Look to Windward (41 page)

“What is it I'm trying to send, to Displace?”.

“Initially, one of a stock of twenty dummy warheads which were loaded into your Soulkeeper before it was emplaced within you. When the time comes for you to fire in anger, you will be manipulating the transference of one end of a microscopic wormhole, though without the wormhole attached.”

“That sounds—”.

“Bizarre, to say the least. Nevertheless.”

“So, it's not a bomb?”.

“No. Though the eventual effect will be somewhat similar.”

“Ah,” Quilan said. “So, once the Displacement has taken place, I just walk away?”.

“Initially, yes.” Quilan could just make out the Estodien looking at him. “Why, Major, were you expecting that to be the moment of your death?”

“Yes, I was.”

“That would be too obvious, Major.”

“This was described to me as being a suicide mission, Estodien. I would hate to think I might survive it and feel cheated.”

“How annoying that it is so dark in here I can't see the expression on your face as you say that, Major.”

“I am quite serious, Estodien.”

“Hmm. Probably just as well. Well, let me put your mind at rest, Major. You will assuredly die when the wormhole activates. Instantaneously. I hope that doesn't conflict with any desire you might have harbored for a lingering demise.”

“The fact will be enough, Estodien. The manner is not something I can bring myself to be concerned with, though I would prefer it to be quick rather than slow.”

“Quick it will be, Major. You have my word on that.”

“So, Estodien, where do I carry out this Displacement?”.

“Inside the Hub of Masaq' Orbital. The space station which sits in the middle of the world.”

“Is that normally accessible?”.

“Of course. Quilan, they run school trips there, so their young can see the place where the machine squats that oversees their pampered lives.” Quilan heard the older male gather his robes about him. “You simply ask to be shown around. It will not seem in the least suspicious. You carry out the Displacement and return to the surface of the Orbital. At the appointed time the wormhole mouth will be connected with the wormhole itself. The Hub will be destroyed.

“The Orbital will continue to run using other automatic systems situated on the perimeter, but there will be some loss of life as particularly critical processes are left to run out of control; transport systems, largely. Those souls stored in the Hub's own substrates will be lost, too. At any given moment those stored souls can number over four billion; these will account for the majority of the lives the Chelgrian-Puen require to release our own people into heaven.”

QUILAN THOUGHTS.

The words rang suddenly in his head, making him flinch. He sensed Visquile go quiet beside him.

~ Gone-before, he thought and bowed his head. ~ Just one thought, really. The obvious one; why not let our dead into the beyond without this terrible action?

HEROES HEAVEN. HONORING KILLED BY ENEMIES WITHOUT REPLY DISGRACES ALL COME BEFORE (MANY MORE). DISGRACE ASSUMED WHEN WAR BELIEVED OUR FAULT. OWN RESPONSIBILITY: ACCEPT DISGRACE/ACCEPT DISGRACED. KNOW NOW WAR CAUSED BY OTHERS. FAULT THEIRS DISGRACE THEIRS RESPONSIBILITY THEIRS: DEBT THEIRS. REJOICE! NOW DISGRACED BECOME HEROES TOO ONCE BALANCE OF LOSS ACHIEVED.

~ It is hard for me to rejoice, knowing that I will have so much blood on my hands.

YOU GO TO OBLIVION QUILAN. YOUR WISH. BLOOD NOT ON YOU BUT ON MEMORY OF YOU. THAT RESTRICTED TO FEW IF MISSION WHOLLY SUCCEEDS. THINK
ACTIONS LEADING TO MISSION NOT RESULTS. RESULTS YOUR NOT CONCERN. OTHER QUESTIONS?

~ No, no other questions, thank you.

•   •   •   

“Think of the cup, think of the interior of the cup, think of the space of air that is the shape of the inside of the cup, then think of the cup, then think of the table, then of the space around the table, then of the route you would take from here to the table, to sit down at the table and take up the cup. Think of the act of moving from here to there, think of the time it would take to move from this place to that place. Think of walking from where you are now to where the cup was when you saw it a few moments ago … Are you thinking of that, Quilan?”.

“… Yes.”

“Send.”

There was a pause.

“Have you sent?”.

“No, Estodien. I don't think so. Nothing has happened.”

“We will wait. Anur is sitting by the table, watching the cup. You might have sent the object without knowing it.” They sat a few moments longer.

Then Visquile sighed and said, “Think of the cup. Think of the interior of the cup, think of the space of air that is the shape of the inside of the cup … ”.

“I will never do this, Estodien. I can't send the damn thing anywhere. Maybe the Soulkeeper is broken.”

“I do not think so. Think of the cup … ”

•   •   •   

“Don't be disheartened, Major. Come now; eat. My people come from Sysa originally. There's an old Sysan saying that the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it.”

They were in the
Soulhaven
's small refectory, at a table apart from the handful of other monks whose watch schedule meant it was their lunchtime too. They had water, bread and meat soup. Quilan was drinking his water from the plain white ceramic cup he had been using as a Displacement target all morning. He stared into it morosely.

“I do worry, Estodien. Perhaps something has gone wrong. Perhaps I don't have the right sort of imagination or something; I don't know.”

“Quilan, we are attempting to do something no Chelgrian has ever done before. You're trying to turn yourself into a Chelgrian Displacement machine. You can't expect to get it right first time, on the first morning you try it.” Visquile looked up as Anur, the gangly monk who had shown them around the behemothaur's exterior the day they had arrived, passed their table with his tray. He bowed clumsily, nearly tipping the contents of his tray onto the floor, only just saving it. He gave a foolish smile. Visquile nodded. Anur had been sitting watching the cup all morning, waiting for a tiny black speck—possibly preceded by a tiny silver sphere—to appear in its white scoop.

Visquile must have read Quilan's expression. “I asked Anur not to sit with us. I don't want you to think of him sitting looking at the cup, I want you to think only of the cup.”

Quilan smiled. “Do you think I might Displace the test object into Anur by mistake?”.

“I doubt that would happen, though you never know. But in any event, if you start to see Anur sitting there, tell me and we'll replace him with one of the other monks.”

“If I did Displace the object into a person, what would happen?”.

“As I understand it, almost certainly nothing. The object is too small to cause any damage. I suppose if it materialized inside the person's eye they might see a speck, or if it appeared right alongside a pain receptor they might feel a tiny pin-prick. Anywhere else in the body it would go unnoticed. If you could Displace this cup,” the Estodien said, lifting his own ceramic cup, identical to Quilan's, “into somebody's brain then I dare say their head might explode, just from the pressure produced by the sudden extra volume. But the dummy warheads you are working with are too small to be noticed.”

“It might block a small blood vessel.”

“A capillary, perhaps. Nothing large enough to cause any tissue damage.”

Quilan drank from his own cup, then held it up, looking at it. “I shall see this damn thing in my dreams.”

Visquile smiled. “That might be no bad thing.”

Quilan supped his soup. “What's happened to Eweirl? I haven't seen him since we arrived.”

“Oh, he is about,” Visquile said. “He is making preparations.”

“To do with my training?”.

“No, for when we leave.”

“When we leave?”.

Visquile smiled. “All in due time, Major.”

“And the two drones, our allies?”.

“As I said, all in good time, Major.”

“And send.”

“Yes!”.

“Yes?”.

“… No. No, I hoped … Well, it doesn't matter. Let's try again.”

“Think of the cup … ”.

•   •   •   

“Think of a place you know or knew well. A small place. Perhaps a room or a small apartment or house, perhaps the interior of a cabin, a car, a ship; anything. It must be a place you knew well enough to be able to find your way around at night, so that you knew where everything was in the darkness and would not trip over things or break them. Imagine being there. Imagine going to a particular place and dropping, say, a crumb or a small bead or seed into a cup or other container … ”.

•   •   •   

That night he again found it difficult to sleep. He lay looking into the darkness, curled on the broad sleeping platform, breathing in the sweet, spicy air of the giant bulbous fruit-like thing where he, Visquile and most of the others were billeted. He tried thinking about that damn cup, but gave up. He was tired of it. Instead he tried to work out exactly what was going on here.

It was obvious, he thought, that the technology
inside the specially adapted Soulkeeper he had been fitted with was not Chelgrian. Some other Involved was taking a part in this; an Involved species whose technology was on a par with the Culture's.

Two of their representatives were probably housed inside the pair of double-cone-shaped drones he'd seen earlier, the ones who had spoken to him inside his head, before the gone-before had. They had not reappeared.

He supposed the drones might be remotely operated, perhaps from somewhere outside the airsphere, though the Oskendari's notorious antipathy toward such technology meant that the drones probably did physically contain the aliens. Equally, that made it all the more puzzling that the airsphere had been chosen as the place to train him in the use of a technology as advanced as that contained within his Soulkeeper, unless the idea was that if the use of such devices escaped attention here, it would also go unnoticed in the Culture.

Quilan went through what he knew of the relatively small number of Involved species sufficiently advanced to take the Culture on in this way. There were between seven and twelve other species on that sort of level, depending which set of criteria you used. None were supposed to be particularly hostile to the Culture; several were allies.

Nothing he knew of would have provided an obvious motive for what he was being trained to do, but then what he knew was only what the Involveds allowed to be known about some of the more profound relationships between them, and that most certainly
did not include everything that was really going on, especially given the time scales some of the Involveds had become used to thinking on.

He knew that the Oskendari airspheres were fabulously old, even by the standards of those who called themselves the Elder races, and had succeeded in remaining mysterious throughout the Scientific Ages of hundreds of come-and-gone or been-and-Sublimed species. The rumors had it that there was some sort of link left between whoever it was who had created the airspheres and subsequently quit the matter-based life of the universe, and the mega and giga fauna which still inhabited the environments.

This link with the gone-before of the airspheres' builders was reputedly the reason that all the hegemonizing and invasive species—not to mention the unashamedly nosy species, such as the Culture—who had encountered the airspheres had thought the better of trying to take them over (or study them too closely).

These same rumors, backed up by ambiguous records held by the Elders, hinted that, long ago, a few species had imagined that they could make the big wandering worlds part of their empire, or had taken it upon themselves to send in survey devices, against the expressed wishes of the behemothaurs and the megalithine and gigalithine globular entities. Such species tended to disappear quickly or gradually from the records concerned thereafter, and there was firm statistical evidence that they disappeared more rapidly and more completely than species which had no record of antagonizing the inhabitants—and by implication the guardians—of the airspheres.

Quilan wondered if the gone-before of the airspheres had been in contact with the gone-before of Chel. Was there some link between the Sublimed of the two (or more, of course) species?

Who knew how the Sublimed thought, how they interacted? Who knew how alien minds worked? For that matter, who was entirely satisfied that they knew how the minds of one of their own species worked?

The Sublimed, he supposed, was the answer to all those questions. But any understanding seemed to be resolutely one-way.

He was being asked to perform a sort of miracle. He was being asked to commit mass murder. He tried to look into himself—and wondered if, even at that moment, the Chelgrian-Puen were listening in to his thoughts, watching the images that flitted through his mind, measuring the fixity of his commitment and weighing the worth of his soul—and was faintly, but only faintly, appalled to realize that while he doubted his ability ever to perform the miracle, he was, at the very least, quite resigned to the commission of that genocide.

•   •   •   

And, that night, not quite gone over to sleep, he remembered her room at the university, where they discovered each other, where he came to know her body better than his own, better than he had known any thing or subject (certainly better than anything he was supposed to be studying), and knew it in darkness and light and indeed placed a seed in a container over and over again.

He could not use that. But he remembered the room, could see the shape of darkness that was her
body as she moved about it sometimes, late at night, switching something off, dousing an incense coil, closing the window when it rained. (Once, she brought out some antique script-strings, erotic tales told in knots, and let him bind her; later she bound him, and he, who had always thought himself the plainest of young males, bluffly proud of his normalcy, discovered that such sex-play was not the preserve of those he'd considered weak and degenerate.)