Dramatis personae
Once the war was over,
Juboal-Rabaroansa Perosteck Alseyn Balveda dam T’seif
had herself put in long-term storage. She had lost most
of her friends during the hostilities and found she possessed little
taste for either celebration or remembrance. Besides, Schar’s World returned
to haunt her after peace resumed, filling her
nights with dreams of dark and winding tunnels, resonant with some nameless horror. The condition
could have been treated,
but Balveda chose the dreamless sleep of storage instead. She left instructions that she was only to be revived once
the Culture
could statistically “prove" the war had been morally justified; in other words, when sufficient time had passed—peacefully—for
it to
be probable that more people would have died in the foreseeable and likely course of Idiran expansion than had in fact
perished during the war.
She was duly awoken in AD 1813 along with several million other people throughout the Culture who
had stored themselves and left the same
revival criterion, most with the same feeling of grim humor as she had. After a few
months Balveda autoeuthanized and was buried in Juboal,
her home star. Fal ’Ngeestra never did get to meet her.
* * *
The Querl
Xoralundra,
spy-father and warrior priest of the Four-Souls tributory sect of Farn-Idir, was among the survivors of the partial
destruction
and capture of the Idiran light cruiser
The Hand of God 137.
He and two other officers escaped the stricken craft while the Mountain
class GCU
Nervous Energy
was attempting to take it intact; his warp unit returned him to Sorpen. Interned briefly by the Gerontocracy there, he
was
traded for a nominal ransom on the arrival of the Idiran Ninety-Third Fleet. He continued to serve in the Intelligence service,
escaping the
schismatic Second Voluntary Purge which followed the Homomdan withdrawal of fleet support. He reverted shortly
afterward to his earlier role
of Combat Logistics Officer and was killed during the Twin Novae battle for control of Arm One-Six,
toward the end of the war.
After joining Ghalssel’s Raiders on Vavatch,
Jandraligeli
became a relatively trusted lieutenant in the mercenary captain’s band, eventually
taking command of the Company’s third ship,
the
Control Surface.
Like all the Raiders who survived the hostilities, Jandraligeli had a profitable
war. He retired shortly after Ghalssel’s
death—during the seven-strata battle sequence in Oroarche—to spend the rest of his days running a
freelance Life Counselor
college on Moon Decadent, in the Sin Seven system of the Well-Heeled Gallants of the Infinitely Joyous Acts
(reformed). He
expired—pleasantly, if not peacefully—in somebody else’s bed.
The drone
Unaha-Closp
was fully repaired. It applied to join the Culture and was accepted; it served on the General Systems Vehicle
Irregular
Apocalypse
and the Limited Systems Vehicle
Profit Margin
until the end of the war, then transferred to the Orbital called Erbil and a post in a
transport systems factory there. It
is retired now, and builds small steam-driven automata as a hobby.
Stafl-Preonsa Fal Shilde ’Ngeestra dam Crose
survived another serious climbing accident, continued to out-guess machines millions of
times more intelligent than she was,
changed sex several times, bore two children, joined Contact after the war, went primitive without
permission on a stage two
uncontacted with a tribe of wild horsewomen, slaved for a dirigible Hypersage in a Blokstaar airsphere, returned to
the Culture
for the drone Jase’s transcorporation into a group-mind, was caught in an avalanche while climbing but lived to tell the tale,
had
another child, then accepted an invitation to join Contact’s Special Circumstances section and spent nearly a hundred
years (as a male) as
emissary to the then recently contacted Million-Star Anarchy of Soveleh. Subsequently she became a teacher
on an Orbital in a small cluster
near the lesser Cloud, published a popular and acclaimed autobiography, then disappeared
a few years later, aged 407, while on a solo
cruising holiday on an old Dra’Azon Ring.
As for Schar’s World, people did go back to it, once, though only after the war was over. Following the departure of the
Clear Air Turbulence
—
aimed rather than piloted out by Perosteck Balveda for an eventual rendezvous with Culture warcraft outside the war zone—it
was over forty
years before any craft was allowed to cross the Quiet Barrier. When that ship, the GCU
Prosthetic Conscience,
did go through, and sent down
a landing party, the Contact personnel concerned found the Command System in perfect repair.
Eight trains stood, flawless, in eight out of the
nine perfect and undamaged stations. No sign of wreckage, damage, bodies
or any part of the old Changer base was found during the four
days that the GCU and its survey teams were permitted to stay.
At the end of that time the
Prosthetic Conscience
was instructed to leave, and
on its departure the Quiet Barrier was closed again, forever.
There was debris. A dump of bodies and all the material from the Changer base, plus the extra equipment brought in by the
Idirans and the
Free Company, and the husk of the chuy-hirtsi warp animal, all lay buried under kilometers of glacial ice
near one of the planet’s poles.
Compressed into a tight ball of mangled wreckage and frozen, mutilated bodies, among the effects
cleared from that part of the defunct
Changer base which had been the cabin of the woman Kierachell there was a small plastic
book with real pages covered in tiny writing. It was a
tale of fantasy, the woman’s favorite book, and the first page of the
story began with these words:
The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two
…
The Mind rescued from the tunnels of the Command System could remember nothing from the period between its warp into the tunnels
and its
eventual repair and refit aboard the GSV
No More Mr. Nice Guy,
following its rescue by Perosteck Balveda. It was later installed in an Ocean
class GSV and survived the war despite taking
part in many important space battles. Modified, it was subsequently replaced into a Range