Iain Banks: Look to Windward

Kabe saw the Chelgrian’s gaze flick briefly towards the stage where the avatar had stood earlier. “All in due course, Tersono,” Ziller said. “But it’s a biggish piece and it’ll be a while yet before its first performance.”

“Ah. Most mysterious.”

Ziller stretched, putting one long furred leg out behind him and tensing before relaxing. He looked at Kabe. “Yes, and if I don’t get back to work on it, it’ll be late.” He turned back to Tersono. “You’ll keep me informed about this wretched emissary?”

“You will have full access to all we know.”

“Right. Good night, Tersono.” The Chelgrian nodded to Kabe. “Ambassador.”

Kabe bowed. The drone dipped. Ziller went softly bounding through the thinning crowd.

Kabe looked back up at the nova, thinking.

Eight-hundred-and-three-year-old light shone steadily down.

The light of ancient mistakes, he thought. That was what Ziller had called it, on the interview Kabe had heard just that morning. “Tonight you dance by the light of ancient mistakes!” Except that no one was dancing.

It had been one of the last great battles of the Idiran war, and one of the most ferocious, one of the least restrained, as the Idirans risked everything, including the opprobrium even of those they regarded as friends and allies, in a series of desperate, wildly destructive and brutal attempts to alter the increasingly obvious likely outcome of the war. Only (if that was a word one could ever use in such a context) six stars had been destroyed during the nearly fifty years the war had raged. This single battle for a tendril of galactic limb, lasting less than a hundred days, had accounted for two of them as the suns Portisia and Junce had been induced to explode.

It had become known as the Twin Novae Battle, but really what had been done to each of the suns had generated something more like a supernova on each. Neither star had shone upon a barren system. Worlds had died, entire biospheres had been snuffed out and billions of sentient creatures had suffered — albeit briefly — and perished in these twin catastrophes.

The Idirans had committed the acts, the gigadeathcrimes — their monstrous weaponry, not that of the Culture, had been directed first at one star, then the other — yet still, arguably, the Culture might have prevented what had happened. The Idirans had attempted to sue for peace several times before the battle started, but the Culture had continued to insist on unconditional surrender, and so the war had ground onwards and the stars had died.

It was long over. The war had ended nearly eight hundred years ago and life had gone on. Still, the real space light had been crawling across the intervening distance for all these centuries, and by its relativistic standard it was only now that those stars blew up, and just at this moment that those billions died, as the outrushing shell of light swept over and through the Masaq’ system.

The Mind that was Masaq’ Orbital Hub had its own reasons for wanting to commemorate the Twin Novae Battle and had asked the indulgence of its inhabitants, announcing that for the interval between the first nova and the second it would be observing its own private term of mourning, although without affecting the execution of its duties. It had intimated there would be some sort of more upbeat event to mark the end of this period, though exactly what form this would take it hadn’t yet revealed.

Kabe suspected he knew, now. He found himself glancing involuntarily in the direction Ziller had taken, just as the Chelgrian’s gaze had strayed towards the stage earlier, when he’d been asked who had commissioned whatever he was working on.

All in due course, Kabe thought. As Ziller had said.

For tonight, all Hub had wanted was that people look up and see the sudden, silent light, and think; perhaps contemplate a little. Kabe had half expected the locals to take no notice whatsoever and just carry on with their busy little one-long-party lives as usual; however it appeared that, here at least, the Hub Mind’s wish had been granted.

“All very regrettable,” the drone E. H. Tersono said at Kabe’s side, and made a sighing sound. Kabe thought it probably meant to sound sincere.

“Salutary, for all of us,” Kabe agreed. His own ancestors had been the Idirans’ mentors, and fought alongside the Idirans in the early stages of the ancient war. The Homomda felt the weight of their own responsibilities as keenly as the Culture did its.

“We try to learn,” Tersono said quietly. “But still we make mistakes.”

It was talking now about Chel, the Chelgrians and the Caste War, Kabe knew. He turned and looked at the machine as the people moved away in the steady, ghostly light.

“You could always do nothing, Tersono,” he told it. “Though such a course usually brings its own regrets.”

I am too glib, sometimes, Kabe thought, I tell them too exactly what they want to hear.

The drone tipped back to make clear that it was looking up at the Homomdan, but said nothing.

The hull of the ruined ship bowed away on all sides, curving out and then back, arcing overhead. They had fitted lights in the centre of what had become the ceiling, directly above the curious, glazed-looking floor; reflections glowed from the glassily swirled, distorted surface itself, and from the few stumps of unidentifiable equipment that protruded above it.

Quilan tried to find a place to stand where he thought he could distinguish what it was he was standing on, then switched off the suit’s field pack and let his feet touch the surface. It was hard to tell through his boots, but the floor seemed to have the feel of what it looked like; glass. The spin they’d given the hull produced what felt like about a quarter gravity. He patted the fastenings securing his bulky backpack.

He looked up and around. The hull’s interior surface looked hardly damaged. There were various indentations and a scattering of holes, some circular and some elliptical, but all quite symmetrical and smooth and part of the design; none went all the way through the hull material and none looked ragged. The only aperture which led to the outside was right in the nose of the craft, seventy metres away from where he stood, more or less in the centre of the spoon-shaped mass of floor. That two-metre-wide hole had been cut in the hull weeks ago to gain access after the hulk had been located and secured. That was how he had gained entry.

He could see various discoloured patches on the hull’s surface that didn’t look right, and a few small dangling tubes and wires, up near the newly emplaced lights. Part of him wondered why they had bothered with the lights. The hull’s interior was evacuated, open to space; nobody would be coming in here without a full suit, so they would have the concomitant sensory equipment that made lights unnecessary. He looked down at the floor. Maybe the technicians had been superstitious, or just emotional. The lights made the place seem a little less forbidding, less haunted.

He could understand that wandering around in here with only ambient radiations to impinge upon the augmented senses might well induce terror if you were of a sensitive nature. They’d found much of what they’d hoped to find; enough for his mission, sufficient to save a thousand or so other souls. Almost certainly not enough to fulfil his hopes. He looked about. It appeared they had removed all the sensory and monitoring equipment they’d been using to inspect the wreck of the privateer Winter Storm.

He felt a shudder through his boots. He glanced up to the side, as the sliced-off bow of the ship was put back in place. Enclosed, in this ship of the dead. At last.

~ Isolation established, it says, said a voice in his head. The machine in his backpack produced a faint vibration.