Look to Windward

A Very Attractive System

(Recording.)

“This is a great simulation.”

“It’s not a simulation.”

“Yeah. Of course. Still, it is though, isn’t it?”

“Push! Push!”

“I’m pushing, I’m pushing!”

“Well, push harder!”

“You don’t think this is a fucking simulation, do you?”

“Oh no, not a fucking simulation.”

“Look, I don’t know what you’re on but whatever it is it’s the wrong stuff.”

“The flames are coming up the shaft!”

“So get some water down it!”

“I can’t reach the—”

“I’m really impressed.”

“You are on something, aren’t you?”

“He must be glanding. Nobody can be this stupid straight.”

“I’m so glad we waited till night, aren’t you?”

“Absolutely. Look at the day side! I’ve never seen it shimmer like that, have you?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“Ha! I love this. Brilliant simulation.”

“It’s not a simulation, you buffoon. Will you listen?”

“We should get this guy out of here.”

“What is that, anyway?”

“Who, not what; Homomdan guy. Called Kabe.”

“Oh.”

They were lava-rafting. Kabe sat in the centre of the flat-decked craft, staring at the mottled yellow-bright flowing river of molten rock ahead and the darkly desolate landscape through which it ran. He could hear the humans talking but he wasn’t paying much attention to who said what.

“He’s already out of it.”

“Just brilliant. Look at that! And the heat!”

“I agree. Get him zapped.”

“It’s on fire!”

“Pole on the dark bits, you idiot, not the bright bits!”

“Bring it in and put it out!”

“What?”

“Fuck, it’s hot.”

“Yeah, it is, isn’t it? I never felt a sim this hot!”

“This is not a simulation, and you’re getting zapped.”

“Can anybody—?”

“Help!”

“Oh, throw it away! Grab another oar.”

They were on one of Masaq’s last eight uninhabited Plates. Here — and for three Plates to spinward and four anti-spinward — Masaq’ Great River flowed dead straight through a seventy-five-thousand-kilometre-long base-material tunnel across a landscape still in the process of being formed.

“Wow! Hot hot hot! Some sim!”

“Get this guy out of here. He shouldn’t have been invited in the first place. There are one-timers here with no savers. If this clown thinks we’re in a sim he could do anything.”

“Jump overboard, hopefully.”

“Need more bods on the starboard side!”

“The what?”

“Right. The right. This side. This side here. Fuck.”

“Don’t even fucking joke about that. He’s so twisted I wouldn’t trust him to punch out if he did fall in.”

“Tunnel ahead! Going to get hotter!”

“Oh, shit.”

“It can’t get hotter! They don’t let it.”

“Will you fucking listen? This is not a simulation!”

As was by now long-standing established practice for the Culture, asteroids from Masaq’s own system — most of them collected and parked in planetary holding orbits several thousand years earlier when the Orbital had first been constructed — were tugged in by Lifter craft and lowered to the Plate’s surface where any one of several energy delivery systems (planetary crust-busting weapons, if you insisted on looking on them that way) heated the bodies to liquid heat so that even more mind-boggling matter- and energy-manipulating processes either let the resulting slag flow and cool in certain designated directions or sculpted it to cloak the already existing morphology of the strategic base matter.

“On.”

“What?”

“On. You fall on, not in. Don’t look at me like that; it’s the density.”

“I bet you know all about fucking density. Got a terminal?”

“No.”

“Implanted?”

“No.”

“Me neither. Try and find somebody who does or is and get that cretin off here.”

“It won’t come out!”

“The pin! You have to knock the pin out first!”

“Oh, yeah.”

People — especially Culture people, whether human, once human, alien or machine — had been building Orbitals like this for thousands of years, and not very long after the process had become a mature technology, still thousands of years earlier, some fun- (or at any rate risk-) loving individual had thought of using a few of the lava streams naturally generated by such processes as the medium for a new sport.

“Excuse me, I have a terminal.”

“Oh. Yeah, Kabe, of course.”

“What?”

“I have a terminal. Here.”

“Ship oars! Mind your heads!”

“It’s fucking glowing in there, man!”

“Sep; hit the cover!”

“Covering now!”

“Oh, wow!”

“Ship them or lose them!”

“Hub! See this guy? Sim-shitter! Zap him out now!”

“Done!”

And so lava-rafting became a pastime. On Masaq’ the tradition was that you did it without the aid of field technology or anything clever in the way of material science. The experience would be more exciting and you would come closer to its reality if you used materials that were only just up to the demands being made in it. It was what people called a minimal-safety-factor sport.

“Watch that oar!”

“It’s caught!”

“Well, push it!”

“Oh, shit!”

“What the—?”

“Aaah!”

“It’s okay, it’s okay!”

“Fuck!”

“…You are all quite mad, by the way. Happy rafting.”

The raft itself — a flat-decked platform four metres by twelve with metre-high gunwales — was ceramic, the cover protecting the rafters from the heat of the lava tunnel they were now shooting down was aluminised plastic, and the steering oars were wood, to introduce a note of the corporeal.

“My hair!”

“Oh! I want to go home!”

“Water bucket!”

“Where’d that guy—?”

“Stop whining.”

“Good grief!”

Lava-rafting had always been exciting and dangerous. Once the eight Plates had been filled with air, it had become more of a hardship; radiated heat was joined by convected, and while people felt it was somehow more authentic to raft without breathing gear, having your lungs scorched was generally no more fun than it sounded.

“Ah! My nose! My nose!”

“Thanks.”

“Sprays!”

“You’re welcome.”

“I’m with the other guy. I don’t believe this.”

Kabe sat back. He had to crouch; the wind-rippled under-surface of the raft’s foil cover was just above his head. The canopy was reflecting the heat of the tunnel’s ceiling, but the air temperature was still extreme. Some of the humans were pouring water over themselves or spraying it onto each other. Coils of steam filled the little mobile cave that the raft had become. The light was very dark red, spilling from either end of the pitching, bucking craft.

“This hurts!”

“Well, stop it hurting!”

“Zap me out too!”

“Nearly out!… Oh-oh. We got hang-spikes.”

The downstream mouth of the lava tunnel had teeth; it was strung with jagged protrusions like stalactites.

“Spikes! Get down!”

One of the hang-spikes ripped the raft’s flimsy protective cover away and flung it onto the yellow-glowing surface of the lava stream. The cover shrank, burst into flames and then, caught in the thermals coming off the braided flow, rose flapping like a burning bird. A blast of heat rolled over the raft. People screamed. Kabe had to fling himself back flat to avoid being hit by one of the pendulous spears of rock. He felt something give beneath him; there was a snap and another scream.

The raft flew out of the tunnel into a broad canyon of craggy cliffs whose basalt dark edges were lit by the broad stream of lava coursing between them. Kabe levered himself back up. Most of the humans were throwing or spraying water around, cooling themselves after the final blast of heat; many had lost hair, some were sitting or lying looking singed but uncaring, staring blankly ahead, blissed out on some secretion. One couple were just sitting hunched up on the flat deck of the raft, crying loudly.

“Was that your leg?” Kabe asked the man sitting on the deck behind him.

The man was holding his left leg and grimacing. “Yes,” he said. “I think it’s broken.”

“Yes. I think it is, too. I’m very sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

“Try not falling back like that again, not while I’m here.”

Kabe looked forward. The glowing river of orange lava meandered into the distance between the canyon walls. There were no more lava tunnels visible. “I think I can guarantee that,” Kabe said. “I do apologise; I was told to sit in the centre of the deck. Can you move?”

The man slid back on one hand and his buttocks, still holding his leg with the other hand. People were calming down. Some were still crying but one was shouting that it was okay, there were no more lava tunnels.

“You all right?” one of the females asked the man with the broken leg. The woman’s jacket was still smouldering. She had no eyebrows and her blonde hair looked uneven and had crisped-looking patches.

“Broken. I’ll live.”

“My fault,” Kabe explained.

“I’ll get a splint.”

The woman went to a locker near the stern. Kabe looked round. There was a smell of burned hair and old-fashioned clothing and lightly crisped human flesh. He could see a few people with discoloured patches on their faces, and a few had their hands submerged in water buckets. The crouched couple were still wailing. Most of the rest who hadn’t blissed out were comforting each other, tear-streaked faces lit by the livid light reflected from the glass-sharp black cliffs. High above, twinkling madly in the brown-dark sky, the nova that was Portisia gazed balefully down.

And this is meant to be fun, Kabe thought.

~ Does it become any more ridiculous?

“What?” somebody yelled from the raft’s bows. “Rapids?”

~ Not really.

Somebody started sobbing hysterically.

~ I’ve seen enough. Shall we?

~ By all means. Once was probably enough.

(Recording ends.)

Kabe and Ziller faced each other across a large, elegantly furnished room lit by golden sunlight that spilled through the opened balcony windows, already filtered through the gently waving branches of an everblue growing outside. A myriad of soft needle-shadows moved on the creamily tiled floor, lay across the ankle-deep, abstractly patterned carpets and fluttered silently on the sculpted surfaces of gleaming wooden sideboards, richly carved chests and plumply upholstered couches.

The Homomdan and the Chelgrian both wore devices which looked like they might have been either protective helmets of dubious effectiveness or rather garish head-jewellery.

Ziller snorted. “We look preposterous.”

“Perhaps that is one reason people take to implants.”

They each took the devices off. Kabe, sitting on a graceful, relatively flimsy-looking chaise longue with deep bays designed especially for tripeds, placed his head-set on the couch beside him.

Ziller, curled on a broad couch, set his on the floor. He blinked a couple of times then reached into his waistcoat pocket for his pipe. He wore pale-green leggings and an enamelled groin plate. The waistcoat was hide, jewelled.

“This was when?” he asked.

“About eighty days ago.”

“The Hub Mind was right. They are all quite mad.”

“And yet most of the people you saw there had lava-rafted before and had just as awful a time. I have checked up since and all but three of the twenty-three humans you saw there have taken part in the sport again.” Kabe picked up a cushion and played with the fringing. “Though it has to be said that two of them have experienced temporary body-death when their lava canoe capsized and one of them — a one-timer, a Disposable — was crushed to death while glacier-caving.”

“Completely dead?”

“Very completely, and forever. They recovered the body and held a funeral service.”

“Age?”

“She was thirty-one standard years old. Barely an adult.”

Ziller sucked on his pipe. He looked towards the balcony windows. They were in a large house in an estate in the Tirian Hills, on Osinorsi Lower, the Plate to spinwards of Xarawe. Kabe shared the house with an extended human family of about sixteen individuals, two of them children. A new top floor had been built for him. Kabe enjoyed the company of the humans and their young, though he had come to realise that he was probably a little less gregarious than he’d thought he was.

He had introduced the Chelgrian to the half dozen other people present in and around the house and shown him round. From down-slope-facing windows and balconies, and from the roof garden, you could see, looming bluely across the plains, the cliffs of the massif that carried Masaq’ Great River across the vast sunken garden that was Osinorsi Lower Plate.

They were waiting for the drone E. H. Tersono, which was on its way to them with what it called important news.

“I seem to recall,” Ziller said, “that I said I agreed with Hub that they were all quite mad and you began your reply with the words ‘And yet’.” Ziller frowned. “And then everything you said subsequently seemed to agree with my original point.”

“What I meant is that however much they appeared to hate the experience, and despite being under no pressure to repeat it—”

“Other than pressure from their equally cretinous peers.”

“—they nevertheless chose to, because however awful it might have seemed at the time, they feel that they gained something positive from it.”

“Oh? And what would that be? That they lived through it despite their stupidity in undertaking this totally unnecessary traumatic experience in the first place? What one should gain from an unpleasant experience should be the determination not to repeat it. Or at least the inclination.”

“They feel they have tested themselves—”

“And found themselves to be mad. Does that count as a positive result?”

“They feel they have tested themselves against nature—”

“What’s natural around here?” Ziller protested. “The nearest ‘natural’ thing to here is ten light minutes away. It’s the fucking sun.” He snorted. “And I wouldn’t put it past them to have meddled with that.”

“I don’t believe they have. In fact it was a potential instability in Lacelere that produced the high back-up rate on Masaq’ Orbital in the first place, before it became famous for excessive fun.” Kabe put the cushion down.

Ziller was staring at him. “Are you saying the sun could explode?”

“Well, sort of, in theory. It’s a very—”

“You’re not serious!”

“Of course I am. The chances are—”

“They never told me that!”

“Actually, it wouldn’t really blow up as such, but it might flare—”

“It does flare! I’ve seen its flares!”

“Yes. Pretty, aren’t they? But there is a chance — no more than one in several million during the time the star spends on the main-sequence — that it might produce a flare sequence that Hub and the Orbital’s defences would be unable to deflect or shelter everyone from.”

“And they built this thing here?”

“I understand it was a very attractive system otherwise. And besides, I believe that over time they’ve added extra protection under-Plate which could stand up to anything short of a supernova, though of course any technology can go wrong and, sensibly, the culture of backing-up as a matter of course is still common.”

Ziller was shaking his head. “They could have mentioned this to me.”

“Perhaps the risk is deemed so tiny they have given up bothering.”

Ziller smoothed his scalp fur. He’d let his pipe go out. “I don’t believe these people.”

“The chances of disaster are very remote indeed, especially for any given year, or even sentient lifetime.” Kabe rose and lumbered over to a sideboard. He picked up a bowl of fruits. “Fruit?”

“No, thank you.”

Kabe selected a ripe sunbread. He had had his intestinal flora altered to enable him to eat common Culture foods. More unusually, he had had his oral and nasal senses modified so that he could taste food as a standard Culture human would. He turned away from Ziller as he popped the sunbread into his mouth, chewed the fruit a couple of times and swallowed. The action of averting his face from others when eating had become habitual; members of Kabe’s species had very big mouths and some humans found the sight of him eating alarming.

“But to return to my point,” he said, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. “Let’s not use the word ‘nature’ then; let us say they feel they have gained something from having pitted themselves against forces much greater than themselves.”

“And this is somehow not a sign of madness.” Ziller shook his head. “Kabe, you may have been here too long.”

The Homomdan crossed to the balcony, gazing out at the view. “I would say that these people are demonstrably not mad. They live lives that seem quite sane otherwise.”

“What? Glacier-caving?”

“That is not all they do.”

“Indeed. They do lots of other insane things; naked blade-fencing, mountain free-climbing, wing-flying—”

“Very few do nothing but take part in these extreme pastimes. Most have otherwise fairly normal lives.”

Ziller relit his pipe. “By Culture standards.”

“Well, yes, and why not? They socialise, they have work-hobbies, they play in more gentle forms, they read or watch screen, they go to entertainments. They sit around grinning in one of their glanded drug states, they study, they spend time travelling—”

“Ah-hah!”

“—apparently just for the sake of it or they simply… potter. And of course many of them indulge in arts and crafts.” Kabe made a smile and spread his three hands. “A few even compose music.”

“They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time travelling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.”

Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. “Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of travelling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled.”

Kabe watched a springleg bounce from branch to branch through the trees outside, its ruddy fur and long tail dappled with leaf shadows. He could hear the shrill voices of human children, playing and splashing in the pool at the side of the house. “Oh, come, Ziller. Arguably any intelligent species feels that to some extent.”

“Really? Does yours?”

Kabe fingered the soft folds of the drapes at the side of the balcony window. “We are much older than the humans, but I think we probably did, once.” He looked back at the Chelgrian, crouched on the wide seat as though ready to pounce. “All naturally evolved sentient life is restless. At some scale or stage.”

Ziller appeared to consider this, then shook his head. Kabe was not yet sure if this gesture meant that he had said something too preposterous to be worth dignifying with an answer, perpetrated an appalling cliché, or made a point that the Chelgrian could not find an adequate reply to.

“The point is,” Ziller said, “that having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats—” He paused and glanced sourly at the sunlight flaring off the gilt border of his seat. “—Well, almost all natural threats, these people then find their lives are so hollow they have to recreate false versions of just the sort of terrors untold generations of their ancestors spent their existences attempting to conquer.”

“I think that is a little like criticising somebody for owning both an umbrella and a shower,” Kabe said. “It is the choice that is important.” He rearranged the curtains more symmetrically. “These people control their terrors. They can choose to sample them, repeat them or avoid them. That is not the same as living beneath the volcano when you’ve just invented the wheel, or wondering whether your levee will break and drown your entire village. Again, this applies to all societies which have matured beyond the age of barbarism. There is no great mystery here.”

“But the Culture is so insistent in its utopianism,” Ziller said, sounding, Kabe thought, almost bitter. “They are like an infant with a toy, demanding it only to throw it away.”

Kabe watched Ziller puff at his pipe for a while, then walked through the cloud of smoke and sat trefoil on the finger-deep carpet near the other male’s couch.

“I think it is only natural, and a sign that one has succeeded as a species, that what used to have to be suffered as a necessity becomes enjoyed as sport. Even fear can be recreational.”

Ziller looked into the Homomdan’s eyes. “And despair?”

Kabe shrugged. “Despair? Well, only in the short term, as when one despairs of completing a task, or winning at some game or sport, and yet later does. The earlier despair makes the victory all the sweeter.”

“That is not despair,” Ziller said quietly. “That is temporary annoyance, the passing irritation of foreseen disappointment. I meant nothing so trivial. I meant the sort of despair that eats your soul, that contaminates your senses so that every experience, however pleasant, becomes saturated with bile. The sort of despair that drives you to thoughts of suicide.”

Kabe rocked back. “No,” he said. “No. They might hope to have put that behind them.”

“Yes. They leave it in their wake for others.”

“Ah.” Kabe nodded. “I think we touch upon what happened to your own people. Well, some of them feel remorse close to despair about that.”

“It was mostly our own doing.” Ziller crumbled some smoke block into his pipe, tamping it down with a small silver instrument and producing further clouds of smoke. “We would doubtless have contrived a war without the Culture’s help.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I disagree. Regardless; at least after a war we might have been forced to confront our own stupidities. The Culture’s involvement meant that we suffered the war’s depredations while failing to benefit from its lessons. We just blamed the Culture instead. Short of our utter destruction the outcome could hardly have been worse, and sometimes I feel that even that is an unjustified exception.”

Kabe sat still for a while. Blue smoke rose from Ziller’s pipe.

Ziller had once been Gifted-from-Tacted Mahrai Ziller VIII of Wescrip. Born into a family of administrators and diplomats, he had been a musical prodigy almost from infancy, composing his first orchestral work at an age when most Chelgrian children were still learning not to eat their shoes.

He had taken the designation Gifted — two caste levels below that he had been born into — when he dropped out of college, scandalising his parents.

Despite garnering outrageous fame and fortune in his career he scandalised them still further, to the point of illness and breakdown, when he became a radical Caste Denier, entered politics as an Equalitarian and used his prestige to argue for the end of the caste system. Gradually public and political opinion began to shift; it started to look as though the long talked-about Great Change might finally happen. After an unsuccessful attempt on his life Ziller renounced his caste altogether, and so was deemed the lowest of the non-criminal low; an Invisible.

A second assassination attempt very nearly succeeded; it left him near death and in hospital for quarter of a year. It was moot whether his months out of the political scrum had made any crucial difference, but unarguably by the time he was recovered the tide had turned again, the backlash had begun and any hope of significant change appeared to have vanished for at least a generation.

Ziller’s musical output had suffered during the years of his political involvement, in quantity at least. He announced that he was quitting public life to concentrate on composition, so alienating his former liberal allies and delighting the conservatives who had been his enemies. Even so, despite great pressure he did not renounce his Invisible status — though increasingly he was treated as an honorary Given — and he never gave any sign of support for the status quo, save for that studied silence on all matters political.

His prestige and popularity increased still further; cascades of prizes, awards and honours were lavished upon him; polls proclaimed him the greatest living Chelgrian; there was talk of him becoming Ceremonial President one day.

With his celebrity and prominence at this unprecedented crescendo of acclaim, he used what was supposed to be his acceptance speech for the greatest civilian honour the Chelgrian State could bestow — at a grand and glittering ceremony in Chelise, the Chelgrian State’s capital, which would be broadcast over the whole sphere of Chelgrian space — to announce that he had never changed his views, he was and always would be a liberal and an Equalitarian, he was more proud to have worked with the people who still espoused such views than he was of his music, he had grown to loathe the forces of conservatism even more than he had in his youth, he still despised the state, the society and the people that tolerated the caste system, he was not accepting this honour, he would be returning all the others he had acquired, and he had already booked passage to leave the Chelgrian State immediately and forever, because unlike the liberal comrades he loved, respected and admired so much, he just did not have the moral strength to continue living in this vicious, hateful, intolerable regime any longer.

His speech was greeted with stunned silence. He left the stage to hisses and boos and spent the night in a Culture embassy compound with a crowd at the gates baying for his blood.

A Culture ship lifted him away the following day; he travelled extensively within the Culture over the next few years and finally made his home on Masaq’ Orbital.

Ziller had remained on Masaq’ even after the election of an Equalitarian President on Chel, seven years after he’d left. Reforms were put in place and the Invisibles and the other castes were fully enfranchised at last, but still, despite numerous requests and invitations, Ziller had not returned to his home, and had offered little in the way of explanation.

People assumed it was because the caste system would still exist. Part of the compromise which had sold the reforms to the higher castes was that titles and caste names would be retained as part of one’s legal nomenclature and a new property law would give ownership of clan lands to the immediate family of the house chief.

In return, people of all levels of society were now free to marry and procreate with whoever would have them, partnered couples would each take the caste of the highest-designated of the two, their young would inherit that caste, elected caste courts would oversee the redesignation of applying individuals, there would no longer be a law to punish people who claimed to be of a higher caste, and so, in theory, anybody could claim to be whatever they wanted to be, though a court of law would still insist on calling them as they had been born or redesignated.

It was an enormous legal and behavioural change from the old system, but it still included caste, and it did not seem to be enough for Ziller.

Then the ruling coalition on Chel had elected a Spayed as President as an effective but surprising symbol of how much had changed. The regime survived a coup attempt by some Guards officers and appeared strengthened by the experience, with power and authority seemingly being distributed even more fully and irrevocably down the ladder of original castes, yet still Ziller, arguably more popular than ever, had not returned. He claimed to be waiting to see what would happen.

Then something terrible happened, and he saw, and still did not go home, even after the Caste War, which broke out nine years after he left and was, by its own admission, largely the Culture’s fault.

Eventually Kabe said, “My own people fought the Culture once.”

“Unlike us. We fought ourselves.” Ziller looked at the Homomdan. “Did you profit from the experience?” he asked tartly.

“Yes. We lost much; many brave people and many noble ships, and we did not succeed in our initial war aims, directly, but we maintained our civilisational course, and gained in as much that we discovered that the Culture could be lived with honourably, and that it was what we had been worried it was not: another temperate dweller in the galactic house. Our two societies have since become companionable and we are occasionally allies.”

“They didn’t crush you utterly, then?”

“They didn’t try to. Nor we them. It was never that sort of war, and besides, that is neither their way nor ours. It is not really anybody’s way, these days. In any event, our dispute with the Culture was always a sideshow to the principal action, which was the conflict between our hosts and the Idirans.”

“Ah yes, the famous Twin Novae Battle,” Ziller said, sounding disparaging.

Kabe was surprised at the tone. “Is your symphony past the tinkering stage yet?”

“Pretty much.”

“You’re still pleased with it?”

“Yes. Very. There is nothing wrong with the music. However I do begin to wonder whether my enthusiasm got the better of me. Perhaps I was wrong to become so involved with our Hub Mind’s memento mori.” Ziller fidgeted with his waistcoat, then waved one hand dismissively. “Oh, take no notice. I always become a little disheartened when I’ve just finished something this size, and I will confess to a degree of nervousness at the prospect of standing up and conducting in front of the sort of numbers Hub is talking about. Plus I’m still not sure about all the extraneous stuff Hub wants to add around the music.” Ziller snorted. “I may be more of a purist than I thought.”

“I am sure it will go wonderfully well. When does Hub intend to announce the concert?”

“Very soon now,” Ziller said, sounding defensive. “It was one of the reasons I came over here. I thought I might be besieged if I stayed home.”

Kabe nodded slowly. “I am glad to be of service. And I cannot wait to hear the piece.”

“Thank you. I’m pleased with it, but I can’t help feeling complicit with Hub’s ghoulishness.”

“I wouldn’t call it ghoulish. Old soldiers are rarely so. Depressed, disturbed and morbid sometimes, but not ghoulish. That is a civilian preoccupation.”

“Hub isn’t a civilian?” Ziller asked. “Hub might be depressed and disturbed? Is this something else they didn’t tell me about?”

“Masaq’ Hub has never been either depressed or disturbed to my knowledge,” Kabe said. “However, it was once the Mind of a war-adapted General Systems Vehicle and it was there at the Twin Novae Battle at the end of the war and suffered near total destruction at the hands of an Idiran battle fleet.”

“Not quite total.”

“Not quite.”

“They don’t believe in the captain going down with the ship, then.”

“I understand that being last to abandon it is considered sufficient. But do you see? Masaq’ mourns and honours those it lost, those who died, and seeks to atone for whatever part it played in the war.”

Ziller shook his head. “The scummer might have told me some of this,” he muttered. Kabe pondered the wisdom of remarking that Ziller might have discovered all of this easily enough himself had he been so inclined, but decided against it. Ziller tapped his pipe out. “Well, let us hope it does not suffer from despair.”

“Drone E. H. Tersono is here,” the house announced.

“Oh, good.”

“About time.”

“Invite it in.”

The drone floated in through the balcony window, sunlight dappling its rosy porcelain skin and blue lumenstone frame. “I noticed the window was open; hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

“Eavesdropping outside, were we?” Ziller asked.

The drone settled delicately on a chair. “My dear Ziller, certainly not. Why? Were you talking about me?”

“No.”

“So, Tersono,” Kabe said. “It is very kind of you to visit. I understand we owe the honour to further news of our envoy.”

“Yes. I have learned the identity of the emissary being sent to us by Chel,” the drone said. “His full name is, and I quote, Called-to-Arms-from-Given Major Tibilo Quilan IV Autumn 47^th of Itirewein, griefling, Sheracht Order.”

“Good heavens,” Kabe said, looking at Ziller. “Your full names are even longer than the Culture’s.”

“Yes. An endearing trait, isn’t it?” Ziller said. He looked into his pipe, brows puckered. “So, our emissary’s a warlord-priest. A rich broker boy from one of the sovereign families who’s found a taste for soldiering, or been shunted into it to keep him out of the way, and then found Faith, or found it politic to find it. Parents traditionalists. And he’s a widower, probably.”

“You know him?” Kabe asked.

“Actually, I do, from a long time ago. We were at infant school together. We were friends, I suppose, though not particularly close. We lost touch after that. Haven’t heard of him since.” Ziller inspected his pipe and seemed to be contemplating lighting it again. Instead he replaced it in his waistcoat pocket. “Even if we weren’t once acquainted though, the rest of the name rigmarole tells you most of what you need to know.” He snorted. “Culture full names act as addresses; ours act as potted histories. And, of course, they tell you whether you should bow, or be bowed to. Our Major Quilan will certainly expect to be bowed to.”

“You may be doing him a disservice,” Tersono said. “I have a full biography you might be interested in—”

“Well, I’m not,” Ziller said emphatically, turning away to look at a painting hanging on one wall. It showed long-ago Homomdans riding enormous tusked creatures, waving flags and spears and looking heroic in a hectic sort of way.

“I’d like to look at it later,” Kabe said.

“Certainly.”

“So that’s, what, twenty-three, twenty-four days till he gets here?”

“About that.”

“Oh, I do so hope he’s having a pleasant journey,” Ziller said in a strange, almost childish voice. He spat into his hands and smoothed the tawny pelt over each forearm in turn, stretching each hand as he did so, so that the claws emerged; gleaming black curves the size of a human’s small finger, glinting in the soft sunlight like polished obsidian blades.

The Culture drone and the Homomdan male exchanged looks. Kabe lowered his head.