“Not yet,” she said, sighing again. “Can you send up that — you know — your… that little—”
“My minidrone.”
“That’s the fella. Keep an eye on it. In case it’s not listening when we…” Her voice trailed off as she swayed from side to side, stretching. She shook a couple of her hands again, tucked the instrument bows under one arm and started trying to push the loosened strands of her hair back into its band. “Weather?” she asked, as a small hatch opened along the flier’s dorsal bulge and a tiny version of the machine buzzed into the air, turning and zipping off towards where she’d seen the distant flock of birds. The minidrone was visible for just a few seconds, illuminated mostly by the hazy light reflecting from the Girdlecity’s upper reaches, the nearest few hundred horizontal kilometres of which still shone in the sunlight like some vast tracery of silver and gold wrapped across the sky.
“Cooling at a degree every fifty minutes,” the flier told her. “Wind variable but increasing to an average of 18 km/h, gusting twenty-five, backing west-north-west.”
Cossont frowned, gazing north-west across the plains to some far, shadow-dark mountains, then looked back at the sloped cliff of Girdlecity behind her. The vast structure was a steep-sided upheaval of semi-exotic metal tubes and facings, curved and sweeping walls of synthetic stone dresswork, swirled patterns of diamond-film windows and whole stretched filigrees of carbon-black cabling, the entire confusion of pierced architectures rising almost straight up to its bright, curved, horizon-to-horizon summit, nearly two hundred kilometres above and arguably, if not technically, in space. She did something she had only taken to doing recently when she was on or in the Girdlecity; she just stood looking, waiting to see some movement. There wasn’t any. There rarely was, these days. Sometimes she felt like the only person still alive and un-Stored in the whole world.
Looking between the various local components of the Girdlecity, Cossont could see sky and clouds on the far side of the colossal artefact, perhaps fifty kilometres away; the sky was brighter to the south, the clouds wispier. The degree of Through here — the proportion of architecture to open air — was about fifty per cent, meaning that winds had an unusually good chance of blowing straight through.
“That might work,” she muttered.
Cossont rubbed at her back again. The Gzilt conventionally possessed the humanoid-normal complement of arms — two, according to most authorities — and the alterations required to provide Vyr with twice the average while retaining the desired qualities of litheness and flexibility had meant leaving her with a spine that was prone to seizing up if left stressed too long in the one position.
“Mind if I sleep?” the flier asked.
“No; you sleep,” Cossont said, flapping one hand at the aircraft as she inspected the elevenstring’s tuning keys and machine heads. “Wait till I need you. Going comms down myself,” she said, clicking at the earbud that controlled the relevant implants.
The flier switched off its lights, hinged the cockpit closed and went quiet and dark.
Alone again, in a pocket of silence as the wind dropped and all went still, Cossont paused for a moment. She looked up into the blue-black sky with its tinily pointed spray of stars and sat-light, and wondered what it would really be like to be Sublimed, to have gone through with it, to be living on this reputedly fabulously and unarguably real Other Side.
The Gzilt had been living with the idea of Subliming for centuries, generations. At first only a few people had thought it would be a good idea; then, gradually, over time, more and more had. Eventually you had the sort of numbers that would make the whole thing work, because to do it properly required serious numbers — preferably a whole civilisation.
In theory an individual could Sublime, but in practice only solitary AIs ever did, successfully. It took something as complex and self-referentially perfect as a high-level AI to have the cohesion to stand up to the Sublime alone; no normal biological individual could — you just evaporated in there. It was not utter annihilation — all the information you brought with you remained — but the persona, the individual as a functioning, identifiable and distinctive entity — that was gone. Civilisations, and the individuals within those civilisations, survived and flourished in the Sublime over galactically significant periods of time, though they gradually changed beyond comprehension.
That, though, would have happened anyway, had those societies stayed in the Real, and all the research and comparisons and experts and statistics agreed that there was orders-of-magnitude more stability in the Sublime than in the realm of mere matter and energy.
Cossont sighed. She had no idea why she was staring up at the sky to think about all this. The Sublime, like some ideas of God or whatever, was all around. She inspected the end of one of her upper-arm fingers. The tip was callused with wear from trying to control the strings of the elevenstring. The Sublime might as well be in the ridges of hardened skin on the end of her finger as up in the sky.
Parcelled, rolled, compressed and enfolded into the dimensions beyond the dimensions beyond the ones you could see and understand; that was where the Sublime was, and it was a maze-like series of right-angle turns away from this, from normal, three-dimensional reality where she stood on a high platform at sunset, thinking about it.
Cossont had a hard enough time really comprehending hyperspace, the fourth dimension, let alone the next three or four that somehow encompassed the Reality and allowed for nested universes to climb away from the universe-creating singularity at the centre of things and either circle back round some immense cosmic doughnut to be re-compacted and born again, or radiate away into whatever it was that surrounded this mind-boggling ultra-universe.
And the Sublimed lay in dimensions beyond even that; unutterably microscopic, unassailably far away but at the same time everywhere, shot through the fabric of space-time not so much like the individual fibres of this metaphorical weave, or their tiniest filaments or their molecules or their atoms or their sub-atomic particles but — pointedly — like the infinitesimal strings that made up those, that made up everything. In dimensions seven to eleven; that was where the Sublimed lay.
And that, of course, was why the elevenstring had eleven strings; it had first been designed all of ten thousand years ago, but even then people had had an inkling about how all this far-reaches-of-reality stuff worked, and artists had thought to incorporate something of these revelations into their own fields, including musical composition. Why the extra internal, resonating strings were there as well — up to thirteen of them, in addition to the ones that could be accessed from the outside of the instrument — she still wasn’t entirely sure. They were a bastard to tune but it was somehow only appropriate to the awkward, obstructive character of the elevenstring that, despite its name, it actually had more than eleven strings.
The wind picked up, soughing across the platform. A few hairs blew across her face. She tucked them back firmly.
Eighteen kinds of weather. Of all the things she’d heard about the Sublime, throughout all the attempts people had made to explain what it was like in any meaningful way, that was the one detail she could remember. It had eighteen different types of weather, not one. She wasn’t even sure what this really meant, let alone whether it was genuinely an improvement on reality.
She took a few deep breaths, readying herself to sit within the instrument and start playing, but still wasn’t quite ready. She kept thinking back to an encounter earlier that evening, shortly after the flier had brought her here from her home, a couple of thousand kilometres away in a part of the Girdlecity still partially inhabited, to this part, overlooking the plains of Kwaalon, where, as far as she knew, there was nobody living at all, not for tens of klicks in any direction.