The person she had become, the person she was now, could see the force in all such arguments and yet still thought it was right to continue with the tradition. Perhaps it was wrong in some theoretical way, but perhaps not, and if it was, well, it did no great harm. Maybe it was even charming, just eccentric. Anyway, she would not like to have to be the Superior on whose shift the tradition was changed.
She had always wondered how faithful to a real, changing society and world this simulation was. Did the cities that the noviciates, travellers and charity representatives spoke of and claimed to have come from really exist? Did people within those cities work and struggle and study and improvise as they would in the Real? If you left this sim running, would somebody somewhere invent moveable type and printing, and so make what they did here in the Refuge irrelevant and all its occupants redundant?
She kept waiting for one of the charity representatives to turn up for their latest meeting with a regretful look and a copy of something hot off this brand new thing called a press.
However, as she approached what must be the end of her life in this virtuality, the freshly illuminated manuscripts kept on being taken away and the supplies of writing materials and of food and other necessities kept on being delivered. She realised that she would die — as far as that idea had any meaning here — in the same society she had been born into. Then she would have to remind herself that she had not been born here, she had simply woken up, already an adult.
One year, a noviciate was brought before her for denying the existence of God. She found herself saying pretty much what had been said to her by the old Superior. Showing the girl the deep buried cell and the whips and flails gave Chay no pleasure, though the dank, lamp-lit dungeon didn’t smell as bad as it had when she’d been shown it, she thought. She’d never had cause to use it; that was probably why. Or maybe her sense of smell was going with everything else. Thankfully, the noviciate relented — albeit with ill-disguised contempt — and no further action needed to be taken. She wondered if she could have ordered the punishment carried out if things hadn’t gone so agreeably.
Her eyesight gradually grew too poor for her to continue to write her life story in her part-charred book. The letters had become larger and larger as her sight had failed. One day, she thought, she would be writing only a single letter per page. Just as well in way, as she had only filled two-thirds of the blank and would die soon with lots of pages unfilled. But writing the bigger and bigger letters made the whole undertaking start to appear ridiculous and self-important, and eventually she gave in and stopped writing altogether. She had long since caught up with herself anyway and was effectively just keeping a rather boring diary.
So she bored the noviciates with her stories instead. She was the Superior, so they had to listen. Or maybe young people these days were just very polite. Her voice had almost gone but still she would be carried to the chapel each day to listen, enraptured, eyes closed, to the beautiful, transcendent singing.
Eventually she lay on her death bed and an angel came for her.
Nineteen
The Jhlupian heavy cruiser Ucalegon — forty times as fast as any ship possessed by the Sichultian Enablement — delivered Veppers to Iobe Cavern City on Vebezua in less than two days. Vebezua was the furthest flung of the Enablement’s planets, lying in a small spiral of stars called the Chunzunzan Whirl, a sparse twist of old stars that also held the Tsung system.
“Of course I’m serious. Why can’t I just buy one?”
“They are not for sale.”
“Why not?”
“It is not policy.”
“So change the policy.”
“The policy is not to be changed.”
“Why is the policy not to be changed?”
“Because changing policies is not policy.”
“Now you’re just going round in circles.”
“I am merely following you.”
“No you’re not. I am being direct. You are being evasive.”
“Nevertheless.”
“… Is that it? ‘Nevertheless’ and we just leave things there?”
“Yes.”
Veppers, Jasken, Xingre, half a dozen others of Veppers’ retinue plus the Jhlupian’s principal aide and a medium-ranking officer from the Ucalegon were sharing a tethered flier making its way through one of the great karst caves that made up Iobe Cavern City. The cave averaged a kilometre or so across; a huge pipe whose floor held a small, winding river. The city’s buildings, terraces, promenades and boulevards rose up from the riverside, increasingly precipitously as they approached the mid-way point of the cave, where the buildings became sheer cliffs; a few went even beyond that, clinging to the overhanging curve of the cavern’s upper wall. The flier tether-rails were stationed further up still, cantilevered out from the cave’s roof on gantries like a sequence of giant cranes. A series of enormous oval holes punctured the roof’s summit, letting in great slanting slabs of withering Vebezuan sunlight.
Lying close to its slowly ever-brightening star, the planet was cursed with too much sunlight but blessed with entire continents made mostly of deeply eroded limestone, providing vast cave systems in which its inhabitants — native animals and Sichultian incomers — could hide. You had to travel to the very high and very low latitudes to find pleasantly balmy climates. The poles were havens of temperate freshness. Very occasionally the hills there even got snow.
“Xingre,” Veppers said with a sorrowful shake of his head, “you are my trusted business associate and even a friend in your own strange alien way, but I may have to go over your head here. Or carapace.”
“Carapace. Though in our language the expression is I may have to go beyond your reach.”
“So who would I have to ask?”
“About what?”
“About buying a ship.”
“No one. There is no one to ask because such things are not covered.”
“Not covered? Is that the same as being not policy?”
“Yes.”
“Lieutenant,” Veppers said, turning to the ship’s officer, who also floated, twelve limbs neatly folded on one of the shiny cushions that doubled as chairs and translators, “is this really true?”
“Is what true, sir?”
“That it’s not possible to buy one of your ships.”
“It is not possible to buy navy ships of our navy.”
“Why not?”
“It is not policy.”
Veppers sighed. “Yes, so I’ve been told,” he said, looking at Xingre.
“Navies rarely sell their vessels, not if they are of the best,” Xingre said.
“You’re already hiring it to me,” Veppers said.
“Not the same,” the officer told him. “We remain in control. Sold to you, you assume control.”
“It’d only be one ship,” Veppers insisted. “I don’t want your whole navy. Really, such a fuss. You people are positively purists.” Veppers had once asked ambassador Huen if it was possible to buy a Culture ship. She’d stared at him for a second, then burst out laughing.
The flier zoomed, rising to avoid a high bridge barring their way. The craft stayed flat rather than pointing its nose up, the winch bogey travelling the network of flier tether rails above reeling in the craft’s four invisibly fine mono-filament lines equally.
Iobe city had banned flying machines entirely for centuries, then allowed fliers to be used but suffered one or two accidents which had resulted in the destruction of several notable buildings and prized historic cross-cavern bridges, so had compromised by allowing fliers but only if they were tethered to tracks in the cavern roofs and controlled automatically.