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tumultuous.
~ Maybe. I suppose it doesn't matter much, anyway. Not any more.
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He saw the Homomdan Kabe Ischloear and the drone E. H. Tersono
appearing from the nearest access .way as the lights began to dim. Kabe
waved. Quilan waved back.
Tersono! We're going to blow up the Hub!
The words formed in his mind. He would stand up and shout them.
But he did not.
~ I didn't intervene. You never meant to really do it.
~ Really?
~ Really.
~ Fascinating. Every philosopher should experience this, don't you think,
Huyler?
~ Easy, son, easy.
Kabe and Tersono joined the Chelgrian. Both noticed he was weeping quietly
but thought it polite not to say anything.
The music rang round the auditorium, a vast invisible clapper in the inverted
bell of the Bowl. The stadium's lights had sunk to darkness; the light show in
the skies above flickered, flowed and flashed.
Quilan had missed the nacreous clouds. He saw the aurorae, the lasers, the
induced layers and levels of clouds, the flashes of the first few meteorites, the
strobing lines that hatched the sky as more and more streaked in. The distant
skies all around the Bowl, way out over the plains bordering the lake,
coruscated with silent horizontal lightning, darting from cloud to cloud in
streaks and bars and sheets of blue-white light.
The music accumulated. Each piece, he realised, was slowly contributing to
the whole. Whether it was Hub's idea or Ziller's, he didn't know, but the
whole evening, the entire concert programme had been designed around the
final symphony. The earlier, shorter pieces were half by Ziller, half by other
composers. They alternated, and it became clear that the styles were quite
different too, while the musical philosophies behind the two competing
strands were dissimilar to the point of antipathy.
The short pauses between each piece, during which the orchestra enlarged
and decreased according to the requirements of each work, allowed just
sufficient time for the strategic structure of the evening to filter through to
people. You could actually hear the coin drop as people worked it out.
The evening was the war.
The two strands of music represented the protagonists, Culture and Idirans.
Each pair of antagonistic pieces stood for one of the many small but
increasingly bitter and wide-scale skirmishes which had taken place, usually
between proxy forces for both sides, during the decades before the war itself
had finally broken out. The works increased in length and in the sensation of
mutual hostility.
Quilan found himself checking the history of the Idiran War, to confirm that
what felt like they ought to be the final pair of preparatory pieces really were
so.
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The music died away. The applause was barely audible, as though everybody
was simply waiting. The complete orchestra filled the central stage. Dancers,
most in float harnesses, distributed themselves about the space around the
stage in a semi-sphere. Ziller took his place at the very focus of the circular
stage, surrounded by a shimmer of projection field. The applause zoomed
suddenly then dropped as quickly away. The orchestra and Ziller shared a
mutual moment of silence and stillness.
A blanking field somewhere in the heavens above blinked off, and - up near
one edge of the Bowl's lip - it was as though the first nova, Portisia, had just
appeared from behind a cloud.
The symphony Expiring Light began with a susurration that built and
engorged until it burst into a single dashingly discordant blast of music; a
mixture of chords and sheer noise that was echoed in the sky by a single
shockingly bright air burst as a huge meteorite plunged into the atmosphere
directly above the Bowl and exploded. Its stunning, frightening, bone-
rattlingly loud sound arrived suddenly in a hypnotic lull in the music, making
everybody - certainly everybody that Quilan was aware of, including himself -
jump.
Thunder rippled round the greater amphitheatre of sky around the lake and
Bowl at its centre. The bolts struck earth now, lancing to the distant ground.
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