He stared at the great folded sweep of snow-settled cliff and mountain as it materialized out of the haze, becoming more real with each beat of his heart.
In the Gray Mountains was the monastery of Cadracet, which belonged to the Sheracht Order. He went there on a retreat once he was released from the hospital, becoming a griefling. He was taking extended furlough from the Army, which allowed such compassionate leave at his rank. The offer of de-enlistment and an honorable discharge, plus a modest pension, had been left open for him.
He already had a batch of medals. He was given one for being in the Army at all, one for being a combatant who’d held a gun, another for being a Given who could easily have avoided fighting in the first place, another for being wounded (with a bar because he had been seriously wounded), yet another for having been on a special mission and a last medal which had been decreed when it had been realized that the war had been the Culture’s responsibility, not that of the Chelgrian species. The soldiers were calling it the Not-Our-Fault prize. He kept the medals in a small box within the trunk in his cell, along with the posthumous ones awarded to Worosei.
The monastery sat on a rocky outcrop on the shoulder of a modest peak, within a small stand of sigh trees by a tumbling mountain stream. It looked across the forested gorge beneath to the crags, cliffs, snow and ice of the tallest peaks in the range. Behind it, crossing the stream by a modest but ancient stone bridge celebrated in songs and tales three thousand years old, passed the road from Oquoon to the central plateau, momentarily straightening from its series of precipitous hairpins.
During the war, a troupe of Invisible servants who had already put to death all their own masters at another monastery further up the road had taken over Cadracet and captured the half of the monks who had not fled—mostly the older ones. They had thrown them over the parapet of the bridge into the rock-strewn stream below. The fall was not quite sufficient to kill all the old males, and some suffered, moaning, throughout that day and into the night, only dying in the cold before dawn the following morning. Two days later, a unit of Loyalist troops had retaken the complex and tortured the Invisibles before burning their leaders alive.
It had been the same story of horror, malevolence and escalatory retribution everywhere. The war had lasted less than fifty days; many wars—most wars, even those restricted to one planet—barely properly began in that time because mobilizations had to be carried out, forces had to be put in place, a war footing had to be established within society and territory had to be attacked, captured and consolidated before further attacks could be prepared and the enemy could be closed with. Wars in space and between planets and habitats of any number could in theory effectively be over in a few minutes or even seconds but commonly took years and sometimes centuries or generations to come to a conclusion, depending almost entirely on the level of technology the civilizations involved possessed.
The Caste War had been different. It had been a civil war; a species and society at war with itself. These were notoriously amongst the most terrible conflicts, and the initial proximity of the combatants, distributed throughout the civilian and military population at virtually every level of institution and facility, meant that there was a kind of explosive savagery about the conflict almost the instant that it commenced, taking many of the first wave of victims utterly by surprise: noble families were knifed in their beds, unaware that any real problem existed, whole dormitories of servants were gassed behind locked doors, unable to believe those they’d devoted their lives to were murdering them, passengers or drivers in cars, captains of ships, pilots of aircraft or space vessels were suddenly assaulted by the person sitting next to them, or were themselves the ones who did the attacking.
Cadracet monastery itself had escaped relatively unscarred from the war, despite its brief occupation; some rooms had been ransacked, a few icons and holy books had been burned or desecrated, but there had been little structural damage.
Quilan’s cell was at the back of the building’s third courtyard, looking out onto the grooved cobbled roadway to the dank green mountainside and the sudden yellow of the gaunt sigh trees. His cell contained a curl-pad on the stone floor, a small trunk for his personal possessions, a stool, a plain wooden desk and a wash-stand.
There was no form of communication allowed in the cell apart from reading and writing. The former had to be conducted with script-string frames or books, and the latter—for those who like him had no facility with the knotting, beading and braiding of script-string—was restricted to that possible utilizing loose paper and an ink pen.
Talking to anyone else inside the cell was also forbidden and by the strictest interpretation of the laws even a monk who talked to himself or cried out in his sleep ought to confess as much to the monastery superior and accept some extra duty as punishment. Quilan had terrible dreams, as he had had since halfway through his stay in the hospital at Lapendal, and frequently woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, but he was never sure if he’d cried out or not. He asked monks in neighboring cells; they claimed never to have heard him. He believed them, on balance.
Talking was allowed before and after meals and during those communal tasks with which it was judged not to interfere. Quilan talked less than the others in the tiered fields where they grew their foods, and on the walks down the mountain paths to gather wood. The others didn’t seem to mind. The exertions made him strong and fit again. They tired him out, too, but not sufficiently to stop him waking each night with the dreams of darkness and lightning, pain and death.
The library was where most studying was done. The reader screens there were intelligently censored so that monks could not fritter their time away on vapid entertainments or trivia; they allowed religious and reference works and scholarly troves to be accessed, but little else. That still left many lifetimes’ worth of material. The machines could also act as links to the Chelgrian-Puen, the gone-before, the already Sublimed. It would, however, be a while before a newcomer like Quilan would be allowed to use them for that purpose.
His mentor and counsellor was Fronipel, the oldest monk left alive after the war. He had hidden from the Invisibles in an old grain-store drum deep in a cellar and had remained there for two days after the Loyalist troops detachment had retaken the monastery, not knowing that he was now safe. Too weak to climb back out of the drum, he had almost died of dehydration and was only discovered when the troops mounted a thorough search to flush out any remaining Invisibles.
Where it showed above his robes, the old male’s pelt was scraggy and tufted with dark patches of thick, coarse fur. Other areas were almost bare, showing his creased, dry-looking gray skin beneath. He moved stiffly, especially when the weather was damp, which was often the case at Cadracet. His eyes, set behind antique glasses, looked filmed, as though there was some gray smoke within the orbs. The old monk wore his decrepitude with no hint of pride or disdain, and yet, in this age of regrown bodies and replacement organs, such decay had to be voluntary, even deliberate.
They talked, usually, in a small bare cell set aside for the purpose. All it contained was a single S-shaped curl-seat and a small window.
It was the old monk’s prerogative to use the first name of those junior to him, and so he called Quilan “Tibilo,” which made him feel like a child again. He supposed this was the desired effect. He in turn was expected to address Fronipel as Custodian.
“I feel … I feel jealous, sometimes, Custodian. Does that sound mad? Or bad?”.
“Jealous of what, Tibilo?”.
“Her death. That she died.” Quilan stared out of the window, unable to look into the older male’s eyes. The view from the little window was much the same as from that of his own cell. “If I could have anything at all I would have her back. I think I have accepted that is impossible, or very unlikely indeed, at the very least … but, you see? There are so few certainties anymore. This is something else; everything is contingent these days, everything is provisional, thanks to our technology,
our understanding.”
He looked into the old monks clouded eyes. “In the old days people died and that was that; you might hope to see them in heaven, but once they were dead they were dead. It was simple, it was definite. Now … ” He shook his head angrily. “Now people die but their Soulkeeper can revive them, or take them to a heaven we know exists, without any need for faith. We have clones, we have regrown bodies—most of me is regrown; I wake up sometimes and think, Am I still me? I know you’re supposed to be your brain, your wits, your thoughts, but I don’t believe it is that simple.” He shook his head, then dried his face on the sleeve of his robe.
“You are envious of an earlier time, then.”
He was silent for a few moments, then said, “That as well. But I am jealous of her. If I can’t have her back then all I’m left with is a desire not to have lived. Not a desire to kill myself, but to have, through having no choice, died. If she can’t share my life, I would share her death. And yet I can’t, and so I feel envy. Jealousy.”
“Those are not quite the same things, Tibilo.”
“I know. Sometimes what I feel is … I’m not sure … a feeble yearning for something I don’t have. Sometimes it is what I think people mean when they use the word envy, and sometimes it is real, raging jealousy. I almost hate her for having died without me.” He shook his head, hardly believing what he was hearing himself saying. It was as though the words, at last expressed to another, gave final shape to thoughts he had not wanted to admit to harboring, even to himself. He stared through his tears at the old monk. “I did love her, though, Custodian. I did.”
The older male nodded. “I’m sure you did, Tibilo. If you didn’t you wouldn’t still be suffering like this.”
He looked away again. “I don’t even know that anymore. I say I loved her, I think I did, I certainly thought I did, but did I? Maybe what I’m really feeling is guilt at not having loved her. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.”
The older male scratched at one of his bare patches. “You know that you are alive, Tibilo, and that she is dead, and that you might see her again.”
He stared at the monk. “Without her Soulkeeper? I don’t believe that, sir. I’m not sure I even believe I would see her again even if it had been recovered.”
“As you pointed out yourself, we live in a time when the dead can return, Tibilo.”
They knew now that there came a time in the development of every civilization—which lasted long enough—when its inhabitants could record their mind-state, effectively taking a reading of the person’s personality which could be stored, duplicated, read, transmitted and, ultimately, installed into any suitably complex and enabled device or organism.
In a sense it was the most radically reductivist position made real; an acknowledgment that mind arose from matter, and could be fundamentally and absolutely defined in material terms, and as such it did not suit everyone. Some societies had reached the horizon of such knowledge and been on the brink of the control it implied, only to turn away, unwilling to lose the benefits of the beliefs such a development threatened.
Other peoples had accepted the exchange and suffered from it, losing themselves in ways that seemed sensible, even worthy at the time but which finally led to their effective extinction.
Most societies subscribed to the technologies involved and changed to deal with the consequences. In places like the Culture the consequences were that people could take back-ups of themselves if they were about to do something dangerous, they could create mind-state versions of themselves which could be used to deliver messages or undertake a multiplicity of experiences in a variety of places and in an assortment of physical or virtual forms, they could entirely transfer their original personality into a different body or device, and they could merge with other individuals—balancing retained individuality against consensual wholeness—in devices designed for such metaphysical intimacy.
Amongst the Chelgrian people the course of history had diverged from the norm. The device which was emplaced in them, the Soulkeeper, was rarely used to revive an individual. Instead it was used to ensure that the soul, the personality of the dying person, would be available to be accepted into heaven.
The majority of Chelgrians had long believed, like the majority of many intelligent species, in a place where the dead went after death. There had been a variety of different religions, faiths and cults on the planet, but the belief system that came to dominate Chel and was exported out to the stars when the species achieved space travel—even if by then it was taken as having a symbolic rather than a literal truth—was one which still spoke of a mythical afterlife, where the good would be rewarded by an eternity of noble joy and the evil would be condemned—no matter what their caste had been in the mortal world—to servitude forever.
According to the carefully kept and minutely analyzed records of the galaxy’s more nit-picking elder civilizations, the Chelgrians had persisted in their religiosity for a significant time after the advent of scientific methodology, and—in continuing to cleave to the caste system—were unusual in retaining such a manifestly discriminatory social order so long into post-contact history. None of this, though, prepared any of the observing societies for what happened not long after the Chelgrians became able to transcribe their personalities into media other than their own individual brains.
Subliming was an accepted if still somewhat mysterious part of galactic life; it meant leaving the normal matter-based life of the universe behind and ascending to a higher state of existence based on pure energy. In theory any individual—biological or machine—could Sublime, given the right technology, but the pattern was for whole swathes of a society and species to disappear at the same time, and often the entirety of a civilization went in one go (only the Culture was known to worry that such—to it—unlikely absoluteness implied a degree of coercion).
There were generally a host of warning signs that a society was about to Sublime—a degree of society-wide ennui, the revival of long-quiescent religions and other irrational beliefs, an interest in the mythology and methodology of Subliming itself—and it almost always happened to fairly well-established and long-lived civilizations.
To flourish, make contact, develop, expand, reach a steady state and then eventually Sublime was more or less the equivalent of the stellar Main Sequence for civilizations, though there was an equally honorable and venerable tradition for just quietly keeping on going, minding your own business (mostly) and generally sitting about feeling pleasantly invulnerable and just saturated with knowledge.
Again, the Culture was something of an exception, neither decently Subliming out of the way nor claiming its place with the other urbane sophisticates gathered reminiscing around the hearth of galactic wisdom, but instead behaving like an idealistic adolescent.
In any event, to Sublime was to retire from the normal life of the galaxy. The few real rather than imagined exceptions to this rule had consisted of little more than eccentricities: some of the Sublimed came back and removed their home planet, or wrote their names in nebulae or sculpted on some other vast scale, or set up curious monuments or left incomprehensible artifacts dotted about space or on planets, or returned in some bizarre form for a usually very brief and topologically limited appearance for what one could only imagine was some sort of ritual.
All this, of course, suited those who remained behind quite well, because the implication was that Subliming led to powers and abilities that gave those who had undergone the transformation an almost god-like status. If the process had been just another useful technological step along the way for any ambitious society, like nanotechnology, AI or wormhole creation, then everybody would presumably do it as soon as they could.
Instead Subliming seemed to be the opposite of useful as the word was normally understood. Rather than let you play the great galactic game of influence, expansion and achievement better than you could before, it appeared to take you out of it altogether.
Subliming w
as not utterly understood—the only way fully to understand it appeared to be to go ahead and do it—and despite various Involveds’ best efforts studying the process it had proved astonishingly frustrating (it had been compared to trying to catch yourself falling asleep, whereas it was felt that it ought to be as easy as watching somebody else fall asleep), but there was a strong and reliable pattern to its likelihood, onset, development and consequences.
The Chelgrians had partially Sublimed; about six percent of their civilization had quit the material universe within the course of a day. They were of all castes, they were of all varieties of religious belief from atheists to the devout of diverse cults, and they included in their number several of the sentient machines Chel had developed but never fully exploited. No discernible pattern in the partial Subliming Event could be determined.
None of this was especially unusual in itself, though for any of them to have gone at all when the Chelgrians had only been in space for a few hundred years did seem—perversely—immature in the eyes of some. What had been remarkable, even alarming, was that the Sublimed had then maintained links with the majority part of their civilization which had not moved on.
The links took the form of dreams, manifestations at religious sites (and sporting events, though people tended not to dwell on this), the alteration of supposedly inviolate data deep inside government and clan archives, and the manipulation of certain absolute physical constants within laboratories. A number of long-lost artifacts were recovered, a host of careers were ruined when scandals were revealed and several unexpected and even unlikely scientific breakthroughs occurred.
This was all quite unheard of.
The best guess that anyone could make was that it was something to do with the caste system itself. Its practice down the millennia had ingrained in the Chelgrians the idea of being part and yet not part of a greater whole; the mind-set it implied and encouraged had hierarchic and continuant implications which had proved stronger than whatever processes drove the normal course of a Subliming Event and its aftermath.