Look to Windward (33 page)

“They might find the ship yet, Quil,” the Estodien told him. “There may still be wreckage. The Culture; their consciences. Helping us look for the lost ships. It might turn up yet. Not her, of course. She is quite lost. The gone-before say there is no sign, no hint of her Soulkeeper having worked. But we might yet find the ship, and know more of what happened.”

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “She is dead. That's all
that matters. Nothing else. I don't care about anything else.”

“Not even your own survival after death, Quilan?” the Estodien asked.

“That least of all. I don't want to survive. I want to die. I want to be as she is. No more. Nothing more. Ever again.”

The Estodien nodded silently, his eyelids drooping, a small smile playing across his face. He glanced at Eweirl. Quilan looked too.

The white-furred male had quietly changed seats. He waited until the big Invisible was approaching, then stood up suddenly in his path. The servant collided with him, spilling three cups of spirit over Eweirl's waistcoat.

“You clumsy fuck! can't you see where you're going?”.

“I'm sorry, sir. I didn't know you'd moved.” The servant offered Eweirl a cloth from his waistband.

Eweirl knocked it away. “I don't want your rag!” he screamed. “I said, can't you see where you're going?” He picked at the lower edge of the green band covering the other male's eyes. The big Invisible flinched instinctively, pulling back. Eweirl had hooked a leg behind him; he stumbled and fell and Eweirl went down with him in a flurry of crashing glasses and tumbling chairs.

Eweirl staggered to his feet and jerked the big male after him. “Attack me, would you? Attack me, would you?” he yelled. He had pulled the servant's jacket down across his shoulders and over his arms so that he was half helpless, though the servant anyway did not
seem to be putting up any fight. He stood impassively as Eweirl screamed at him.

Quilan didn't like this. He looked at Visquile, but the Estodien was looking on tolerantly. Quilan pushed himself up from the table they were curled at. The Estodien put a hand on his arm, but he pulled it away.

“Traitor!” Eweirl bellowed at the Invisible. “Spy!” He pulled the servant around and pushed him this way and that; the big male crashed into tables and chairs, staggering and nearly falling, unable to save himself with his trapped arms, each time using what leverage he had from his midlimb to fend off the unseen obstacles.

Quilan started to make his way around the table. He tripped over a chair and had to fall across the table to avoid hitting the floor. Eweirl was spinning and pushing the Invisible, trying to disorient him or make him dizzy as well as get him to fall over. “Right!” he shouted in the servant's ear. “I'm taking you to the cells!” Quilan pushed himself away from the table.

Eweirl held the servant before him and started marching not to the double doors which led from the bar but toward the terrace doors. The servant went uncomplainingly at first, then must have regained his sense of direction or maybe just smelled or heard the sea and felt the open air on his fur, because he pushed back and started to say something in protest.

Quilan was trying to get in front of Eweirl and the Invisible, to intercept them. He was a few meters to the side now, feeling his way around the tables and chairs.

Eweirl reached up with one hand, pulled the green
eye-band down—so that for an instant Quilan could see the Invisible's two empty sockets—and forced it over the servant's mouth. Then he whipped the other male's legs from under him and while he was still trying to stagger back to his feet ran him out across the terrace to the wall and up-ended the Invisible over the top and into the night.

He stood there, breathing heavily, as Quilan came stumbling up to his side. They both looked over. There was a dim white ruff of surf around the base of the seastack. After a moment Quilan could see the pale shape of the tiny falling figure, outlined against the dark sea. After a moment more, the faint sound of a scream floated up to them. The white figure joined the surf with no visible splash and the scream stopped a few moments later.

“Clumsy,” Eweirl said. He wiped some spittle from around his mouth. He smiled at Quilan, then looked troubled and shook his head. “Tragic,” he said. “High spirits.” He put one hand on Quilan's shoulder. “High jinks, eh?” He reached out and brought Quilan into a hug, pressing him hard into his chest. Quilan tried to push away, but the other male was too strong. They swayed, close to the wall and the drop. The other male's lips were at his ear. “Do you think he wanted to die, Quil? Hmm, Quilan? Hmm? Do you think he wanted to die? Do you?”.

“I don't know,” Quilan mumbled, finally being allowed to use his midlimb to push himself away. He stood looking up at the white-furred male. He felt more sober now. He was half terrified, half careless. “I know you killed him,” he said, and immediately
thought that he might die too, now. He thought about taking up the classical defensive position, but didn't.

Eweirl smiled and looked back at Visquile, who still sat where he had been throughout. “Tragic accident,” Eweirl said. The Estodien spread his hands. Eweirl held onto the wall to stop himself swaying, and waved at Quilan. “Tragic accident.”

Quilan felt suddenly dizzy, and sat down. The view started to disappear at the edges. “Leaving us too?” he heard Eweirl inquire. Then nothing till the morning.

•   •   •   

“You chose me, then?”.

“You chose yourself, Major.”

He and Visquile sat in the privateer's lounge area. Along with Eweirl, they were the only people aboard. The ship had its own AI, albeit an uncommunicative one. Visquile claimed not to know the craft's orders, or its destination.

Quilan drank slowly; a restorative laced with anti-hangover chemicals. It was working, though it might have worked more quickly.

“And what Eweirl did to the Blinded Invisible?”.

Visquile shrugged. “What happened was unfortunate. These accidents happen when people drink freely.”

“It was murder, Estodien.”

“That would be impossible to prove, Major. Personally I was, like the unfortunate concerned, unsighted at the time.” He smiled. Then the smile faded. “Besides, Major, I think you'll find Called-To-Arms Eweirl has a certain latitude in such matters.” He reached out and patted Quilan's hand. “You must not concern yourself with the unhappy incident any further.”

•   •   •   

Quilan spent a lot of time in the ship's gym. Eweirl did, too, though they exchanged few words. Quilan had little he wanted to say to the other male, and Eweirl didn't seem to care. They worked and hauled and pulled and ran and sweated and panted and dust-bathed and showered alongside each other, but barely acknowledged the other's presence. Eweirl wore earplugs and a visor, and sometimes laughed as he exercised, or made growling, appreciative noises.

Quilan ignored him.

He was brushing the dust-bath off one day when a bead of sweat dropped from his face and spotted in the dust like a globule of dirty mercury, rolling into the hollow by his feet. They had mated once in a dust-bath, on their honeymoon. A droplet of her sweet sweat had fallen into the gray fines just so, rolling with a fluid silky grace down the soft indentation they had created.

He was suddenly aware he had made a keening, moaning noise. He looked out at Eweirl in the main body of the gym, hoping he would not have heard, but the white-furred male had taken his plugs and visor off, and was looking at him, grinning.

•   •   •   

The privateer rendezvoused with something after five days' travel. The ship went very quiet and moved oddly, as though it was on solid ground but being slid around from side to side. There were thudding noises, then hisses, then most of the remaining noise of the craft died. Quilan sat in his little cabin and tried accessing the exterior views on his screens; nothing.
He tried the navigation information, but that had been closed off too. He had never before lamented the fact that ships had no windows or portholes.

He found Visquile on the ship's small and elegantly spare bridge, taking a data clip from the craft's manual controls and slipping it into his robes. The few data screens still live on the bridge winked out.

“Estodien?” Quilan asked.

“Major,” Visquile said. He patted Quilan on the elbow. “We're hitching a ride.” He held up a hand as Quilan opened his mouth to ask where to. “It's best if you don't ask with whom or to where, Major, because I'm not able to tell you.” He smiled. “Just pretend we're still under way using our own power. That's easiest. You needn't worry; we're very secure in here. Very secure indeed.” He touched midlimb to midlimb. “See you at dinner.”

•   •   •   

Another twenty days passed. He became even fitter. He studied ancient histories of the Involveds. Then one day he woke and the ship was suddenly loud about him. He turned on the cabin screen and saw space ahead. The navigation screens were still unavailable, but he looked all about the ship's exterior views through the different sensors and viewing angles and didn't recognize anything until he saw a fuzzy Y shape and knew they were somewhere on the outskirts of the galaxy, near the Clouds.

Whatever had brought them here in only twenty days must be much faster than their own ships. He wondered about that.

•   •   •   

The privateer craft was held in a bubble of vacuum within a vast blue-green space. A wobbling limb of atmosphere three meters in diameter flowed slowly out to meet with their outer airlock. On the far side of the tube floated something like a small airship.

The air was briefly cold as they walked through, turning gradually warmer as they approached the airship. The atmosphere felt thick. Underneath their feet, the tunnel of air seemed as pliantly firm as wood. He carried his own modest luggage; Eweirl toted two immense kit bags as though they were purses, and Visquile was followed by a civilian drone carrying his bags.

The airship was about forty meters long; a single giant ellipsoid in dark purple, its smooth-looking envelope of skin lined with long yellow strakes of frill which rippled slowly in the warm air like the mantle of a fish. The tube led the three Chelgrians to a small gondola slung underneath the vessel.

The gondola looked like something grown rather than constructed, like the hollowed-out husk of an immense fruit; it appeared to have no windows until they climbed aboard, making the ship tip gently, but gauzy panels let in light and made the smooth interior glow with a pastel-green light. It held them comfortably. The tube of air dissipated behind them as the gondola's door irised shut.

Eweirl popped his earplugs in and put on his visor, sitting back, seemingly oblivious. Visquile sat with his silvery stave planted between his feet, the round top under his chin, gazing ahead through one of the gauzy windows.

Quilan had only the vaguest idea where he was. He had seen the gigantic, slowly revolving elongated 8-shaped object ahead of them for several hours before they'd rendezvoused. The privateer ship had closed very slowly, seemingly on emergency thrust alone, and the thing—the world, as he was now starting to think of it, having come to a rough estimate of its size—had just kept getting bigger and bigger and filling more and more of the view ahead, yet without betraying any detail.

Finally one of the body's lobes had blotted out the view of the other, and it was as though they were approaching an immense planet of glowing blue-green water.

What looked like five small suns were visible revolving with the vast shape, though they seemed too small to be stars. Their positioning implied there would be another two, hidden behind the world. As they got very close, matching rotational speed with the world and coming near enough to see the forming indentation they were heading for, with the tiny purple dot immediately behind it, Quilan saw what looked like layers of clouds, just hinted at, inside.

“What is this place?” Quilan said, not trying to keep the wonder and awe out of his voice.

“They call them airspheres,” Visquile said. He looked warily pleased, and not especially impressed. “This is a rotating twin-lobe example. Its name is the Oskendari airsphere.”

The airship dipped, diving still deeper into the thick air. They passed through one level of thin clouds like islands floating on an invisible sea. The airship wobbled
as it went through the layer. Quilan craned his neck to see the clouds, lit from underneath by a sun far beneath them. He experienced a sudden sense of disorientation.

Below, something appearing out of the haze caught his eye; a vast shape just one shade darker than the blueness all around. As the airship approached he saw the immense shadow the shape cast, stretching upwards into the haze. Again, something like vertigo struck him.

He'd been given a visor too. He put it on and magnified the view. The blue shape disappeared in a shimmer of heat; he took the visor off and used his naked eyes.

“A dirigible behemothaur,” Visquile said. Eweirl, suddenly back with them, took off his visor and shifted over to Quilan's side of the gondola to look, imbalancing the airship for a moment. The shape below looked a little like a flattened and more complicated version of the craft they were in. Smaller shapes, some like other airships, some winged, flew lazily about it.

Quilan watched the smaller features of the creature emerge as they dropped down toward it. The behemothaur's envelope skin was blue and purple, and it too possessed long lines of pale yellow-green frills which rippled along its length, seemingly propelling it. Giant fins protruded vertically and laterally, topped with long bulbous protrusions, like the wing-tip fuel tanks of ancient aircraft. Across its summit line and along its sides, great scalloped dark-red ridges ran, like three enormous, encasing spines. Other protrusions, bulbs and hummocks covered its top and sides, producing
a generally symmetrical effect that only broke down at a more detailed level.