Look to Windward c-7

by Iain M. Banks

  A small team of medics flew in one day and took him to a big but obviously rarely used hospital hollowed out of the rock deep beneath the stack’s buildings. They equipped him with an improved Soulkeeper, but that was the only implant they touched or introduced. He had heard of agents and people on special missions being fitted with brain-linked communications rigs, poison-detection nasal glands, poison-producing sacs, subcutaneous weapon systems… the list was long but he, apparently, was going to receive none of these. He wondered why.

  At one point there was a hint that whoever undertook the mission might not be entirely alone. He wondered about that, too.

  Not all his training and education was martial; at least half of each waking day was spent being a student again, sitting in a curl-chair learning through screens or listening to Chuelfier.

  The old male instructed him in Chelgrian history, in religious philosophy both before and after the partial Sublimation of the Chelgrian-Puen, and in the discovered history of the rest of the galaxy and its other sentient beings.

  He learned more than he’d ever imagined wanting or needing to know of what Soulkeepers did and how they did it, and what limbo and heaven were like. He learned where the old religion had been overly fanciful or just plain wrong in its assumptions and tenets, where it had inspired the Chelgrian-Puen and so been made real, and where it had been superseded. He had no direct contact with any of the gone-before, but he came to understand the afterlife better than he ever had before. Sometimes, knowing that it was almost beyond doubt that Worosei would never experience anything of this created glory, he felt that they had chosen him only to torture him, that all of this was an elaborate and cruel charade to find the knife of Worosei’s loss that was forever buried in his flesh and twist it with all their might.

  He learned all there was to know about the Caste War and the Culture’s involvement in the changes that had led to it.

  He learned about the personalities who had contributed to the War’s background, and listened to some of the music of Mahrai Ziller, at turns so achingly full of loss he cried, at others so full of anger he wanted to smash something.

  A number of suspicions and possible scenarios began to form in his mind, though he kept them to himself.

  Sometimes now he dreamt of Worosei. In one dream they were being married here on the seastack, and a great wind off the sea whipped people’s hats away; he went to grab hers as it flew towards the parapet and then crashed into the whitewashed concrete, tipping over it with her hat still just out of reach. He started to fall towards the sea, and felt himself gather in the breath for a scream, then recalled that of course Worosei wasn’t really here, and could not be here; she was dead, and he might as well be. He smiled at the waves as they rushed up to meet him, and woke before he hit with a feeling of somehow having been cheated, the salty dampness on his pillow like sea.

  One morning he was walking across the parade ground beneath the snapping white tents of the awnings, heading towards Chuelfier’s class room for the first lecture of the day, when he saw a small group of people directly ahead. Colonel Ghejaline, Wholom and Chuelfier were standing talking to the white- and black-clothed figure in the middle of the group.

  There were five others, three on the right of the central group, two on the left. All were males dressed as clerks. The male in the middle was small and old-looking, with a sort of sideways hunch to his stance. It was something of a shock for Quilan to realise that the male was dressed in the black and white striped robe of an Estodien, one of those who went between this world and the next. He wore a lop-sided smile and held onto a long mirror staff. His fur looked slick, as though it had been oiled.

  Quilan was about to greet the Colonel, but as he approached the three people he knew dropped back to let the Estodien take a couple of small steps forward.

  “Estodien,” Quilan said, bowing deeply.

  “Major Quilan,” the old male said in a soft, smooth voice. He reached his hand out to Quilan, who had become aware that the male standing on the extreme right of the group bulked out his clerical robes differently to the rest, and that this same male had started moving round to the side, as if starting to circle behind him. When the male disappeared from his view, the semi-shadow he cast by the attenuated light coming through the white awnings suddenly moved faster.

  What finally made Quilan certain he might be about to be attacked was something about the way that the old Estodien stretched when he reached out his hand. He was frail, and could not help but keep his distance from something that might prove violent.

  Quilan made as though to take the older male’s hand, then ducked and spun, went back on his haunches and brought his midlimb and hands out in the classic pounce-defence stance.

  The bulky-looking male dressed as a clerk had been about to strike; he had rocked back on his haunches and his sleeves were rolled back to reveal tightly muscled arms, though his claws were only half exposed. There was a radiant, almost feral look on his white-furred face that lasted for a moment and even brightened for an instant as Quilan turned to confront him but then he glanced at the Estodien and relaxed, sitting back and lowering his arms and his head in what might have been a bow.

  Quilan stayed exactly as he was, his head turning slightly to and fro, his gaze flicking as far behind him as he could manage without losing sight of the white-furred male. There did not appear to be any other movement or threat.

  There was a frozen moment when nothing happened, save for the distant calls of the sea birds, the far-away thudding of the waves. Then the Estodien clicked his staff on the parade ground’s concrete once, and the white-furred male rose and turned in one fluid movement and went to stand where he had before.

  “Major Quilan,” the old male said again. “Please, stand.” He held out his hand once more. “No more unpleasant surprises, at least not for today, I give you my word.”

  Quilan took the Estodien’s hand and rose from his crouch.

  Colonel Ghejaline came forward. She looked pleased, Quilan thought. “Major Quilan, this is Estodien Visquile.”

  “Sir,” Quilan said as the older male released his hand.

  “And this is Eweirl,” Visquile said, indicating the white-furred male to his left. The bulky-looking male nodded and smiled. “I hope you have the wit to realise you passed two little tests there, Major, not one.”

  “Yes, sir. Or the same one, twice, sir.”

  Visquile’s smile broadened, revealing small, sharp teeth. “You don’t really have to call me ‘sir’, Major, though I confess I rather like it.” He turned to Wholom and Chuelfier, and then to Colonel Ghejaline. “Not bad.” He looked back to Quilan, looking him down then up. “Come along, Major, we’ll have a talk, I think.”

  “We are told it is very unusual for them to make such a mistake. We are told that we should feel flattered they took such an interest in us in the first place. We are told that they respect us. We are told that it is an accident of development and the evolution of galaxies, stars, planets and species that we meet them on less than equal technological terms. We are told that what happened is unfortunate but that we may eventually gain from it. We are told they are honourable people who only wished to help and now feel that they are in our debt because of their carelessness. We are told that we may profit more through their crushing guilt than we might have gained thanks to their easy patronage.” The Estodien Visquile smiled his thin, sharp smile. “None of this matters.”

  The Estodien and Quilan sat alone in a small tower perched out over the side of one of the stack’s lowest levels of superstructure. Air and sea showed on three sides and the warm wind blew in through one glassless window and out another, laden with the scent of brine. They sat curled on grass mats.

  “What matters,” the old male went on, “is what the Chelgrian-Puen have decided.”

  There was a pause. Quilan suspected he was supposed to fill it, and so said, “And what would that be, Estodien?”

  The old male’s fur had the odour of
expensive perfume. He sat up and back on his mat, looking out of a window towards the long swells of the sea. “It has been a consistent article of our faith for twenty-seven hundred years,” he said casually, “that the souls of the departed are held in limbo for a full year before being accepted into the glory of heaven. That has not changed since we—our gone-before—made heaven real. Nor have many of the other doctrines associated with such matters. They have become rules, in a sense.” He turned and smiled again at Quilan before looking away through the window once more.

  “What I’m about to tell you is known to very few people, Major Quilan. It must stay that way, do you understand?”

  “Yes, Estodien.”

  “Colonel Ghejaline does not know, and nor do any of your tutors.”

  “I understand.”

  The old male turned to him suddenly. “Why do you want to die, Quilan?”

  He rocked back, thrown. “I—in a way I don’t, Estodien. I just don’t particularly want to live. I want to be no more.”

  “You want to die because your mate is dead and you are pining for her, is that not the truth?”

  “I would put it a little stronger than pining for her, Estodien. But it was her death that took the meaning out of my life.”

  “The lives of your family and your society in this time of need and restructuring; these mean nothing to you?”

  “Not nothing, Estodien. But not enough, either. I wish that I could feel otherwise, but I cannot. It is as though all the people I care about but feel I ought to care about more are already in another world from the one I inhabit.”

  “She was just a female, Quilan, just a person, just one individual. What makes her so special that her memory—forever irretrievable, apparently—outranks the more pressing needs of those still alive for whom something can still be done?”

  “Nothing, Estodien. It is—”

  “Nothing indeed. It is not her memory; it is yours. It is not her specialness or uniqueness that you celebrate, Quilan, but your own. You are a romantic, Quilan. You find the idea of tragic death romantic, you find the idea of joining her—even if it is joining her in oblivion—romantic.” The old male drew himself up as though getting ready to go. “I hate romantics, Quilan. They do not really know themselves, but what is worse they do not really want to know themselves—or, ultimately, anybody else—because they think that will take the mystery out of life. They are fools. You are a fool. Probably your wife was a fool, too.” He paused. “Probably you were both romantic fools,” he said. “Fools who were doomed to a life of disillusionment and bitterness when you discovered that your precious romanticism faded away after the first few years of marriage and you were left to confront not just your own inadequacies but those of your mate. You were lucky she died. She was unlucky it was her and not you.”

  Quilan looked at the Estodien for a few moments. The old male was breathing a little deeper and harder than should have been necessary, but otherwise he was controlling any fear he felt very well. He would be thoroughly backed-up, and as an Estodien he would be reborn or reincarnated as and when he wished. That, however, would not prevent the animal self from contemplating being bundled through a window and falling to the sea with anything other than terror. Of course this assumed the old male wasn’t wearing some sort of AG harness, in which case he might simply be afraid of Quilan ripping his throat out before Eweirl or anybody else could do anything about it.

  “Estodien,” Quilan said evenly, “I have thought of all of that and been through all of that. I have accused myself of all of these things that you mention, and in rather less temperate language than you have used. You find me at the end of the process you might have wished to initiate with such assertions, not the start.”

  The Estodien looked at him. “Quite good,” he said. “Speak more honestly, more fully.”

  “I am not to be riled into violence by someone who never knew her calling my wife a fool. I know she was not, which is enough. And I think you just wanted to find out how easy I might be to anger.”

  “Perhaps not easy enough, Quilan,” the old male said. “Not all tests are passed or failed as one might expect.”

  “I am not trying to pass your tests, Estodien. I am trying to be honest. I assume your tests are good ones. If they are and I do my best and fail while somebody else succeeds then that is better than me succeeding by telling you what I think you want to hear rather than what I feel.”

  “That is calm to the point of smugness, Quilan. Perhaps this mission requires somebody with more aggression and cunning than that reply indicates you to be in possession of.”

  “Perhaps it does, Estodien.”

  The old male kept his gaze locked on Quilan for some time. Eventually he looked away out of the window again. “The war dead will not be allowed into heaven, Quilan.”

  He had to listen to the comment in his head, replaying it, to be sure he had heard correctly. He blinked. “Estodien?”

  “It was a war, Major, not a civilian disturbance or a natural disaster.”

  “The Caste War?” he asked, and immediately felt stupid.

  “Yes, of course the Caste War,” Visquile snapped. He composed himself again. “The Chelgrian-Puen have told us that the old rules apply.”

  “The old rules?” He thought he already knew what was meant.

  “They must be avenged.”

  “A soul for a soul?” This was the stuff of barbarism, of the old cruel gods. The death of each Chelgrian had to be balanced by the death of an enemy, and until that balance had been achieved the fallen warriors were held from heaven.

  “Why ought one to leap to the idea of a one-to-one correspondence?” the Estodien asked, with a cold smile. “Perhaps one death would be all that might be required. One important death.” He looked away again.

  Quilan was silent for a while, and motionless. When Visquile did not look back to him from the window and the view, he said, “One death?”

  The Estodien fixed him with his gaze again. “One important death. Much might result from that.” He looked away, humming a tune. Quilan recognised the melody; it was by Mahrai Ziller.

  Absence of Gravitas

  “The point is: what happens in heaven?”

  “Unknowable wonderfulness?”

  “Nonsense. The answer is nothing. Nothing can happen because if something happens, in fact if something can happen, then it doesn’t represent eternity. Our lives are about development, mutation and the possibility of change; that is almost a definition of what life is: change.”

  “Have you always thought that?”

  “If you disable change, if you effectively stop time, if you prevent the possibility of the alteration of an individual’s circumstances—and that must include at least the possibility that they alter for the worse—then you don’t have life after death; you just have death.”

  “There are those who believe that after death the soul is recreated into another being.”

  “That is conservative and a little stupid, certainly, but not actually idiotic.”

  “And there are those who believe that, upon death, the soul is allowed to create its own universe.”

  “Monomaniacal and laughable as well as provably wrong.”

  “Then there are those who believe that the soul—”

  “Well, there are all sorts of different beliefs. However, the ones that interest me are those concerning the idea of heaven. That’s the idiocy it annoys me that others cannot see.”

  “Of course, you could just be wrong.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “In any case, even if heaven did not exist originally, people have created it. It does exist. In fact, lots of different heavens exist.”

  “Pa! Technology. These so-called heavens will not last. There will be war in them, or between them.”

  “And the Sublimed?”

  “At last; something beyond heaven. And unfortunately therefore useless. But a start. Or rather an end. Or a start, again, of another sort
of life, so proving my point.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “We’re all lost. We are found dead.”

  “…Are you really a professor of divinity?”

  “Of course I am! You mean it isn’t obvious?”

  “Cr Ziller! You met the other Chelgrian yet?”

  “I’m sorry, have we met?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m asking.”

  “No, I meant have you and I met?”

  “Trelsen Scofford. We met at the Gidhoutan’s.”

  “Did we?”

  “You said what I said about your stuff was ‘singular’ and ‘uniquely viewpointed’.”

  “I think I hear myself in there somewhere.”

  “Great! So, you met this guy yet?”

  “No.”

  “No? But he’s been here twenty days! Someone said he only lives—”

  “Are you really as ignorant as you appear, Trelsen, or is this some sort of bizarre act, perhaps even meant to be amusing?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You should be. If you paid more than the most passing—”

  “I just heard there was another Chelgrian—”

  “—attention to what’s going on you’d know that the ‘other Chelgrian’ is a feudal tough, a professional bully come to attempt to persuade me to go back with him to a society I despise. I have no intention of meeting the wretch.”

  “Oh. I didn’t realise.”

  “Then you’re simply ignorant rather than malevolent. Congratulations.”

  “So you’re not going to meet him at all?”

  “That’s right; not at all. My plan is that after keeping him waiting for a few years he’ll either get fed up and slope home to be ritually chastised or he’ll gradually become seduced by Masaq’ and its many attractions in particular and by the Culture and all its wonderful manifestations in general, and become a citizen. Then I might meet him. Brilliant strategy, don’t you think?”

  “You serious?”

  “I’m always serious, never more so than when I’m being flippant.”