Reikl stared into her eyes for a few moments. “We need to ask you to do something for us, Lieutenant Commander,” she said. “I need to ask you; your regiment. Something that might have a relevance for all the Gzilt.” Reikl took a breath. “You are of course back under military discipline now, though even that might be seen to carry less significance than it ought, these days. But I need to know: are you willing to do what we might ask, what I might ask?” Her gaze flicked from one of Cossont’s eyes to the other, back again.
“What is it I’m being ask—?”
“Look for something,” Reikl told her.
“Look for something?” Cossont frowned. “Ma’am, I wasn’t special forces or anything…” she said. She felt trapped here, with just the two of them in this length of gleaming tube. Reikl was smaller than her, she realised, but seemed to have a compressed power, a sort of density that gave the impression of being overbearing.
“I know,” Reikl said, waving one hand. “We’re going to give you a combat arbite. Well, technically an android; looks human. For protection.”
“Protection?” Cossont found herself saying. She was no warrior. She’d been terrible at self-defence and weapon training; she’d stayed on an extra year after her draft period and risen to the dizzy height of Lieutenant Commander on the strength of a sincere interest in military band ceremonial music and an over-enthusiastic Commanding Officer. She hadn’t even been backed-up, had her mind-state read or anything, and that was just the first sign that you were taking the Military Outright seriously as a profession. Now they were talking of teaming her up with some combat arbite, for protection. Protection from whom, from what?
“Probably unnecessary protection,” the general said dismissively. “But this is of more than passing importance.” She smiled, unconvincingly. “Let me ask you, Ms Cossont: where do you feel your loyalties lie?”
Cossont felt disoriented by the sudden change in direction. “Loyalties? Um, well, to the regiment, to Gzilt,” she said. “And, ah, family…”
“And how do you feel about Subliming?” The general glanced at her chest. “I see you have no time-to, though your records say you were issued with one.”
“I just left it behind one day,” Cossont said, hearing her voice falter. She cleared her throat. “I’m ready to Sublime, with everybody else,” she said, drawing herself up a little, as though for inspection. Reikl looked at her, said nothing. “There’s a bit of… I’m a little nervous,” Cossont confessed. “I suppose everybody is, but, well, it’s all documented, it’s all meant to be… better. There; in the Sublime.” She was aware this sounded lame. She shook her head. “And it’s all I’ve ever known, ma’am; just what’s expected. Of course I’m going to go when everybody else does.” Reikl waited. Cossont added, “Because everybody else… does.”
Reikl nodded. “Kind of in the whole culture, whole society, preparing, since before you were born,” she agreed. “Now,” she said, “I’m going to ask you again: are you willing to do what we might ask, what I might ask?”
Cossont looked into the other woman’s eyes for a moment. She thought of all the people you heard about who had resigned commissions, disobeyed orders, committed ludicrous crimes, especially just recently, all because the Subliming was so close and the wheels of justice ground so slow; by the time they might expect to be punished, they’d have gone with everybody else. Every individual got their own chance, apparently, with no way — aside from summary execution — for society to pick and choose who went.
She suspected most people had been tempted to do something crazy in these final days, maybe something they’d always thought about but never dared do, until now. She’d gone for the other option, of just keeping your head down and maybe taking on an absorbing life-task until the big day came. One way of looking at this was that it was less self-obsessed. Another was that it was less daring, a cop-out, almost cowardly.
She could say no, she was aware of that. Reikl she trusted, and had heard good things about, but the uselessness of the other two senior officers had been a shock. She hadn’t realised how mad things had become. They’d all be Sublimed soon anyway — what was the point of taking on some mission that might be even slightly dangerous? It was all very romantic, but she had no illusions regarding her own abilities — she was no spy, no hero, no super-agent.
Still, there was something about the intensity of the other woman’s gaze and the way she carried herself, some expression of the force of her personality — and maybe just some residual need in Cossont to obey somebody so much more senior, inculcated from childhood and throughout her life — that made her want to please Reikl, to do as she said or even demanded. It was also, she admitted to herself, a way of abandoning her idiotic life-task without losing too much self-respect. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do whatever I can, ma’am. But it would help to know—”
“Yes.” Reikl nodded, as though just remembering something. “Yes, well, sorry to make it sound so melodramatic, Lieutenant Commander, but let me get to the point: the Book of Truth is a lie.”
Cossont stared at her.
The Gzilt holy book was something you just grew up with, something you took for granted, and felt proud of. It might, in a sense, have outlived its most useful period, when it had demonstrably been telling the Gzilt people truths — facts — they could never have guessed at the time, but it was still revered. Of course there were doubts about it, there always had been; when you found out about all the other holy books there had ever been throughout the histories of other peoples throughout the galaxy, you realised how common they were, and how fallible, how restricted they were by the usually tribal prejudices and traditions of the people who — it took real blind faith not to accept — had made them up.
But even then, of course, the Book of Truth stood alone, as the one that had made sense throughout.
That the Zihdren had turned out to be not quite so important, and not unique, as the book implied, made little difference. Because another thing that you learned was that everybody had their own point of view; all species and civilisations saw things from their own perspective — and with themselves, generally, naturally, at the centre of things. The Gzilt were in one sense no different, and in another were rather better off, more justified in their self-regard, because they had had less to repudiate, less baggage to renounce; their holy book had little to apologise for.
“A lie?” she heard herself saying.
“Not just a misinterpretation or a good deed or helping hand taken too far: an outright, deliberate lie, coated with a selection of scientific truths to make it easier to swallow, but otherwise fashioned purely to deceive,” Reikl told her.
“By the Zihdren?”
“By the Zihdren,” Reikl confirmed. “In fact, by a tiny faction within the Zihdren: a solitary university faculty, a small renegade research team with a single dissident individual at its head. We are, and always have been since the Book was put together, an experiment, Ms Cossont. The Scribe was just a clever man down on his luck with a gift for speculation, embroidery and marketing. He was selected by the Zihdren — profiled, chosen — and then given the basis of the Book. The rest, of course, he just made up.
“We know all this because there was a Zihdren-Remnanter ship on its way to Zyse and the parliament for the final ceremonies. It was carrying a… an android, some sort of humanoid entity that was to represent the Zihdren at the ceremonies, but it was also supposed to confess all this deception to the political high-ups just before Subliming, so that technically the confession would have been made and the Zihdren’s revelation would have been delivered, but too late — you’d assume, they were assuming — to make any difference, and not for general consumption, of course. The political establishment is more locked into the whole Subliming idea than anybody else; they might be a little shocked, dazed even, to have confirmed what cynics and apostates have been muttering for millennia, but they would never call off the whole Subliming or think to put it to a vote or a plebiscite.”