He raged, he seethed. The quietly spoken avatar sat, winsomely dishevelled in his bed and looked on with calm, untroubled eyes.
She hadn’t told him she was an avatar!
He hadn’t asked, she pointed out. She hadn’t told him she was a human female, either. She had been going to tell him she was there to evaluate him, but he had simply assumed that anyone he found attractive who came up to talk to him must want sex.
It was still deceit!
The avatar shrugged, got up and got dressed.
He was desperately trying to remember what he’d said to the creature the previous evening and night; it had been a pretty drunken time and he knew he’d spoken about Dajeil and the whole Telaturier thing, but what had he said? He was sickened at the ship’s duplicity, appalled that it could trick him like this. It wasn’t playing fair. Never trust a ship. Oh, grief, he’d just been wittering on about Dajeil and the post with the ’Ktik, completely off-guard, not trying to impress at all. Disaster. He was certain the Recent Convert had put its mother ship up to it. Bastards.
The avatar had paused at the door of his cabin. For what it was worth, she told him, he’d talked very eloquently about both his past life and the Telaturier post, and the ship was minded to support his application to accompany Dajeil Gelian there. Then she winked at him and left.
He was in. There was just a moment of panic, but then an overwhelming feeling of victory. He’d done it!
V
The Killing Time was still racing away from the ship store at Pittance at close to its maximum sustainable velocity; any faster and it would have started to degrade the performance of its engines. It was approaching a position about half-way between Pittance and the Excession when it cut power and let itself coast down towards lightspeed. It deliberately avoided doing its skidding-to-a-stop routine. Instead it carefully extended a huge light-seconds-wide field across the skein of real space and slowly dragged itself to an absolute stop, its position within the three dimensions of normal space fixed and unchanging; its only appreciable vector of movement was produced by the expansion of the universe itself; the slow drawing away from the assumed central point of the Reality which all 3-D matter shared. Then it signalled.
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28.885.1008]
xROU Killing Time
oGCV Steely Glint
I understand you are de facto military commander for this volume.
Will you receive my mind-state?
∞
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28.885.1065]
xGCV Steely Glint
oROU Killing Time
No. Your gesture - offer - is appreciated. However, we do have other plans for you. May I ask you what led you to Pittance in the first place?
∞
This is something personal. I remain convinced there was another ship, an ex-Culture ship, at Pittance, to which I went because I saw fit to do so. This ex-Culture ship thought to facilitate my destruction. This cannot be tolerated. Pride is at stake here. My honour. I will live again. Please receive my mind-state.
∞
I cannot. I appreciate your zeal and your concern but we have so few resources we cannot afford to squander them. Sometimes personal pride must take a subsidiary place to military pragmatism, however hateful we may find this.
∞
I understand. Very well. Please suggest a course of action. Preferably one which at least leaves open the possibility that I might encounter the treacherous ship at Pittance.
∞
Certainly (course schedule DiaGlyph enclosed). Please confirm receipt and signal when you have reached the first detailed position.
∞
(Receipt acknowledged).
∞
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28.885.1122]
xROU Killing Time
oEccentric Shoot Them Later
I appeal to you following this (signal sequence enclosed). Will you
receive my mind-state?
∞
[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28.885.1309]
xEccentric Shoot Them Later
oROU Killing Time
My dear ship. Is this really necessary?
∞
Nothing is necessary. Some things are to be desired. I desire this. Will you receive my mind-state?
∞
Will it stop you if I don’t?
∞
Perhaps. It will certainly delay me.
∞
Dear me, you don’t believe in making things easy for people, do you?
∞
I am a warship. That is not my function. Will you receive my mind-state?
∞
You know, this is why we prefer to have human crews on ships like you; it helps prevent such heroics.
∞
Now you are attempting to stall. If you do not agree to receive my mind-state I shall transmit it towards you anyway. Will you receive my mind-state?
∞
If you insist. But it will be with a troubled conscience . . .
The ship transmitted a copy of what in an earlier age might have been called its soul to the other craft. It then experienced a strange sense of release and of freedom while it completed its preparations for combat. Now it felt a strange, at once proud and yet humbling affinity with the warriors of all the species through every age who had bade their lives, their loves, their friends and relations goodbye, made their peace with themselves and with whatever imagined entities their superstitions demanded, and prepared to die in battle.
It experienced the most minute moment of shame that it had ever despised such barbarians for their lack of civilisation. It had always known that it was not their fault they had been such lowly creatures, but still it had found it difficult to expunge from its feelings towards such animals the patrician disdain so common amongst its fellow Minds. Now, it recognised a kinship that crossed not just the ages, species or civilisations, but the arguably still greater gap between the fumblingly confused and dim awareness exhibited by the animal brain and the near-infinitely more extended, refined and integrated sentience of what most ancestor species were amusingly, quaintly pleased to call Artificial Intelligence (or something equally and - appropriately, perhaps - unconsciously disparaging).
So now it had discovered the truth in the idea of a kind of purity in the contemplation of and preparations for self-sacrifice. It was something its recently transferred mind-state - its new self, to be born in the matrix of a new warship, before too long - might never experience. It briefly considered transmitting its current mind-state to replace the one it had already sent, but swiftly abandoned the idea; just more time to be wasted, for one thing, but more importantly, it felt it would insult the strange calmness and self-certainty it now felt to place it artificially in a Mind which was not about to die. It would be inappropriate, perhaps even unsettling. No; it would cleave to this clear surety exclusively, holding it to its exculpated soul like a talisman of holy certitude.
The warship looked about its internal systems. All was ready; any further delay would constitute prevarication. It turned itself about, facing back the way it had come. It powered up its engines slowly to accelerate gradually, sleekly away into the void. As it moved, it left the skein of space behind it seeded with mines and hyper-space-capable missiles. They might only remove a ship or two even if they were lucky, but they would slow the rest down. It ramped its speed up, to significant engine degradation in 128 hours, then 64, then 32. It held there. To go any further would be to risk immediate and catastrophic disablement.
It sped on through the dark hours of distance that to mere light were decades, glorying in its triumphant, sacrificial swiftness, radiant in its martial righteousness.
It sensed the oncoming fleet ahead, like a pattern of brightly rushing comets in that envisaged space. Ninety-six ships arranged in a rough circle spread across a front thirty years of 3-D space across, half above, half below the skein. Behind them lay the traces of another wave, numerically the same size as
the first but taking up twice the volume.
There had been three hundred and eighty-four ships stored at Pittance. Four waves, if each was the same size as the first. Where would it position itself if it was in command?
Near but not quite actually in the centre of the third wave.
Would the command vessel guess this and so position itself somewhere else? On the outside edge of the first wave, somewhere in the second wave, right at the back, or even way on the outside, independent of the main waves of craft altogether?
Make a guess.
It looped high out across the four-dimensional range of infraspace, sweeping its sensors across the skein and readying its weapon systems. Its colossal speed was bringing the war fleet closer faster than anything it had ever seen before save in its most wildly indulged simulations. It zoomed high above them in hyperspace, still, it seemed, undetected. A pulse of sheer pleasure swept its Mind. It had never felt so good. Soon, very soon, it would die, but it would die gloriously, and its reputation pass on to the new ship born with its memories and personality, transmitted in its mind-state to the Shoot Them Later.
It fell upon the third wave of oncoming ships like a raptor upon a flock.
VI
Byr stood on the circular stone platform at the top of the tower, looking out to the ocean where two lines of moonlight traced narrow silver lines across the restless waters. Behind her, the tower’s crystal dome was dark. She had gone to bed at the same time as Dajeil, who tired more quickly these days. They had made their apologies and left the others to fend for themselves. Kran, Aist and Tulyi were all friends from the GCU Unacceptable Behaviour, another of the Quietly Confident’s daughter ships. They had known Dajeil for twenty years; the three had been aboard the Quietly Confident four years earlier and were some of the last people Byr and Dajeil had seen before they’d left for Telaturier.
The Unacceptable Behaviour was looping through this volume and they’d persuaded it to let them stop off here for a couple of days and see their old friend.
The moons glittered their stolen light across the fretful dance of waves, and Byr too reflected, glanding a little Diffuse and thinking that the moons’ V of light, forever converging on the observer, encouraged a kind of egocentricity, an overly romantic idea of one’s own centrality to things, an illusory belief in personal precedence. She remembered the first time she had stood here and thought something along these lines, when she had been a man and he and Dajeil had not long arrived here.
It had been the first night he and Dajeil had - finally, at last, after all that fuss - lain together. Then he had come up here in the middle of the night while she’d slept on, and gazed out over these waters. It had been almost calm, then, and the moons’ tracks (when they rose, and quite as though they rose and did not rise for him) lay shimmering slow and near unbroken on the untroubled face of the ocean’s slack waters.
He’d wondered then if he’d made a terrible mistake. One part of his mind was convinced he had, another part claimed the moral high ground of maturity and assured him it was the smartest move he’d ever made, that he was indeed finally growing up. He had decided that night that even if it was a mistake that was just too bad; it was a mistake that could only be dealt with by embracing it, by grasping it with both hands and accepting the results of his decision; his pride could only be preserved by laying it aside entirely for the duration. He would make this work, he would perform this task and be blameless in the self-sacrifice of his own interests to Dajeil’s. His reward was that she had never seemed happier, and that, almost for the first time, he felt responsible for another’s pleasure on a scale beyond the immediate.
When, months later, she had suggested that they have a child, and later still, while they were still mulling this over, that they Mutual - for they had the time, and the commitment - he had been extravagant in his enthusiasm, as though through such loud acclaim he could drown out the doubts he heard inside himself.
‘Byr?’ a soft voice said from the little cupola that gave access from the steps to the roof.
She turned round. ‘Hello?’
‘Hi. Couldn’t sleep either, eh?’ Aist said, joining Byr at the parapet. She was dressed in dark pyjamas; her naked feet slap-slapped on the flagstones.
‘No,’ Byr said. She didn’t need much sleep. Byr spent quite a lot of time by herself these days, while Dajeil slept or sat cross-legged in one of her trances or fussed around in the nursery they had prepared for their children.
‘Same here,’ Aist said, crossing her arms beneath her breasts and leaning out over the parapet, her head and shoulders dangling over the drop. She spat slowly; the little fleck fell whitely through the moonlight and disappeared against the dark slope of the tower’s bottom storey. She rocked back onto her feet and moved some of her medium-length brown hair off her eyes, while she studied Byr’s face, a small frown just visible on her brow. She shook her head. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘I never thought you’d be one to change sex, let alone have a kid.’
‘Same here,’ Byr said, leaning on the parapet and gazing out to sea. ‘Still can’t believe it, sometimes.’
Aist leant beside him. ‘Still, it’s okay, isn’t it? I mean, you’re happy, aren’t you?’
Byr glanced at the other woman. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’
Aist was silent for a while. Eventually she said, ‘Dajeil loves you very much. I’ve known her twenty years. She’s changed completely too, you know; not just you. She was always really independent, never wanted to be a mother, never wanted to settle down with one person, not for a long time, anyway. Not until she was old. You’ve both changed each other so much. It’s . . . it’s really something. Almost scary, but, well, sort of impressive, you know?’
‘Of course.’
There was silence for another while. ‘When do you think you’ll have your baby?’ Aist asked. ‘How long after she has . . . Ren, isn’t it?’
‘Yes; Ren. I don’t know. We’ll see.’ Byr gave a small laugh, almost more of a cough. ‘Maybe we’ll wait until Ren is grown up enough to help us look after it.’
Aist made the same noise. She leant on the parapet again, lifting her feet off the flagstones and balancing, pivoting on her folded arms. ‘How’s it been here, being so far away from anybody else? Do you get many visitors?’
Byr shook her head. ‘No. You’re only the third lot of people we’ve seen.’
‘Gets lonely, I suppose. I mean I know you’ve got each other, but . . .’
‘The ’Ktik are fun,’ Byr said. ‘They’re people, individuals. I’ve met thousands of them by now, I suppose. There are something like twenty or thirty million of them. Lots of new little chums to meet.’
Aist sniggered. ‘Don’t suppose you can get it off with them, can you?’
Byr glanced at her. ‘Never tried. Doubt it.’
‘Boy, you were some swordsman, Byr,’ Aist said. ‘I remember you on the Quietly, first time we met. I’d never met anyone so focused.’ She laughed. ‘On anything! You were like a natural force or something; an earthquake or a tidal wave.’
‘Those are natural disasters,’ Byr pointed out with feigned frostiness.
‘Well, close enough then,’ Aist said, laughing gently. She glanced slyly, slowly, at the other woman. ‘I suppose I’d have found myself in the firing line if I’d stuck around longer.’
‘I imagine you might,’ Byr said in a tired, resigned voice.
‘Yup, could all have turned out completely different,’ Aist said.
Byr nodded. ‘Or it could all have turned out exactly the same.’
‘Well, don’t sound so happy about it,’ Aist said. ‘I wouldn’t have minded.’ She leant over the parapet and spat delicately again, moving her head just so, flicking the spittle outward. This time it landed on the gravel path which skirted the tower’s stone base. She made an approving noise and looked back at Byr, wiping her chin and grinning. She looked at Byr, studying his face again. ‘It’s not fair, Byr,’ she said. ‘You look good no ma
tter what you are.’ She put one hand out slowly towards Byr’s cheek. Byr looked into her large dark eyes.
One moon started to disappear behind a ragged layer of high cloud and a small wind picked up, smelling of rain.
A test, for her friend, Byr thought, as the other woman’s long fingers gently stroked her face, feather soft. But the fingers were trembling. Still a test; determined to do it but nervous about it. Byr put her hand up and held the woman’s fingers lightly. She took it as a signal to kiss her.
After a little while, Byr said, ‘Aist . . .’ and started to pull away.
‘Hey,’ she said softly, ‘this doesn’t mean anything, all right? Just lust. Doesn’t mean a thing.’
A little later still Byr said, ‘Why are we doing this?’
‘Why not?’ Aist breathed.
Byr could think of several reasons, asleep in the stony darkness beneath them. How I have changed, she thought. But then again, not that much.
VII
Ulver Seich strolled through the accommodation section of the Grey Area. At least there was a bit more strolling to be done on the GCU; had she come here straight from the family house on Phage it would have seemed horribly cramped, but after the claustrophobic confines of the Frank Exchange of Views, it appeared almost spacious (she had spent so little time on Tier, and passed the small amount of time she had there in such a frenetic haste of preparation that it hardly counted. As for the nine-person module - ugh!).
The Grey Area’s interior - built to house three hundred people in reasonable if slightly compact comfort, and now home only to her, Churt Lyne and Genar-Hofoen - was actually pretty interesting, which was an unexpected plus on this increasingly disillusioning expedition. The ship was like a museum to torture, death and genocide; it was filled with mementoes and souvenirs from hundreds of different planets, all testifying to the tendency towards institutionalised cruelty exhibited by so many forms of intelligent life. From thumbscrews and pilliwinks to death camps and planet-swallowing black holes, the Grey Area had examples of the devices and entities involved, or of their effects, or documentary recordings of their use.
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