He held the woman's recorded brain patterns, backed-up onto the little blue cube. Easily crushable. His other hand, finger resting on the small switch, could turn off her life.
He wondered if he would do it, and seemed to wait for a while, as if expecting some part of his own mind to assume control from him. A couple of times it seemed to him that he felt the start of the impulse to throw the switch, and could have started to do so just an instant later, but each time suppressed the urge. He left his finger there, looked at the small cube inside its protective cage. He thought how remarkable and at the same time how oddly sad it was that all of a human mind could be contained in something so small. Then he reflected that a human brain was not so very much bigger than the little blue cube, and used resources and techniques far more ancient, and so was no less impressive (and still as sad).
He closed the woman up again in her chill sleep, and continued on his slow-motion walk to the centre of the ship.
'I don't know any stories.'
'Everybody knows stories,' Ky told him.
'I don't. Not proper stories.'
'What's a "proper" story?' Ky sneered. They sat in the Crew Lounge, surrounded by their debris.
He shrugged. 'An interesting one. One people want to listen to.'
'People want to listen to different things. What one person would call a proper story might not please somebody else.'
'Well, I can only go by what I think would be a proper story, and I don't have any. Not stories that I want to tell, anyway.' He grinned coldly at Ky.
'Ah; that's different,' Ky nodded.
'Indeed it is.'
'Well, tell me what you believe in, then,' Ky said, leaning towards him.
'Why should I?'
'Why shouldn't you? Tell me because I asked.'
'No.'
'Don't be so stand-offish. We're the only three people for billions of kilometres and the ship's a bore; who else is there to talk to?'
'Nothing.'
'Exactly. Nothing and nobody.' Ky looked pleased.
'No; I meant that's what I believe in; nothing.'
'At all?'
He nodded. Ky sat back, thoughtful, nodding. 'They must have hurt you bad.'
'Who?'
'Whoever robbed you of whatever it was you used to believe in.'
He shook his head slowly. 'Nobody ever robbed me of anything,' he said. Ky was silent for a while, so he sighed and said, 'So, Ky, what do you believe in?'
Ky looked at the blank screen that covered most of one wall of the lounge. 'Something other than nothing.'
'Anything with a name is other than nothing,' he said.
'I believe in what's around us,' Ky said, arms crossed, sitting back in the seat. 'I believe in what you can see from the carousel, what we'd see if that screen was on, although what you'd see wouldn't be the only sort of what I believe in that I believe in.'
'In a word, Ky,' he said.
'Emptiness,' Ky said with a flickering, jittery smile. 'I believe in emptiness.'
He laughed. 'That's pretty close to nothing.'
'Not really,' Ky said.
'Looks it to most of us.'
'Let me tell you a sort of story.'
'Must you?'
'No more than you must listen.'
'Yeah... okay, then. Anything to pass the time.'
'The story is this. It's a true story, by the way, not that that matters. There is a place where the existence or non-existence of souls is taken very seriously indeed. Many people, whole seminaries, colleges, universities, cities and even states devote almost all their time to the contemplation and disputation of this matter and related topics.
'About a thousand years ago, a wise philosopher-king who was considered the wisest man in the world announced that people spent too much time discussing these things, and could, if the matter was settled, apply their energies to more practical pursuits which would benefit everybody. So he would end the argument once and for all.
'He summoned the wisest men and women from every part of the world, and of every known persuasion, to discuss the matter.
'It took many years to assemble every single person who wished to take part, and the resulting debates, papers, tracts, books, intrigues and even fights and murders took even longer.
'The philosopher-king took himself off to the mountains to spend these years alone, emptying his mind of everything so that he would be able, he hoped, to come back once the process of argument was ended and pronounce the final decision.
'After many years they sent for the king, and when he felt ready he listened to everyone who thought they had something to say on the existence of souls. When they had all said their piece, the king went away to think.
'After a year, the king announced he had come to his decision. He said that the answer was not quite so simple as everybody had thought, and he would publish a book, in several volumes, to explain the answer. The king set up two publishing houses, and each published a great and mighty volume. One repeated the sentences, "Souls do exist. Souls do not exist," time after time, part after part, page after page, section after section, chapter after chapter, book after book. The other repeated the words, "Souls do not exist. Souls do exist," in the same fashion. In the language of the kingdom, I might add, each sentence had the same number of words, even the same number of letters. These were the only words to be found beyond the title page in all the thousands of pages in each volume. The king had made sure that the books began and finished printing at the same time, and were published at the same time, and that exactly the same number were published. Neither of the publishing houses had any perceivable superiority or seniority over the other.
'People searched the volumes for clues; they looked for a single repetition, buried deep in the volumes, where a sentence or even a letter had been missed out or altered, but they found none. They turned to the king himself, but he had taken a vow of silence, and bound up his writing hand. He would still nod or shake his head in reply to questions concerning the governing of his kingdom, but on the subject of the two volumes, and the existence or otherwise of souls, the king would give no sign.
'Furious disputes arose, many books were written; new cults began. Then a half-year after the two volumes had been published, two more appeared, and this time the house that had published the volume beginning, "Souls do not exist," published the volume which began, "Souls do exist." The other publisher followed suit, so that theirs now began, "Souls do not exist." This became the pattern.
'The king lived to be very old, and saw several dozen volumes published. When he was on his death bed, the court philosopher placed copies of the book on either side of him, hoping the king's head would fall to one side or the other at the moment of death, so indicating by the first sentence of the appropriate volume which conclusion he had really come to... but he died with his head straight on the pillow and with his eyes, under the eyelids, looking straight ahead.
'That was a thousand years ago,' Ky said. 'The books are published still; they have become an entire industry, an entire philosophy, a source of un-ending argument and -'
'Is there an ending to this story?' he asked, holding up one hand.
'No,' Ky smiled smugly. 'There is not. But that is just the point.'
He shook his head, got up and left the Crew Lounge.
'But just because something does not have an ending,' Ky shouted, 'doesn't mean it doesn't have a...'
The man closed the elevator door, outside in the corridor; Ky rocked forward in the seat and watched the lift-level indicator ascend to the middle of the ship. '... conclusion,' Ky said, quietly.
He'd been revived nearly half a year when he almost killed himself.
He was in the elevator car, watching a torch he had left in the centre of the car as it slowly spun. He had left the torch switched on, and put out all the other lights. He watched the tiny spot of light move slowly around the circular wall of the car, slow as any clock hand.
He remembered the search
lights of the Staberinde, and wondered how far they were away from it now. So far that even the sun itself must be weaker than a searchlight seen from space.
He did not know why that made him think of just taking off the helmet, but found himself starting to do it, nevertheless.
He stopped. It was quite a complicated procedure to open the suit while in vacuum. He knew each of the steps, but it would take some time. He looked at the white spot of light which the torch was shining on the wall of the lift, not far from his head. The white spot was gradually coming closer as the torch spun. He would start to ready the suit to take the helmet off; if the torch beam hit his eye - no, his face, any part of his head - before that, then he would stop, and go back as though nothing had happened. Otherwise, if the spot of light did not strike his face in time, he would take the helmet off and die.
He allowed himself the luxury of letting the memories wash over him, while his hands slowly began the sequence that would end, unless interrupted, with the helmet being blasted off his shoulders by the air pressure.
Staberinde, the great metal ship stuck in stone (and a stone ship, a building stuck in water), and the two sisters. Darckense; Livueta (and of course he'd realised at the time that he was taking their names, or something like their names, in making the one he masqueraded under now). And Zakalwe, and Elethiomel. Elethiomel the terrible, Elethiomel the Chairmaker...
The suit beeped at him, trying to warn him he was doing something very dangerous. The spot of light was a few centimetres from his head.
Zakalwe; he tried to ask himself what the name meant to him. What did it mean to anybody? Ask them all back home; what does this name mean to you? War, perhaps, in the immediate aftermath; a great family, if your memory was long enough; a kind of tragedy. If you knew the story.
He saw the chair again. Small and white. He closed his eyes, tasting bitterness in this throat.
He opened his eyes. Three final clips to go, then one quick twist... he looked at the spot of light. It was invisible, so close to the helmet, so close to his head. The torch in the centre of the elevator car was facing almost straight at him, its lens bright. He undid one of the three final helmet clips. There was a tiny hiss, barely noticeable.
Dead, he thought, seeing the girl's pale face. He undid another clip. The hiss grew no louder.
There was a sense of brightness at the side of the helmet, where the light would be shining.
Metal ship, stone ship, and the unconventional chair. He felt tears come to his eyes, and one hand - the one not undoing the third helmet clip - went to his chest, where, under the many synthetic layers of the suit, beneath the fabric of the under-suit, there was a small puckered mark on the skin just over his heart; a scar that was two decades old, or seven decades old, depending how you measured time.
The torch swung, and just as the final clip came undone, and the spot of light started to leave the inside edge of the suit, to shine on his face, the torch flickered and went out.
He stared. It was almost totally dark. There was the hint of light from outside the car; the faintest of red glows, produced by all the near-dead people and the quietly watching equipment.
Out. The torch had gone out; charge exhausted or just a fault, it didn't matter. It had gone out. It hadn't shone on his face. The suit beeped again, plaintive above the quiet hiss of escaping air.
He looked down, at the hand that lay over his chest.
He looked back up at where the torch must be, unseen in the centre of the car in the centre of the ship, in the middle of its journey.
How do I die now? he thought.
He did go back to his chill sleep, after a year. Erens and Ky, their sexual predilections forever estranging them despite the fact they seemed like a well-matched couple otherwise, were still arguing when he left.
He ended up in another lo-tech war, learning to fly (because he knew now that aircraft would always win against a battleship), and flying the frosty vortices of air above the vast white islands that were the colliding tabular icebergs.
Thirteen
Where they lay, the discarded robes looked like the just-shed skin of some exotic reptile. He had been going to wear those, but then changed his mind. He would wear the clothes he had come here in.
He stood in the bathroom, in its steams and smells, stopping the razor again, then putting it to his head, slowly and carefully as though pulling a comb through his hair in slow motion. The razor scraped through the foam on his skin, catching a last few stubbly hairs. He swept the razor past the tops of his ears, then took up a towel, wiped the gleaming skin of his skull, inspecting the baby-smooth landscape he had revealed. The long dark hair lay scattered on the floor, like plumage scattered during a fight.
He looked out to the citadel parade grounds, where a few weak fires glowed. Above the mountains, the sky was just starting to become light.
From the window, he could see a few craggy levels of the citadel's curbed wall and jutting towers. In that first outlining light, it looked, he thought - though trying hard not to feel maudlin - poignant, even noble, now that he knew it was doomed.
He turned from the sight and went to put on his shoes. The air moved over his shaven skull, feeling very strange. He missed the feel and sweep of his hair on the nape of his neck. He sat on the bed, pulled on the shoes and clasped them, then looked at the telephone sitting on the bedside cabinet. He lifted the device.
He recalled (he seemed to remember) contacting the space port last night, after Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw had gone. He had been feeling bad, dissociated and remote somehow, and he was not at all certain he really did remember calling the technicians there, but he thought he probably had. He'd told them to ready the ancient space craft, for the Decapitation strike, sometime that morning. Or he hadn't. One of the two. Maybe he had been dreaming.
He heard the citadel operator asking him who he wanted. He asked for the space port.
He talked to the technicians. The chief flight engineer sounded tense, excited. The craft was ready, fuelled up, coordinates locked in; it could be launched within a few minutes as soon as he gave the word.
He nodded to himself as he listened to the man. He heard the chief flight engineer pause. The question was unasked, but there.
He watched the skies outside the window. They still looked dark, from inside here. 'Sir?' the chief flight engineer said. 'Sir Zakalwe? What are your orders, sir?'
He saw the little blue cube, the button; he heard the whisper of escaping air. There was a shudder, just then. He thought it was his own body, reacting involuntarily, but it was not; the shudder ran through the fabric of the citadel, through the walls of the room, through the bed beneath him. Glass rattled in the room. The noise of the explosion rumbled through the air beyond the thick windows, low and unsettling.
'Sir?' the man said. 'Are you still there?'
They would probably intercept the spacecraft; the Culture itself - the Xenophobe, probably - would use effectors on it... the decapitation strike was bound to fail...
'What should we do, sir?'
But there was always a possibility...
'Hello? Hello, sir?'
Another explosion shook the citadel. He looked at the handset he held. 'Sir, do we go ahead?' he heard a man say, or remembered a man saying, from long ago and far away... And he had said yes, and taken on a terrible cargo of memories, and all the names that might bury him...
'Stand down,' he said quietly. 'We won't need the strike now,' he said. He put the handset down, and left the room quickly, taking the rear stairs, away from the main entrance to his apartments, where he could already hear a commotion building.
More explosions shook the citadel, dislodging dust around him as the curtain wall was breached and breached again. He wondered how it would be with the regional headquarters, how they would fall, and whether the raid to capture the high priests would be as bloodless as Sma had hoped. But he realised even as he thought about it all that he no longer really cared.
He
left the citadel via a postern and entered the great square that was the parade ground. The small fires still burned outside the tents of the refugees. In the distance, great clouds of dust and smoke floated slowly into the grey dawn sky above the curtain wall. He could see a couple of gaps in the wall from here. The people in the tents were starting to wake up and come out. From the citadel walls at his back and above him, he could hear the crackle of gunfire.
A heavier gun fired from the breached walls, and a huge explosion shook the ground, ripping a great hole in the cliff that was the citadel; an avalanche of stone thundered into the parade ground, burying a dozen tents. He wondered what sort of ammunition the tank was firing; not a type they'd had until this morning, he suspected.
He walked on through the tent city, as the people appeared, blinking, from their sleep. Scattered firing continued from the citadel; the vast cloud of dust rolled over the parade ground from the great tumbled breach in the towering walls. Another shot from near the curtain walls; another ground-quaking detonation that brought a whole side of the citadel down, the stones bursting from the wall as though with relief, falling and tumbling in their own rolling dust; released, returning to the earth.
There was less firing from the citadel ramparts now, as the dust drifted and the sky slowly lightened and the frightened people clutched at each other outside their tents. More firing came from the breached curtain walls, and from inside the parade ground, within the tent city.
He walked on. Nobody stopped him; few people really seemed to notice him. He saw a soldier fall from the curtain wall to his right, tumbling into the dust. He saw the people running this way and that. He saw the Imperial Army soldiers, in the distance, riding on a tank.
He walked through the clustered tents, avoiding people running, stepping over a couple of the smouldering fires. The huge breaches in the curtain wall and the citadel itself smoked in the increasing grey light, which was just starting to take on colour as the sky burned pink and blue.
Sometimes, as the people milled and streamed around him, running past, clutching babies, dragging children, he thought he saw people he recognised, and several times was on the point of turning and talking to them, putting out his hand to stop the snowfall effaces rushing past him, shouting after them...