Look to Windward (42 page)

He saw the pattern of shadow her body made across the tell-tale lights and reflections in the room. Here, now, in this strange world, so many years of time and millennia of light away from that blessed time and place, he imagined himself getting up and crossing from the curl-pad to the far side of the room. There was—there had been—a little silver cuplet on a shelf there. Sometimes when she wanted to be absolutely naked, she would take off the ring her mother had given her. It would be his duty, his mission to take the ring from her hand and place the gold band in the silver cuplet.

•   •   •   

“All right. Are we there?”.

“Yes, we're there.”

“So. Send.”

“Yes … No.”

“Hmm. Well, we begin again. Think of—”.

“Yes, the cup.”

•   •   •   

“We are quite certain the device is working, Estodien?”.

“We are.”

“Then it's me. I just can't … It's just not in me.” He
dropped some bread into his soup. He laughed bitterly. “Or it is in me, and I can't get it out.”

“Patience, Major. Patience.”

•   •   •   

“There. Are we there?”.

“Yes, yes, we're there.”

“And; send.”

“I—Wait. I think I felt—”.

“Yes! Estodien! Major Quilan! It worked!”.

Anur came running through from the refectory.

•   •   •   

“Estodien, what do you think our allies will gain from my mission?”.

“I'm sure I don't know, Major. It is not really a subject it would benefit either of us to worry ourselves with.”

They sat in a small runabout; a sleek little two-person craft of the
Soulhaven,
in space, outside the airsphere.

The same small airship that had carried them from the airsphere portal the day they'd arrived had taken Quilan and Visquile on the return trip. They had walked through the solid-seeming tube of air again, this time to the runabout. It had drifted away from the portal, then picked up speed. It seemed to be heading toward one of the sun-moons which provided the airsphere with light. The moon drifted closer. Sunlight poured from what looked like a gigantic near-flat crater covering half of one face. It looked like the incandescent eyeball of some infernal deity.

“All that matters, Major,” Visquile said, “is that the technology appears to work.”

They had conducted ten successful trials with the supply of dummy warheads loaded inside the Soulkeeper. There had been an hour or so of failed attempts to repeat his initial success, then he'd managed to perform two Displacements in succession.

After that the cup had been moved to different parts of the
Soulhaven;
Quilan had only two unsuccessful attempts before he became able to Displace the specks wherever he was asked. On the third day he attempted and conducted only two Displacements, to either end of the ship. This, the fourth day, was the first time Quilan would attempt a Displacement outside the
Soulhaven
.

“Are we going to that moon, Estodien?” he asked as the giant satellite grew to fill the view ahead.

“Nearby,” Visquile said. He pointed. “You see that?” A tiny fleck of gray floated away to one side of the sun-moon, just visible in the wash of light pouring from the crater. “That is where we are going.”

It was something between a ship and a station. It looked like it could have been either, and as though it might have been designed by any one of thousands of early-stage Involved civilizations. It was a collection of gray-black ovoids, spheres and cylinders linked by thick struts, revolving slowly in an orbit around the sun-moon configured so that it would never fly over the vast light beam issuing from the side facing the airsphere.

“We have no idea who built it,” Visquile said. “It has been here for the last few tens of thousands of years and has been much modified by successive species who have thought to use it to study the airsphere and
the moons. Parts of it are currently equipped to provide reasonable conditions for ourselves.”

The little runabout slid inside a hangar pod stuck to the side of the largest of the spherical units. It settled to the floor and they waited while the pod's exterior doors revolved shut and air rushed in.

The canopy unsucked itself from the little craft's fuselage; they stepped out into cold air that smelled of something acrid.

The two big double-cone-shaped drones whirred from another airlock, coming to hover on either side of them.

There was no voice inside his head this time, just a deep humming from one of them which modulated to say, “Estodien, Major. Follow.”

And they followed, down a passageway and through a couple of thick, mirror-finish doors to what appeared to be a sort of broad gallery with a single long window facing them and curving back behind where they had come in. It might have been the viewing cupola of an ocean liner, or a stellar cruise ship. They walked forward and Quilan realized that the window—or screen—was taller and deeper than he had at first assumed.

The impression of a band of glass or screen fell away as he understood that he was looking at the single great ribbon that was the slowly revolving surface of an immense world. Stars shone faintly above and below it; a couple of brighter bodies which were, just, more than mere points of light must be planets in the same system. The star providing the sunlight had to be almost directly behind the place he was looking from.

The world looked flat, spread out like the peel from some colossal fruit and thrown across the background stars. Edged top and bottom in the glinting gray-blue translucency of enormous containing walls, the surface was separated into long strips by numerous, regularly positioned verticals of gray-brown, white and—in the center—stark gray-black. These enormous mountain ranges stretched from wall to wall across the world, parcelling it up into what must have been a few dozen separate divisions.

Between them there lay about equal amounts of land and ocean, the land partly in the form of island continents, partly in smaller but appreciably large islands—set in seas of various hues of blue and green—and partly in great swathes of green, fawn, brown and red which extended from one retaining wall to the other, sometimes dotted with seas, sometimes not, but always traversed by a single darkly winding thread or a collection of barely visible filaments, green and blue tendrils laid across on the ochers, tans and tawns of the land.

Clouds swirled, speckled, waved, dotted, arced and hazed in a chaos of patterns, near-patterns and patches, brush strokes strewn across the canvas of terrain and water below.

“This is what you will see,” one of the drones hummed.

The Estodien Visquile patted Quilan on the shoulder. “Welcome to Masaq' Orbital,” he said.

•   •   •   

~ Five billion of them, Huyler. Males, females, their young. This is a terrible thing we're being asked to do.

~ It is, but we wouldn't be doing it if these people hadn't done something just as terrible to us.

~ These people, Huyler? These people right here, on Masaq'?

~ Yes, these people, Quil. You've seen them. You've talked to them. When they discover where you're from they tone it down for fear of insulting you, but they're so obviously proud of the extent and depth of their democracy. They're so damned smug that they're so fully involved, they're so proud of their ability to have a say and of their right to opt-out and leave if they disagree profoundly enough with a course of action.

So, yes, these people. They share collective responsibility for the actions of their Minds, including the Minds of Contact and Special Circumstances. That's the way they've set it up, that's the way they want it to be. There are no ignorants here, Quil, no exploited, no Invisibles or trodden-upon working class condemned forever to do the bidding of their masters. They are all masters, every one. They can all have a say on everything. So by their own precious rules, yes, it was these people who let what happened to Chel happen, even if few actually knew anything about the details at the time.

~ Do only I think that this is … harsh?

~ Quil, have you heard even one of them suggest that they might disband Contact? Or reign-in SC? Have we heard any of them even suggesting thinking about that? Well, have we?

~ No.

~ No, not one. Oh, they tell us of their regret in such pretty language, Quilan, they say they're so fucking sorry in so many beautifully expressed and elegantly couched and delivered ways; it's like it's a game for them. It's like they're
competing to see who can be most convincingly contrite! But are they prepared to really do anything apart from tell us how sorry they are?

~ They have their own blindnesses. It is the machines we have our real argument with.

~ It is a machine you are going to destroy.

~ And with it five billion people.

~ They brought it upon themselves, Major. They could vote to disband Contact today, and any one or any group of them could leave tomorrow for their Ulterior or for anywhere else, if they decided they no longer agreed with their damned policy of Interference.

~ It is still a terrible thing we're asked to do, Huyler.

~ I agree. But we must do it. Quil, I've avoided putting it in these terms because it sounds so portentous and I'm sure it's something you've thought about yourself anyway, but I do have to remind you; four and a half billion Chelgrian souls depend on you, Major. You really are their only hope.

~ So I'm told. And if the Culture retaliates?

~ Why should they retaliate against us because one of their machines goes mad and destroys itself?

~ Because they will not be fooled. Because they are not so stupid as we would like them to be, just careless sometimes.

~ Even if they do suspect anything, they will still not be certain it was our doing. If everything goes according to plan it will look like the Hub did it itself, and even if they were certain we were responsible, our planners think that they will accept that we brought about an honest revenge.

~ You know what they say, Huyler. Don't fuck with the Culture. We are about to.

~ I don't buy the idea that this is some piece of wisdom
the other Involveds have arrived at thoughtfully after millennia of contact with these people. I think it's something the. Culture came up with itself. It's propaganda, Quil.

~ Even so, a lot of the Involveds seem to think it's true. Be even slightly nice to the Culture and it will fall over itself to be still nicer back. Treat them badly and they—

~ —And they act all hurt. It's contrived. You have to come on really evil to get them to drop the ultra-civilized performance.

~ Slaughtering five billion of them, at least, will not constitute what they'd regard as an act of evil?

~
They cost us that; we cost them that. They recognize that sort of revenge, that sort of trade, like any other civilization. A life for a life. They won't retaliate, Quil. Better minds than ours have thought this through. The way the Culture will see it, they'll confirm their own moral superiority over us by
not
retaliating. They'll accept what we're going to do to them as the due payment for what they did to us, without provocation. They'll draw a line under it there. It'll be treated as a tragedy; the other half of a debacle that began when they tried to interfere with our development. A tragedy, not an outrage.

~ They might wish to make an example of us.

~ We are too far down the Involved pecking order to be worthy opponents, Quilan. There would be no honor for them in punishing us further. We have already been punished as innocents. All you and I are trying to do is even up that earlier damage.

~ I worry that we may be being as blind to their real psychology as they were to ours when they tried to interfere. With all their experience, they were wrong about us. We have so little training in second-guessing
the reactions of alien species; how can we be so certain that we will get it right where they failed so dismally?

~ Because this matters so much to us, that's why. We have thought long and hard about what we're going to do. All this began exactly because they failed to do the same thing. They have become so blasé about such matters that they try to interfere with as few ships as possible, with as few resources as possible, in search of a sort of mathematical elegance. They have made the fates of entire civilizations part of a game they play amongst themselves, to see who can produce the biggest cultural change from the smallest investment of time and energy.

And when it blows up in their faces, it is not they who suffer and die, but us. Four and a half billion souls barred from bliss because some of their inhuman Minds thought they'd found a nice, neat,
elegant
way to alter a society which had evolved to stability over six millennia
.

They had no right to try to interfere with us in the first place, but if they were determined to do it they might at least have had the decency to make sure they did it properly, with some thought for the numbers of innocent lives they were dealing with.

~ We still may be committing a second mistake upon a first. And they may be less tolerant than we imagine.

~ If nothing else, Quilan, even if there is some retaliation by the Culture, however unlikely that might be,
it doesn't matter!
If we succeed in our mission here then those four and a half billion Chelgrian souls will be saved; they'll be admitted to heaven. No matter what happens after that they'll be safe because the Chelgrian-Puen will have allowed them in
.

~ The Puen could allow the dead in now, Huyler.
They could just change the rules, accept them into heaven.

~ I know, Quilan. But there is honor to be considered here, and the future. When it was first revealed that each of our own deaths had to be balanced by that of an enemy—