There was no form of communication allowed in the cell apart from reading and writing. The former had to be conducted with script-string frames or books, and the latter – for those who like him had no facility with the knotting, beading and braiding of script-string – was restricted to that possible utilising loose paper and an ink pen.
Talking to anyone else inside the cell was also forbidden and by the strictest interpretation of the laws even a monk who talked to himself or cried out in his sleep ought to confess as much to the monastery superior and accept some extra duty as punishment. Quilan had terrible dreams, as he had had since halfway through his stay in the hospital at Lapendal, and frequently woke up in a panic in the middle of the night, but he was never sure if he’d cried out or not. He asked monks in neighbouring cells; they claimed never to have heard him. He believed them, on balance.
Talking was allowed before and after meals and during those communal tasks with which it was judged not to interfere. Quilan talked less than the others in the tiered fields where they grew their foods, and on the walks down the mountain paths to gather wood. The others didn’t seem to mind. The exertions made him st.rong and fit again. They tired him out, too, but not sufficiently to stop him waking each night with the dreams of darkness and lightning, pain and death.
The library was where most studying was done. The reader screens there were intelligently censored so that monks could not fritter their time away on vapid entertainments or trivia; they allowed religious and reference works and scholarly troves to be accessed, but little else. That still left many lifetimes’ worth of material. The machines could also act as links to the Chelgrian.Puen, the gone-before, the already Sublimed. It would, however, be a while before a newcomer like Quilan would be allowed to use them for that purpose.
His mentor and counsellor was Fronipel, the oldest monk left alive after the war. He had hidden from the Invisibles in an old grain-store drum deep in a cellar and had remained there for two days after the Loyalist troops detachment had retaken the monastery, not knowing that he was now safe. Too weak to climb back out of the drum, he had almost died of dehydration and was only discovered when the troops mounted a thorough search to flush out any remaining Invisibles.
Where it showed above his robes, the old male’s pelt was scraggy and tufted with dark patches of thick, coarse fur. Other areas were almost bare, showing his creased, dry-looking grey skin beneath. He moved stiffly, especially when the weather was damp, which was often the case at Cadracet. His eyes, set behind antique glasses, looked filmed, as though there was some grey smoke within the orbs. The old monk wore his decrepitude with no hint of pride or disdain, and yet, in this age of regrown bodies and replacement organs, such decay had to be voluntary, even deliberate.
They talked, usually, in a small bare cell set aside for the purpose. All it contained was a single S-shaped curl-seat and a small window.
It was the old monk’s prerogative to use the first name of those junior to him, and so he called Quilan ‘Tibilo’, which made him feel like a child again. He supposed this was the desired effect. He in turn was expected to address Fronipel as Custodian.
‘I feel … I feel jealous, sometimes, Custodian. Does that sound mad? Or bad?’
‘Jealous of what, Tibilo?’
‘Her death. That she died.’ Quilan stared out of the window, unable to look into the older male’s eyes. The view from the little window was much the same as from that of his own cell. ‘If I could have anything at all I would have her back. I think I have accepted that is impossible, or very unlikely indeed, at the very least.. . but, you see? There are so few certainties any more. This is something else; everything is contingent these days, everything is provisional, thanks to our technology, our understanding.’
He looked into the old monk’s clouded eyes. ‘In the old days people died and that was that; you might hope to see them in heaven, but once they were dead they were dead. It was simple, it was definite. Now …‘ He shook his head angrily. ‘Now people die but their Soulkeeper can revive them, or take them to a heaven we know exists, without any need for faith. We have clones, we have regrown bodies – most of me is regrown; I wake up sometimes and think, Am I still me? I know you’re supposed to be your brain, your wits, your thoughts, but I don’t believe it is that simple.’ He shook his head, then dried his face on the sleeve of his robe.
‘You are envious of an earlier time, then.’
He was silent for a few moments, then said, ‘That as well. But I am jealous of her. If I can’t have her back then all I’m left with is a desire not to have lived. Not a desire to kill myself, but to have, through having no choice, died. If she can’t share my life, I would share her death. And yet I can’t, and so I feel envy. Jealousy.’
‘Those are not quite the same things, Tibilo.’
‘I know. Sometimes what I feel is… I’m not sure.., a feeble yearning for something I don’t have. Sometimes it is what I think people mean when they use the word envy, and sometimes it is real, raging jealousy. I almost hate her for having died without me.’ He shook his head, hardly believing what he was hearing himself saying. It was as though the words, at last expressed to another, gave final shape to thoughts he had not wanted to admit to harbouring, even to himself. He stared through his tears at the old monk. ‘I did love her, though, Custodian. I did.’
The older male nodded. ‘I’m sure you did, Tibilo. If you didn’t you wouldn’t still be suffering like this.’
He looked away again. ‘I don’t even know that any more. I say I loved her, I think I did, I certainly thought I did, but did I? Maybe what I’m really feeling is guilt at not having loved her. I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more.
The older male scratched at one of his bare patches. ‘You know that you are alive, Tibilo, and that she is dead, and that you might see her again.’
He stared at the monk. ‘Without her Soulkeeper? I don’t believe that, sir. I’m not sure I even believe I would see her again even if it had been recovered.’
‘As you pointed out yourself, we live in a time when the dead can return, Tibilo.’
They knew now that there came a time in the development of every civilisation – which lasted long enough – when its inhabitants could record their mind-state, effectively taking a reading of the person’s personality which could be stored, duplicated, read, transmitted and, ultimately, installed into any suitably complex and enabled device or organism.
In a sense it was the most radically reductivist position made real; an acknowledgement that mind arose from matter, and could be fundamentally and absolutely defined in material terms, and as such it did not suit everyone. Some societies had reached the horizon of such knowledge and been on the brink of the control it implied, only to turn away, unwilling to lose the benefits of the beliefs such a development threatened.
Other peoples had accepted the exchange and suffered from it, losing themselves in ways that seemed sensible, even worthy at the time but which finally led to their effective extinction.
Most societies subscribed to the technologies involved and changed to deal with the consequences. In places like the Culture the consequences were that people could take back-ups of them- selves if they were about to do something dangerous, they could create mind-state versions of themselves which could be used to deliver messages or undertake a multiplicity of experiences in a variety of places and in an assortment of physical or virtual forms, they could entirely transfer their original personality into a different body or device, and they could merge with other individuals – balancing retained individuality against con- sensual wholeness – in devices designed for such metaphysical intimacy.
Amongst the Chelgrian people the course of history had diverged from the norm. The device which was emplaced in them, the Soulkeeper, was rarely used to revive an individual. Instead it was used to ensure that the soul, the personality of the dying person, would be available to be accepted into heaven.
The majority of Chelgrians had long believed, like the majority of many intelligent species, in a place where the dead went after death. There had been a variety of different religions, faiths and cults on the planet, but the belief system that came to dominate Chel and was exported out to the stars when the species achieved space travel – even if by then it was taken as having a symbolic rather than a literal truth – was one which still spoke of a mythi- cal afterlife, where the good would be rewarded by an eternity of noble joy and the evil would be condemned – no matter what their caste had been in the mortal world – to servitude forever.