He never would have the opportunity, of course — again, reality scarcely ever worked that neatly — but if, in theory, he was presented with the chance, the fabled they’re-tied-to-a-chair-and-you’ve-got-a-gun scenario, able to hurt or kill whoever had killed most of those he’d loved, he might do it. There was an argument that it would only make him as bad as them, but then he knew that in a way he was already just as bad as them. The only moral reason for doing it would be to rid the world, the galaxy, the universe of one self-evidently bad person. As though there would ever be a shortage, as though that wouldn’t just leave the same niche for another.
And it would be a military machine, a hierarchy involved here, anyway. The responsibility would almost certainly diffuse out from whoever — or whatever group — had drawn up the relevant strategy through to whoever had given some probably vague order down to whoever had drawn up the general and specific targeting criteria, on down to some schmuck grunt or thoughtless technician who’d pressed a button or tapped a screen or thought-clicked an icon floating in a holo tank. And doubtless that individual would be a product of the usual hammer-subtle military induction and indoctrination process, breaking the individual down and building them back up again into a usefully obedient semi-automatic asset, sentimental towards their closest comrades, loyal only to some cold code. And, oh, how utterly sure you would have to be that they really were responsible in the first place, that you weren’t being fooled by whoever had arranged all this tying-to-a-chair stuff and equipped you with a gun in the first place.
Maybe automatics had slotted in the final target programming. Was he supposed to track down the programmer too and tie him up with whoever had given the attack-authorisation or dreamed up the whole wizzo plan for visiting Ulubis in the first place?
If it had really been Beyonders, it might have been an AI which was responsible for the deed, for who-knew-what reason. Why, he’d have to find it, turn the durn thing off. Though wasn’t the Mercatoria’s murderous attitude to AIs one of the reasons he hated it so much?
And maybe, of course, it had all been their mistake and his fault. Perhaps they’d thought they were going to hit an empty house and only his idiot advice, his meddling, had filled it with people. How to apportion the blame there?
His eyes were bad now, like sand had been thrown in them. He couldn’t really see anything, the tears were so thick. (He could still see via the collar, which was a strange experience, the tipped, clear view of the arrowhead’s senses overlaid on his body’s own.) He couldn’t kill himself. He had to go on, see what could be done, pay tribute, try to make up, try to leave the place even fractionally better than he’d found it, try to do whatever good he might be capable of.
He waited for the Truth to kick in, for the sim-run to end, and when it didn’t — as he’d known it wouldn’t but had almost hoped it would — he felt bitter, resigned and grimly amused all at once.
He told the little gascraft to tip back and seal him in again. The arrowhead angled backwards, closing the canopy and enveloping him once more, the shock-gel already moving to cushion and cosset him, tendrils of salve within it starting to heal and repair his flesh and soothe his weeping eyes. He thought the machine did it all with something like relief, but knew that was a lie. The relief was his.
“Ah, opinions differ as opinions should. Always have, do and will. Might we have been bred? Who knows? Maybe we were pets. Perhaps professional prey. Maybe we were ornaments, palace entertainers, whipping beings, galaxy-changing seed-machines gone wrong (these are some of our myths). Maybe our makers disappeared, or we overthrew them (another myth — vainglorious, overly flattering — I distrust it). Maybe these makers were some proto-plasmatics ? This, must be said, a pervasive one, a tenacious trope. Why plasmatics? Why would beings of the flux — stellar or planetary, no matter — wish to make something like us, so long ago? We have no idea. Yet the rumour persists.
“All we know is that we are here and we have been here for ten billion years or more. We come and we go and we live our lives at different rates, generally slower as we get older, as you good people have seen within these walls, but beyond that, why are we? What are we for? What is our point? We have no idea. You’ll forgive me; these questions seem somehow more important when applied to us, to Dwellers, because we do seem -well, if not designed, certainly, as one might say, prone to persisting, given to hanging about.
“No disrespect, do understand, but the selfsame questions applied to Quick, to humans or even — like-species apologies begged, dear colonel, accept — to oerileithe, have not the same force because you do not have our track record, our provenance, our sheer cussed, gratuitous, god-denying abidance. Who knows? Maybe one day you will! After all, the universe is still young, for all our shared egocentricity, our handed-down certitude of culmination, and perhaps when the Final Chronicles are written by our unknowable ultimate inheritors they will record that the Dwellers lasted a mere dozen billion years or so in the first heady flush of the universe’s infancy before they faded away to nothing, while the oerileithe and humans, those bywords for persistence, those doughty elongueurs, those synonyms for civilisational endurance, lasted two and three hundred billion years respectively, or whatever. Then the same questions might be asked of you: Why? What for? To what end? And — who can say! — perhaps for you, such being the case, there will be an answer. Better yet, one that makes sense.
“For now, though, we alone are stuck with such awkward challenges. Everybody else seems to come and go, and that appears natural, that is to be expected, that is the given: species appear, develop, blossom, flourish, expand, coast, shrink and fade. Cynics would say: ha! just nature, is all — no credit to claim, no blame to take, but I say huzzah! Good for all for trying, for taking part, for being such sports. But we? Us? No, we’re different. We seem cursed, doomed, marked out to outstay our welcome, linger in a niche that could as well fit many — yes, many! — others, making everybody else feel uncomfortable by our just still being here when by rights we should have shuffled off with our once-contemporaries long ago. It’s an embarrassment, I don’t mind admitting. I’m amongst friends, I can say these things. And anyway, I’m just an old mad Dweller, a tramp, an itinerant, a floatful plodder from place to place, worthy of nothing but contempt and handouts, both if I’m lucky, worse if I’m not. I try your patience. Forgive me. I get to talk to so few apart from the voices I make up.”
The speaker was an off-sequence Dweller of Cuspian age called Oazil. To be off-sequence was to have declared oneself -or, sometimes, to have been declared by one’s peers — uninterested in or apart from the usual steady progression of age and seniority that Dweller society assumed its citizens would follow. It was not by itself a state of disgrace — it was often compared to a person becoming a monk or a nun — though if it had been imposed on rather than chosen by a Dweller it was certainly a sign that they might later become an Outcast, and physically ejected from their home planet, a sanction which, given the relaxed attitude Dwellers displayed to both interstellar travel times and spaceship-construction quality control, was effectively a sentence of somewhere between several thousand years solitary confinement, and death.
Oazil was an itinerant, a tramp, a wanderer. He had entirely lost contact with a family he claimed to have anyway forgotten all details of, had no real friends to speak of, belonged to no clubs, sodalities, societies, leagues or groups and had no permanent home.