The same fate nearly befell the elevenstring, which she kept maintained and which she played, briefly, about once a year. But that would have felt like just too much rejection; keeping the ridiculous instrument somehow kept her from feeling quite so bad about abandoning QiRia’s soul, even if by now she had convinced herself, again, that he was just an old fraud.

Still, it was only when she was thinking of looking for a life-task to give her something to do while she waited for the Subliming to happen that she thought again of playing the thing.

This was a decision she would later regret, often.

She woke up, wondered where she was. Dim light, and her augmented eyes, showed her a room or cabin she didn’t recognise. It looked very nice though. There was almost complete silence. She was in the spacious shuttle craft of the Culture ship, the Mistake Not … She looked over the side of the billow bed, located in a little alcove off the craft’s main open area. Another alcove, closed off, held the inert body of the android Parinherm. The elevenstring was stashed overhead somewhere in a storage locker.

Pyan lay on the floor, a dark mat. It raised the tip of one corner lazily, sleepily acknowledging her, then went flat again.

She lay thinking about the day just passed. She’d been unconscious at least twice. She’d briefly met or at least seen dozens of people who were now all dead. She’d been rescued once, twice, just escaping death both times. And she’d been told to look for the soul of an old fraud she’d met once, for a few days, nearly twenty years earlier, when – looking back – she’d been little more than a kid. People were dying and ships damaging themselves to get her from place to place, and she wasn’t at all sure she was the right person to do whatever it was they were all expecting her to do.

Soon it wouldn’t matter anyway. She was still going to Sublime, wasn’t she? Everybody else was. She supposed she’d sort of have to go if everybody else did.

Personally, she wasn’t sure it really mattered whether the Book of Truth had been based on a lie; a lot of people had long half assumed that.

How much did it matter to others though? Perhaps a lot – perhaps enough. Would that knowledge – if it was true – stop people Subliming? Maybe it would. So much of the whole process of deciding to make this final civilisational transition had been about mood, relying on an atmosphere that involved a kind of gradually growing, shared, blissful, resignation. A feeling of inevitability had settled over the Gzilt somehow, self-propagating and self-reinforcing, making Subliming look like just the next, natural step.