Look to Windward

The Memory of Running

The figure seemed to coalesce out of nothing, out of the air. Anyone or anything watching would have needed more than natural senses to have noticed the slow fall of dust spread out over an hour of time and a radial kilometre of the grasslands; that anything out of the ordinary was happening would only have become obvious a little later when an odd sort of wind seemed to stir itself out of the gentle breeze, disturbing the grass on the broad plain and producing what appeared to be a slowly revolving dust devil, whirling quietly in the air and gradually shrinking and tightening and darkening and speeding up until, suddenly, it disappeared, and where it had been there stood what looked like a tall and graceful Chelgrian female, dressed in the country day clothes of the Given caste.

The first thing she did when she felt she was complete was to crouch down and dig into the earth beneath the grass with her fingers. Her claws slid out, spearing the ground. She ripped out a handful of the soil and grass. She held the handful of earth and vegetation up to her broad, dark nose and sniffed slowly.

She was waiting. She had nothing better to do for the moment, and so she thought that she would take a good hard look and a good long sniff at the ground she stood on.

There were so many different tones and flavours to the smell. The grass held a spectrum of odours of its own, all of them fresher and brighter than the heavy notes of the soil, giving it a scent of the air and the winds rather than the ground.

She raised her head, letting the breeze ruffle her head fur. She took in the view. It was almost perfectly simple; ankle-high grass stretching in every direction. There was a hint of cloud to the far north-east, where the Xhesseli Mountains were. She had seen them on the way down. Above, and everywhere else in the sky, just aquamarine clarity. No sign of contrails. That was good. The sun was halfway up the southern sky. To the north, both moons shone full face, and a single day star twinkled near the eastern horizon.

She was aware of some part of her mind using the information in the sky to calculate her position, the time and the precise compass direction she was facing in. The resulting knowledge made its existence felt, but did not force itself upon her; it was like the presence of somebody in an ante-room, signalled by a polite knock on the door. She called up another layer of data and was presented with an overlay across the sky; suddenly she could see a grid superimposed across the heavens, and drawn on it were the paths of numerous satellites and a few sub-orbital transport craft, with identities attached and a further stratum of more finely detailed information on each implied. The satellites whose images were slowly flashing were the ones which had been interfered with.

Then she saw a couple of dots on the eastern horizon, and turned to them, her eyes adjusting. Inside her, something exactly like a heart thumped hard and fast for a single beat before she could control it again. Some of the earth fell from the handful she held.

The dots were birds, a few hundred metres away.

She relaxed.

The birds rose into the air, facing each other and flapping wildly. They were half displaying, half fighting. There would be a female sitting crouched in the grass nearby watching the two males. The scientific and common names of the species, their range, feeding and mating habits and a variety of other information about the creatures seemed to hover at the back of her mind. The two birds fell back into the grass again. Their calls came thinly through the air. She had never heard their voices before, but knew that they sounded as they ought to.

Of course, it was still possible that the birds were not as innocent and unthreatening as they appeared. They might be real but altered animals, or not biological at all; in either case they might be part of a surveillance system. Well, there was nothing to be done. She would go on waiting a little longer.

She returned her attention to the clump of turf she held, bringing it up to her eyes, soaking up the sight. There were many different types of grasses and tiny plants in the handful, most of them a pale yellow-green colour. She saw seeds, roots, tendrils, petals, husks, blades and stems. The relevant information describing each different species duly made its existence known at the back of her mind.

She was, by now, also aware that the data presenting itself had already been evaluated by some other part of her mind. If anything had looked wrong or seemed out of place — if, for example, those birds had moved in a manner so as to imply that they were heavier than they were supposed to be — then her attention would have been drawn to the anomaly. So far, everything seemed to be reassuringly normal. The data was a distant, comforting awareness, patiently lingering on the outskirts of her perception.

A few tiny animals moved within the mass of soil and on the surfaces of the vegetation. She knew their names and details, too. She watched a pale, thread-thin worm waving about blindly in the humus.

She put the divot back, pressing the clump of soil into the hole it had left and patting it down. She dusted off her hands while she looked around once more. Still no sign of anything amiss. The birds in the distance rose into the air again, then descended. A warm wave of air unfolded itself across the surface of the grass and flowed around her, stroking her fur where it was not covered by her plain hide waistcoat and pants. She picked up her cloak and fastened it round her shoulders. It became part of her, just like the waistcoat and pants.

The wind came from the west. It was freshening, taking the cries of the displaying birds away, so that when they rose in the distance for a third time, they seemed to do so quite silently.

There was just a hint, a faint tang of salt in the wind. It was sufficient to decide her. Enough of waiting.

She looped the cloak’s tail-loop over her long tawny tail, then turned her face to the wind.

She wished that she had chosen a name. If she had she would have spoken it now; voiced it to the clear air like some declaration of intent. But she did not have a name, because she was not what she appeared to be; not a Chelgrian female; not a Chelgrian, not even a biological creature at all. I am a Culture terror weapon, she thought; designed to horrify, warn and instruct at the highest level. A name would have been a lie.

She checked her orders, just to be sure. It was true. She had complete discretion in the manner. A lack of instruction could be interpreted as a quite specific instruction. She could do anything; she was off the leash.

Very well.

She leant back on her rear legs and brought her arms up to slip them into the glove pouches at the top of her waistcoat, then — with an initial bound very like a pounce — she set off, settling quickly into an easy-looking lope that carried her away across the grass in a series of long, smoothly sinuous bounds that stretched and compressed her powerful back and brought her heavily muscled rear legs and broad midlimb almost together then pushed them flying apart with every surging leap.

She felt the joy of the run and understood the ancient rightness of the wind in her face and fur. To run, to chase, to hunt, to bring down and kill.

The cloak rippled across her back in the slipstream. Her tail flicked from side to side.