He tumbled away, finally screaming in a high, hoarse voice. She was still holding his stomach in her hand. His intestines unravelled, whipping out of his body in a long, quivering line as he fell.
Skinned and disembowelled, he was light enough—and his entrails sufficiently elastic as well as firmly anchored—for him to bounce up and down on the end of his own guts for a while, jerking and quivering and shrieking, before she let him fall into the salty waves.
She watched the splashes with Chelgrian eyes for a while, then became a cloud of dust in which the biggest single components were the nanomissiles.
By the time the warhead in Eweirl’s brain exploded a few minutes later, she had become an attenuated column of grayness sucking itself up into the sky high above.
Epilogue
It is good to have a body again. I enjoy sitting here in this little café in this quaint hill village, smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of wine and looking out over distant Chelise. The air is clear and the view is sharp and autumn is just beginning. It is definitely good to be alive.
I am Sholan Hadesh Huyler, an admiral-general of the Chelgrian Combined Forces, retired. I did not suffer the same fate as that shared by the Hub Mind of Masaq’ Orbital and my one-time colleague and charge, Major Tibilo Quilan. The Hub pulled me out of Quilan’s Soulkeeper device, saved me, transmitted me to one of its guardian GSVs and—much later—I was united with my old self, the one which Quilan rescued twice: once—with his wife Worosei—from the Military Institute in Cravinyr City on Aorme, and once—with the Navy drone—from the wreck of the Winter Storm.
Now I am a free citizen on Chel again, with a reasonable pension (in fact two) and the respect of my superiors (actually two sets of them, though only one lot know of the existence of the other bunch, and they would resist being called my superiors). I hope that I may never be needed again, but if I am, I will do my duty not for my old masters but for my new equals. For I am, by the definition I would have used up to a few years ago, a traitor.
The Chelgrian High Command thought that I might have been got at in some way—even turned—before the wreck of the ship was found, however I seemed to check out and I certainly made all the right responses.
They were both right and wrong. I was turned by the Culture while I was still in the substrate in the Institute on Aorme. They hadn’t thought of that, long before the Caste War.
The best way to turn an individual—person or machine—is not to invade them and implant some sort of mimetic virus or any such nonsense, but to make them change their mind themselves, and that is what they did to me, or rather what they persuaded me to do to myself.
They showed me all there was to be shown about my society and theirs and, in the end, I preferred theirs. Essentially I became a Culture citizen and at the same time an agent of Special Circumstances, which is the uncharacteristically coy name they employ for their combined intelligence, espionage and counter-espionage organization.
I went along with everything else to keep Masaq’ and its people safe, not to ensure its destruction. I was SC’s insurance policy, their get-out clause, their parachute (I heard many colorful analogies). If I had been told to do so, I would have prevented Quilan from making his Displacements, not taken over and done them for him had he demurred. In the end it was decided that sufficient other safeguards had been put in place for the Displacements to go ahead, with the aim of back-tracking along the attempted wormhole link to discover and even attack the Involveds behind the attack (this failed and to the best of my knowledge it is still not known who those mysterious allies were, though I’m sure SC has its suspicions).
I spend most of my time on Masaq’ these days, often in the company of Kabe Ischloear; we have similar roles. I come back here to Chel on occasion, but I prefer my new home. Only recently Kabe pointed out that he had lived in the Culture for nearly a decade before he realized that when the Culture calls somebody from an alien society who lives amongst them “Ambassador,” what they mean is that that person represents the Culture to their original civilization, the assumption being that the alien concerned will naturally consider the Culture better than their home and so worthy of promotion within it.
Such hubris!
Nevertheless.
I have met Mahrai Ziller. He was wary at first but eventually warmed to me. Lately we have been talking about him accompanying me back here, to Chel, for an informal visit, perhaps early next year. So I may yet accomplish the task that was only ever Quilan’s covering story.
They tell me that the Hub and Quilan went together into total oblivion, with no back-ups, no copies, no mind-states, no souls left behind.
I suppose it must have been what they both wanted. In the case of the Major, I believe I can understand, and I still feel deeply sorry for him and the effects of a loss he could neither mourn away nor stand, though—like a lot of people, I think—I find it hard to understand how something as fabulously complicated and comprehensively able intellectually as a Mind might also want to destroy itself.
Life never ceases to surprise.
Also by Iain M. Banks
CONSIDER PHLEBAS
THE PLAYER OF GAMES
USE OF WEAPONS
THE STATE OF THE ART
AGAINST A DARK BACKGROUND
FEERSUM ENDJINN
EXCESSION
INVERSIONS
Also by Iain Banks
THE WASP FACTORY
WALKING ON GLASS
THE BRIDGE
ESPEDAIR STREET
CANAL DREAMS
THE CROW ROAD
COMPLICITY
WHIT
A SONG OF STONE
THE BUSINESS
We hope you enjoyed reading this Pocket Books eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Pocket Books and Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2000 by Iain M. Banks
Quotation from “The Waste Land” taken from Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S.
Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Originally published in Great Britain in 2000 by Orbit
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Banks, Iain.
Look to windward / Iain M. Banks.
p. cm.
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2168-6
eISBN-13 : 978-1-43910-849-9
I. Title.
PR6052.A485 L66 2001
823’.914—dc21
2001021833
First Pocket Books hardcover printing August 2001
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends