Look to Windward (50 page)

He was sitting up in a sort of cross between a bed and a giant nest. He blinked, ungumming his eyes. It did not feel as though it had been blood keeping them shut.

He squinted at the creature hanging a few meters in front of him. It blinked and turned its head a little.

“Praf?” he said, coughing. His throat felt sore, but at least it was properly connected to his head again.

The small, dark creature shook its leathery wings.

“Uagen Zlepe,” it said, “I am charged with welcoming you. I am 8827 Praf, female. I share the bulk of the memories
associated with the fifth-order Decider of the 11th Foliage Gleaner Troupe of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus which was known to you as 974 Praf, including, it is believed, all those regarding yourself.”

Uagen coughed up some fluid. He nodded and looked around. This looked like the interior of Yoleus' Invited Guests' Quarters, with the sub-divisions removed.

“Am I back on Yoleus?” he asked.

“You are aboard the dirigible behemothaur Yoleusenive.”

Uagen stared at the hanging creature in front of him. It took him a moment or two to work out the implications of what he'd just heard. He felt his mouth go dry He swallowed. “The Yoleus has … evolved?” he croaked.

“That is the case.”

He put his hand up to his throat, feeling the tender but whole flesh. He looked slowly up and around. “How was I” he began, then had to stop and swallow and start again. “How was I brought back? How was I rescued?”

“You were found in the without. You wore a piece of equipment which stored your personality. The Yoleusenive has repaired and reconstructed your body and quickened your mind-life within said body.”

“But I wasn't wearing any … ” Uagen began, then his voice trailed off as he looked down to where his fingers were stroking the skin around his neck where, once, there had been a necklace.

“The piece of equipment that stored your personality was where your fingers are now” 8827 Praf confirmed, and clacked her beak once.

Aunt Silder's necklace. He remembered the tiny sting at the back of his neck. Uagen felt tears well in his eyes. “How much time has passed?” he whispered.

Praf's head tipped to one side again and her eyelids flickered.

Uagen cleared his throat and said, “Since I left the Yoleus; how much time has passed?”

“Nearly one Grand Cycle.”

Uagen found he could not speak for a little while. Eventually he said, “One … one, ah, galactic, umm Grand Cycle?”

8827 Praf's beak clacked a couple of times. She shook herself, adjusting her dark wings as though they were a cloak. “That is what a Grand Cycle is,” she said as though explaining something obvious to someone just hatched. “Galactic.”

Uagen swallowed on a dry, dry throat. It was as though it was still ripped out and open to the vacuum. “I see,” he said.

Closure

S
he went bounding across the grass toward the cliff, nostrils flared to the wind and the tang of ozone, her face-fur flattened in the breeze. She came to the great double bowl where the land had long ago been vaporized and blown away. The grass fell curving beneath her. Beyond lay the ocean. In front, the seastacks rose like the trunks of immense fossilized trees, their bases awash with creamy foam. She leapt.

A small drone had been sent to investigate the running figure. Its weapons were armed and ready to fire. Just as it was about to intercept the female and shout a challenge, she came to the grassy edge of the crater and jumped. What happened next was unexpected. The drone's camera showed the leaping figure disintegrate and turn into a flock of birds. They flew past the drone, flowing around its casing like water about a stone. The machine twitched this way and that, then turned and followed.

The order came to attack the flock of birds. The
drone instigated a prey-rich-environment targeting regime, but then another order countermanded the first and told it to attack a group of three more defense drones which had just risen from the nearest seastack. It curved away, zooming to gain height.

Lasers flickered from cupolas high on two of the seastacks, but the flock of birds had become a swarm of insects; the weapon light found few of them and those it did simply reflected it. Then the two laser towers began to fire at each other, and both exploded in balls of flame.

The first drone attacked the other three as they spread out and accelerated toward the swarm of insects. It shot down one before it was itself destroyed. Then the other two drones attacked each other, swooping in and ramming at high speed in a flash and a single sharp detonation of sound; much of the resulting wreckage was composed of pieces small enough to drift in the wind.

Several small- and medium-sized explosions shook each of the seastacks, and smoke began to drift across the blue sky.

The insect swarm collected on a broad balcony and resumed the form of a Chelgrian female. She knocked the balcony doors down and stepped into the room. Alarms warbled. She frowned and they fell silent. The only sensory or command system not fully under her control was a tiny passive camera in one corner of the room. She was to leave the complex's security monitoring system uncorrupted, so that what was done was seen to be done, and recorded. She listened carefully.

She strode into the bathroom and found him in the emergency one-person lift which had been disguised as a shower cabinet. The lift had jammed in the shaft. She flowed over the hole, formed a partial vacuum and sucked the capsule back up. She pulled open the door and reached in for the naked, cowering male.

Estodien Visquile opened his mouth to scream for mercy. She became insects—they represented something of a phobia for the Estodien—and poured into his throat, choking him and forcing open the route to his lungs and to his stomach. The insects packed each tiny air-sac in his lungs tight; others bulked out the Estodien's stomach to the point of bursting and beyond, then invaded his body cavity, while others rammed down into the rest of his digestive system, forcing an explosion of fecal matter from his anus.

The Estodien crashed and battered about the shower cabinet lift capsule, smashing the ceramic fittings and denting the plastics. More insects streamed into his ears and forced their way around his horrified, staring eyes, burning their way into his skull while his skin crawled and writhed with the insects which had invaded his body cavity and gone onto slide their way under his flesh.

The insects infested his entire body eventually, as he lay thrashing on the floor on a film of his own blood. They continued to insinuate their way into every bodily part of him until, about three minutes after the attack had begun, Visquile's movements gradually ceased.

The insects, the birds and the Chelgrian female
were made of EDust. Everything Dust was composed of tiny machines of varying sizes and capabilities. With the exception of one type, none was larger than a tenth of a millimeter in any direction. Interestingly, the dust had originally been designed as the ultimate building material.

The one class of exception to the tenth-of-a-millimeter rule was that of AM nanomissiles, which were only a tenth of a millimeter in diameter, but an entire millimeter in length. One of those lodged in the center of the Estodien's brain, beside his Soulkeeper, while all the other components withdrew and reformed into the Chelgrian female.

She padded away from the deflated body lying in its bloody pool. The nanomissiles were, she thought, a give-away to the identity of her makers; an integral part of the message she was delivering. She went out of the bathroom and the apartment, down some stairs and across a terrace. Somebody shot at her with an ancient hunting rifle. It was the only projectile weapon left working for several kilometers around; she let the bullet pass through a hole in her chest and out the other side, while a set of components in one of her eyes briefly lased and blinded the male who had shot at her.

In the accommodation block behind her, the nanomissile embedded in Visquile's brain sensed his Soulkeeper about to read and save his mind. The explosion of the missile's warhead destroyed the whole building. Debris rained down, around and through her as she walked calmly away.

She found her second target trapped in a small two-person
flyer, trying to smash his way out of the cockpit canopy with an oxygen cylinder.

She pulled the canopy open. The white-furred male lashed out with an antique knife; it penetrated her chest and she let it hang there while she took him by the throat and lifted him bodily out of the machine. He kicked and spat and gurgled. The knife in her chest was swallowed inside her as she walked to the edge of the terrace. He hung easily in her grip, as though he weighed nothing; his kicks seemed to have no appreciable effect on her whatsoever.

At the terrace edge she held him over the balustrade. The drop to the sea was about two hundred meters. The knife he had tried to harm her with appeared smoothly out of the palm of her hand, like magic. She used it to skin him. She was ferociously quick; it took a minute or so. His screams wheezed out through his partially crushed windpipe.

She let his bloody white pelt drop away toward the waves like a heavy, sodden rug. She threw the knife away and used her own claws to rip him open from midlimb to groin, then reached inside, pulling and twisting at the same time as she let go of his neck.

He tumbled away, finally screaming in a high, hoarse voice. She was still holding his stomach in her hand. His intestines unravelled, whipping out of his body in a long, quivering line as he fell.

Skinned and disembowelled, he was light enough—and his entrails sufficiently elastic as well as firmly anchored—for him to bounce up and down on the end of his own guts for a while, jerking and quivering
and shrieking, before she let him fall into the salty waves.

She watched the splashes with Chelgrian eyes for a while, then became a cloud of dust in which the biggest single components were the nanomissiles.

By the time the warhead in Eweirl's brain exploded a few minutes later, she had become an attenuated column of grayness sucking itself up into the sky high above.

Epilogue

I
t is good to have a body again. I enjoy sitting here in this little café in this quaint hill village, smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of wine and looking out over distant Chelise. The air is clear and the view is sharp and autumn is just beginning. It is definitely good to be alive.

I am Sholan Hadesh Huyler, an admiral-general of the Chelgrian Combined Forces, retired. I did not suffer the same fate as that shared by the Hub Mind of Masaq' Orbital and my one-time colleague and charge, Major Tibilo Quilan. The Hub pulled me out of Quilan's Soulkeeper device, saved me, transmitted me to one of its guardian GSVs and—much later—I was united with my old self, the one which Quilan rescued twice: once—with his wife Worosei—from the Military Institute in Cravinyr City on Aorme, and once—with the Navy drone—from the wreck of the
Winter Storm
.

Now I am a free citizen on Chel again, with a reasonable pension (in fact two) and the respect of my
superiors (actually two sets of them, though only one lot know of the existence of the other bunch, and they would resist being called my superiors). I hope that I may never be needed again, but if I am, I will do my duty not for my old masters but for my new equals. For I am, by the definition I would have used up to a few years ago, a traitor.

The Chelgrian High Command thought that I might have been got at in some way—even turned—before the wreck of the ship was found, however I seemed to check out and I certainly made all the right responses.

They were both right and wrong. I was turned by the Culture while I was still in the substrate in the Institute on Aorme. They hadn't thought of that, long before the Caste War.

The best way to turn an individual—person or machine—is not to invade them and implant some sort of mimetic virus or any such nonsense, but to make them change their mind themselves, and that is what they did to me, or rather what they persuaded me to do to myself.

They showed me all there was to be shown about my society and theirs and, in the end, I preferred theirs. Essentially I became a Culture citizen and at the same time an agent of Special Circumstances, which is the uncharacteristically coy name they employ for their combined intelligence, espionage and counter-espionage organization.

I went along with everything else to keep Masaq' and its people safe, not to ensure its destruction. I was SC's insurance policy, their get-out clause, their parachute
(I heard many colorful analogies). If I had been told to do so, I would have prevented Quilan from making his Displacements, not taken over and done them for him had he demurred. In the end it was decided that sufficient other safeguards had been put in place for the Displacements to go ahead, with the aim of back-tracking along the attempted wormhole link to discover and even attack the Involveds behind the attack (this failed and to the best of my knowledge it is still not known who those mysterious allies were, though I'm sure SC has its suspicions).

I spend most of my time on Masaq' these days, often in the company of Kabe Ischloear; we have similar roles. I come back here to Chel on occasion, but I prefer my new home. Only recently Kabe pointed out that he had lived in the Culture for nearly a decade before he realized that when the Culture calls somebody from an alien society who lives amongst them “Ambassador,” what they mean is that that person represents the Culture to their original civilization, the assumption being that the alien concerned will naturally consider the Culture better than their home and so worthy of promotion within it.

Such hubris!

Nevertheless.

I have met Mahrai Ziller. He was wary at first but eventually warmed to me. Lately we have been talking about him accompanying me back here, to Chel, for an informal visit, perhaps early next year. So I may yet accomplish the task that was only ever Quilan's covering story.