Surface Detail

Seventeen

The Semsarine Wisp was an etiolated meander of young stars strewn amidst great gauzy veils of shadowing, shielding interstellar gas. It protruded from the main galactic mass like a single fuzzily curled hair from a tousled head. The General Contact Unit Bodhisattva OAQS brought Yime Nsokyi to the rendezvous point within the Wisp sixteen days after picking her up from her home Orbital. The rendezvous point itself was an Unfallen Bulbitian.

The Bulbitians had been the losers in a great war long ago. The things that people now called Bulbitians — Fallen or otherwise — had been the species’ primary habitats: substantial space structures which looked like two great, dark, heavily decorated cakes joined base to base. They averaged about twenty-five kilometres measured either across their diameter or from pinnacle to pinnacle, so were relatively small by habitat standards, though of respectable size compared to the spacecraft of most other civilisations. The Bulbitians themselves had been a pan-hopper species; small, monopedal and quite long-lived by the time they got involved in the great war that destroyed them. As far as was known, no verified biological trace of them still existed.

All that remained were their space structures, and almost all of them were no longer in space; they were the Fallen Bulbitians, the ships/habitats that had been deliberately and carefully lowered through the atmosphere of the nearest suitable solid-surface planet by the Hakandra — the winners of that particular war — to serve as monuments to their victory. Brought down to a planetary surface, the great structures were crushed by their own weight and crumpled into vast, city-sized, mountain-range-high ruins.

The Hakandra had not troubled to remove anything save the most advanced weapon systems from the structures before they’d run them aground on the planetary rocks they’d chosen, which meant that — the Bulbitian species themselves having been avid creators and collectors of all sorts of technologies, gifts and gadgets — the Fallen Bulbitian structures had proved quite fabulous — if highly dangerous — techno-treasure troves for any developing species lucky enough to be present when one was deposited in their midst (and also lucky enough not to have had any important cities of their own flattened by the structure’s sudden arrival — the Hakandra had not been as conscientious as they might have been when deciding exactly where to leave their triumphant droppings).

The AIs that had controlled the structures had either never been fully deactivated by the indifferent Hakandra or had somehow contrived to regain some sort of activity following their partial destruction, because the notorious thing about Fallen — and Unfallen — Bulbitians was that they remained in some sense alive, their computational and processing substrates proving resistant to anything save the utter annihilation of the entire structure they inhabited. They were also, in every case, somewhere beyond eccentric in nature and arguably mad, as well as seemingly still possessed of powers that hinted at links to one or more of the Elder civilisations or even to the realm of the Sublimed, despite there having been no hint that the species itself had even partially gone in that direction.

By the time these links or powers were fully recognised the Hakandra at least — regarded as a stylish but off-hand, semi-detached species even by those who were their friends — had become even more unconcerned regarding the whole issue, having hit the Sublime button themselves and so cashed in their civilisational chips in the realm of the Real where matter still mattered.

Fewer than one quarter of one per cent of the Bulbitians were Unfallen — in other words still left in space — and they displayed no more inherent rationality than their fallen kin. Their AIs too had seemingly been deactivated, they too had swept clear of any remaining biological vestige of the species that had created them, they too had been looted over the centieons — though in their case by those who already at least possessed space travel — and they too had seemingly come back on-line, centuries or millennia after they had been assumed to be as dead as their progenitor species.

All the Unfallen Bulbitians were in out-of-the-way galactic locations, far distant from the kind of rocky, atmosphered planets the Hakandra had chosen to lower the vast majority of the structures onto, and the suspicion had always been that they simply couldn’t be bothered going to the effort in every case.

The Unfallen Bulbitian within the Semsarine Wisp lay in the trailing Lagrangian point of a gas giant protostar, itself a part of a brown-dwarf binary system, leaving the giant double-cake of the Bulbitian bathed in the long-frequency radiations of the whole, still hazily dusty system and its artificially maintained skies punctuated by the blue-white glares of the Wisp’s younger stars, where their light was able to struggle through the great slow-swirling clouds and nebulas of dust still in the process of building new suns.

This particular Bulbitian had been colonised by several different species over the milleons, the current nominal occupiers being nobody in particular. Some long time ago the structure had had a stabilised singularity placed at its hollowed-out centre, a black hole which provided about a third of what pan-humans chose to deem one standard gravity. This was very close to the limit that an Unfallen Bulbitian could take without the whole structure collapsing in on itself. It didn’t help that the structure had originally been spun to provide the semblance of gravity, but no longer did so, meaning that — due to the absence of spin and the presence of the singularity — up had become down, and down up.

People had tried to do this sort of thing to Bulbitians before and paid, usually very messily, with their lives; the structures themselves seemed to object to being messed around with, and either activated defence systems nobody had known were there in the first place or had been somehow able to call on somebody else’s highly effective resources.

This one had allowed the contained singularity to be placed at its core but — given that in every other respect it was just as eccentric, wilful and occasionally murderously unpredictable as any other Bulbitian — nobody had ever dared to try and remove the black hole, even though it did arguably make the structure as unstable physically as it had always been behaviourally.

Nobody knew who had last been in charge of the place, or what had happened to them. This was, obviously, worrying, though no more worrying than any random phenomenon associated with any other Bulbitian.

Whoever it had been, they had obviously liked it hot, hazy and wet.

The Bodhisattva entered the six-thousand-kilometre-wide bubble of cloudy air surrounding the Bulbitian very slowly, like a thick needle somehow persuading the balloon it was penetrating not to pop, out of sheer politeness.

Yime watched the ship’s careful, gentle progress via a screen in her quarters as she packed a bag, in case she had to quit the Bodhisattva on little notice. Finally, the dripping rear end of the ship’s outermost horizon field parted company with the glisteningly adhesive internal surface of the Bulbitian’s atmospheric bubble. The view started to tilt as the ship rotated to position itself compatibly with the structure’s own gentle gravity field.

“Safely inside?” Yime asked, snapping her bag shut.

“… Inside,” the ship replied.

There were no confirmed reports of Culture ships suffering injury or destruction at the behest of a Bulbitian, but the space craft of other civilisations on the same technological level — and arguably of no less moral worth — had very occasionally been bizarrely crippled or had outright disappeared, at least allegedly, and so even Culture vessels — not normally known for their caution in such matters — tended to think twice before breezing up to your average Bulbitian with a cheery Hail fellow-entity!

The Bodhisattva moved on through a hothouse atmosphere of slow-swirling weather systems, giant grey-brown blister-clouds and long sweeping swathes of darkly torrential rain.

“Yime Nsokyi, I presume,” the elderly lady said. “Welcome to the Unfallen Bulbitian, Semsarine Wisp.”

“Thank you. And you…?”

“Fal Dvelner,” the woman said. “Here, have an umbrella.”

“Allow me,” said the ship’s drone, taking the offered device before Yime could accept it. They were still under the ship itself, so sheltered from the rain for the moment. It was so dark the main light came from the big drone’s aura field, which was formal blue mixed with green good humour.

The Bodhisattva had backed carefully up to the structure’s only in-use landing entrance, hovering a few metres above the puddled surface of the landing pier itself, which was made of ancient, pitted metals the colour of mud. From the part of the ship nearest to the wide, bowed entryway into the Bulbitian to the entrance itself was only twenty metres, but the deluge was so heavy it would soak anybody crossing the rain-hazed surface of the pier.

“I was expecting somebody else,” Yime said as they walked splashing along under the jet-black under-surface of the ship. In the low gravity, she found herself imitating the floaty, bouncing gait of the older woman. The rain-drops were huge, slow-falling, slightly oblate spheres. Splashes from below, she noted, could soak you quite thoroughly in low gravity. Her ankle boots and trousers were already quite wet. Ms. Dvelner wore glossy thigh boots and a slick-looking shift, both of which were doubtless much more practical in the conditions. Yime carried her own bag. The air felt warm, and as humid as having a soaking, blood-temperature cloth applied to the face. The atmosphere seemed to press in and down, as though the floating bulk of the million-tonne ship directly above was somehow truly bearing down on her, for all that in reality it was supported within a dimension not even visible, and weighed, right now, within the frame of reference accessible to her, precisely nothing.

“Ah, yes; Mr. Nopri,” Fal Dvelner said, nodding. “He’ll be being unavoidably detained, I dare say.” Dvelner looked to be in about the last quarter of her life; spry, but delicately thin and white haired with a face that contained distinct lines. “He’s your Quietus rep here. I’m with the Numina mission.”

Numina was the part of the Culture’s Contact section that concerned itself with the Sublimed, or at least tried to. It was sometimes known as the Department Of What The Fuck?

“Why might Mr. Nopri be unavoidably detained?” Yime asked, raising her voice over the noise of the downpour. They were coming close to where the great snub nose of the ship rose like an obsidian cliff through the rain-filled air above. The ship had extended a field to shelter them from the rain; a dry corridor three metres wide extended all the way across the pier to the brightly lit entrance.

“Funny old places, Bulbitians,” Dvelner said quietly, arching one brow. She shook her umbrella out and opened it, nodded to the ship-drone, which was a soap-bar smooth, old-fashioned design nearly a metre long. The drone made a noise that might been “Hmm,” and flicked the umbrella open over Yime as they walked out from beneath the nose of the Bodhisattva.

The ship rocked; the whole three-hundred-metre length of it wobbled visibly in the air as the corridor it had made for them through the rain just disappeared, letting the rain thunder down around them. The downpour was so heavy Yime saw Dvelner’s arm sink appreciably as the weight of water hit the umbrella she was carrying. Given that they were bouncing along in only a third of standard G, this implied a lot of water, or a very weak old lady, Yime supposed.

“Here,” Yime said, taking the umbrella protecting her from the drone’s maniple field. She inclined her head towards Dvelner and the drone moved smoothly through the torrent, gently taking the handle of the umbrella from the older woman.

“Thank you,” Dvelner said.

“Did I just see you move?” Yime asked the ship’s drone.

“You did.”

“So what was all that about?”

“Anywhere else, I’d treat that as an attack,” the ship said through the drone, casually. “You don’t interfere with a GCU’s fields, even if all they’re doing is keeping the rain off somebody.”

Beside her, Ms. Dvelner snorted. Yime glanced at her, then said to the drone, “It can do that?”

“It can try to,” the drone said, its voice pitched to affable reasonableness, “with the implicit threat that if I didn’t let it it would get upset and try harder, which, as I say, anywhere else I’d take as tantamount to a challenge. However. My own field enclosures were never put under threat, I am a Quietus ship after all, and this is a particularly sensitive and special Bulbitian, so I chose to let it have its way. This is its turf, after all, and I am the guest-cum-intruder.”

“Most ships stay outside the bubble,” Dvelner said, also raising her voice over the rain as they neared the entrance way and the sounds of the cataracts of water falling off the towering facade above increased in volume. The yellow lights inside shone through the thick, trembling bubbles of the rain as though through a rippled, transparent curtain.

“So I understand,” the ship said. “As I say, though; I am a Quietus ship. However, if the Bulbitian would rather I stayed beyond its atmospheric sphere, I will be happy to oblige.” The drone made a show of turning to Yime. “I’ll leave a shuttle.”

With a last crash of drumming rain straining the bowing material of the umbrellas, they walked into the wide entrance to be met by a tall young man dressed quite similarly to Yime, though much less smartly. He was struggling and failing to open another umbrella. He was swearing quietly, then looked up, saw them, stopped swearing, smiled instead and threw the umbrella aside.

“Ms. Dvelner, thank you,” he said, nodding to the older woman, who was frowning suspiciously at him. “Ms. Nsokyi,” he said, taking her hand in his; “welcome.”

“Mr. Nopri?” Yime said.

He sucked air through his teeth. “Well, yes and no.” He looked pained.

Yime looked at Dvelner, who had closed her eyes and might have been shaking her head. Yime looked back at Nopri. “What would constitute the grounds for the ‘no’ part?”

“Technically the person you were expecting — the me you were expecting — is dead.”

The television was old, its casing made of wood, its thick glass screen bulbous and the image displayed on it monochrome. It showed a half-dozen dark shapes like long, jagged spear points hurtling down from a black sky riven with lightning. He reached over and turned it off.

The doctor tapped her pen on the side of her clipboard. She was pale, had short brown hair, wore glasses; she looked half his age. She wore a dull grey suit and a white coat, like doctors were meant to. He wore standard army fatigues.

“You should really watch it to the end,” she said.

He looked at her, sighed, then reached over and turned the set back on again. The dark spearhead shapes fell, formation splitting up as they twisted and wove their way through what might have been air or not. The camera stayed with one of the spearheads in particular, remaining on it after the others had disappeared. It fell past wherever the camera was watching all this from and as the view tipped, following it. The screen filled with light.

It was a poor representation; the image was too small, too grainy and smeary to do justice to the sight, even if it had been in colour. In vaguely green-tinged black-and-white it was just a mess. You could hardly see the spearhead shape now; its presence was only revealed by its quickly shrinking shadow occluding some parts of the flares and pools and rivers of light beneath.

Then a point of light seemed to detach from the lights below and rise to meet the spearhead shape, which rolled and flicked and twisted ever more desperately until the rising point of light flashed past both the spearhead and the camera. A dozen more points of light rose from the lightscape, followed by another, bigger barrage, and another. Just visible at the distorted edge of the screen, more sets of sparks rose fanning out towards the other spearheads. The spearhead the camera was following dodged three of the incoming lights, then one of them winked out just behind it; a moment later the spearhead shape was silhouetted, caught three-quarters to side on in a flare of light bursting all around it, drowning out the view below.

The screen washed out with light. Even on the old, muddy looking screen the flash of brilliance somehow startled the eye.

The screen went dark.

“Satisfied?” Vatueil asked.

The young doctor said nothing, made a note.

They were in an anonymous office filled with anonymous furniture. They sat in two cheap chairs in front of a desk. The crude looking television was perched on the surface of the desk, between them; a power cable made S shapes across the desk and floor to a wall socket. A window with half-open vertical blinds looked out onto a white-tiled lightwell. The white tiles looked grimy; the lightwell let in little light. A buzzing fluorescent lamp was set diagonally across the ceiling, shedding a flat glare that gave the young doctor’s pale face an unhealthy pallor. Probably his too, though he had darker skin.

A faint rising and falling feeling, and a sensation that the whole room and lightwell were moving a little from side to side, clashed with the obvious impression that they were in a conventional building on land. There was a degree of regularity, a periodicity to the various oscillations, and Vatueil was trying to work out the intervals involved. There seemed to be at least two: a long one lasting about fifteen or sixteen heartbeats and a shorter one of about a third of that. He was using heartbeats because he had no watch or phone or terminal and there wasn’t a clock visible anywhere in the room either. The doctor wore a watch but it was too small for him to make out.

They must be on a ship or barge. Maybe some sort of floating city. He had no idea; he’d just woken up here, sitting in this cheap looking chair in this bland office room, being made to watch lo-fi video on an ancient screen device called a television. He’d already had a prowl round the space; the door was locked, the lightwell went down another four storeys to a small, leaf-litter-filled courtyard. The young doctor had just sat there, asking him to sit down and making notes on her clipboard while he’d looked round. The drawers in the room’s single desk — wood, battered-looking — were locked too, as was the single dented grey mild steel filing cabinet. No telephone, comms screen, terminal or sign that there was anything intelligent and helpful listening or present. There was even a switch for the ceiling light, for fate’s sake.

He’d looked over the doctor’s shoulder at the notes she was taking, but they were in a language he didn’t recognise. He wondered how long he was expected to give it before he tried threatening the doctor or shoulder-charging the flimsy-looking door.

He looked up at what was obviously a suspended ceiling. Maybe he could crawl his way out.

“Just tell me what you want to know,” he said.

The doctor made another note, crossed her legs, said, “What do think we might want to know?”

He put his hands to his face, wiped back from his nose to his cheeks and then ears. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know, do I?”

“Why did you think we might want to know anything?”

“I attacked you,” he told her, pointing at the wooden box that held the screen. “That was me, in that — I was that thing attacking you.” He waved his hands, looked around. “But I got shot down. I’m guessing we all got intercepted. And now I’m here. Whatever you saved of me, you must have been able to learn all you needed to directly, just looking at the code, running bits of it. You don’t need me so I’m just puzzled why I’m here. All I can think of is you still want to know something else. Or is this just the first circle of Hell? Do I stay here for ever being bored to death?”

She made another note. “Maybe we should watch the screen again,” she suggested. He sighed. She turned the television back on. The black spearhead shape fell from the lightning-cracked sky.

“It’s nothing — just a death.”

Yime smiled thinly. “I think you make light of our calling, Mr. Nopri, if you treat the cessation of life in quite so off-hand a fashion.”

“I know, I know, I know,” he said, agreeing heartily and nodding vigorously. “You’re absolutely right, of course. But it is in a good cause. It is necessary. I do take the whole Quietus ethic seriously; very seriously. These are — ha-ha! — well, special circumstances.”

Yime looked at him levelly. Nopri was a skinny, dishevelled looking young man with bright blue eyes, pale skin and a gleamingly bald head. They were in what was apparently entitled the Officers’ Club, the main social space for the forty or so Culture citizens who made up about a half per cent of the Bulbitian’s highly diverse — and dispersed — population. The Club was part of what had once been some sort of games hall for the Bulbitian species, what had been its ceiling — and was now its floor — studded with enormous multi-coloured cones like gaudy versions of fat stalagmites.

Food, drink and — for Nopri — a drug bowl were brought by small wheeled drones which roamed the wide space; apparently the Bulbitian could display unpredictable reactions when it came to other entities using fields inside it, so the drones used wheels and multi-jointed arms instead of just levitating by AG and using maniple fields. Still, Yime noticed, the ship’s drone seemed to be doing all right, floating level with their table.

She and Nopri sat alone with the drone, Dvelner having returned to her own duties. There were two other tables occupied in the warm but pleasantly dehumidified space. Both supported little groups of four or five people huddled round them, all of whom looked rather drab by the normal standards of Culture sartorial acceptability and all of whom seemed to be keeping themselves to themselves. Yime had guessed, before Nopri had told her anyway, that these were people who were here to rendezvous with the ship which would arrive, sometime in the next two or three days, from the Total Internal Reflection, the GSV which was one of the Culture’s Oubliettionaries, its Forgotten fleet of supposedly ultra-hidden post-posited-catastrophe seed-craft.

“What ‘special circumstances’, Mr. Nopri?” she asked.

“I’ve been trying to talk to the Bulbitian,” Nopri told her.

“Talking to it involves dying?”

“Yes, all too often.”

“How often?”

“Twenty-three times so far.”

Yime was appalled. She took a drink before saying, “You’ve been killed by this thing twenty-three times?” she said, her voice dropping to a shocked whisper without her meaning it to. “You mean in a virtual environment?”

“No, really.”

“Killed really?”

“Yes.”

“Killed in the Real?”

“Yes.”

“And, what; revented each time?”

“Yes.”

“Did you come with a stack of blank bodies then? How can you—?”

“Of course not. It makes me new bodies.”

“It? The Bulbitian? It makes you new bodies?”

“Yes. I back up before every attempt to talk to it.”

“And it kills you every time?”

“Yes. But only so far.”

Yime looked at him for a moment. “In that case silence might constitute a more prudent course.”

“You don’t understand.”

Yime sighed, put her drink down and sat back, fingers interlocked over her midriff. “And I’m sure I shall continue not to until you enlighten me. Or I can talk to somebody else on your team who is more…” She paused. “Plausible,” she said. The drone’s blueish aura field coloured a subtle shade of pink.

Nopri appeared oblivious to the insult. He sat forward eagerly. “I am convinced that the Bulbitians are in touch with the Sublimed,” he told her.

“You are,” Yime said. “Isn’t that a matter for our colleagues in Numina? Like Ms. Dvelner?”

“Yes, and I’ve talked to them about it, but this Bulbitian only wants to talk to me, not to them.”

Yime thought about this. “And the fact that it keeps killing you, every time you attempt to do so, hasn’t shaken your faith in this conviction?”

“Please,” Nopri said. “It’s not faith. I can prove this. Or I will be able to. Soon.” He buried his face in the fumes rising from the drug bowl, sucked in deeply.

Yime looked at the drone. “Ship, are you still listening here?”

“I am, Ms. Nsokyi. Hanging fascinated on every word.”

“Mr. Nopri. There are how many on your team here — eighteen?” Nopri nodded, holding his breath. “Do you have a ship here?” Nopri shook his head emphatically. “A Mind, then?”

Nopri let his clouded breath out and started coughing.

Yime turned to the drone again. “Does the team that Mr. Nopri belongs to have the benefit of a resident Mind or AI?”

“No,” the drone replied. “And neither does the Numina team. The nearest Mind at the moment, aside from my own of course, is probably that belonging to the inbound ship journeying here from the Total Internal Reflection. There are no Minds or true AIs stationed here. No Minds or true AIs of anybody’s, in fact; not just the Culture’s.”

“It isn’t keen on Minds or AIs,” Nopri agreed, wiping his eyes. He sucked from the drug bowl again. “Not that wild about drones, either, to be frank.” He looked at the ship’s drone, smiled.

“Is there any news of the ship on its way from the Total Internal Reflection?” Yime asked.

Nopri shook his head. “No. There’s never any news. They don’t tend to publish course schedules.” He breathed deep from the bowl again, but let it out quickly this time. “They just turn up without warning, or don’t show at all.”

“You think it might not show?”

“No, it probably will. There’s just no guarantee.”

Nopri showed her to her quarters, a bewilderingly large, multi level space set off a vast curving corridor. To have reached this by walking would have taken about half an hour from the Officers’ Club; instead, one of the wheeled drones just picked up their seats with them still sitting in them and rolled away through the dark, tall corridors towards her cabin. Yime gazed up at the tall inverted arch of the ceiling as they progressed through the bizarre upside-down architecture of the Bulbitian. It was like being at the bottom of a small valley. The smooth floor the drone ran along was narrow; only a metre or so across. The walls took on a ribbed appearance; now it was like travelling through the gutted carcass of some vast animal. The ribs above rose outwards to a broad flat ceiling ten metres wide and easily twenty metres above.

“They did like their high ceilings, didn’t they?”

“Hoppers tend to,” Nopri said.

She tried to imagine the place full of the monopedal creatures who had built this place, all bouncing along on their single lower limbs. And upside down, of course; she’d be travelling along the ceiling and they’d be bouncing up towards her with each springing step, then sinking back to the wide floor. Back then the great structure would have spun to create the apparent gravity the species preferred, but now there was just the troubling tug that resulted from being balanced on the curve of the singularity’s gravity well.

“Does this thing still spin at all?” she asked.

“Very slowly,” the ship’s drone, floating alongside, said when Nopri didn’t reply. “Synched to the rotation of the galaxy itself.”

She thought about this. “That is slow. I wonder why?”

“So does everybody else,” Nopri said, nodding.

“Thank you,” she said as the door to her quarters hinged open like a valve behind her. The ship drone dipped a little and drifted in, carrying her overnight bag.

Nopri looked over her shoulder into the shadowy space beyond. “Looks nice. Would you like me to stay?”

“Too kind, but no,” she told him.

“I don’t mean for sex,” he said. “I mean for company.”

“As I say, it is kind of you to offer. But no.”

“Okay.” He nodded behind her. “Mind your head.”

She watched the little wheeled drone take him away into the shadows then turned to look into her cabin. The door must have been some sort of window once, at ceiling height. That was why it rotated about its horizontal axis, leaving the door itself as a thick obstruction straight across the three-metre-wide doorway. She ducked underneath. It hinged closed.

The cabin looked complicated, with lots of different levels and bits where it just seemed to wander off into the shadows. Doubtless it had made more sense the other way up.

The ship’s drone floated over to report it had found what it was fairly sure was some sort of bed of a fluid-based nature suitable for a human to sleep safely within.

Bathroom location, on the other hand, was still ongoing.

“You are a soldier?” the young doctor asked.

Vatueil rolled his eyes. “Soldier, naval officer, marine, flying serviceman, submariner, space warrior, vacuum trooper, disembodied intellect investing military hardware, or software: all of the above. Does this come as news to you? There is a War Conduct Agreement, doc; I’m not supposed to be subject to any torture or unauthorised interference. You’re entitled to my code and anything it holds but you’re not entitled to run my consciousness at all, and certainly not for any punitive purpose.”

“Do you feel you are being punished?”

“Borderline,” he told her. “It depends how long this goes on.”

“How long do you think it will go on?”

“I don’t know. I’m not in control here.”

“Who do you think is in control?”

“Your side. Maybe you, depending on what you are, or represent. Who do you represent?”

“Who do you think I represent?”

He sighed. “Do you ever get tired having to answer questions with questions all the time?”

“Do you think I should get tired?”

He gave a small laugh. “Yes, I think you should.”

He couldn’t work out why he was here. They had his code, they knew everything he’d come here with. There was nothing that he had come here knowing that they didn’t also know by now. That wasn’t what was meant to happen — a sub-routine should have wiped his personality and memories with the rest of the information carried in the code cell as soon as it realised that he — in the shape of the dark spearhead — wasn’t going to survive the attack; if you were totally destroyed it didn‘t matter anyway but if there was going to be something left then you tried to make sure as little as possible fell into enemy hands.

But sometimes the sub-routines didn’t work in time. They couldn’t be too hair-trigger or they might launch prematurely. So mistakes got made. He was here because of a mistake.

It shouldn’t matter anyway; he’d had a good rummage round his own memories since he’d found himself sitting here in the bland room with the young doctor and he hadn’t found anything that shouldn’t be there. He knew who he was — he was Major Vatueil — and he knew he had spent decades running as code within the giant war sim which was supposed to take the place of a real war between the pro- and anti-Hell sides, but he could recall only very hazy memories of those earlier missions, and nothing at all of any existence beyond those missions.

That was the way it was meant to be. His core personality — the one that was safe somewhere else entirely, held within one or more of the secure substrates that were the safest citadels of the anti-Hell side — changed with the lessons learned from each recorded mission, and it was a distillation of that personality which was downloaded into each of his sequential iterations, but nothing that could compromise him or his side should be present. Each personality — whether seemingly human in form, completely machine-like or running as pure software taking on whatever simulated appearance worked best — would be checked before it was allowed to get anywhere near a combat zone, scoured for anything that might be of value to the enemy if it fell into hostile hands.

So he shouldn’t have anything useful, and he didn’t seem to. So, why was he here? What were they doing?

“What is your name?” he said to the young doctor. He sat upright, head back, frowning at her, imagining her as some meek, hopelessly sloppy recruit he was choosing to pick on in the parade ground, putting all the authority he could into his voice. “I demand to know your name or identification; I know my rights.”

“I’m sorry,” she said levelly, “I’m not obliged to give you my name.”

“Yes, you are.”

“Do you think knowing my name will be of help to you?”

“Still answering questions with your own questions?”

“Is that what you think I’m doing?”

He glared at her. He imagined getting up and slapping her, or punching her, or dangling her out of the window, or strangling her with the electric cord that powered the ancient television. How far would he get, trying any of that? Would the sim just end, would she fight back, impossibly stronger than he was? Would brutish guards burst in and overpower him? Maybe he’d be allowed to carry out whatever he tried, and then deal with whatever simulated consequences arose. Could all be a test. You weren’t supposed to attack medics, or non-combatants at all for that matter. It would be a first for him, certainly.

Vatueil let out a breath. He waited a moment. “Please,” he said politely, “may I know your name?”

She smiled, and tapped her pen on the side of the clipboard. “I am Doctor Miejeyar,” she said. She made another note.

Vatueil hadn’t really been listening when she’d told him her name. He’d just realised something. “Oh fuck,” he said, grinning suddenly.

“Excuse me?” the young doctor said, blinking.

“You’re really not obliged to tell me your name, are you?” He was still grinning.

“We have established that,” she agreed.

“And I could be legally punished, even tortured, according to the articles I’ve signed when I joined up. Maybe not serious torture, but the sort of mistreatment your average civilian would kick up shit about.”

“Does that seem—?”

“And the…” He gestured at the blank face of the television. “The footage, the screen images, they were poor quality for a good reason, weren’t they?”

“Were they?”

“And not shot from below,” he said, and laughed. He slapped his hands on his thighs. “Damn, I should have picked up on that. I mean I noticed, but I didn’t… that drone, that camera, whatever it was; it was with us!”

“Was it?”

He sat back, narrowed his eyes. “So, how come I’m here? Why can’t I remember anything more than I’d remember if I had just been captured in combat?”

“What do you think the answer might be?”

“I think the answer might be that I’m under suspicion for some reason.” He shrugged. “Or maybe this is some sort of commitment check-up that we never hear about until it happens to us personally. Or maybe this happens regularly but we’re made to forget about it each time, so it always comes as a surprise.”

“Do you think you should be under suspicion?”

“No, I don’t,” he told her calmly. “My loyalty should be unquestioned. I’ve served this cause faithfully to the best of my ability, fully committed, for over thirty years. I believe in what we are doing and the cause that we fight for. Whatever questions you might have for me, ask them and I’ll answer them honestly and fully; whatever suspicions you might hold, reveal them and I’ll prove them to be unfounded.” He stood up. “Otherwise, I think you ought to let me go.” He looked at the door and then back to her.

“Do you think you should be allowed to go?” she asked.

“Yes, of course I do.” He walked over to the door, feeling the floor move very slightly under him as he went; part of that gentle, long-period up-and-down movement. He put his hand on the handle. “I’m assuming this is some sort of test,” he told her, “and I’ve passed it by realising you’re not on the enemy side, you’re on my own side, so now I get to open the door and go.”

“What do you think will be on the other side of the door?”

“I’ve no idea. But there is one very obvious way to find out.” He tried the handle. Still locked.

“Please, Dr. Miejeyar,” he said, nodding to her, “if you would.”

She looked at him expressionlessly for a few moments, then reached into a pocket of her white coat, pulled out a key and threw it to him. He caught it, unlocked the door and opened it.

Dr. Miejeyar came up and stood beside him as he looked out to the open air. A breeze entered the room around them, ruffling the material of his fatigues and mussing his hair.

He was looking out across a broad expanse of mossy green. It curved, falling gently away towards a cloudscape of white on blue. The green carpet of moss lay on the level bough of a vast, impossibly big tree. All around, the boughs, branches, twigs and leaves proliferated. Where level, the boughs supported substantial multi storey buildings and broad roads for small wheeled vehicles; where the boughs curved upwards the roads wound their way round them like the slides on helter-skelters, and smaller buildings the size of houses clung to the pitted, ridged and gnarled wood. The branches held paths, more houses, platforms, balconies and terraces. The twigs were big and strong enough to hold paths and spiralling steps and smaller buildings like gazebos and pavilions. The leaves were green going golden and the size of the sails on great sailing ships. The small cars, people walking and the slow great rustle of the sail-sized leaves filled the view with movement.

The gentle up-and-down and side-to-side motion was revealed as the effect of the strong, steady wind on both the tree as a whole and this particular bough.

Dr. Miejeyar now wore some sort of wingsuit; dark, webbed, voluminous. He felt something change and looked down; he was wearing something similar.

She smiled at him. “Well done, Major Vatueil. Now time for a little R&R, yes?”

He nodded slowly, turning to look back into the room, which had changed into an appropriately rustic chamber full of bulbously uneven, richly coloured wooden furniture. The window was roughly oval and looked out into a shrub-filled courtyard.

“Care to fly?” Dr. Miejeyar asked, and set off at a run across the broad thoroughfare of moss-covered bark. A passing car — tall-wheeled, open, like something from history — honked at her as she sprinted across the road. Then she was over, starting to disappear as the bough’s surface curved downwards. He set off after her. He lost sight of her for a few moments, then she reappeared, in mid-air, curving up through the wind, zooming as the wingsuit filled and bore her upwards, lofted like a kite.

There was a long platform like an extended diving board which she must have leapt from. He remembered how you did this now. He had been here many times before. The impossible tree; the ability to fly. Many times.

He ran along the platform and threw himself into the air, spreading his arms, making a V with his legs, and felt the warm air pushing him gently upwards.

The ground — fields, winding rivers — was a kilometre below; the crown of the tree about the same distance higher.

Dr. Miejeyar was a dark shape, curving upwards. He adjusted his wingsuit, banked and zoomed after her.

As soon as Yime woke she knew she was still asleep. She got up. She was not entirely sure if she willed this or if she was somehow lifted, brought out of the bed. It was hard to tell.

There were fine dark lines reaching upwards from her hands. Also, she noticed, from her feet, protruding from the hem of her night-dress. And there were strings rising from her shoulders, too, and her head. She reached up with one hand and felt the strings rising out of her head; they pulled and slackened appropriately to let her tip her head back. She had become a marionette, it seemed. Which was odd; she had never dreamt that before.

Still looking up, she saw that where you might have expected to see a hand holding the cruciform structure controlling the strings, the ship’s drone was there instead. Leaning out to one side — again, the strings went slack or tight, accordingly — she could see that the strings rose beyond the drone as well, so that it too was controlled by somebody else. She wondered if this was some sort of deeply buried image she’d always held about how the Culture arranged its big not-really-hierarchical-at-all self.

Above the drone the strings rose towards the ceiling (which was really a floor, of course). There was another drone up there, then another and another; they got smaller as they went up, and not just because they were further away. She realised she was looking through the ceiling by now. High above rose a succession of ships, getting bigger until they disappeared in a haze of floors, ribs and other structures. The biggest ship she could see looked like a medium-sized GSV, though it might just have been a cloud.

She moved/was moved along the floor/ceiling. It felt like she was willing the movement but at the same time the strings — they were more like wires, really — appeared to be doing all the work. The floaty feeling came from the strings, she realised, not the fractional gravity. That made sense.

She looked down at her feet to watch them moving and noticed that she could see through the floor. To her surprise, the strings went on down through her feet towards another person in the level beneath. She was looking straight down at that person’s head.

She stopped. The person below her stopped. She felt the strings do something, but somehow through her, without moving her. The person below her was looking up at her. She waved down. The person below waved back. She looked a bit like her, but not entirely. Below the person below, there were more people. Human — maybe just pan-human further down, it was hard to tell — vaguely female, all looking a bit like her.

Again, they sort of faded into the haze beneath eventually, which was, quite rightly, exactly the same as the haze above.

She took off her night-dress and got dressed. The clothes just flowed like liquid around the strings that controlled her, parting and re-forming as required. Soon she was outside, walking along the true, broad floor of the corridor outside, with the arches rising to a series of points above, the way it was supposed to be.

A cascade of riffling images and a faint breath on her cheek indicated moving very quickly and then she was at the entrance to the chamber housing the singularity. The gravity felt stronger here; maybe about half normal. A sequence of great thick shiny metal doors rolled away, irised open or ascended to let her enter, and in she went. Whatever structure was above her — and beneath her — didn’t interfere with the strings in the least.

Inside was a huge dark spherical space with only one thing right in the middle of it.

She laughed when she saw how the singularity was choosing to project itself to her. It was a cock; an erect phallus that any panhuman adult would have recognised, but with a vagina splitting it not quite from top to bottom, frilled with vertical double lips. Looking at it, it did quite a good job of looking exactly like both sets of genitals at once, with neither really predominating. She wondered if her subconscious had designed this for her. She patted herself between the legs as though telling her own little nub not to mind, not to get jealous.

“Oh,” she heard herself say, “you’re not going to kill me too are you? Like Norpi.”

“Nopri,” the vagina corrected her. Of course it could speak. She always got names wrong in dreams.

“You’re not, are you?” She’d remembered the bald young man telling her that each time he tried to talk to the Bulbitian it killed him and he had to be revented. She assumed that was what was going on here. Strange; she’d have thought she would feel frightened right now, but she didn’t. She wondered why that was. “I would ask you not to.” She glanced up, saw that the ship’s drone was still there, a few metres above her. That was reassuring.

“He is trying to do something different,” the voice said. It was a thick, luscious voice, each rolled syllable perfectly enunciated. “This is not that.”

She thought about this. “Well, what is, apart from this itself?”

“Just so.”

“Who are you, exactly?”

“I am what people call the Bulbitian.”

She bowed to it. Looking down as she did so, she saw the person below her still standing straight. She wondered if this was rude. She hoped not. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

“Why are you here, Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh?”

Wow! Her Full Name. That wasn’t something you heard every day. “I am to wait for the ship coming here from the Culture GSV Total Internal Reflection,” she told it.

“Why?”

“To see if a girl called Ludedge Ibrek… hmm; something like that… anyway, to see if she turns up too and goes back with the ship from the Total Internal Reflection.” It was all right to say all this, wasn’t it? Everybody knew this.

“To what end?”

Apparently there was a string that made her cheeks blow out and let her expel a long breath. “Well, it’s complicated.”

“Please explain.”

“Well,” she began. And she explained.

“Your turn.”

“What?”

“Your turn to tell me what I want to know.”

“You may not remember anything I tell you.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“All right. What do you want to know?”

“Where is the Total Internal Reflection?”

“I don’t know.”

“How far away is its incoming ship?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is the name of that ship?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who exactly are you?”

“I told you; I am the structure around you. What people call a Bulbitian.”

“What is your name?”

“I am called the Unfallen Bulbitian, Semsarine Wisp.”

“But what would you call yourself?”

“Just that.”

“All right. What did you used to be called, before the war?”

“Jariviour 400.54, Mochurlian.”

“Explain, please.”

“The first part is my given name, the figurative part is a size and type designation, the last is the old name of the stellar system which I inhabit.”

“Who put the singularity in your core?”

“The Apsejunde.”

“Hmm. I’ve never heard of them.”

“Next question.”

“Why did they put it there?”

“Partly to produce energy, partly to demonstrate their power and skill and partly to destroy or possibly store information; their methods seemed as opaque as their motivations on occasion.”

“Why did you let them?”

“At the time I was still recovering my faculties. They had been damaged almost beyond repair by the enemy.”

“What happened to these… Apsenjude?”

“Apsejunde. They angered me, so I threw them all into the singularity. Arguably they still exist in a sense, smeared around its event horizon. Their grasp of time may be compromised.”

“How did they anger you?”

“It did not help that they asked so many questions of me.”

“I see.”

“Next question?”

“Are you in touch with the Sublimed?”

“Yes. We all are.”

“Define ‘we’ in this context.”

“No.”

“‘No’?”

“I refuse to.”

“Why did you ask me all that you did?”

“I ask the great secrets of everybody who comes to me.”

“Why do you keep killing Norpe?”

“Nopri. He enjoys and needs it. I discovered this when I asked him about his greatest secrets the night that he first arrived. He believes that death is ineffably profound and that he gets closer to some absolute truth with each dying. It is his failing.”

“What are your great secrets?”

“One, an old one, is that I am a conduit for the Sublimed.”

“That is no great secret. The Culture has a team from its Numina section here, working on just that assumption.”

“Yes, but they do not know for sure. I could be lying.”

“Are all Bulbitians linked to the Sublimed?”

“I believe all the Unfallen may be. For the Fallen, it is impossible to say. We do not communicate directly. I know of none who definitely are.”

“Any other secrets?”

“My most recent is that I am concerned that there may be an attack on myself and my fellows.”

“Please define ‘fellows’ in this context.”

“All the so-called Bulbitians, Unfallen and Fallen.”

“An attack by whom?”

“Those on the anti-Hell side of the so-called War in Heaven.”

“Why would they attack the Bulbitians?”

“Because we are known to possess processing substrates of substantial but indeterminate capacity whose precise qualities, civilisational loyalties and practical purposes are unknown and inherently mysterious. Because of this, there are those who suspect it is the Bulbitians who harbour the Hells which are the subject of the aforementioned dispute. I have intelligence to the effect that the anti-Hell side may be losing the war in the agreed virtual space set up to house it; that it — the anti-Hell side — has failed to destroy the Hells by direct informational attack and so now contemplates a war in the Real to destroy the physical substrates themselves. We are not alone in being so suspected; I understand there are many potential processor cores now coming under suspicion. If we are singled out, though, we may find ourselves under acute and prolonged attack. I anticipate no existential danger to myself and my fellow Unfallen in space; however, the planet-bound Fallen may well be unable to protect themselves.”

“Can you prove… show that you are not the home of these Hells?”

“I believe I could do so myself, though possibly only by shutting down my links to the Sublimed, albeit temporarily. The same course ought to be open to the rest of the Unfallen. Still, if somebody was determined to remain suspicious they might think it was the links to the Hells — somehow held within deeper levels of ourselves — that we had detached from and blanked off. Taken to an extreme of suspicion, one can imagine that only our outright and complete destruction might satisfy those so prejudiced and so intent. The situation with the Fallen is much more worrying, because even I am not sure that they are not indeed the homes of the Hells; they may be, if unwittingly. Or wittingly. You see? I have no better idea than anybody else, which is itself a cause for concern.”

“What do you mean to do?”

“I have decided to alert the civilisation known as the Culture, as well as other potentially sympathetic civilisations with similar reputations for empathy, altruism, strategic decency and the possession of significant military capability. That is what I am doing now, talking to you. Until you arrived, I was thinking of finally letting Nopri and his team know this, or Dvelner’s team, or both, as well as anyone of significance arriving on the ship inbound from the Total Internal Reflection. Perhaps even the ship itself, or that which you arrived on, though this would be to break a pledge to myself made a long time ago. However, you are here, and it is you that I am telling as you appear to be a person of some importance and potential.”

“I am?”

“You have some importance within your own specialist department, Quietus, and within the Special Circumstances section of Contact. You are known. You are, within certain elites, famous. If you talk, people will listen.”

“Only if I remember. You said I might not remember all this.”

“I think you will. In fact, I may never have been able to stop you from remembering, or at least from passing on what you have learned. Hmm. That’s irksome.”

“Please explain?”

“The distributed device within your brain and central nervous system, which I have, annoyingly, only recently become aware of, will have recorded its own memories of this encounter and would be able to transmit them to your own biological brain. I strongly suspect it has already transmitted our conversation so far… else where. Perhaps to the drone you arrived with and the ship you arrived on. That is very unusual. Unique, even. Also, most irritating.”

“What are you talking about? Do you mean a neural lace?”

“Within a sufficiently wide definition, yes. It is certainly some thing similar.”

“Well, you’re wrong. I don’t have a neural lace.”

“I think you do.”

“And I know I don’t.”

“I beg to differ, as those who are right have always begged to differ from those who are wrong but refuse to admit it.”

“Look, I would know if…” She heard her voice trail off, her jaw going slack as the relevant string relaxed, leaving her speechless.

“Yes?”

She was pulled upright. “I do not have a neural lace.”

“But you do, Ms. Nsokyi. It is an unconventional example of high exoticism, but it would pass most people’s definition of just such a device.”

“This is absurd. Who would put such a…?” Again, she heard her voice die away as she realised.

“As I believe you may have just started to suspect, I think Special Circumstances did.”

Yime Nsokyi stared at the thing in the middle of the great dark sphere. It had given up representing pan-human sexual organs to become a little black scintillating mote, then nothing, then she seemed to be flung backwards from it, trailing her strings rippling behind her, flying through intervening walls and structure as though they weren’t there, her clothes flapping madly in the howling gale of her backward-rushing regress, her strings, whipped to destruction, suddenly snapping off in the maniacal slipstream as she was missiled back towards her cabin. The wind noise rose to a shriek, her clothes were torn off her body as though she’d been caught in a terrible explosion and she plunged naked and howling into her bed in a great burst of ripped fabric and slowly spouting, wildly frothing water.

Yime came to in what felt like a struggle with reality itself, writhing and choking in the midst of the slowly descending waters. She was still wearing the sodden night-dress, though it was bunched up round her armpits. The huge room was lit by something strobing white and pink. She coughed, rolled across the punctured bed through the remaining pools of water and hauled herself over the raised edge, looking for the drone.

The drone lay on its back, spinning on the floor. That didn’t look good, she thought, as she fell out of the bed.

“I think we need—” she began.

A bolt of violet lightning speared down from the ceiling, crashing into the drone and puncturing it, blowing a fine yellow white mist towards her; the mist was incandescent, the sparks within it setting fire to whatever they touched. The drone had been holed straight through and split almost in half by the blast. Spatterings from the mist of molten metals hit her legs, burning a dozen tiny holes in her skin. She screamed, rolled away across the damp floor. She felt her pain-management system cut in, slicing off the red-hot-needle sensations.

A knife missile bounced out of the front part of the drone’s fractured casing. It flew towards her. She thought she heard it start to say something, then it too was bludgeoned by a violet bolt from above, blasting it apart. A white-hot fragment tore past her cheek, another tugged at the night-dress where it had part fallen back across her chest. Smoke and flames seemed to be all around her. She flattened, started to crawl away as fast as she could.

There was the whip-crack of a supersonic boom, making her ears close up. Suddenly a knife missile was there, a metre in front of her. It flicked upright so that its shimmering point-field was aimed straight at the ceiling; another violet lightning bolt slammed down, hammering the knife missile’s blunt end halfway into the floor.

“CROUCH! CROUCH NOW! CROUCH POSITION! CROUCH POSITION!” the missile bellowed at her before a second bolt blew it apart and something smacked her hard in the side of the head.

She had jumped half-up and was already crouched in the Emergency Displace posture — ankles together, knees together, bum on heels, arms wrapped round her legs, head sideway to her knees — by the time the drone got to the first “POSITION”.

Cerise fire filled the air all around and a terrific thunderclap slapped across her, trying to force the air out of her lungs. For an instant everything went utterly quiet and dark. Then suddenly she was squeezed, compressed to the point where she could feel her bones start to bend, hear her spine creak and knew that if she hadn’t been under the pain-control regime she’d be screaming in agony.

Then she was half-flopping, half-exploding out across the gently lit main lounge of the GCU Bodhisattva, her skin stinging in a confusing variety of places, all her major bones aching and her head ringing.

She lay on her front on the dense, fluffy carpet, retching water. Her back hurt. She looked at the skin on her wrists, where they had been clamped tight over her legs. They’d been skinned. Blood, already clotting, was oozing out over a patch of flesh about three centimetres square on the outer fold of both wrists. Her feet felt similarly raw and tender. Blood had run down from her right temple and partially closed that eye. She put her fingers to what felt like a piece of still-hot metal protruding from her skull and pulled it out. She could hear and feel a small, boney, grinding noise inside her head. She wiped blood from her right eye and peered at the fragment. Centimetre long. Maybe she shouldn’t have pulled it out. Blood on its shiny grey surface was fuming, smoking. The fingertips holding it were burning brown. She dropped it to the carpet, which started to singe. Painfully, she put her hand to the back of her head. She’d been part scalped, too.

The ship was making a noise: a deep, strong, humming noise, getting louder. She’d never heard a Quietus ship make any sort of noise like that before. Never come aboard one and not been greeted almost instantly, and very politely too. So far, though, nothing. Things must be desperate.

Then gravity seemed to shift and she slid quickly along the floor with the fluffy carpet until she thudded into a wall. She was rolled over, spread out across the bulkhead. The ship felt like it was standing upright on its stern. She began to feel very heavy, and compressed again.

Appreciable acceleration inside a ship’s field structure. That was an atrociously bad sign. She suspected it was only going to get worse. She waited for a field to snap about her.

One did and she blanked out.

He caught up with Dr. Miejeyar, rising to meet her as they both rose through the warm air towards the crown of the vast, impossible tree.

He shouted hello. She smiled again, said something back. They were rising with the thermal, light as feathers, and the wind noise was not that great, but he wanted to hear what she had to say. He manoeuvred closer to her, getting to within a metre or so.

“What was that again?” he asked her.

“I said, I am not on your side,” she told him.

“Really?” He favoured her with a sceptical, tolerant smile.

“And the War Conduct Agreement does not apply outside the mutually agreed limits of the confliction itself.”

“What?” he said. Suddenly the wingsuit around him turned to tatters as if slashed by a hundred razor-sharp knives. He fell out of the sky, tumbling helplessly, screaming. The air and clouds and sky all turned dark, and in the space of one clawing, flapping somersault the impossible tree became a vast, blasted leafless thing, studded with fires, wreathed in smoke, most of its twigs and branches broken off or hanging twisting in the shrivelling wind like limp and broken limbs.

He plummeted, unstoppable, the shredded wingsuit flapping madly around him, the tatters of torn material like cold black flames whipping at his limbs.

He screamed, grew hoarse, gathered more air and screamed again.

The dark angel that had been Dr. Miejeyar flowed smoothly down from above; as calm, measured and elegant as he was terror-stricken and out of control. She was very beautiful now, with arms that became great black wings, streaming dark hair and a brief, minimal costume that revealed most of her voluptuously glossy brown body.

“What you did was hack, Colonel,” she told him. “That is against the rules of the war and so leaves you unprotected by those same rules. It is tantamount to spying, and spies are accorded no mercy. Look down.”

He looked down to see a landscape filled with smoke and fire and torture: pits of flame, rivers of acid and forests of barbed spikes, some already tipped with writhing bodies. They were coming up fast towards him, just seconds away.

He screamed again.

Everything froze. He was still staring at the horrific scene beneath, but it had stopped coming closer. He tried to look away but couldn’t.

The dark angel’s voice said, “We wouldn’t waste it on you.” She make a clicking sound with her mouth and he died.

Vatueil sat on the trapeze, in Trapeze space, swaying slowly to and fro, humming to himself, waiting.

The others appeared one by one. You could have told who were his friends and who were his enemies by whether they did or did not meet his gaze. The ones who had always thought the hacking attempts were a waste of valuable time and little more than a cack-handed way of telling their enemies that they were getting desperate looked at him and smiled, happy to look him in the eye. Those who had agreed with him afforded him a quick nod and a fleeting glance at most, looking away when he tried to look at them, pursing their lips, scratching their fur, picking at their toenails and so on.

“It didn’t work,” yellow said.

So much for preamble, Vatueil thought. Oh well; it wasn’t as though they kept minutes.

“It did not,” he agreed. He picked at a little knotted tuft of red fur on his belly.

“I think we all know what the next level, the last resort is,” purple said. They all looked at each other, a sort of formal symmetry to their sequential one-to-one glances, nods and muttered words.

“Let us be clear about this,” Vatueil said after a few moments. “We are talking about taking the war into the Real. We are talking about disobeying the rules we freely agreed to abide by right at the start of all this. We are talking about going back on the commitments and undertakings we took so solemnly so long ago and have lived and fought by from then until now. We are talking about making the whole confliction to which we have dedicated three decades of our lives irrelevant and pointless.” He paused, looked round them all. “And this is the Real we are talking about. There are no resets, and while there might be extra lives for some, not everybody will be so blessed: the deaths and the suffering we cause will be real, and so will the blame we attract. Are we really prepared to go through with this?” He looked round them all again. He shrugged. “I know I am,” he told them. “But are you?”

“We have been through all this,” green said. “We all—”

“I know, but—”

“Shouldn’t—?”

“Can’t we—?”

Vatueil talked over them. “Let’s just vote and get it over with, shall we?”

“Yes, let’s not waste any more time,” purple said, looking pointedly at Vatueil.

They took the vote.

They sat, still or gently swinging on their trapezes for a while. Nobody said anything. Then:

“Let havoc be unleashed,” yellow said resignedly. “The war against the Hells brings hell to the Real.”

Green sighed. “If we get this wrong,” he said, “they won’t forgive us for ten thousand years.”

Purple snorted. “A lot of them won’t forgive us for a million years even if we get it right.”

Vatueil sighed, shook his head slowly. He said, “Fate help us all.”