Look to Windward (48 page)

But he did not.

~ I didn't intervene. You never meant to really do it.

~ Really?

~ Really.

~ Fascinating. Every philosopher should experience this, don't you think, Huyler?

~ Easy son, easy.

Kabe and Tersono joined the Chelgrian. Both noticed he was weeping quietly but thought it polite not to say anything.

•   •   •   

The music rang around the auditorium, a vast invisible clapper in the inverted bell of the Bowl. The stadiums lights had sunk to darkness; the light show in the skies above flickered, flowed and flashed.

Quilan had missed the nacreous clouds. He saw the aurorae, the lasers, the induced layers and levels of clouds, the flashes of the first few meteorites, the strobing lines that hatched the sky as more and more streaked in. The distant skies all around the Bowl, way out over the plains bordering the lake, coruscated with silent horizontal lightning, darting from cloud to cloud in streaks and bars and sheets of blue-white light.

The music accumulated. Each piece, he realized, was slowly contributing to the whole. Whether it was Hub's idea or Ziller's, he didn't know, but the whole evening, the entire concert program had been designed around the final symphony. The earlier, shorter pieces were half by Ziller, half by other composers. They alternated, and it became clear that the styles were quite different too, while the musical
philosophies behind the two competing strands were dissimilar to the point of antipathy.

The short pauses between each piece, during which the orchestra enlarged and decreased according to the requirements of each work, allowed just sufficient time for the strategic structure of the evening to filter through to people. You could actually hear the coin drop as people worked it out.

The evening was the war.

The two strands of music represented the protagonists, Culture and Idirans. Each pair of antagonistic pieces stood for one of the many small but increasingly bitter and wide-scale skirmishes which had taken place, usually between proxy forces for both sides, during the decades before the war itself had finally broken out. The works increased in length and in the sensation of mutual hostility.

Quilan found himself checking the history of the Idiran War, to confirm that what felt like they ought to be the final pair of preparatory pieces really were so.

The music died away. The applause was barely audible, as though everybody was simply waiting. The complete orchestra filled the central stage. Dancers, most in float harnesses, distributed themselves about the space around the stage in a semi-sphere. Ziller took his place at the very focus of the circular stage, surrounded by a shimmer of projection field. The applause zoomed suddenly then dropped as quickly away. The orchestra and Ziller shared a mutual moment of silence and stillness.

A blanking field somewhere in the heavens above blinked off, and—up near one edge of the Bowls
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 around the greater amphitheater of sky around the lake and Bowl at its center. 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 center 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 kilometer-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 clamor 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 toward the distant glow.

The light came from the band of the Orbital. He walked into what looked just like the mock-up of 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 gray 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 realized.

“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 onward, 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 realized 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.