There were treaties and agreements to limit this sort of behaviour, but these usually only covered the galaxy’s more mature and settled societies, as well as those directly under their control or in their thrall; the relevant tech was like a new toy for those recently arrived at the great Involved table of the galactic meta-civilisation and tended to get used with enthusiasm for a while.
Societies which had only recently renounced the chronic use of force and resort to war – often reluctantly – were usually the most keen to watch those for whom such behaviour was still routine. One of the last-resort methods of dealing with those displaying such voyeurism was to turn their own devices against them, scooping the surveillance machines up from wherever they had been scattered, fiddling with their software and then infesting the worlds of their creators with them, concentrating on the homes and favoured recreational facilities of the powerful. This usually did the trick.
The peoples living within Sursamen, especially those like the Sarl, who would have been both unsuspecting of and defenceless against such conceited oversight, were amongst those supposedly protected against its depredations. But just because something wasn’t public didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. The Culture had one of the most open and inclusive dataverse structures in the galaxy but even it didn’t see or know everything. There were still plenty of private, hidden things going on. As a rule you got to hear of them eventually, but by then the damage had usually been done.
From the Eighth, though, so far; nothing. Either nobody was spying, or if they were they were keeping very quiet about it. The Morthanveld were easily capable, but too proud, law-abiding and anyway disdainful (much like the Culture, then); the Nariscene probably thought themselves above such behaviour too, and the Oct, well, the Oct didn’t really seem to care about anything other than pushing their claim to be the true Inheritors of the Veil legacy.
Even routine accessing of the Oct parts of the dataverse meant having to suffer a recorded lecture on the history of the galaxy according to the Oct, the whole point of which was to highlight the similarities between the Veil and the Oct and emphasise what a good claim the Oct had on the Involucra’s estate. To the Oct this inheritance obviously included both the Shellworlds themselves and the respect they felt ought to come attached, respect they rightly felt they were not being accorded. The Culture’s interface software just as routinely filtered this nonsense out – the Oct claim was strong only according to themselves; the vast majority of trusted scholars, backed by some pretty unimpeachable evidence, held that the Oct were a relatively recent species, quite unrelated to the Veil – but it was always there.
The Oct did watch over the Sarl, but very patchily, infrequently and – by agreement – with centimetre-scale devices; things big enough for a human to see. Usually these were attached to machines manned by Oct: scendships, aircraft, ground vehicles and the environment suits they wore.
There wasn’t much material publicly available from the last few hundreds of days, but there was some. Djan Seriy watched recordings of the great battle which had decided the fate of the Deldeyn, on the land around the Xiliskine Tower. The commentary and accompanying data, such as they were, suggested that the Aultridia had taken over the relevant sections of the Tower and transported the Deldeyn forces into a position where they could carry out their sneak attack on the Sarl heartlands. An SC-flagged data-end appended to the recording suggested Aultridian involvement was a lie; the Oct had been in charge.
All the recordage was from the latter part of the battle, and taken from static positions well above the action, probably from the Tower itself. She wondered if somewhere in what she was looking at there was detail of her father being wounded, and of whatever fate had overtaken Ferbin. She tried to zoom in, thinking to instruct an agent to look for anything relevant, but the recording was too coarse and lost detail well before individuals on the battlefield could be recognised.
She watched – again as though from on high, though this time the cameras were mounted on something flying – as the Sarl forces, now under Mertis tyl Loesp, crossed a canal in the desert near the Hyeng-zhar, its tall mists in the hazy distance, and saw their final short siege and shorter attack on Rasselle, the Deldeyn capital city.
That seemed to be all; a proper news report or docu-feature would have included victory celebrations in Pourl, tyl Loesp accepting the surrender of the Deldeyn commander, piles of dead bodies consigned to pits, banners going up in flames or the tears of the inconsolable bereaved, but the Oct hadn’t thought to get even remotely artistic or judgemental.
Just the sort of enthrallingly primitive, barbaric but dashing war comfortably positioned people liked to hear about, Anaplian thought. It was almost a pity nobody had thought to record it in all its gory detail.
A rapidly expanding but almost entirely vapid cloud of comment, analysis, speculation and exploitation was attached to the Oct recording through the news and current affairs organisations which took an interest in such events. Many Shellworld and Sursamen scholars – there were even people who regarded themselves as Eighth scholars, Sarl scholars – bemoaned the lack of decent data, leaving so much to speculation. For others, this lack of detail seemed to be merely an opportunity; offers to play war games based on the recent events were appended. Entertainments inspired by the recent thrilling events were also in preparation, or indeed already available.
Djan Seriy shivered in her couch by a fragrant poolside (splashing, laughter, the warmth of light on her skin) as she lay there, eyes closed, watching, experiencing all of this. She felt suddenly as she had right at the start of her involvement with the Culture, back in the shockingly confusing early days when everything seemed like bedlam and clash. This was all just too much to take in; at once far too close to home and utterly, horribly, invasively alien compared to it.
She would leave her agents running within the dataverse, in case there was some more directly observed stuff, and it was just well hidden.
Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.
She was being melodramatic, she decided. She checked there was no more of use to watch, clicked out, stood up and went to join in a noisy game of pool tag.
One ship, another ship. From the Seed Drill she was passed on to the GCU You Naughty Monsters. Another baton-like transmissal took her to the Xenoglossicist, an Air-class Limited System Vehicle. On her last night aboard there was an all-crews dance party; she threw herself into the wild music and wilder dancing like one abandoned.
The last Culture ship to carry her before she entered the Morthanveld domain was called You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave, a Gangster-class Very Fast Picket and ex-Rapid Offensive Unit.
She still hated the silly names.
17. Departures
Oramen woke to the sound of a thousand bells, blown temple horns, manufactury sirens, carriage hooters and just-audible mass cheering and knew immediately that the war must be over, and won. He looked about. He was in a gambling and whore house known as Botrey’s, in the city’s Schtip district. There was a shape in the bedclothes beside him which belonged to the girl whose name he would remember shortly.
Droffo, his new equerry, who was newly married and determinedly faithful, chose to turn a blind eye to Oramen’s whoring so long as it was carried out in gambling or drinking houses; an honest bordello he would not even contemplate entering. His new servant, Neguste Puibive, had, before he’d left the farm, promised his mother he would never pay for sex and was dutifully honouring this commitment to the letter, though not beyond; he had been modestly successful in persuading some of the more generous girls to extend their favours to him out of simple kindness, as well as sympathy for one who had made such a well-meant if hopelessly naïve promise.
Oramen’s absences from court had not gone unnoticed or unremarked. Just the morning before, at a formal late breakfast reception given by Har
ne, the lady Aelsh, to welcome her latest astrologer – Oramen had already successfully forgotten the fellow’s name – Renneque, accompanied by and arm-in-arm with Ramile, the pretty young thing Oramen remembered from Harne’s earlier party with the various actors and philosophisers, had scolded him.
“Why, it’s that young fellow!” she had exclaimed upon seeing him. “Look, Ramile! I recall that pretty face, if not the name after so long apart. How d’you do, sir? My name’s Renneque. Yours?”
He’d smiled. “Ladies Renneque, Ramile. How good to see you again. Have I been remiss?”
Renneque sniffed. “I’ll say. Most unfathomably. I declare there are those absent at the war who’re more often at court than you, Oramen. Are we so boring you avoid us, prince?”
“Absolutely not. On the contrary. I determined myself to be so ineffably tedious I thought to remove myself from our most quotidian conduct in the hope of making myself seem more contrastedly interesting to you when we do meet.”
Renneque was still thinking this through when Ramile smiled slyly at Oramen but to Renneque said, “I think the prince finds other ladies more to his liking, elsewhere.”
“Does he, now?” Renneque asked, feigning innocence.
Oramen smiled an empty smile.
“It may be we are not wanted,” Ramile suggested.
Renneque raised her delicate chin. “Indeed. Perhaps we are not good enough for the prince,” she said.
“Or it may be we are too good for him,” Ramile mused.
“How could that be?” Oramen asked, for want of anything better.
“It’s true,” Renneque agreed, taking a tighter hold of her companion’s arm. “Some prize availability over virtue, I’ve heard.”
“And a tongue loosened by money rather than moved by wit,” Ramile offered.
Oramen felt his face flush. “While some,” he said, “trust an honest harlot over the most apparently virtuous and courtly of women.”
“Some might, out of sheer perversity,” said Renneque, whose eyes had widened at the word “harlot”. “Though whether a man of judgement and honour would term one of those females ‘honest’ in the first place might give rise to some controversy.”
“One’s values, like so much else, might become infected in such company,” Ramile suggested, and tossed her pretty head and long flow of tight blonde curls.
“I meant, ladies,” Oramen said, “that a whore takes her reward there and then, and seeks no further advancement.” This time, as he said “whore”, both Renneque and Ramile looked startled. “She loves for money and makes no lie of it. That is honest. There are those, however, who’d offer any favour seemingly for nothing, but would later expect a very great deal of a young man with some prospect of advancement.”
Renneque stared at him as though he’d lost his mind. Her mouth opened, perhaps to say something. Ramile’s expression changed the most, altering quickly from something like anger back to that sly look, then taking on a small, knowing smile.
“Come away, Renneque,” she said, drawing the other woman back with her arm. “The prince mistakes us grievously, as though in a fever. We’d best withdraw to let the blush subside, and lest we catch it too.”
They turned away as one, noses in the air.
He regretted his rudeness almost immediately, but too late, he felt, to make amends. He supposed he was already a little upset; that morning’s mail had delivered a letter from his mother, all the way from far-distant Kheretesuhr, telling him that she was heavily pregnant by her new husband and had been advised by her doctors not to travel great distances. So to voyage all the way to court, to Pourl, was unthinkable. A new husband? he’d thought. Pregnant?Heavily pregnant, so that it was no recent thing? He’d heard nothing of this, nothing of either. She had not thought to tell him anything. The date on the letter was weeks past; it had suffered some serious delay in finding him, or had lain unposted.
He felt hurt, cheated somehow, as well as jealous and oddly spurned. He still was not sure how to respond. It had even crossed his mind that it might be best not to reply at all. Part of him wanted to do just that, so letting his mother wonder at not being kept informed, making her feel uncared-for, as she had made him feel.
Even while he was still lying there listening to the distant sounds of triumph, trying to work out exactly what he felt about the war’s victorious conclusion and puzzling over the fact that his immediate reaction was somehow not one of utter and untrammelled joy, Neguste Puibive, his servant, ran into the room and stopped, breathless, at the foot of the bed. Luzehl, the girl Oramen had spent the night with, was waking up too, rubbing her eyes and looking dubiously at Puibive, a tall, wide-eyed, buck-toothed boy fresh from the country. He was full of enthusiasm and good will and had the uncommon ability of looking gangly even while asleep.
“Sir!” he shouted. He noticed Luzehl and blushed. “Begging both your pardons, sir, young lady!” He gulped air. “Sir! Still begging your pardon, sir, but the war is finished, sir, and we are victorious! The news is just arrived! Tyl Loesp, great Werreber, they – all Sarl – are triumphant! What a great day! Sorry to have intruded, sir! I’ll extrude now, sir!”
“Neguste, hold,” Oramen said, as the youth – a year older than Oramen but often seeming younger – turned and made to go, tripping over his own feet as he did so and stumbling again as he turned back on Oramen’s command. He sorted himself out and stood, at attention, looking blinking at Oramen, who asked, “Is there any more detail, Neguste?”
“I heard the great news from a one-armed parliamentarian constable charged with shouting it to the rooftops, sir, and he wore a cocked hat. The lady from the infusions bar across the road near fainted when she heard and wished her sons a safely speedy return, sir!”
Oramen stifled a laugh. “Detail within the report of the victory itself, Neguste.”
“Nothing further, sir! Just we are victorious, the capital city of the Deldeyn is taken, their king is dead by his own hand and our brave boys have triumphed, sir! And tyl Loesp and mighty Werreber are safe! Casualties have been light. Oh! And the Deldeyn capital is to be renamed Hausk City, sir!” Neguste beamed with pleasure at this. “That’s a fine thing, eh, sir?”
“Fine indeed,” Oramen said and lay back smiling. As he’d listened to Neguste’s breathless delivery he’d felt his mood improve and gradually begin to resemble what he’d have hoped it would have been from the start. “Thank you, Neguste,” he told the lad. “You may go.”
“Pleasure do soing, sir!” Neguste said. He had yet to come up with a reliable and consistent phrase suitable for such moments. He turned without tripping, found the door successfully and closed it behind him. He barged back in a heartbeat later. “And!” he exclaimed. “A telegraphical letter, sir! Just delivered.” He took the sealed envelope from his apron, handed it to Oramen and retreated.
Luzehl yawned. “Is it really over then?” she asked as Oramen broke the seal and opened the folded sheet.
Oramen nodded slowly. “So it would seem.” He smiled at the girl and started swinging his legs out of the bed as he read. “I’d better get to the palace.”
Luzehl stretched out, tossed her long, black, entangledly curled hair and looked insulted. “Immediately, prince?”
The telegram brought news that he had a new half-brother. It had been written not by Aclyn herself but by her principal lady-in-waiting. The birth had been protracted and difficult – not surprising, it was stated, given the lady Blisk’s relatively mature age – but mother and child were recovering. That was all.
“Yes, immediately,” Oramen said, shrugging off the girl’s hand.
The heat around the Hyeng-zhar had grown oppressive; two suns – the Rollstars Clissens and Natherley – stood high in the sky and vied to squeeze the most sweat out of a man. Soon, in this water-purged extremity, if the star-watchers and weather sages were to be believed, the land would be plunged into near total darkness for nearly fifty short-days and a sudden winter would ensue, turning the r
iver and the Falls into ice.
Tyl Loesp looked out over the vast tiered, segmented cataract of the Hyeng-zhar, blinking sweat out of his eyes, and wondered that such colossal, booming energy and such furious heat could be quieted, stilled and chilled so soon by the mere absence of passing stars. And yet the scientists said it was going to happen and indeed seemed quite excited about it, and the records talked of such happenings in the past, so it must be so. He wiped his brow. Such heat. He’d be glad to be under the water.
Rasselle, the Deldeyn capital city, had fallen easily in the end. After a lot of whining from Werreber and some of the other senior army people – and some evidence that the low-order troops were unaccountably coy on the matter of putting captured Deldeyn to death – tyl Loesp had rescinded the general order regarding the taking of prisoners and the sacking of cities.
In retrospect, he ought to have pressed Hausk to have demonised the Deldeyn more. Chasque had been enthusiastic and together they had tried to convince Hausk the attitude of the soldiery and the populace would be improved if they could be made to hate the Deldeyn with a visceral conviction, but the King had, typically, been overcautious. Hausk distinguished between the Deldeyn as a people on the one hand and their high command and corrupt nobility on the other, and even allowed that they might altogether constitute an honourable foe. He would, in any event, need to govern them once they had been defeated, and people nursing a justified grievance against a murderously inclined occupier made peaceful, productive rule impossible. On this purely practical issue he judged massacre wasteful and even contrary as a method of control. Fear lasted a week, anger a year and resentment a lifetime, he’d held. Not if you kept fuelling that fear with every passing day, tyl Loesp had countered, but had been overruled.
“Better grudging respect than terrified submission,” Hausk had told him, clapping him on the shoulder after the discussion that had finally decided the matter. Tyl Loesp had bitten back his reply.
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