According to the carefully kept and minutely analysed rec- ords of the galaxy’s more nit-picking elder civilisations, the Chelgrians had persisted in their religiosity for a significant time after the advent of scientific methodology, and – in continuing to cleave to the caste system – were unusual in retaining such a manifestly discriminatory social order so long into post-contact history. None of this, though, prepared any of the observing societies for what happened not long after the Chelgrians became able to transcribe their personalities into media other than their own individual brains.
Subliming was an accepted if still somewhat mysterious part of galactic life; it meant leaving the normal matter-based life of the universe behind and ascending to a higher state of existence based on pure energy. In theory any individual – biological or machine – could Sublime, given the right technology, but the pattern was for whole swathes of a society and species to disappear at the same time, and often the entirety of a civilisation went in one go (only the Culture was known to worry that such – to it – unlikely absoluteness implied a degree of coercion).
There were generally a host of warning signs that a society was about to Sublime – a degree of society-wide ennui, the revival of long-quiescent religions and other irrational beliefs, an interest in the mythology and methodology of Subliming itself – and it almost always happened to fairly well-established and long-lived civilisations.
To flourish, make contact, develop, expand, reach a steady state and then eventually Sublime was more or less the equivalent of the stellar Main Sequence for civilisations, though there was an equally honourable and venerable tradition for just quietly keeping on going, minding your own business (mostly) and generally sitting about feeling pleasantly invulnerable and just saturated with knowledge.
Again, the Culture was something of an exception, neither decently Subliming out of the way nor claiming its place with the other urbane sophisticates gathered reminiscing round the hearth of galactic wisdom, but instead behaving like an idealistic adolescent.
In any event, to Sublime was to retire from the normal life of the galaxy. The few real rather than imagined exceptions to this rule had consisted of little more than eccentricities: some of the Sublimed came back and removed their home planet, or wrote their names in nebulae or sculpted on some other vast scale, or set up curious monuments or left incomprehensible artifacts dotted about space or on planets, or returned in some bizarre form for a usually very brief and topologically limited appearance for what one could only imagine was some sort of ritual.
All this, of course, suited those who remained behind quite well, because the implication was that Subliming led to powers and abilities that gave those who had undergone the transformation an almost god-like status. If the process had been just another useful technological step along the way for any ambitious society, like nanotechnology, Al or wormhole creation, then everybody would presumably do it as soon as they could.
Instead Subliming seemed to be the opposite of useful as the word was normally understood. Rather than let you play the great galactic game of influence, expansion and achievement better than you could before, it appeared to take you out of it altogether.
Subliming was not utterly understood – the only way fully to understand it appeared to be to go ahead and do it – and despite various Involveds’ best efforts studying the process it had proved astonishingly frustrating (it had been compared to trying to catch yourself falling asleep, whereas it was felt that it ought to be as easy as watching somebody else fall asleep), but there was a strong and reliable pattern to its likelihood, onset, development and consequences.
The Chelgrians had partially Sublimed; about six per cent of their civilisation had quit the material universe within the course of a day. They were of all castes, they were of all varieties of religious belief from atheists to the devout of diverse cults, and they included in their number several of the sentient machines Chel had developed but never fully exploited. No discernible pattern in the partial Subliming Event could be determined.
None of this was especially unusual in itself, though for any of them to have gone at all when the Chelgrians had only been in space for a few hundred years did seem – perversely – immature in the eyes of some. What had been remarkable, even alarming, was that the Sublimed had then maintained links with the majority part of their civilisation which had not moved on.
The links took the form of dreams, manifestations at religious sites (and sporting events, though people tended not to dwell on this), the alteration of supposedly inviolate data deep inside government and clan archives, and the manipulation of certain absolute physical constants within laboratories. A number of long-lost artifacts were recovered, a host of careers were ruined when scandals were revealed and several unexpected and even unlikely scientific breakthroughs occurred.
This was all quite unheard of.
The best guess that anyone could make was that it was some- thing to do with the caste system itself. Its practice down the millennia had ingrained in the Chelgrians the idea of being part and yet not part of a greater whole; the mind-set it implied and encouraged had hierarchic and continuant implications which had proved stronger than whatever processes drove the normal course of a Subliming Event and its aftermath.
For a few hundred days a lot of Involveds started watching the Chelgrians very carefully indeed. From being a not par- ticularly interesting and arguably slightly barbaric species of middling abilities and average prospects, they suddenly acquired a glamour and mystique most civilisations struggled over mil- lennia to develop. Across the galaxy, research programmes into Subliming were quietly instituted, dragged out of dormancy and re-energised, or accelerated as the horrible possibilities sank in.
The fears of the Involveds proved unfounded. What the Chelgrian-Puen, the gone-before, did with their still applicable super powers was to build heaven. They made matter of fact what had until then required an act of faith to believe in. When a Chelgrian died, their Soulkeeper device was the bridge that carried them across to the afterlife.
There was an inevitable vagueness associated with the whole procedure that Involveds throughout the galaxy had become used to when dealing with anything to do with Subliming, but it had been proved to the satisfaction of even the most sceptical of observers that the personalities of dead Chelgrians did survive after death, and could be contacted through suitably enabled devices or people.
Those souls described a heaven very similar to that of Chelgrian mythology, and even talked of entities which might have been the souls of Chelgrians dead long before the develop- ment of Soulkeeper technology, though none of these remote ancestor personalities could be contacted by the mortal world directly and the suspicion was that they were constructs of the Chelgrian-Puen, best guesses at what the ancestors might have been like if heaven had really existed from the start.
There could, however, be no real doubt that people were saved by their Soulkeeper and did indeed enter the heaven fashioned for them by the Chelgrian-Puen in the image of the paradise envisaged by their ancestors.
‘But are the returned dead really the people we knew, Cus- todian?’
‘They appear to be, Tibilo.’
‘Is that enough? Just appearing?’
‘Tibilo, you might as well ask when we awake whether we are the same person who went to sleep.’
He gave a thin, bitter smile. ‘I have asked that.’
‘And what was your answer?’
‘That, sadly, yes we are.
‘You say “sadly” because you feel bitter.’
‘I say “sadly” because if only we were different people with every wakening then the me that wakes up would not be the one who lost his wife.’
‘And yet we are different people, very slightly, with every new day.’
‘We are different people, very slightly, with every new eye- blink, Custodian.’
‘Only in the most trivial sense that time has passed during the moment of that blink. We age with every moment but the real increments of our experience are measured in days and nights. In sleep and dreams.’
‘Dreams,’ Quilan said, staring away again. ‘Yes. The dead escape death in heaven, and the living escape life in dreams.’
‘Is this something else you have asked yourself?’
It was not uncommon, nowadays, for people with terrible memories either to have them excised, or to retreat into dreams, and live from then on in a virtual world from which it was relatively easy to exclude the memories and their effects that had made normal life so unbearable.
‘You mean have I considered it?’
‘Yes,’
‘Not seriously. That would feel as though I was denying her.’ Quilan sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Custodian. You must get bored hearing me say the same things, day after day.’
‘You never say quite the same thing, Tibilo.’ The old monk gave a small smile. ‘Because there is change.’