“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.)
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.