Iain Banks: Look to Windward

He really did seem to be falling. He really did seem to be unable to stop. The universe, the world, the Bowl really did seem to be unreachably distant. He felt vaguely upset that he was missing the rest of the concert, the conclusion of the symphony. What price clarity and proximity, though, and where lay the relevance of being there and using or not using a magnification screen or amplification when everything he’d seen so far had been distorted by the tears in his eyes and all he’d heard had been drowned out by the clamour of his guilt at what he had done, what he had made possible and what was surely going to happen?

He wondered, as he fell into that encompassing darkness, and the world was reduced to a single not especially bright point of light above — no more luminous than a nova distant by most of a thousand years — if he’d somehow been fed a drug. He supposed the Culture people would all be enhancing the experience with their glanded secretions, making the reality of the experience both more and less real.

He landed with a bump. He sat up and looked around.

He saw a distant light to one side. Again, not particularly bright. He got to his feet. The floor was warm and with just a hint of pliancy. There was no smell, no sound except his own breathing and heartbeat. He looked up. Nothing.

~ Huyler?

He waited for a moment. Then a moment longer.

~ Huyler?

~ HUYLER?

Nothing.

He stood and gloried in the silence for a while, then walked towards the distant glow.

The light came from the band of the Orbital. He walked into what looked like the Hub’s viewing gallery. The place seemed to be deserted. The Orbital spun around him with a vast, implicit unhurriedness. He walked on a little, past couches and seats, until he came to the one that was occupied.

The avatar, lit by the reflected light of the Orbital’s surface, looked up as he approached and patted the curl-seat next to it. The creature was dressed in a dark grey suit.

“Quilan,” it said. “Thank you for coming. Please; sit down.” The reflections slid off its perfect silver skin like liquid light.

He sat down. The curl-seat fitted perfectly.

“What am I doing here?” he asked. His voice sounded strange. There were no echoes, he realised.

“I thought we should talk,” the avatar said.

“What about?”

“What we’re going to do.”

“I don’t understand.”

The avatar held up a tiny thing like a jewel, grasping it in a pincer of silver fingers. It glittered like a diamond. At its heart was a tiny flaw of darkness. “Look what I found, Major.”

He did not know what to say. After what seemed like a long time he thought:

~ Huyler?

The moment went on. Time seemed to have stopped. The avatar could sit perfectly, utterly, inhumanly still.

“There were three,” he told it.

The avatar smiled thinly, reached into the top pocket of the suit and produced another two of the jewels. “Yes, I know. Thank you for that.”

“I had a partner.”

“The guy in your head? So we thought.”

“I have failed then, haven’t I?”

“Yes. But there is a consolation prize.”

“What is that?”

“Tell you later.”

“What happens now?”

“We listen to the end of the symphony.” It held out one slim silver hand. “Take my hand.”

He took its hand. He was back in the Stullien Bowl, but this time everywhere. He looked straight down, he watched from a thousand other angles, he was the stadium itself, its lights and sounds and very structure. At the same time he could see everywhere around the Bowl, into the sky, out to the horizon, all around. He experienced a long moment of terrifying vertigo; vertigo which seemed to be pulling him not down but in every direction at once. He would fly apart, he would simply dissolve.

~ Stick with it, the avatar’s hollow voice said.

~ I’m trying to.

The music and the sights swamped him, overwhelmed him, ran him through with light. The symphony rolled onwards, approaching a sequence of resolutions and cadenzas that were a small yet still titanic reflection of the whole work, the rest of the earlier concert, the war itself.

~ Those things I Displaced, they are—

~ I know what they are. They’ve been taken care of.

~ I’m sorry.

~ I know that.

The music rose like the bulging bruise of water from an undersea explosion, an instant before the smooth swell ruptures and the spout of white spray bursts forth.

The dancers rose and fell, swirled and flocked and spread and shrank. Images of war strobed above the stage. The skies filled with light, flickering staggeringly brief shadows that were obliterated almost instantly by the next detonation in the vast bombardment of fire.

Then all fell away, and Quilan sensed time itself slow down. The music faded to a single hanging line of keening ache, the dancers lay like fallen leaves scattered about the stage, the holo above the stage vanished and the light seemed to evaporate from the sky, leaving a darkness that pulled at the senses, as though the vacuum was calling to his soul.

Time slowed still further. In the sky near the tiny remaining light that was the nova Portisia, there was just the merest hint of something flickering. Then that stopped, held, frozen, too.

The moment that was now, that for all his life had been a point, became that line, that long note of music and that drawing sough of black. From the line extended a plane, which folded and folded until there was space for the viewing gallery again, and there he sat, still holding the hand of the silver-skinned avatar.

He looked into himself and realised that he felt no fear, no despair and no regret.

When it spoke, it was as though it used his own voice.

~ You must have loved her very much, Quilan.

~ Please, if you can, if you will, look into my soul.

The avatar looked levelly at him.

~ Are you sure?

~ I’m sure.

That long look went on. Then the creature slowly smiled. ~ Very well.

It nodded after a few more moments. ~ She was a remarkable person. I see what you saw in her. The avatar made a noise like a sigh. ~ We surely did do a terrible thing to you, didn’t we?

~ We did it to ourselves, in the end, but yes, you brought it upon us.

~ This was a terrible revenge to contemplate, Quilan.

~ We believed we had no choice. Our dead… well, I imagine you know.

It nodded. ~ I know.

~ It is over, isn’t it?

~ A lot is.

~ My dream this morning…

~ Ah yes. The avatar smiled again. ~ Well, that could have been me messing with your mind, or just your guilty conscience, don’t you think?

He guessed he would never be told. ~ How long have you known? he asked.

~ I have known since a day before you arrived. I can’t speak for Special Circumstances.

~ You let me make the Displacements. Wasn’t that dangerous?

~ Only a little. I had my back-up by then. A couple of GSVs have been here or hereabouts for a while, as well as the Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall. Once we knew what you were up to, they could protect me even from an attack like the one you envisaged. We let it happen because we’d like to know where the other ends of those wormholes are. Might tell us something about who your mysterious allies were.

~ I’d like to know myself. He thought about this. ~ Well, I used to.

The avatar frowned. ~ I’ve discussed this with some of my peers. Want to know one ugly thought?

~ Are there not enough in the world already?

~ Assuredly. But sometimes ugly thoughts can be prevented from becoming ugly deeds by exposing them.

~ If you say so.

~ One should always ask who has most to gain. With respect, Chel does not, in this measure, count.