Of course here, in the kingdom of the dead, engaged in a seemingly never-ending fight over the fate of the souls of the departed, further deaths were no barrier to continuance. After each death in service the soldier’s achievements were reviewed by panels of his peers and other expert minds. Had he been brave, cool under fire, resourceful? According to the answers, lessons were learned. Soldiers, reincarnated to fight again, rose, fell or maintained their position in the ranks depending on how well they were judged to have done, and military practice itself changed gradually in response to the same adjudication.
Gradually at first, Vatueil had worked his way up through the hierarchy. Even where his contribution ended in death, failure and defeat he was found to have done the best he could have done with what resources and advantages he’d started with, and, most especially, to have shown imagination in his decisions.
His very first incarnation in the war effort had given every indication of being a disaster; not even knowing that he was in a simulation, having no idea what he was really fighting for, he had been a military tunneller who had turned traitor, been tortured and then died. Still, he had thought to walk through the poison gas rather than try to outrun it, which had counted in his favour, and the fact that such a previously stalwart and dependable soul had chosen to take his chances with the enemy rather than immediately try to get back to his own side had counted more against those in charge of that aspect of the battle space than it had against him, and helped convince those then running the war at a higher level that much of it was being waged too harshly and with too great an emphasis on secrecy.
And yes, here — in this open maze of broken moons, drifting rocks, abandoned facilities and empty factories, many generations of combatants ago — he had been part of the struggle.
Again, even though he had ended up fighting — all too successfully — against his own people, that had not been his fault. He had not even been his complete self in that instance, some all-too-believable glitch within the re-created scenario meaning that his download into the combat unit had been only partial, leaving it crippled inside, not knowing who was friend and who was foe. Still, even reduced, his essence had fought well, displayed imagination and shown some glimmerings of trying to develop. That had been worth another promotion.
Yet here was that same place, still disputed. Not all the subsequent battles throughout and amongst the somersaulting cascade of rocky debris and the orbiting industrial wasteland of deserted infrastructure wheeling round the system’s planets had produced a decisive victory for either side.
He looked at it, remembering, wondering what other troopers like his old self still laboured, fought and died there.
“We need a decision,” the group leader for this watch said. “Pursue, hold, abandon?” Her disembodied head looked round all the others at once, fixing her gaze on each simultaneously, because in the sim, of course, you could do this.
He voted abandon, though he was not convinced. Abandon was the decision, by just the one vote. He felt a sort of despairing elation, and wondered if that contradictory mix was also something only possible in a sim. It had been so long since he’d been properly alive, he was no longer sure.
It didn’t matter; they would abandon the battle for the simulated asteroids and the simulated orbiting facilities in this particular simulated system in this particular simulated version of this particular simulated era in this particular simulated galaxy.
He felt that he should feel bad about this, but did not.
What was one more betrayal amongst so many?
Nine
To build on such a scale would have been spectacular enough, she thought. That this thing was not unique, that it was not that special, that it was one of a “class” was moderately astounding. That it was some way from being one of the largest class was completely astounding. That it could move — bewilderingly, unreally quickly in a realm hidden at right angles to everything she had ever known or experienced — was beyond belief.
She sat with her legs dangling over the edge of a thousand-metre cliff and watched the various craft at play. Fliers of too many shapes and types to be sure they were not each unique — the smallest carrying only one man, woman or child — buzzed and fussed above, below, before and on each side. Larger craft floated with a stately grace, their appearance varied, motley and near chaotic with masts, pennants, exposed decks and bulbously glittering excrescences but their general structure approaching a sort of bloated uniformity the greater in size they were; they drifted on the unhurried breezes the vast craft’s internal meteorology created. True ships, spacecraft, generally more sober in form if not in decoration, moved with still greater deliberation, often accompanied by small squat-looking tug-craft that looked hewn from solid.
The canyon in front of her was fifteen kilometres long, its laser-straight edges softened by the multi-coloured mass of climbing, hanging and floating foliage draped spilling like gaudy ice-falls from the tops of the two great strakes on either side.
The sheer walls were diced with a breathtaking complexity of variously sized, mostly brightly lit apertures from or into a few of which, on occasion, the various air and spacecraft issued or disappeared, the whole staggering, intricate network of docks and hangars graphed onto each colossal escarpment representing a mere detail on the surface of this truly gigantic vessel.
The floor of the great canyon was near table-flat grassland, strung all about with meandering streams making their way to a hazy plain, kilometres ahead. Above, beyond filmy layers of pale cloud, a single bright, yellow-white line provided light and warmth, looping day-slow across the sky in place of a sun. It disappeared into the misty distance of the view in front of her. It was almost noon by the ship’s own time and so the sunline stood near directly overhead.
At her back, behind a low wall, in the parkland that covered the vessel’s topmost surface, people passed, tumbling waters could be heard and tall, distant trees stood on gentle rolling hills. Dotted amongst the trees, long vertical bands of pale, almost transparent vegetation rose into the air, each soaring to two or three times the height of the tallest trees and surmounted by a dark ovoid the size of the crowns of the trees beneath. Dozens of these strange shapes swayed to and fro in the breeze, oscillating together like some vast seaweed forest.
Lededje and Sensia were sitting on the natural-looking cliff edge of dark red rock, their backs to the low wall of undressed stone. Looking straight down, Lededje could just about make out the filaments of a sort of gauzy net five or six metres down that would catch you if you fell. It didn’t really look up to the job, she thought, but she’d been prepared to trust Sensia when she’d suggested sitting here.
Ten metres to her right, a stream launched out into the air from a spur of rock. Its separating, whitening spray fell only fifty metres or so before it was unceremoniously gathered up by half of a giant inverted cone of what looked like glass and funnelled into a transparent pipe that plunged straight down towards the valley floor. It was almost a relief to see that, like so many other seemingly exotic, extraordinary and fabulous things, at least part of the GSV’s functional glamour ended up expressing itself as plumbing.
This was the Culture General Systems Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amongst Folly, the ship whose avatoid Sensia she had addressed when she’d first woken up within its near infinite substrate of thinking material.