The two Estodiens had communicated with the Chelgrian- Puen and their on-board shades for a few moments without Quilan being involved, though even so he had experienced a sort of incoherent back-wash from their conversations while they’d lasted. It had been like standing in a great cavern and hearing people talking somewhere in the distance.
Then it was his turn. The voice was loud, a shout in his head.
QUILAN. WE ARE CHELGRIAN-PUEN.
They had told him to try to think his answers, to sub-vocalise. He thought, I am honoured to speak to you. YOU: REASON HERE?
I don’t know. I am being trained. I think you might know more about my mission than I do.
CORRECT. GIVEN PRESENT KNOWLEDGE: WILLING?
I will do what is required.
MEANS YOUR DEATH.
I realise that.
MEANS HEAVEN FOR MANY.
That is a trade I am willing to make.
NOT WOROSEI QUILAN.
I know.
QUESTIONS?
May I ask whatever I like?
YES.
-~ All right. Why am I here?
TO BE TRAINED.
But why particularly this place?
SECURITY. PROPHYLACTIC MEASURE. DENIABILITY. DANGER.
INSISTENCE OF ALLIES IN THIS.
Who are our allies?
OTHER QUESTIONS?
-~ What am I to do at the end of my training?
KILL.
Who?
MANY. OTHER QUESTIONS?
-~ Where will I be sent?
DISTANT. NOT CHELGRIAN SPHERE.
Does my mission involve the composer Mahrai Ziller?
YES.
Am I to kill him?
IF SO, REFUSE?
I haven’t said that.
QUALMS?
If it was to be so, I would like to know the reasoning.
IF NO REASONS GIVEN, REFUSE?
I don’t know. There are some decisions you just can’t anticipate until you must really make them. You’re not going to tell me whether my• mission involves killing him or not?
CORRECT. CLARIFICATION IN TIME. BEFORE MISSION BEGINS.
PREPARATION AND TRAINING FIRST.
How long will I be here?
OTHER QUESTIONS?
What did you mean by danger, earlier?
-~ PREPARATION AND TRAINING. OTHER QUESTIONS?
No, thank you.
WE WOULD READ YOU.
What do you mean?
LOOK IN YOUR MIND.
-~ You want to look into my mind?
CORRECT.
-~ Now?
YES.
Very well. Do I have to do anything?
He was briefly dizzy, and was aware of swaying in his seat.
DONE. UNHARMED?
I think so.
CLEAR.
You mean … I am clear?
CORRECT. TOMORROW: PREPARATION AND TRAINING.
The two Estodiens sat smiling at him.
He could only sleep fitfully, and woke from another dream of drowning to blink into the strange thick darkness. He fumbled for his visor and with the grey-blue image of the small room’s curved walls before him, rose from the curl-pad and went to stand by the single window, where a warm breeze trickled slowly in and then seemed to die, as though exhausted by the effort. The visor showed a ghostly image of the window’s rough frame, and, outside, the vaguest hint of clouds.
He took off the visor. The darkness appeared utter, and he stood there letting it soak into him until he thought he saw a flash, somewhere high above and blue with distance. He won- dered if it was lightning; Anur had said it happened between cloud and air masses when they passed each other, rising and fall- ing along the thermal gradients of the sphere’s chaotic atmospheric circulation.
He saw a few more flashes, one of them of an appreciable length, although still seeming far, far away. He slipped the visor back on and held his hand up with claws extended, bringing two tips almost together; just a couple of millimetres apart. There. The flash had been that long.
Another flash. Seen with the visors, it was so bright the visor’s optics turned the centre of the tiny flash black to protect his night vision. Instead of just the minuscule spark itself, he saw the whole of a cloud system light up as well, the rolls and towers of the piled and distant vapour picked out in a remote blue wash of luminescence that vanished almost as soon as he became aware of it.
He took the visor off again and listened for the noise produced by those flashes. All he heard was a faint, enveloping noise like a strong wind heard from far away, seeming to come from all around him and course up through his bones. It appeared to contain within it frequencies deep enough to be distant rumbles of thunder, but they were low and continuous and unwavering, and try as he might he could not detect any change or peak in that long slow flow of half-felt sound.
There are no echoes here, he thought. No solid ground or cliffs anywhere for sound to reflect off. The behemothaurs absorb sound like floating forests, and inside them their living tissues soak up all noise.
Acoustically dead. The phrase came back to him. Worosei had done some work with the university music department, and had shown him a strange room lined with foam pyramids. Acoustically dead, she’d told him. It felt and sounded true; their voices seemed to die as each word left their lips, every sound exposed and alone, without resonance.
‘Your Soulkeeper is more than a normal Soulkeeper, Quilan,’ Visquile told him. They were alone in the innermost recessional space of the Sowihaven, the following day. This was his first briefing. ‘It performs the normal functions of such a device, keeping a record of your mind-state; however it also has the capacity to carry another mind-state within it. You will, in a sense, have another person aboard when you undertake your mission. There is still more to come, but do you have anything you would like to say or ask about that?’
‘Who will this person be, Estodien?’
‘We are not certain yet. Ideally – according to the mission- profiling people in Intelligence, or rather according to their machines – it would be a copy of Sholan Hadesh Huyler, the late Admiral-General who was amongst those souls you were charged with recovering from the Military Institute on Aorme. However as the Winter Storm is lost, presumed destroyed, and the original substrate was aboard the vessel, we will probably have to go with a second choice. That choice is still being discussed.’
‘Why is this considered necessary, Estodien?’
‘Think of it as having a co-pilot aboard, Major. You will have somebody to talk to, somebody to advise you, to talk things over with, while you are on your mission. This may not 2 seem necessary now, but there is a reason we believe it may be advisable.’
‘Do I take it that it will be a long mission?’
‘Yes. It may take several months. The minimum duration would be about thirty days. We can’t be any more precise because it depends partly on your mode of transport. You may be taken to your destination aboard one of our own craft, or on a faster vessel from one of the older Involved civilisations, possibly one belonging to the Culture.’
‘Does the mission involve the Culture, Estodien?’
‘It does. You are being sent to the Culture world Masaq’, an Orbital.’
‘That is where Mahrai Ziller lives.’
‘Correct.’
‘Am I to kill him?’
‘That is not your mission. Your covering story is that you are going there to try to convince him to return to Chel.’
‘And my real mission?’
‘We will come to that in due course. And therein lies a precedent.’
‘A precedent, Estodien?’
‘Your true mission will not be clear to you when you start it. You will know the covering story and you will almost certainly have a feeling that there is more to your task than that, but you will not know what it is.
‘So am I to be given something like sealed orders, Estodien?’
‘Something like that. But those orders will be locked inside your own mind. Your memory of this time – probably from some time just after the war to the end of your training here – will only gradually come back to you as you near the com- pletion of your mission. By the time you recall this conversation – at the end of which you will know what your mission really is, though not yet exactly how you will accomplish it – you should be quite close, though not in exactly the correct position.’
‘Can memory be drip-fed so accurately, Estodien?’
‘It can, though the experience may be a little disorienting, and that is the most important reason for giving you your co-pilot. The reason we are doing this is specifically because the mission involves the Culture. We are told that they never read people’s minds, that the inside of your head is the one place they regard as sacrosanct. You have heard this?’
‘Yes.’
‘We believe that this is probably true, but your mission is of sufficient importance for us to take precautions in case it is not.
We imagine that if they do read minds, the most likely time this will happen will be when the subject concerned boards one of their ships, especially one of their warships. If we are able to arrange that you are taken to Masaq’ on such a vessel, and it does look inside your head, all it will find, even at quite a deep level, is your innocent covering story.