigalithine globular entities. They’re even bigger; the biggest are the size of small continents. People are even less sure whether they’re sentient or not. We shouldn’t see any of those or the other behemothaurs because we’re so low in the lobe. They pretty well never descend this far. Buoyancy problems.”

“How does the Sansemin manage to stay down here?” Quilan asked.

The young monk looked at Visquile before answering. “It’s been modified,” he said. He pointed up at a dozen or so dangling pods large enough to contain two full-grown Chelgrians. “Here you can see some of the subsidiary fauna being grown. These will become raptor scouts when they bud and hatch.”

Quilan and the two Estodiens sat with bowed heads in the innermost recessional space of the Soulhaven, a nearly spherical cavity only a few metres in diameter and surrounded by two-metre-thick walls made from substrates holding millions of departed Chelgrian souls. The three males were arranged in a triangle facing inwards, fur-naked.

It was the evening of the day they had arrived, by the time the Soulhaven kept. To Quilan it felt like the middle of the night. Outside, it would be the same eternal but ever changing day as it had been for a billion and a half years or more.

The two Estodiens had communicated with the Chelgrian-Puen and their on-board shades for a few moments without Quilan being involved, though even so he had experienced a sort of incoherent back-wash from their conversations while they’d lasted. It had been like standing in a great cavern and hearing people talking somewhere in the distance.

Then it was his turn. The voice was loud, a shout in his head.

QUILAN. WE ARE CHELGRIAN-PUEN.

They had told him to try to think his answers, to sub-vocalise. He thought, ~ I am honoured to speak to you.

YOU: REASON HERE?

~ I don’t know. I am being trained. I think you might know more about my mission than I do.

CORRECT. GIVEN PRESENT KNOWLEDGE: WILLING?

~ I will do what is required.

MEANS YOUR DEATH.

~ I realise that.

MEANS HEAVEN FOR MANY.

~ That is a trade I am willing to make.

NOT WOROSEI QUILAN.

~ I know.

QUESTIONS?

~ May I ask whatever I like?

YES.

~ All right. Why am I here?

TO BE TRAINED.

~ But why particularly this place?

SECURITY. PROPHYLACTIC MEASURE. DENIABILITY. DANGER. INSISTENCE OF ALLIES IN THIS.

~ Who are our allies?

OTHER QUESTIONS?

~ What am I to do at the end of my training?

KILL.

~ Who?

MANY. OTHER QUESTIONS?

~ Where will I be sent?

DISTANT. NOT CHELGRIAN SPHERE.

~ Does my mission involve the composer Mahrai Ziller?

YES.

~ Am I to kill him?

IF SO, REFUSE?

~ I haven’t said that.

QUALMS?

~ If it was to be so, I would like to know the reasoning.

IF NO REASONS GIVEN, REFUSE?

~ I don’t know. There are some decisions you just can’t anticipate until you must really make them. You’re not going to tell me whether my mission involves killing him or not?

CORRECT. CLARIFICATION IN TIME. BEFORE MISSION BEGINS. PREPARATION AND TRAINING FIRST.

~ How long will I be here?

OTHER QUESTIONS?

~ What did you mean by danger, earlier?

PREPARATION AND TRAINING. OTHER QUESTIONS?

~ No, thank you.

WE WOULD READ YOU.

~ What do you mean?

LOOK IN YOUR MIND.

~ You want to look into my mind?

CORRECT.

~ Now?

YES.

~ Very well. Do I have to do anything?

He was briefly dizzy, and was aware of swaying in his seat.

DONE. UNHARMED?

~ I think so.

CLEAR.

~ You mean… I am clear?

CORRECT. TOMORROW: PREPARATION AND TRAINING.

The two Estodiens sat smiling at him.

He could only sleep fitfully, and woke from another dream of drowning to blink into the strange thick darkness. He fumbled for his visor and with the grey-blue image of the small room’s curved walls before him, rose from the curl-pad and went to stand by the single window, where a warm breeze trickled slowly in and then seemed to die, as though exhausted by the effort. The visor showed a ghostly image of the window’s rough frame, and, outside, the vaguest hint of clouds.

He took off the visor. The darkness appeared utter, and he stood there letting it soak into him until he thought he saw a flash, somewhere high above and blue with distance. He wondered if it was lightning; Anur had said it happened between cloud and air masses when they passed each other, rising and falling along the thermal gradients of the sphere’s chaotic atmospheric circulation.

He saw a few more flashes, one of them of an appreciable length, although still seeming far, far away. He slipped the visor back on and held his hand up with claws extended, bringing two tips almost together; just a couple of millimetres apart. There. The flash had been that long.

Another flash. Seen with the visors, it was so bright the visor’s optics turned the centre of the tiny flash black to protect his night vision. Instead of just the minuscule spark itself, he saw the whole of a cloud system light up as well, the rolls and towers of the piled and distant vapour picked out in a remote blue wash of luminescence that vanished almost as soon as he became aware of it.

He took the visor off again and listened for the noise produced by those flashes. All he heard was a faint, enveloping noise like a strong wind heard from far away, seeming to come from all around him and course up through his bones. It appeared to contain within it frequencies deep enough to be distant rumbles of thunder, but they were low and continuous and unwavering, and try as he might he could not detect any change or peak in that long slow flow of half-felt sound.

There are no echoes here, he thought. No solid ground or cliffs anywhere for sound to reflect off. The behemothaurs absorb sound like floating forests, and inside them their living tissues soak up all noise.

Acoustically dead. The phrase came back to him. Worosei had done some work with the university music department, and had shown him a strange room lined with foam pyramids. Acoustically dead, she’d told him. It felt and sounded true; their voices seemed to die as each word left their lips, every sound exposed and alone, without resonance.

“Your Soulkeeper is more than a normal Soulkeeper, Quilan,” Visquile told him. They were alone in the innermost recessional space of the Soulhaven, the following day. This was his first briefing. “It performs the normal functions of such a device, keeping a record of your mind-state; however it also has the capacity to carry another mind-state within it. You will, in a sense, have another person aboard when you undertake your mission. There is still more to come, but do you have anything you would like to say or ask about that?”

“Who will this person be, Estodien?”

“We are not certain yet. Ideally — according to the mission-profiling people in Intelligence, or rather according to their machines — it would be a copy of Sholan Hadesh Huyler, the late Admiral-General who was amongst those souls you were charged with recovering from the Military Institute on Aorme. However as the Winter Storm is lost, presumed destroyed, and the original substrate was aboard the vessel, we will probably have to go with a second choice. That choice is still being discussed.”

“Why is this considered necessary, Estodien?”

“Think of it as having a co-pilot aboard, Major. You will have somebody to talk to, somebody to advise you, to talk things over with, while you are on your mission. This may not seem necessary now, but there is a reason we believe it may be advisable.”

“Do I take it that it will be a long mission?”

“Yes. It may take several months. The minimum duration would be about thirty days. We can’t be any more precise because it depends partly on your mode of transport. You may be taken to your destination aboard one of our own craft, or on a faster vessel from one of the older Involved civilisations, possibly one belonging to the Culture.”

“Does the mission involve the Culture, Estodien?”

“It does. You are being sent to the Culture world Masaq’, an Orbital.”

“That is where Mahrai Ziller lives.”

“Correct.”

“Am I to kill him?”

“That is not your mission. Your covering story is that you are going there to try to convince him to return to Chel.”

“And my real mission?”

“We will come to that in due course. And therein lies a precedent.”

“A precedent, Estodien?”

“Your true mission will not be clear to you when you start it. You will know the covering story and you will almost certainly have a feeling that there is more to your task than that, but you will not know what it is.”

“So am I to be given something like sealed orders, Estodien?”

“Something like that. But those orders will be locked inside your own mind. Your memory of this time — probably from some time just after the war to the end of your training here — will only gradually come back to you as you near the completion of your mission. By the time you recall this conversation — at the end of which you will know what your mission really is, though not yet exactly how you will accomplish it — you should be quite close, though not in exactly the correct position.”

“Can memory be drip-fed so accurately, Estodien?”

“It can, though the experience may be a little disorienting, and that is the most important reason for giving you your co-pilot. The reason we are doing this is specifically because the mission involves the Culture. We are told that they never read people’s minds, that the inside of your head is the one place they regard as sacrosanct. You have heard this?”

“Yes.”

“We believe that this is probably true, but your mission is of sufficient importance for us to take precautions in case it is not. We imagine that if they do read minds, the most likely time this will happen will be when the subject concerned boards one of their ships, especially one of their warships. If we are able to arrange that you are taken to Masaq’ on such a vessel, and it does look inside your head, all it will find, even at quite a deep level, is your innocent covering story.”

“We believe, and have verified through experiments, that such a scanning process could be carried out without your knowledge. To go any deeper, to discover the memories we will initially hide even from you, this scanning process will have to reveal itself; you will be aware that it is taking place, or at the very least you will know that it has taken place. If that should happen, Major, your mission will end early. You will die.”

Quilan nodded, thinking. “Estodien, has any sort of experiment been carried out on me yet? I mean, have I already lost any memories, whether I agreed to such a thing or not?”

“No. The experiments I mentioned were carried out on others. We are very confident that we know what we are doing, Major.”

“So the deeper I go into my mission the more I’ll know about it?”

“Correct.”

“And the personality, the co-pilot, will it know everything from the start?”

“It will.”

“And it cannot be read by a Culture scan?”

“It can, but it would require a deeper and more detailed reading than that required for a biological brain. Your Soulkeeper will be like your citadel, Quilan; your own brain is the curtain wall. If the citadel has fallen, the walls are either long since stormed, or irrelevant.

“Now. As I said, there is more to tell about your Soulkeeper. It contains, or will contain, a small payload and what is commonly known as a matter transmitter. Apparently it does not really transmit matter, but it has the same effect. I freely confess the importance of the distinction escapes me.”

“And this is in something the size of a Soulkeeper?”

“Yes.”

“Is this our own technology, Estodien?”

“That is not something that you need to know, Major. All that matters is whether it works or not.” Visquile hesitated, then said, “Our own scientists and technologists make and apply astonishing new discoveries all the time, as I’m sure you are aware.”

“Of course, Estodien. What would the payload you mentioned be?”

“You may never know that, Major. At the moment, I myself do not know exactly what it is either, though I will be told in due course, before your mission properly begins. At the moment all I know is something of the effect it will have.”

“And that would be what, Estodien?”

“As you might imagine, a degree of damage, of destruction.”

Quilan was silent for a few moments. He was aware of the presence of the millions of gone-before personalities stored in the substrates around him. “Am I to understand that the payload will be transmitted into my Soulkeeper?”

“No, it was put in place along with the Soulkeeper device.”

“So it will be transmitted from the device?”

“Yes. You will control the transmission of the payload.”

“I will?”

“That is what you are here to be trained for, Major. You will be instructed in the use of the device so that when the time comes you are able to transmit the payload into the desired location.”

Quilan blinked a few times. “I may have fallen a little behind with recent advances in technology, but—”

“I would forget about that, Major. Previously existing technologies are of little importance in this matter. This is new. There is no precedent that we know of for this sort of process; no book to refer to. You will be helping to write that book.”

“I see.”

“Let me tell you more about the Culture world Masaq’.” The Estodien gathered his robes about him and settled himself further into the cramped curl-pad. “It is what they call an Orbital; a band of matter in the shape of a very thin bracelet, orbiting round a sun — in this case the star Lacelere — in the same zone one would expect to find an habitable planet.

“Orbitals are on a different scale from our own space habitats; Masaq’, like most Culture Orbitals, has a diameter of approximately three million kilometres and therefore a circumference of nearly ten million kilometres. Its width at the foot of its containing walls is about six thousand kilometres. Those walls are about a thousand kilometres high, and open at the top; the atmosphere is held in by the apparent gravity created by the world’s spin.

“The size of the structure is not arbitrary; Culture Orbitals are built so that the same speed of revolution which produces one standard gravity also creates a day-night cycle of one of their standard days. Local night is produced when any given part of the Orbital’s interior is facing directly away from the sun. They are made from exotic materials and held together principally by force fields.

“Floating in space in the centre of the Orbital, equidistant from all places on its rim, is the Hub. This is where the AI substrate that the Culture calls a Mind exists. The machine oversees all aspects of the Orbital’s running. There are thousands of subsidiary systems tasked with overseeing all but the most critical procedures, but the Hub can assume direct control of any and all of them at the same time.

“The Hub has millions of human-form representative entities called avatars with which it deals on a one-to-one basis with its inhabitants. It is theoretically capable of running each of those and every other system on the Orbital directly while communicating individually with every human and drone present on the world, plus a number of other ships and Minds.

“Each Orbital is different and each Hub has its own personality. Some Orbitals have only a few components of land; these are usually square parcels of ground and sea called Plates. On an Orbital as broad as Masaq’ these are normally synonymous with continents. Before an Orbital is finished, in the sense of forming a closed loop like Masaq’, they can be as small as two Plates, still three million kilometres apart but joined only by force fields. Such an Orbital might have a total population of just ten million humans. Masaq’ is towards the other end of the scale, with over fifty billion people.

“Masaq’ is known for the high rate of back-up of its inhabitants. This is sometimes held to be because a lot of them take part in dangerous sports, but really the practice dates from the world’s inception, when it was realised that Lacelere is not a perfectly stable star and that there is a chance that it could flare with sufficient violence to kill people exposed on the surface of the world.

“Mahrai Ziller has lived there for the last seven years. He appears to be content to remain on the world. As I say, you will, seemingly, be going there to attempt to persuade him to renounce his exile and return to Chel.”

“I see.”

“Whereas your real mission is to facilitate the destruction of Masaq’ Hub and so cause the deaths of a significant proportion of its inhabitants.”

The avatar was going to show him round one of the manufactories, beneath a Bulkhead Range. They were in an underground car, a comfortably fitted-out capsule which sped beneath the underside of the Orbital’s surface, in the vacuum of space. They had swung half a million kilometres round the world, with the stars shining through panels in the floor.

The underground car line spanned the gap beneath the gigantic A-shape of the Bulkhead Range on a monofil-supported sling-bridge two thousand kilometres long. Now the car was hurtling to a stop near the centre, to ascend vertically into the factory space, hundreds of kilometres above.

~ You all right, Major?

~ Fine. You?

~ The same. Mission target just come through?

~ Yes. How am I doing?

~ You’re fine. No obvious physical signs. You sure you’re all right?

~ Perfectly.

~ And we’re still Go status?

~ Yes, we’re still Go.

The silver-skinned avatar turned to look at him. “You’re sure you won’t be bored seeing a factory, Major?”

“Not one producing starships, not at all. Though you must be running out of places to distract me with,” he said.

“Well, it’s a big Orbital.”

“There’s one place I would like to see.”

“Where’s that?”

“Your place. The Hub.”

The avatar smiled. “Why, certainly.”