“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 toward 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 civilization, 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 recategorization.”
“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’ behavior 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 line 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 lines 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 line 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 kilometers away in the otherwise empty center 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.”
4
Scorched Ground
~ Are our own ships not good enough?
~ Theirs are faster.
~ Still?
~ I’m afraid so.
~ And I hate this chopping and changing. First one ship then another, then another, then a fourth. I feel like a delivery package.
~ This wouldn’t be some obscure form of insult, or way of trying to delay us, would it?
~ You mean not giving us our own ship?
~ Yes.
~ I don’t think so. In an obscure sort of way they may even be trying to impress us. They’re saying that they’re taking so much care to correct the mistakes they made that they won’t spare any ships from normal duty for anybody.
~ Sparing four ships at different times makes more sense?
~ It does the way they’ll have their forces set up. The first ship was very much a war craft. They’re keeping those close to Chel in case the war should begin again. They may loop a certain distance out, for example to ferry us, but no further. The one we are on now is a Superlifter, a sort of fast tug. The one we’re approaching is a General Systems Vehicle; a kind of giant depot or mother ship. It carries other warships they could deploy in the event of further hostilities, if they went beyond the scale their immediately available matériel could deal with. The GSV can loop further out than the war vessel but still can’t stray too far from Chelgrian space. The last ship is an old demilitarized war craft of a type commonly used throughout the galaxy for this sort of picket duty.
~ Throughout the galaxy. Somehow that still always comes as a shock.
~ Yes. Decent of them to take such an interest in our relatively puny well-being.
~ If you believe them, that is all they were ever trying to do.
~ Do you believe them, Major?
~ I think I do. I am just not convinced that that is sufficient excuse for what happened.
~ Damn right it isn’t.
• • •
The first three days of their journey had been spent aboard the Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Nuisance Value. It was a massive, cobbled-together object; a bundle of gigantic engine units behind a single weapon pod and a tiny accommodation section that looked like an afterthought.
~ God that thing is ugly, Huyler said when they first saw it, riding across from the wreck of the Winter Storm in the tiny shuttle with the ship’s black-skinned, gray-suited avatar. ~ And these people are supposed to be decadent aesthetes?
~ There is a theory that they are ashamed of their weaponry. As long as it looks inelegant, rough and disproportionate they can pretend that it is not really theirs, or not really a part of their civilization, or only temporarily so, because everything else they make is so subtly refined.
~ Or it could just be form following function. However I confess that’s a new one on me. Which university whizz-kid came up with that theory?
~ You will be glad to know, Hadesh Huyler, that we now have a Civilizational Metalogical Profiling Section in Naval Intelligence.
~ I can see I have a lot of catching up to do with the latest terminology. What does metalogical mean?
~ It is short for psycho-physio-philosophilogical.
~ Well, naturally. Of course it is. Glad I asked.
~ It is a Culture term.
~ A fucking Culture term?
~ Yes, sir.
~ I see. And what the hell does this metalogical section of ours actually do?
~ It tries to tell us how other Involveds think.
~ Involveds?
~ Also one of their terms. It means space-faring species beyond a certain technological level which are willing and able to interact with each other.
~ I see. Always a bad sign when you start using the enemy’s terminology.
Quilan glanced at the avatar sitting in the seat next to him. It smiled uncertainly at him.
~ I would agree with that, sir.
He returned his gaze to the view of the Culture warship. It was, indeed, rather ugly. Before Huyler had expressed his own thoughts, Quilan had been thinking how brutally powerful the craft looked. How odd to have somebody else in your head who looked through the same eyes and saw exactly the same things you did and yet came to such different conclusions, experienced such dissimilar emotions.
The craft filled the screen, as it had since they had set off. They were approaching it quickly, but it had been a long way off; some few hundred kilometers. A read-out at the side of the screen was counting the magnification level back toward zero. Powerful, Quilan thought—entirely to himself—and ugly. Perhaps, in some sense, that was always the case. Huyler broke into his thoughts:
~ I take it your servants are already aboard?
~ I am not taking any servants, sir.
~ What?
~ I am going alone, sir. Apart from yourself, of course.
~ You’re going without servants? Are you some sort of fucking outcast or something, Major? You’re not one of these embryonicist Caste Deniers, are you?
~ No, sir. Partly, my not bringing servants reflects some of the changes that have occurred in our society since your body-death. These will no doubt be explained in your briefing files.
~ Yes, well, I’ll be taking a further look at those when I have the time. You wouldn’t believe the amount of tests and stuff they’ve been putting me through, even while you were asleep. I had to remind them that constructs need naps, too, or they’d have burned me out in here. But look, Major; this thing about servants. I read up on the Caste War, but I thought it ended up a draw. Dear scum in heaven, does this mean we lost it?
~ No, sir. The war ended in a compromise following the Culture’s intervention.
~ I know that, but a compromise which involves having no servants?
~ No, sir. People still have servants. Officers still employ squires and equerries. However I am of an order which eschews such personal help.
~ Visquile mentioned you were some sort of monk. I didn’t realize you’d be quite so self-denying.
~ There is another reason for traveling alone, sir. If I might remind you, the Chelgrian we are being sent to meet is a Denier.
~ Oh, yeah, this Ziller guy. Some spoiled, fur-rending liberal brat who thinks it’s his God-given duty to do the whining for those who can’t be bothered whining for themselves. Best thing you can do with these people is kick them out. These shits don’t understand the first thing about responsibility or duty. You can’t renounce your caste anymore than you can renounce your species. And we’re indulging this arse-leaf?
~ He is a great composer, sir. And we didn’t chuck him out; Ziller left Chel to go into self-exile in the Culture. He renounced his Given status and took—
~ Oh, let me guess. He declared himself an Invisible.
~ Yes, sir.
~ Pity he didn’t go the whole way and make himself a Spayed.
~ At any rate, he is not well disposed to Chelgrian society. The idea was that by going without an entourage I might make myself less intimidating and more acceptable to him.
~ We should not be the ones having to make ourselves acceptable to him, Major.
~ We are in a position where we have no choice, sir. It has been decided at cabinet level that we must try to persuade him to return. I have accepted that mission, as indeed you have yourself. We cannot force him to return, so we must appeal to him.
~ Is he likely to listen?
~ I really have no idea, sir. I knew him when we were both children, I have followed his career and I have enjoyed his music. I have even studied it. However that is all I have to offer. I imagine people closer to him by
family or conviction might have been asked to do what I am doing, but it would seem that none of them were prepared to take on the task. I have to accept that while I may not be the ideal candidate, I must be the best of those available for the job, and just get on with it.
~ This all sounds a little forlorn, Major. I worry about your morale.
~ My spirits are at something of a low ebb, sir, for personal reasons; however my morale and sense of purpose are more robust and, when all’s said and done, orders are orders.
~ Yes, aren’t they just, Major?
• • •
The Nuisance Value carried a human crew of twenty and a handful of small drones. Two of the humans greeted Quilan in the cramped shuttle hangar and showed him to his quarters, which comprised a single cabin with a low ceiling. His meager baggage and belongings were already there, transferred from the Navy frigate that had taken him to the hulk of the Winter Storm.
Something like a Navy officer’s cabin had been created for him. One of the drones had been assigned to him; it explained that the cabin’s interior could deform to create something closer to his desires. He told the drone he was content with the present arrangements and was happy to unpack and remove the rest of his vacuum suit by himself.
~ Was that drone trying to be our servant?
~ I doubt it, sir. It may do as we ask if we do so nicely.
~ Huh!
~ So far they all seem quite diffident and determined to be helpful, sir.
~ Right. Suspicious as hell.
• • •
Quilan was attended to by the drone, which to his surprise did indeed act as an almost silent and very efficient servant, cleaning his clothes, sorting his kit and advising him on the minimal—almost nonexistent—etiquette that applied on board the Culture vessel.
There was what passed for a formal dinner on the first evening.