Look to Windward

Expiring Light

The late afternoon sun shone through a kilometre-high gap between the mountains and the cloud. Ziller came out of the bathroom puffing his fur dry with a powerful little hand-held blower. He frowned at Tersono and looked mildly surprised to see Kabe and the avatar.

“Hello all. Still not going. Anything else?”

He threw himself down onto a big couch and stretched out, rubbing the fluffed-up fur over his belly.

“I took the liberty of asking Ar Ischloear and Hub here to attempt to reason with you one last time,” Tersono said. “There would still be ample time to get to the Stullien Bowl in a seemly manner and—”

“Drone, I don’t know what you don’t understand,” Ziller said, smiling. “It’s perfectly simple. If he goes, I don’t. Screen, please. Stullien Bowl.”

A screen, out-holo’d, burst into life across the whole of the wall on the other side of the room, protruding just beyond the furniture. The projection filled with a couple of dozen views of the Bowl, its surroundings and various groups of people and talking heads. There was no sound. With the rehearsal finished, some enthusiasts could be seen already making their way into the giant amphitheatre.

The drone swivelled its body quickly, jerking once, to indicate it was looking at first the avatar and then Kabe. When neither said anything, it said, “Ziller, please.”

“Tersono, you’re in the way.”

“Kabe; will you talk to him?”

“Certainly,” Kabe said, nodding massively. “Ziller. How are you?”

“I’m well, thank you, Kabe.”

“I thought you were moving a little awkwardly.”

“I confess I am a little stiff; I was neck-jumping a Kussel’s Janmandresile earlier this morning and it threw me.”

“You are otherwise uninjured?”

“Some bruises.”

“I thought you disapproved of such activities.”

“All the more so now.”

“You wouldn’t recommend it, then?”

“Certainly not for you, Kabe; if you neck-jumped a Kussel’s Janmandresile you’d probably break its back.”

“You are probably correct,” Kabe chuckled. He put one hand to cup his chin. “Hmm. Kussel’s Janmandresiles; they’re only found on—”

“Will you stop it?” screeched the drone. Its aura field burned white with anger.

Kabe turned, blinking, to the machine. He spread his arms wide, setting a chandelier tinkling. “You said talk to him,” he rumbled.

“Not about him making an exhibit of himself indulging in some ridiculous so-called sport! I meant about going to the Bowl! About conducting his own symphony!”

“I did not make an exhibit of myself. I rode that giant beast for a good hundred metres.”

“It was sixty at the most and it was a hopeless neck-jump,” the drone said, doing a good vocal impression of a human spitting with fury. “It wasn’t even a neck-jump! It was a back jump followed by an undignified scramble. Do that in a competition and you’d get negative style marks!”

“I still didn’t—”

“You did make an exhibit of yourself!” the machine shouted. “That simian in the trees by the river was Marel Pomiheker; news-feeder, guerrilla journalist, media-raptor and all-round data-hound. Look!” The drone swept away from the screen and pointed a strobing grey field at one of the twenty-four rectangular projections protruding from the screen. It showed Ziller squatting on a branch, hiding up a tree in a jungle.

“Shit,” Ziller said, looking aghast. The view cut to a large purple animal coming down a jungle path. “Screen off,” Ziller said. The holos disappeared. Ziller looked at the three others, brows furled. “Well, I certainly can’t go out in public now, can I?” he said sarcastically to Tersono.

“Ziller, of course you can!” Tersono yelped. “Nobody cares you got thrown off some stupid animal!”

Ziller looked at the avatar and the Homomdan and briefly crossed his eyes.

“Tersono would like me to try and argue you into attending the concert,” Kabe told Ziller. “I doubt that anything I might say would change your mind.”

Ziller nodded. “If he goes, I stay here,” he said. He looked at the timepiece standing on top of the antique mosaikey on a platform near the windows. “Still over an hour.” He stretched out more fully and clasped his hands behind his head. He grimaced and brought his arms down again, massaging one shoulder. “Actually I doubt I could conduct anyway. Pulled a muscle, I think.” He lay back again. “So, I imagine our Major Quilan is dressing now, yes?”

“He’s dressed,” the avatar said. “In fact, he’s gone.”

“Gone?” Ziller asked.

“Left for the Bowl,” the avatar said. “He’s in a car right now. Already ordered his interval drinks.”

Ziller looked briefly troubled, then brightened and said, “Ha.”

The car was a large one, half full; crowded by local standards. At the far end, through a few embroidered hangings and a screen of plants, he could hear a group of young, all shouting and laughing. One calm adult voice sounded like its owner was trying to keep them in order.

A child burst through the screen of plants, looking back the way it had come, almost tripping. It glanced round at the adults in this end of the car. It looked to be about to throw itself back through the plants again until it saw Quilan. Its eyes widened and it walked over to sit beside him. Its pale face looked flushed and it was breathing hard. Its dark straight hair was plastered to its forehead with sweat.

“Hello,” it said. “Are you Ziller?”

“No,” Quilan said. “My name is Quilan.”

“Geldri T’Chuese,” the child said, putting out its hand. “How do you do.”

“How do you do.”

“Are you going to the Festival?”

“No, I’m going to a concert.”

“Oh, the one at the Stullien Bowl?”

“Yes. And you? Are you going to the concert?”

The child snorted derisively. “No. There’s a whole bunch of us; we’re going round the Orbital by car until we get bored. Quern wants to go round at least three times in a row because Xiddy’s been round twice with his cousin, but I think twice is enough.”

“Why do you want to go round the Orbital?”

Geldri T’Chuese looked oddly at Quilan. “Just for a laugh,” it said, as though it ought to be obvious. A gale of laughter burst through the screen of plants from the far end of the car.

“Sounds very noisy,” Quilan said.

“We’re wrestling,” the child explained. “Before that we had a farting competition.”

“Well, I’m not sorry I missed that.”

Another peal of high-pitched laughter rang down the car. “I’d better get back,” Geldri T’Chuese said. It patted his shoulder. “Nice to meet you. Hope you enjoy the concert.”

“Thank you. Goodbye.”

The child took a run at the screen of plants and jumped through between two of the clumps. There were more screams and laughs.

~ I know.

~ You know what?

~ I can guess what you’re thinking.

~ Can you?

~ That they will probably still be in the underground car system when the Hub is destroyed.

~ Is that really what I was thinking?

~ It’s what I’d be thinking. It is tough.

~ Well, thank you for that.

~ I’m sorry.

~ We’re all sorry.

The journey took a little longer than it would normally; there were a lot of people and cars stacking up to unload at the Bowl’s sub-surface access points. In the lift, Quilan nodded to a few people who recognised him from the news-service pieces he’d done. He saw one or two frowning at him, and guessed they knew that by coming he was probably going to prevent Ziller from attending. He shifted on his seat and inspected an abstract painting hanging nearby.

The lift arrived on the surface and people walked out into a broad, open concourse beneath a colonnade of tall, straight-trunked trees. Soft lights shone against the dark blue of the evening sky. Smells of food filled the air and people thronged cafés, bars and restaurants at the sides of the concourse. The Bowl filled the sky at the end of the broad way, studded with lights.

“Major Quilan!” a tall, handsome man in a bright coat shouted, rushing up to him. He offered his hand and Quilan shook it. “Chongon Lisser. Lisser News; usual affiliations, forty per cent take-up and rising.”

“How do you do?” Quilan kept on walking; the tall male walked to one side and a little in front, keeping his head turned towards Quilan to maintain eye contact.

“I’m very well, Major, and I hope you are too. Major, is it true that Mahrai Ziller, the composer of tonight’s symphony here at the Stullien Bowl, Guerno Plate, Masaq’, has told you that if you attend the concert tonight then he won’t?”

“No.”

“It’s not true?”

“He hasn’t told me anything directly.”

“But would it be correct to say that you must have heard that he wouldn’t attend if you did?”

“That is correct.”

“And yet you have chosen to attend.”

“Yes.”

“Major Quilan, what is the nature of the dispute between you and Mahrai Ziller?”

“You would have to ask him that. I have no dispute with him.”

“You don’t resent the fact that he’s put you in this invidious position?”

“I don’t think it is an invidious position.”

“Would you say that Mahrai Ziller is being petty or vindictive in any way?”

“No.”

“So would you say he’s behaving perfectly reasonably?”

“I am not an expert on Mahrai Ziller’s behaviour.”

“Do you understand people who say you’re behaving very selfishly by coming here tonight, as that means Mahrai Ziller won’t be here to conduct the first performance of his new work, so reducing the experience for everybody concerned?”

“Yes, I do.”

By now they were near the end of the wide concourse, where what looked like a tall, broad wall of glowing glass extending over the breadth of the pavement was slowly alternately brightening and dimming. The crowds thinned out a little beyond here; the barrier was a field wall, set up to admit only those who’d won out in the ticket lottery.

“So you don’t feel that—”

Quilan had brought his ticket with him, though he’d been told it was really just a souvenir and not required for entry. Chongon Lisser obviously didn’t have a ticket; he bumped softly into the glowing wall and Quilan stepped around him and passed on through with a nod and a smile. “Good evening,” he said.

There were more news service people inside; he continued to answer politely but minimally and just kept on walking, following his terminal’s instructions, to his seat.

Ziller watched the news feeds following Quilan with an open mouth. “That son-of-a-bitch! He’s really going! He’s not bluffing! He’s actually going to take his seat and keep me away! From my own fucking concert! The stub-cocked son-of-a-prey-bitch!”

Ziller, Kabe and the avatar watched as several remotes followed Quilan to his seat, a specially prepared Chelgrian curl-pad. There was a Homomdan seat next to it, a space for Tersono, and a few other seats and couches. The camera platform showed Quilan sitting, looking around at the slowly filling Bowl, and calling up a function on his terminal which created a flat screen in front of him holding the concert programme notes.

“I think I see my seat,” Kabe said thoughtfully.

“And I mine,” Tersono said. Its aura field looked agitated. It turned to face Ziller, seemed about to say something, then did not. The avatar did not move, but Kabe had the impression that there had been some communication between Hub Mind and the Contact Section drone.

The avatar folded its arms and walked across the room to look out at the city. A cold clear cobalt sky arched over the jagged surround of mountains. The machine could see the bubble that was Aquime’s Dome Square. There was a giant screen there, relaying the scenes at the Stullien Bowl to a swelling crowd.

“I confess I didn’t think he’d go,” the avatar said.

“Well, he fucking has!” Ziller said, spitting. “The puss-eyed bollock-dragger!”

“I was under the impression he was going to spare you this too,” Kabe said, squatting on the floor near Ziller. “Ziller, I’m most terribly sorry if I misled you in any way, even if it was inadvertently. I am still convinced that Quilan strongly implied he would not be going. I can only assume that something has changed his mind.”

Again, Tersono seemed to be on the brink of saying something, its aura field altering and its casing rising a little in the air, and again it appeared to subside again at the last moment. Its field was grey with frustration.

The avatar turned from the window, arms still folded. “Well, if you don’t need me, Ziller, I’ll be getting back to the Bowl. Can’t have too many ushers and general helpers at something like this. Always some cretin who’s forgotten how to operate an automatic drinks dispenser. Kabe, Tersono? Can I offer you a Displace back?”

“Displace?” Tersono said. “Certainly not! I’ll take a car.”

“Hmm,” the avatar said. “You should still make it. I wouldn’t hang around, though.”

“Well,” Tersono said hesitantly, fields flickering. “Unless Cr Ziller wants me to stay, of course.”

They looked at Ziller, who was still watching the wall of screens. “No,” he said faintly, waving one hand. “Go. Go, by all means.”

“No, I think I ought to stay,” the drone said, floating closer to the Chelgrian.

“And I think you ought to go,” Ziller said sharply.

The drone stopped as though it had hit a wall. It flushed creamily rainbow with surprise and embarrassment, then bowed in the air and said, “Just so. Well, see you there. Ah… Yes. Goodbye.” It thrummed through the air to the doors, whisked them open and closed them quickly but silently behind it.

The avatar looked quizzically at the Homomdan. “Kabe?”

“Instantaneous travel appears to agree with me. I will be happy to accept.” He paused and looked at Ziller. “I too would be perfectly happy to stay here, Ziller. We don’t have to watch the concert. We could—”

Ziller leapt to his feet. “Fuck it!” he said through his teeth. “I’m going! That piece of wriggling vomit isn’t going to keep me from my own fucking symphony. I’ll go. I’ll go and I’ll conduct and I’ll even hang around and schmooze and be schmoozed at afterwards, but if that little turd Tersono or anybody else tries to introduce that selfish litter-fucker Quilan to me, I swear I’ll bite the shit-head’s throat out.”

The avatar suppressed most of a grin. Its eyes twinkled as it looked at Kabe. “Well, that sounds eminently reasonable, don’t you think, Kabe?”

“Absolutely.”

“I’ll get dressed,” Ziller said, bounding towards the internal doors. “Won’t take a moment.”

“We’ll have to Displace to give us enough time!” the avatar yelled.

“Fine!” Ziller called out.

“There’s a one in sixty—”

“Yes, yes, I know! Let’s just risk it, eh?”

Kabe looked at the broadly smiling avatar. He nodded. The avatar held out its arms and gave a little bow. Kabe mimed applause.

~ You guessed wrong.

~ What about?

~ About how Ziller would jump. He’s coming after all.

~ Is he?

Even as he thought the question, Quilan became aware of people around him starting to mutter, and heard the word “Ziller” mentioned a few times as the news spread. The Bowl was mostly full now, a gigantic buzzing container of sound and light and people and machines. The brightly lit centre, the empty stage where the various instruments glittered, looked still and silent and waiting, like the eye of a storm.

Quilan tried not to think anything very much. He spent some time fiddling with the magnifying field built into his seat, adjusting it so that the stage area seemed to swell in front of him. When he was happy that — like everybody else apart from the real no-magnification purists — he had what appeared to be a ringside seat, he sat back.

~ He is definitely on his way?

~ He’s here; they Displaced.

~ Well, I tried.

~ You’re probably worrying needlessly. I doubt anything will go so far wrong here that anybody’s going to be in any real danger.

Quilan looked at the sky above the Bowl. It was probably dark blue or violet but it looked pitch black beyond the vague haze of the Bowl’s rim lights.

~ There are several hundred thousand lumps of rock and ice heading straight this way. Converging on the sky above this place. I wouldn’t be too sure this is safe.

~ Oh, come on. You know what they’re like. They’ll have back-ups on the back-ups, octuple redundancy; safety to the point of paranoia.

~ We’ll see. Another thing occurred to me.

~ What?

~ Supposing our allies, whoever they might be, have made their own plans for what’s really going to happen when they trigger their surprise.

~ Go on.

~ As I understand it, there’s no limit to what you could squeeze through the wormhole’s mouth. Supposing instead of just enough energy to destroy the Hub, they put through enough to annihilate it, suppose they shoot an equivalent mass of antimatter through the hole? How much does the Hub unit weigh?

~ About a million tonnes.

~ A two-million-tonne matter/antimatter explosion would kill everybody on the Orbital, wouldn’t it?

~ I suppose it would. But why would our allies — like you say, whoever they might be — want to kill everybody?

~ I don’t know. The point is that it would be possible. You and I have no idea what our masters have agreed to, and from what we’ve been told, they too might have been deceived. We are at the mercy of these alien allies.

~ You are worrying too much, Quil.

Quilan watched the orchestra begin to take to the stage. The air filled with applause. It was not the full orchestra, and Ziller would not appear yet because the first piece was not one of his, but even so the reception was tumultuous.

~ Maybe. I suppose it doesn’t matter much, anyway. Not any more.

He saw the Homomdan Kabe Ischloear and the drone E. H. Tersono appearing from the nearest access way as the lights began to dim. Kabe waved. Quilan waved back.

Tersono! We’re going to blow up the Hub!

The words formed in his mind. He would stand up and shout them.

But he did not.

~ I didn’t intervene. You never meant to really do it.

~ Really?

~ Really.

~ Fascinating. Every philosopher should experience this, don’t you think, Huyler?

~ Easy, son, easy.

Kabe and Tersono joined the Chelgrian. Both noticed he was weeping quietly but thought it polite not to say anything.

The music rang round the auditorium, a vast invisible clapper in the inverted bell of the Bowl. The stadium’s lights had sunk to darkness; the light show in the skies above flickered, flowed and flashed.

Quilan had missed the nacreous clouds. He saw the aurorae, the lasers, the induced layers and levels of clouds, the flashes of the first few meteorites, the strobing lines that hatched the sky as more and more streaked in. The distant skies all around the Bowl, way out over the plains bordering the lake, coruscated with silent horizontal lightning, darting from cloud to cloud in streaks and bars and sheets of blue-white light.

The music accumulated. Each piece, he realised, was slowly contributing to the whole. Whether it was Hub’s idea or Ziller’s, he didn’t know, but the whole evening, the entire concert programme had been designed around the final symphony. The earlier, shorter pieces were half by Ziller, half by other composers. They alternated, and it became clear that the styles were quite different too, while the musical philosophies behind the two competing strands were dissimilar to the point of antipathy.

The short pauses between each piece, during which the orchestra enlarged and decreased according to the requirements of each work, allowed just sufficient time for the strategic structure of the evening to filter through to people. You could actually hear the coin drop as people worked it out.

The evening was the war.

The two strands of music represented the protagonists, Culture and Idirans. Each pair of antagonistic pieces stood for one of the many small but increasingly bitter and wide-scale skirmishes which had taken place, usually between proxy forces for both sides, during the decades before the war itself had finally broken out. The works increased in length and in the sensation of mutual hostility.

Quilan found himself checking the history of the Idiran War, to confirm that what felt like they ought to be the final pair of preparatory pieces really were so.

The music died away. The applause was barely audible, as though everybody was simply waiting. The complete orchestra filled the central stage. Dancers, most in float harnesses, distributed themselves about the space around the stage in a semi-sphere. Ziller took his place at the very focus of the circular stage, surrounded by a shimmer of projection field. The applause zoomed suddenly then dropped as quickly away. The orchestra and Ziller shared a mutual moment of silence and stillness.

A blanking field somewhere in the heavens above blinked off, and — up near one edge of the Bowl’s lip — it was as though the first nova, Portisia, had just appeared from behind a cloud.

The symphony Expiring Light began with a susurration that built and engorged until it burst into a single dashingly discordant blast of music; a mixture of chords and sheer noise that was echoed in the sky by a single shockingly bright air burst as a huge meteorite plunged into the atmosphere directly above the Bowl and exploded. Its stunning, frightening, bone-rattlingly loud sound arrived suddenly in a hypnotic lull in the music, making everybody — certainly everybody that Quilan was aware of, including himself — jump.

Thunder rippled round the greater amphitheatre of sky around the lake and Bowl at its centre. The bolts struck earth now, lancing to the distant ground. The sky hatched with squadrons and fleets of darting meteorite trails while the folds of aurorae and sky-wide effects whose origin it was hard to guess at filled the mind and beat at the eye even as the music pounded at the ear.

Visuals of the war and more abstract images filled the air directly above the stage and the whirling, tumbling, interlacing bodies of the dancers.

Somewhere near the furious centre of the work, while the thunder played bass and the music rolled over it and around the auditorium like something wild and caged and desperate to escape, eight trails in the sky did not end in air bursts and did not fade away but slammed down into the lake all around the Bowl, creating eight tall and sudden geysers of lit white water that burst out of the still dark waters as though eight vast under-surface fingers had made a sudden grab at the sky itself.

Quilan thought he heard people shriek. The entire Bowl, the whole kilometre-diameter of it, shook and quivered as the waves created by the lake-strikes smashed into the giant vessel. The music seemed to take the fear and terror and violence of the moment and run screaming away with it, pulling the audience behind like an unseated rider caught in the stirrup of their panic-stricken mount.

A terrible calmness settled over Quilan as he sat there, half cowering, battered by the music, assailed by the washes and spikes of light. It was as though his eyes formed a sort of twin tunnel in his skull and his soul was gradually falling away from that shared window to the universe, falling on his back forever down a deep dark corridor while the world shrank to a little circle of light and dark somewhere in the shadows above. Like falling into a black hole, he thought to himself. Or maybe it was Huyler.

He really did seem to be falling. He really did seem to be unable to stop. The universe, the world, the Bowl really did seem to be unreachably distant. He felt vaguely upset that he was missing the rest of the concert, the conclusion of the symphony. What price clarity and proximity, though, and where lay the relevance of being there and using or not using a magnification screen or amplification when everything he’d seen so far had been distorted by the tears in his eyes and all he’d heard had been drowned out by the clamour of his guilt at what he had done, what he had made possible and what was surely going to happen?

He wondered, as he fell into that encompassing darkness, and the world was reduced to a single not especially bright point of light above — no more luminous than a nova distant by most of a thousand years — if he’d somehow been fed a drug. He supposed the Culture people would all be enhancing the experience with their glanded secretions, making the reality of the experience both more and less real.

He landed with a bump. He sat up and looked around.

He saw a distant light to one side. Again, not particularly bright. He got to his feet. The floor was warm and with just a hint of pliancy. There was no smell, no sound except his own breathing and heartbeat. He looked up. Nothing.

~ Huyler?

He waited for a moment. Then a moment longer.

~ Huyler?

~ HUYLER?

Nothing.

He stood and gloried in the silence for a while, then walked towards the distant glow.

The light came from the band of the Orbital. He walked into what looked like the Hub’s viewing gallery. The place seemed to be deserted. The Orbital spun around him with a vast, implicit unhurriedness. He walked on a little, past couches and seats, until he came to the one that was occupied.

The avatar, lit by the reflected light of the Orbital’s surface, looked up as he approached and patted the curl-seat next to it. The creature was dressed in a dark grey suit.

“Quilan,” it said. “Thank you for coming. Please; sit down.” The reflections slid off its perfect silver skin like liquid light.

He sat down. The curl-seat fitted perfectly.

“What am I doing here?” he asked. His voice sounded strange. There were no echoes, he realised.

“I thought we should talk,” the avatar said.

“What about?”

“What we’re going to do.”

“I don’t understand.”

The avatar held up a tiny thing like a jewel, grasping it in a pincer of silver fingers. It glittered like a diamond. At its heart was a tiny flaw of darkness. “Look what I found, Major.”

He did not know what to say. After what seemed like a long time he thought:

~ Huyler?

The moment went on. Time seemed to have stopped. The avatar could sit perfectly, utterly, inhumanly still.

“There were three,” he told it.

The avatar smiled thinly, reached into the top pocket of the suit and produced another two of the jewels. “Yes, I know. Thank you for that.”

“I had a partner.”

“The guy in your head? So we thought.”

“I have failed then, haven’t I?”

“Yes. But there is a consolation prize.”

“What is that?”

“Tell you later.”

“What happens now?”

“We listen to the end of the symphony.” It held out one slim silver hand. “Take my hand.”

He took its hand. He was back in the Stullien Bowl, but this time everywhere. He looked straight down, he watched from a thousand other angles, he was the stadium itself, its lights and sounds and very structure. At the same time he could see everywhere around the Bowl, into the sky, out to the horizon, all around. He experienced a long moment of terrifying vertigo; vertigo which seemed to be pulling him not down but in every direction at once. He would fly apart, he would simply dissolve.

~ Stick with it, the avatar’s hollow voice said.

~ I’m trying to.

The music and the sights swamped him, overwhelmed him, ran him through with light. The symphony rolled onwards, approaching a sequence of resolutions and cadenzas that were a small yet still titanic reflection of the whole work, the rest of the earlier concert, the war itself.

~ Those things I Displaced, they are—

~ I know what they are. They’ve been taken care of.

~ I’m sorry.

~ I know that.

The music rose like the bulging bruise of water from an undersea explosion, an instant before the smooth swell ruptures and the spout of white spray bursts forth.

The dancers rose and fell, swirled and flocked and spread and shrank. Images of war strobed above the stage. The skies filled with light, flickering staggeringly brief shadows that were obliterated almost instantly by the next detonation in the vast bombardment of fire.

Then all fell away, and Quilan sensed time itself slow down. The music faded to a single hanging line of keening ache, the dancers lay like fallen leaves scattered about the stage, the holo above the stage vanished and the light seemed to evaporate from the sky, leaving a darkness that pulled at the senses, as though the vacuum was calling to his soul.

Time slowed still further. In the sky near the tiny remaining light that was the nova Portisia, there was just the merest hint of something flickering. Then that stopped, held, frozen, too.

The moment that was now, that for all his life had been a point, became that line, that long note of music and that drawing sough of black. From the line extended a plane, which folded and folded until there was space for the viewing gallery again, and there he sat, still holding the hand of the silver-skinned avatar.

He looked into himself and realised that he felt no fear, no despair and no regret.

When it spoke, it was as though it used his own voice.

~ You must have loved her very much, Quilan.

~ Please, if you can, if you will, look into my soul.

The avatar looked levelly at him.

~ Are you sure?

~ I’m sure.

That long look went on. Then the creature slowly smiled. ~ Very well.

It nodded after a few more moments. ~ She was a remarkable person. I see what you saw in her. The avatar made a noise like a sigh. ~ We surely did do a terrible thing to you, didn’t we?

~ We did it to ourselves, in the end, but yes, you brought it upon us.

~ This was a terrible revenge to contemplate, Quilan.

~ We believed we had no choice. Our dead… well, I imagine you know.

It nodded. ~ I know.

~ It is over, isn’t it?

~ A lot is.

~ My dream this morning…

~ Ah yes. The avatar smiled again. ~ Well, that could have been me messing with your mind, or just your guilty conscience, don’t you think?

He guessed he would never be told. ~ How long have you known? he asked.

~ I have known since a day before you arrived. I can’t speak for Special Circumstances.

~ You let me make the Displacements. Wasn’t that dangerous?

~ Only a little. I had my back-up by then. A couple of GSVs have been here or hereabouts for a while, as well as the Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall. Once we knew what you were up to, they could protect me even from an attack like the one you envisaged. We let it happen because we’d like to know where the other ends of those wormholes are. Might tell us something about who your mysterious allies were.

~ I’d like to know myself. He thought about this. ~ Well, I used to.

The avatar frowned. ~ I’ve discussed this with some of my peers. Want to know one ugly thought?

~ Are there not enough in the world already?

~ Assuredly. But sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming ugly deeds by exposing them.

~ If you say so.

~ One should always ask who has most to gain. With respect, Chel does not, in this measure, count.

~ There are many Involveds who might like to see you suffer a reverse.

~ One may come on its own; they tend to. Things have been going very well with the Culture over the last eight hundred years or so. Blink-of-an-eye stuff for the Elders, but a long time for an Involved to stay quite as determinedly in-play as we have. But our power may have peaked; we may be becoming complacent, even decadent.

~ This seems to be a pause I am meant to fill. By the way, how long do we have, before the second nova ignites?

~ Back in reality, about half a second. The avatar smiled. ~ Here, many lifetimes. It looked away, to the image of the Orbital hanging in space before them, slowly rotating.

~ It is not impossible that the allies who made all this possible are, or represent, some rogue group of Culture Minds.

He stared at the creature. ~ Culture Minds? he asked.

~ Now isn’t that a terrible thing to have to think? That our own might turn against us?

~ But why?

~ Because we might be becoming too soft. Because of that complacency, that decadence. Because some of our Minds might just think that we need a bit of timely blood and fire to remind us the universe is a perfectly uncaring place and that we have no more right to enjoy our agreeable ascendancy than any other empire long fallen and forgotten. The avatar shrugged. ~ Don’t be so shocked, Quilan. We could be wrong.

It looked away for a moment. Then it said:

~ No luck with the wormholes. It sounded sad. ~ We may never know now. It turned to look at him again. There was an expression of terrible sorrow on its face. ~ You’ve wanted to die since you realised you’d lost her, since you recovered from your wounds, haven’t you, Quilan?

~ Yes.

It nodded. ~ Me too.

He knew the story of its twin, and the worlds it had destroyed. He wondered, assuming it was telling the truth, how many lifetimes of regret and loss you could fit into eight hundred years, when you could think, experience and remember with the speed and facility of a Mind.

~ What will happen to Chel?

~ A handful of individuals — certainly no more — may pay with their lives. Other than that, nothing. It shook its head slowly. ~ We cannot let you have your balancing souls, Quilan. We will try to reason with the Chelgrian-Puen. It’s tricky territory for us, the Sublimed, but we have contacts.

It smiled at him. He could see his broad, furred face reflected in the image’s delicate features.

~ We still owe you for our mistake. We will do all we can to make amends. This attempt does not absolve us. Nothing has been balanced. It squeezed his hand. He had forgotten they were still holding each other. ~ I am sorry.

~ Sorrow seems a common commodity, doesn’t it?

~ I believe the raw material is life, but happily there are other by-products.

~ You are not really going to kill yourself, are you?

~ Both of us, Quilan.

~ Do you really—?

~ I am tired, Quilan. I have waited for these memories to lose their force over the years and decades and centuries, but they have not. There are places to go, but either I would not be me when I went there, or I would remain myself and so still have my memories. By waiting for them to drop away all this time I have grown into them, and they into me. We have become each other. There is no way back I consider worth taking.

It smiled regretfully and squeezed his hand again.

~ I’ll be leaving everything in good working order, and in good hands. It’ll be a more-or-less seamless transition, and nobody will suffer or die.

~ Won’t people miss you?

~ They’ll have another Hub before too long. I’m sure they’ll take to it, too. But I hope they do miss me a little. I hope they do think well of me.

~ And you’ll be happy?

~ I won’t be happy or unhappy. I won’t be. Neither will you.

It turned more towards him and held out its other hand.

~ Are you ready, Quilan? Will you be my twin in this?

He took its other hand.

~ If you will be my mate.

The avatar closed its eyes.

Time seemed to expand, exploding all around him.

His last thought was that he’d forgotten to ask what had happened to Huyler.

Light shone in the sky above the Bowl.

Kabe, lost in the silence and the darkness, watched the light of the star called Junce as it flickered and then blazed, close enough to the earlier, fading nova of Portisia to all but drown it out.

At his side, Quilan, who had been very quiet and still for some time, suddenly slumped forward in his curl-pad and collapsed to the floor before Kabe could catch him.

“What?” he heard Tersono screech.

The applause was starting.

Breath flowed out of the Chelgrian’s mouth, then he went quite still.

Noises of shock and consternation built up around Kabe, and — as he hunkered down and tried to revive the dead alien creature — another bright, bright light shone above; exactly, precisely overhead.

He called Hub for help but there was no answer.