Gridfire struck the Orbital. Horza paused and watched the screen as it lit up suddenly, flashing once over its whole surface until the sensors coped with the sudden increase in brilliance and compensated. For some reason Horza had thought the Culture would just splash the gridfire all over the massive Orbital and then spatter the remains with CAM, but they didn’t do that; instead a single narrow line of blinding white light appeared right across the breadth of the day side of the Orbital, a thin fiery blade of silent destruction which was instantly surrounded by the duller but still perfectly white cover of clouds. That line of light was part of the grid itself, the fabric of pure energy which lay underneath the entire universe, separating this one from the slightly younger, slightly smaller antimatter universe beneath. The Culture, like the Idirans, could now partially control that awesome power, at least sufficiently to use it for the purposes of destruction. A line of that energy, plucked from nowhere and sliced across the face of the three-dimensional universe, was down there: on and inside the Orbital, boiling the Circlesea, melting the two thousand kilometres of transparent wall, annihilating the base material itself, straight across its thirty-five-thousand-kilometre breadth.
Vavatch, that fourteen million kilometre hoop, was starting to uncoil. A chain, it had been cut.
There was nothing left now to hold it together; its own spin, the source of both its day-night cycle and its artificial gravity, was now the very force tearing it all apart. At about one hundred and thirty kilometres per second, Vavatch was throwing itself into outer space, unwinding like a released spring.
The livid line of fire appeared again, and again, and again, working its way methodically round the Orbital from where the original burst had struck, neatly parcelling the entire Orbital into squares, thirty-five thousand kilometres to a side, each containing a sandwich of trillions upon trillions of tonnes of ultradense base material, water, land and air.
Vavatch was turning white. First the gridfire seared the water into a border of clouds; then the outrushing air, spilling from each immense flat square like heavy fumes off a table, turned its load of water vapour to ice. The ocean itself, no longer held by the spin force, was shifting, spilling with infinite slowness over one edge of every plate of ruptured base material, becoming ice and swirling away into space.
The precise, brilliant line of fire marched on, going back in reverse-spin direction, neatly dissecting the still curved, still spinning sections of the Orbital with its sudden, lethal flashes of light — light from outside the normal fabric of reality.
Horza remembered what Jandraligeli had called it, back when Lenipobra had been enthusing about the destruction.
“The weaponry of the end of the universe,” the Mondlidician had said. Horza watched the screen and knew what the man had meant.
It was all going. All of it. The wreck of the Olmedreca, the tabular berg it had collided with, the wreck of the CAT’s shuttle, Mipp’s body, Lenipobra’s, whatever was left of Fwi-Song’s corpse, Mr First’s… the living bodies of the other Eaters — if they hadn’t been rescued, or had still refused… the Damage game arena, the docks and Kraiklyn’s dead body, the hovercraft… animals and fishes, birds, germs, all of it: everything flash-burned or flash-frozen, suddenly weightless, spinning into space, going, dying.
The relentless line of fire completed its circuit of the Orbital, back almost to where it had started. The Orbital was now a rosette of white flat squares backing slowly away from each other towards the stars: four hundred separate slabs of quickly freezing water, silt, land and base material, angling out above or underneath the plane of the system’s planets like flat square worlds themselves.
There was a moment of grace then, as Vavatch died in solitary, blazing splendour. Then at its dark centre, another blazing star patch rose, bursting white as the Hub was struck with the same terrible energy which had smashed the world itself.
Like a target, then, Vavatch blazed.
Just as Horza thought that the Culture would be content with that, the screen lit up once more. Everyone of those flat cards, and the Hub, of the exploded Orbital blazed once with an icy, sparkling brilliance as though a million tiny white stars were shining through each shattered piece.
The light faded, and those four hundred expanses of flat worlds with their centre Hub were gone, replaced by a grid of diced shapes, each exploding away from the others as well as from the rest of the disintegrating Orbital.
Those pieces flashed, too, bursting slowly with a billion pinpricks of light which, when they faded, left debris almost too small to make out.
Vavatch was now a swollen and spiralled disc of flashing, glittering splinters, expanding very slowly against the distant stars like a ring of bright dust. The glinting, sparkling centre made it look like some huge, lidless and unblinking eye.
The screen flashed one final time. No single points of light could be made out this time. It was as though the whole now vague but bloated image of the shattered circular world glowed with some internal heat, making a torus-shaped cloud out of it, a halo of white light with a fading iris at its centre. Then the show was over, and only the sun lit up the slowly blooming nimbus of the annihilated world.
On other wavelengths there would probably be a lot still to see, but the mess-room screen was on normal light. Only the Minds, only the starships, would see the whole destruction perfectly; only they would be able to appreciate it for all that it had to offer. Of the entire range of the electromagnetic spectrum, the unaided human eye could see little more than one per cent: a single octave of radiation out of an immense long keyboard of tones. The sensors on a starship would see everything, right across that spectrum, in far greater detail and at a much slower apparent speed. The whole display that was the Orbital’s destruction was, for all its humanly perceivable grandeur, quite wasted on the animal eye. A spectacle for the machines, thought Horza; that was all it was. A sideshow for the damn machines.
“Chicel…” Dorolow said. Wubslin exhaled loudly and shook his head. Yalson turned and looked at Horza. Aviger stayed with his head turned to the screen.
“Amazing what one can accomplish when one puts one’s mind to it, eh… Horza?”
At first, stupidly, he thought that Yalson had said it, but of course it was Balveda.
She brought her head up slowly. Her deep, dark eyes were open; she looked groggy, and her body still sagged against the webbing of the seat straps. The voice had been clear and steady, though.
Horza saw Yalson reaching for the stun gun on the table. She reached out and brought the gun closer to her but left it lying on the table. She was looking suspiciously at the Culture agent. Aviger and Dorolow and Wubslin were staring at her, too.
“Are the batteries on that stun gun running down?” Wubslin said. Yalson was still looking at Balveda, her eyes narrowed.