How cruel that thought was. To have been so close to a death difference between his death and his survival. he would now happily welcome, but prevented from embracing it by the misguided belief that he could ever see her alive again. He had only been told that she was dead after he’d arrived here in Lapendal. He’d been asking about her since he woke up from the first major operation on the Navy hospital ship, when they had reduced him to his head and upper trunk.
He had brushed aside the doctor’s solemn, careful explanation of how radical they had had to be and how much of his body they had had to sacrifice in order to save his life, and he had demanded, through his confusion and nausea and pain, to know where she was. The doctor hadn’t known. He’d said he would find out, but then never reappeared in person, and nobody else on the staff seemed to be able to find out either.
A chaplain from a Caring Order had done his best to deter- mine the whereabouts of the Winter Storm and Worosei, but the war was still being waged, and discovering the location of a fighting ship, or anybody who might be on it, was not the sort of information you really expected to be told.
He wondered who had known then that the ship was missing, presumed lost. Only the Navy, probably. It was likely that not even their own clan had been informed before it became obvious. Had there been a time when he could have been told of Worosei’s fate and still have been close enough to death to have stepped easily over that threshold? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
He’d finally been told by his brother-in-law, Worosei’s twin, the day after the clan had been told. The ship was lost, presumed destroyed. It and its single escort craft had been surprised by an Invisible fleet a few days out of Aorme. The enemy attacked with what sounded like a sort of gravity-wave impactor weapon. The larger ship was hit first; the escort vessel reported that the Winter Storm suffered total internal destruction, almost instantaneously. There had been no trace of any souls being saved from it.
The escort craft tried to escape, was pursued and run down. Its own destruction terminated its last message before it could even give its position. A few souls had been saved from it; much later they confirmed the details of the engagement.
Worosei had died instantly, which Quilan supposed he ought to treat as some sort of blessing, but the calamity that had overtaken the Winter Storm had happened so quickly that there had been no time for the people aboard to be saved by their Soulkeepers, and the weaponry used against them had been specifically configured to destroy the devices themselves.
It would be half a year before Quilan was able to appreciate the irony that in tuning the attack to wreck Soulkeeper-scale technology, the impactor had left the old-tech substrate rescued from Aorme almost unharmed.
Worosei’s twin had broken down and cried when he’d told Quilan the news. Quilan felt a kind of distant concern for his ‘~ brother-in-law and made some of the noises of comforting, but he did not cry, and – trying to look into his own thoughts and feelings – all he could make out was a terrible barrenness, an al- most complete lack of emotion, save for a feeling of puzzle- ment that he should experience so limited a reaction in the first place.
He suspected his brother-in-law felt ashamed of crying in front of Quilan, or was offended that Quilan did not show any sign of sorrow. In any event, he only ever came for that one visit. Others of Quilan’s own clan made the journey to see him; his father and various other relations. He found it difficult to know what to say to them. Their visits tailed off and he was quietly relieved.
A grief counsellor was assigned to him but he didn’t know what to say to her either and felt he was letting her down, not being able to follow her leads into emotional areas she said she thought he needed to explore. Chaplains were no more comfort. 4 When the war ended, suddenly, unexpectedly, just a few days earlier, he’d thought something like, Well, I’m glad that’s over, but he realised almost immediately that he hadn’t really felt anything. The rest of the patients and the staff of the hospital wept and laughed and grinned and those who could got drunk and partied into the night, but he felt oddly dissociated from it all, and experienced only resigned annoyance at the noise, which kept him awake after he’d normally have been safely asleep. Now his only regular visitor, save for the medical staff, was the Colonel.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve heard, have you?’ Colonel Dimirj said. His eyes seemed to shine and he looked, Quilan thought, like somebody who has just escaped death, or won an unlikely bet.
‘Heard what, Jarra?’
‘About the war, Major. About how it started, who caused it, why it ended so suddenly.’
‘No, I haven’t heard anything about that.’
‘Didn’t you think it stopped hell of a quick?’
‘I didn’t really think about it. I suppose I rather lost touch with things while I was unwell. I didn’t appreciate how quickly the war ended.’
‘Well, now we know the reason why,’ the Colonel said, and slapped the side of Quilan’s bed with his good arm. ‘It was those bastard Culture people!’
‘They stopped the war?’ Chel had had contact with the Culture for the last few hundred years. They were known to be widespread throughout the galaxy and technologically superior
though without the Chelgrians’ apparently unique link with the Sublimed – and prone to allegedly altruistic interference. One of the more forlorn hopes people had cleaved to during the war was that the Culture would suddenly step in and gently prise the combatants apart, making everything all right again.
It hadn’t happened. Neither had the Chelgrian-Puen, Chel’s own advanced force amongst the Sublimed, stepped in, which had been an even more pious hope. What had happened, more prosaically but scarcely less surprisingly, was that the two sides in the war, the Loyalists and the Invisibles, had suddenly started talking and with surprising speed come to an agreement. It was a compromise that didn’t really suit anybody but certainly it was better than a war that was threatening to tear Chelgrian civilisation apart. Was Colonel Dimirj saying that the Culture somehow had intervened?
‘Oh, they stopped it, if you want to look at it that way.’ The Colonel leant close over Quilan. ‘You want to know how?’
Quilan did not particularly care, but it would be rude to say so. ‘How?’
‘They told us and the Invisibles the truth. They showed us who the real enemy was.
‘Oh. So they did intervene after all.’ Quilan was still confused. ‘Who is the real enemy?’
‘Them! The Culture, that’s who,’ the Colonel said, slapping Quilan’s bedside again. He sat back, nodding, his eyes bright. ‘They stopped the war by confessing that they started it in the first place, that’s what they did. Uh-huh.’
‘I don’t understand.’
The war had begun when the newly enfranchised and em- powered Invisibles had turned all their recently acquired weaponry on those who had been their betters in the old enforced caste system.
New militias and Equalitarian Guard Companies had been created as a result of the abortive Guards’ Revolt, when part of the Army had tried to stage a coup after the first Equali- tarian election. The militias and Companies, and the accelerated training-up of the one-time lower castes so that they could take command of a majority of the Navy’s ships, were part of an attempt to democratise Chel’s armed forces and ensure that through a system of power balances no single branch of the armed forces could take control of the state.
It was an imperfect and expensive solution, and it meant that more people than ever before had access to vastly powerful weaponry, but all that had to happen for it to work was that nobody behaved insanely. But then Muonze, the Spayed caste President, had seemed to do just that, and been joined by half of those who had gained most through the reforms. How could the Culture have had anything to do with that? Quilan suspected the Colonel was determined to tell him.
‘It was the Culture that got that Equalitarian idiot Kapyre elected President before Muonze,’ Dimirj said, leaning over Quilan again. ‘Their fingers were on the scales all the time. They were promising the parliamentarians the whole fucking galaxy if they voted for Kapyre; ships, habitats, technologies; the gods only know what. So in comes Kapyre, out goes common sense, out goes three thousand years of tradition, out goes the system, in comes their precious fucking equality and that ball-less cretin Muonze. And do you know what?’