Quilan stepped aboard the little airship. He looked out through one of the gauzy windows as the craft lifted away from the platform. Visquile and Eweirl were already deep in conversation.
The rest of the journey was a mirror-image of the route he had taken on the way out except that when he got to Chel he was taken from Equator Launch City in a sealed shuttle straight to Ubrent, and then by car, at night, directly to the gates of the monastery at Cadracet.
He stood on the ancient path. The night air smelled fragrant with sigh tree resin, and seemed thin like water after the soup-thick atmosphere of the airsphere.
He had returned only to be called away. As far as the official records were concerned, he had never left, never been taken away by the strange lady in her dark cloak all those months ago, never descended with her to the road that led back to the world and was spotted with fresh blood.
Tomorrow he would be summoned to Chelise itself, to be asked to undertake a mission to the Culture world called Masaq’, to attempt to persuade the renegade and dissident Mahrai Ziller, composer, to return to his home-place and be the very symbol of the renaissance of Chel and the Chelgrian domain.
Tonight, while he slept—if all went according to plan and the temporary microstructures, chemicals and nano-glandular processes which had been imparted into his brain had the desired effect—he would forget all that had happened since Colonel Ghejaline had appeared out of the snow in the courtyard of the monastery those hundred and more days ago.
He would remember what he needed to remember, no more, bit by bit. His most available memories would be kept safe from intrusion and comprehension by all but the most obvious and damaging procedures. He thought he could feel the process of forgetting starting to happen even as he recalled the fact that it would take place.
Summer rain fell gently around him. The engine sound and the lights of the car that had brought him here had disappeared into the clouds below. He raised his hand to the little door set within the gates.
The postern opened quickly and silently and he was beckoned to come in.
• • •
~Yes. Well done.
It had crossed his mind that now he had done what he was supposed to do, now that the mission was over, he might start—or try to start—telling the drone Tersono, or the Hub avatar itself, or the Homomdan Kabe, or all three, what he had just done, so that Huyler would have no choice but to disable him, hopefully kill him, but he did not.
Huyler might not kill him, after all, just disable him, and besides, he would be partially jeopardizing the mission. It was better for Chel, better for the mission, to make everything appear as normal, until the light from the second nova poured through the system and across the Orbital.
“Well, that completes the tour,” the avatar said.
“So. My friends; shall we go?” the drone E. H. Tersono said chirpily. Its ceramic casing was surrounded by a healthy pink glow.
“Yes,” Quilan heard himself say. “Let’s go.”
15
A Certain Loss of Control
He woke slowly, a little fuzzy-headed. It was very dark. He stretched lazily and could feel Worosei at his side. She moved sleepily toward him, curling into his body to fit. He put one arm around her and she snuggled closer.
Just as he was waking more completely and deciding that he wanted her, she turned her head to his, smiling, her lips opening.
She slid on top of him, and it was one of those times when the sex is so strong and balanced and exalted that it is almost beyond separate genders; it is as though it doesn’t matter who is male and who is female, and which part belongs to which person, when the genitalia seem somehow at once shared and separate, both belonging to each and to neither; his sex was a magical entity that penetrated both of them equally as she moved over him, while hers became like some fabulous, enchanted cloak that had spread and flowed to cover both their bodies, turning every part of them into a single sexually sensual surface.
It brightened very gradually as they made love, and then, after they had each finished and their pelts were matted with saliva and sweat and they were both panting heavily, they lay side by side, staring into each other’s eyes.
He was grinning. He couldn’t help it. He looked around. He still wasn’t entirely sure where he was. The room looked anonymous and yet extremely high-ceilinged and very bright. He had the odd feeling it ought to be making his eyes hurt, and yet it wasn’t.
He looked at her again. She had her head propped up on one fist and was looking at him. When he saw that face, took in that expression, he felt a strange shock, and then an exquisite, perfectly intense terror. Worosei had never looked at him like this; not just at him but around him, through him.
There was an utter coldness and a ferocious, infinite intelligence in those dark eyes. Something without mercy or illusion was staring straight into his soul and finding it not so much wanting, as absent.
Worosei’s fur turned perfectly silver and smoothed into her skin. She was a naked silver mirror and he could see himself in her long, lithe frame, perversely distorted like something being melted and pulled apart. He opened his mouth and tried to speak. His tongue was too big and his throat had gone quite dry.
It was she who spoke, not him:
“Don’t think I’ve been fooled for a moment, Quilan.”
It was not Worosei’s voice.
She pushed down on her elbow and rose from the bed with a powerful, fluid grace. He watched her go, and then became aware that behind him, on the other side of the curl-pad, there was an old male, also naked and staring at him, blinking.
The old fellow didn’t say a thing. He looked confused. He was at once utterly familiar and a complete stranger.
• • •
Quilan woke, panting. He stared wildly around.
He was in the broad curl-pad in the apartment in Aquime City. It looked to be about dawn and there was a swirl of snow beyond the dome of the skylight.
He gasped, “Lights,” and looked around the huge room as it brightened.
Nothing appeared to be out of place. He was alone.
It was the day that would end with the concert in the Stullien Bowl, which would climax with the first performance of Mahrai Ziller’s new symphony Expiring Light, which itself would end when the light from the nova induced upon the star Junce eight hundred years ago finally arrived at the Lacelere system and Masaq’ Orbital.
With an ignoble and tearing feeling of nausea he remembered that he had done his duty and the matter was out of his hands, out of his head, now. What would happen would happen. He could do no more about it than anybody else here. Less, in fact. Nobody else here had another mind aboard, listening to their every thought—
Of course; since last night, if not before, he no longer had his hour of grace at the end and beginning of each day.
~ Huyler?
~ Here. Have you had dreams like that before?
~ You experienced it too?
~ I’m watching and listening for any sign you might give which would warn them what’s going to happen this evening. I’m not invading your dreams. But I do have to monitor your body, so I know that was one hell of a hot dream that seemed to suddenly turn pretty frightening. Want to tell me about it?
Quilan hesitated. He waved the lights off and lay back in the darkness. “No,” he said.
He became aware that he had spoken rather than thought the word at the same time as he realized that he couldn’t say the next word he’d thought he was going to say. It would have been “No” again, but it just never made it to his lips.
He found that he could not move at all. Another moment of terror, at his paralysis and the fact he was at the mercy of somebody else.
~ Sorry. You were speaking there, not communicating. There; you’re, ah, back in charge.
Quilan moved on the curl-pad and cleared his throat, checking that he controlled his own body again.
~ All I was going to say was, No, no need. No need to talk about it.<
br />
~ You sure? You haven’t been that distressed until now, not in the whole time we’ve been together.
~ I’m telling you I’m fine, all right?
~ Okay, all right.
~ Even if I wasn’t it wouldn’t matter anyway, would it? Not after tonight. I’m going to try and get more sleep now. We can talk later.
~ Whatever you say. Sleep well.
~ I doubt it.
He lay back and watched the dry-looking dark flurries of snow fling themselves whirling at the domed skylight in a soundless fury that seemed poised in meaning exactly halfway between comic and threatening. He wondered if the snow looked the same way to the other intelligence watching through his eyes.
He didn’t think any more sleep would come, and it did not.
• • •
The dozen or so civilizations which would eventually go onto form the Culture had, during their separate ages of scarcity, spent vast fortunes to make virtual reality as palpably real and as dismissibly virtual as possible. Even once the Culture as an entity had been established and the use of conventional currency had come to be seen as an archaic hindrance to development rather than its moderating enabler, appreciable amounts of energy and time—both biological and machine—had been spent perfecting the various methods by which the human sensory apparatus could be convinced that it was experiencing something that was not really happening.
Thanks largely to all this pre-existing effort, the level of accuracy and believability exhibited as a matter of course by the virtual environments available on demand to any Culture citizen had been raised to such a pitch of perfection that it had long been necessary—at the most profoundly saturative level of manufactured-environment manipulation—to introduce synthetic cues into the experience just to remind the subject that what appeared to be real really wasn’t.
Even at far less excessive states of illusory permeation, the immediacy and vividness of the standard virtual adventure was sufficient to make all but the most determinedly and committedly corporeal of humans quite forget that the experience they were having wasn’t authentic, and the very ubiquity of this common-place conviction was a ringing tribute to the tenacity, intelligence, imagination and determination of all those individuals and organizations down the ages who had contributed to the fact that, in the Culture, anybody anytime could experience anything anywhere for nothing, and never need worry themselves with the thought that actually it was all pretend.
Naturally, then, there was, for almost everybody occasionally and for some people pretty well perpetually, an almost inestimable cachet in having seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt or generally experienced something absolutely and definitely for real, with none of this contemptible virtuality stuff getting in the way.
The avatar gave a snort. “They’re really doing it.” It laughed with surprising heartiness, Kabe thought. It was not the sort of thing you expected a machine, or even the human-form representative of a machine, to do at all.
“Doing what?” he asked.
“Reinventing money,” the avatar said, grinning and shaking its head.
Kabe frowned. “Would that be entirely possible?”
“No, but it’s partially possible.” The avatar glanced at Kabe. “It’s an old saying.”
“Yes, I know. ‘They’d reinvent money for this,’” Kabe quoted. “Or something similar.”
“Quite.” The avatar nodded. “Well, for tickets to Ziller’s concert, they practically are. People who can’t stand other people are inviting them to dinner, booking deep-space cruises together—good grief—even agreeing to go camping with them. Camping!” The avatar giggled. “People have traded sexual favors, they’ve agreed to pregnancies, they’ve altered their appearance to accommodate a partner’s desires, they’ve begun to change gender to please lovers; all just to get tickets.” It spread its arms. “How wonderfully, bizarrely, romantically barbaric of them! don’t you think?”.
“Absolutely,” Kabe said. “Are you sure about ‘romantically’?”.
“And they have indeed,” the avatar continued, “come to agreements that go beyond barter to a form of liquidity regarding future considerations that sounds remarkably like money, at least as I understand it.”
“How extraordinary.”
“It is, isn’t it?” the silver-skinned creature said. “Just one of those weird flash-fashions that jumps out of the chaos for an instant every now and again. Suddenly everybody’s a live symphonic music fan.” It looked puzzled. “I’ve made it clear there’s no real room to dance.” It shrugged, then swept an arm around to indicate the view. “So. What do you think?”.
“Most impressive.”
The Stullien Bowl was practically empty. The preparations for that evening’s concert were on schedule and under way. The avatar and the Homomdan stood on the lip of the amphitheatre near a battery of lights, lasers and effects mortars each of which quite dwarfed Kabe and, he thought, looked a lot like weapons.
The crisp blue day was a couple of hours old, the sun rising at their back. Kabe could just make out the tiny shadows he and the avatar were casting across a pattern of seats four hundred meters away.
The Bowl was over a kilometer across: a steeply raked coliseum of spun carbon fibers and transparent diamond sheeting whose seats and platforms focused around a generously circular field which could adapt itself to accommodate various sports and a variety of concert and other entertainment configurations. It did have an emergency roof, but that had never been used.
The whole point of the Bowl was that it was open to the sky, and if the weather had to be of a certain type, well then Hub would do something it almost never did, and interfere meteorologically, using its prodigious energy projection and field-management capabilities to manipulate the elements until the desired effect was arrived at. Such meddling was inelegant, untidy and blunderingly coercive, but it was accepted that it had to be done to keep people happy, and that was, ultimately, Hub’s whole reason for being.
Technically, the Bowl was a giant specialized barge. It floated within a network of broad canals, slowly flowing rivers, broad lakes and small seas which stretched across one of Masaq’s more varied continent-Plates and along, through and across which it could—albeit rather slowly—navigate itself, so providing a wide choice of external backgrounds visible through the supporting structure and above the stadium’s lip, including jagged, snow-strewn mountains, giant cliffs, vast deserts, carpeting jungles, towering crystal cities, vast waterfalls and gently swaying blimp tree forests.
For a particularly wild event, there was a rapids course; a giant, quickly flowing river the Bowl could descend like a monstrous inflatable riding the world’s biggest flume, monumentally spinning, tipping and bobbing until it encountered the vast cliff-encircled whirlpool at the bottom, where it simply revolved atop a swirling column of spiraling water being sucked plunging into a set of colossal pumps capable of emptying a sea, until one of Hub’s Superlifters came to hoist it bodily back up to its normal elevation among the waterways above.
For tonight’s performance the Bowl would be staying where it was, at the point of a small peninsula on the shores of Bandel Lake, Guerno Plate, a dozen continents to spinward from Xaravve. The peninsula’s point housed a collection of underground access points, various elegantly disguised storage and support buildings, a broad concourse lined with bars, cafés, restaurants and other entertainment venues, and a giant bracket-shaped dock where the Bowl underwent any necessary maintenance and repair.
The Bowl’s in-built strategic tactile, sound and light systems, even without any in-person participatory enhancement, were as good as they could possibly be; Hub took responsibility for the remaining external conditions.
The Bowl was one of six, all specifically constructed to provide venues for events which needed to be held outside. They were distributed across the world so that there ought always to be one in the right place at the right time, no matter what the required conditions.
“Though of
course,” Kabe felt bound to point out, “you could have just one, and then slow down or speed up the whole Orbital, to synchronize.”
“Been done,” the avatar said sniffily.
“I rather thought it might.”
The avatar looked up. “Ah ha.” Directly overhead, just visible through the morning haze above, a tiny roughly rectangular shape was glowing with reflected sunlight.
“What is that?”.
“That is the Equator Class General Systems Vehicle Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall,” the avatar said. Kabe saw its eyes narrow fractionally and a small smile formed about its lips and eyes. “It changed its course schedule to come and see the concert too.” The avatar watched the shape grow bigger, and frowned. “It’ll have to move from there though; that’s where my air-burst meteorites are coming through.”
“Air burst?” Kabe said. He was watching the glowing rectangle of the GSV enlarge slowly. “That sounds, ah, dramatic.” Dangerous might seem a more suitable word, he thought.
The avatar shook its head. It too was watching the giant craft as it lowered itself into the atmosphere above them. “Na, it’s not that dangerous,” the avatar said, apparently but presumably not actually reading his mind. “The shower choreography is pretty much all set up. There might be a few bits of soft stuff that could still outgas and need retrajectoring, but they all have their own escort engines anyway.” The avatar grinned at him. “I used a whole bunch of old knife missiles; reactivated war stock, which seemed appropriate. Reckoned they needed the practice.”
They looked back up into the sky. The GSV was now about the same size as a hand held out at full arm’s stretch. Features were starting to appear on its golden-white surfaces. “All the rocks are fully set up; fired up and forgotten long ago,” the avatar continued, “sliding in simple as rings on an orrery. No danger there either.” It nodded at the GSV, which was close and bright enough now to be casting its own light over the surrounding landscape, like a strangely rectangular golden moon floating over the world.