Look to Windward c-7

by Iain M. Banks

  So a trace of some sort of bias, some element of moral or other partiality must be present in the Culture’s Minds. Why should that trace not be what would, in a human or a Chelgrian, be a perfectly natural predisposition towards boredom caused by the sheer grinding relentlessness of their celebrated altruism and a weakness for the occasional misdemeanour; a dark, wild weed of spite in the endless soughing golden fields of their charity?

  The thought did not disturb him, which itself seemed odd. Some part of him, some part that was hidden, dormant, even found the idea, if not pleasant, at least satisfactory, even useful.

  He increasingly had the feeling that there was more to discover about the mission he had undertaken, and that it was important, and that he would be all the more determined to do whatever it was that had to be done.

  He knew that he would know more about it, later; remember more, later, because he was remembering more now, all the time.

  “And how are we today, Quil?”

  Colonel Jarra Dimirj lowered himself into the seat by Quilan’s bed. The Colonel had lost his midlimb and one arm in a flyer crash on the very last day of the war; these were regrowing. Some of the casualties in the hospital seemed unconcerned about wandering around with developing limbs exposed, and some, often the more grizzled and proudly scarred ones, even made a joke of the fact that they had what looked exactly like a child’s arm or midlimb or leg attached to themselves.

  Colonel Dimirj preferred to keep his rematuring limbs covered up, which—to the extent that he really cared about anything—Quilan found more tasteful. The Colonel seemed to have made it his duty to talk to all the patients in the hospital on a rota. Obviously it was his turn. He looked different today, Quilan thought. He seemed energised. Perhaps he was due to go home soon, or had been promoted.

  “I’m fine, Jarra.”

  “Uh-huh. How’s your new self coming along, anyway?”

  They seem happy enough. Apparently I’m making satisfactory progress.”

  They were in the military hospital at Lapendal, on Chel. Quilan was still confined to bed, though the bed itself was wheeled, powered and self-contained and could, had he wanted, have taken him throughout most of the hospital and a fair part of the grounds. Quilan thought this sounded like a formula for chaos, but allegedly the medical staff actually encouraged their charges to wander. It didn’t matter; nothing mattered; Quilan hadn’t used the bed’s mobility at all. He left it where it was, just to the side of the tall window which, he was told, looked out across the gardens and the lake to the forests on the far shore.

  He hadn’t looked out of the window. He hadn’t read anything, except for the screen when they tested his eyesight. He hadn’t watched anything, except for the comings and goings of the medical staff, patients and visitors in the corridor outside. Sometimes, when the door was left closed, he only heard the people in the corridor. Mostly he just stared ahead, at the wall on the far side of the room, which was white.

  “That’s good, yes,” the Colonel said. “When do they think you’ll be out of that bed?”

  “They think perhaps another five days.”

  His injuries had been severe. One more day in the half-wrecked truck struggling across the Phelen Plains on Aorme and he would have died. As it was he had been delivered to Golse City, triaged and transferred to an Invisible depot ship with only hours to spare. The depot vessel’s hopelessly over-stretched medics did their best to stabilise him. Still, he nearly died several more times.

  The Loyalist military and his family negotiated his ransom. A neutral medical shuttle craft from one of the Caring Orders took him to a Navy hospital ship. He was barely alive when he arrived. They had to throw away his body from the midriff down; necrosis had eaten as far as his midlimb and was busily destroying his internal organs. In the end they disposed of those too and amputated his midlimb, putting him on a total life-support machine until the rest of his body regrew, part by part; skeleton, organs, muscles and ligaments, skin and fur.

  The process was almost complete, though he had recovered more slowly than they’d expected. He could not believe that he had come so close to dying so many times, and had been so unlucky not to.

  Perhaps the thought of seeing Worosei, of surprising her, of seeing the expression on her face that he had daydreamed about in the crippled truck lurching across the plains; perhaps that had kept him going. He didn’t know, because all he could remember after the first few days in the truck was in the form of momentary and disconnected sensations: pain, a smell, a flash of light, a sudden feeling of nausea, an overheard word or phrase.

  So he did not know what his thoughts—assuming he’d had any thoughts—had been during that fevered, scrambled time, but it seemed to him perfectly possible and even likely that only those daydreams of Worosei had sustained him and made exactly the difference between his death and his survival.

  How cruel that thought was. To have been so close to a death he would now happily welcome, but prevented from embracing it by the misguided belief that he could ever see her alive again. He had only been told that she was dead after he’d arrived here in Lapendal. He’d been asking about her since he woke up from the first major operation on the Navy hospital ship, when they had reduced him to his head and upper trunk.

  He had brushed aside the doctor’s solemn, careful explanation of how radical they had had to be and how much of his body they had had to sacrifice in order to save his life, and he had demanded, through his confusion and nausea and pain, to know where she was. The doctor hadn’t known. He’d said he would find out, but then never reappeared in person, and nobody else on the staff seemed to be able to find out either.

  A chaplain from a Caring Order had done his best to determine the whereabouts of the Winter Storm and Worosei, but the war was still being waged, and discovering the location of a fighting ship, or anybody who might be on it, was not the sort of information you really expected to be told.

  He wondered who had known then that the ship was missing, presumed lost. Only the Navy, probably. It was likely that not even their own clan had been informed before it became obvious. Had there been a time when he could have been told of Worosei’s fate and still have been close enough to death to have stepped easily over that threshold? Perhaps. Perhaps not.

  He’d finally been told by his brother-in-law, Worosei’s twin, the day after the clan had been told. The ship was lost, presumed destroyed. It and its single escort craft had been surprised by an Invisible fleet a few days out of Aorme. The enemy attacked with what sounded like a sort of gravity-wave impactor weapon. The larger ship was hit first; the escort vessel reported that the Winter Storm suffered total internal destruction, almost instantaneously. There had been no trace of any souls being saved from it.

  The escort craft tried to escape, was pursued and run down. Its own destruction terminated its last message before it could even give its position. A few souls had been saved from it; much later they confirmed the details of the engagement.

  Worosei had died instantly, which Quilan supposed he ought to treat as some sort of blessing, but the calamity that had overtaken the Winter Storm had happened so quickly that there had been no time for the people aboard to be saved by their Soulkeepers, and the weaponry used against them had been specifically configured to destroy the devices themselves.

  It would be half a year before Quilan was able to appreciate the irony that in tuning the attack to wreck Soulkeeper-scale technology, the impactor had left the old-tech substrate rescued from Aorme almost unharmed.

  Worosei’s twin had broken down and cried when he’d told Quilan the news. Quilan felt a kind of distant concern for his brother-in-law and made some of the noises of comforting, but he did not cry, and—trying to look into his own thoughts and feelings—all he could make out was a terrible barrenness, an almost complete lack of emotion, save for a feeling of puzzlement that he should experience so limited a reaction in the first place.

  He suspected his brother-in-law felt ashamed
of crying in front of Quilan, or was offended that Quilan did not show any sign of sorrow. In any event, he only ever came for that one visit. Others of Quilan’s own clan made the journey to see him; his father and various other relations. He found it difficult to know what to say to them. Their visits tailed off and he was quietly relieved.

  A grief counsellor was assigned to him but he didn’t know what to say to her either and felt he was letting her down, not being able to follow her leads into emotional areas she said she thought he needed to explore. Chaplains were no more comfort.

  When the war ended, suddenly, unexpectedly, just a few days earlier, he’d thought something like, Well, I’m glad that’s over, but he realised almost immediately that he hadn’t really felt anything. The rest of the patients and the staff of the hospital wept and laughed and grinned and those who could got drunk and partied into the night, but he felt oddly dissociated from it all, and experienced only resigned annoyance at the noise, which kept him awake after he’d normally have been safely asleep. Now his only regular visitor, save for the medical staff, was the Colonel.

  “Don’t suppose you’ve heard, have you?” Colonel Dimirj said. His eyes seemed to shine and he looked, Quilan thought, like somebody who has just escaped death, or won an unlikely bet.

  “Heard what, Jarra?”

  “About the war, Major. About how it started, who caused it, why it ended so suddenly.”

  “No, I haven’t heard anything about that.”

  “Didn’t you think it stopped hell of a quick?”

  “I didn’t really think about it. I suppose I rather lost touch with things while I was unwell. I didn’t appreciate how quickly the war ended.”

  “Well, now we know the reason why,” the Colonel said, and slapped the side of Quilan’s bed with his good arm. “It was those bastard Culture people!”

  “They stopped the war?” Chel had had contact with the Culture for the last few hundred years. They were known to be widespread throughout the galaxy and technologically superior—though without the Chelgrians’ apparently unique link with the Sublimed—and prone to allegedly altruistic interference. One of the more forlorn hopes people had cleaved to during the war was that the Culture would suddenly step in and gently prise the combatants apart, making everything all right again.

  It hadn’t happened. Neither had the Chelgrian-Puen, Chel’s own advanced force amongst the Sublimed, stepped in, which had been an even more pious hope. What had happened, more prosaically but scarcely less surprisingly, was that the two sides in the war, the Loyalists and the Invisibles, had suddenly started talking and with surprising speed come to an agreement. It was a compromise that didn’t really suit anybody but certainly it was better than a war that was threatening to tear Chelgrian civilisation apart. Was Colonel Dimirj saying that the Culture somehow had intervened?

  “Oh, they stopped it, if you want to look at it that way.” The Colonel leant close over Quilan. “You want to know how?”

  Quilan did not particularly care, but it would be rude to say so. “How?”

  “They told us and the Invisibles the truth. They showed us who the real enemy was.”

  “Oh. So they did intervene after all.” Quilan was still confused. “Who is the real enemy?”

  “Them! The Culture, that’s who,” the Colonel said, slapping Quilan’s bedside again. He sat back, nodding, his eyes bright. “They stopped the war by confessing that they started it in the first place, that’s what they did. Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The war had begun when the newly enfranchised and empowered Invisibles had turned all their recently acquired weaponry on those who had been their betters in the old enforced caste system.

  New militias and Equalitarian Guard Companies had been created as a result of the abortive Guards’ Revolt, when part of the Army had tried to stage a coup after the first Equalitarian election. The militias and Companies, and the accelerated training-up of the one-time lower castes so that they could take command of a majority of the Navy’s ships, were part of an attempt to democratise Chel’s armed forces and ensure that through a system of power balances no single branch of the armed forces could take control of the state.

  It was an imperfect and expensive solution, and it meant that more people than ever before had access to vastly powerful weaponry, but all that had to happen for it to work was that nobody behaved insanely. But then Muonze, the Spayed caste President, had seemed to do just that, and been joined by half of those who had gained most through the reforms. How could the Culture have had anything to do with that? Quilan suspected the Colonel was determined to tell him.

  “It was the Culture that got that Equalitarian idiot Kapyre elected President before Muonze,” Dimirj said, leaning over Quilan again. “Their fingers were on the scales all the time. They were promising the parliamentarians the whole fucking galaxy if they voted for Kapyre; ships, habitats, technologies; the gods only know what. So in comes Kapyre, out goes common sense, out goes three thousand years of tradition, out goes the system, in comes their precious fucking equality and that ball-less cretin Muonze. And do you know what?”

  “No. What?”

  “They got him elected, too. Same tactics. Basic bribery.”

  “Oh.”

  “And what are they saying now?”

  Quilan shook his head.

  “They’re saying they didn’t know he was going to go crazy, that it never occurred to them that a bit of equality—exactly what these people had been shouting for all this time—might not be enough for them, that some of them might just be stupid and vicious enough to want revenge. Never dawned on them that their shit-caste friends might want to do some score-settling, no. That wouldn’t make sense, that wouldn’t be logical.” The colonel almost spat that last word. “So when it all blew up in our faces they were still moving their own ships and military people away from us. Didn’t have the forces to intervene, couldn’t find nine-tenths of the people they’d been paying off and whispering to because they were dead, like Muonze, or being held hostage or in hiding.”

  The Colonel sat back again. “So our civil war wasn’t really one at all; it was all these do-gooders’ work. Frankly I don’t know that even this is the truth. How do we really know they’re as powerful and advanced as they claim? Maybe their science is little better than ours and they were getting frightened of us. Maybe they meant all this to happen.”

  Quilan was still trying to take all this in. After a few moments, while the Colonel sat there, nodding, he said, “Well, if they had they wouldn’t suddenly admit it, would they?”

  “Ha! Maybe it was about to come out anyway, so they tried to look as good as they could by confessing.”

  “But if they told both us and the Invisibles in the first place, to stop the war—”

  “Same thing; maybe we were about to find out on our own. They were just making the best of a bad job. I mean,” Dimirj said, tapping one claw on the side of Quilan’s bed, “can you believe they’ve actually had the gall to quote figures, statistics at us? Telling us that this hardly ever happens, that ninety-nine per cent or whatever of these ‘interferences’ go according to plan, that we’ve just been really unlucky and they’re really sorry and they’ll help us rebuild?” The Colonel shook his head. “The nerve of them! If we hadn’t lost most of our best in that insane fucking war that they caused I’d be tempted to go to war with them!”

  Quilan stared at the other male. The Colonel’s eyes were wide, his head fur was standing straight as he shook his head. He found that his own head was shaking too, in disbelief. “Is all this true?” he asked. “Really?”

  The Colonel stood up, as though impelled by his anger. “You should watch the news, Quil.” He looked around, as though for something to take his rage out on, then took a deep breath.

  “Won’t be the end of this, I tell you, Major. Not the end, not by a long, long way.” He nodded. “I’ll see you later, Quil. Goodbye for now.” He slammed the door on hi
s way out.

  And so Quilan did switch on a screen, for the first time in months, and discovered that it was indeed all very much as the Colonel had said, and that the pace of change in his own society had truly been forced by the Culture, and it by its own confession had offered what they called help and others might have called bribes to get elected the people it thought ought to be elected, and advised and cajoled and wheedled and arguably threatened its way to what it thought was best for the Chelgrians.

  It had started to slacken off its involvement, and stand down the forces it had secretly brought up to near the Chelgrian sphere of influence and colonisation in case things went wrong, when, without any warning, it had all gone quite spectacularly wrong.

  Their excuses were as the Colonel had laid out, though there was also, Quilan thought, a hint that they weren’t as used to predator-evolved species as they were to others, and that had been a factor in their failure to anticipate either the catastrophic behaviour change which started with Muonze and cascaded down through the restructured society, or the suddenness and ferocity with which it occurred once it had begun.

  He could hardly believe it, but he had to. He watched a lot of screen, he talked to the Colonel and to some other patients who’d started to come to visit him. It was all true. All of it.

  One day, the day before he was to be allowed out of his bed for the first time, he heard a bird singing in the grounds outside his window. He clicked at the buttons on the bed’s control panel, and made it turn and raise him up so that he could look out of the window. The bird must have flown off, but he saw the cloud-scattered sky, the trees on the far side of the glittering lake, the breaking waves on the rocky shore, and the wind-stroked grasses of the hospital grounds.