Look to Windward (35 page)

“So am I to be given something like sealed orders, Estodien?”.

“Something like that. But those orders will be locked inside your own mind. Your memory of this time—probably from some time just after the war to the end of your training here—will only gradually come back to you as you near the completion of your mission. By the time you recall this conversation—at the end of which you will know what your mission really is, though not yet exactly how you will accomplish it—you should be quite close, though not in exactly the correct position.”

“Can memory be drip-fed so accurately, Estodien?”.

“It can, though the experience may be a little disorienting, and that is the most important reason for giving you your co-pilot. The reason we are doing this is specifically because the mission involves the Culture. We are told that they never read people's minds, that the inside of your head is the one place they regard as sacrosanct. You have heard this?”.

“Yes.”

“We believe that this is probably true, but your mission is of sufficient importance for us to take precautions in case it is not. We imagine that if they do read minds, the most likely time this will happen will be when the subject concerned boards one of their ships, especially one of their warships. If we are able to arrange that you are taken to Masaq' on such a vessel, and it does look inside your head, all it will find, even at quite a deep level, is your innocent covering story.

“We believe, and have verified through experiments, that such a scanning process could be carried out without your knowledge. To go any deeper, to discover the memories we will initially hide even from you, this scanning process will have to reveal itself; you will be aware that it is taking place, or at the very least you will know that it has taken place. If that should happen, Major, your mission will end early. You will die.”

Quilan nodded, thinking. “Estodien, has any sort of experiment been carried out on me yet? I mean, have I already lost any memories, whether I agreed to such a thing or not?”.

“No. The experiments I mentioned were carried out on others. We are very confident that we know what we are doing, Major.”

“So the deeper I go into my mission the more I'll know about it?”.

“Correct”.

“And the personality, the co-pilot, will it know everything from the start?”.

“It will.”

“And it cannot be read by a Culture scan?”

“It can, but it would require a deeper and more detailed reading than that required for a biological brain. Your Soulkeeper will be like your citadel, Quilan; your own brain is the curtain wall. If the citadel has fallen, the walls are either long since stormed, or irrelevant.

“Now. As I said, there is more to tell about your Soulkeeper. It contains, or will contain, a small payload and what is commonly known as a matter transmitter. Apparently it does not really transmit matter, but it has the same effect. I freely confess the importance of the distinction escapes me.”

“And this is in something the size of a Soulkeeper?”.

“Yes.”

“Is this our own technology, Estodien?”.

“That is not something that you need to know, Major. All that matters is whether it works or not.” Visquile hesitated, then said, “Our own scientists and technologists make and apply astonishing new discoveries all the time, as I'm sure you are aware.”

“Of course, Estodien. What would the payload you mentioned be?”.

“You may never know that, Major. At the moment, I myself do not know exactly what it is either, though I will be told in due course, before your mission properly begins. At the moment all I know is something of the effect it will have.”

“And that would be what, Estodien?”.

“As you might imagine, a degree of damage, of destruction.”

Quilan was silent for a few moments. He was aware
of the presence of the millions of gone-before personalities stored in the substrates around him. “Am I to understand that the payload will be transmitted into my Soulkeeper?”.

“No, it was put in place along with the Soulkeeper device.”

“So it will be transmitted from the device?”.

“Yes. You will control the transmission of the payload.”

“I will?”.

“That is what you are here to be trained for, Major. You will be instructed in the use of the device so that when the time comes you are able to transmit the payload into the desired location.”

Quilan blinked a few times. “I may have fallen a little behind with recent advances in technology, but—”.

“I would forget about that, Major. Previously existing technologies are of little importance in this matter. This is new. There is no precedent that we know of for this sort of process; no book to refer to. You will be helping to write that book.”

“I see.”

“Let me tell you more about the Culture world Masaq'.” The Estodien gathered his robes about him and settled himself further into the cramped curl-pad. “It is what they call an Orbital; a band of matter in the shape of a very thin bracelet, orbiting around a sun—in this case the star Lacelere—in the same zone one would expect to find an habitable planet.

“Orbitals are on a different scale from our own space habitats; Masaq', like most Culture Orbitals, has a diameter of approximately three million kilometers
and therefore a circumference of nearly ten million kilometers. Its width at the foot of its containing walls is about six thousand kilometers. Those walls are about a thousand kilometers high, and open at the top; the atmosphere is held in by the apparent gravity created by the world's spin.

“The size of the structure is not arbitrary; Culture Orbitals are built so that the same speed of revolution which produces one standard gravity also creates a day-night cycle of one of their standard days. Local night is produced when any given part of the Orbital's interior is facing directly away from the sun. They are made from exotic materials and held together principally by force fields.

“Floating in space in the center of the Orbital, equidistant from all places on its rim, is the Hub. This is where the AI substrate that the Culture calls a Mind exists. The machine oversees all aspects of the Orbital's running. There are thousands of subsidiary systems tasked with overseeing all but the most critical procedures, but the Hub can assume direct control of any and all of them at the same time.

“The Hub has millions of human-form representative entities called avatars with which it deals on a one-to-one basis with its inhabitants. It is theoretically capable of running each of those and every other system on the Orbital directly while communicating individually with every human and drone present on the world, plus a number of other ships and Minds.

“Each Orbital is different and each Hub has its own personality. Some Orbitals have only a few components of land; these are usually square parcels of
ground and sea called Plates. On an Orbital as broad as Masaq' these are normally synonymous with continents. Before an Orbital is finished, in the sense of forming a closed loop like Masaq', they can be as small as two Plates, still three million kilometers apart but joined only by force fields. Such an Orbital might have a total population of just ten million humans. Masaq' is toward the other end of the scale, with over fifty billion people.

“Masaq' is known for the high rate of back-up of its inhabitants. This is sometimes held to be because a lot of them take part in dangerous sports, but really the practice dates from the world's inception, when it was realized that Lacelere is not a perfectly stable star and that there is a chance that it could flare with sufficient violence to kill people exposed on the surface of the world.

“Mahrai Ziller has lived there for the last seven years. He appears to be content to remain on the world. As I say, you will, seemingly, be going there to attempt to persuade him to renounce his exile and return to Chel.”

“I see.”

“Whereas your real mission is to facilitate the destruction of Masaq' Hub and so cause the deaths of a significant proportion of its inhabitants.”

The avatar was going to show him around one of the manufacturies, beneath a Bulkhead Range. They were in an underground car, a comfortably fitted-out capsule which sped beneath the underside of the Orbital's surface, in the vacuum of space. They had swung half a
million kilometers around the world, with the stars shining through panels in the floor.

The underground car line spanned the gap beneath the gigantic A-shape of the Bulkhead Range on a monofil-supported slingbridge two thousand kilometers long. Now the car was hurtling to a stop near the center, to ascend vertically into the factory space, hundreds of kilometers above.

~ You all right, Major?

~ Fine. You?

~ The same. Mission target just come through?

~ Yes. How am I doing?

~ You're fine. No obvious physical signs. You sure you're all right?

~ Perfectly.

~ And we're still Go status?

~ Yes, we're still Go.

The silver-skinned avatar turned to look at him. “You're sure you won't be bored seeing a factory, Major?”.

“Not one producing starships, not at all. Though you must be running out of places to distract me with,” he said.

“Well, it's a big Orbital.”

“There's one place I would like to see.”

“Where's that?”.

“Your place. The Hub.”

The avatar smiled. “Why, certainly.”

Flight

A
re we nearly there yet?”.

“Uncertain. That which the creature said. It meant?”.

“Never mind that! Are we
there
yet?”.

“This is hard to know with certitude. To return to that which the creature said. Is its meaning yet known to you?”.

“Yes! Well, sort of! Please, can we go way
faster?”

“Not really. We proceed as fast as is possible given the circumstances and therefore I thought our time might be employed by the telling of that which you understand from the creature's sayings. What would you then say was the import of such?”.

“It doesn't matter! Well, it does, but! Just. Oh. Hurry! Faster! Go faster!”.

They were inside the dirigible behemothaur Sansemin, Uagen Zlepe, 974 Praf and three of the raptor scouts. They were squeezing their way down a sinuous, undulating tube whose warm, slime-slick walls
pulsed alarmingly every few moments. The air moving past them from ahead stank of rotting meat. Uagen fought the urge to gag. They could not go back to the outside the way they had come; it had been blocked off by some sort of rupture which had trapped and suffocated two of the raptor scouts who'd gone ahead of them.

Instead they had—after the creature had said what it had to Uagen and after an agonizingly long and absurdly relaxed discussion amongst the raptor scouts and the 974 Praf—taken another route out of the interrogatory chamber. This route initially led deeper and further into the quivering body of the dying behemothaur.

Two of the three raptor scouts insisted on going ahead in case of trouble, but they were squeezing their way through the convolutions of the twisting passage with some difficulty and Uagen was convinced that he could have gone quicker by himself.

The passage was deeply ribbed underfoot, making it hard to walk without supporting oneself on the wet and quivering walls. Uagen wished he'd brought gloves. His partial IR sense could make out little detail here because everything seemed to be the same temperature, reducing all he could see to a nightmarish monochrome of shadows upon shadows; it was, Uagen thought, worse than being blind.

The raptor scout in the lead came to a fork in the passage and stopped, apparently thinking.

There was a sudden concussive thud from all around them, then a pulse of fetid air swirled over them from behind, momentarily overcoming the flow of air from
ahead and producing a still greater stench that very nearly made Uagen throw up.

He heard himself yelp. “What was that?”.

“This is unknown,” the Interpreter 974 Praf told him. The head wind resumed. The leading raptor scout chose the lower left-hand passage and shouldered its wings down the narrow cleft. “That way,” 974 Praf said helpfully.

•   •   •   

I'm going to die, Uagen thought, quite clearly and almost calmly. I'm going to die stuck inside this rotting, bloating, incinerating ten-million-year-old alien airship, a thousand light years from another human being and with information that might save lives and make me a hero.

Life is so unfair!

The creature on the wall in the interrogatory chamber had lived just long enough to tell him something which also might kill him, of course, if it was true, and even if he did get out of here. From what it had said, the knowledge he now possessed made him a target for people who wouldn't think twice about killing him or anybody else.

“You're Culture?” he said to the long, five-limbed thing hanging on the wall in the chamber.

“Yes,” it said, trying to keep its head up as it talked to him. “Agent. Special Circumstances.”

Uagen felt himself go
gulp
again. He'd heard of SC. He'd dreamt about being a Special Circumstances agent when he'd been a child. Dammit, he'd dreamt about being one when he'd been a young adult. He'd never
really imagined he'd meet a real one. “Oh,” he said, feeling infinitely foolish even as he said, “How do you do.”

“You?” the creature said.

“What? Oh! Umm. Scholar. Uagen Zlepe. Scholar. Pleased to. Well. Probably not. Umm. I just. Well.” He was fingering the necklace again. It must sound like he was twittering. “Doesn't matter. Can we get you down from there? This whole place, well, thing, is—”.

“Ha. No. don't think so,” the creature said, and might even have been trying to smile. It made a gesture with its head like a backward nod, then grimaced with pain. “Hate to tell you. Only me holding this together, such as it is. Through this link.” It shook its head. “Listen, Uagen. You have to get out.”