However, a century or so after the end of the Idiran War, the Padressahl had had what the Culture regarded as the gross bad manners to suddenly sublime off into Advanced Elderhood at just the wrong time, leaving their less mature charges joyfully off the leash and both snapping at the heels of the local members of the Culture’s great long straggling civilisational caravan wending its way towards progress (whether they went wittingly or not), and positively savaging several of the even less well-developed neighbouring species which for their own good nobody else had yet thought fit to contact.
Suggestions by a few of the more cynical Culture Minds that the Padressahl decision to hit the hyperspace button and go for full don’t-give-a-damn-anymore god-head had been caused partially if not principally by their frustration and revulsion at the incorrigible ghastliness of Affront nature had never been either fully accepted or convincingly refuted.
Whatever; in the end, with a deal of arm and tentacle twisting, some deftly managed suitable-technology donation (through what the Affront Intelligence Regiment still gleefully but naïvely thought was some really neat high-tech theft on their part), the occasional instance of knocking heads together (or whatever anatomical feature was considered appropriate) and a hefty amount of naked bribery (woefully inelegant to the refined intellect of the average Culture Mind - their tastes generally ran to far more rarefied forms of chicanery - but undeniably effective) the Affront had - kicking and screaming at times, admittedly - finally been more or less persuaded to join the great commonality of the galactic meta-civilisation; they had agreed to abide by its rules almost all the time and had grudgingly accepted that other beings beside themselves might have rights, or at least tolerably excusable desires (such as those concerning life, liberty, self-determination and so on), which occasionally might even override the self-evidently perfectly natural, demonstrably just and indeed arguably even sacred Affronter prerogative to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they damn well pleased, preferably while having a bit of fun with the locals at the same time.
All that, however, represented only a partial solution to the least vexing part of the problem. If the Affront had been simply one more expansionist species of callously immature but technologically localised adventurers with bad contact manners, the problem they represented to the Culture would have subsided to the sort of level that would have gone more or less unnoticed; they would have become just another part of the general clutter of inventively obdurate species struggling to express themselves in the vast emptiness that was the galaxy.
The problem was rooted deeper, however; it went back further, it was more intrinsic. The problem was that the Affront had spent uncounted millennia long before they’d even got off their own fog-bound moon-planet tinkering with and carefully altering the flora and, especially, the fauna of that environment. They had discovered at a relatively early point in their development how to change the genetic make-up of both their own inheritance - which almost by definition needed little further amendment, given their manifest superiority - and that of the creatures with whom they shared their home world.
Those creatures had all, accordingly, been amended as the Affront saw fit, for their own amusement and delight. The result was what one Culture Mind had described as a kind of self-perpetuating, never-ending holocaust of pain and fear.
Affronter society rested on a huge base of ruthlessly exploited juvenile geldings and a sub-class of oppressed females who unless born to the highest families - and not always even then - could count themselves lucky if they were only raped by the males from their own tribe. It was generally regarded as significant - within the Culture if nowhere else - that one of the few aspects of their own genetic inheritance with which the Affront had deemed it desirable to meddle had been in the matter of making the act of sex a somewhat less pleasurable and considerably more painful act for their females than their basic genetic legacy required; the better, it was claimed, to further the considered good of the species rather than the impetuously selfish pleasure of the individual.
When an Affronter went hunting for the artificially fattened treehurdlers, limbcroppers, paralice or skinstrippers that were their favoured prey, it was in a soar-chariot pushed by the animals called swiftwings which lived in a state of perpetual dread, their nervous systems and pheromone receptors painstakingly tuned to react with ever increasing levels of dread and the urge to escape as their masters became more and more excited and so exuded more of the relevant odours.
The hunted animals themselves were artificially terrified as well, just by the very appearance of the Affronters, and so driven to ever more desperate manoeuvres in their frantic urge to escape.
When an Affronters’ skin was cleaned it was by the small animals called xysters, whose diligence had been vastly improved by giving them such a frenetic hunger for an Affronter’s dead skin cells that unless they were overcome by exhaustion they were prone to bloating themselves literally to the point of bursting.
Even the Affront’s standard domesticated food animals had long since been declared as tasting much more interesting when they betrayed the signs of having been severely stressed, and so had also been altered to such a pitch of highly strung anxiety - and husbanded in conditions diligently contrived to intensify the effect - that they inevitably produced what any Affronter worth his methylacetylene would agree was the most inspiringly tasty meat this side of an event horizon.
The examples went on; in fact, reviewing their society, it was more or less impossible to avoid manifestations of the Affronters’ deliberate, even artistic use of genetic manipulation to produce through a kind of ebulliently misplaced selfishness - which to them was indistinguishable from genuine altruism - the sort of result it took most societies paroxysms of self-destructive wretchedness to generate.
Hearty but horrible; that was the Affront. ‘Progress through pain!’ It was an Affronter saying. Genar-Hofoen had even heard Fivetide say it. He couldn’t recall exactly, but it had probably been followed by a bellowed, ‘Ho ho ho!’
The Affront appalled the Culture; they appeared so unamendable, their attitude and their abominable morality seemed so secured against remedy. The Culture had offered to provide machines to do the kind of jobs the juvenile castrati did, but the Affront just laughed; why, they could quite easily build machines of their own, but where was the honour in being served by a mere machine?
Similarly, the Culture’s attempts to persuade the Affront that there were other ways to control fertility and familial inheritance besides those which relied on the virtual imprisonment, genetic mutilation and organised violation of their females, or to consume vat-grown meat - better, if anything, than the real thing - or to offer non-sentient versions of their hunting animals all met with equally derisive if brusquely good-humoured dismissals.
Still, Genar-Hofoen liked them, and had come even to admire them for their vivacity and enthusiasm; he had never really subscribed to the standard Culture belief that any form of suffering was intrinsically bad, he accepted that a degree of exploitation was inevitable in a developing culture, and leant towards the school of thought which held that evolution, or at least evolutionary pressures, ought to continue within and around a civilised species, rather than - as the Culture had done - choosing to replace evolution with a kind of democratically agreed physiological stasis-plus-option-list while handing over the real control of one’s society to machines.
It was not that Genar-Hofoen hated the Culture, or particularly wished it ill in its present form; he was deeply satisfied that he had been born into it and not some other humanoid species where you suffered, procreated and died and that was about it; he just didn’t feel at home in the Culture all the time. It was a motherland he wanted to leave and yet know he could always return to if he wanted. He wanted to experience life as an Affronter, and not just in some simulation, however accurate. Plus, he wanted to go somewhere the Culture had never been, and well, explore.
Neither ambition seemed to him all that much t
o ask, but he’d been thwarted in both desires until now. He’d thought he’d detected movement on the Affronter side of things before this Sleeper business had come up, but now, if all concerned were to be believed, he could more or less have whatever he wanted, no strings attached.
He found this suspicious in itself. Special Circumstances was not notorious for its desire to issue blank cheques to anyone. He wondered if he was being paranoid, or had just been living with the Affront for too long (none of his predecessors had lasted longer than a hundred days and he’d been here nearly two years already).
Either way, he was being cautious; he had asked around. He still had some replies to receive - they should be waiting for him when he arrived at Tier - but so far everything seemed to tally. He had also asked to speak to a representation of the Desert Class MSV Not Invented Here, the ship acting as incident coordinator for all this - again, this ought to happen on Tier - and he’d looked up the craft’s own history in the module’s archives and transferred the results to the suit’s own AI.
The Desert Class had been the first type of General Systems Vehicle the Culture had constructed, providing the original template for the Very Large Fast Self-Sufficient Ship concept. At three-and-a-bit klicks in length it was tiny by today’s standards - ships twice its length and eight times its volume were routinely constructed inside GSVs the size of the Sleeper Service and the whole class had been demoted to Medium Systems Vehicle status - but it certainly had the distinction of age; the Not Invented Here had been around for nearly two millennia and boasted a long and interesting career, coming as close as the Culture’s distributed and democratic military command structure had allowed to being in advisory control of several fleets in the course of the Idiran War. It was now in that equivalent of serenely glorious senescence that affected some ancient Minds; no longer producing many smaller ships, taking relatively little to do with Contact’s normal business, and keeping itself relatively sparsely populated.
It remained, nevertheless, a full Culture ship; it hadn’t taken a sabbatical, gone into a retreat or become an Eccentric, nor had it joined the Culture Ulterior - the fairly recently fashionable name for the bits of the Culture that had split away and weren’t really fully paid-up members any more. All the same, and despite the fact that the archive entry on the old ship was huge (as well as all the naked factual stuff, it contained one hundred and three different full-length biographies of the craft which it would have taken him a couple of years to read), Genar-Hofoen couldn’t help feeling that there was a slight air of mystery about the old ship.
It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.
Also included in the archive entries were some fairly wild claims by a few of the smaller, more eccentric news and analyses journals and reviews - some of them one-person outfits - to the effect that the MSV was a member of some shadowy cabal, that it was part of a conspiracy of mostly very old craft which stepped in to take control of situations which might threaten the Culture’s cozy proto-imperialist meta-hegemony; situations which proved beyond all doubt that the so-called normal democratic process of general policy-making was a complete and utter ultra-statist sham and the humans - and indeed their cousins and fellow dupes in this Mind-controlled plot, the drones - had even less power than they thought they had in the Culture. . . . There was quite a lot of stuff like that. Genar-Hofoen read it until his head felt as if it was spinning, then he stopped; there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
Whatever; doubtless the old MSV was not itself in total command of the situation he was allowing himself to be dragged into, but just the tip of the iceberg, representing a collection, if not a cabal, of other interested and experienced Minds who’d all be having a say in the immediate reaction to the discovery of this artifact near Esperi.
As well as his request for a talk with a personality-state of the Not Invented Here, Genar-Hofoen had sent messages to ships, drones and people he knew with SC connections, asking them if what he’d been told was all true. A few of the nearer ones had got replies to him before he’d left God’shole habitat, each confirming that what they had been told of what he was asking about - which admittedly varied according to how much whatever collection of Minds the Not Invented Here was representing had chosen to tell the individuals concerned. The information he’d received looked genuine and the deal he’d been offered sounded good. At any rate, by the time he’d got to Tier and received all his replies he reckoned so many other people and Minds not irretrievably complicit with SC would have heard about what he’d been offered it would become impossible for SC to wriggle out of its deal with him without losing an unthinkable amount of face.
He still suspected there was a lot more to this than he was being told, and he had no doubt he was and would continue to be both manipulated and used, but providing the price they were paying him was right, that didn’t bother him, and at least the job itself sounded simple enough.
He’d taken the precaution of checking up on the story his uncle had told him about the disappearing trillion-year-old sun and the orbiting artifact. Sure enough, there it was; a semi-mythological story set way back in the archives, one of any number of weird-sounding tales with frustratingly little evidence to back them up. Certainly nobody seemed able to explain what had happened in this case. And of course there was nobody around to ask anymore. Except for the lady he was travelling to talk to.
The captain of the good ship Problem Child had indeed been a woman; Zreyn Tramow. Honorary Contact Fleet Captain Gart-Kepilesa Zreyn Enhoff Tramow Afayaf dam Niskat-west, to give her her official title and Full Name. The archives held her picture. She’d looked proud and capable; a pale, narrow face, with close-set eyes, centimetre-short blonde hair and thin lips, but smiling, and with what appeared to him at least to be an intelligent brightness to those eyes. He liked the look of her.
He’d wondered what it would be like to have been Stored for two-and-a-bit millennia and then be woken up with no body to return to and a man you’d never seen before talking to you. And trying to steal your soul.
He’d stared at the photograph for a while, trying to see behind those clear blue mocking eyes.
They played another two games of batball; Fivetide won those as well. Genar-Hofoen was quivering with fatigue by the end. Then it was time to freshen up and head for the officers’ mess, where there was a full-dress uniform celebration dinner that evening because it was Commander Kindrummer VI’s birthday. The carousing went on long into the night; Fivetide taught the human some obscene songs, Genar-Hofoen responded in kind, two Atmosphere Force Wing Captains had an only semi-serious duel with grater muffs - much blood, no limbs lost, honour satisfied - and Genar-Hofoen did a tightrope walk over the commander’s table pit while the scratchounds howled beneath. The suit swore it hadn’t contributed to the feat, though he was sure it had steadied him a couple of times. However, he didn’t say anything.
Around them, the Kiss The Blade and its two escorts powered their way through the spaces between the stars, heading for Tier habitat.
IV
Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way. She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss . . . to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now.
She toyed with the idea of pretending she was still asleep, but then he must just have touched exactly the right spot and she couldn’t help making a noise and moving and clenching and so she rolled over and took his face in her hands and kissed it.
‘Oh no,’ she croaked, laughing. ‘Don’t stop; that’s a fine way to say good morning.’
‘Nearly afternoon,’ the young man breathed. He was called Otiel. He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that co
uld raise bumps on your skin at a hundred metres, or, better still, millimetres. Metaphysics student. Swam a lot and free-climbed. The one she’d set her heart on the previous evening. The leg-liker. Long, sensitive fingers.
‘Hmm . . . Really? Well . . . you know . . . maybe you can say that later, but meantime you just keep right on - WHAT?’
Ulver Seich jerked to a sitting position, eyes wide open. She slapped the young man’s hand away and stared wildly around. She was in what she thought of as her Romantic bed. It was more of a chamber, really; a ruched, pavilion-ceilinged five-metre crimson hemisphere filled with billowy bolsters and slinky sheets which blended into puffy paddings forming the single wall of the chamber and which swelled out in places to form various projections, shelves, straps and little seat-like things. She had other beds; her childhood bed, still stuffed with toys; her Just Sleep bed, comfy and surrounded by nocturne plants; a huge grandly formal and terribly old-fashioned canopied Reception bed, for when she wanted to receive friends, and an oil bed, which was basically a four-metre sphere of warm oils; you had to put little nose-plug things in and the air was Displaced into you. Not to everybody’s taste, sadly, but very erotic.
Her neural lace had woken up already with the adrenaline rush. It told her it was half an hour to noon. Shit. She’d thought she’d set an alarm to wake her an hour ago. She’d meant to. Must have slipped her mind due to the fun; hormonal re-prioritisation. Well, it happened.
‘What . . . ?’ Otiel said, smiling. He was looking at her oddly. Like he was wondering whether this was part of some game. Twinkle in the eye. He reached out for her.
Damn, the gravity was still on. She commanded the bed controls to switch to one-tenth G. ‘Sorry!’ she said, blowing him a kiss as the apparent gravity cut by ninety per cent. The padding beneath their bodies suddenly had a lot less weight to support; the effect was to produce a very gentle, padded pat on the bottom which was enough to send them both floating fractionally upwards. He looked surprised; it was such a sweet, boyish, innocent expression she almost stayed.
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