Look to Windward

Peer Group

Important visitors to Masaq’ were usually trans-shipped by a giant ceremonial barge of gilded wood, glorious flags and generally fabulous aspect encased within an ellipsoid envelope of perfumed air sewn with half a million perfumed candle balloons. For the Chelgrian emissary Quilan, Hub thought that such flagrant ostentation might strike a discordant, overly celebratory note, and so instead a plain but stylish personnel module was sent to rendezvous with the ex-warship Resistance Is Character-Forming.

The welcoming party consisted of one of the Hub’s thin, silver-skinned avatars, the drone E. H. Tersono, the Homomdan Kabe Ischloear and a human female representative from the Orbital’s General Board called Estray Lassils who both looked and was old. She had long white hair, currently gathered into a bun, and a very tanned, deeply lined face, and for all her age she was tall and slim and carried herself very upright. She wore a formal-looking plain black dress with a single brooch. Her eyes were bright and Kabe formed the impression that a lot of the grooves on her face were smile and laughter lines. He immediately liked her, and — given that the General Board had been elected by the human and drone population of the Orbital, and itself had duly chosen her to represent it — decided that so must everybody else.

“Hub,” Estray Lassils said in an amused-sounding voice. “Your skin looks more matte than usual.”

The Orbital’s avatar wore white trousers and a tight jacket over its silvery skin, which did indeed, Kabe thought, seem less reflective than it usually appeared.

The creature nodded. “There are Chelgrian source tribes which once had superstitious beliefs concerning mirrors,” it said in its incongruously deep voice. Its wide black eyes blinked. Estray Lassils found herself looking at a pair of tiny images of herself depicted in the avatar’s eyelids, which it had briefly turned fully reflective. “I thought, just to be on the safe side…”

“I see.”

“And how is everybody on the Board, Ms Lassils?” the drone Tersono asked. It appeared, if anything, more reflective than usual, its rosy porcelain skin and lacy lumenstone frame looking highly polished.

The woman shrugged. “As ever. I haven’t seen them for a couple of months. The next meeting’s…” She looked thoughtful.

“In ten days’ time,” supplied her brooch.

“Thank you, house,” she said. She nodded at the drone. “There you are.”

The General Board was supposed to represent the inhabitants of the Orbital to Hub at the highest level; it was pretty much an honorary office given that each individual could talk directly to Hub whenever they wanted, but as that carried even the most thinly theoretical possibility that a mischievous or deranged Hub could play every single person on an Orbital off against each other to further some unspecified nefarious scheme, it was usually thought sensible to have a conventionally elected and delegated set-up as well. It also meant that visitors from more autocratic or layered societies were provided with somebody they could identify as an official representative of the whole population.

The main reason that Kabe decided he liked Estray Lassils was that despite being there in this arguably quite consequential ceremonial role — she did represent nearly fifty billion people, after all — she had, apparently on a whim, brought along one of her nieces, a six-year-old child called Chomba.

The girl was thin and blonde and sat quietly on the padded edge of the central pool in the personnel module’s circular main lounge area as it sped out to meet the still decelerating Resistance Is Character-Forming. She wore a pair of deep purple shorts and a loose jacket of vivid yellow. Her feet were dangling in the water, where long red fish swam amongst artfully arranged rocks and beds of gravel. They eyed the child’s waggling toes with leery curiosity and were gradually approaching.

The others stood — or in Tersono’s case floated — in a group in front of the lounge’s forward screen section. The screen extended right round the circular wall of the lounge so that when it was all activated it looked as if you were riding through space standing on one large disc with another suspended over your head (the ceiling could act as a screen too, as could the floor, though some people found the full effect unsettling).

The tallest, deepest part of the screen faced directly forwards and it was there that Kabe glanced now and again, but all it showed was the star field, with a slowly flashing red ring showing the direction the ship was approaching from. Two broad bands of Masaq’ Orbital traversed the screen from floor to ceiling, and there was a big storm system of whorled clouds visible on one mostly oceanic Plate, but Kabe was more distracted by the sinuously swimming fish and the human child.

It was one of the effects of living in a society where people commonly lived for four centuries and on average bore just over one child each that there were very few of their young around, and — as these children tended to stick together in their own peer groups rather than be found distributed throughout the society — there seemed to be even fewer than there really were. It was more or less accepted in some quarters that the Culture’s whole civilisational demeanour resulted from the fact that every single human in the society had been thoroughly, comprehensively and imaginatively spoiled as a child by virtually everyone around them.

“It’s all right,” the child said to Kabe when she noticed him looking at her. She nodded at the slowly swimming fish. “They don’t bite.”

“Are you sure?” Kabe asked, squatting trefoil to bring his head closer to the child’s. She watched this manoeuvre with what looked like wide-eyed fascination, but seemed to think the better of commenting.

“Yes,” she said. “They don’t eat meat.”

“But you have such very tasty-looking little toes,” Kabe said, meaning to be funny but instantly worrying that he might frighten her.

She frowned briefly, then hugged herself and snorted with laughter. “You don’t eat people, do you?”

“Not unless I’m terribly hungry,” Kabe told her gravely, and then silently cursed himself again. He was starting to recall why he’d never been very good with children of his own species.

She looked uncertain about this, then — after one of those vacant expressions you got used to when people were consulting a neural lace or other implanted device — she smiled. “You’re vegetarians, Homomdans. I just checked.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “Do you have a neural implant?” He’d understood that children didn’t usually possess them; as a rule they had toys or avatar companions who fulfilled that sort of role. Being fitted with your first implant was about as close as some bits of the Culture got to a formal adult initiation rite. Another tradition was to move smoothly from a cuddly talking toy via other gradually less childish devices to a tasteful little pen terminal, brooch or jewel stud.

“Yes, I do have a lace,” she said proudly. “I asked.”

“She pestered,” Estray Lassils said, coming to stand by the poolside.

The girl nodded. “Well beyond the established limit that any normal and reasonable child would have given up at or before,” she said, in gruff tones that were probably meant to impersonate a man’s voice.

“Chomba is seeking to redefine the term ‘precocious’,” Estray Lassils told Kabe, ruffling the child’s short blonde curls. “With considerable success, so far.” The girl ducked away under Estray’s hand, tutting. Her feet splashed in the water, driving the circling fish further away.

“I hope you said hello properly to Ambassador Kabe Ischloear,” Estray told the child. “You were uncharacteristically shy when I introduced you earlier.”

The girl sighed theatrically and stood up in the water, putting out one tiny hand and taking the massive slab of hand that Kabe offered. She bowed. “Ar Kabe Ischloear, I’m Masaq’ Sintriersa Chomba Lassils dam Palacope, how do you do?”

“I do well,” Kabe said, inclining his head. “How do you do, Chomba?”

“As she pleases, basically,” the older female said. Chomba rolled her eyes.

“Unless I’m mistaken,” Kabe said to the child, “your precocity hasn’t extended to nominating a middle name yet.”

The girl smiled with what was probably meant to be a sly expression. Kabe wondered if he’d used too many long words.

“She informs us she has,” Estray explained, looking at the child through narrowed eyes. “She’s just not telling us what it is yet.”

Chomba turned her nose up and looked away, smirking. Then she grinned widely at Kabe. “Do you have any children, Ambassador?”

“Sadly, no.”

“Are you just here by yourself, then?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Don’t you get lonely?”

“Chomba,” Estray Lassils chided gently.

“It’s all right. No, I don’t get lonely, Chomba. I know too many people to become lonely. And I have so much to do.”

“What do you do?”

“I study, I learn and I report.”

“What, about us?”

“Yes. I set out many years ago to try to understand humans, and perhaps, therefore, people in general.” He spread his hands slowly and tried to make a smile. “That quest continues. I write articles and essays and pieces of prose and poetry which I send back to my original home, seeking, where I can and my modest talents allow, to explain the Culture and its people more fully to my own. Of course both our societies know everything about the other in terms of raw data, but sometimes a degree of interpretation is required for sense to be extracted from such information. I seek to provide that personal touch.”

“But isn’t it funny, being surrounded by us?”

“Just say when this all starts to get too much, Ambassador,” Estray Lassils said apologetically.

“That’s quite all right. Sometimes it’s funny, Chomba, sometimes baffling, sometimes very rewarding.”

“But we’re completely different, aren’t we? We have two legs. You’ve got three. Don’t you miss other Homomdans?”

“Only one.”

“Who’s that?”

“Somebody I once loved. Unfortunately she did not love me.”

“Is that why you came here?”

“Chomba…”

“Perhaps it is, Chomba. Distance and difference can heal. At least here, surrounded by humans, I need never see somebody I might mistake, even for an instant, for her.”

“Wow. You must have loved her a lot.”

“I suppose I must.”

“Here we are,” the Hub’s avatar said. It turned to face the rear of the lounge. On the curve of screen-wall, the stubby cylinder of the Resistance Is Character-Forming was sliding across the darkness, from ahead to astern. There were hints of the craft’s field complex becoming briefly visible, like layers of gauze the module seemed to be slipping through as it closed with the larger vessel.

The module went astern, floating towards the accommodation unit near the front of the ex-warship, where a rectangle of hull was picked out in small lights. There was an almost imperceptible thud as the two craft connected. Kabe watched the water in the pool; it didn’t even ripple. The avatar walked up to the rear of the lounge, with the drone floating just behind its left shoulder. The view astern disappeared to show the module’s wide rear doors.

“Dry your feet,” Kabe heard Estray Lassils tell her niece.

“Why?”

The module’s doors jawed open, revealing a plant-lined vestibule and a tall Chelgrian dressed in formal grey religious robes. Something that looked like a large tray floated at his side, carrying two modest bags.

“Major Quilan,” the silver-skinned avatar said, walking forward and bowing. “I represent Masaq’ Hub. You are very welcome.”

“Thank you,” the Chelgrian said. Kabe smelled something tangy as the atmospheres of the module and the ship mingled.

The introductions were made. The Chelgrian seemed polite but reserved, Kabe thought. He spoke Marain at least as well as Ziller — and with the same accent — and, like Ziller, really had learned the language rather than chosen to rely on an interpretation device.

Last to be presented was Chomba, who recited her almost full name to the Chelgrian, dug into a jacket pocket and presented the male with a small posy of flowers. “They’re from our garden,” she explained. “Sorry they’re a bit crushed but they were in my pocket. Don’t worry about that; it’s just dirt. Do you want to see some fish?”

“Major, we are so very pleased you were able to come,” the drone Tersono said, floating smoothly between the Chelgrian and the child. “I know I speak not just for all of us here but for every single person on the Orbital of Masaq’ when I say we feel truly honoured that you are visiting us.”

Kabe thought this would be Major Quilan’s opportunity to mention Ziller, if he was of a mind to puncture this rather unrealistic image of politeness, but the male just smiled.

Chomba was glaring at the drone. Quilan tilted his head to see past Tersono’s body and look at her as Tersono, extending a blue-pink field in an arc towards the Chelgrian’s shoulders, ushered him forwards. The floating platform carrying Quilan’s bags followed him into the module; the doors closed and became a screen again. “Now,” said the drone, “we are all here to say welcome, obviously, but also to let you know that we are entirely at your disposal for the duration of your visit, however long that may be.”

“I’m not. I’ve got stuff to do.”

“Ha ha ha ha,” said the drone. “Well, all of us who’re grown up, at any rate. Tell me, how was your journey? Satisfactory, I hope.”

“It was.”

“Please; take a seat.” They arranged themselves on some couches while the module moved off. Chomba went back to dip her feet in the pool. Behind, the Resistance Is Character-Forming did the ship equivalent of a back-flip, became a dot, and vanished.

Kabe was pondering the differences between Quilan and Ziller. They were the only two Chelgrians he had ever met face to face, though he had done a deal of studying of the species since Tersono had first asked him to help at the recital on the barge Soliton. He knew the major was younger than the composer, and thought he looked leaner and fitter, too. There was a sleek sheen to his light brown fur, and he had a more muscled frame. Even so, he appeared more care-worn around his large dark eyes and broad nose. Perhaps that was not so surprising. Kabe knew quite a lot about Major Quilan.

The Chelgrian turned to him. “Do you represent the Homomda officially here, Ar Ischloear?” he asked.

“No, Major,” Kabe began.

“Ar Ischloear is here at Contact’s request,” Tersono said.

“They asked me to help play host to you,” Kabe told the Chelgrian. “I am shamefully weak in the face of such flattery and so accepted immediately, even though I have no real diplomatic training. To tell the truth, I am more of a cross between a journalist, a tourist and a student than anything else. I hope you don’t mind me mentioning this now. It’s just in case I commit some terrible faux-pas of protocol. If I do I wouldn’t want it to reflect on my hosts.” Kabe nodded to Tersono, which gave a stiff little inclinatory bow.

“Are there many Homomdans on Masaq’?” Quilan asked.

“I’m the only one,” Kabe said.

Major Quilan nodded slowly.

“The task of representing our average citizen falls to me, Major,” Estray said. “Ar Ischloear is not representative. However he is very charming.” She smiled at Kabe, who realised he had never come up with a translatable gesture to indicate humility. “I think,” the woman continued, “that we probably asked Kabe to help play host to prove that we’re not so awful on Masaq’ that we frighten away all our non-human guests.”

“Certainly Mahrai Ziller seems to have found your hospitality irresistible,” Quilan said.

“Cr Ziller continues to grace us with his presence,” Tersono agreed. Its aura field looked very rosy against the cream of the couch it rested on. “Hub here is being very modest in not immediately extolling the numerous virtues of Masaq’ Orbital, but let me assure you it is a place of almost innumerable delights. Masaq’ Great—”

“I assume that Mahrai Ziller does know that I am here,” Quilan said quietly, looking from the drone to the avatar.

The silver-skinned creature nodded. “He has been kept informed of your progress. Unfortunately he is not here to welcome you personally.”

“I wasn’t particularly expecting him to be,” Quilan said.

“Ar Ischloear is one of Cr Ziller’s best friends,” Tersono said. “I’m sure, when the time comes, you’ll all find plenty to talk about.”

“I think I can safely claim to be the best Homomdan friend he has on Masaq’,” agreed Kabe.

“I understand your own connection with Cr Ziller goes further back, Major,” Estray said. “To school, is that right?”

“Yes,” Quilan said. “However we haven’t met or talked since then. We are more one-time friends than old friends. How is our absent genius, Ambassador?” he asked Kabe.

“He is well,” Kabe said. “Still busily writing away.”

“Missing home?” the Chelgrian asked. There was just the suggestion of a smile on his broad face.

“He would claim not to be,” Kabe said, “though I think in his music over the last few years I have detected a certain plaintive harking back to traditional Chelgrian folk themes, with hints of eventual resolution implicit in their serial development.” From the corner of one eye, Kabe saw Tersono’s aura field blush with pleasure as he said this. “Though that may mean nothing, of course,” he added. The drone’s field collapsed back to a frosty blue.

“You are a fan, I take it, Ambassador,” the Chelgrian said.

“Oh, I think we all are,” Tersono said quickly. “I—”

“I’m not.”

“Chom,” said Estray.

“The darling child may find the maestro’s music still beyond her,” the drone said. Kabe caught a hint of a blossoming purple field flattening and dissipating in the direction of the girl sitting on the edge of the pool. He saw Chomba’s mouth work but suspected Tersono had thrown some sort of field wall between her and the rest of the party. He could just about hear that she had said something, but had no idea what it was. Chomba herself either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care. She was concentrating on the fish.

“I count myself one of Cr Ziller’s most fervent aficionados,” the drone was saying loudly. “I have seen Ms Estray Lassils applaud loudly at several of Cr Ziller’s concerts and recitals and I know that to this day Hub delights in occasionally reminding all of its near-neighbour Orbitals that your compatriot chose to make his second home here rather than on any of them. We are all positively quivering with anticipation at the prospect of listening to Cr Ziller’s latest symphony in a few weeks’ time. I am quite certain it will be splendid.”

Quilan nodded. He held his hands out. “Well, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, I’ve been asked to try to persuade Mahrai Ziller to return to Chel,” he said, looking round the others but settling his gaze on Kabe. “I don’t imagine that this will be an easy task. Ar Ischloear—”

“Please, call me Kabe.”

“Well, Kabe, what do you think? Am I right in believing it’s going to be an uphill struggle?”

Kabe thought.

“I can’t imagine,” began Tersono, “that Cr Ziller would really dream of passing up the chance to meet with the first Chelgrian—”

“I think that you are absolutely right, Major Quilan,” Kabe told him.

“—to set foot—”

“Please, call me Quil.”

“—on Masaq’ for—”

“Frankly, Quil, they’ve given you a stinker of a job.”

“—all these many, many years.”

“That’s just what I thought.”

~ All right?

~ Yes. Thank you for that.

~ You are very welcome, Huyler sent, impersonating the deep voice of the Hub avatar. I was almost too busy taking stuff in to pass any comments anyway.

~ Well, it wasn’t really necessary as it turned out.

They had been worried that Quilan’s welcome might be overwhelming, either accidentally or deliberately. His momentary slip when they had first boarded the Resistance Is Character-Forming and had spoken aloud in reply to a transmitted thought of Huyler’s had made them wary, and so they’d agreed that, for the first part of Quilan’s reception at least, Huyler would stay in the background, keeping silent unless he spotted something alarming that he felt he had to draw Quilan’s attention to.

~ So, Huyler; anything interesting?

~ Bit of a menagerie, don’t you think? Only one of them’s human.

~ What about the child?

~ Well, and the child. If it really is a child.

~ Let us not become paranoid, Huyler.

~ Let us not become complacent either, Quil. Anyway, it looks like they’re going for the cuteness angle rather than the top-brass approach.

~ There is a sense in which Estray Lassils is President of the World. And the silver-skinned avatar is under the direct control of the god which holds the power of life or death over the Orbital and everybody on it.

~ Yes, and there is a sense in which the woman is a powerless temporary figurehead and the avatar is just a puppet.

~ And the drone, and the Homomdan?

~ The machine claims to be from Contact so that may well mean it’s from Special Circumstances. The big three-legged guy seems genuine so I’d give him the benefit of the doubt for now; they probably think he’s a suitable host because he’s got more than the number of legs they’re used to. He’s got three legs, we’ve got three counting the midlimb; it could be that simple.

~ I suppose.

~ Anyway, we’re here.

~ Indeed we are. And quite an impressive “here” it is, don’t you think?

~ It’s all right, I suppose.

Quilan smiled thinly. He leant on the deck-side rail, and looked around. The river stretched into the distance, the view dropped away to either side.

Masaq’ Great River was a single loop of water stretching unbroken right round the Orbital and flowing slowly as a result of nothing more than the huge spinning world’s coriolis effect.

Fed by tributary rivers and mountain streams throughout its length, it was depleted by evaporation where it ran through deserts, drained by overflow waterfalls and the run-offs into seas, swamps and irrigation networks, and absorbed into giant lakes, vast oceans and entire continent-wide river systems and networks of canals, only to reappear via great converse estuaries which eventually bundled it into a single gathered current once again.

It ran its unending course through labyrinths of caverns under raised continents, their depths lit sporadically by plunging holes and immense troughs deep as the roots of mountains. It traversed the slowly decreasing numbers of yet unformed Plate topographies within transparent tunnels which gave out onto landscapes still being moulded and inscribed by the manufactured vulcanologies of Orbital terraforming techniques.

It disappeared under Bulkhead Ranges in colossal watery mazes slung beneath those hollow ramparts and slipped — flooding sometimes for whole seasons — across entire horizon-wide plains before running through winding canyons kilometres deep and thousands long. It iced over from one end of a continent to another during the Orbital’s aphelion or within the local winters produced by a Plate group’s sun lenses set on disperse. Its course took in dozens of neatly circumscribed or lushly sprawling cities and — when it reached Plates like Osinorsi, whose median level was well below the stream’s steady elevation — the river was carried above the plains, savannas, deserts or swamps on single or braided massifs towering hundreds or thousands of metres above the surrounding ground; hoisted ribbons of land crowned with cloud, edged with falls, strewn with hanging vegetation and vertical towns, punctured by caves and tunnels and — as here — with artfully carved and soaring arches that turned the monumental massifs into a more precise image of exactly what they were: vast aqueducts on a water course ten million kilometres long.

The parapet of the massif here, just a few kilometres from the cliffs and the plains that marked the beginning of Xarawe, was a flower-strewn grassy bank less than ten metres wide. From his vantage point here, standing on a raised forecastle of the ceremonial barge Bariatricist, Quilan could look down through wisps of cloud to rolling hills and meandering rivers unwinding through misty forests two kilometres below.

They had asked him whether he wanted to go straight to the house they had provided for him, or if he would like to take in part of Masaq’ Great River, and one of its famous barges, where a small reception had been arranged. He’d said he would be happy to take them up on their kind offer. The Hub avatar had looked quietly pleased; the drone Tersono had positively glowed with rosy approval.

The personnel module had lowered itself gently towards the atmosphere of the Orbital. The craft’s ceiling had also become a screen, showing off the soaring arc of the Orbital’s evening and night far-side while the vessel submerged into the slowly warming morning air above Osinorsi Plate. The module had swung out over one end of the vastly elongated S shape of the central massif carrying the river above the Plate’s lower level. They rendezvoused with the Bariatricist near the border of Xarawe.

At about four hundred metres, the barge was nearly twice as long as the river here was wide; it was a tall, beamy craft tiered with decks and studded with masts, some of which held highly decorated sails, most of which trailed banners and flags.

Quilan had seen lots of people, though the vessel was hardly crowded.

“This isn’t all for me, is it?” he’d asked the drone Tersono as the module approached one of the barge’s half-decks stern first.

“Well,” it had said, sounding uncertain. “No. Why, would you prefer to have a private craft?”

“No, I was just wondering.”

“There are various other receptions, parties and different events taking place on the barge just now,” the avatar had told him. “Plus there are several hundred people for whom the vessel is their temporary or permanent home.”

“How many people have come to see me?”

“About seventy,” the avatar replied.

“Major Quilan,” the drone had said. “If you’ve changed your mind—”

“No, I—”

“Major, might I make a suggestion?” Estray Lassils had said.

“Please do.”

And so the module had positioned itself so that he could walk straight out onto the barge’s high forecastle; Estray Lassils had disembarked at the same time and shown him the route to take; she’d hung back while he found his way across a sort of gantry, through a rather riotous party, and eventually fetched up on one of the set-back decks looking out over the vessel’s bows.

There were a few humans there, mostly in couples. He had remembered a hot hazy day on a much smaller boat on a broad but almost infinitely tinier river, thousands of light years away now; her touch and smell, the weight of her hand on his shoulder…

The humans had looked at him with curiosity, but had left him alone. He’d gazed out, taking in the view. The day was bright but cool. The great river and the vast, stunning world flowed and revolved beneath him, taking him with them both.