He swept away, leaving the tent, so that it fell away beneath him, became a speck beside the thin trails in the dust, and the mountains swam past, white capping ochre, and the trails and the tent disappeared, and the mountains shrank, and the glaciers and the starveling snows of summer became white claws on the rock, and the curved edge pressed in, compressing the view, so that the globe beneath became a coloured boulder, stone, pebble, gravel, grain of sand, speck of silt-dust, then was lost in the sandstorm whirl of the great revolving lens that was the home of all of them, which itself became a fleck on a thin bubble surrounding emptiness, skeined to its lonely siblings by the fabric that was only a slimly different articulation of nothingness.
More specks. All vanished. Darkness reigned.
He was still there.
Beneath it all, he’d been told, was more. All you had to do, Sma said, was think in seven dimensions and see the whole universe as a line on the surface of a torus, starting at a point, becoming a circle as it was born, then expanding, moving up the inside of the torus, over the top, to the outside, then relapsing, falling back in, shrinking. Others had gone before it, others came after it (the greater/smaller spheres outside of/inside their own universe, seen in four dimensions). Different time-scales lived outside and inside the torus; some universes expanding forever, others living less than a blink of an eye.
But it was too much. It all meant too much to matter. He had to concentrate on what he knew and what he was and what he had become, for the moment at least.
He found a sun, a planet, out of all that existence, and fell towards it, knowing this was the place, the font of all his dreams and memories.
He searched for meaning, found ashes. Where does it hurt? Well, just here, actually. A wrecked summerhouse, smashed and burned. No sign of a chair.
Sometimes, like now, the banality of it all quite took his breath away. He stopped and checked, for there were drugs that did that; took your breath away. He was still breathing. Probably his body was already set up to ensure that anyway, but the Culture – Chaos bless it twice – had set up a further program in him, to make certain. Cheating, as far as these people were concerned (he saw the girl in front of him, and watched her, through mostly-closed eyes, then closed again), but that was just too bad; he’d done something for them, little though they really knew it, and now they could do something for him.
But the throne, Sma had said once, is the ultimate symbol for many cultures. To sit, in splendour, is the highest articulation of power. The rest come to you; lower, often bowing, frequently backing off, sometimes prostrate (though that is always a bad sign, said the Culture’s blessed statistics), and to sit, to be made less animal by that evolutionarily uncalled-for posture, signified the ability to use.
There were some small civilisations – barely more than tribes, Sma had said – where they slept sitting, in special sleep chairs, because they believed that to lie down was to die (did they not always find the dead lying down?).
Zakalwe (was that really his name? It suddenly sounded strange and alien in his remembrance), Zakalwe, Sma said, I visited a place (how had they come to this? What had made him mention anything about this? Had he been drunk? Guard down again? Probably trying to seduce Sma, but ended up under the table again), Zakalwe I once visited a place where they killed people by putting them in a chair. Not torture – that was common enough; beds and chairs were very much the par when it came to getting people helpless and confined, to inflict pain upon them – but actually set it up to kill them while they sat. They – get this – they either gassed them or they passed very high electric currents through them. A pellet dropped into a container beneath the seat, like some obscene image of a commode, producing a fatal gas; or a cap over their head, and their hands dipped in some conducting fluid, to fry their brains.
You want to know the punch-line? Yeah, Sma, give us the punch-line. This same state had a law that forbade – and I quote – ‘cruel and unusual punishments!’ Can you believe that?
He circled around the planet, so far away.
Then fell towards it, through the air to the ground.
He found the shell of the mansion, like a forgotten skull; he found the wrecked summerhouse, like a shattered skull; he found the stone boat, like a deserted image of a skull. Fake. It was never floating.
He saw another boat; a ship; a hundred thousand tonnes of destruction, sitting in its own dry image of desuetude, its layers bristling outwards. Primary, secondary, tertiary, anti-aircraft, small…
He circled, then tried to approach, zeroing in…
But there were too many layers, and they defeated him.
He was thrown out again, and had to circle the planet once more, and as he did so, saw the Chair, and saw the Chairmaker – not the one he’d thought of, before; the other Chairmaker, the real one, and one that he had to keep returning to, through all the memories – in all his ghastly glory.
But some things were too much.
Some things were too much to bear.
Damn people. Damn others. Damn there being other people.
Back to the girl. (Why did there have to be other people?)
Yes she still had little experience as a guider-through, but as a stranger the man had been given to her, because they thought she was the best of the untried. But she would show them. Perhaps, through this, they were already considering her for the Matriarchs.
She would lead them one day. She felt this in her bones. The same bones that ached when she saw a child fall; the same ache in her cupped child-bones that came when she saw someone fall hard to the ground, would be her guide through the politics and tribulations of the tribe. She would prevail. Like this man here in front of her, but different. She had that inner strength, too. She would lead her people; it was like a child inside her, growing, that certainty. She would stir her people against the conquerors; she would show their brief hegemony for what it was; a side-track on the desert trail that was their destiny. The people beyond the plains, in their corrupt perfumed palace on the cliff, would fall beneath them. The power and thought of the women, and the power and bravery of their men – desert thorns – would crush the decadent petal-people of the cliffs. The sands would be theirs again. Temples would be carved in her name.
Lies. The girl was young and knew nothing of the tribes’ thoughts or destiny. She was a scrap thrown to him, to ease his passage into what they imagined would be his death-dream. Her vanquished people’s fate scarcely mattered to her; they had replaced that ancient heritage with thoughts of prestige and gadgets.
Let her dream. He relaxed into the calm frenzy of the drug.
There was a nexus where the vanishing-point of memory met the time-light from another place, and he was not yet sure he had out-run it.
He tried to see the great house again, but it was obscured by smoke and star-shell. He looked to the great battleship, confined within its dry-land dock, but it would not grow any larger. It was a capital ship, no more, no less, and he could not access the depths of meaning that it really held for him.
All he’d done was take the Chosen across the wastes to the Palace. Why had they wanted the Chosen to get to the court? It seemed absurd. The Culture did not believe in such supernatural, superstitious nonsense. But the Culture required him to make sure the Chosen got to the Court, despite all sorts of nastiness getting in his way.
To perpetuate a corrupt line. To carry on a reign of stupidness.
Well, they had their own reasons. You took the money and ran. Except there was no money, as such. What was a boy to do?
Believe. Though they scorned belief. Do. Act, though they were wary of action. He was their whipper boy, he realised. A borrowed hero. They thought little enough of heroes for this to be a boost to one’s own self-belief.
Come with us, do these things, that you would like to do anyway, except more so, and we will give you what you could never really have anywhere or anytime else; real proof that you are doing the right thing; that not only are you having immense fun, it is also for the common good. So enjoy.