Their excuses were as the Colonel had laid out, though there was also, Quilan thought, a hint that they weren’t as used to predator-evolved species as they were to others, and that had been a factor in their failure to anticipate either the catastrophic behavior change which started with Muonze and cascaded down through the restructured society, or the suddenness and ferocity with which it occurred once it had begun.
He could hardly believe it, but he had to. He watched a lot of screen, he talked to the Colonel and to some other patients who’d started to come to visit him. It was all true. All of it.
One day, the day before he was to be allowed out of his bed for the first time, he heard a bird singing in the grounds outside his window. He clicked at the buttons on the bed’s control panel, and made it turn and raise him up so that he could look out of the window. The bird must have flown off, but he saw the cloud-scattered sky, the trees on the far side of the glittering lake, the breaking waves on the rocky shore, and the wind-stroked grasses of the hospital grounds.
“Once, in a market in Robunde, he had bought her a caged bird because it sang so beautifully. He took it to the room they were hiring while she completed her thesis paper on temple acoustics.
She thanked him graciously, walked to the window, opened the cage’s door and shooed the little bird out; it flew away over the square, singing. She watched the bird for a moment until it disappeared, then looked around to him with an expression that was at once apologetic, defiant and concerned. He was leaning against the door frame, smiling at her.”
His tears dissolved the view.
7
Peer Group
Important visitors to Masaq’ were usually transshipped 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 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 blond 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 around 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 forward 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 civilizational demeanor 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 maneuver 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 child
ren 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 blond 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 toward 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 gray 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 honored 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 toward the Chelgrian’s shoulders, ushered him forward. 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 great 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 Hom
omda 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 realized 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 nonhuman 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.”