or something; I don’t know.”
“Quilan, we are attempting to do something no Chelgrian has ever done before. You’re trying to turn yourself into a Chelgrian Displacement machine. You can’t expect to get it right first time, on the first morning you try it.” Visquile looked up as Anur, the gangly monk who had shown them round the behemothaur’s exterior the day they had arrived, passed their table with his tray. He bowed clumsily, nearly tipping the contents of his tray onto the floor, only just saving it. He gave a foolish smile. Visquile nodded. Anur had been sitting watching the cup all morning, waiting for a tiny black speck—possibly preceded by a tiny silver sphere—to appear in its white scoop.
Visquile must have read Quilan’s expression. “I asked Anur not to sit with us. I don’t want you to think of him sitting looking at the cup, I want you to think only of the cup.”
Quilan smiled. “Do you think I might Displace the test object into Anur by mistake?”
“I doubt that would happen, though you never know. But in any event, if you start to see Anur sitting there, tell me and we’ll replace him with one of the other monks.”
“If I did Displace the object into a person, what would happen?”
“As I understand it, almost certainly nothing. The object is too small to cause any damage. I suppose if it materialised inside the person’s eye they might see a speck, or if it appeared right alongside a pain receptor they might feel a tiny pin-prick. Anywhere else in the body it would go unnoticed. If you could Displace this cup,” the Estodien said, lifting his own ceramic cup, identical to Quilan’s, “into somebody’s brain then I dare say their head might explode, just from the pressure produced by the sudden extra volume. But the dummy warheads you are working with are too small to be noticed.”
“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 universe, 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 oneway.
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.
