well do what I can to make the journey as safe as possible. I’ll help with the vessel’s maintenance, if
you like. I would prefer, though, if you called
me by my name, and not just by that word you manage to make sound like an
expletive: ‘machine.’ I am
called
Unaha-Closp. Is it asking too
much for you to address me as such."
“Why, certainly not, Unaha-Closp," Horza said, trying to look and sound sufficiently bogus in his abjection. “I shall most
assuredly ensure that
I call you that in future."
“It might," the drone said, rising from the table to the level of Horza’s eyes, “seem amusing to you, but it matters to me.
I am not just a
computer, I am a drone. I am conscious and I have an individual identity. Therefore I have a name."
“I told you I’d use it," Horza said.
“Thank you. I shall go and see if your engineer needs any help inspecting the laser housing." It floated to the door. Horza
watched it go.
He was alone. He sat down and looked at the screen, down at the far end of the mess. The debris that had been Vavatch glowed
with a
barren glare; that vast cloud of matter was still visible. But it was cooling, dead and spinning away; becoming less
real, more ghostly, less
substantial all the time.
He sat back and closed his eyes. He would wait awhile before going to sleep. He wanted to give the others time to think about
what they
had found out. They would be easier to read then; he would know if he was safe for the moment or whether he would
have to watch them all. He
also wanted to wait until Yalson and Dorolow had finished with Balveda. The Culture agent might
be biding her time, now she thought she had
longer to live, but she might still try something. He wanted to be awake in case
she did. He still hadn’t decided whether to kill her now or not, but
at least he, too, now had time to think.
* * *
The
Clear Air Turbulence
completed its last programmed course correction, swinging its nose toward the Glittercliff face; not in the precise
direction
of the Schar’s World star, but onto the general bearing.
Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered
twinkling
fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out toward the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled
with the fury of the world’s
destruction.
Horza sat alone in the mess room a little longer, watching the remnants dissipate.
Light against the darkness, a fat torus of nothing, just debris. An entire world just wiped out. Not merely destroyed—the
very first cut of the
Grid energies would have been enough to do that—but obliterated, taken carefully, precisely, artistically
apart; annihilation made into an
aesthetic experience. The arrogant grace of it, the absolutezero coldness of that sophisticated
viciousness… it impressed almost as much as it
appalled. Even he would admit to a certain reluctant admiration.
The Culture had not wasted its lesson to the Idirans and the rest of the galactic community. It had turned even that ghastly
waste of effort and
skill into a thing of beauty…. But it was a message it would regret, Horza thought, as the hyper-light
sped and the ordinary light crawled through
the galaxy.
This was what the Culture offered, this was its signal, its advertisement, its legacy: chaos from order, destruction from
construction, death
from life.
Vavatch would be more than its own monument; it would commemorate, too, the final, grisly manifestation of the Culture’s lethal
idealism,
the overdue acknowledgment that not only was it no better than any other society, it was much, much worse.
They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave
it any point or
advancement (a memory of darkness swept through him, and he shivered)…. But theirs was the ultimate mistake,
the final error, and it would
be their undoing.
Horza considered going to the bridge to switch the view on the screen to real space, and so see the Orbital intact again,
as it had been a
few weeks before when the real light the
CAT
was now traveling through had left the place. But he shook his head slowly, though there was
nobody there to see, and watched
the quiet screen at the far end of the disordered and deserted room instead.