She looked around. Some sort of sitting or reception room. The place looked banal, in a spacious, luxurious, understated sort of way. Quite different from the sumptuous, over-dressed surroundings she and Berdle had found The Master of the Revels in the last time they’d been in the airship.
“What about that… chest, thing, Berdle mentioned?” she asked.
She moved towards another set of double doors. The lights flickered in the suite, seeming almost to fail, then recovering.
“Item fitting description in adjacent cabin, facing,” the suit said helpfully just before it opened the doors for her.
Still nobody about. One giant octagonal bed; many curtained alcoves, some holding items of furniture. In one stood the big upright chest Berdle had talked about earlier.
It was about as tall as she was and maybe a metre wide and deep when closed. It had a small wheel at each corner and stood hinged open to about ninety degrees. Clothes on a rail filled most of one side; the other side was all drawers.
She opened the top drawer, going up on tiptoe to see inside. The little cylinder lay on a piece of soft, folded material along with the rest of the bits and pieces that had been on the necklace they’d seen ten days earlier.
She stared at it, picked it up.
Behind their little window of thick crystal, the pair of sea-green orbs that had looked like berries seemed to stare back at her.
“Anomalous pres—” the suit began.
Then two things happened.
She was struck — kicked, it felt like — in the back, very hard, though somehow she and the suit managed to stay standing. At the same time something burst brightly, pink and white, off the drawer-front immediately before her, about level with the middle of her chest.
She was still thinking about turning round, wondering what had happened, when she realised that whatever light had burst against the drawer-front must have come straight through her to get there.
Smoke drifted up from the exit wound in her chest. She could smell roasted meat over the cold, sharp sensation of the oxygen.
“—ence detect…” the suit said, as more, individually slightly lighter kicks struck her all over her back and rear. This time she was thrown against the drawers of the chest, and the whole thing nearly tipped over. Then it bounced off the bulkhead behind and she was thrown back again, turning woozily round as she did so — the little trails of smoke made pretty spirals in the relatively still air — before she started to slide downwards. The ruined, ragged back of the suit went stuttering down the set of drawer handles, jolting her as she slumped to the deck.
A one-armed figure was standing in the doorway looking at her, just lowering his one good arm.
“Ship… re… establish — blish — lish — ish — shh…” the suit whispered to her, and sighed to quietness. The faint draft of oxygen at her nostrils faded.
Then the one-armed figure in the doorway lit up brilliantly all down one side, from foot to scalp, and was thrown bodily, hard against the door jamb, pieces flying off it as it rebounded, lit up from the other side now, disintegrating.
What was left, reduced to something like a too-thin, charred, one-armed skeleton, fell forwards, hitting the deck at about the same time as she did.
Twenty-three
(S -0)
Something.
Somebody talking to her.
Asking questions. A question:
Did she want to keep both sets of arms?
Of course she wanted to keep both sets of arms. What sort of idiotic, dumb-ass—
…back to sleep…
This would all be hurried, extemporised, done much more quickly than the normal guidelines advised, to keep to the schedule.
She didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t even know where she was, in this darkness. Once or twice she woke up — in this darkness — and wondered who she was.
But each time she remembered.
“…it was all a sociological experiment by the Zihdren. A rogue Philosophariat — the Philosophariat Apposital… I think that was their name — they, it — it was all down to one individual in the end — planted everything in the Book of Truth according to some obscure Metalogical hypothesis, to settle an argument between two groups of scholars with opposing theories. Briper Drodj, the Scribe, elab-orated on the basics as everybody pretty much knew, but the essence was always what the Zihdren had put there. Of course this whole approach was later discredited and the Philosophariat Apposital was ‘Dissolved with Moderate Disgrace’ not long after, and this particular experiment — like many similar others — was quietly forgotten. The Zihdren Sublimed a couple of centuries later, decades before the Gzilt even reached space.
“All this became known to a very few people way back at the start of the process which brought the Culture into existence. Happened following contact by Zihdren-Remnanter. They were, I suppose — so they claimed — conscience-stricken. Well, conscience-charged might be a better way of putting it. The Zihdren had felt bad taking this grubby little secret into the Enfolding so they thought they could have the best of both worlds by Subliming without mentioning it but leaving it to their Remnanters to spill the broth at a later date.
“There had been rumours about all this before, of course, but no one who counted in Gzilt society, or not enough of them, had ever really thought it mattered all that much until then, when the whole join-this-new-grouping-or-not thing was in the air. And, by the by, it wasn’t even definitely going to be called the Culture at this point; did you know that? A lot of people wanted that we should all call ourselves the Aliens, I remember, but… anyway, the vote went to ‘Culture’. Though, frankly, I didn’t vote for it. Or Aliens, I might add; I abstained.
“Anyway, we knew — the negotiating teams knew — that there was something the Remnanters had inherited — some dark secret or something — that might have a bearing one way or the other on the whole joining issue, for the Gzilt. Maybe even — the rumours were crazy, some of them — for the others too, as in a veto against the Gzilt joining being used, perhaps, by one or more of the other parties. Which was sort of ticklish enough, but, the thing is, the Remnanters still wanted the thing kept secret afterwards, even after it had been factored into the negotiations.
“That caused some head-scratching.
“It was an AI that came up with what looked like the best solution, at which, I recall, we were all quite pleasantly surprised at the time. Huh. That was a sign of the future, if ever there was one. Anyway.
“So, the solution was that one volunteer representative — who at the same time would have to be approved by the others in his or her team, so it wasn’t as simple as the first volunteer getting the gig… anyway, one of us from each of the relevant civs — should agree to hear this evidence from the Zihdren-Remnanter, vote on it — with a veto — and then forget what it was we’d been asked to vote on.
“This was all going to be made possible by preparing each of these rep’s brains before they heard the big secret, then — after they had — just, well, wiping that bit of their memories. We were all assured this was all entirely possible, and reliable and not in any way dangerous, and the most we’d forget would be a single day’s worth of memories. So we all agreed.
“And it all happened, and we all heard the big, bad terrible secret, but obviously it wasn’t that big or bad or terrible, because nobody vetoed the Gzilt joining this new cobbled-together civ — we were calling ourselves mongrels even back then, feeling very edgy and radical. And so the Gzilt were cleared to become part of the Culture… even though in the end they didn’t actually take up the offer and go through with it.