Oh well; it’s out of our fields now.
Best of luck, like they say.
VIII
The avatar Amorphia moved one of its catapults forward an octagon, in front of the woman’s leading tower; the noise of solid wooden wheels rumbling and squeaking along on equally solid axles, and of lashed-together wooden spars and planks flexing and creaking, filled the room. A curious smell which might have been wood rose gently from the board-cube.
Dajeil Gelian sat forward in her fabulously sculpted chair, one hand absently tapping her belly gently, the other at her mouth. She sucked at one finger, her brows creased in concentration. She and Amorphia sat in the main room of her new accommodation aboard the GCU Jaundiced Outlook, which had been restructured to mimic precisely the lay-out of the tower she had lived in for nearly forty years. The big, round room, capped by its transparent dome, resounded - between the sound effects produced by the game-cube - to the noise of rain. The surrounding screens showed recordings of the creatures Dajeil had studied, swum and floated with during most of those four decades. All around, the woman’s collected curios and mementoes were placed and set just where they had been in the tower by its lonely sea. In the broad grate, a log fire crackled exuberantly.
Dajeil thought for a while, then took a cavalarian and shifted it across the board to the noise of thundering hooves and the smell of sweat. It came to a halt by a baggage train undefended save for some irregulars.
Amorphia, sat blackly folded on a small stool on the other side of the board, went very still. Then it moved an Invisible.
Dajeil looked round the board, trying to work out what all the avatar’s recent Invisible moves were leading up to. She shrugged; the cavalry piece took the irregulars almost without loss, to the sound of iron clashing on iron and screams, and the smell of blood.
Amorphia made another Invisible move.
Nothing happened for a moment. Then there was an almost subsonic rumbling sound. Dajeil’s tower collapsed, sinking through the octagon in the board in a convincing-looking cloud of dust and the floor-shaking sound of grinding, crunching rocks. And more screams. A lot of the important moves seemed to be accompanied by those. A smell of turned-over earth and stone-dust filled the air.
Amorphia looked up almost guiltily. ‘Sappers,’ it said, and shrugged.
Dajeil cocked one eyebrow. ‘Hmm,’ she said. She surveyed the new situation. With the tower gone, the way lay open to her heartland. It didn’t look good. ‘Think I should sue for peace?’ she asked.
‘Shall I ask the ship?’ the avatar asked.
Dajeil sighed. ‘I suppose so,’ she sighed.
The avatar glanced down at the board again. It looked up. ‘Seven-eighths chance it would go to me,’ the avatar told the woman.
She sat back in the great chair. ‘It’s yours, then,’ she said. She leant forward briefly and picked up another tower. She studied it. The avatar sat back, looking moderately pleased with itself. ‘Are you happy here, Dajeil?’ it asked.
‘Thank you, yes,’ she replied. She returned her attention to the miniature tower-piece held in her fingers. She was silent for a while, then said, ‘So. What is going to happen, Amorphia? Can you tell me yet?’
The avatar gazed steadily at the woman. ‘We are heading very quickly towards the war zone,’ it said in a strange, almost childish voice. Then it sat forward, inspecting her closely.
‘War zone?’ Dajeil said, glancing at the board.
‘There is a war,’ the avatar confirmed, nodding. It assumed a grim expression.
‘Why? Where? Between whom?’
‘Because of a thing called an excession. Around the place where we are heading. Between the Culture and the Affront.’ It went on to explain a little of the background.
Dajeil turned the little tower-model over and over in her hands, frowning at it. Eventually she asked, ‘Is this Excession thing really as important as everybody seems to think?’
The avatar looked thoughtful for just a moment, then it spread its arms and shrugged. ‘Does it really matter?’ it said.
The woman frowned again, not understanding. ‘Doesn’t it matter more than anything?’
It shook its head. ‘Some things mean too much to matter,’ it said. It stood up and stretched. ‘Remember, Dajeil,’ it told her, ‘you can leave at any point. This ship will do as you wish.’
‘I’ll stick around for now,’ she told it. She looked briefly up at it. ‘When--?’
‘A couple of days,’ it told her. ‘All being well.’ It stood looking down at her for a while, watching her turn the small tower over and over in her fingers. Then it nodded and turned and quietly walked out of the room.
She hardly noticed it go. She leant forward and placed the small tower on an octagon towards the rear margin of the board, on a region of shore bordering the hem of blue that was supposed to represent the sea, near where, a few moves earlier, a ship-piece of Amorphia’s had landed a small force which had established a bridge-head. She had never placed a tower in such a position, in all their games. The board interpreted the move with the sound of screams once more, but this time the screams were the plaintive, plangent calls of sea birds calling out over the sound of heavy, pounding surf. A sharply briny odour filled the air above the board cube and she was back there, back then, with the sound of the sea birds and the smell of the dashing wild sea tangled in her hair, and the growing child continually heavy and sporadically lively, almost violent with its sudden, startling kicks, in her belly.
She sat cross-legged on the pebble shore, the tower at her back, the sun a great round red shield of fire plunging into the darkly unruly sea and throwing a blood-coloured curtain across the line of the cliffs a couple of kilometres inland. She gathered her shawl about her and ran a hand through her long black hair as best she could. It stuck, held up by knots. She didn’t try to pull them out; she’d rather look forward to the long, slow process of having them combed and cajoled and carefully teased out, later in the evening, by Byr.
Waves crashed on the shingle and rocks of the shore to either side of her in great sighing, soughing intakings of what sounded like the breath of some great sea creature, a gathering, deepening sound that ended in the small moment of half-silence before each great wave fell and burst against the tumbled, growling slope of rocks and stones, pushing and pulling and rolling the giant glistening pebbles in thudding concussions of water forcing its way amongst their spaces while the rocks slid and smacked and cracked against each other.
Directly in front of her, where there was a raised shelf of rock just under the surface of the sea, the waves breaking on the shallower slope in front of her were smaller, almost friendlier, and the main force of the grumbling, swelling ocean was met fifty metres out at a rough semicircle marked by a line of frothing surf.
She clasped her hands palm up on her lap, beneath the bulge of her belly, and closed her eyes. She breathed deeply, the ozone and the brine sharp in her nostrils, connecting her to the sea’s salty restlessness, making her, in her mind, again part of its great fluid coalescing of constancy and changefulness, imbuing her thoughts with something of that heaving, sheltering vastness, that world-cleaving cradle of layered, night-making depth.
Inside her mind, in the semi-trance she now assumed, she stepped smilingly down through her own fluid layers of protection and conformation, to where her baby lay, healthy and growing, half awake, half asleep, wholly beautiful.
Her own genetically altered body gently interrogated the placental processes protecting the joined but subtly different chemistries and inheritance of her child’s body from her own immune system and carefully, fairly managing the otherwise selfishly voracious demands the baby made upon her body’s resources of blood, sugars, proteins, minerals and energy.
The temptation was always to tamper, to fiddle with the settings that regulated everything, as though by such meddling one proved how carefully painstaking and watchful one was being, but she always resisted, content that there were no warn
ing signs, no notice that some imbalance was threatening either her health or that of the fetus and happy to leave the body’s own systemic wisdom to prevail over the brain’s desire to intervene.
Shifting the focus of her concentration, she was able to use another designed-in sense no creature from any part of her typically distributed Cultural inheritance had ever possessed to look upon her soon-to-be child, modelling its shape in her mind from the information provided by a subset of specialised organisms swimming in the as yet unbroken water surrounding the fetus. She saw it; hunched and curled in an orbed spectrum of smooth pinks, crouched round its umbilical link with her as though it was concentrating on its supply of blood, trying to increase its flow-rate or nutritional saturation.
She marvelled at it, as she always did; at its bulbously headed beauty, at its strange air of blankly formless intensity. She counted its fingers and toes, inspected the tightly closed eyelids, smiled at the tiny budded cleft that spoke of the cells’ unprompted selection of congenital femaleness. Half her, half something strange and foreign. A new collection of matter and information to present to the universe and to which it in turn would be presented; different, arguably equal parts of that great ever-repetitive, ever-changing jurisdiction of being.
Reassured that all was well, she left the dimly aware being to continue its purposeful, unthinking growth, and returned to the part of the real world where she was sitting on the pebbled beach and the waves fell loud and foaming amongst the tumbled, rumbling rocks.
Byr was there when she opened her eyes, standing knee-deep in the small waves just in front of her, wet-suited, golden hair damply straggled in long ringlets, face dark against the display of ruddy sunset behind, found just in the act of taking off the suit’s face-mask.
‘Evening,’ she said, smiling.
Byr nodded and splashed up out of the water, sitting down beside her and putting an arm round her. ‘You okay?’
She held the fingers of the hand over her shoulder. ‘Both fine,’ she said. ‘And the gang?’
Byr laughed, peeling off the suit’s feet to reveal wrinkled pink-brown toes. ‘Sk’ilip’k’ has decided he likes the idea of walking on land; says he’s ashamed his ancestors went out of the ocean and then went back in again as if the air was too cold. He wants us to make him a walking machine. The others think he’s crazy, though there is some support for the idea of them all somehow going flying together. I left them a couple more screens and increased some of their access to the flight archives. They gave me this; for you.’
Byr handed her something from the suit’s side pouch.
‘Oh; thank you.’ She put the small figurine in one palm and turned it over carefully with her fingers, inspecting it by the fading red light of the day’s end. It was beautiful, worked out of some soft stone to perfectly resemble their idea of what they thought a human ought to look like; naturally flippered feet, legs joined to the knees, body fatter, shoulders slender, neck thicker, head narrower, hairless. It did look like her; the face, for all that it was distorted, bore a distinct resemblance. Probably G’Istig’tk’t’s work; there was a delicacy of line and a certain humour about the figurine’s facial expression that spoke to her of the old female’s personality. She held the little figure up in front of Byr. ‘Think it looks like me?’
‘Well, you’re certainly getting that fat.’
‘Oh!’ she said, slapping Byr lightly on the shoulder. She glanced down at her lap, reaching to pat her belly. ‘I think you’re starting to show yourself, at last,’ she said.
Byr smiled, her face still freckled with droplets of water, catching the dying light. She looked down, holding Dajeil’s hand, patting her belly. ‘Na,’ she said, rising to her feet. She held out a hand to Dajeil and glanced round to the tower. ‘You coming in or are you going to sit around communing with the ocean swell all evening? We’ve got guests, remember?’
She took a breath to say something, then held up her hand. Byr helped pull her up; she felt suddenly heavy, clumsy and . . . unwieldy. Her back hurt dully. ‘Yes, let’s go in, eh?’
They turned towards the lonely tower.
9
Unacceptable Behaviour
I
The Excession’s links with the two regions of the energy grid just fell away, twin collapsing pinnacles of fluted skein fabric sinking back into the grid like idealised renderings of some spent explosion at sea. Both layers of the grid oscillated for a few moments, again like some abstractly perfect liquid, then lay still. The waves produced on the grid surfaces damped quickly to nothing, absorbed. The Excession floated free on the skein of real space, otherwise as enigmatic as ever.
There was, for a while, silence between the three watching ships.
Eventually, the Sober Counsel asked, ~ . . . Is that it?
~ So it would appear, the Fate Amenable To Change replied. It felt terrified, elated, disappointed, all at once. Terrified to be in the presence of something that could do what it had just observed, elated to have witnessed it and taken the measurements it had - there were data here, in the velocity of the skein-grid collapse, in the apparent viscosity of the grid’s reaction to the links’ decoupling - that would fuel genuinely, utterly original science - and disappointed because it had a sneaking feeling that that was it. The Excession was going to sit here like this for a while, still doing nothing. Seemingly endless boredom, instants of blinding terror . . . endless boredom again. With the Excession around you didn’t need a war.
The Fate Amenable To Change started relaying all the data it had collected on the grid-skein links’ collapse to a variety of other ships, without even collating it properly first. Get it out of this one location first, just in case. Another part of its Mind was thinking about it, though.
~ That thing reacted, it told the other two craft.
~ To the Affront signal? the Appeal To Reason sent. ~ I was wondering about that.
~ Could this be the state in which the Peace Makes Plenty discovered the entity? the Sober Counsel asked.
~ It could indeed, couldn’t it? the Fate Amenable To Change agreed.
~ The time has come, the Appeal To Reason sent. ~ I’m sending in a drone.
~ No! You wait until the Excession assumes the configuration it probably possessed when it overpowered your comrade and then you decide to approach it just as it must have? Are you quite mad?
~ We cannot just sit here any longer! the Appeal To Reason told the Culture craft. ~ The war is days away from us. We have tried every form of communication known to life and had nothing in return! We must do more! Launching drone in two seconds. Do not attempt to interfere with it!
II
‘Well, we were going to have them at the same time; it seemed ... I don’t know; more romantic, I suppose, more symmetrical.’ Dajeil laughed lightly, and stroked Byr’s arm. They were in the big circular room at the top of the tower; Kran, Aist and Tulyi, and her and Byr. She stood by the log fire, with Byr. She looked to see if Byr wanted to take up the story, but she just smiled and drank from her wine goblet. ‘But then when we thought about it,’ Dajeil continued, ‘it did kind of seem a bit crazy. Two brand new babies, and just the two of us here to look after them, and first-time mothers.’
‘Only-time mothers,’ Byr muttered, making a face into her goblet. The others laughed.
Dajeil stroked Byr’s arm again. ‘Well, however it turns out, we’ll see. But you see this way we can have . . . whatever time in between Ren being born and our other child.’ She looked at Byr, smiling warmly. ‘We haven’t decided on the other name yet. Anyway,’ she went on, ‘doing it this way will give me time to recover and get the two of us used to coping with a baby, before Byr has his . . . well, hers,’ she said laughing, and put her arm round her partner’s shoulder.
‘Yes,’ Byr said, glancing at her. ‘We can practise on yours and then get it right with mine.’
‘Oh, you!’ Dajeil said, squeezing Byr’s arm. The other woman smiled briefly.
The term used for what
Dajeil and Byr were doing was Mutualling. It was one of the things you could do when you were able - as virtually every human in the Culture had been able to do for many millennia - to change sex. It took anything up to a year to alter yourself from a female to a male, or vice-versa. The process was painless and set in action simply by thinking about it; you went into the sort of trance-like state Dajeil had accessed earlier that evening when she had looked within herself to check on the state of her fetus. If you looked in the right place in your mind, there was an image of yourself as you were now. A little thought would make the image change from your present gender to the opposite sex. You came out of the trance, and that was it. Your body would already be starting to change, glands sending out the relevant viral and hormonal signals which would start the gradual process of conversion.
Within a year a woman who had been capable of carrying a child - who, indeed, might have been a mother - would be a man fully capable of fathering a child. Most people in the Culture changed sex at some point in their lives, though not all had children while they were female. Generally people eventually changed back to their congenital sex, but not always, and some people cycled back and forth between male and female all their lives, while some settled for an androgynous in-between state, finding there a comfortable equanimity.
Long-term relationships in a society where people generally lived for at least three and a half centuries were necessarily of a different nature from those in the more primitive civilisations which had provided the Culture’s original blood-stock. Life-long monogamy was not utterly unknown, but it was exceptionally unusual. A couple staying together for the duration of an offspring’s entire childhood and adolescence was a more common occurrence, but still not the norm. The average Culture child was close to its mother and almost certainly knew who its father was (assuming it was not in effect a clone of its mother, or had in place of a father’s genes surrogated material which the mother had effectively manufactured), but it would probably be closer to the aunts and uncles who lived in the same extended familial grouping; usually in the same house, extended apartment or estate.
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