So far so good, he thought. Now, what is the light?
He might have to come back to that one. Same with: What is the sound?
He tried another question: Where is this happening?
He searched his sodden clothes but found nothing in any of the pockets. He looked for a name tag that he felt ought to be sewn on to his collar, but it seemed to have been ripped off. He searched the small boat, but still found no answers. So he tried to imagine being in the distant keep over the towering waves, and visualised himself walking into a cavernous store room of jumble and nonsense and memories buried deep in the castle… but could see nothing in detail. His eyes closed and he wept with frustration, while the small boat juddered and tipped underneath him.
When he opened his eyes, he was holding a little clip of paper with the word FOHLS printed on it. He was so surprised he let the slip of paper go; the wind whipped it away into the dark sky over the black waves. But he had remembered. Fohls was the answer. The planet of Fohls.
He felt relieved, and a little proud. He’d discovered something.
What was he doing here?
Funeral. He seemed to remember something about a funeral. Surely it had not been his own.
Was he dead? He thought about this question for a while. He supposed it was possible. Maybe there was an afterlife, after all. Well, if there was life after death, that would teach him. Was this sea of pain a divine punishment? Was the light a god? He dipped his hand over the side of the boat, into the pain; it filled him, and he withdrew. Cruel god if that really was the case. What about all the stuff I did for the Culture? he wanted to ask. Doesn’t that cancel some of the bad out? Or were those smug self-satisfied bastards wrong all along? God, he’d love to be able to go back and tell them. Imagine the look on Sma’s face!
But he didn’t think he was dead. It hadn’t been his funeral. He could remember the flat-topped tower by the cliffs looking out over the sea, and helping to carry some old warrior’s body there. Yes, somebody had died and they were being ceremonially disposed of.
Something was nagging at him.
Suddenly he clutched at the boat’s rotten timbers and stared out over the heaving ocean.
There was a ship. Every now and again he could see a ship, far in the distance. Barely more than a dot, and mostly the waves were in the way, but it was a ship. A hole seemed to open somewhere inside him; his guts fell through it.
He thought he recognised the ship.
Then the boat split apart, and he dropped through it, through the water underneath, then splashed out of the underside of the water, into air again, and saw the ocean beneath him, and a tiny speck of its surface, which he was falling towards. It was another small boat; he crashed through it, through more water, through more air, through the wreckage of a boat, through another layer of water and another level of air…
Hey – one part of his mind thought, as he fell – this is like how Sma described the Reality… splashed through more waves, through the water, out into air, heading for more waves…
This wasn’t going to stop. He remembered that the Reality Sma had described was expanding all the time; you could fall through forever; really forever, not until the end of the universe; literally forever.
That won’t do, he thought to himself. He’d have to face the ship.
He landed in a little creaking, leaking boat.
The ship was much closer now. The ship was huge and dark and bristled with guns and it was heading straight for him, bow wave a huge white V of foam bisected by its stem.
Shit, he wasn’t going to be able to get away from it. The cruel curves of the bows raced slicing towards him. He closed his eyes.
Once upon a time there was… a ship. A great ship. A ship for destroying things with; other ships, people, cities… It was very big and it was designed to kill people and to keep people inside it from being killed.
He tried not to remember what the great ship was called. Instead he saw the ship somehow installed near the middle of a city, and felt confused, and could not work out how it got there. The ship started to look like a castle, for some reason, and that did, and did not, make sense. He began to feel frightened. The ship’s name was like some huge sea creature, bumping into the hull of his boat; like a battering-ram thudding into the walls of the castle keep. He tried to block it out, knowing it was just a name but not wanting to hear it because it always made him feel bad.
He put his hands over his ears. That worked for a moment. But then the ship, set in stone, near the centre of the battered city, fired its great guns, gouting black and flashing yellow-white, and he knew what was coming, and tried to scream to cover the noise, but when it arrived it was the name of the ship that the guns had spoken, and it shattered the boat, demolished the castle, and resounded through the bones and spaces of his skull, like the laughter of an insane god, forever.
The light went out then, and he sank gratefully away from the awful, accusing sound.
Light. Staberinde said a calm voice from somewhere inside. Staberinde. It’s only a word.
The Staberinde. The ship. He turned away from the light, back into the darkness.
Light. Sounds, too; a voice. What was I thinking about, earlier? (He recalled something about a name, but ignored that.) Funeral. Pains. And the ship. There was a ship. Or there had been. Maybe still is, for all… but there was something about a funeral. The funeral is why you are here. That was what confused you before. You thought you were dead, in fact you were only living. He remembered something about boats and oceans and castles and cities, but could not actually see them any more.
Now, from somewhere, comes touch, touch coming in from out there. Not pain but touch. Two different things…
The touch, again. It feels like the touch of a hand; a hand touching his face, causing more pain, but still a touch, and distinguishably a hand. His face felt terrible. He must look terrible.
Where am I again? Crash. Funeral. Fohls.
Crash. Of course; my name is…
Too hard.
What do I do, then?
That’s easier. You are a paid agent of the most advanced – well, certainly the most energetic – humanoid civilisation in the… Reality? (No.) Universe? (No.) Galaxy? Yes, galaxy… and you were representing them at a… a… funeral, and you were coming back on some stupid aircraft to be picked up and taken away from all this, when something happened on board the aircraft and it went… and he’d seen flames and… and there had been that old jungle floating right… then nothing and pain, and nothing but pain. Then drifting and floating in and out of it.
The hand touched his face again. And this time there was something to see. He thought it looked like a cloud, or like a moon through a cloud, itself unseen but shining through.
Possibly the two were connected, he thought. Yes; here it comes again, and yes, there we are; sensation, feeling; the hand on the face again. Throat, swallowing, water or some liquid. You are being given something to drink. From the way it goes down there seems to be… yes, upright, we are upright, not on our back. The hands, own hands, they are… an open feeling, feeling very open, very vulnerable, naked.
Thinking about his body was bringing the pain back again. He decided to give up on that. Try something else.
Try the crash again. Back from the funeral and the desert coming right up… no, mountains. Or was it jungle? He couldn’t remember. Where are we? Jungle, no… desert, no… what then? Don’t know.
Asleep, he thought suddenly; you were asleep in the aircraft in the night, and had just enough time to wake up in the darkness and see flames and begin to realise before light detonated inside your head. After that, pain. But you didn’t see any sort of terrain floating/rushing up to meet you, because it was very dark.
The next time he came round, everything had changed. He felt vulnerable and exposed. As his eyes opened and he tried to remember how to see, he slowly made out dusty streaks of light in a brown gloom, and saw earthenware pots near a mud or earth wall, and a small fireplace in the centre of the room, and spears leaning against a wall, and other blades. Straining his neck to bring his head up, he could see something else; the rough wooden frame he was tied to.