‘That was ghoulish, wasn’t it?’
‘Call it what you want. It was something I felt I had to do. War can alter your perceptions, change your sense of values. I didn’t want to feel that what I was doing was anything other than momentous and horrific; even, in some first principles sense, barbaric. I sent drones, micro-missiles, camera platforms and bugs down to those three Orbitals. I watched each of those people die. Some went in less than the blink of an eye, obliterated by my own energy weapons or annihilated by the warheads I’d Displaced. Some took only a little longer, incinerated by the radiation or torn to pieces by the blast fronts. Some died quite slowly, thrown tumbling into space to cough blood which turned to pink ice in front of their freezing eyes, or found themselves suddenly weightless as the ground fell away beneath their feet and the atmosphere around them lifted off into the vacuum like a tent caught in a gale, so that they gasped their way to death.
‘Most of them I could have rescued; the same Displacers I was using to bombard the place could have sucked them off it, and as a last resort my effectors might have plucked their mind-states from their heads even as their bodies froze or burned around them. There was ample time.’
‘But you left them.’
‘Yes.’
‘And watched them.’
‘Yes.’
‘Still, it was their choice to stay.’
‘Indeed.’
‘And did you ask their permission to record their death throes?’
‘No. If they would hand me the responsibility for killing them, they could at least indulge me in that. I did tell all concerned what I would be doing beforehand. That information saved a few. It did attract criticism, though. Some people felt it was insensitive.’
‘And what did you feel?’
‘Appalled. Compassion. Despair. Detached. Elated. God-like. Guilty. Horrified. Miserable. Pleased. Powerful. Responsible. Soiled. Sorrowful.’
‘Elated? Pleased?’
‘Those are the closest words. There is an undeniable elation in causing mayhem, in bringing about such massive destruction. As for feeling pleased, I felt pleasure that some of those who died did so because they were stupid enough to believe in gods or afterlives that do not exist, even though I felt a terrible sorrow for them as they died in their ignorance and thanks to their folly. I felt pleasure that my weapon and sensory systems were working as they were supposed to. I felt pleasure that de- spite my misgivings I was able to do my duty and act as I had determined a fully morally responsible agent ought to, in the circumstances.’
‘And all this makes you suitable to command a world of fifty billion souls?’
‘Perfectly,’ the avatar said smoothly. ‘I have tasted death, Ziller. When my twin and I merged, we were close enough to the ship being destroyed to maintain a real-time link to the substrate of the Mind within as it was torn apart by the tidal forces produced by a line gun. It was over in a micro-second, but we felt it die bit by bit, area by distorted area, memory by disappearing memory, all kept going until the absolute bitter end by the ingenuity of Mind design, falling back, stepping down, closing off and retreating and regrouping and compressing and abandoning and abstracting and finessing, always trying by whatever means possible to keep its personality, its soul intact until there was nothing remaining to sacrifice, nowhere else to go and no survival strategies left to apply.
‘It leaked away to nothingness in the end, pulled to pieces until it just dissolved into a mist of sub-atomic particles and the energy of chaos. The last two coherent things it held onto were its name and the need to maintain the link that communicated all that was happening to it, from it, to us. We experienced everything it experienced; all its bewilderment and terror, each iota of anger and pride, every last nuance of grief and anguish. We died with it; it was us and we were it.
‘And so you see I have already died and I can remember and replay the experience in perfect detail, any time I wish.’ The avatar smiled silkily as it leant closer to him, as though imparting a confidence. ‘Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an Al through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side.
‘We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying.’
It looked away for a moment. The Orbital streamed past above their heads. Nothing stayed in sight for longer than the blink of an eye. The underground car tracks were blurs. The impression of speed was colossal. Ziller looked down. The stars appeared now to be stationary.
He’d done the maths in his head before they entered the module. Their speed relative to the Orbital was now about a hundred and ten kilometres per second. Long-range express car-trains would still be overtaking them; the module would take an entire day to circle the world hovering here, while Hub’s travel-time guarantee was no more than two hours from any express port to any.other, and a three-hour journey from any given sub-Plate access point to another.
‘I have watched people die in exhaustive and penetrative detail,’ the avatar continued. ‘I have felt for them. Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts? Per second, a human – or a Chelgrian – might have twenty or thirty, even in the heightened state of extreme distress associated with the process of dying in pain.’ The avatar’s eyes seemed to shine. It came forward, closer to his face by the breadth of a hand.
‘Whereas I,’ it whispered, ‘have billions.’ It smiled, and some- thing in its expression made Ziller clench his teeth. ‘I watched those poor wretches die in the slowest of slow motion and I knew even as I watched that it was I who’d killed them, who was at that moment engaged in the process of killing them. For a thing like me to kill one of them or one of you is a very, very easy thing to do, and, as I discovered, absolutely disgusting. Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.
‘And, as you might imagine, I consider that I have an obligation to discharge. I fully intend to spend the rest of my existence here as Masaq’ Hub for as long as I’m needed or until I’m no longer welcome, forever keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms and just generally protecting this quaint circle of fragile little bodies and the vulnerable little brains they house from whatever harm a big dumb mechanical universe or any consciously malevolent force might happen or wish to visit upon them, specifically because I know how appallingly easy they are to destroy. I will give my life to save theirs, if it should ever come to that. And give it gladly, happily, too, knowing that the trade was entirely worth the debt I incurred eight hundred years ago, back in Arm One-Six.’
The avatar stepped back, smiled broadly and tipped its head to one side. It suddenly looked, Ziller thought, as though it might as well have been discussing a banquet menu or the positioning of a new underground access tube. ‘Any other questions, Cr Ziller?’
He looked at it for a moment or two. ‘Yes,’ he said. He held up his pipe. ‘May I smoke in here?’
The avatar stepped forward, put one arm round his shoulders and with its other hand clicked its fingers. A blue-yellow flame sprang from its index finger. ‘Be my guest.’
Above their heads, in a matter of seconds, the Orbital slowed to a stop, while beneath their feet the stars started to revolve once again.
14
Returning to Leave, Recalling Forgetting
How many will die?
‘Perhaps ten percent. That is the calculation.’
‘Hmm, yes. That is five billion?’ about what we lost. That is the approximate number of souls barred from the beyond by the catastrophe visited upon us by the Culture.’
‘That is a great responsibility, Estodien.’
‘It is mass murder, Major,’ Visquile said, with a humourless smile. ‘Is that what you are thinking?’
‘It is revenge, a balancing.’
‘And it is still mass murder, Major. Let us not mince our words. Let us not hide behind euphemisms. It is mass murder of non-combatants, and as such illegal according to the galactic agreements we are signatory to. Nevertheless we believe it is a necessary act. We are not barbarians, we are not insane. We would not dream of doing something so awful, even to aliens, if it had not become obvious that it had become – through the actions of those same aliens – something which had to be done to rescue our own people from limbo. There can be no doubt that the Culture owes us those lives. But it is still an appalling act even to be contemplating.’ The Estodien sat forward and grasped one of Quilan’s hand in his. ‘Major Quilan, if you have changed your mind, if you are beginning to reconsider, tell us now. Do you still have the taste for this?’