Look to Windward

Infra Dawn

“But you might die.”

“That’s the whole point.”

“Really. I see.”

“No, I don’t think you do, do you?”

“No.”

The woman laughed and continued to adjust the flying harness. All about them the landscape was the colour of drying blood.

Kabe stood on a rugged but still elegant platform made from wood and stone and perched on the edge of a long escarpment. He was talking with Feli Vitrouv, a woman with wild black hair and deep brown skin over hard-looking muscles. She wore a tight blue body suit with a small belly pack and was in the process of strapping herself into a wing harness, a complicated device full of compressed, slatted fins that covered most of her rear surfaces, from ankles to neck and down her arms. About sixty other people — half of them also wing-fliers — were distributed about the platform, which was surrounded by the blimp tree forest.

Dawn was just starting to break anti-spinwards, throwing long slanting rays across the cloud-whisped indigo sky. The fainter stars had long since been submerged in the slowly brightening vault; barely a handful still twinkled. The only other heavenly objects visible were the lobed shape of Dorteseli, the larger of the two ringed gas giants in the system, and the wavering white point that was the nova Portisia.

Kabe looked around the platform. The sunlight was so red it almost looked brown. It shone from the vastly distant atmospheres above the Orbital’s trailing plates, over the escarpment’s edge, across the dark valley with its pale islands of mist and sank onwards to the low rolling hills and the distant plains on the far side. The cries of the forest’s nocturnal animals had slowly disappeared over the past twenty minutes or so, and the calls of birds were beginning to fill the night-chilled air above the low forest.

The blimpers were dark domes scattered amongst the taller ground-hugging trees. They looked threatening to Kabe, especially in this ruddy glow. The giant black gas sacs loomed, shrivelled and deflated but still impressively rotund, over the bloated bulk of the banner reservoir, while their strangler roots snaked across the ground all around them like giant tentacles, establishing their territory and keeping ordinary trees at bay. A breeze stirred the branches of the ground trees and set their leaves rustling pleasantly. The blimpers at first appeared not to be affected by the wind, then moved slowly, creaking and crackling, adding to the effect of monstrousness.

The crimson sunlight was just starting to catch the tops of the more distant blimp trees, hundreds of metres away along the shallow side of the scarp; a handful of wing-fliers had already disappeared and headed down barely discernible paths into the forest. On the other side of the platform the view sank over cliffs, scree and forest into the shadows of the broad valley, where the meandering loops and oxbow lakes of Tulume River could be glimpsed through the slowly drifting patches of mist.

“Kabe.”

“Ah, Ziller.”

Ziller wore a close-fitting dark suit, with only his head, hands and feet showing. Where the suit’s material covered the pad of his midlimb it had been reinforced with hide. It had been the Chelgrian who’d wanted to come out here originally to see the wing-fliers. Kabe had already watched this particular sport, albeit from a distance, a few years earlier, shortly after he’d first arrived on Masaq’. Then he’d been on a long articulated river barge heading down the Tulume for the Ribbon Lakes, the Great River and the city of Aquime, and had observed the distant dots of the wing-fliers from the vessel’s deck.

This was the first time Kabe and Ziller had met since the gathering on the barge Soliton five days earlier. Kabe had completed or put on hold various articles and projects he had been working on and had just begun to study the material on Chel and the Chelgrians which the Contact drone E. H. Tersono had sent him. He had half expected Ziller not to contact him at all, and so had been surprised when the composer had left a message asking him to meet him at the wing-fliers’ platform at dawn.

“Ah, Cr Ziller,” Feli Vitrouv said as the Chelgrian loped up and folded himself to a crouch between her and Kabe. The woman flicked an arm out above her. A wing membrane snapped out for a few metres, translucent with a hint of blue-green, then flipped back. She clicked her mouth, seemingly satisfied. “We still haven’t succeeded in persuading you to have a go, no?”

“No. What about Kabe?”

“I’m too heavy.”

“Fraid so,” Feli said. “Too heavy to do it properly. You could fit him with a float harness, I suppose, but that would be cheating.”

“I thought the whole point of this sort of exercise was to cheat.”

The woman looked up from tightening a strap round her thigh. She grinned at the crouched Chelgrian. “Did you?”

“Cheating death.”

“Oh, that. That’s just a form of words, isn’t it?”

“It is?”

“Yeah. It’s cheat as in… deprive. Not cheating in the technical sense of agreeing to follow certain rules and then secretly not, while everybody else does.”

The Chelgrian was silent for a moment, then said, “Uh-huh.”

The woman stood up straight, smiling. “When are we going to get to a statement of mine you agree with, Cr Ziller?”

“I’m not sure.” He glanced about the platform, where the remaining fliers were completing their preparations and the others were packing up breakfast picnics and transferring to the various small aircraft hovering silently nearby. “Isn’t all of this cheating?”

Feli exchanged shouts of good luck and last minute advice with a few of her fellow wing-fliers. Then she looked at Kabe and Ziller and nodded towards one of the aircraft. “Come on. We’ll cheat and take the easy way.”

The aircraft was a little arrowhead-shaped sliver of a thing with a large open cabin. Kabe thought it looked more like a small motorboat than a proper plane. He guessed it was big enough to take about eight humans. He weighed the same as three of the bipeds and Ziller was probably almost the mass of two so they should be under its maximum capacity, but it still didn’t look up to the task. It wobbled very slightly as he stepped aboard. Seats morphed and rearranged themselves for the two non-human shapes. Feli Vitrouv swung into the lead seat with a sort of clacking noise from the stowed wing fins, which she flicked out of the way as she sat. She pulled a control grip from the cockpit’s fascia and said, “Manual please, Hub.”

“You have control,” the machine said.

The woman clicked the grip into place and, after a look around, pulled, twisted and pushed it to send them gently backing out and away from the platform and then racing off just above the tops of the ground trees. Some sort of field prevented more than a gentle breeze from entering the passenger compartment. Kabe reached out and poked it with one finger, feeling an invisible plastic resistance.

“So, how is all of this cheating?” Feli called back.

Ziller looked over the side. “Could you crash this?” he asked casually.

She laughed. “Is that a request?”

“No, just a question.”

“Want me to try?”

“Not particularly.”

“Well then, no; I probably couldn’t. I’m flying it, but if I did anything really stupid the automatics would take over and haul us out of trouble.”

“Is that cheating?”

“Depends. Not what I call cheating.” She angled the craft down towards a group of blimp trees in a large clearing. “I’d call it a reasonable combination of fun and safety.” She turned back to glance at them. The craft wriggled fractionally in the air, aiming between two tall ground trees. “Though of course a purist might say I shouldn’t be using an aircraft to get to my blimp in the first place.”

The trees rushed past, one on either side, very close; Kabe felt himself flinch. There was a hint of a thud and when he looked back Kabe saw a few leaves and twigs whirling and falling in their slipstream. The craft bellied down towards the largest blimp tree, aiming close in underneath the curve of the gas sac where the giant tentacle roots joined together and merged into the dark brown bulbous pod of the banner reservoir.

“A purist would walk?” suggested Ziller.

“Yup.” The woman made a sort of tapping-down motion with the grip and the craft settled onto the roots. She stowed the grip control in the panel in front of her. “Here’s our boy,” she said, nodding up at the dark black-green balloon blotting out most of the morning sky.

The blimp tree towered fifteen metres over them, casting a deep shadow. The gas sac’s surface was rough and veined and yet still looked thin as paper, giving the impression of having been sewn together, clumsily, from giant leaves. Kabe thought it looked like a thunder cloud.

“How would they get here in the first place, to this forest?” Ziller asked.

“I think I see what you’re getting at,” Feli said, jumping out of the craft and landing on a broad root. She checked her harness points again, squinting at them in the semi-darkness. “Most of them would come by underground,” she said, glancing round at the blimp tree and then up at the ruby light sifting through the ground trees. “A few would power-glide,” she added, frowning at the blimper, which seemed to be stretching, tautening. Kabe thought he detected sounds coming from the banner reservoir.

“Some would take an aircraft,” she went on, then flashed a smile at them and said, “Excuse me. I think it’s time I got into place.”

She took a pair of long gloves from the belly pack and pulled them on. Curved black nails half as long as her fingers extended from their tips when she flexed them, then she turned and clambered up the side of the reservoir pod until she was at its lip, where the springy material curled under the blimp. The tree was creaking loudly now, the gas sac expanding and becoming taut.

“Others might come by ground car or bike, or boat and then walk,” Feli went on, settling down in a crouch on the lip of the reservoir. “Of course the real purists, the sky junkies, they live out here in huts and tents and survive off hunting and wild fruits and vegetables. They travel everywhere on foot or by wing and you never see them in town at all. They live for flying; it’s a ritual, a… what do you call it? A sacrament, almost a religion with them. They hate people like me because we do it for fun. Lot of them won’t talk to us. Actually, some of them won’t talk to each other and I think some have lost the power of speech alto — Whoo!” Feli turned away as the blimp suddenly parted company with the banner reservoir and rose into the sky like a giant black bubble from a vast brown mouth.

Beneath the gas sac, attached to it by a thick mass of filaments, rose a broad green streamer of tissue-thin leaf, eight metres across and webbed with darker veins.

Feli Vitrouv stood, flicked out the claws in her gloves and flung herself at the mass of filaments just under the blimp, thumping into the great curtain of leaf and making it shudder and ripple. She kicked at it with her feet, and more blades punctured the membrane. The blimp hesitated in its ascent, then continued up into the sky.

Released from the shadow of the blimp, the air around the aircraft seemed to lighten as the huge shape swept into the still brightening sky with a noise like a sigh.

“Ha ha!” shouted Feli.

Ziller leant over to Kabe. “Shall we follow her?”

“Why not?”

“Flying machine?” Ziller said.

“Hub here, Cr Ziller,” said a voice from their seats’ headrests.

“Take us up. We’d like to follow Ms Vitrouv.”

“Certainly.”

The aircraft rose almost straight up, smoothly and quickly, until they were level with the black-haired woman, who had twisted so that she faced out from the banner under the blimp. Kabe looked over the side of the craft. They were about sixty metres up by now, and gaining height at a respectable rate. Looking right down, he could see into the blimper’s base pod, where the reams of banner leaf unfolded from their reservoir and were hauled rippling into the air.

Feli Vitrouv smiled broadly at them, her body being pulled this way and that as the banner leaf flapped and ruffled in the roaring wind of the plant’s ascent. “Okay there?” she said, laughing. Her hair flew about her face and she kept shaking her head.

“Oh, I think we’re fine,” Ziller shouted. “And you?”

“Never better!” the woman yelled, looking up at the blimp and then down at the ground.

“To go back to this thing about cheating,” Ziller said.

She laughed. “Yes? What?”

“This whole place is a cheat.”

“How so?” She flicked one hand and hung dangerously by a single arm while her other hand, claws stowed, brushed her hair away from her mouth. The movement made Kabe nervous. If he’d been her he’d have worn a cap or something.

“It’s made to look like a planet,” Ziller shouted. “It’s not.”

Kabe was watching the still rising sun. It was bright red now. An Orbital sunrise, like an O sunset, took much longer than the same event on a planet. The sky above you brightened first, then the rising star seemed to coalesce out of the infrared, a shimmering vermilion spectre emerging out of the haze line and then sliding along the horizon, shining dimly through the Plate walls and the distant abundances of air and only gradually gaining height, though, once it had properly begun, the daylight lasted longer than on a globe. All of which was arguably a gain, Kabe thought, as sunset and sunrises often produced the day’s more spectacular and attractive vistas.

“So what?” Feli had both hands anchored again.

“So why bother with this?” Ziller shouted, indicating the blimp. “Fly up here. Use a floater harness—”

“Do it all in a dream, do it all in VR!” She laughed.

“Would it be any less false?”

“That’s not the question. The question is, Would it be any less real?”

“Well, would it?”

She nodded vigorously. “Abso-fucking-lutely!” Her hair, caught in a sudden updraught, swirled above her head like black flames.

“So you only think it’s fun if there’s a certain degree of reality involved?”

“It’s more fun,” she shouted. “Some people blimp jump as their main recreation, but they only ever do it in…” Her voice was lost as a gust of wind roared around them; the blimper shuddered and the aircraft trembled a fraction.

“In what?” Ziller bellowed.

“In dreams,” she shouted. “There are VR wing-flier purists who make a point of never doing the real thing!”

“Do you despise them?” Ziller yelled.

The woman looked mystified. She leant out from the rippling membrane, then detached one hand — this time she left the glove where it was, anchored in the thick filament membrane — dug in her belly pack and clipped something tiny to one nostril. Then she put her hand back into the glove and relaxed back. When she spoke again, it was in a normal speaking voice and — relayed through Kabe’s own nose ring and whatever terminal set-up Ziller was using — it was as though she was sitting right beside each of them.

“Despise them, did you say?”

“Yes,” said Ziller.

“Why in the world would I despise them?”

“They achieve with minimal effort and no risk what you have to gamble your life on.”

“That’s their choice. I could do that too if I wanted. And anyway,” she said, glancing up at the blimp above her, then taking a longer look at the skies around, “it’s not exactly the same thing you achieve, is it?”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. You know you’ve been in VR, not reality.”

“You could fake that too.”

She appeared to sigh, then grimaced. “Look, sorry; it’s time to fly, and I prefer to be alone. No offence.” She took her hand out of the glove again, put the nose-stud terminal in her belly pack and, after a struggle, got her hand back in the glove. Kabe thought she looked cold. They were over half a kilometre above the escarpment now and the air spilling over the aircraft’s fields felt chill on his carapace. Their rate of ascent had slowed appreciably, and Feli’s hair was blowing out to one side rather than whipping all about her head.

“See you later!” she yelled through the air. Then she let go.

She leant out, gloves coming free first, then boots; Kabe saw the shining claws flick back in, reflecting orange-yellow in the sunlight as she dropped away. Released, the blimp set off into the sky again.

Kabe and Ziller looked out over the same side of the aircraft; it pushed back, keeping level, then spun around so they could watch the woman as she swooped. She kicked her legs and threw out her arms; the wing slats deployed, turning her in a single flicker into a giant blue-green bird. Over the noise of the wind, Kabe heard her wild ya-hooing. She curved away, heading towards the sunrise, then kept on turning and disappeared momentarily behind the banner leaf. In the skies around them, Kabe could make out a handful of other fliers; tiny dots and shapes angling through the air beneath the tethered balloons of the risen blimp trees.

Feli was banking round, gaining height now, heading back on a rising curve that would take her underneath them. The aircraft swivelled slowly in the air, keeping her in view.

She passed twenty metres beneath them, performing a roll and yelling at them, a huge grin on her face. Then she swung back over to present her back to the sky and swooped again, pulling her wings in and tearing away and down. She seemed to be diving into the ground. “Oh!” Kabe heard himself say.

Suppose she died? He had already started to compose in his head the next voice-piece he would send to the Homomdan Far-Flung Correspondents News Service. Kabe had been sending these illustrated letters back home every six days for nearly nine years now and had built up a small but devoted band of listeners. He had never had to describe an accidental death in one of his recordings and he did not relish the idea of doing so now.

Then the blue-green wings flicked out again and the woman rose once more, a kilometre away, before finally disappearing behind a fence of banner leaves.

“Our angel is not immortal, is she?” Ziller asked.

“No,” Kabe said. He was not sure what an angel was, but thought it would be rude to ask either Ziller or Hub for the information. “No, she’s not backed-up.”

Feli Vitrouv was one of about half of the wing-fliers for whom no recording of her mind-state existed to revive them if they dived into the ground and were killed. It gave Kabe an unpleasant feeling just thinking about it.

“They call themselves the Disposables,” he said.

Ziller was silent for a moment. “Strange that people are happy to adopt epithets they would fight to the death to throw off had they been imposed.” A yellow-orange highlight reflected off part of the aircraft’s brightwork. “There is a Chelgrian caste called the Invisibles.”

“I know.”

Ziller looked up. “Yes, how are your studies going?”

“Oh, well enough. I’ve only had four days, and there were various pieces of my own I’ve had to finish. However, I’ve made a start.”

“An unenviable task you’ve taken on, Kabe. I’d offer an apology on behalf of my species except I feel it would be superfluous as that is more or less what my entire body of work consists of.”

“Oh, now,” Kabe said, embarrassed. To feel such shame for one’s own was, well, shameful.

“Whereas this lot,” Ziller said, nodding over the side of the aircraft at the wheeling dots of the wing-fliers, “are just odd.” He settled back in his seat and produced his pipe from a pocket. “Shall we stay here a while and admire the sunrise?”

“Yes,” Kabe said. “Let’s.”

From up here they could see for hundreds of kilometres across Frettle Plate. The system’s star, Lacelere, was still rising and slowly yellowing to full brightness, shining through the continents of air to anti-spinward, its radiance obliterating any detail on the lands still in shade. To spinward — beneath the fuzzily broad then sharp but slowly diminishing line of the Plates that had risen into full sunlight, hanging in the sky like a bright, beaded bracelet — the Tulier Mountains rose, capes of snow about their shoulders. Spin-right, the view just faded away across the savannas, disappearing into haze. Left, there was a hint of hills in the blue distance, one edge of a broad estuary where Masaq’ Great River decanted into Frettle Sea, and the waters beyond.

“You don’t think I bait the humans too much, do you?” Ziller asked. He sucked on his pipe, frowning at it.

“I think they enjoy it,” Kabe said.

“Really? Oh.” Ziller sounded disappointed.

“We help to define them. They like that.”

“Define them? Is that all?”

“I don’t think that’s the only reason they like to have us here, certainly not in your case. But we give them an alien standard to calibrate themselves against.”

“That sounds slightly better than being upper-caste pets.”

“You are different, dear Ziller. They call you Composer Ziller, Cr Ziller; an address mode I’ve never heard of before. They are intensely proud you chose to come here. The Culture as a whole and Hub and the people of Masaq’ in particular, obviously.”

“Obviously,” Ziller murmured, pulling on his still stubbornly unlit pipe and staring across the plains.

“You are a star amongst them.”

“A trophy.”

“Of a sort, but very respected.”

“They have their own composers.” Ziller frowned into the bowl of the pipe, tapping it and tutting. “Dregs, one of their machines, their Minds, could out-compose all of them put together.”

“But that,” Kabe said, “would be cheating.”

The Chelgrian’s shoulder shook and he made a sort of huhing noise that might have been a laugh.

“They wouldn’t let me cheat to get away from this fucking emissary.” He looked sharply at the Homomdan. “Any more news on that?”

Kabe already knew from Masaq’ Hub that Ziller had been diligently ignoring anything to do with the envoy being sent from his home. “They have dispatched a ship to bring him or her here,” Kabe said. “Well, to start the process. There appeared to be a sudden change of plan at the Chelgrian end.”

“Why?”

“From what they tell me, they don’t know. A rendezvous was agreed, then changed by Chel.” Kabe paused. “There was something about a wrecked ship.”

“What wrecked ship?”

“Ah… Hmm. We might have to ask Hub. Hello, Hub?” he said, tapping his nose ring unnecessarily and feeling foolish.

“Kabe, Hub here. What can I do for you?”

“This wrecked ship that the Chelgrian envoy was being picked up from.”

“Yes?”

“Do you have any details?”

“It was an Itirewein clan articled privateer of the Loyalist faction, lost in the closing stages of the Caste War. The hulk was discovered near the star Reshref a few weeks ago. It was called the Winter Storm.”

Kabe looked at Ziller, who was obviously being included in the conversation. The Chelgrian shrugged. “Never heard of it.”

“Is there any more information on the identity of the emissary they’re sending?” Kabe asked.

“A little. We don’t have his name yet, but apparently he is or was a moderately senior military officer who later took religious orders.”

Ziller snorted. “Caste?” he asked heavily.

“We believe he is a Given of the house Itirewein. I have to point out that there is a degree of uncertainty in all this, however. Chel has not been very forthcoming with information.”

“You don’t say,” Ziller said, looking across the rear of the aircraft to watch the yellow-white sun complete its rise.

“When do we expect the emissary to arrive now?” Kabe asked.

“In about thirty-seven days.”

“I see. Well, thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I or Dn Tersono will talk to you later, Kabe. I’ll leave you guys in peace.”

Ziller was adding something to the bowl of his pipe. “Does it make a difference, the caste status of this envoy?” Kabe asked.

“Not really,” Ziller said. “I don’t care who or what they send. I don’t want to talk to them. Certainly dispatching somebody from one of the more militant ruling cliques who happens also to be some sort of holy boot-boy shows they aren’t trying particularly hard to ingratiate themselves with me. I don’t know whether to feel insulted or honoured.”

“Perhaps he is a devotee of your music.”

“Yes, maybe he doubles or triples as a musicology professor for one of the more exclusive universities,” Ziller said, sucking on the pipe again. Some smoke drifted from the bowl.

“Ziller,” Kabe said. “I’d like to ask you a question.” The Chelgrian looked at him. He went on. “The extended piece you’ve been working on. Would it be to mark the end of the Twin Novae period, commissioned by Hub?” He found himself glancing without meaning to in the direction of Portisia’s bright point.

Ziller smiled slowly. “Between ourselves?” he asked.

“Of course. You have my word.”

“Then, yes,” Ziller said. “A full-blown symphony to commemorate the end of Hub’s period of mourning and encompass both a meditation on the horrors of the war and a celebration of the peace which has, with only the most trivial of blemishes, reigned since. To be performed live just after sunset on the day the second nova ignites. If my conducting is of its usual accurate standard and I time it right, the light should hit at the start of the final note.” Ziller spoke with relish. “Hub thinks it’s going to arrange some sort of light show for the piece. I’m not sure I’ll allow that, but we’ll see.”

Kabe suspected the Chelgrian was relieved that somebody had guessed and he could talk about it. “Ziller, this is wonderful news,” he said. It would be the first full-length piece Ziller had completed since his self-imposed exile. Some people, Kabe included, had worried that Ziller might never again produce anything on the truly monumental scale he had proved such a master of. “I look forward to it. Is it finished?”

“Nearly. I’m at the tinkering stage.” The Chelgrian looked up at the light-point that was the nova Portisia. “It has gone very well,” he said, sounding thoughtful. “Wonderful raw material. Something I could really get my teeth into.” He smiled at Kabe without warmth. “Even the catastrophes of the other Involveds are somehow on another level of elegance and aesthetic refinement compared to those of Chel. My own species’ abominations are efficient enough in terms of the death and suffering produced, but pedestrian and tawdry. You’d think they’d have the decency to provide me with better inspiration.”

Kabe was silent for a few moments. “It is sad to hate your own people so much, Ziller.”

“Yes, it is,” Ziller agreed, looking out towards the distant Great River. “Though happily that hatred does produce vital inspiration for my work.”

“I know there is no chance that you will go back with them, Ziller, but you should at least see this emissary.”

Ziller looked at him. “Should I?”

“Not to do so will make it appear you are frightened of his arguments.”

“Really? What arguments?”

“I imagine he will say that they need you,” Kabe said patiently.

“To be their trophy instead of the Culture’s.”

“I think trophy is the wrong word. Symbol might be better. Symbols are important, symbols do work. And when the symbol is a person then the symbol becomes… dirigible. A symbolic person can to some extent steer their own course, determine not just their own fate but that of their society. At any rate, they will argue that your society, your whole civilisation, needs to make peace with its most famous dissident so that it can make peace with itself, and so rebuild.”

Ziller gazed levelly at him. “They chose you well, didn’t they, Ambassador?”

“Not in the way I think you mean. I am neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic to such an argument. But it is likely to be one they would wish to put to you. Even if you really haven’t thought about this, and haven’t tried to anticipate their propositions, then nevertheless you must know that if you had you would have worked this out for yourself.”

Ziller stared at the Homomdan. Kabe found that it was not quite as difficult as he’d imagined, meeting the gaze of those two large dark eyes. Nevertheless, it was not something he’d have chosen as a recreation.

“Am I really a dissident?” Ziller asked at last. “I’ve just got used to thinking of myself as a cultural refugee or a political asylum seeker. This is a potentially unsettling recategorisation.”

“Your earlier comments have stung them, Ziller. As have your actions, firstly coming here at all, and then staying on after the background to the war became clear.”

“The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability.”

“That is bitterness, my dear Ziller. No outside observer would make such a hostile summation of your species’ recent history.”

“Three thousand years counts as recent history?”

“You are changing the subject.”

“Yes, I find it comical that three millennia count as ‘recent’ to you. Certainly that’s more interesting than arguing over the exact degree of culpability ascribable to my compatriots’ behaviour since we came up with our exciting idea for a caste system.”

Kabe sighed. “We are a long-lived species, Ziller, and have been part of the galactic community for many millennia. Three thousand years are far from insignificant by our reckoning, but in the lifetime of an intelligent, space-faring species it does indeed count as recent history.”

“You are disturbed by these things, aren’t you, Kabe?”

“What things, Ziller?”

The Chelgrian pointed the stem of his pipe over the side of the aircraft. “You felt for that human female as she seemed to be about to plunge into the ground and splatter her un-backed-up brains across the landscape, didn’t you? And you find it uncomfortable — at least — that I am, as you put it, bitter, and that I hate my own people.”

“All that is true.”

“Is your own existence so replete with equanimity you find no outlet for worry except on behalf of others?”

Kabe sat back, thinking. “I suppose it appears so.”

“Hence, perhaps, your identification with the Culture.”

“Perhaps.”

“So, you would feel for it, in its current, oh, shall we say embarrassment regarding the Caste War?”

“Encompassing all thirty-one trillion of the Culture’s citizens might stretch even my empathy a little.”

Ziller smiled thinly and looked up at the horizon of the Orbital hanging in the sky. The bright ribbon began at the haze line to spinward, thinning and sweeping into the sky; a single strip of land punctuated by vast oceans and the ragged, ice-shored barriers of the trans-atmospheric Bulkhead Ranges, its surface speckled green and brown and blue and white; waisted here, broadening there, usually hemmed by the Edge Seas and their scattered islands, though in places — and invariably where the Bulkhead Ranges reared — stretching right to the retaining walls. The thread that was Masaq’ Great River was visible in a few of the nearer regions. Overhead, the Orbital’s far side was just a bright line, the details of its geography lost in that burnished filament.

Sometimes, if you had very good eyesight indeed and looked up to the far side directly above, you could just make out the tiny black dot that was Masaq’ Hub, hanging free in space, one and a half million kilometres away in the otherwise empty centre of the world’s vast bracelet of land and sea.

“Yes,” said Ziller. “They are so many, aren’t they?”

“They could easily have been more. They have chosen stability.”

Ziller was still gazing into the sky. “Do you know there are people who’ve been sailing the Great River since the Orbital was completed?”

“Yes. A few are on their second circuit now. They call themselves the Time Travellers because, heading against the spin, they are moving less quickly than everybody else on the Orbital, and so incur a reduced relativistic time dilation penalty, negligible though the effect is.”

Ziller nodded. The great dark eyes drank in the view. “I wonder if anyone goes against the flow?”

“A few do. There are always some.” Kabe paused. “None of them have yet completed a circuit of the entire Orbital; they would need to live a very long time to do so. Theirs is a harder course.”

Ziller stretched his midlimb and arms and put his pipe away. “Just so.” He made a shape with his mouth Kabe knew was a genuine smile. “Shall we return to Aquime? I have work to do.”