The general glanced at her notebook, turned a page, nodded curtly. Cossont felt relief at getting something right.
“So, the ALC had turned—”
“The what?” Reikl interrupted, then shook her head quickly. “No; got it. Ship. Carry on.”
“The ship turned up at Perytch IV, I went down to this giant raft, met with QiRia — he was in human form by now, put back into his old body, though he was still kind of strange and vague a lot of the time. Oh, and there was another ship avatar there, from a Culture ship called the… Warm, Considering. I think. Pretty sure that was it. Felt like it was his… his mentor or protector or something. It seemed to take this claim of his about being incredibly old seriously too. I just thought, well, I just assumed this was all some sort of elaborate joke — Culture ships do this kind of thing… but I met him and we talked; just an hour at first, then more the next day, and the ship seemed happy to stick around and the old guy didn’t seem to want me to go and he was kind of fascinating, so we talked a lot, over several days. He claimed he’d spent… dozens of lifetimes as various other types of creature over the years, and often with some sort of sound or music-based thing going on, and he really did claim that he’d known Vilabier.” Cossont found herself laughing, just once. Reikl didn’t look amused but didn’t tell her to shut up either. “Back when he’d been human the first time, if…”
“T. C. Vilabier?” Reikl said, glancing at her notes. “The composer who died nine thousand, eight hundred and thirty-four years ago?”
“Yes!” Cossont said, waving her upper arms briefly. Etalde’s jacket slid off her shoulders; she caught it with her lower arms, replaced it. Marshal Boyuter regarded this action with what looked like consternation. “So I thought he was crazy,” Cossont continued, glancing at the two men but concentrating on Reikl. “At first. By the time I left, five, six days later, I believed him. He didn’t seem bothered either way; maintained that what he was telling me was all true but it didn’t matter if I believed him or not.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Mostly stuff about Vilabier himself. How he’d hated—”
“What else?” Reikl said. “Aside from Vilabier. What else might he have been doing at that time? Round about then — within a century or so.”
Cossont pressed her lips together. “Ah,” she said, after a moment. “Well, he did say that he’d been…” She shook her head. “He claimed he’d been involved with the negotiations, the conference that set up the Culture.” She shrugged, shook her head again, as though denying any responsibility for such patent nonsense. “He actually claimed… he’d been on one of the negotiating teams.”
“Which one?”
“He never would say. I didn’t believe that bit at all, frankly. I thought he was just playing with me. I could believe the whole thing with Vilabier — there were so many details, so much stuff I’d never heard of that sounded right… and also that turned out to be true, though only after I’d done some really deep research… But he was always much more vague about all the stuff concerning the conference and the negotiations, like he hadn’t bothered to do the research to lie properly. I mean, I checked, obviously; went through all the standard data searches, but there was nobody of that name mentioned and it’s all pretty well documented. I didn’t, you know, press him on it after the first time or two; he’d just bring it up again later, now and again, and tease me for obviously not believing him. Actually I was kind of embarrassed for him. The Vilabier stuff was so convincing but the… you know; being in right at the start of the Culture, when we… well, it was just so… so unbelievable.”
She suspected she knew how Reikl had got to hear about this. Like most people Cossont kept a journal and in the public part of it — the part that was shared by friends and might in theory be accessed by anybody — she had mentioned meeting somebody who claimed to have known Vilabier. She couldn’t remember if she’d mentioned QiRia by name, but she had mentioned the meeting. It had been a sort of boast, she’d supposed, though, at the same time, when she’d made the entry, she had played the episode down, maybe given the impression there had been only one meeting, not a series over several days. Even as she’d dictated the words she’d treated it all as much more of a joke than it had really felt at the time, as though she had stopped believing in it herself.
It had felt oddly like betrayal, as though she was letting QiRia down somehow, but — in the context of the sort of thing you bandied around with pals, about family, friends, boys, crushes, drink, drugs, pranks and so on — it had seemed too serious in its raw form, too pretentious. So she’d mentioned him only in passing, as an example of the kind of eccentric/crazy you met sometimes when you travelled, especially if you got to go travelling on a Culture ship (serious kudos there — few people got to do that and she knew most of her friends were jealous she’d been chosen, even if it had just been by lottery).
Reikl said nothing for a moment. Neither did the marshal or the other general, though that felt less noteworthy. Reikl looked down at her notebook on the table in front of her. “What was his first name?” she asked. She looked at Cossont. “You just called him QiRia; there must have been more, no?”
“Ngaroe,” Cossont told her. “He was called Ngaroe QiRia. Though he was just re-assuming that name; for the time just before — decades, like I say — he’d been…” Cossont looked up and away, grimacing. Right now she was missing her earbud and access to distant data storage. She spread her arms, nearly dislodging the jacket again. “Isserem?” she offered. “That was his… his aquatic name.”
Reikl nodded again, lifted a small pointer and made some sort of amendment to her notes. It might have been a tick.
“Intercepted!” General Gazan’tyo said suddenly, again.
Marshal Boyuter looked at him, openly sneering.
Reikl put the notebook back in her pocket. She wore a time-to on her chest; a tiny mechanical-looking thing. She glanced at it, stood, looked at the marshal and then General Gazan’tyo. “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me and the Lieutenant Commander?”
The two men exchanged looks, nodded. The marshal made the little tool thing hover again. He seemed to be humming to himself.
Reikl nodded to Cossont, who stood and followed her out of the room via the same door she’d entered by, though — once the arm-thick door had rotated back into place — she realised she was looking down a short stretch of gleaming circular-section corridor that hadn’t been there before. Another door was rolling aside at the far end as they walked. It closed behind them as they entered an identical length of corridor; its diameter was at least three metres but there was no distinct floor and the slight curvature under her feet made walking surprisingly awkward. It was like walking down a smooth-bore gun barrel. Cossont guessed that this was a part of the asteroid interior left over from when it had been without its own gravity field.
When both the doors behind and ahead were closed, General Reikl stopped and turned to Cossont, making her stop too.
“I apologise for the state of my fellow senior officers,” Reikl told her.
“I…” Cossont began, unsure what to say.
The general looked very earnest. “You seem… quite sober.”
“Um, thank you, ma’am,” Cossont said, and felt foolish.