Look to Windward c-7

by Iain M. Banks

  A blanking field somewhere in the heavens above blinked off, and—up near one edge of the Bowl’s lip—it was as though the first nova, Portisia, had just appeared from behind a cloud.

  The symphony Expiring Light began with a susurration that built and engorged until it burst into a single dashingly discordant blast of music; a mixture of chords and sheer noise that was echoed in the sky by a single shockingly bright air burst as a huge meteorite plunged into the atmosphere directly above the Bowl and exploded. Its stunning, frightening, bone-rattlingly loud sound arrived suddenly in a hypnotic lull in the music, making everybody—certainly everybody that Quilan was aware of, including himself—jump.

  Thunder rippled round the greater amphitheatre of sky around the lake and Bowl at its centre. The bolts struck earth now, lancing to the distant ground. The sky hatched with squadrons and fleets of darting meteorite trails while the folds of aurorae and sky-wide effects whose origin it was hard to guess at filled the mind and beat at the eye even as the music pounded at the ear.

  Visuals of the war and more abstract images filled the air directly above the stage and the whirling, tumbling, interlacing bodies of the dancers.

  Somewhere near the furious centre of the work, while the thunder played bass and the music rolled over it and around the auditorium like something wild and caged and desperate to escape, eight trails in the sky did not end in air bursts and did not fade away but slammed down into the lake all around the Bowl, creating eight tall and sudden geysers of lit white water that burst out of the still dark waters as though eight vast under-surface fingers had made a sudden grab at the sky itself.

  Quilan thought he heard people shriek. The entire Bowl, the whole kilometre-diameter of it, shook and quivered as the waves created by the lake-strikes smashed into the giant vessel. The music seemed to take the fear and terror and violence of the moment and run screaming away with it, pulling the audience behind like an unseated rider caught in the stirrup of their panic-stricken mount.

  A terrible calmness settled over Quilan as he sat there, half cowering, battered by the music, assailed by the washes and spikes of light. It was as though his eyes formed a sort of twin tunnel in his skull and his soul was gradually falling away from that shared window to the universe, falling on his back forever down a deep dark corridor while the world shrank to a little circle of light and dark somewhere in the shadows above. Like falling into a black hole, he thought to himself. Or maybe it was Huyler.

  He really did seem to be falling. He really did seem to be unable to stop. The universe, the world, the Bowl really did seem to be unreachably distant. He felt vaguely upset that he was missing the rest of the concert, the conclusion of the symphony. What price clarity and proximity, though, and where lay the relevance of being there and using or not using a magnification screen or amplification when everything he’d seen so far had been distorted by the tears in his eyes and all he’d heard had been drowned out by the clamour of his guilt at what he had done, what he had made possible and what was surely going to happen?

  He wondered, as he fell into that encompassing darkness, and the world was reduced to a single not especially bright point of light above—no more luminous than a nova distant by most of a thousand years—if he’d somehow been fed a drug. He supposed the Culture people would all be enhancing the experience with their glanded secretions, making the reality of the experience both more and less real.

  He landed with a bump. He sat up and looked around.

  He saw a distant light to one side. Again, not particularly bright. He got to his feet. The floor was warm and with just a hint of pliancy. There was no smell, no sound except his own breathing and heartbeat. He looked up. Nothing.

  ~ Huyler?

  He waited for a moment. Then a moment longer.

  ~ Huyler?

  ~ HUYLER?

  Nothing.

  He stood and gloried in the silence for a while, then walked towards the distant glow.

  The light came from the band of the Orbital. He walked into what looked like the Hub’s viewing gallery. The place seemed to be deserted. The Orbital spun around him with a vast, implicit unhurriedness. He walked on a little, past couches and seats, until he came to the one that was occupied.

  The avatar, lit by the reflected light of the Orbital’s surface, looked up as he approached and patted the curl-seat next to it. The creature was dressed in a dark grey suit.

  “Quilan,” it said. “Thank you for coming. Please; sit down.” The reflections slid off its perfect silver skin like liquid light.

  He sat down. The curl-seat fitted perfectly.

  “What am I doing here?” he asked. His voice sounded strange. There were no echoes, he realised.

  “I thought we should talk,” the avatar said.

  “What about?”

  “What we’re going to do.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The avatar held up a tiny thing like a jewel, grasping it in a pincer of silver fingers. It glittered like a diamond. At its heart was a tiny flaw of darkness. “Look what I found, Major.”

  He did not know what to say. After what seemed like a long time he thought:

  ~ Huyler?

  The moment went on. Time seemed to have stopped. The avatar could sit perfectly, utterly, inhumanly still.

  “There were three,” he told it.

  The avatar smiled thinly, reached into the top pocket of the suit and produced another two of the jewels. “Yes, I know. Thank you for that.”

  “I had a partner.”

  “The guy in your head? So we thought.”

  “I have failed then, haven’t I?”

  “Yes. But there is a consolation prize.”

  “What is that?”

  “Tell you later.”

  “What happens now?”

  “We listen to the end of the symphony.” It held out one slim silver hand. “Take my hand.”

  He took its hand. He was back in the Stullien Bowl, but this time everywhere. He looked straight down, he watched from a thousand other angles, he was the stadium itself, its lights and sounds and very structure. At the same time he could see everywhere around the Bowl, into the sky, out to the horizon, all around. He experienced a long moment of terrifying vertigo; vertigo which seemed to be pulling him not down but in every direction at once. He would fly apart, he would simply dissolve.

  ~ Stick with it, the avatar’s hollow voice said.

  ~ I’m trying to.

  The music and the sights swamped him, overwhelmed him, ran him through with light. The symphony rolled onwards, approaching a sequence of resolutions and cadenzas that were a small yet still titanic reflection of the whole work, the rest of the earlier concert, the war itself.

  ~ Those things I Displaced, they are-

  ~ I know what they are. They’ve been taken care of.

  ~ I’m sorry.

  ~ I know that.

  The music rose like the bulging bruise of water from an undersea explosion, an instant before the smooth swell ruptures and the spout of white spray bursts forth.

  The dancers rose and fell, swirled and flocked and spread and shrank. Images of war strobed above the stage. The skies filled with light, flickering staggeringly brief shadows that were obliterated almost instantly by the next detonation in the vast bombardment of fire.

  Then all fell away, and Quilan sensed time itself slow down. The music faded to a single hanging line of keening ache, the dancers lay like fallen leaves scattered about the stage, the holo above the stage vanished and the light seemed to evaporate from the sky, leaving a darkness that pulled at the senses, as though the vacuum was calling to his soul.

  Time slowed still further. In the sky near the tiny remaining light that was the nova Portisia, there was just the merest hint of something flickering. Then that stopped, held, frozen, too.

  The moment that was now, that for all his life had been a point, became that line, that long note of music and that drawing sough of black. From the line
extended a plane, which folded and folded until there was space for the viewing gallery again, and there he sat, still holding the hand of the silver-skinned avatar.

  He looked into himself and realised that he felt no fear, no despair and no regret.

  When it spoke, it was as though it used his own voice.

  ~ You must have loved her very much, Quilan.

  ~ Please, if you can, if you will, look into my soul.

  The avatar looked levelly at him.

  ~ Are you sure?

  ~ I’m sure.

  That long look went on. Then the creature slowly smiled. ~ Very well.

  It nodded after a few more moments. ~ She was a remarkable person. I see what you saw in her. The avatar made a noise like a sigh. ~ We surely did do a terrible thing to you, didn’t we?

  ~ We did it to ourselves, in the end, but yes, you brought it upon us.

  ~ This was a terrible revenge to contemplate, Quilan.

  ~ We believed we had no choice. Our dead… well, I imagine you know.

  It nodded. ~ I know.

  ~ It is over, isn’t it?

  ~ A lot is.

  ~ My dream this morning…

  ~ Ah yes. The avatar smiled again. ~ Well, that could have been me messing with your mind, or just your guilty conscience, don’t you think?

  He guessed he would never be told. ~ How long have you known? he asked.

  ~ I have known since a day before you arrived. I can’t speak for Special Circumstances.

  ~ You let me make the Displacements. Wasn’t that dangerous?

  ~ Only a little. I had my back-up by then. A couple of GSVs have been here or hereabouts for a while, as well as the Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall. Once we knew what you were up to, they could protect me even from an attack like the one you envisaged. We let it happen because we’d like to know where the other ends of those wormholes are. Might tell us something about who your mysterious allies were.

  ~ I’d like to know myself. He thought about this. ~ Well, I used to.

  The avatar frowned. ~ I’ve discussed this with some of my peers. Want to know one ugly thought?

  ~ Are there not enough in the world already?

  ~ Assuredly. But sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming ugly deeds by exposing them.

  ~ If you say so.

  ~ One should always ask who has most to gain. With respect, Chel does not, in this measure, count.

  ~ There are many Involveds who might like to see you suffer a reverse.

  ~ One may come on its own; they tend to. Things have been going very well with the Culture over the last eight hundred years or so. Blink-of-an-eye stuff for the Elders, but a long time for an Involved to stay quite as determinedly in-play as we have. But our power may have peaked; we may be becoming complacent, even decadent.

  ~ This seems to be a pause I am meant to fill. By the way, how long do we have, before the second nova ignites?

  ~ Back in reality, about half a second. The avatar smiled. ~ Here, many lifetimes. It looked away, to the image of the Orbital hanging in space before them, slowly rotating.

  ~ It is not impossible that the allies who made all this possible are, or represent, some rogue group of Culture Minds.

  He stared at the creature. ~ Culture Minds? he asked.

  ~ Now isn’t that a terrible thing to have to think? That our own might turn against us?

  ~ But why?

  ~ Because we might be becoming too soft. Because of that complacency, that decadence. Because some of our Minds might just think that we need a bit of timely blood and fire to remind us the universe is a perfectly uncaring place and that we have no more right to enjoy our agreeable ascendancy than any other empire long fallen and forgotten. The avatar shrugged. ~ Don’t be so shocked, Quilan. We could be wrong.

  It looked away for a moment. Then it said:

  ~ No luck with the wormholes. It sounded sad. ~ We may never know now. It turned to look at him again. There was an expression of terrible sorrow on its face. ~ You’ve wanted to die since you realised you’d lost her, since you recovered from your wounds, haven’t you, Quilan?

  ~ Yes.

  It nodded. ~ Me too.

  He knew the story of its twin, and the worlds it had destroyed. He wondered, assuming it was telling the truth, how many lifetimes of regret and loss you could fit into eight hundred years, when you could think, experience and remember with the speed and facility of a Mind.

  ~ What will happen to Chel?

  ~ A handful of individuals—certainly no more—may pay with their lives. Other than that, nothing. It shook its head slowly. ~ We cannot let you have your balancing souls, Quilan. We will try to reason with the Chelgrian-Puen. It’s tricky territory for us, the Sublimed, but we have contacts.

  It smiled at him. He could see his broad, furred face reflected in the image’s delicate features.

  ~ We still owe you for our mistake. We will do all we can to make amends. This attempt does not absolve us. Nothing has been balanced. It squeezed his hand. He had forgotten they were still holding each other. ~ I am sorry.

  ~ Sorrow seems a common commodity, doesn’t it?

  ~ I believe the raw material is life, but happily there are other by-products.

  ~ You are not really going to kill yourself, are you?

  ~ Both of us, Quilan.

  ~ Do you really-?

  ~ I am tired, Quilan. I have waited for these memories to lose their force over the years and decades and centuries, but they have not. There are places to go, but either I would not be me when I went there, or I would remain myself and so still have my memories. By waiting for them to drop away all this time I have grown into them, and they into me. We have become each other. There is no way back I consider worth taking.

  It smiled regretfully and squeezed his hand again.

  ~ I’ll be leaving everything in good working order, and in good hands. It’ll be a more-or-less seamless transition, and nobody will suffer or die.

  ~ Won’t people miss you?

  ~ They’ll have another Hub before too long. I’m sure they’ll take to it, too. But I hope they do miss me a little. I hope they do think well of me.

  ~ And you’ll be happy?

  ~ I won’t be happy or unhappy. I won’t be. Neither will you.

  It turned more towards him and held out its other hand.

  ~ Are you ready, Quilan? Will you be my twin in this?

  He took its other hand.

  ~ If you will be my mate.

  The avatar closed its eyes.

  Time seemed to expand, exploding all around him.

  His last thought was that he’d forgotten to ask what had happened to Huyler.

  Light shone in the sky above the Bowl.

  Kabe, lost in the silence and the darkness, watched the light of the star called Junce as it flickered and then blazed, close enough to the earlier, fading nova of Portisia to all but drown it out.

  At his side, Quilan, who had been very quiet and still for some time, suddenly slumped forward in his curl-pad and collapsed to the floor before Kabe could catch him.

  “What?” he heard Tersono screech.

  The applause was starting.

  Breath flowed out of the Chelgrian’s mouth, then he went quite still.

  Noises of shock and consternation built up around Kabe, and—as he hunkered down and tried to revive the dead alien creature—another bright, bright light shone above; exactly, precisely overhead.

  He called Hub for help but there was no answer.

  Space, Time

  — fear and the sudden tearing pain, the huge white-furred face suddenly filling his vision; the despair and terror and the anger at having been betrayed as he woke and tried—too late, far too late—to bring his hands up in what would have been a futile gesture anyway, then the ferocious thud as the creature’s huge jaws slammed into his neck, and the agony of the steel-like hold and the instant constriction, the cutting-off from air, and the shaking; neck snapping, b
rain rattling, dislodging him from sense and life…

  Something rasped against his neck; there went aunt Slider’s necklace. The shaking went on. Something thin and broken whipped tinily against his neck as the blood sprayed out and the breath was worried out of him. You bastard, he thought, slipping away again from the savage side-to-side thrashing.

  The pain went on, fading, as he was dragged now, held by the neck, through the alien ship. His limbs hung limp, cut off from his brain; he was a rag, a broken puppet. The corridors still smelled of rotting fruit. Eyes gummed with his own blood. Nothing to be done, nothing to hope for.

  Mechanical noises. Then the feeling of being dropped. A surface beneath him. Released, his head felt barely joined to his body, rolling onto its side.

  Sounds of growling and tearing and slashing, sounds he felt ought to connect to pain, to some sensation at least, but which meant nothing. Then silence, and darkness, and the inability to do anything but witness this slow fading-away of sensation itself. And another small pain near the nape of his neck; a final, tiny jab, like an afterthought; almost comical.

  Failed. Failed to get back. Failed to warn. Failed to be the hero. It was not supposed to end this way, dying a lonely, painful death, conscious only of betrayal, fear and hopelessness.

  Hissing. Fading. Cold. Movement; being scraped along inside a sudden, chill breeze.

  Then utter silence, utter cold, and no weight whatsoever.

  Uagen Zlepe, scholar, felt cheated that his blood-gummed eyes prevented him from seeing the distant stars in their vacuum-naked state as he died.

  — Great Yoleusenive, this is that which was found in the without by the servants of the Hiarankebine six thousand and three hundred beats to aft. It was brought within the world for the inspection of the Hiarankebine, which sends these remains with its esteem and compliments, believing that your self might add to the sum of knowledge with its revered evaluation.

  — This form may have been known to the one to whom you address your remarks. Its appearance brings associations, memories. They are old, though. Now beginning is a deep search of our long-term memory archival storage capacity. This will take some time to complete. Let us talk further on the subject before us while said search is taking place.