It arrived, at last, after a climb of many thousands of steps, at the door to the airy, enclosed lair inhabited by the consciousness of the Sublime-returnee, the abstract of what had once been the Mind of the Zoologist.
There was no answer when it knocked. The place sounded quiet. It already felt that it knew what it was going to find. The door was locked, but only at a crude physical level, within the sim. Unlocking it was hardly more complicated than the act of turning the handle and pushing the door open.
The door swung, stuck, had to be pushed.
The Caconym’s avatoid walked in and looked around.
The space was, as it had guessed, empty of the Zoologist’s mind-state. It was full of almost everything else, including debris, litter and rubbish of every kind, stained glassware, bulbously gleaming electrical gear, intestinal quantities of tubing, foul smells, loudly protesting, unfed animals, and multitudinous ropes hanging from the ceiling, but of the strange creature with the pale red, mottled skin and the long arms with six fingers, there was no sign.
After it stopped looking for the avatoid of the Zoologist it started looking for a note. It didn’t find one.
“You might have said goodbye,” it said, eventually, to the air, in case its departed guest had left some sort of message behind that might be triggered by speech… but its voice just disappeared into the clutter and the dust and the hazy sunlight coming through the tall windows, and brought no response.
The ship instituted a full search of its computational and storage substrates, just in case, but with no real hope it would find any sign of the Zoologist. Sure enough, there was nothing. Apart from this ersatz, abandoned lab and its own memories of its departed colleague, the Zoologist had left without a trace.
The Caconym was about to calm the squawking, screeching animals in their cages, but then grew instantly tired of the whole absurd conceit, and with one command abolished the entire castle and everything in and around it, closing down the whole scenario with a single thought.
Twenty-four
(S -0)
In the end he went with everybody else.
There had been a time there when he thought he must have gone mad, for he had been thinking of staying behind, of not going at all, and perhaps — once it had all taken place — of putting himself into the hands of some authority, to be tried and judged and accept whatever punishment might be decreed for what he had done — for all the things he had done, but especially for this last thing.
But that had been just a passing fantasy, a mood, something to be indulged. In the end he knew he had to go, and he told himself that not going, and indulging in this masochistic orgy of justice and repentance, would be the truly selfish thing for him to do. Finally, at long last, it was not all about him. He was, he would be, just another humble Enfoldee, taking his place along with everybody else for the step off the cliff that bore you up rather than causing you to fall…
The Presence that had hung over the parliament building for so long had swelled a little, become a dark sphere. In the last few hours, more and more Presences had appeared, sliding into existence throughout the whole of Gzilt space, wherever there were people: in homes and communes and barracks, in ships and sea ships and aircraft, in squares and piazzas, in public halls, lecture theatres, auditoria and temples, markets and malls, sports venues and transport stations and in all the places where the Stored had recently been resting, before pre-waking.
The aliens who had come to wish the Gzilt farewell, and those who had come to profit from their going, had, by convention, withdrawn for the moment, leaving those about to depart to themselves.
Time-to devices and public clocks and displays spread throughout the Gzilt realm ticked down the last few hours and minutes, and people met at pre-arranged places and ate last meals and said last things and, sometimes, told others secrets they’d been keeping. Or decided not to.
Generally, as people tended to, they got together in groups of family and friends, then joined with other groups to form gatherings of dozens or hundreds and — again, as people usually did, though the exact expression of such emotionality depended both on the physical as well as the psychological make-up of the species concerned — they held hands.
Many sang.
Many bands and orchestras played.
And in the end the time counted down to nothing, and, in the presence of Presences, all you did was say, “I Sublime, I Sublime, I Sublime,” and that was that. Off you went, just folding out of existence as though turning through a crease in the air that nobody had noticed was there before.
He met up with Marshal Chekwri at the end. She had no more family than he did, and they had come to share much over the last twenty days or so.
They stood in the gardens of the parliament, under an inappropriately squally sky, with showers, waiting to say the words with a few dozen others. They left it relatively late during the hour that was regarded as the optimum period, just to make sure that a respectable proportion of the whole Gzilt civilisation was indeed going.
It was, he reflected numbly, a lot like watching election results coming in. There was a slow start to the Instigation, but the numbers quickly swelled about a quarter of an hour in, according to the news channels still covering events, and by the start of the last third of the hour it was obvious almost everybody was making the transition. The numbers Subliming accelerated again. Those gathered in the garden agreed they could go.
“Traditionally, people tell each other secrets at this point,” Marshal Chekwri said to him, in a brief moment when the others were all making their goodbyes and choosing where to stand, and with whom. “Mine,” Chekwri said, with a smirk, “is that I failed my officer exam. I cheated. Blackmailed a senior officer to get the pass.” She shrugged. “Never looked back.” She put her head to one side. “You?”
He stared at her. For an instant he wasn’t sure he knew who he was staring at, or why, or that he knew anybody or anything any more. Eventually he shook his head. “Too many,” he said, almost too quietly to be heard, turning away from her. “Too many.”
Jevan and Solbli, his secretary and aide-de-camp, were there, and he was astonished when it was Jevan who said he had always loved him, not Solbli, whose secret was that she had no secret.
He mumbled something, lost for speech for the first time in many decades.
They chose the end of the just-started minute as the time they would go. They all joined hands and when the time came they all said the words and went, just as a small rain shower began.
In the end he went with everybody else.
He was re-made, and yet he had been destroyed. He knew he would have done all he could, in his additional incarnation within the android on Xown, but still — again — it had not been enough. Had he been successful, he might have stayed behind, with something to celebrate and to live up to. Instead, he could only admit defeat. It was some consolation that nothing calamitous happened in the interval between the failed operation inside the Girdlecity, and the Instigation that was the beginning of the Subliming.
All that mattered now was that the crew of the Uagren had accepted him, and he was part of the ship now.
No Presence needed to appear; ship AIs were capable of performing their own Enfolding.
Agansu went with them.
In the end she didn’t go, not there and then. She knew what this meant.
“I can’t leave without you!” Warib had wailed from the screen, the sea blue-green behind her, the happy voyagers forming up in their last formations, hugging and crying and choosing who to hold hands with.