The Estodien crashed and battered about the shower cabinet lift capsule, smashing the ceramic fittings and denting the plastics. More insects streamed into his ears and forced their way around his horrified, staring eyes, burning their way into his skull while his skin crawled and writhed with the insects which had invaded his body cavity and gone on to slide their way under his flesh.
The insects infested his entire body eventually, as he lay thrashing on the floor on a film of his own blood. They continued to insinuate their way into every bodily part of him until, about three minutes after the attack had begun, Visquile’s movements gradually ceased.
The insects, the birds and the Chelgrian female were made of EDust. Everything Dust was composed of tiny machines of vary- ing sizes and capabilities. With the exception of one type, none was larger than a tenth of a millimetre in any direction. Inter- estingly, the dust had originally been designed as the ultimate building material.
The one class of exception to the tenth-of-a-millimetre rule was that of AM nanomissiles, which were only a tenth of a millimetre in diameter, but an entire millimetre in length. One of those lodged in the centre of the Estodien’s brain, beside his Soulkeeper, while all the other components withdrew and reformed into the Chelgrian female.
She padded away from the deflated body lying in its bloody pool. The nanomissiles were, she thought, a give-away to the identity of her makers; an integral part of the message she was delivering. She went out of the bathroom and the apartment, down some stairs and across a terrace. Somebody shot at her with an ancient hunting rifle. It was the only projectile weapon left working for several kilometres around; she let the bullet pass through a hole in her chest and out the other side, while a set of components in one of her eyes briefly lased and blinded the male who had shot at her.
In the accommodation block behind her, the nanomissile embedded in Visquile’s brain sensed his Soulkeeper about to read and save his mind. The explosion of the missile’s warhead destroyed the whole building. Debris rained down, around and through her as she walked calmly away.
She found her second target trapped in a small two-person flyer, trying to smash his way out of the cockpit canopy with an oxygen cylinder.
She pulled the canopy open. The white-furred male lashed out with an antique knife; it penetrated her chest and she let it hang there while she took him by the throat and lifted him bodily out of the machine. He kicked and spat and gurgled. The knife in her chest was swallowed inside her as she walked to the edge of the terrace. He hung easily in her grip, as though he weighed nothing; his kicks seemed to have no appreciable effect on her whatsoever.
At the terrace edge she held him over the balustrade. The drop to the sea was about two hundred metres. The knife he had tried to harm her with appeared smoothly out of the palm of her hand, like magic. She used it to skin him. She was ferociously quick; it took a minute or so. His screams wheezed out through his partially crushed windpipe.
She let his bloody white pelt drop away towards the waves like a heavy, sodden rug. She threw the knife away and used her own claws to rip him open from midlimb to groin, then reached inside, pulling and twisting at the same time as she let go of his neck.
He tumbled away, finally screaming in a high, hoarse voice. She was still holding his stomach in her hand. His intestines unravelled, whipping out of his body in a long, quivering line as he fell.
Skinned and disembowelled, he was light enough – and his entrails sufficiently elastic as well as firmly anchored – for him to bounce up and down on the end of his own guts for a while, jerking and quivering and shrieking, before she let him fall into the salty waves.
She watched the splashes with Chelgrian eyes for a while, then became a cloud of dust in which the biggest single components were the nanomissiles.
By the time the warhead in Eweirl’s brain exploded a few minutes later, she had become an attenuated column of greyness sucking itself up into the sky high above.
Epilogue
It is good to have a body again. I enjoy sitting here in this little cafe in this quaint hill village, smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of wine and looking out over distant Chelise. The air is clear and the view is sharp and autumn is just beginning. It is definitely good to be alive.
I am Sholan Hadesh Huyler, an admiral-general of the Chelgrian Combined Forces, retired. I did not suffer the same fate as that shared by the Hub Mind of Masaq’ Orbital and my one-time colleague and charge, Major Tibilo Quilan. The Hub pulled me out of Quilan’s Soulkeeper device, saved me, transmitted me to one of its guardian GSVs and – much later – I was united with my old self, the one which Quilan rescued twice: once – with his wife Worosei – from the Military Institute in Cravinyr City on Aorme, and once – with the Navy drone – from the wreck of the Winter Storm.
Now I am a free citizen on Chel again, with a reasonable pension (in fact two) and the respect of my superiors (actually two sets of them, though only one lot know of the existence of the other bunch, and they would resist being called my superiors). I hope that I may never be needed again, but if I am, I will do my duty not for my old masters but for my new equals. For I am, by the definition I would have used up to a few years ago, a traitor.
The Chelgrian High Command thought that I might have been got at in some way – even turned – before the wreck of the ship was found, however I seemed to check out and I certainly made all the right responses.
They were both right and wrong. I was turned by the Culture while I was still in the substrate in the Institute on Aorme. They hadn’t thought of that, long before the Caste War.
The best way to turn an individual – person or machine – is not to invade them and implant some sort of mimetic virus or any such nonsense, but to make them change their mind themselves, and that is what they did to me, or rather what they persuaded me to do to myself.
They showed me all there was to be shown about my society and theirs and, in the end, I preferred theirs. Essentially I became a Culture citizen and at the same time an agent of Special Circumstances, which is the uncharacteristically coy name they employ for their combined intelligence, espionage and counter-espionage organisation.
I went along with everything else to keep Masaq’ and its people safe, not to ensure its destruction. I was SC’s insurance policy, their get-out clause, their parachute (I heard many colourful analogies). If I had been told to do so, I would have prevented Quilan from making his Displacements, not taken over and done them for him had he demurred. In the end it was decided that sufficient other safeguards had been put in place for the Displacements to go ahead, with the aim of backtracking along the attempted wormhole link to discover and even attack the Involveds behind the attack (this failed and to the best of my knowledge it is still not known who those mysterious allies were, though I’m sure SC has its suspicions).
I spend most of my time on Masaq’ these days, often in the company of Kabe Ischloear; we have similar roles. I come back here to Chel on occasion, but I prefer my new home. Only recently Kabe pointed out that he had lived in the Culture for nearly a decade before he realised that when the Culture calls somebody from an alien society who lives amongst them ‘Ambassador’, what they mean is that that person represents the Culture to their original civilisation, the assumption being that the alien concerned will naturally consider the Culture better than their home and so worthy of promotion within it.
Such hubris!
Nevertheless.
I have met Mahrai Ziller. He was wary at first but eventually warmed to me. Lately we have been talking about him accompanying me back here, to Chel, for an informal visit, perhaps early next year. So I may yet accomplish the task that was only ever Quilan’s covering story.
They tell me that the Hub and Quilan went together into total oblivion, with no back-ups, no copies, no mind-states, no souls left behind.
I suppose it must have been what they both wanted. In the case of the Major, I believe I can understand, and I still feel deeply sorry for him and the effects of a loss he could neither mourn away nor stand, though – like a lot of people, I think – I find it hard to understand how something as fabulously complicated and comprehensively able intellectually as a Mind might also want to destroy itself.