Look to Windward

Some Ways of Dying

The ship lift sat underneath the falls; when it was needed, its counter-weighted cradle swung slowly up and out from the swirling pool at the foot of the torrent, trailing veils and mists of its own. Behind the plunging curtain of water, the giant counter-weight moved slowly down through its subterranean pool, balancing the dock-sized cradle as it rose until it slotted into a wide groove carved into the lip of the falls. Once home, its gates gradually forced themselves open against the current, so that the cradle presented a sort of balcony of water jutting out beyond the river’s kilometre-wide drop-off point.

Two bullet-shaped vessels powered upstream from either side like giant fish; they trailed long booms which stretched out to form a wide V that funnelled the oncoming barge towards the cradle. Once the gates had closed again and the barge was safely enclosed, the booms retracted, the cradle opened its side caissons to the onrushing force of the water and the extra weight slowly overcame the balancing mass of the counter-weight, now deep under the pool beneath.

Cradle and barge tipped slowly outwards and down, descending amongst the thunder and mist towards the turmoil of waters below.

Ziller, dressed in a waistcoat and leggings that were thoroughly saturated, stood with the Hub avatar on a forward-facing promenade deck just below the bridge of the barge Ucalegon, on the River Jhree, Toluf Plate. The Chelgrian shook himself, unleashing spray, as the cradle’s downstream gates opened and the barge made its way, thudding and bumping against the inflatable sides of the cradle, into the maelstrom of clashing waves and surging hummocks of water beyond.

He leant over to the avatar and pointed up through the churning clouds of vapour towards the falls’ lip, two hundred metres above. “What would happen if the barge missed the cradle up there?” he yelled over the sound of the waterfall.

The avatar, looking drenched but uncaring in a thin dark suit which clung to its silvery frame, shrugged. “Then,” it said loudly, “there would be a disaster.”

“And if the downstream gates opened while the cradle was still at the top of the falls?”

The creature nodded. “Again, disaster.”

“And if the cradle’s supporting arms gave way?”

“Disaster.”

“Or if the cradle started to descend too soon?”

“Ditto.”

“Or either set of gates gave way before the cradle reached the pool?”

“Guess what.”

“So this thing does have an anti-gravity keel or something, doesn’t it?” Ziller shouted. “As back-up, redundancy? Yes?”

The avatar shook its head. “No.” Droplets fell from its nose and ears.

Ziller sighed and shook his head, too. “No, I didn’t really think so.”

The avatar smiled and leant towards him. “I take it as an encouraging sign that you’re beginning to ask that sort of question after the experience concerned is past the dangerous stage.”

“So I’m becoming as thoughtlessly blasé about risk and death as your inhabitants.”

The avatar nodded enthusiastically. “Yes. Encouraging, isn’t it?”

“No. Depressing.”

The avatar laughed. It looked up at the sides of the gorge as the river funnelled its way onwards to join Masaq’ Great River via Ossuliera City. “We’d better get back,” the silver-skinned creature said. “Ilom Dolince will be dying soon, and Nisil Tchasole coming back.”

“Oh, of course. Wouldn’t want to miss either of your grotesque little ceremonies, would we?”

They turned and walked round the corner of the deck. The barge powered its way through the chaos of waves, its bows smacking into surging piles of white and green water and throwing great curtains of spray into the air to land like torrential squalls of rain across the decks. The buffeted vessel tipped and heaved. Behind it, the cradle was slowly and steadily submerging itself again in the raging currents.

A lump of water crashed onto the deck behind them, turning the promenade into a surging river half a metre deep. Ziller had to drop to all threes and use one hand on the deck rail to steady himself as they made their way through the torrent to the nearest doors. The avatar walked sloshing through the stream surging round its knees as though indifferent. It held the doors open and helped Ziller through.

In the foyer, Ziller shook himself again, spattering the gleaming wooden walls and embroidered hangings. The avatar just stood and the water fell off it, leaving its silvery skin and its matte clothes completely dry while the water drained away from its feet across the decking.

Ziller dragged a hand through his face fur and patted his ears. He looked at the immaculate figure standing smiling opposite him while he dripped. He wrung some water out of his waistcoat as he inspected the avatar’s skin and clothing for any remaining sign of moisture. It appeared to be perfectly dry. “That is a very annoying trait,” he told it.

“I did offer earlier to shelter both of us from the spray,” the avatar reminded him. The Chelgrian pulled one of his waistcoat pockets inside out and watched the resulting stream of water hit the deck. “But you said you wanted fully to appreciate the experience with all your senses including that of touch,” the avatar continued. “Which I have to say I did think was a little casual at the time.”

Ziller looked ruefully at his sodden pipe and then at the silver-skinned creature. “And that,” he said, “is another one.”

A small drone carrying a very large, neatly folded white towel of extreme fluffiness banked round a corner and sped along the passage towards them, coming to a sudden stop at their side. The avatar took the towel and nodded to the other machine, which dipped and raced away again.

“Here,” the avatar said, handing the Chelgrian the towel.

“Thank you.”

They turned to walk down the passageway, passing saloons where small groups of people were watching the tumbling waters and roiling mists of spray outside.

“Where’s our Major Quilan today?” Ziller asked, rubbing his face in the towel.

“Visiting Neremety, with Kabe, to see some sworl islands. It’s the first day of the local school’s Tempt Season.”

Ziller had seen this spectacle himself on another Plate six or seven years earlier. Tempt Season was when the adult islands released the algal blooms they’d been storing to paint fabulous swirling patterns across the craterine bays of their shallow sea. Allegedly the display persuaded the sea-floor-dwelling calves of the year before to surface and blossom into new versions of themselves.

“Neremety?” he asked. “Where’s that?”

“Half a million klicks away if it’s a stride. You’re safe for now.”

“How very reassuring. Aren’t you running out of places to distract our little message-boy with? Last I heard you were showing him round a factory.” Ziller pronounced the last word through a snorting laugh.

The avatar looked hurt. “A starship factory, if you please,” it said, “but yes, a factory nevertheless. Only because he asked, I might add. And I’ve no shortage of places to show him, Ziller. There are places on Masaq’ you haven’t even heard of you’d love to visit if only you knew about them.”

“There are?” Ziller stopped and stared at the avatar.

It halted too, grinning. “Of course.” It spread its arms. “I wouldn’t want you to know all my secrets at once, would I?”

Ziller walked on, drying his fur and looking askance at the silver-skinned creature stepping lightly at his side. “You are more female than male, you know that, don’t you?” he said.

The avatar raised its brows. “You really think so?”

“Definitely.”

The avatar looked amused. “He wants to see Hub next,” it told him.

Ziller frowned. “Come to think of it, I’ve never been there myself. Is there much to see?”

“There’s a viewing gallery. Good outlook on the whole surface, obviously, but no better than most people get when they arrive, unless they’re in a terrible hurry and fly straight up to the under-surface.” It shrugged. “Apart from that, not much to see.”

“I take it all your fabulous machinery is just as boring to look at as I imagine it to be.”

“If not more so.”

“Well, that ought to distract him for a good couple of minutes.” Ziller towelled under his arms and — rising to walk, stooped, on his hind legs alone — around his midlimb. “Have you mentioned to the wretch that I may well not appear at the first performance of my own symphony?”

“Not yet. I believe Kabe might be raising the subject today.”

“Think he’ll do the honourable thing and stay away?”

“I really have no idea. If the suspicions we share are correct, E. H. Tersono will probably try and talk him into going.” The avatar flashed Ziller a wide smile. “It will employ some sort of argument based on the idea of not giving in to what it will probably characterise as your childish blackmail, I imagine.”

“Yes, something as shallow as that.”

“How fares Expiring Light?” the avatar asked. “Are the primer pieces ready yet? We’re only five days away and that’s close to the minimum time people are used to.”

“Yes, they’re ready. I just want to sleep on a couple of them one more night, but I’ll release them tomorrow.” The Chelgrian glanced at the avatar. “You’re quite sure this is the way to do it?”

“What, using primer pieces?”

“Yes. Won’t people lose out on the freshness of the first performance? Whether I conduct it or not.”

“Not at all. They’ll have heard the rough tunes, the outlines of the themes, that’s all. So they’ll find the basic ideas recognisable, although not familiar. That’ll let them appreciate the full work all the more.” The avatar slapped the Chelgrian across the shoulders, raising a fine spray from his waistcoat. Ziller winced; the slight-looking creature was stronger than it appeared. “Ziller, trust us; this way works. Oh, and having listened to the draft you’ve sent, it is quite magnificent. My congratulations.”

“Thank you.” Ziller continued drying his flanks with the towel, then looked at the avatar.

“Yes?” it said.

“I was wondering.”

“What?”

“Something I’ve wondered about ever since I came here, something I’ve never asked you, first of all because I was worried what the answer would be, later because I suspected I already knew the answer.”

“Goodness. What can it be?” the avatar asked, blinking.

“If you tried, if any Mind tried, could you impersonate my style?” the Chelgrian asked. “Could you write a piece — a symphony, say — that would appear, to the critical appraiser, to be by me, and which, when I heard it, I’d imagine being proud to have written?”

The avatar frowned as it walked. It clasped its hands behind its back. It took a few more steps. “Yes, I imagine that would be possible.”

“Would it be easy?”

“No. No more easy than any complicated task.”

“But you could do it much more quickly than I could?”

“I’d have to suppose so.”

“Hmm.” Ziller paused. The avatar turned to face him. Behind Ziller, the rocks and veil trees of the deepening gorge moved swiftly past. The barge rocked gently beneath their feet. “So what,” the Chelgrian asked, “is the point of me or anybody else writing a symphony, or anything else?”

The avatar raised its brows in surprise. “Well, for one thing, if you do it, it’s you who gets the feeling of achievement.”

“Ignoring the subjective. What would be the point for those listening to it?”

“They’d know it was one of their own species, not a Mind, who created it.”

“Ignoring that, too; suppose they weren’t told it was by an AI, or didn’t care.”

“If they hadn’t been told then the comparison isn’t complete; information is being concealed. If they don’t care, then they’re unlike any group of humans I’ve ever encountered.”

“But if you can—”

“Ziller, are you concerned that Minds — AIs, if you like — can create, or even just appear to create, original works of art?”

“Frankly, when they’re the sort of original works of art that I create, yes.”

“Ziller, it doesn’t matter. You have to think like a mountain climber.”

“Oh, do I?”

“Yes. Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and — in some cases — permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and enjoying a light picnic.”

“If I was one of those climbers I’d be pretty damned annoyed.”

“Well, it is considered rather impolite to land an aircraft on a summit which people are at that moment struggling up to the hard way, but it can and does happen. Good manners indicate that the picnic ought to be shared and that those who arrived by aircraft express awe and respect for the accomplishment of the climbers.”

“The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they’d wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages.” The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. “How far do I have to take this analogy, Cr Ziller?”

“You’ve made your point, but this mountain climber still wonders if he ought to re-educate his soul to the joys of flight and stepping out onto someone else’s summit.”

“Better to create your own. Come on; I’ve a dying man to see on his way.”

Ilom Dolince lay on his death bed, surrounded by friends and family. The awnings which had covered the aft upper deck of the barge while it had descended the falls had been withdrawn, leaving the bed open to the air. Ilom Dolince sat up, half submerged in floating pillows and lying on a puff mattress that looked, Ziller thought, appropriately like a cumulus cloud.

The Chelgrian hung back, at the rear of the crescent of sixty or so people arranged standing or sitting round the bed. The avatar went to stand near the old man and took his hand, bending to talk to him. It nodded then beckoned over to Ziller, who pretended not to see, and made a show of being distracted by a gaudy bird flying low over the milky white waters of the river.

“Ziller,” the avatar’s voice said from the Chelgrian’s pen terminal. “Please come over. Ilom Dolince would like to meet you.”

“Eh? Oh. Yes, of course,” he said. He felt quite acutely awkward.

“Cr Ziller, I am privileged to meet you.” The old man shook the Chelgrian’s hand. In fact he did not look that old, though his voice sounded weak. His skin was less lined and spotted than that of some humans Ziller had seen, and his head hair had not fallen out, though it had lost its pigment and so appeared white. His handshake was not strong, but Ziller had certainly felt limper ones.

“Ah. Thank you. I’m flattered you wanted to, ah, take up some of your, ah, time with meeting an alien note dabbler.”

The white-haired man in the bed looked regretful, even pained. “Oh, Cr Ziller,” he said. “I’m sorry. You’re a little uncomfortable with this, aren’t you? I’m being very selfish. It didn’t occur to me my dying might—”

“No, no, I, I… Well, yes.” Ziller felt his nose colour. He glanced round the other people nearest the bed. They looked sympathetic, understanding. He hated them. “It just seems strange. That’s all.”

“May I, Composer?” the man said. He stretched out one hand and Ziller allowed one of his to be grasped again. The grip was lighter this time. “Our ways must seem odd to you.”

“No odder than ours to you, I’m sure.”

“I am very ready to die, Cr Ziller.” Ilom Dolince smiled. “I’ve lived four hundred and fifteen years, sir. I’ve seen the Chebalyths of Eyske in their Skydark migration, watched field liners sculpt solar flares in the High Nudrun, I’ve held my own newborn in my hands, flown the caverns of Sart and dived the tube-arches of Lirouthale. I’ve seen so much, done so much, that even with my neural lace trying to tie my elsewhere memories as seamlessly as it can into what’s in my head, I can tell I’ve lost a lot from in here.” He tapped one temple. “Not from my memory, but from my personality. And so it’s time to change or move on or just stop. I’ve put a version of me into a group mind in case anybody wants to ask me anything at any time, but really I can’t be bothered living any more. At least, not once I’ve seen Ossuliera City, which I’ve been saving for this moment.” He smiled at the avatar. “Maybe I’ll come back when the end of the universe happens.”

“You also said you wanted to be revived into an especially nubile cheerleader if Notromg Town ever won the Orbital Cup,” the avatar said solemnly. It nodded and took a breath in through its teeth. “I’d go with the universe-ending thing, if I were you.”

“So you see, sir?” Ilom Dolince said, his eyes glittering. “I’m stopping.” One thin hand patted Ziller’s. “I’m only sorry I won’t be here to listen to your new work, maestro. I was very tempted to stay, but… Well, there is always something to keep us, if we are not determined, isn’t there?”

“I dare say.”

“I hope you’re not offended, sir. Little else would have made me even think of delaying. You’re not offended, are you?”

“Would it make any difference if I was, Mr Dolince?” Ziller asked.

“It would, sir. If I thought you were especially hurt, I could still delay, though I might be straining the patience of these good people,” Dolince said, looking round those gathered by his bedside. There was a low chorus of friendly-sounding dissent. “You see, Cr Ziller? I have made my peace. I don’t think I have ever been so well thought of.”

“Then I’d be honoured to be included in that regard.” He patted the human’s hand.

“Is it a great work, Cr Ziller? I hope it is.”

“I can’t say, Mr Dolince,” Ziller told him. “I’m pleased with it.” He sighed. “Experience would indicate that provides no guide whatsoever either to its initial reception or eventual reputation.”

The man in the bed smiled widely. “I hope it goes wonderfully well, Cr Ziller.”

“So do I, sir.”

Ilom Dolince closed his eyes for a moment or two. When they flickered open his grip gradually loosened. “An honour, Cr Ziller,” he whispered.

Ziller let the human’s hand go and stepped gratefully away as others flowed in around him.

Ossuliera City emerged from the shadows round a corner of the gorge. It was partly carved from the fawn-coloured cliffs of the chasm itself, and partly from stones brought in from other areas of the world, and beyond. The River Jhree was tamed here, running straight and deep and calm in a single great channel from which smaller canals and docks diverged, arched over by delicate bridges of foametal and wood both living and dead.

The quaysides on either bank were great flat platforms of golden sandstone running into the blue-hazed distance, speckled with people and animals, shadeplant and pavilions, leaping fountains and tall twisted columns of extravagantly latticed metals and glittering minerals.

Tall and stately barges sat moored by steps where troupes of chaurgresiles sat grooming each other with solemn intensity. The mirror sails of smaller craft caught fitful, swirling breezes to slide angled shadows along the quiet waters behind and cast flitting, shimmering reflections along the bustling quays to either side.

Above, the stepped city rose in set-back terrace after set-back terrace from these vast and busy shelves of stone; awnings and umbreltrees dotted the galleries and piazzas, canals disappeared into vaulted tunnels cut into the chiselled cliffs, perfume fires sent thin coils of violet and orange smoke rolling up towards the pale blue sky, where flocks of pure white lucent ploughtails wheeled on outstretched wings inscribing silent spirals in the air, and arcing overhead a layered succession of higher and longer and more tenuously poised bridges bowed like rainbows made solid in the misty air, their intricately carved and dazzlingly inlaid surfaces brimming with flowers and strung with leafchain, storeycreep and veilmoss.

Music played, echoing amongst the canyons, decks and bridges of the city. The barge’s sudden appearance caused a volley of excited trumpeting from a shambling pack of cumbrosaurs arranged on a flight of steps descending to the river.

Ziller, at the deck rail, turned from the tumult of the view to look back to the bed where Ilom Dolince lay. A few people seemed to be crying. The avatar was holding a hand over the man’s forehead. It smoothed its silver fingers down over his eyes.

The Chelgrian watched the beautiful city glide past for a while. When he looked back again a long grey Displacement drone was hovering over the bed. The people gathered round stood back a little, forming a rough circle. A silvery field shimmered in the air where the man’s body was, then shrank to a point and vanished. The bedclothes settled back softly over the place where the body had been.

“People always look up to the sun at such moments,” he remembered Kabe pointing out once. What he was witnessing was the conventional method of disposing of the dead both here and throughout most of the rest of the Culture. The body had been Displaced into the core of the local star. And, as Kabe had pointed out, if they could see it, the people present always looked up to that sun, even though it would usually be a million years or more before the photons formed from the dispatched corpse would shine down upon wherever it was they stood.

A million years. Would this artificial, carefully maintained world still be here after all that time? He doubted it. The Culture itself would probably be gone by then. Chel certainly would. Perhaps people looked up now because they knew there would be nobody around to look up then.

There was another ceremony to be carried out on the barge before it left Ossuliera City. A woman called Nisil Tchasole was to be reborn. Stored in mind-state only eight hundred years earlier, she had been a combatant in the Idiran War. She’d wanted to be reawakened in time to see the light from the second of the Twin Novae shine down upon Masaq’. A clone of her original body had been grown for her and her personality was to be quickened inside it within the hour, so she would have the next five or so days to re-acclimatise herself to life before the second nova burst upon the local skies.

The pairing of this rebirth with Ilom Dolince’s death was supposed to take some of the sadness out of the man’s departure, but Ziller found the very neatness of the pairing trite and contrived. He didn’t wait to see this overly neat revival; he jumped ship when it docked, walked around for a while and then took the underground back to Aquime.

“Yes, I was a twin, once. The story is well known, I think, and very much on record. There are any number of tellings and interpretations of it. There are even some fictive and musical pieces based on it, some more accurate than others. I can recommend—”

“Yes, I know all that, but I’d like you to tell the story.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure.”

“Oh, all right then.”

The avatar and the Chelgrian stood in a little eight-person module, underneath the outer-facing surface of the Orbital. The craft was an all-media general run-about, capable of travelling under water, flying in atmosphere or, as now, voyaging in space, albeit at purely relativistic speeds. The two of them stood facing forward; the screen started at their feet and swept above their heads. It was like standing in the front of a glass-nosed spaceship, except that no glass ever made could have transmitted such a faithful representation of the view ahead and around.

It was two days after the death of Ilom Dolince, three before the concert in the Stullien Bowl. Ziller, his symphony completed and rehearsals under way, felt consumed by a familiar restlessness. Trying to think of sights on Masaq’ he hadn’t yet seen, he’d asked to be shown what the Orbital looked like from underneath as it sped by, and so he and the avatar had descended by sub-Plate access to the small space port deep under Aquime.

The plateau Aquime sat on was mostly hollow, the space inside taken up by old ship stores and mostly mothballed general-product factories. Sub-Plate access over the majority of the Orbital’s area was a matter of descending a hundred metres or less; from Aquime there was a good kilometre straight down to open space.

The eight-person module was slowing now, relative to the world above them. It was facing spinwards, so the effect was of the Orbital fifty metres above their heads starting to move past overhead, slowly at first but gradually more and more quickly, while the stars beneath their feet and to either side, which had been slowly wheeling, appeared now to be slowing down to a stop.

The undersurface of the world was a greyly shining expanse of what looked like metal, lit dimly by the starlight and the sunlight reflected from some of the system’s nearer planets. There was something intimidatingly flat and perfect about the vast plain hanging above their heads, Ziller thought, for all that it was dotted with masts and access points and woven by the underground car tracks.

The tracks rose slowly in places to cross other routes which sank halfway into the fabric of the under-surface before returning to the vast and level plain. In other places the tracks swung round in vast loops that were tens or even hundreds of kilometres across, creating a vastly complicated lacework of grooves and lines etched into the under-surface of the world like a fabulously intricate inscription upon a bracelet. Ziller watched some of the cars zip across the under-surface, in ones or twos or longer trains.

The tracks provided the best gauge of their relative speed; they had moved above them languidly at first, seeming to slide gradually away or come curving smoothly back. Now, as the module slowed, using its engines to brake, and the Orbital appeared to speed up, the lines started to flow and then race by above.

They went under a Bulkhead Range, still seeming to gather speed. The ceiling of greyness above them raced away, disappearing into a darkness hundreds of kilometres in height, strung with microscopic lights way above. The car tracks here rested on impossibly slender sling-bridges; they flashed past, perfectly straight thin lines of dim light, their supporting monofils invisible at the relative speed the module had built up.

Then the far slope of the Bulkhead Range came swooping down to meet them, flashing towards the module’s nose. Ziller tried not to duck. He failed. The avatar said nothing, but the module moved further out, so that they were half a kilometre away from the under-surface. This had the temporary effect of seeming to slow the Orbital down.

The avatar started to tell Ziller its story.

Once, the Mind that had become Masaq’ Hub — replacing the original incumbent, who had chosen to Sublime not long after the end of the Idiran War — had been the mind in the body of a ship called the Lasting Damage. It was a Culture General Systems Vehicle, built towards the end of the three uneasy decades when it gradually became clear that a war between the Idirans and the Culture was more likely to occur than not.

It had been constructed to fulfil the role of a civilian ship if that conflict somehow didn’t happen, but it had also been designed to play a full part in the war if it did come, ready to continually construct smaller warships, transport personnel and matériel and — packed with its own weaponry — become directly involved in battle.

During the first phase of the conflict, when the Idirans were pressing the Culture on every front and the Culture was doing little more than falling further and further back and mounting only very occasional holding actions where time had to be bought to carry out an evacuation, the number of genuine warships ready to fight was still small. The slack was mostly taken up by General Contacts Vehicles, but the few war-prepped GSVs took their share of the burden as well.

There were frequent occasions and battles when military prudence would have dictated the dispatch of a fleet of smaller war craft, the non-return of some — even most — of which would be deplorable but not a disaster, but which, while the Culture was still completing its preparations for full-scale war production, could only be dealt with by the commitment of a combat-ready GSV.

A tooled-up General Systems Vehicle was a supremely powerful fighting machine, easily outgunning any single unit on the Idiran side, but it was not just inherently less flexible as an instrument of war compared to a fleet of smaller craft, it was also unique in the binary nature of its survivability. If a fleet ran into serious trouble usually some of its ships could run away to fight another day, but a similarly beset GSV either triumphed or suffered total destruction — at its own behest if not because of the actions of the enemy.

Just the contemplation of a loss on such a magnitude was sufficient to give the strategic planning Minds of the Culture’s war command the equivalent of ulcers, sleepless nights and general conniptions.

In one of the more desperate of those engagements, buying time while a group of Culture Orbitals was readied for flight and slowly accelerated to a velocity sufficient to ensure the worlds’ escape from the volume of space under threat, the Lasting Damage had thrown itself into a particularly wild and dangerous environment deep inside the blossoming sphere of Idiran hegemony.

Before it had departed on what most concerned, including itself, thought would be its last mission, it had, as a matter of course, transmitted its mind-state — effectively its soul — to another GSV which then sent the recording onwards to another Culture Mind on the far side of the galaxy, where it might be held, dormant and safe. Then, along with a few subsidiary units — barely meriting the name warships, more like semi-devolved powered weapon pods — it set off on its raid, climbing up and out above the lens of the galaxy on a high, curving course, hooked above the swell of stars like a claw.

The Lasting Damage plunged into the web of Idiran supply, logistic support and reinforcement routes like a berserk raptor thrown into a nest of hibernating kittens, devastating and disrupting all it could find in an erratic series of pulverisingly murderous full-speed attacks spread throughout centuries of space the Idirans had thought long since swept free of Culture ships.

It had been agreed that there would be no communication from the GSV unless by some miracle it made it back into the rapidly withdrawing sphere of Culture influence; the only sign that reached its comrade craft that it had escaped immediate detection and destruction was that the pressure on the units remaining behind to resist the direct thrust of the Idiran battle fleets lessened appreciably, as enemy vessels were either intercepted before they reached the front or diverted from it to deal with the emerging threat.

Then there came rumours, through some of the refugee craft of neutrals fleeing the hostilities, of a knot of Idiran fleets swarming round a volume of space near a recent raid location on the very outskirts of the galaxy, followed by a furious battle culminating in a gigantic annihilatory explosion, whose signature, when it was finally picked up and analysed, was exactly that produced when a beleaguered military GSV of the Culture had had time to orchestrate a maximally extraneously damaging destruct sequence.

News of the battle and the GSVs martial success and final sacrifice was headlining, main-menu stuff for less than a day. The war, like the Idiran battle fleets, swept onwards, burgeoning with distraction and ruse, incident and havoc, horror and spectacle.

Gradually the Culture implemented its shift to full-scale war production; the Idirans — already slowed by the commitments they’d had to make to control the colossal volumes of their newly conquered territories — found the pace of their advance faltering in places, initially through their own inability to bring the requisite combat apparatus to bear but increasingly due to the growing ability of the Culture to push back, as whole fleets of new warships were produced and dispatched by the Culture’s Orbital manufacturies, far away from the war.

New evidence of the destruction of the GSV Lasting Damage—and the Idiran war vessels it had taken with it — came in from a neutral ship of another Involved species which had passed near the battle site. The stored personality of the Lasting Damage was duly resurrected from the Mind it had been stored with and emplaced into another craft of the same class. It joined — rejoined — the encompassing struggle, thrown into battle after battle, never knowing which might be its last, and holding within itself all the memories of its earlier incarnation, intact right up until the instant it had cast off its fields and set its looping, trajectorial course for Idiran space, a full year earlier.

There was just one complication.

The Lasting Damage, the original ship Mind, had not been destroyed. As a GSV it had struggled to the end and fought to the last, dutifully, determinedly and without thought for its own safety, but finally, as an individual Mind, it had escaped in one of its slaved weapon pods.

Having suffered its due portion of the profoundly focused attentions of not one but several Idiran war fleets, the not-quite-warship was by then little more than a wreck; a not-quite-not-quite-warship.

Thrown from the erupting energies of the self-destructing GSV, flung out of the main body of the galaxy with barely sufficient energy to maintain its own fabric, it flew above and away from the plane of the galaxy more like a gigantic piece of shrapnel than any sort of ship, largely disarmed, mostly blind, entirely dumb and not daring to use its all-too-rough and barely ready engines for fear of detection until, at length, it had no choice. Even then it turned them on for only the minimum amount of time necessary to stop itself colliding with the energy grid between the universes.

If the Idirans had had more time, they would have searched for any surviving fragments of the GSV, and probably they would have found the castaway. As it was, there had been more pressing matters to attend to. By the time anybody thought to double-check that the GSV’s destruction had been as complete as it had first appeared, the half-ruined vessel, now millennia distant from the upper limit of the great disc of stars that was the galaxy, was just about far enough away to escape detection.

Gradually it had started to repair itself. Hundreds of days passed. Eventually it risked using its much worked-upon engines to start tugging it towards the regions of space where it hoped the Culture still held sway. Uncertain who was where, it abstained from signalling until, at last, it arrived back in the galaxy proper in a region which it was reasonably confident must still be outside Idiran control.

The signal announcing its arrival caused some confusion at first, but a GSV rendezvoused with it and took it aboard. It was informed it had a twin.

It was the first but not the last time something like this would happen during the war, despite all the care the Culture took to confirm the deaths of its Minds. The original Mind was re-emplaced in another newly built GSV and took the name Lasting Damage I. The successor ship renamed itself Lasting Damage II.

They became part of the same battle fleet following their mutual request and fought together through another four decades of war. Near the end they were both present when the Battle of the Twin Novae took place, in the region of space known as Arm One-Six.

One survived, the other perished.

They had swapped mind-states before the battle began. The survivor incorporated the soul of the destroyed ship into its own personality, as they had agreed. It too was almost annihilated in the fighting, and again had to take to a smaller craft to save both itself and the salvaged soul of its twin.

“Which one died,” Ziller asked, “I or II?”

The avatar gave a small, diffident smile. “We were close together at the time when it happened, and it was all very confused. I was able to conceal who died and who survived for a good many years, until somebody did the relevant detective work. It was II who was killed, I who lived.” The creature shrugged. “It didn’t matter. It was only the fabric of the craft housing the substrate which was destroyed, and the body of the surviving ship met the same fate. The result was the same as it would have been the other way round. Both Minds became the one Mind, became me.” The avatar seemed to hesitate, then gave a dainty little bow.

Ziller watched the Orbital race by overhead. Car lines whipped past, almost too fast to follow. Only the vaguest impressions of actual cars, even in long trains, were visible unless they were moving in the same direction as the module appeared to be. Then they seemed to move more slowly for a while, before drawing away, pulling ahead, falling behind or curving away to either side.

“I imagine the situation must have been confused indeed if you were able to hide who’d died,” Ziller said.

“It was pretty bad,” the avatar agreed lightly. It was watching the Orbital under-surface whiz by with a vague smile on its face. “The way war tends to be.”

“What was it made you want to become a Hub Mind?”

“You mean beyond the urge to settle down and do something constructive after all those decades spent hurtling across the galaxy destroying things?”

“Yes.”

The avatar turned to face him. “I’d have to assume you’ve done your research here, Cr Ziller.”

“I do know a little of what happened. Just think of me as old-fashioned enough, or primitive enough, to like hearing things straight from the person who was there.”

“I had to destroy an Orbital, Ziller. In fact I had to blitz three in a single day.”

“Well, war is hell.”

The avatar looked at him, as though trying to decide whether the Chelgrian was trying too hard to make light of the situation. “As I said, the events are all entirely a matter of public record.”

“I take it there was no real choice?”

“Indeed. That was the judgement I had to act upon.”

“Your own?”

“Partially. I was part of the decision-making process, though even if I’d disagreed I might still have acted as I did. That’s what strategic planning is there for.”

“It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders.”

“Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilisationally.”

“A terrible waste, three Orbitals. A responsibility.”

The avatar shrugged. “An Orbital is just unconscious matter, even if it does represent a lot of effort and expended energy. Their Minds were already safe, long gone. The human deaths were what I found affecting.”

“Did many people die?”

“Three thousand four hundred and ninety-two.”

“Out of how many?”

“Three hundred and ten million.”

“A small proportion.”

“It’s always one hundred per cent for the individual concerned.”

“Still.”

“No, no Still,” the avatar said, shaking its head. Light slid across its silver skin.

“How did the few hundred million survive?”

“Shipped out, mostly. About twenty per cent were evacuated in underground cars; they work as lifeboats. There are lots of ways to survive: you can move whole Orbitals if you have the time, or you can ship people out, or — short-term — use underground cars or other transport systems, or just suits. On a very few occasions entire Orbitals have been evacuated by storage/transmission; the human bodies were left inert after their mind-states were zapped away. Though that doesn’t always save you, if the storing substrate’s slagged too before it can transmit onwards.”

“And the ones who didn’t get away?”

“All knew the choice they were making. Some had lost loved ones, some were, I suppose, mad, but nobody was sure enough to deny them their choice, some were old and/or tired of life, and some left it too late to escape either corporeally or by zapping after watching the fun, or something went wrong with their transport or mind-state record or transmission. Some held beliefs that caused them to stay.” The avatar fixed its gaze on Ziller’s.

“Save for the ones who experienced equipment malfunctions, I recorded every one of those deaths, Ziller. I didn’t want them to be faceless, I didn’t want to be able to forget.”

“That was ghoulish, wasn’t it?”

“Call it what you want. It was something I felt I had to do. War can alter your perceptions, change your sense of values. I didn’t want to feel that what I was doing was anything other than momentous and horrific; even, in some first principles sense, barbaric. I sent drones, micro-missiles, camera platforms and bugs down to those three Orbitals. I watched each of those people die. Some went in less than the blink of an eye, obliterated by my own energy weapons or annihilated by the warheads I’d Displaced. Some took only a little longer, incinerated by the radiation or torn to pieces by the blast fronts. Some died quite slowly, thrown tumbling into space to cough blood which turned to pink ice in front of their freezing eyes, or found themselves suddenly weightless as the ground fell away beneath their feet and the atmosphere around them lifted off into the vacuum like a tent caught in a gale, so that they gasped their way to death.

“Most of them I could have rescued; the same Displacers I was using to bombard the place could have sucked them off it, and as a last resort my effectors might have plucked their mind-states from their heads even as their bodies froze or burned around them. There was ample time.”

“But you left them.”

“Yes.”

“And watched them.”

“Yes.”

“Still, it was their choice to stay.”

“Indeed.”

“And did you ask their permission to record their death throes?”

“No. If they would hand me the responsibility for killing them, they could at least indulge me in that. I did tell all concerned what I would be doing beforehand. That information saved a few. It did attract criticism, though. Some people felt it was insensitive.”

“And what did you feel?”

“Appalled. Compassion. Despair. Detached. Elated. God-like. Guilty. Horrified. Miserable. Pleased. Powerful. Responsible. Soiled. Sorrowful.”

“Elated? Pleased?”

“Those are the closest words. There is an undeniable elation in causing mayhem, in bringing about such massive destruction. As for feeling pleased, I felt pleasure that some of those who died did so because they were stupid enough to believe in gods or afterlives that do not exist, even though I felt a terrible sorrow for them as they died in their ignorance and thanks to their folly. I felt pleasure that my weapon and sensory systems were working as they were supposed to. I felt pleasure that despite my misgivings I was able to do my duty and act as I had determined a fully morally responsible agent ought to, in the circumstances.”

“And all this makes you suitable to command a world of fifty billion souls?”

“Perfectly,” the avatar said smoothly. “I have tasted death, Ziller. When my twin and I merged, we were close enough to the ship being destroyed to maintain a real-time link to the substrate of the Mind within as it was torn apart by the tidal forces produced by a line gun. It was over in a micro-second, but we felt it die bit by bit, area by distorted area, memory by disappearing memory, all kept going until the absolute bitter end by the ingenuity of Mind design, falling back, stepping down, closing off and retreating and regrouping and compressing and abandoning and abstracting and finessing, always trying by whatever means possible to keep its personality, its soul intact until there was nothing remaining to sacrifice, nowhere else to go and no survival strategies left to apply.

“It leaked away to nothingness in the end, pulled to pieces until it just dissolved into a mist of sub-atomic particles and the energy of chaos. The last two coherent things it held onto were its name and the need to maintain the link that communicated all that was happening to it, from it, to us. We experienced everything it experienced; all its bewilderment and terror, each iota of anger and pride, every last nuance of grief and anguish. We died with it; it was us and we were it.

“And so you see I have already died and I can remember and replay the experience in perfect detail, any time I wish.” The avatar smiled silkily as it leant closer to him, as though imparting a confidence. “Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side.

“We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying.”

It looked away for a moment. The Orbital streamed past above their heads. Nothing stayed in sight for longer than the blink of an eye. The underground car tracks were blurs. The impression of speed was colossal. Ziller looked down. The stars appeared now to be stationary.

He’d done the maths in his head before they entered the module. Their speed relative to the Orbital was now about a hundred and ten kilometres per second. Long-range express car-trains would still be overtaking them; the module would take an entire day to circle the world hovering here, while Hub’s travel-time guarantee was no more than two hours from any express port to any other, and a three-hour journey from any given sub-Plate access point to another.

“I have watched people die in exhaustive and penetrative detail,” the avatar continued. “I have felt for them. Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts? Per second, a human — or a Chelgrian — might have twenty or thirty, even in the heightened state of extreme distress associated with the process of dying in pain.” The avatar’s eyes seemed to shine. It came forward, closer to his face by the breadth of a hand.

“Whereas I,” it whispered, “have billions.” It smiled, and something in its expression made Ziller clench his teeth. “I watched those poor wretches die in the slowest of slow motion and I knew even as I watched that it was I who’d killed them, who was at that moment engaged in the process of killing them. For a thing like me to kill one of them or one of you is a very, very easy thing to do, and, as I discovered, absolutely disgusting. Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.

“And, as you might imagine, I consider that I have an obligation to discharge. I fully intend to spend the rest of my existence here as Masaq’ Hub for as long as I’m needed or until I’m no longer welcome, forever keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms and just generally protecting this quaint circle of fragile little bodies and the vulnerable little brains they house from whatever harm a big dumb mechanical universe or any consciously malevolent force might happen or wish to visit upon them, specifically because I know how appallingly easy they are to destroy. I will give my life to save theirs, if it should ever come to that. And give it gladly, happily, too, knowing that the trade was entirely worth the debt I incurred eight hundred years ago, back in Arm One-Six.”

The avatar stepped back, smiled broadly and tipped its head to one side. It suddenly looked, Ziller thought, as though it might as well have been discussing a banquet menu or the positioning of a new underground access tube. “Any other questions, Cr Ziller?”

He looked at it for a moment or two. “Yes,” he said. He held up his pipe. “May I smoke in here?”

The avatar stepped forward, put one arm round his shoulders and with its other hand clicked its fingers. A blue-yellow flame sprang from its index finger. “Be my guest.”

Above their heads, in a matter of seconds, the Orbital slowed to a stop, while beneath their feet the stars started to revolve once again.