Also, back in the (apparently) real world, there was an argument that the Truth implied approval of its own extinctions, that it tacitly encouraged mass murder and genocide. Logically, if one way of upping the proportion of those who truly believed was to evangelise, convince and convert, another was to decrease the numbers of those who steadfastly refused to accept the Truth at all — if necessary by killing them. The tipping point into revelation and deliverance for all might come not at the moment when a sceptic became a believer but at the point that an un-reformable heathen breathed their last.
The Stormshear plunged into a great dark wall of thicker cloud, dimming the view. Lights started to come on, shining from the supporting structure and the Dweller skiffs. Soon they could see little, and the mad, overwhelming cacophony of the slipstream and the droning engines made sonosense near impossible. A methane hail rattled around them in the gathering gloom.
· Time to go in, perhaps, the colonel said.
· Amen.
* * *
The next day brought target practice, as the Stormshear’s weapons and crew were brought up to some form of war-readiness. Y’sul, Hatherence and Fassin were allowed to watch from inside an observation dome right at the front of the ship, a temporary structure protruding from the Dreadnought’s armoured nose like a little bubble of diamond. They shared the place with a few dozen interested civilians, mostly administrators of the various cities where the Stormshear had been paying courtesy calls during the last long period of peace. Uniformed pet-children floated amongst the VIPs, carrying trays of food and drugs.
Ahead, through a ten-kilometre gap in the clouds, they could see an object like a small bright blue ship, a target being towed by another Dreadnought a hundred or more klicks still further ahead.
The Stormshear shuddered mightily and an instant later there came a great blast of noise. Tracks like dozens of vapour trails appeared in the sky beneath and above them, great combs of thin, plaited gas racing in front of them headed by the barely glimpsed dark dots of the shells converging on the target. Screens set into each dent-seat — where working — showed a magnified view of the blue target; it shook as its hollow structure was punctured by the shells, holes appearing briefly on its hull before sealing up again.
A desultory cheer went up from a few of the generally bored-looking Dwellers present. It was drowned out by the clicking of maniple fingers demanding service from the pet-children waiters.
“I never asked,” Hatherence said, leaning close to Y’sul as he snorted up the coils of purple from a fuming stoke-pipe. “What is the war actually about?”
Y’sul turned jerkily and gave the impression of trying to get his outer sensory regions to focus on the colonel. “About?” he said, looking confused. The exhausted stoke-stick attached to the pipe went out with a loud “pop’. “Well, it’s about when two, ah, opposing groups of, ah people, ah, that is to say, Dwellers, in this case, obviously, decide to, umm, fight. Fight! Yes, usually over some issue, and… and they use weapons of war to do so, until one side or other — did I say there are usually just two sides? That’s kind of the conventional number, I believe. Sort of a quorum, you might say. Though—”
“I wasn’t looking for the definition of a war, Y’sul.”
“No? Good. I thought you probably had such things of your own. Most people seem to.”
“I meant, what is the point at issue? What is the cause of the war?”
“The cause?” Y’sul asked, looking surprised. He roted as far back in his dent-seat as he could while the ship shuddered again and another salvo, from each side of the vessel this time, lanced forwards to the distant target. “Well,” he said, distracted by the dancing dots of the shells dragging their gas trails after them. “Well, I’m sure there is one…’ He started mumbling. Hatherence seemed to realise she’d already got as much sense out of Y’sul as she was going to while he was sucking on the stoke-pipe, and settled back in her seat with a sigh.
· Dweller Formal Wars are like duels fought on a huge scale, Fassin told her. The colonel turned fractionally towards him. — Normally about some aesthetic dispute. They’re often the final stage of a planet-planning dispute.
· Planet-planning?
· A common one is where there’s some dispute concerning the number of belts and zones a planet ought to have. Then, the Odds and the Evens are the two sides, usually.
· Planet-planning? the colonel repeated, as though she hadn’t picked up right the first time. — I did not think gas-giants were, well, planned.
· The Dwellers claim they can alter the number of bands a planet has, over a sufficiently great amount of time. They’ve never been reliably observed doing this but that doesn’t stop them claiming to be able to do it. Anyway, it’s not the doing of the thing that matters, it’s the principle. What sort of world do we want to live in? That’s the question.
· Even or Odd?
— Exactly. A Formal War is just the working-out.
Another salvo. The ship really shook this time, and a number of the slave-children yelped at the ragged boom resulting. Combs of gas trails leapt from all sides, a cone defining a tunnel of braided sky in front of them.
· Wars are also fought over disagreements such as which GasClipper ought to be allowed to fly a certain pennant colour during a race.
· A war for this? Hatherence sounded genuinely horrified. — Have these people never heard of committees?
— Oh, they have committees and meetings and dispute proce-dures. They have lots of those. But getting Dwellers to stick with a decision that’s gone against them, even after they’ve sworn on their life beforehand that they’ll abide by it, is not the easiest thing to do, in this or any other world. So disagree-ments tend to rumble on. Formal Wars are just the Dweller equivalent of a Supreme Court, a tribunal of last resort. Also, you have to understand that they don’t really have standing armed forces as such. Between wars, the Dreadnoughts and other military bits and pieces are cared for by enthusiasts, by clubs. Even when a Formal War is declared, all that happens is that the clubs get bigger as ordinary people sign up. The clubs sound and feel like what you or I might understand as proper military authorities but they’ve no legal standing.
The colonel shook as though just confronted with something of ultimate grisliness. — How perverse.
· For them, it seems to work.
· The verb “work’, Hatherence sent, — like so many other common terms, seems to be required to take on additional mean-ings when one talks of Dwellers. How do they decide who’s won one of these bizarre conflicts?
· Occasionally a straight dead-count, or the number of Dreadnoughts destroyed or crippled. More usually there’ll be an elegance threshold pre-agreed.
· An elegance threshold?
· Hatherence, Fassin said, turning to her, — did you do any research into Dweller life? All that time in -
· I believe I encountered a mention of this concept but dismissed it at the time as fanciful. It genuinely counts in such matters?
· It genuinely counts.
· And they can’t agree a workable disputes procedure for what ship flies which colourings without resorting to war, but they can happily agree on that resulting war being decided on a concept as fuzzy as elegance?
— Oh, that’s never disputed. They have an algorithm for it.