“Some do. I have. Though I have also detected a sort of long-term tidal action in that and a lot of other emotional states. For real-time centuries I will feel, say, gradually more secure in myself, then for the next few centuries I’ll feel less certain. Or over time I’ll go from thinking I know pretty much everything to realising I know next to nothing, then back again, and so on and so on. Overall, it approximates to a sort of steady state, I suppose, and I am by now quite entirely used to such periodicity and allow for it. Similarly, I seem to oscillate between times of feeling that nothing matters, when I tend to act riskily, foolishly — often on a whim — and intervening periods when I feel that everything matters, and I become cautious, risk-averse, fearful and paranoid. The former attitude believes in a sort of benign fate, thinking I am just somehow destined to live for ever, while the latter believes in statistics, and a cold, uncaring cosmos, and cannot quite believe that I have lived as long as I have while ever thinking that life is just a hoot, and taking risks and behaving rashly is worth it just for the fun of tweaking the nose of the universe. The former state has a sort of cheery contempt for its opposite, while the latter is simply terrified of its obverse. Anyway, my point is: come back in a century or two and I might not seem so sure of myself.”
“In a century — in a few years — I’ll be with everybody else in the Sublime.”
“Best place for all of us. I’d go myself but longevity has become such a habit.”
“You don’t want to be offered the chance to go with us, with the Gzilt?”
“You’d be my second choice, after the Culture itself, but no. Not really my choice to make anyway; my real self will take that decision and I’ll be looked out wherever I am and taken away too, if and when the time comes.”
“They say it’s like the most brilliant lucid dream, for ever.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Do you dream, in there?”
“No. Being switched off is exactly like going to sleep — you’re not really aware of it happening, only of waking up again. But you wake after a dreamless sleep.”
“I’m sleepy now,” Cossont said, yawning involuntarily just at the thought. “I’m going to switch you off. That definitely okay? You sure?”
“Entirely. Sweet dreams, Ms Cossont.”
“Sleep well, Mr QiRia.”
…She woke up. Still aboard the
They’d be at Ospin in a couple of hours, bouncing into the microrbital belonging to the Incast Secular Collectionary order she’d donated the device to.
She remembered that evening aboard the clipper, umpteen years ago, and remembered a surprising amount of that conversation with QiRia’s stored mind-state. She remembered lying with just two hands clasped behind her neck, travelling with the sensibly sized volupt — as elegant in form as it was in tone — rather than the hulking lump of half-unplayable preposterousness that was the twenty-four-string elevenstring.
She remembered fretting over things like pleasing her mother without giving in to her, and whether she’d find somebody as cute as that serving captain in the cocktail bar — though single.
This time, she was wondering whether a pursuing ship might be just about to blow them out of the skies, or whether some pre-alerted special forces ultra-commandos would be waiting for them at the Bokri microrbital to slice or blast them to pieces. Also, whether she’d live to see the Subliming, and whether she would, in the end, go along with everybody else into it.
Vyr lay in the darkness, top hands clasped behind her neck, lower hands clasped over her belly, thinking that, sometimes, not all change was for the better.
The image — of a tearful woman sitting with her back to a view of clouds and sea — was shown as though on a conventional screen hanging in front of him.
“…and then she just seemed to disappear, from the face of the planet, and apparently her bed hasn’t been even slept in for days — many, I mean several days — and then, of course, she is in the Fourteenth, the regiment the Fourteenth, and she was always very active in the Reserve,
“Madame—”
“—terrible explosion on this planet and for all I know — well, I thought, I assumed the worst, naturally, as any mother would. I wondered, ‘Could she have been there, was that where she went? Did she know something?’ as soon as I heard about, about the thing, but then there was nothing…”
The screen went blank. Colonel Agansu nodded. “I see. And this lady is…?”
“She is Warib Cossont, mother of Vyr Cossont, Reserve Lieutenant Commander in the Fourteenth, the female her mother is referring to,” the intelligence officer of the
“This may tie in with the unexpected presence of the
“Was Vyr Cossont listed as one of those aboard the Fzan-Juym satellite?” the colonel asked.
“No,” the IO said.
“However, that means nothing,” the captain said. “There was barely time for her to be registered and besides, if she was being summoned for some sort of secret mission she would never have been added to the official complement anyway.”
“Where did this information come from?” Agansu asked.
“The screen clip came medium-ranks secret from Regimental Central Intelligence, flagged low probable relevance,” the IO officer said. “But we then added it to a review of our own multiple-remotes sensor data following the destruction of the HQ, which indicated there’s a fifty per cent chance that one of the larger medium-sized pieces of wreckage was a mostly intact though largely disabled four-berth shuttle. That being the case, there is then a sixty per cent chance that one or more viable biologicals could have been Displaced from the wreck to the
“Why was this information not extracted from the data at the time?” Agansu asked.
“The data from remotes,” the captain said, “especially in a combat volume, is received erratically, sporadically and late. Real-time data has to be prioritised, Colonel.”
“I see. This Lieutenant Commander Cossont; I can see no mention of her in any special forces or intelligence lists.”
“We don’t believe she is special forces or on a military intelligence secondment,” the captain said. “We believe her semi-civilian status was not cover, but the truth. Her value to the Fourteenth’s high command may have been opportunistic and sudden; the likelihood is it would only just have come to light before she was summoned.”
“And what might the nature of that value have been?” Agansu asked.
“We don’t know yet,” the IO admitted. “Best guess is possibly related to the Culture individual Ngaroe QiRia, who is mentioned in the message from the Zihdren recovered at Ablate.”
“There is record of an individual or individuals of that name having visited Gzilt several times in the past,” the captain added, “though not for several centuries.”
“And all this tells us what?” Agansu asked.
“Perhaps where Lieutenant Commander Cossont is heading,” the captain said. “Until now the Culture ship has pursued a course which has made its final destination difficult to predict, even at a system level. However, within the last half-day, it has become almost certain that it’s aiming for somewhere within the Ospin system. There is a record of Vyr Cossont travelling to the habitat of Bokri, within the Centralised Dataversities of Ospin.”
“When?” Agansu asked.
“Sixteen years ago, three and a half years after she returned from a student exchange trip within the Culture. Her most likely destination within Bokri, we believe, would have been the Incast order. It is possible she deposited an article of some sort with them, possibly a mind-state; the cargo manifest for the vessel she travelled on is a little ambiguous on the exact nature of whatever she might have left there, though some sort of article classified as a
