Many sang.

Many bands and orchestras played.

And in the end the time counted down to nothing, and, in the presence of Presences, all you did was say, “I Sublime, I Sublime, I Sublime,” and that was that. Off you went, just folding out of existence as though turning through a crease in the air that nobody had noticed was there before.

He met up with Marshal Chekwri at the end. She had no more family than he did, and they had come to share much over the last twenty days or so.

They stood in the gardens of the parliament, under an inappropriately squally sky, with showers, waiting to say the words with a few dozen others. They left it relatively late during the hour that was regarded as the optimum period, just to make sure that a respectable proportion of the whole Gzilt civilisation was indeed going.

It was, he reflected numbly, a lot like watching election results coming in. There was a slow start to the Instigation, but the numbers quickly swelled about a quarter of an hour in, according to the news channels still covering events, and by the start of the last third of the hour it was obvious almost everybody was making the transition. The numbers Subliming accelerated again. Those gathered in the garden agreed they could go.

“Traditionally, people tell each other secrets at this point,” Marshal Chekwri said to him, in a brief moment when the others were all making their goodbyes and choosing where to stand, and with whom. “Mine,” Chekwri said, with a smirk, “is that I failed my officer exam. I cheated. Blackmailed a senior officer to get the pass.” She shrugged. “Never looked back.” She put her head to one side. “You?”

He stared at her. For an instant he wasn’t sure he knew who he was staring at, or why, or that he knew anybody or anything any more. Eventually he shook his head. “Too many,” he said, almost too quietly to be heard, turning away from her. “Too many.”

Jevan and Solbli, his secretary and aide-de-camp, were there, and he was astonished when it was Jevan who said he had always loved him, not Solbli, whose secret was that she had no secret.

He mumbled something, lost for speech for the first time in many decades.

They chose the end of the just-started minute as the time they would go. They all joined hands and when the time came they all said the words and went, just as a small rain shower began.

In the end he went with everybody else.

He was re-made, and yet he had been destroyed. He knew he would have done all he could, in his additional incarnation within the android on Xown, but still – again – it had not been enough. Had he been successful, he might have stayed behind, with something to celebrate and to live up to. Instead, he could only admit defeat. It was some consolation that nothing calamitous happened in the interval between the failed operation inside the Girdlecity, and the Instigation that was the beginning of the Subliming.