“I had to destroy an Orbital, Ziller. In fact I had to blitz three in a single day.”

“Well, war is hell.”

The avatar looked at him, as though trying to decide whether the Chelgrian was trying too hard to make light of the situation. “As I said, the events are all entirely a matter of public record.”

“I take it there was no real choice?”

“Indeed. That was the judgment I had to act upon.”

“Your own?”

“Partially. I was part of the decision-making process, though even if I’d disagreed I might still have acted as I did. That’s what strategic planning is there for.”

“It must be a burden, not even being able to say you were just obeying orders.”

“Well, that is always a lie, or a sign you are fighting for an unworthy cause, or still have a very long way to develop civilizationally.”

“A terrible waste, three Orbitals. A responsibility.”

The avatar shrugged. “An Orbital is just unconscious matter, even if it does represent a lot of effort and expended energy. Their Minds were already safe, long gone. The human deaths were what I found affecting.”

“Did many people die?”

“Three thousand four hundred and ninety-two.”

“Out of how many?”

“Three hundred and ten million.”

“A small proportion.”

“It’s always one hundred percent for the individual concerned.”

“Still.”

“No, no Still,” the avatar said, shaking its head. Light slid across its silver skin.

“How did the few hundred million survive?”

“Shipped out, mostly. About twenty percent were evacuated in underground cars; they work as lifeboats. There are lots of ways to survive: you can move whole Orbitals if you have the time, or you can ship people out, or—short-term—use underground cars or other transport systems, or just suits. On a very few occasions entire Orbitals have been evacuated by storage/transmission; the human bodies were left inert after their mind-states were zapped away. Though that doesn’t always save you, if the storing substrate’s slagged too before it can transmit onward.”

“And the ones who didn’t get away?”

“All knew the choice they were making. Some had lost loved ones, some were, I suppose, mad, but nobody was sure enough to deny them their choice, some were old and/or tired of life, and some left it too late to escape either corporeally or by zapping after watching the fun, or something went wrong with their transport or mind-state record or transmission. Some held beliefs that caused them to stay.” The avatar fixed its gaze on Ziller’s. “Save for the ones who experienced equipment malfunctions, I recorded every one of those deaths, Ziller. I didn’t want them to be faceless, I didn’t want to be able to forget.”

“That was ghoulish, wasn’t it?”

“Call it what you want. It was something I felt I had to do. War can alter your perceptions, change your sense of values. I didn’t want to feel that what I was doing was anything other than momentous and horrific; even, in some first principles sense, barbaric. I sent drones, micro-missiles, camera platforms and bugs down to those three Orbitals. I watched each of those people die. Some went in less than the blink of an eye, obliterated by my own energy weapons or annihilated by the warheads I’d Displaced. Some took only a little longer, incinerated by the radiation or torn to pieces by the blast fronts. Some died quite slowly, thrown tumbling into space to cough blood which turned to pink ice in front of their freezing eyes, or found themselves suddenly weightless as the ground fell away beneath their feet and the atmosphere around them lifted off into the vacuum like a tent caught in a gale, so that they gasped their way to death.

“Most of them I could have rescued; the same Displacers I was using to bombard the place could have sucked them off it, and as a last resort my effectors might have plucked their mind-states from their heads even as their bodies froze or burned around them. There was ample time.”

“But you left them.”

“Yes.”

“And watched them.”

“Yes.”

“Still, it was their choice to stay.”

“Indeed.”

“And did you ask their permission to record their death throes?”

“No. If they would hand me the responsibility for killing them, they could at least indulge me in that. I did tell all concerned what I would be doing beforehand. That information saved a few. It did attract criticism, though. Some people felt it was insensitive.”

“And what did you feel?”

“Appalled. Compassion. Despair. Detached. Elated. God-like. Guilty. Horrified. Miserable. Pleased. Powerfill. Responsible. Soiled. Sorrowful.”

“Elated? Pleased?”

“Those are the closest words. There is an undeniable elation in causing mayhem, in bringing about such massive destruction. As for feeling pleased, I felt pleasure that some of those who died did so because they were stupid enough to believe in gods or afterlives that do not exist, even though I felt a terrible sorrow for them as they died in their ignorance and thanks to their folly. I felt pleasure that my weapon and sensory systems were working as they were supposed to. I felt pleasure that despite my misgivings I was able to do my duty and act as I had determined a fully morally responsible agent ought to, in the circumstances.”

“And all this makes you suitable to command a world of fifty billion souls?”

“Perfectly,” the avatar said smoothly. “I have tasted death, Ziller. When my twin and I merged, we were close enough to the ship being destroyed to maintain a real-time link to the substrate of the Mind within as it was torn apart by the tidal forces produced by a line gun. It was over in a micro-second, but we felt it die bit by bit, area by distorted area, memory by disappearing memory, all kept going until the absolute bitter end by the ingenuity of Mind design, falling back, stepping down, closing off and retreating and regrouping and compressing and abandoning and abstracting and finessing, always trying by whatever means possible to keep its personality, its soul intact until there was nothing remaining to sacrifice, nowhere else to go and no survival strategies left to apply.

“It leaked away to nothingness in the end, pulled to pieces until it just dissolved into a mist of sub-atomic particles and the energy of chaos. The last two coherent things it held onto were its name and the need to maintain the link that communicated all that was happening to it, from it, to us. We experienced everything it experienced; all its bewilderment and terror, each iota of anger and pride, every last nuance of grief and anguish. We died with it; it was us and we were it.

“And so you see I have already died and I can remember and replay the experience in perfect detail, any time I wish.” The avatar smiled silkily as it leaned closer to him, as though imparting a confidence. “Never forget I am not this silver body, Mahrai. I am not an animal brain, I am not even some attempt to produce an AI through software running on a computer. I am a Culture Mind. We are close to gods, and on the far side.

“We are quicker; we live faster and more completely than you do, with so many more senses, such a greater store of memories and at such a fine level of detail. We die more slowly, and we die more completely, too. Never forget I have had the chance to compare and contrast the ways of dying.” [...] “I have watched people die in exhaustive and penetrative detail,” the avatar continued. “I have felt for them. Did you know that true subjective time is measured in the minimum duration of demonstrably separate thoughts? Per second, a human—or a Chelgrian—might have twenty or thirty, even in the heightened state of extreme distress associated with the process of dying in pain.” The avatar’s eyes seemed to shine. It came forward, closer to his face by the breadth of a hand.

“Whereas I,” it whispered, “have billions.” It smiled, and something in its expression made Ziller clench his teeth. “I watched those poor wretches die in the slowest of slow motion and I knew even as I watched that it was I who’d killed them, who was at that moment engaged in the process of killing them. For a thing like me to kill one of them or one of you is a very, very easy thing to do, and, as I discovered, absolutely disgusting. Just as I need never wonder what it is like to die, so I need never wonder what it is like to kill, Ziller, because I have done it, and it is a wasteful, graceless, worthless and hateful thing to have to do.

“And, as you might imagine, I consider that I have an obligation to discharge. I fully intend to spend the rest of my existence here as Masaq’ Hub for as long as I’m needed or until I’m no longer welcome, forever keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms and just generally protecting this quaint circle of fragile little bodies and the vulnerable little brains they house from whatever harm a big dumb mechanical universe or any consciously malevolent force might happen or wish to visit upon them, specifically because I know how appallingly easy they are to destroy. I will give my life to save theirs, if it should ever come to that. And give it gladly, happily, too, knowing that the trade was entirely worth the debt I incurred eight hundred years ago, back in Arm One-Six.”

The avatar stepped back, smiled broadly and tipped its head to one side. It suddenly looked, Ziller thought, as though it might as well have been discussing a banquet menu or the positioning of a new underground access tube. “Any other questions, Cr. Ziller?”

He looked at it for a moment or two. “Yes,” he said. He held up his pipe. “May I smoke in here?”

The avatar stepped forward, put one arm around his shoulders and with its other hand clicked its fingers. A blue-yellow flame sprang from its index finger. “Be my guest.”