‘That would be very embarrassing for all concerned.’
‘So keep him away if you want me there.’
‘How could I possibly do that?’
‘You are a Hub Mind, as you’ve recently explained in exhaust- ting detail. Your resources are almost infinite.’
‘Why can’t we just keep the two of you apart on the night?’
‘Because it won’t happen. An excuse will be found to bring us together. An encounter will be manufactured.’
‘What if I give you my word that I will make sure that Quilan and you are never brought face to face? He will be there, but I’ll ensure that you are kept apart.’
‘With one avatar? … Have you put a sound field round us?’
‘Just round our heads, yes. This avatar’s lips will no longer move and its voice will alter slightly as a result; don’t be alarmed.’
‘I’ll try to hold my terror in check. Go on.’
‘If I really have to I can make sure there are several avatars there at the concert. They don’t always have to have silver skin, you know. And I’ll have drones present, too.’
‘Big bulky drones?’
‘Better; small, mean ones.’
‘No good. No deal.’
‘And knife missiles.’
‘Still no.’
‘Why not? I do hope you are not going to say that you don’t trust me. My word is my word. I never break it.’
‘I do trust you. The reason that it’s no deal is because of the people who would want this meeting to happen.’
‘Go on.’
‘Tersono. Contact. Grief, Special fucking Circumstances, for all I know.’
‘Hmm.’
‘If they want the two of us to meet – I mean really, deter- minedly want – could you definitely, certainly stop it from happening, Hub?’.
‘Your question could apply to any moment since Quilan’s arrival.’
‘Yes, but until now a seemingly chance meeting would have been too artificial, too obviously contrived. They’d have expected me to react badly, and they’d have been absolutely right. Our meeting must look like fate, like it was inevitable, as though my music, my talent, my personality and very being have made it pre-ordained.’
‘You could always go and if you’re forced to meet still react badly.’
‘No. I don’t see why I should. I don’t want to meet him; simple as that.’
‘I give you my word I will do everything I can to make sure that you do not meet.’
‘Answer the question: if SC were determined to force a meeting, could you stop them?’
‘No.’
‘As I thought.’
‘I’m not doing very well here, am I?’
‘No. However there is one thing that might change my mind.’
‘Ah. What’s that?’
‘Look into the bastard’s mind.’
‘I can’t do that, Ziller.’
‘Why not?’
‘It is one of the very few more-or-less unbreakable ruies of the Culture. Nearly a law. If we had laws, it would be one of the first on the statute book.’
‘Only more-or-less unbreakable?’
‘It is done very, very rarely, and the result tends to be ostracism. There was a ship called the Grey Area, once. It used to do that sort of thing. It became known as the Meatfucker as a result. When you look up the catalogues that’s the name it’s listed under, with its original, chosen name as a footnote. To be denied your self-designated name is a unique insult in the Culture, Ziller. The vessel disappeared some time ago. Probably it killed itself, arguably as a result of the shame attached to such behaviour and resulting disrespect.’
‘All it is is looking inside an animal brain.’
‘That’s just it. It is so easy, and it would mean so little, really. That is why the not-doing of it is probably the most profound manner in which we honour our biological progenitors. This prohibition is a mark of our respect. And so I cannot do it.’
‘You mean you won’t do it.’
‘They are almost the same thing.’
‘You have the ability.’
‘Of course.’
‘Then do it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I won’t attend the concert otherwise.’
‘I know that. I mean what would I be looking for?’
‘The real reason he’s here.’
‘You really imagine he might be here to harm you?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘What would stop me saying I would do this thing and then only pretending to do it? I could tell you I had looked and found nothing.’
‘I’d ask you to give your word you would really do it.
‘Have you not heard of the idea that a promise made under duress does not count?’
‘Yes. You know you could have said nothing there.’
‘I wouldn’t want to deceive you, Ziller. That too would be dishonourable’
‘Then it sounds like I’m not going to that concert.’
‘I will still hope that you might, and work towards it.’
‘Never mind. You could always hold another competition; the winner gets to conduct.’
‘Let me think about this. I’ll release the sound field. Let’s watch the dune riders.’
The avatar and the Chelgrian turned from facing each other to stand with the others by the parapet of the trundling feast hail’s viewing platform. It was night, and cloudy. Knowing the weather would be so, people had come to the dune slides of Efilziveiz-Regneant to watch the biolume boarding.
The dunes were not normal dunes; they were titanic spills of sand forming a three-kilometre-high siope from one Plate to another, marking where the sands from one of the Great River’s sandbank spurnings were blown across towards the Plate’s spinward edge to slip down to the desert regions of the sunken continent below.
People ran, rolled, boarded, ski’d, skiffed or boated down the dunes all the time, but on a dark night there was something special to be seen. Tiny creatures lived in the sands, arid cousins of the plankton that created bioluminescence at sea, and when it was very dark you could see the tracks left by peopie as they tumbled, twisted or carved their way down the vast slope.
It had become a tradition that on such nights the freeform chaos of individuals pleasing only themselves and the occasional watching admirer was turned into something more organised, and so – once it was dark enough and sufficient numbers of spectators had turned up on the crawler-mounted viewing platforms, bars and restaurants – teams of boarders and skiers set off from the top of the dunes in choreographed waves, triggering sand-slip cascades in broad lines and vees of scintillating light descending like slow, ghostly surf and weaving gently sparkling trails of soft blue, green and crimson tracks across the sighing sands, myriad necklaces of enchanted dust glowing like linear galaxies in the night.
Ziller watched for a while. Then he sighed and said, ‘He’s here, isn’t he?’
‘A kilometre away,’ the avatar replied. ‘Higher up on the other side of the run. I’m monitoring the situation. Another one of me is with him. You are quite safe.’
‘This is as close as I ever want to get to him, unless you can do something.’
‘I understand.’
12
A Defeat of Echoes
-~ So unterritorial
-~ I suppose when you have this much territory you can afford to be
-~ Do you think I’m old-fashioned to be disturbed by it~’
-~ No. I think it’s quite natural.
-~ They have too much of everything.
-~ With the possible exception of suspicion.
-~ We can’t be sure of that.
-~ I know. Still; so far, so good.
Quilan closed the lockless door to his apartment. He turned and looked out at the floor of the gallery, thirty metres below. Groups of humans strolled amongst the plants and pools, between the stalls and bars, the restaurants and – well; shops, exhibitions? It was hard to know what to call them.
The apartment they had given him was near the roof level of one of Aquime City’s central galleries. One set of rooms looked out across the city to the inland sea. The other side of the suite, like this glazed lobby outside, looked down into the gallery itself.
Aquime’s altitude and consequently cold winters meant that a lot of the life of the city took place indoors rather than out, and as a result what would have been ordinary streets in a more temperate city, open to the sky, here were galleries, roofed-over streets vaulted with anything from antique glass to force fields. It was possible to walk from one end of the city to the other under cover and wearing summer clothes, even when, as now, there was a blizzard blowing.
Free of the driving snow that was bringing visibility down to a few metres, the view from the apartment’s exterior was delicately impressive. The city had been built in a deliberately archaic style, mostly from stone. The buildings were red and blonde and grey and pink, and the slates covering the steeply pitched roofs were various shades of green and blue. Long tapering fingers of forest penetrated the city almost to its heart, bringing further greens and blues into play and – with the galleries – dicing the city into irregular blocks and shapes.