‘It might block a small blood vessel.’
‘A capillary, perhaps. Nothing large enough to cause any tissue damage.’
Quilan drank from his own cup, then held it up, looking at it. ‘I shall see this damn thing in my dreams.’
Visquile smiled. ‘That might be no bad thing.’
Quilan supped his soup. ‘What’s happened to Eweirl? I haven’t seen him since we arrived.’
‘Oh, he is about,’ Visquile said. ‘He is making preparations.’
‘To do with my training?’
‘No, for when we leave.’
‘When we leave?’
Visquile smiled. ‘All in due time, Major.
‘And the two drones, our allies?’
‘As I said, all in good time, Major.’
‘And send.’
‘Yes!’
‘Yes?’
‘… No. No, I hoped … Well, it doesn’t matter. Let’s try again.’
‘Think of the cup…’
‘Think of a place you know or knew well. A small place. Perhaps a room or a small apartment or house, perhaps the interior of a cabin, a car, a ship; anything. It must be a place you knew well enough to be able to find your way around at night, so that you knew where everything was in the darkness and would not trip over things or break them. Imagine being there. Imagine going to a particular place and dropping, say, a crumb or a small bead or seed into a cup or other container …
That night he again found it difficult to sleep. He lay looking into the darkness, curled on the broad sleeping platform, breathing in the sweet, spicy air of the giant bulbous fruit-like thing where he, Visquile and most of the others were billeted. He tried thinking about that damn cup, but gave up. He was tired of it. Instead he tried to work out exactly what was going on here.
It was obvious, he thought, that the technology inside the specially adapted Soulkeeper he had been fitted with was not Chelgrian. Some other Involved was taking a part in this; an Involved species whose technology was on a par with the Culture’s.
Two of their representatives were probably housed inside the pair of double-cone-shaped drones he’d seen earlier, the ones who had spoken to him inside his head, before the gone-before had. They had not reappeared.
He supposed the drones might be remotely operated, perhaps from somewhere outside the airsphere, though the Oskendari’s notorious antipathy towards such technology meant that the drones probably did physically contain the aliens. Equally, that made it all the more puzzling that the airsphere had been chosen as the place to train him in the use of a technology as advanced as that contained within his Soulkeeper, unless the idea was that if the use of such devices escaped attention here, it would also go unnoticed in the Culture.
Quilan went through what he knew of the relatively small number of Involved species sufficiently advanced to take the Culture on in this way. There were between seven and twelve other species on that sort of level, depending which set of criteria you used. None were supposed to be particularly hostile to the Culture; several were allies.
Nothing he knew of would have provided an obvious motive for what he was being trained to do, but then what he knew was only what the Involveds allowed to be known about some of the more profound relationships between them, and that most certainly did not include everything that was really going on, especially given the time scales some of the Involveds had become used to thinking on.
He knew that the Oskendari airspheres were fabulously old, even by the standards of those who called themselves the Elder races, and had succeeded in remaining mysterious throughout the Scientific Ages of hundreds of come-and-gone or been- and-Sublimed species. The rumours had it that there was some sort of link left between whoever it was who had created the airspheres and subsequently quit the matter-based life of the uni- verse, and the mega and giga fauna which still inhabited the environments.
This link with the gone-before of the airspheres’ builders was reputedly the reason that all the hegemonising and invasive species – not to mention the unashamedly nosy species, such as the Culture – who had encountered the airspheres had thought the better of trying to take them over (or study them too closely).
These same rumours, backed up by ambiguous records held by the Elders, hinted that, long ago, a few species had imagined that they could make the big wandering worlds part of their empire, or had taken it upon themselves to send in survey devices, against the expressed wishes of the behemothaurs and the megalithine and gigalithine globular entities. Such species tended to disappear quickly or gradually from the records concerned thereafter, and there was firm statistical evidence that they disappeared more rapidly and more completely than species which had no record of antagonising the inhabitants – and by implication the guardians – of the airspheres.
Quilan wondered if the gone-before of the airspheres had been in contact with the gone-before of Chel. Was there some link between the Sublimed of the two (or more, of course) species?
Who knew how the Sublimed thought, how they interacted? Who knew how alien minds worked? For that matter, who was entirely satisfied that they knew how the minds of one of their own species worked?
The Sublimed, he supposed, was the answer to all those questions. But any understanding seemed to be resolutely one- way.
He was being asked to perform a sort of miracle. He was being asked to commit mass murder. He tried to look into himself and wondered if, even at that moment, the Chelgrian-Puen were listening in to his thoughts, watching the images that flitted through his mind, measuring the fixity of his commitment and weighing the worth of his soul – and was faintly, but only faintly, appalled to realise that while he doubted his ability ever to perform the miracle, he was, at the very least, quite resigned to the commission of that genocide.
And, that night, not quite gone over to sleep, he remembered her room at the university, where they discovered each other, where he came to know her body better than his own, better than he had known any thing or subject (certainly better than anything he was supposed to be studying), and knew it in darkness and light and indeed placed a seed in a container over and over again.
He could not use that. But he remembered the room, could see the shape of darkness that was her body as she moved about it sometimes, late at night, switching something off, dousing an incense coil, closing the window when it rained. (Once, she brought out some antique script-strings, erotic tales told in knots, and let him bind her; later she bound him, and he, who had always thought himself the plainest of young males, bluffly proud of his normalcy, discovered that such sex-play was not the preserve of those he’d considered weak and degen- erate.)
He saw the pattern of shadow her body made across the tell-tale lights and reflections in the room. Here, now, in this strange world, so many years of time and millennia of light away from that blessed time and place, he imagined himself getting up and crossing from the curl-pad to the far side of the room. There was – there had been – a little silver cuplet on a shelf there. Sometimes when she wanted to be absolutely naked, she would take off the ring her mother had given her. It would be his duty, his mission to take the ring from her hand and place the gold band in the silver cuplet.
‘All right. Are we there?’
‘Yes, we’re there.’
‘So. Send.’
‘Yes … No.’
‘Hmm. Well, we begin again. Think of-’
‘Yes, the cup.’
‘We are quite certain the device is working, Estodien?’
‘We are.
‘Then it’s me. I just can’t… It’s just not in me.’ He dropped some bread into his soup. He laughed bitterly. ‘Or it is in me, and I can’t get it out.’
‘Patience, Major. Patience.’
‘There. Are we there?’
‘Yes, yes, we’re there.
‘And; send.’
‘I- Wait. I think I felt-’
‘Yes! Estodien! Major Quilan! It worked!’
Anur came running through from the refectory.
‘Estodien, what do you think our allies will gain from my mission?’
‘I’m sure I don’t know, Major. It is not really a subject it would benefit either of us to worry ourselves with.’
They sat in a small runabout; a sleek little two-person craft of the Soulhaven, in space, outside the airsphere.
The same small airship that had carried them from the airsphere portal the day they’d arrived had taken Quilan and Visquile on the return trip. They had walked through the solid-seeming tube of air again, this time to the runabout. It had drifted away from the portal, then picked up speed. It seemed to be heading towards one of the sun-moons which provided the airsphere with light. The moon drifted closer. Sunlight poured from what looked like a gigantic near-flat crater covering half of one face. It looked like the incandescent eyeball of some infernal deity.