“This is Toark,” Anaplian said. “He is not mine.”
“Indeed. I thought I might have heard.”
Anaplian glanced at the drone. “I’m sure you would have.”
“And Handrataler Turminder Xuss. Good day to you too.”
“Delightful as ever,” muttered the drone.
“Turminder, this does not involve you initially. Would you excuse Djan Seriy and me? You might entertain our young friend.”
“I am becoming an accomplished child-minder. My skills grow with every passing hour. I shall hone them.”
The drone escorted the boy from the balcony. Anaplian glanced up at the overhanging bulk of the accommodation deck and took her hat off, throwing it into one suspended seat and herself into another. A drinks tray floated up.
Batra drifted nearer, a greyly skeletal bush about head-height. “You are at home here,” he stated.
Anaplian suspected she was being gently rebuked. Had she been overcasual in her hat-throwing and her seat-collapsing-into? Perhaps Batra was chiding her for not showing him sufficient deference. He was her superior, to the extent that this wilfully unhierarchic civilisation understood the idea of superiors and inferiors. He could have her thrown out of SC if he wanted to – or at the very least, make her restart the whole process – however, he wasn’t usually so sensitive regarding matters of etiquette.
“It serves,” she said.
Batra floated across the deck and settled into another of the seats hanging from the ceiling, resting in it like a sort of fuzzy, vaguely metallic ball. He had formed part of the side facing Anaplian into a kind of simulated face, so that his visual sensors were where the eyes should be and his voice came from where a human mouth would have been. It was disconcerting. Just having a fuzzy ball talking to you would have been much less alarming, Anaplian thought.
“I understand that events have not ended as well as they might with the Zeloy/Nuersotise situation.”
“A year ago we disabled and turned back an army on its way to sack a city,” Anaplian said wearily. “Today the would-be attackers became the attacked. The more progressive tendency, as we would put it, ought now to prevail. Though at a cost.” She pursed her lips briefly. “Part of which I have just witnessed.”
“I have seen some of this.” The image of the face suggested by Batra’s mass of steely-looking tendrils expressed a frown, then closed its eyes, politely indicating that he was reviewing data from elsewhere. Anaplian wondered if he was watching general views of the siege and sacking of the city, or something that included her unwarranted excursion on the seatrider.
Batra’s eyes opened again. “The knowledge that so much worse happens where we do nothing, and always has, long before we came along – and that so much worse might happen here were we to do nothing – seems of very little significance when one is confronted with the grisly reality of aggression we have failed to prevent. All the more so when we had a hand in allowing or even enabling it.” He sounded genuinely affected. Anaplian, who was innately suspicious of perfectly one hundred per cent natural, utterly unamended human-basic humans, wondered whether Batra – this bizarre, many-times-alien, two-thousand-year-old creature that still thought of itself as “he” – was expressing sincere emotion, or simply acting. She wondered this very briefly, having realised long ago the exercise was pointless.
“Well,” she said, “it is done.”
“And much more remains to be done,” Batra said.
“That’ll get done too,” Anaplian said, beginning to lose patience. She was short on patience. She had been told this was a fault. “I imagine,” she added.
The metallic bush rolled back a little, and the face on its surface seemed to nod. “Djan Seriy, I have news,” Batra said.
Something about the way the creature said this made her quail. “Really?” she said, feeling herself battening down, shrinking inward.
“Djan Seriy, I have to tell you that your father is dead and your brother Ferbin may also be deceased. I am sorry. Both for the news itself and to be the one who bears it.”
She sat back. She drew her feet up so that she was quite enclosed in the gently swinging egg of the suspended seat. She took a deep breath and then unfolded herself deliberately. “Well,” she said. “Well.” She looked away.
It was, of course, something she had tried to prepare herself for. Her father was a warrior. He had lived with war and battle all his adult life and he usually led from the front. He was also a politician, though that was a trade he’d had to train himself to do well rather than one that he had taken to entirely naturally and excelled at. She had always known he was likely to die before old age took him. Throughout the first year when she had come to live amongst these strange people that called themselves the Culture she had half expected to hear he was dead and she was required to return for his funeral.
Gradually, as the years had passed, she had stopped worrying about this. And, also gradually, she had started to believe that even when she did hear he was dead it would mean relatively little to her.
You had to study a lot of history before you could become part of Contact, and even more before you were allowed to join Special Circumstances. The more she’d learned of the ways that societies and civilisations tended to develop, and the more examples of other great leaders were presented to her, the less, in many ways, she had thought of her father.
She had realised that he was just another strong man, in one of those societies, at one of those stages, in which it was easier to be the strong man than it was to be truly courageous. Might, fury, decisive force, the willingness to smite; how her father had loved such terms and ideas, and how shallow they began to look when you saw them played out time and time again over the centuries and millennia by a thousand different species.
This is how power works, how force and authority assert themselves, this is how people are persuaded to behave in ways that are not objectively in their best interests, this is the kind of thing you need to make people believe in, this is how the unequal distribution of scarcity comes into play, at this moment and this, and this . . .
These were lessons anybody born into the Culture grew up with and accepted as being as natural and obvious as the progression of a star along the Main Sequence, or evolution itself. For somebody like her, coming in from outside, with a set of assumptions built up in a society that was both profoundly different and frankly inferior, such understanding arrived in a more compressed time frame, and with the impact of a blow.
And Ferbin dead too, perhaps. That she had not expected. They had joked before she’d left that he might die before his father, in a knife fight over a gambling game or at the hand of a cuckolded husband, but that had been the sort of thing one said superstitiously, inoculating the future with a weakened strain of afflictive fate.
Poor Ferbin, who had never wanted to be king.
“Do you need time to grieve?” Batra asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head fiercely.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive,” she said. “My father. Did he die in battle?”
“Apparently so. Not on the battlefield, but of his wounds, shortly after, before he could receive full medical attention.”
“He’d rather have died on the field itself,” she told Batra. “He must have hated having to settle for second best.” She found that she was both crying a little, and smiling. “When did it happen?” she asked.
“Eleven days ago.” Batra made a bristling motion. “Even news of such importance travels slowly out of a Shellworld.”
“I suppose,” Anaplian said, her expression thoughtful. “And Ferbin?”
“Missing, on the same battlefield.”
Anaplian knew what that meant. The vast majority of those labelled missing in battles either never reappeared at all, or turned up dead. And what had Ferbin being doing anywhere near a battle in the first place? “Do you know where?” she asked. “Exactly how far-flung a province was it?”
“Near the Xiliskine Tower.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“Near the Xiliskine Tower,” Batra repeated. “Within sight of Pourl – that is the capital, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Anaplian said. Her mouth was suddenly quite dry. Dear God, it had all fallen away, then. It had all crumbled and gone. She felt a sorrow she barely understood.
“So was this some . . . Excuse me.” She cleared her throat. “Was this a final stand, in that case?”
And why hadn’t she heard? Why had no one told her things had reached a point of such awful desperation? Were they afraid she’d try to return and use her new-found skills and powers to intercede? Were they worried she’d try to join the fray, was that it? How could they?
“Now, Djan Seriy,” Batra said, “while I have been briefed in this, I cannot claim to have immediate access to an expert database. However, I understand that it was the result of what was expected to be a surprise attack by the Deldeyn.”
“What? From where?” Anaplian said, not even trying to hide her alarm.
“From this Xiliskine Tower.”
“But there’s no way out of . . .” she began, then put one hand to her mouth, pursing her lips and frowning as she stared at the floor. “They must have opened a new . . .” she said, more to herself than to Batra. She looked up again. “So, is the Xiliskine controlled by the Aultridia now, or . . . ?”
“First, let me assure you that as I understand it, Pourl and your father’s people are not under threat. The Deldeyn are the ones facing disaster.”
Anaplian’s frown deepened, even as the rest of her body showed signs of relaxing. “How so?”
“Your father had effectively completed his Wars of Unity, as he termed them.”
“Really?” She felt a surge of relief and a perverse urge to laugh. “He did keep busy.”
“The Deldeyn would appear to have assumed that they’d be his next target. They therefore staged what they hoped would be a decisive, preemptive surprise attack on your father’s capital city, having been convinced by the – Oct? Inheritors?”
“Synonyms.” Anaplian flapped one hand again. “Either.”
“That they, the Oct, would deliver the Deldeyn forces in secret to where a new portal would be opened in the Xiliskine Tower through which they might effect such an attack, taking the city. This was a ruse, and one which the Sarl were party to. Your father’s forces were waiting for the Deldeyn and destroyed them.”
Anaplian looked confused. “Why were the Oct deceiving the Deldeyn?”
“This is still a matter for conjecture, apparently.”
“And the Aultridia?”
“The other Conducer species. They have backed the Deldeyn in the past. They are believed to be considering military and diplomatic action against the Oct.”
“Hmm. So why . . . ?” Anaplian shook her head once more. “What is going on back there?” she asked. Again, Jerle Batra suspected this question was not really directed at him. He let her continue. “So, Ferbin’s in charge – no, of course, he’s probably dead too. Oramen, then?” she asked, looking worried and sceptical at once.
“No; your younger brother is deemed too young to inherit all your father’s power immediately. A man called Mertis tyl Loesp is regent until your brother’s next birthday.”
“Tyl Loesp,” Anaplian said thoughtfully. She nodded. “At least he’s still around. He should be all right.”
“Your younger brother won’t be in any danger, will he?”
“Danger?”
Batra’s impersonated face configured a weak smile. “It has been my understanding that, like wicked stepmothers, ambitious regents do not usually come out well from such contexts. Perhaps that is only in tales.”
“No,” Anaplian said with what sounded like relief. She wiped her eyes. “Tyl Loesp’s been my father’s best friend since they were children. He’s always been loyal, fastened his ambitions to my father’s. God knows, they were grand enough for two. Grand enough for a host.’ Anaplian looked away to one side, where the bright, tropic air of this place that she had almost come to think of as home over the last two years now seemed as far away as it had when she’d first arrived. “Though what do I know? It’s been fifteen years.”
She wondered how much Ferbin had changed in that time, and Oramen. Her father, she strongly suspected, would hardly have changed at all – he had been the same forbidding, occasionally sentimental, rarely tender, utterly focused individual for as long as she’d known him. Utterly focused, yet with one eye always on history, on his legacy.
Had she ever known him? Most of the time he wasn’t there to be known in the first place, always away fighting his distant wars. But even when he had returned to Pourl, his palace, concubines and children, he had been more interested in the three boys, especially Elime, the eldest and by far the most like him in character. Second in age, her gender and the circumstances of her birth had fixed the King’s only daughter firmly last in his affections.
“Should I leave you, Djan Seriy?” Batra asked.
“Hmm?” She looked back at him.
“I thought you may need time alone. Or do you need to talk? Either is—”
“I need you to talk to me,” she told him. “What is the situation now?”
“On what is called the Eighth? Stable. The King is mourned with all due—”
“Has he been buried?”
“He was due to be, seven days ago. My information is eight or nine days old.”
“I see. Sorry. Go on.”
“The great victory is celebrated. Preparations for the invasion of the Deldeyn continue apace. The invasion is widely expected to take place between ten and twenty days from now. The Oct have been censured by their Nariscene mentors, though they have blamed everybody else for what has happened, including elements within their own people. The Aultridia have, as I have said, threatened retaliation. The Nariscene are trying to keep the peace. The Morthanveld are so far not involved, though they have been kept informed.”
She pinched her lower lip with her fingers. She took a breath and said, “How long would it take for me to get back to Sursamen?”
“A moment, please,” Batra said, falling silent for a moment while, she imagined, he consulted the course schedules of whole networks of distant ships. She had time to wonder why he hadn’t already memorised or at least accessed this information, and whether this possibly deliberate hesitation implied a criticism of her for even thinking of abandoning her post here.
“Between one hundred and thirty and one hundred and sixty days,” Batra told her. “The uncertainty comes from the changeover to Morthanveld space.”
Morthanveld space. The Morthanveld were the highest-level Involved species around Sursamen. As part of her training Anaplian had studied, and been suitably stunned by, the full three-dimensional map of all the various species that inhabited the galaxy and had spread sufficiently far from their homes to discover that they were profoundly Not Alone.
The standard star chart detailing the influence of the better-travelled players was fabulously complex and even it only showed major civilisations; those with just a few solar systems to their name didn’t really show up, even with the holo-map filling one’s entire field of vision. Generally overlapping, often deeply interconnected, slowly shifting, subject to continual gradual and very occasionally quite sudden change, the result looked like something committed by a madman let loose in a paint factory.
The Morthanveld held sway over vast regions of space, one tiny pocket of which happened to include the star around which her home planet orbited. They had been there, or spreading slowly out in that direction, for longer than the Culture had existed, and the two civilisations had long since settled into a comfortable and peaceful co-existence, though the Morthanveld did expect all but the most pressing business crossing their sphere of influence to be conducted using their own spacecraft.
Having immersed herself in the politics, geography, technology and mythology of Prasadal
for over two intense, demanding years, and having almost ignored outside events for the same amount of time, Anaplian realised she had half forgotten that the Culture was not somehow the totality of the galactic community – that it was, indeed, a relatively small part, even if it was a powerful and almost defiantly widespread one.
“Would I be excused here?” she asked Batra.
“Djan Seriy,” the metallic bush said, and for the first time something other than its pretended face moved, its sides expanding in a gesture that looked a lot like a human spreading their arms, “you are a free agent. Nothing keeps you here but you. You may go at any time.”
“But would I be welcome back? Would I still have a place in SC if I did return home? Could I come back here, to Prasadal?”
“None of that is for me finally to decide.”
The creature was being evasive. It would have a say, even if the final decision might be made by some tiny clique of ship Minds spread throughout the Culture and across the galaxy.
Anaplian arched one eyebrow. “Take a guess.”
“SC, I’d imagine, yes. Here? I can only imagine. How long would you be going for, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Anaplian admitted.
“And neither would we. It is unlikely you would start any return journey within a few days of arriving. You might be gone a standard year, all told. Perhaps longer; who can say? We would have to replace you here.”
There was a degree of margin in the system here, of course. Her colleagues could fill in for her, for a while at least. Leeb Scoperin especially knew what Anaplian had been doing in her part of the planet and seemed to have the sort of natural understanding of her aims and techniques that would let him take over her role with as little turbulence as possible, plus he was one of those training an assistant, so the overall burden wouldn’t be too great. But that sort of arrangement would not do for ever. A little slack was one thing, but leaving people feeling useless for extended amounts of time was pointless and wasteful, so the platform was not overstaffed for the task in hand. Batra was right; they’d have to replace her.