The air was briefly cold as they walked through, turning gradually warmer as they approached the airship. The atmosphere felt thick. Underneath their feet, the tunnel of air seemed as pliantly firm as wood. He carried his own modest luggage; Eweirl toted two immense kit bags as though they were purses, and Visquile was followed by a civilian drone carrying his bags.
The airship was about forty meters long; a single giant ellipsoid in dark purple, its smooth-looking envelope of skin lined with long yellow strakes of frill which rippled slowly in the warm air like the mantle of a fish. The tube led the three Chelgrians to a small gondola slung underneath the vessel.
The gondola looked like something grown rather than constructed, like the hollowed-out husk of an immense fruit; it appeared to have no windows until they climbed aboard, making the ship tip gently, but gauzy panels let in light and made the smooth interior glow with a pastel-green light. It held them comfortably. The tube of air dissipated behind them as the gondola’s door irised shut.
Eweirl popped his earplugs in and put on his visor, sitting back, seemingly oblivious. Visquile sat with his silvery stave planted between his feet, the round top under his chin, gazing ahead through one of the gauzy windows.
Quilan had only the vaguest idea where he was. He had seen the gigantic, slowly revolving elongated 8-shaped object ahead of them for several hours before they’d rendezvoused. The privateer ship had closed very slowly, seemingly on emergency thrust alone, and the thing—the world, as he was now starting to think of it, having come to a rough estimate of its size—had just kept getting bigger and bigger and filling more and more of the view ahead, yet without betraying any detail.
Finally one of the body’s lobes had blotted out the view of the other, and it was as though they were approaching an immense planet of glowing blue-green water.
What looked like five small suns were visible revolving with the vast shape, though they seemed too small to be stars. Their positioning implied there would be another two, hidden behind the world. As they got very close, matching rotational speed with the world and coming near enough to see the forming indentation they were heading for, with the tiny purple dot immediately behind it, Quilan saw what looked like layers of clouds, just hinted at, inside.
“What is this place?” Quilan said, not trying to keep the wonder and awe out of his voice.
“They call them airspheres,” Visquile said. He looked warily pleased, and not especially impressed. “This is a rotating twin-lobe example. Its name is the Oskendari airsphere.”
The airship dipped, diving still deeper into the thick air. They passed through one level of thin clouds like islands floating on an invisible sea. The airship wobbled as it went through the layer. Quilan craned his neck to see the clouds, lit from underneath by a sun far beneath them. He experienced a sudden sense of disorientation.
Below, something appearing out of the haze caught his eye; a vast shape just one shade darker than the blueness all around. As the airship approached he saw the immense shadow the shape cast, stretching upwards into the haze. Again, something like vertigo struck him.
He’d been given a visor too. He put it on and magnified the view. The blue shape disappeared in a shimmer of heat; he took the visor off and used his naked eyes.
“A dirigible behemothaur,” Visquile said. Eweirl, suddenly back with them, took off his visor and shifted over to Quilan’s side of the gondola to look, imbalancing the airship for a moment. The shape below looked a little like a flattened and more complicated version of the craft they were in. Smaller shapes, some like other airships, some winged, flew lazily about it.
Quilan watched the smaller features of the creature emerge as they dropped down toward it. The behemothaur’s envelope skin was blue and purple, and it too possessed long lines of pale yellow-green frills which rippled along its length, seemingly propelling it. Giant fins protruded vertically and laterally, topped with long bulbous protrusions, like the wing-tip fuel tanks of ancient aircraft. Across its summit line and along its sides, great scalloped dark-red ridges ran, like three enormous, encasing spines. Other protrusions, bulbs and hummocks covered its top and sides, producing a generally symmetrical effect that only broke down at a more detailed level.
As they drew still closer, Quilan had to press himself against the frame of the little airship’s gondola window to see both ends of the giant below them. The creature must be five kilometers long, perhaps more.
“This is one of their domains,” the Estodien went on. “They have seven or eight others distributed around the outskirts of the galaxy. No one is entirely sure quite how many there are. The behemothaurs are as big as mountains and as old as the hills. They are sentient, allegedly, the remnant of a species or civilization which Sublimed more than a billion years ago. Though again, only by repute. This one is called the Sansemin. It is in the power of those who are our allies in this matter.”
Quilan looked inquiringly at the older male. Visquile, still hunched over holding his glittering stave, made a shrugging motion.
“You’ll meet them, or their representatives, Major, but you won’t know who they are.”
Quilan nodded, and went back to looking out the window. He considered asking why they had come to this place, but thought the better of it.
“How long will we be here, Estodien?” he asked instead.
“For a while,” Visquile said, smiling. He watched Quilan’s face for a moment, then said, “Perhaps two or three moons, Major. We won’t be alone. There are already Chelgrians here; a group of about twenty monks of the Abremile Order. They inhabit the temple ship Soulhaven, which is inside the creature. Well, most of it is. As I understand it only the fuselage and life support units of the temple ship are actually present. The vessel had to leave its drive units behind, somewhere outside, in space.” He waved one hand. “The behemothaurs are sensitive to force-field technologies, we’re told.”
The superior of the temple ship was tall and elegant and dressed in a graceful interpretation of the order’s simple robes. He met them on a broad landing platform at the rear of what looked like a giant, gnarled, hollowed-out fruit stuck onto the behemothaur’s skin. They stepped from the airship.
“Estodien Visquile.”
“Estodien Quetter.” Visquile made the introductions.
Quetter bowed fractionally to Eweirl and Quilan. “This way,” he said, indicating a cleft in the behemothaur’s skin.
Eighty meters along a gently sloping tunnel floored with something like soft wood they came to a giant ribbed chamber whose atmosphere was oppressively humid and suffused with a vaguely charnel smell. The temple ship Soulhaven was a dark cylinder ninety meters in length and thirty across, taking up about half of the damp, warm chamber. It appeared to be tethered by vines to the chamber’s walls, and what looked like creepers had grown over much of its hull.
Quilan had, over the years of his soldiering, become used to encountering makeshift camps, temporary command posts, recently requisitioned command HQs and so on. Some part of him took in the feel of the place—the extemporised organization, the mix of clutter and orderliness—and decided that the Soulhaven had been here for about a month.
A pair of large drones, each the shape of two fat cones set base to base, floated up to them in the dimness, humming gently. Visquile and Quetter both bowed. The two floating machines tipped briefly toward them.
“You are Quilan,” said one. He could not tell which.
“Yes,” he said.
Both machines floated very close to him. He felt the fur around his face stand on end, and smelled something he could not identify. A breeze blew around his feet.
QUILAN MISSION GREAT SERVICE HERE TO PREPARE TEST LATER TO DIE AFRAID?
He was aware that he had flinched backwards and had almost taken a step away. There had been no sound, just the words ringing in his head. Was he being spoken to by the gone-before?
AFRAID? the voice said in his head once more.
“No,” he said. “
Not afraid, not of death.”
CORRECT DEATH NOTHING.
The two machines withdrew to where they had hovered before.
WELCOME ALL. SOON PREPARE.
Quilan sensed both Visquile and Eweirl rock back as if caught in a sudden gust of wind, though the other Estodien, Quetter, did not budge. The two machines made the tipping motion again. Apparently they were dismissed; they returned down the tunnel to the outside.
Their own quarters were, mercifully, here on the exterior of the giant creature, in the giant hollowed-out bulb they had landed near. The air was still cloyingly humid and thick, but if it smelled of anything it smelled of vegetation and so seemed fresh in comparison to the chamber where the Soulhaven rested.
Their luggage had already been off-loaded. Once they had settled, they were taken on a tour of the behemothaur’s exterior by the same small airship they’d arrived on. Anur, a gangly, awkward-looking young male who was the Soulhaver’s most junior monk, escorted them, explaining something of air-spheres’ legendary history and hypothesized ecology.
“We think there are thousands of the behemothaurs,” he said as they slid under the bulging belly of the creature, beneath hanging jungles of skin foliage. “And almost a hundred megalithine and gigalithine globular entities. They’re even bigger; the biggest are the size of small continents. People are even less sure whether they’re sentient or not. We shouldn’t see any of those or the other behemothaurs because we’re so low in the lobe. They pretty well never descend this far. Buoyancy problems.”
“How does the Sansemin manage to stay down here?” Quilan asked.
The young monk looked at Visquile before answering. “It’s been modified,” he said. He pointed up at a dozen or so dangling pods large enough to contain two full-grown Chelgrians. “Here you can see some of the subsidiary fauna being grown. These will become raptor scouts when they bud and hatch.”
• • •
Quilan and the two Estodiens sat with bowed heads in the innermost recessional space of the Soulhaven, a nearly spherical cavity only a few meters in diameter and surrounded by two-meter-thick walls made from substrates holding millions of departed Chelgrian souls. The three males were arranged in a triangle facing inward, fur-naked.
It was the evening of the day they had arrived, by the time the Soulhaven kept. To Quilan it felt like the middle of the night. Outside, it would be the same eternal but ever changing day as it had been for a billion and a half years or more.
The two Estodiens had communicated with the Chelgrian-Puen and their on-board shades for a few moments without Quilan being involved, though even so he had experienced a sort of incoherent back-wash from their conversations while they’d lasted. It had been like standing in a great cavern and hearing people talking somewhere in the distance.
Then it was his turn. The voice was loud, a shout in his head.
QUILAN. WE ARE CHELGRIAN-PUEN.
They had told him to try to think his answers, to sub-vocalize. He thought, ~ I am honored to speak to you.
YOU: REASON HERE?
~ I don’t know. I am being trained. I think you might know more about my mission than I do.
CORRECT. GIVEN PRESENT KNOWLEDGE: WILLING?
~ I will do what is required.
MEANS YOUR DEATH.
~ I realize that.
MEANS HEAVEN FOR MANY.
~ That is a trade I am willing to make.
NOT WOROSEI QUILAN.
~ I know.
QUESTIONS?
~ May I ask whatever I like?
YES.
~ All right. Why am I here?
TO BE TRAINED.
~ But why particularly this place?
SECURITY. PROPHYLACTIC MEASURE. DENIABILITY. DANGER. INSISTENCE OF ALLIES IN THIS.
~ Who are our allies?
OTHER QUESTIONS?
~ What am I to do at the end of my training?
KILL.
~ Who?
MANY. OTHER QUESTIONS?
~ Where will I be sent?
DISTANT. NOT CHELGRIAN SPHERE.
~ Does my mission involve the composer Mahrai Ziller?
YES.
~ Am I to kill him?
IF SO, REFUSE?
~ I haven’t said that.
QUALMS?
~ If it was to be so, I would like to know the reasoning.
IF NO REASONS GIVEN, REFUSE?
~ I don’t know. There are some decisions you just can’t anticipate until you must really make them. You’re not going to tell me whether my mission involves killing him or not?
CORRECT. CLARIFICATION IN TIME. BEFORE MISSION BEGINS. PREPARATION AND TRAINING FIRST.
~ How long will I be here?
OTHER QUESTIONS?
~ What did you mean by danger, earlier?
~ PREPARATION AND TRAINING. OTHER QUESTIONS? ~ No, thank you.
WE WOULD READ YOU.
~ What do you mean?
LOOK IN YOUR MIND.
~ You want to look into my mind?
CORRECT.
~ Now?
YES.
~ Very well. Do I have to do any—
—thing?
He was briefly dizzy, and was aware of swaying in his seat.
DONE. UNHARMED? ~ I think so.
CLEAR.
~You mean … I am clear?
CORRECT. TOMORROW: PREPARATION AND TRAINING.
The two Estodiens sat smiling at him.
• • •
He could only sleep fitfully, and woke from another dream of drowning to blink into the strange thick darkness. He fumbled for his visor and with the gray-blue image of the small room’s curved walls before him, rose from the curl-pad and went to stand by the single window, where a warm breeze trickled slowly in and then seemed to die, as though exhausted by the effort. The visor showed a ghostly image of the window’s rough frame, and, outside, the vaguest hint of clouds.
He took off the visor. The darkness appeared utter, and he stood there letting it soak into him until he thought he saw a flash, somewhere high above and blue with distance. He wondered if it was lightning; Anur had said it happened between cloud and air masses when they passed each other, rising and falling along the thermal gradients of the sphere’s chaotic atmospheric circulation.
He saw a few more flashes, one of them of an appreciable length, although still seeming far, far away. He slipped the visor back on and held his hand up with claws extended, bringing two tips almost together; just a couple of millimeters apart. There. The flash had been that long.
Another flash. Seen with the visors, it was so bright the visor’s optics turned the center of the tiny flash black to protect his night vision. Instead of just the minuscule spark itself, he saw the whole of a cloud system light up as well, the rolls and towers of the piled and distant vapor picked out in a remote blue wash of luminescence that vanished almost as soon as he became aware of it.
He took the visor off again and listened for the noise produced by those flashes. All he heard was a faint, enveloping noise like a strong wind heard from far away, seeming to come from all around him and course up through his bones. It appeared to contain within it frequencies deep enough to be distant rumbles of thunder, but they were low and continuous and unwavering, and try as he might he could not detect any change or peak in that long slow flow of half-felt sound.
There are no echoes here, he thought. No solid ground or cliffs anywhere for sound to reflect off. The behemothaurs absorb sound like floating forests, and inside them their living tissues soak up all noise.
Acoustically dead. The phrase came back to him. Worosei had done some work with the university music department, and had shown him a strange room lined with foam pyramids. Acoustically dead, she’d told him. It felt and sounded true; their voices seemed to die as each word left their lips, every sound exposed and alone, without resonance.
• • •
“Your Soulkeeper is more than a normal Soulkeeper, Quilan,” Visquile told him. They wer
e alone in the innermost recessional space of the Soulhaven, the following day. This was his first briefing. “It performs the normal functions of such a device, keeping a record of your mind-state; however it also has the capacity to carry another mind-state within it. You will, in a sense, have another person aboard when you undertake your mission. There is still more to come, but do you have anything you would like to say or ask about that?”
“Who will this person be, Estodien?”.
“We are not certain yet. Ideally—according to the mission-profiling people in Intelligence, or rather according to their machines—it would be a copy of Sholan Hadesh Huyler, the late Admiral-General who was amongst those souls you were charged with recovering from the Military Institute on Aorme. However as the Winter Storm is lost, presumed destroyed, and the original substrate was aboard the vessel, we will probably have to go with a second choice. That choice is still being discussed.”
“Why is this considered necessary, Estodien?”.
“Think of it as having a co-pilot aboard, Major. You will have somebody to talk to, somebody to advise you, to talk things over with, while you are on your mission. This may not seem necessary now, but there is a reason we believe it may be advisable.”
“Do I take it that it will be a long mission?”.
“Yes. It may take several months. The minimum duration would be about thirty days. We can’t be any more precise because it depends partly on your mode of transport. You may be taken to your destination aboard one of our own craft, or on a faster vessel from one of the older Involved civilizations, possibly one belonging to the Culture.”
“Does the mission involve the Culture, Estodien?”.
“It does. You are being sent to the Culture world Masaq’, an Orbital.”
“That is where Mahrai Ziller lives.”
“Correct.”
“Am I to kill him?”.
“That is not your mission. Your covering story is that you are going there to try to convince him to return to Chel.”
“And my real mission?”.
“We will come to that in due course. And therein lies a precedent.”
“A precedent, Estodien?”.
“Your true mission will not be clear to you when you start it. You will know the covering story and you will almost certainly have a feeling that there is more to your task than that, but you will not know what it is.”