Look to Windward (14 page)

“It's on fire!”.

“Pole on the dark bits, you idiot, not the bright bits!”.

“Bring it in and put it out!”.

“What?”

“Fuck, it's hot.”

“Yeah, it is, isn't it? I never felt a sim this hot!”.

“This is not a simulation, and you're getting zapped.”

“Can anybody—?”.

“Help!”

“Oh, throw it away! Grab another oar.”

They were on one of Masaq's last eight uninhabited Plates. Here—and for three Plates to spinward and four anti-spinward—Masaq' Great River flowed dead straight through a seventy-five-thousand-kilometer-long base-material tunnel across a landscape still in the process of being formed.

“Wow! Hot hot hot! Some sim!”.

“Get this guy out of here. He shouldn't have been invited in the first place. There are one-timers here with no savers. If this clown thinks we're in a sim he could do anything.”

“Jump overboard, hopefully.”

“Need more bods on the starboard side!”.

“The what?”.

“Right. The right. This side. This side here. Fuck”.

“Don't even fucking joke about that. He's so twisted I wouldn't trust him to punch out if he did fall in.”

“Tunnel ahead! Going to get hotter!”.

“Oh, shit.”

“It can't get hotter! They don't let it.”

“Will you fucking
listen?
This is not a simulation!”.

As was by now long-standing established practice for the Culture, asteroids from Masaq's own system—most of them collected and parked in planetary holding orbits several thousand years earlier when the Orbital had first been constructed—were tugged in by Lifter craft and lowered to the Plate's surface where any one of several energy delivery systems (planetary crust-busting weapons, if you insisted on looking on them that way) heated the bodies to liquid heat so
that even more mind-boggling matter- and energy-manipulating processes either let the resulting slag flow and cool in certain designated directions or sculpted it to cloak the already existing morphology of the strategic base matter.

“On.”

“What?”.

“On. You fall on, not in. Don't look at me like that; it's the density.”

“I bet you know all about fucking density. Got a terminal?”.

“No.”

“Implanted?”.

“No.”

“Me neither. Try and find somebody who does or is and get that cretin off here.”

“It won't come out!”.

“The pin! You have to knock the pin out first!”.

“Oh, yeah.”

People—especially Culture people, whether human, once human, alien or machine—had been building Orbitals like this for thousands of years, and not very long after the process had become a mature technology, still thousands of years earlier, some fun- (or at any rate risk-) loving individual had thought of using a few of the lava streams naturally generated by such processes as the medium for a new sport.

“Excuse me, I have a terminal.”

“Oh. Yeah, Kabe, of course.”

“What?”.

“I have a terminal. Here.”

“Ship oars! Mind your heads!”

“It's fucking glowing in there, man!”.

“Sep; hit the cover!”.

“Covering now!”.

“Oh, wow!”.

“Ship them or lose them!”.

“Hub! See this guy? Sim-shitter! Zap him out now!”.

“Done … ”.

And so lava-rafting became a pastime. On Masaq' the tradition was that you did it without the aid of field technology or anything clever in the way of material science. The experience would be more exciting and you would come closer to its reality if you used materials that were only just up to the demands being made in it. It was what people called a minimal-safety-factor sport.

“Watch that oar!”.

“It's caught!”.

“Well, push it!”.

“Oh, shit!”.

“What the—?”.

“Aaah!”.

“It's okay, it's okay!”.

“Fuck!”.

“… You are all quite mad, by the way. Happy rafting.”

The raft itself—a flat-decked platform four meters by twelve with meter-high gunwales—was ceramic, the cover protecting the rafters from the heat of the lava tunnel they were now shooting down was aluminized plastic, and the steering oars were wood, to introduce a note of the corporeal.

“My hair!”.

“Oh! I want to go home!”

“Water bucket!”.

“Where'd that guy—?”.

“Stop whining.”

“Good
grief!”

Lava-rafting had always been exciting and dangerous. Once the eight Plates had been filled with air, it had become more of a hardship; radiated heat was joined by convected, and while people felt it was somehow more authentic to raft without breathing gear, having your lungs scorched was generally no more fun than it sounded.

“Ah! My nose! My nose!”.

“Thanks.”

“Sprays!”.

“You're welcome”.

“I'm with the other guy. I don't believe this.”

Kabe sat back. He had to crouch; the wind-rippled undersurface of the raft's full cover was just above his head. The canopy was reflecting the heat of the tunnel's ceiling, but the air temperature was still extreme. Some of the humans were pouring water over themselves or spraying it onto each other. Coils of steam filled the little mobile cave that the raft had become. The light was very dark red, spilling from either end of the pitching, bucking craft.

“This hurts!”.

“Well, stop it hurting!”.

“Zap me out too!”.

“Nearly out! … Oh-oh. We got hang-spikes.”

The downstream mouth of the lava tunnel had teeth; it was strung with jagged protrusions like stalactites.

“Spikes! Get down!”.

One of the hang-spikes ripped the raft's flimsy protective cover away and flung it onto the yellow-glowing surface of the lava stream. The cover shrank, burst into flames and then, caught in the thermals coming off the braided flow, rose flapping like a burning bird. A blast of heat rolled over the raft. People screamed. Kabe had to fling himself back flat to avoid being hit by one of the pendulous spears of rock. He felt something give beneath him; there was a snap and another scream.

The raft flew out of the tunnel into a broad canyon of craggy cliffs whose basalt dark edges were lit by the broad stream of lava coursing between them. Kabe levered himself back up. Most of the humans were throwing or spraying water around, cooling themselves after the final blast of heat; many had lost hair, some were sitting or lying looking singed but uncaring, staring blankly ahead, blissed out on some secretion. One couple were just sitting hunched up on the flat deck of the raft, crying loudly.

“Was that your leg?” Kabe asked the man sitting on the deck behind him.

The man was holding his left leg and grimacing. “Yes,” he said. “I think it's broken.”

“Yes. I think it is, too. I'm very sorry. Is there anything I can do?”.

“Try not falling back like that again, not while I'm here.”

Kabe looked forward. The glowing river of orange lava meandered into the distance between the canyon walls. There were no more lava tunnels visible. “I think
I can guarantee that,” Kabe said. “I do apologize; I was told to sit in the center of the deck. Can you move?”.

The man slid back on one hand and his buttocks, still holding his leg with the other hand. People were calming down. Some were still crying but one was shouting that it was okay, there were no more lava tunnels.

“You all right?” one of the females asked the man with the broken leg. The woman's jacket was still smouldering. She had no eyebrows and her blond hair looked uneven and had crisped-looking patches.

“Broken. I'll live.”

“My fault,” Kabe explained.

“I'll get a splint.”

The woman went to a locker near the stern. Kabe looked around. There was a smell of burned hair and old-fashioned clothing and lightly crisped human flesh. He could see a few people with discolored patches on their faces, and a few had their hands submerged in water buckets. The crouched couple were still wailing. Most of the rest who hadn't bussed out were comforting each other, tear-streaked faces lit by the livid light reflected from the glass-sharp black clifls. High above, twinkling madly in the brown-dark sky, the nova that was Portisia gazed balefully down.

And this is meant to be fun, Kabe thought.

~ Does it become anymore ridiculous?

“What?” somebody yelled from the raft's bows.
“Rapids?”

~ Not really.

Somebody started sobbing hysterically.

~ I've seen enough. Shall we?

~ By all means. Once was probably enough.

(Recording ends.)

Kabe and Ziller faced each other across a large, elegantly furnished room lit by golden sunlight that spilled through the opened balcony windows, already filtered through the gently waving branches of an everblue growing outside. A myriad of soft needle-shadows moved on the creamily tiled floor, lay across the ankle-deep, abstractly patterned carpets and fluttered silently on the sculpted surfaces of gleaming wooden sideboards, richly carved chests and plumply upholstered couches.

The Homomdan and the Chelgrian both wore devices which looked like they might have been either protective helmets of dubious effectiveness or rather garish head-jewelry.

Ziller snorted. “We look preposterous.”

“Perhaps that is one reason people take to implants.”

They each took the devices off. Kabe, sitting on a graceful, relatively flimsy-looking chaise longue with deep bays designed especially for tripeds, placed his head-set on the couch beside him.

Ziller, curled on a broad couch, set his on the floor. He blinked a couple of times then reached into his waistcoat pocket for his pipe. He wore pale-green leggings and an enamelled groin plate. The waistcoat was hide, jewelled.

“This was when?” he asked.

“About eighty days ago.”

“The Hub Mind was right. They are all quite mad.”

“And yet most of the people you saw there had
lava-rafted before and had just as awful a time. I have checked up since and all but three of the twenty-three humans you saw there have taken part in the sport again.” Kabe picked up a cushion and played with the fringe. “Though it has to be said that two of them have experienced temporary body-death when their lava canoe capsized and one of them—a one-timer, a Disposable—was crushed to death while glacier-caving.”

“Completely dead?”.

“Very completely, and forever. They recovered the body and held a funeral service.”

“Age?”.

“She was thirty-one standard years old. Barely an adult.”

Ziller sucked on his pipe. He looked toward the balcony windows. They were in a large house in an estate in the Tirian Hills, on Osinorsi Lower, the Plate to spinwards of Xaravve. Kabe shared the house with an extended human family of about sixteen individuals, two of them children. A new top floor had been built for him. Kabe enjoyed the company of the humans and their young, though he had come to realize that he was probably a little less gregarious than he'd thought he was.

He had introduced the Chelgrian to the half dozen other people present in and around the house and shown him around. From down-slope-facing windows and balconies, and from the roof garden, you could see, looming bluely across the plains, the cliffs of the massif that carried Masaq' Great River across the vast sunken garden that was Osinorsi Lower Plate.

They were waiting for the drone E. H. Tersono, which was on its way to them with what it called important news.

“I seem to recall,” Ziller said, “that I said I agreed with Hub that they were all quite mad and you began your reply with the words ‘And yet.'” Ziller frowned. “And then everything you said subsequently seemed to agree with what I had said.”

“What I meant is that however much they appeared to hate the experience, and despite being under no pressure to repeat it—”.

“Other than pressure from their equally cretinous peers.”

“—they nevertheless chose to, because however awful it might have seemed at the time, they feel that they gained something positive from it.”

“Oh? And what would that be? That they lived through it despite their stupidity in undertaking this totally unnecessary traumatic experience in the first place? What one should gain from an unpleasant experience should be the determination not to repeat it. Or at least the inclination.”

“They feel they have tested themselves—”.

“And found themselves to be mad. Does that count as a positive result?”.

“They feel they have tested themselves against nature—”.

“What's natural around here?” Ziller protested. “The nearest ‘natural' thing to here is ten light minutes away. It's the fucking sun.” He snorted. “And I wouldn't put it past them to have meddled with that.”

“I don't believe they have. In fact it was a potential
instability in Lacelere that produced the high back-up rate on Masaq' Orbital in the first place, before it became famous for excessive fun.” Kabe put the cushion down.

Ziller was staring at him. “Are you saying the sun could explode?”.

“Well, sort of, in theory. It's a very—”.

“You're not serious!”.

“Of course I am. The chances are—”.

“They never told me
that!”

“Actually, it wouldn't really blow up as such, but it might flare—”.

“It
does
flare! I've seen its flares!”.

“Yes. Pretty, aren't they? But there is a chance—no more than one in several million during the time the star spends on the main-sequence—that it might produce a flare sequence that Hub and the Orbital's defenses would be unable to deflect or shelter every-one from.”

“And they built this thing here?”.