The septame watched the arrow-shaped mass of avatars and their hangers-on move towards him, like something aimed. “Solitude,” he said, to himself rather than really to Yegres, who was too far away and submerged in the crowd of people behind. “Solitude, not solitariness.” Of course, he was careful not to move his lips, in case.
Banstegeyn greeted the seven tall, silver-skinned creatures with all the dignity and politeness he could muster. Solemnity, too, though really it was easy to be solemn; it was the dignity and politeness he was having problems with.
Having dreamt of Orpe on consecutive nights, he’d used the relevant implants to stop himself dreaming over the last two, and had slept well, but now he was starting to feel that he had only displaced the problem, for he had the annoying, irrational and even very slightly frightening feeling– even though he was entirely awake and apparently well rested — that Orpe was just out of sight, just beyond the corner of his eye. It was disconcerting, troubling.
He most certainly did not believe in ghosts or any such nonsense, but — when it happened, catching him out, when he thought he glimpsed her, or thought he’d just missed seeing her, a moment earlier, just as he turned his head or blinked — he felt as terrified as he imagined people must have felt in the old days, when they had been superstitious. He knew it was his own mind, his own brain, acting against him, betraying him, deliberately troubling him, but it felt like something other, something supernatural, uncanny.
On a few occasions over the last few days he’d wanted just to scream, for no good reason. Especially at formal ceremonial events when it would have been absolutely the worst, most shocking and disrespectful thing to do. So many aliens arriving, so many different forms and types of creature, so many in exo-suits or things like tiny spacecraft it was like welcoming the contents of a toy cupboard, scaled for giants. How were you supposed to keep a straight face? That was when he most wanted to do it: to laugh hysterically in their faces or scream and shout and swear and thrash about on the floor and tear his hair out…
But: just a few more days. A few more days and it would all be over. They could all go to the happy land of good and plenty and never need to bother with horrible, messy, painful real life again.
He couldn’t wait. It was the only thing keeping him together.
“Please,” he said, smiling too broadly as he half turned to indicate the way through the variously smiling, grinning, tight-faced dignitaries behind him to the scarcely smaller and even more sumptuous room where President Int’yom waited — enthroned, enrobed, befuddled. “This way, please. The president is impatient to meet you.”
“Thank you,” the leading avatar said. The seven looked identicaclass="underline" tall, straight, dressed plainly but elegantly and their expressions radiating a kind of severe serenity. At their rear, Ziborlun, the Culture avatar the court had become used to, looked small, plain and homely in comparison.
Just as Banstegeyn turned more fully, to walk ahead of the Culture avatars, he caught a glimpse of — but, no, of course, it wasn’t really her at all.
A civilian, she hadn’t been backed-up; one of those who believed life was lived all the more sweetly and more sensibly for knowing there was no second chance, while understanding, without ever really needing to think about it, that a society as sophisticated and mature as that of Gzilt made sudden accidental death almost unheard of anyway. So, it wasn’t her, and it would never be her.
And only three days to go anyway, he told himself again, so it didn’t really matter. He stumbled slightly as he walked in front of the silver creatures to the opening doors of the presidential chamber. He wondered who would have noticed.
Only three more days.
He walked into the hundreds-strong swirl of bizarrely accoutred aliens and milling, red-clad people thronging the presidential chamber.
“Septame, a word?” Marshal Chekwri said, touching him on one elbow to draw him slightly aside from the crowds surrounding the dais where the acting president was greeting the avatars.
“Of course, Chekwri, but I am busy.”
“As ever. However. Two things. First: the ships we had see off the Ronte reckon they’re heading for Vatrelles. I thought we might let that leak to our new allies the Liseiden.”
“What? Why?”
“Distraction. Something to fill the news, and, if they quarrel, then perhaps another reason to leave this squabbling reality behind, no? Reinforcement.”
“Yes, yes, all right. Is that all?”
“No. I did say two things. Some pleasant news.”
“Always welcome. What is it?” The marshal’s staffers and his own, headed by Solbli and Jevan, had created a space around them so they could talk with a degree of privacy.
Chekwri brought her mouth close to his ear. “We have a major asset in place somewhere it might come in useful.”
“Do we? That’s good. What, and where?”
“Where, is Xown. What, is the returned Churkun. It was off for a while there, thinking about Subliming early following the event at Ablate, but in the end it didn’t make the leap; wants to go with everybody else — isn’t that nice? — so reported to me, happily — always worth covering such possibilities in standing orders — and asked if it could be of use. So I sent it to Xown, because that was the last place the Culture ship and the absconded Ms Cossont seemed to be interested in.” The marshal drew back a little, winked at him. Winked! Had she done this before? Was this some new thing, some fresh loosening of behaviour and discipline ahead of the so-near-now Subliming? “The simulations backed me up, but it was my idea first. Always good to be proved right. Isn’t it, Septame?”
“Always,” he agreed.
“And I think this time we go in full force, gloves off, maximum strength, if called for, don’t you?”
“Yes, yes, whatever you think fit.”
“Splendid. So we have a fully equipped, committedly one-of-us combat-hardened battleship ready and waiting at Xown, and that is a very good, a particularly good thing, Septame. May I tell you why?”
“Yes, Chekwri, why don’t you tell me why?”
“Because it has just reported that something fast — both coming in quick and braking very hard indeed — has just about hauled to a stop at Xown, and it’s almost certainly going to be the Culture ship.”
Colonel Agansu, still undergoing treatments he had come to regard as meaning he was under repair — rather than representing anything as biological as healing — had a dilemma.
“Colonel, the regs are clear. You need to update your avatar down on Xown. It’s been plugging along there patiently keeping pace with the airship for nearly ten days but now there’s a distinct likelihood it’s going to be put in harm’s way and it needs to have every advantage we can give it.”
“I am aware of that, Captain,” Agansu said. “Thank you.”
The colonel had been badly injured in the battle at the Incast facility on the Bokri Orbital. The Culture creature — the ship’s avatar — had succeeded not only in destroying the combat arbite Uhtryn through the illegal use of anti-matter weaponry within an enclosed civilian space, but had then somehow turned his own weaponry against him, turning a large portion of its own body into a perfectly reflective dish that had bounced his laser pulse straight back at him, crippling both his suit and his body, sending him plunging down the elevator shaft with little or no AG left.
He could still hear his own screams, loud inside his helmet, as he fell, blinded, burning, baked, both legs and one arm shattered, into the shaft, to land with a terrible crushing crash on top of the already wrecked elevator car at the bottom. He’d blacked out then, or the suit helmet’s remaining medical functions had put him mercifully under, but he could still hear that raw, inhuman scream in his ears and feel the awful smacking thud of impact, cracking open the suit, splintering his bones and breaking his back.