Look to Windward

He could not use that. But he remembered the room, could see the shape of darkness that was her body as she moved about it sometimes, late at night, switching something off, dousing an incense coil, closing the window when it rained. (Once, she brought out some antique script-strings, erotic tales told in knots, and let him bind her; later she bound him, and he, who had always thought himself the plainest of young males, bluffly proud of his normalcy, discovered that such sex-play was not the preserve of those he’d considered weak and degenerate.)

He saw the pattern of shadow her body made across the tell-tale lights and reflections in the room. Here, now, in this strange world, so many years of time and millennia of light away from that blessed time and place, he imagined himself getting up and crossing from the curl-pad to the far side of the room. There was—there had been—a little silver cuplet on a shelf there. Sometimes when she wanted to be absolutely naked, she would take off the ring her mother had given her. It would be his duty, his mission to take the ring from her hand and place the gold band in the silver cuplet.

“All right. Are we there?”

“Yes, we’re there.”

“So. Send.”

“Yes… No.”

“Hmm. Well, we begin again. Think of—”

“Yes, the cup.”

“We are quite certain the device is working, Estodien?”

“We are.”

“Then it’s me. I just can’t… It’s just not in me.” He dropped some bread into his soup. He laughed bitterly. “Or it is in me, and I can’t get it out.”

“Patience, Major. Patience.”

“There. Are we there?”

“Yes, yes, we’re there.”

“And; send.”

“I—Wait. I think I felt—”

“Yes! Estodien! Major Quilan! It worked!” Anur came running through from the refectory.

“Estodien, what do you think our allies will gain from my mission?”

“I’m sure I don’t know, Major. It is not really a subject it would benefit either of us to worry ourselves with.”

They sat in a small runabout; a sleek little two-person craft of the Soulhaven, in space, outside the airsphere.

The same small airship that had carried them from the airsphere portal the day they’d arrived had taken Quilan and Visquile on the return trip. They had walked through the solid-seeming tube of air again, this time to the runabout. It had drifted away from the portal, then picked up speed. It seemed to be heading towards one of the sun-moons which provided the airsphere with light. The moon drifted closer. Sunlight poured from what looked like a gigantic near-flat crater covering half of one face. It looked like the incandescent eyeball of some infernal deity.

“All that matters, Major,” Visquile said, “is that the technology appears to work.”

They had conducted ten successful trials with the supply of dummy warheads loaded inside the Soulkeeper. There had been an hour or so of failed attempts to repeat his initial success, then he’d managed to perform two Displacements in succession.

After that the cup had been moved to different parts of the Soulhaven; Quilan had only two unsuccessful attempts before he became able to Displace the specks wherever he was asked. On the third day he attempted and conducted only two Displacements, to either end of the ship. This, the fourth day, was the first time Quilan would attempt a Displacement outside the Soulhaven.

“Are we going to that moon, Estodien?” he asked as the giant satellite grew to fill the view ahead.

“Nearby,” Visquile said. He pointed. “You see that?” A tiny fleck of grey floated away to one side of the sun- moon, just visible in the wash of light pouring from the crater. “That is where we are going.”

It was something between a ship and a station. It looked like it could have been either, and as though it might have been designed by any one of thousands of early-stage Involved civilisations. It was a collection of grey- black ovoids, spheres and cylinders linked by thick struts, revolving slowly in an orbit round the sun-moon configured so that it would never fly over the vast light beam issuing from the side facing the airsphere.

“We have no idea who built it,” Visquile said. “It has been here for the last few tens of thousands of years and has been much modified by successive species who have thought to use it to study the airsphere and the moons. Parts of it are currently equipped to provide reasonable conditions for ourselves.”

The little runabout slid inside a hangar pod stuck to the side of the largest of the spherical units. It settled to the floor and they waited while the pod’s exterior doors revolved shut and air rushed in.

The canopy unsucked itself from the little craft’s fuselage; they stepped out into cold air that smelled of something acrid.

The two big double-cone-shaped drones whirred from another airlock, coming to hover on either side of them.

There was no voice inside his head this time, just a deep humming from one of them which modulated to say, “Estodien, Major. Follow.”

And they followed, down a passageway and through a couple of thick, mirror-finish doors to what appeared to be a sort of broad gallery with a single long window facing them and curving back behind where they had come in. It might have been the viewing cupola of an ocean liner, or a stellar cruise ship. They walked forward and Quilan realised that the window—or screen—was taller and deeper than he had at first assumed.

The impression of a band of glass or screen fell away as he understood that he was looking at the single great ribbon that was the slowly revolving surface of an immense world. Stars shone faintly above and below it; a couple of brighter bodies which were, just, more than mere points of light must be planets in the same system. The star providing the sunlight had to be almost directly behind the place he was looking from.

The world looked flat, spread out like the peel from some colossal fruit and thrown across the background stars. Edged top and bottom in the glinting grey-blue translucency of enormous containing walls, the surface was separated into long strips by numerous, regularly positioned verticals of grey-brown, white and—in the centre— stark grey-black. These enormous mountain ranges stretched from wall to wall across the world, parcelling it up into what must have been a few dozen separate divisions.

Between them there lay about equal amounts of land and ocean, the land partly in the form of island continents, partly in smaller but appreciably large islands—set in seas of various hues of blue and green—and partly in great swathes of green, fawn, brown and red which extended from one retaining wall to the other, sometimes dotted with seas, sometimes not, but always traversed by a single darkly winding thread or a collection of barely visible filaments, green and blue tendrils laid across on the ochres, tans and tawns of the land.

Clouds swirled, speckled, waved, dotted, arced and hazed in a chaos of patterns, near-patterns and patches, brush strokes strewn across the canvas of terrain and water below.

“This is what you will see,” one of the drones hummed.

The Estodien Visquile patted Quilan on the shoulder. “Welcome to Masaq’ Orbital,” he said.

~ Five billion of them, Huyler. Males, females, their young. This is a terrible thing we’re being asked to do.

It is, but we wouldn’t be doing it if these people hadn’t done something just as terrible to us.

~ These people, Huyler? These people right here, on Masaq’?

~ Yes, these people, Quil. You’ve seen them. You’ve talked to them. When they discover where you’re from they tone it down for fear of insulting you, but they’re so obviously proud of the extent and depth of their democracy. They’re so damned smug that they’re so fully involved, they’re so proud of their ability to have a say and of their right to opt-out and leave if they disagree profoundly enough with a course of