~ Pretty damn strange. I dare say I’ll get used to it. Looks like everything checks out. Shit, that female techie doesn’t look any better through a male’s eyes than she does through a camera. Of course; what he could see, Huyler could see. Before he could reply, Huyler added, You sure you’re okay?
~ Positive, sir. I’m fine.
• • •
He stood within the hulk of the Winter Storm. The Navy drone went back and forth across the strange, almost flat floor of the wreck, searching in a grid pattern. It passed the hole in the floor where the substrate from Aorme had been wrenched out.
In the two days since they’d found the substrate, Quilan had persuaded the techs that it was worth recalibrating the drone to look for substrates much smaller than the one Huyler had been in, substrates the size of a Soulkeeper, in fact. They had already performed a standard search, but he got them at least to try and look more closely. The Mendicant Sisters on the temple ship had helped with the persuading; any chance to rescue a soul had to be pursued to the utmost.
By the time the drone was ready, though, the Culture ship which would take him on the first leg of his journey was already starting to decelerate. The Navy drone would have time for one sweep and one sweep only.
He watched it make its passes, following its own unseen grid across the flat floor. He looked up and around the gaping shell of the ship’s hull.
He tried to recreate in his mind the interior of the vessel as it had been when it had been intact, and wondered in what part of it she had stayed, where she had moved and where she had lain her head to sleep in the ship’s false night.
The main drive units might be up there, filling half the ship, the flyer hangar was there, in the stern, the decks would spread here and here; individual cabins would have been over there, or over there.
Maybe, he thought, maybe there was still a chance, maybe the techs had been wrong and there was still something left to find. The hull only held because it was energised somehow. They still didn’t understand everything about these great, gifted ships. Perhaps somewhere within the hull itself …
The machine floated up to him, clicking, ceiling lights glittering across its metallic carapace. He looked at it.
~ Sorry to break in, Quil, but it wants you to get the hell out the way.
~ Of course. Sorry. Quilan stepped to one side. Not too clumsily, he hoped. It had been a while since he’d worn a suit.
~ I’ll leave you alone again.
~ No, it’s all right. Talk if you want to talk.
~ Hmm. Okay. I’ve been wondering.
~ What?
~ We’ve spent so much time doing technical, calibrating stuff, but we haven’t touched on some of the basic assumptions being made here, like is it really true we can hear each other when we talk like this but not when we think? Seems a damn fine distinction to me.
~ Well, that’s what we’ve been told. Why, have you had any hint of—?
~ No, it’s just that when you look at something through another person’s eyes and you think something, after a while you start to wonder if it’s really what you think or some sort of bleed-over from what they’re thinking.
~ I think I see what you mean.
~ So, think we should test it out?
~ I suppose we could, sir.
~ All right. See if you can catch what I’m thinking.
~ Sir, I don’t think … he thought, but there was silence, even as his own thoughts tailed off. He waited a few more moments. Then a few more. The drone continued on its search pattern, each time passing by further and further away.
~ Well? Catch anything?
~ No, sir. Sir, I—
~ You don’t know what you missed, Major. Okay, your turn. Go on. Think of something. Anything.
He sighed. The enemy ship—no, he shouldn’t think of them that way … The ship could be here by now. He felt that what he and Huyler were doing right now was a waste of time, but on the other hand there was nothing they could do to make the drone carry out its task any faster, so they weren’t really wasting any time at all. All the same, it felt like it.
What a strange interval, he thought, to be here in this hermetic mausoleum, standing in the midst of such forlorn desolation with another mind inside his own, trading absences in the face of a task he knew nothing about.
And so he thought of the long avenue at Old Briri in the fall, the way she scuffed through the amber drifts of fallen leaves, kicking golden explosions of leaves into the air. He thought of their marriage ceremony, in the gardens of her parents’ estate, with the oval bridge reflected in the lake. As they’d made their vows a wind out of the hills had ruffled the reflection and taken it away, snapping at the awning above them, blowing off hats and making the priest clutch at her robes, but the same strong, spring-scented breeze had stroked the tops of the veil trees and sent a shimmering white cloud of blossom falling around them, like snow.
A few of the petals were still resting on her fur and eyelashes at the end of the service when he turned to her, removed his own ceremonial muzzle and hers, and kissed her. Their friends and family hurrahed; hats were thrown into the air and some were caught by another gust of wind, to land in the lake and sail off across the little waves like a dainty flotilla of brightly colored boats.
He thought again of her face, her voice, those last few moments. Live for me, he had said, and made her promise. How could they have known it would be a promise she could never keep, and he would still live to remember?
Huyler’s voice broke in. ~ Done your thinking, Major?
~ Yes, sir. Did you catch anything?
~ No. Just physiological stuff. Looks like we’ve still got some degree of privacy. Oh; the machine says it’s finished.
Quilan looked at the drone, which had arrived at the far end of the spoon of floor. ~ What does it … Look, Huyler, can I talk to that thing directly?
~ I think I can set that up, now it’s finished. I’ll still be able to hear though.
~ I don’t mind, I just …
~ There. Try that.
~ Machine? Drone?
~ Yes, Major Quilan.
~ Are there any other personality constructs in here, anywhere within the hull?
~ No. Only the one I was tasked with discovering earlier which now shares coordinates with yourself, that of Admiral-General Huyler.
~ Are you sure? he asked, wondering if any hint of his hope and despair could color his communicated words.
~ Yes.
~ What about within the fabric of the hull material itself?
~ That is not relevant.
~ Have you scanned it?
~ I cannot. It is not open to my sensors.
The machine was merely clever, not sentient. It would probably not have been able to recognize the emotions behind his words anyway, even if they had been communicated.
~ Are you absolutely certain? Have you scanned everything?
~ I am certain. Yes. The only three personalities present within the ship’s hull in any form appreciable to my senses are: you, the personality through which I am communicating to you, and my own.
He looked down at the sworl of floor between his feet. So there was no hope. ~ I see, he thought. ~ Thank you.
~ You are welcome.
Gone. Gone utterly and forever. Gone in a way that was new, bereft of the comforts of ignorance, and without appeal. Before, we believed that the soul might be saved. Now our technology, our better understanding of the universe and our vanguard in the beyond, has robbed us of our unreal hopes and replaced them with its own rules and regulations, its own algebra of salvation and continuance. It has given us a glimpse of heaven, and made more intense the reality of our despair when we know that truly it exists and that those we love will never be found there.
He switched on his communicator. There was a message waiting: THEY’RE HERE, said the letters on the suit’s little screen. It was timed eleven minutes earlier. A lot more time had passed than he’d have estimated.
<
br /> ~ Looks like our ride’s arrived.
~ Yes. I’ll let them know we’re ready.
~ You do that, Major.
“Major Quilan here,” he transmitted. “I understand our guests have arrived.”
“Major.” It was the voice of mission CO, Colonel Ustremi. “Everything all right in there?”.
“Everything is fine, sir.” He looked across the glassy floor and around the huge empty space. “Just fine.”
“Did you find what you were looking for, Quil?”.
“No, sir. I did not find what I wanted.”
“I’m sorry, Quil.”
“Thank you, sir. You can open the hatchway again. The machine’s finished its work. Let the techs see what else they can find by just digging.”
“Opening now. One of our guests wants to come and say hello.”
“In here?” he said, watching the tiny cone in the ship’s bow hinge away.
“Yes. That okay with you?”.
“I suppose.” Quil looked back at the drone, which was hovering where it had completed its search. “Tell your machine to switch itself off first, will you?”.
“Done.”
The Navy drone settled to the floor.
“Okay, send them in when they’re ready.”
• • •
The figure appeared in the blackness of the removed hatchway. It looked human and yet could not be; one of them would have been no more able to survive in the vacuum without a suit than he was.
Quilan upped the magnification on the visor, zooming in as the creature began to walk down the slope of the hull’s interior. The biped had what looked like jet black skin and its clothing was shiny gray. It looked very thin but then they all did. Its feet met the flat surface he was already standing on and brought it closer. It swung its arms as it walked.
~ They’d look like prey if there was just more eating on them.
He didn’t reply. The zoomed window in the visor kept the creature at the same magnification until the distinction between the window and the rest of the view disappeared. The thing’s face was narrow and pointed, its nose thin and sharp, and the eyes set in the night-black face were small and vividly blue surrounded by white.
~ Shit. They don’t look any more appetizing closer up.
“Major Quilan?” the creature said. The skin above its eyes moved when it spoke to him, but not its mouth.
“Yes,” he said.
“How do you do. I am the avatar of the Rapid Offensive Unit Nuisance Value. Pleased to meet you. I’ve come to take you on the first leg of your trip to Masaq’ Orbital.”
“I see.”
~ Quick suggestion; ask how to address it.
“Do you have a name, or rank? What should I call you?”.
“I am the ship,” it said, raising and dropping its narrow shoulders. “Call me Nuisance, if you like.” Its mouth twisted up at the edges. “Or Avatar, or just Ship.”
~ Or just abomination.
“Very well, Ship.”
“Okay.” It held up its hands. “I just wanted to say hello personally. We’ll be waiting for you. Let us know when you’re ready to go.” It let its gaze arc up and around. “They said it was all right to come in here. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything.”
“I had finished in here. I was looking for something but I didn’t find it.”
“I’m sorry”.
~ So you should be, you worm-fucker.
“Yes. Shall we go?” He started toward the circle of night in the bow of the ship. The avatar fell into step alongside. Its gaze took in the floor briefly. “What happened to this ship?”.
“We don’t know exactly” he told it. “It lost a battle. Something hit it very hard. The hull survived but everything else inside it was destroyed.”
The avatar nodded. “Compacted fused state,” it stated. “And the crew?”.
“We are walking on them.”
“I’m sorry.” The creature immediately floated off the floor by half a meter. It stopped making the walking motion and posed itself as though sitting. It crossed its legs and arms. “This happened in the war, I take it.”
They came to the slope and started up it; he kept on walking. He turned briefly to the creature. “Yes, Ship, it happened during your war.”
3
Infra Dawn
But you might die.”
“That’s the whole point.”
“Really. I see.”
“No, I don’t think you do, do you?”.
“No.”
The woman laughed and continued to adjust the flying harness. All about them the landscape was the color of drying blood.
Kabe stood on a rugged but still elegant platform made from wood and stone and perched on the edge of a long escarpment. He was talking with Feli Vitrouv, a woman with wild black hair and deep brown skin over hard-looking muscles. She wore a tight blue body suit with a small belly pack and was in the process of strapping herself into a wing harness, a complicated device full of compressed, slatted fins that covered most of her rear surfaces, from ankles to neck and down her arms. About sixty other people—half of them also wing-fliers—were distributed about the platform, which was surrounded by the blimp tree forest.
Dawn was just starting to break anti-spinwards, throwing long slanting rays across the cloud-whisped indigo sky. The fainter stars had long since been submerged in the slowly brightening vault; barely a handful still twinkled. The only other heavenly objects visible were the lobed shape of Dorteseli, the larger of the two ringed gas giants in the system, and the wavering white point that was the nova Portisia.
Kabe looked around the platform. The sunlight was so red it almost looked brown. It shone from the vastly distant atmospheres above the Orbital’s trailing plates, over the escarpment’s edge, across the dark valley with its pale islands of mist and sank onward to the low rolling hills and the distant plains on the far side. The cries of the forest’s nocturnal animals had slowly disappeared over the past twenty minutes or so, and the calls of birds were beginning to fill the night-chilled air above the low forest.
The blimpers were dark domes scattered amongst the taller ground-hugging trees. They looked threatening to Kabe, especially in this ruddy glow. The giant black gas sacs loomed, shriveled and deflated but still impressively rotund, over the bloated bulk of the banner reservoir, while their strangler roots snaked across the ground all around them like giant tentacles, establishing their territory and keeping ordinary trees at bay. A breeze stirred the branches of the ground trees and set their leaves rustling pleasantly. The blimpers at first appeared not to be affected by the wind, then moved slowly, creaking and crackling, adding to the effect of monstrousness.
The crimson sunlight was just starting to catch the tops of the more distant blimp trees, hundreds of meters away along the shallow side of the scarp; a handful of wing-fliers had already disappeared and headed down barely discernible paths into the forest. On the other side of the platform the view sank over cliffs, scree and forest into the shadows of the broad valley, where the meandering loops and oxbow lakes of Tulume River could be glimpsed through the slowly drifting patches of mist.
“Kabe.”
“Ah, Ziller.”
Ziller wore a close-fitting dark suit, with only his head, hands and feet showing. Where the suit’s material covered the pad of his midlimb it had been reinforced with hide. It had been the Chelgrian who’d wanted to come out here originally to see the wing-fliers. Kabe had already watched this particular sport, albeit from a distance, a few years earlier, shortly after he’d first arrived on Masaq’. Then he’d been on a long articulated river barge heading down the Tulume for the Ribbon Lakes, the Great River and the city of Aquime, and had observed the distant dots of the wing-fliers from the vessel’s deck.
This was the first time Kabe and Ziller had met since the gathering on the barge Soliton five days earlier. Kabe had completed or put on hold various articles and projects he had been working on and had just begun to st
udy the material on Chel and the Chelgrians which the Contact drone E. H. Tersono had sent him. He had half expected Ziller not to contact him at all, and so had been surprised when the composer had left a message asking him to meet him at the wing-fliers’ platform at dawn.
“Ah, Cr. Ziller,” Feli Vitrouv said as the Chelgrian loped up and folded himself to a crouch between her and Kabe. The woman flicked an arm out above her. A wing membrane snapped out for a few meters, translucent with a hint of blue-green, then flipped back. She clicked her mouth, seemingly satisfied. “We still haven’t succeeded in persuading you to have a go, no?”.
“No. What about Kabe?”.
“I’m too heavy.”
“Fraid so” Feli said. “Too heavy to do it properly. You could fit him with a float harness, I suppose, but that would be cheating.”
“I thought the whole point of this sort of exercise was to cheat.”
The woman looked up from tightening a strap around her thigh. She grinned at the crouched Chelgrian. “Did you?”.
“Cheating death.”
“Oh, that. That’s just a form of words, isn’t it?”.
“It is?”.
“Yeah. It’s cheat as in … deprive. Not cheating in the technical sense of agreeing to follow certain rules and then secretly not, while everybody else does.”
The Chelgrian was silent for a moment, then said, “Uh-huh.”
The woman stood up straight, smiling. “When are we going to get to a statement of mine you agree with, Cr. Ziller?”.
“I’m not sure.” He glanced about the platform, where the remaining fliers were completing their preparations and the others were packing up breakfast picnics and transferring to the various small aircraft hovering silently nearby. “Isn’t all of this cheating?”.
Feli exchanged shouts of good luck and last minute advice with a few of her fellow wing-fliers. Then she looked at Kabe and Ziller and nodded toward one of the aircraft. “Come on. We’ll cheat and take the easy way.”
The aircraft was a little arrowhead-shaped sliver of a thing with a large open cabin. Kabe thought it looked more like a small motorboat than a proper plane. He guessed it was big enough to take about eight humans. He weighed the same as three of the bipeds and Ziller was probably almost the mass of two so they should be under its maximum capacity, but it still didn’t look up to the task. It wobbled very slightly as he stepped aboard. Seats morphed and rearranged themselves for the two non-human shapes. Feli Vitrouv swung into the lead seat with a sort of clacking noise from the stowed wing fins, which she flicked out of the way as she sat. She pulled a control grip from the cockpit’s fascia and said, “Manual please, Hub.”