He saw the Homomdan Kabe Ischloear and the drone E. H. Tersono appearing from the nearest access way as the lights began to dim. Kabe waved. Quilan waved back.
Tersono! We’re going to blow up the Hub!
The words formed in his mind. He would stand up and shout them.
But he did not.
I didn’t intervene. You never meant to really do it.
Really?
Really.
Fascinating. Every philosopher should experience this, don’t you think, Huyler?
Easy, son, easy.
Kabe and Tersono joined the Chelgrian. Both noticed he was weeping quietly but thought it polite not to say anything.
The music rang round the auditorium, a vast invisible clapper in the inverted bell of the Bowl. The stadium’s lights had sunk to darkness; the light show in the skies above flickered, flowed and flashed.
Quilan had missed the nacreous clouds. He saw the aurorae, the lasers, the induced layers and levels of clouds, the flashes of the first few meteorites, the strobing lines that hatched the sky as more and more streaked in. The distant skies all around the Bowl, way out over the plains bordering the lake, coruscated with silent horizontal lightning, darting from cloud to cloud in streaks and bars and sheets of blue-white light. The music accumulated. Each piece, he realised, was slowly contributing to the whole. Whether it was Hub’s idea or Ziller’s, he didn’t know, but the whole evening, the entire concert programme had been designed around the final symphony. The earlier, shorter pieces were half by Ziller, half by other composers. They alternated, and it became clear that the styles were quite different too, while the musical philosophies behind the two competing strands were dissimilar to the point of antipathy.
The short pauses between each piece, during which the orches- tra enlarged and decreased according to the requirements of each work, allowed just sufficient time for the strategic structure of the evening to filter through to people. You could actually hear the coin drop as people worked it out.
The evening was the war.
The two strands of music represented the protagonists, Cul- ture and Idirans. Each pair of antagonistic pieces stood for one of the many small but increasingly bitter and wide-scale skirmishes which had taken place, usually between proxy forces for both sides, during the decades before the war itself had finally broken out. The works increased in length and in the sensation of mutual hostility.
Quilan found himself checking the history of the Idiran War, to confirm that what felt like they ought to be the final pair of preparatory pieces really were so.
The music died away. The applause was barely audible, as though everybody was simply waiting. The complete orches- tra filled the central stage. Dancers, most in float harnesses, distributed themselves about the space around the stage in a semi-sphere. Ziller took his place at the very focus of the circular stage, surrounded by a shimmer of projection field. The applause zoomed suddenly then dropped as quickly away. The orchestra and Ziller shared a mutual moment of silence and stillness.
A blanking field somewhere in the heavens above blinked off, and – up near one edge of the Bowl’s lip – it was as though the first nova, Portisia, had just appeared from behind a cloud.
The symphony Expiring Light began with a susurration that built and engorged until it burst into a single dashingly discord- ant blast of music; a mixture of chords and sheer noise that was echoed in the sky by a single shockingly bright air burst as a huge meteorite plunged into the atmosphere directly above the Bowl and exploded. Its stunning, frightening, bone-rattlingly loud sound arrived suddenly in a hypnotic lull in the music, making everybody – certainly everybody that Quilan was aware of, including himself – jump.
Thunder rippled round the greater amphitheatre of sky around the lake and Bowl at its centre. The bolts struck earth now, lan- cing to the distant ground. The sky hatched with squadrons and fleets of darting meteorite trails while the folds of aurorae and sky-wide effects whose origin it was hard to guess at filled the mind and beat at the eye even as the music pounded at the ear.
Visuals of the war and more abstract images filled the air directly above the stage and the whirling, tumbling, interlacing bodies of the dancers.
Somewhere near the furious centre of the work, while the thunder played bass and the music rolled over it and around the auditorium like something wild and caged and desperate to escape, eight trails in the sky did not end in air bursts and did not fade away but slammed down into the lake all around the Bowl, creating eight tall and sudden geysers of lit white water that burst out of the still dark waters as though eight vast under-surface fingers had made a sudden grab at the sky itself.
Quilan thought he heard people shriek. The entire Bowl, the whole kilometre-diameter of it, shook and quivered as the waves created by the lake-strikes smashed into the giant vessel. The music seemed to take the fear and terror and violence of the moment and run screaming away with it, pulling the audience behind like an unseated rider caught in the stirrup of their panic-stricken mount.
A terrible calmness settled over Quilan as he sat there, half cowenng, battered by the music, assailed by the washes and spikes of light. ft was as though his eyes formed a sort of twin tunnel in his skull and his soul was gradually falling away from that shared window to the universe, falling on his back forever down a deep dark corridor while the world shrank to a little circle of light and dark somewhere in the shadows above. Like falling into a black hole, he thought to himself. Or maybe it was Huyler.
He really did seem to be falling. He really did seem to be unable to stop. The universe, the world, the Bowl really did seem to be unreachably distant. He felt vaguely upset that he was missing the rest of the concert, the conclusion of the symphony. What price clarity and proximity, though, and where lay the relevance of being there and using or not using a magnification screen or amplification when everything he’d seen so far had been distorted by the tears in his eyes and all he’d heard had been drowned out by the clamour of his guilt at what he had done, what he had made possible and what was surely going to happen?
He wondered, as he fell into that encompassing darkness, and the world was reduced to a single not especially bright point of light above – no more luminous than a nova distant by most of a thousand years – if he’d somehow been fed a drug. He supposed the Culture people would all be enhancing the experience with their glanded secretions, making the reality of the experience both more and less real.
He landed with a bump. He sat up and looked around.
He saw a distant light to one side. Again, not particularly bright. He got to his feet. The floor was warm and with just a hint of pliancy. There was no smell, no sound except his own breathing and heartbeat. He looked up. Nothing.
-~ Huyler?
He waited for a moment. Then a moment longer.
-~ Huyler?
-~ HUYLER?
Nothing.
He stood and gloried in the silence for a while, then walked towards the distant glow.
The light came from the band of the Orbital. He walked into what looked just like the mock-up of the Hub’s viewing gallery. The place seemed to be deserted. The Orbital spun around him with a vast, implicit unhurriedness. He walked on a little, past couches and seats, until he came to the one that was occupied.
The avatar, lit by the reflected light of the Orbital’s surface, looked up as he approached and patted the curl-seat next to it. The creature was dressed in a dark grey suit.
‘Quilan,’ it said. ‘Thank you for coming. Please; sit down.’ The reflections slid off its perfect silver skin like liquid light.
He sat down. The curl-seat fitted perfectly.
‘What am I doing here?’ he asked. His voice sounded strange. There were no echoes, he realised.
‘I thought we should talk,’ the avatar said.
‘What about?’
‘What we’re going to do.’
‘I don’t understand.’
The avatar held up a tiny thing like a jewel, grasping it in a pincer of silver fingers. It glittered like a diamond. At its heart was a tiny flaw of darkness. ‘Look what I found, Major.’
He did not know what to say. After what seemed like a long time he thought,
Huyler?
The moment went on. Time seemed to have stopped. The avatar could sit perfectly, utterly, inhumanly still.
‘There were three,’ he told it.
The avatar smiled thinly, reached into the top pocket of the suit and produced another two of the jewels. ‘Yes, I know. Thank you for that.’