"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.
There were partnerships which were intended to last, however, and one of the ways that certain couples chose to emphasise their co-dependence was by synchronising their sex-changes and at different points playing both parts in the sexual act. A couple would have a child, then the man would become female and the woman would become male, and they would have another child. A more sophisticated version of this was possible due to the amount of control over one's reproductive system which still further historic genetic tinkering had made possible.
It was possible for a Culture female to become pregnant, but then, before the fertilised egg had transferred from her ovary to the womb, begin the slow change to become a man. The fertilised egg did not develop any further, but neither was it necessarily flushed away or reabsorbed. It could be held, contained, put into a kind of suspended animation so that it did not divide any further, but waited, still inside the ovary. That ovary, of course, became a testicle, but — with a bit of cellular finessing and some intricate plumbing — the fertilised egg could remain safe, viable and unchanging in the testicle while that organ did its bit in inseminating the woman who had been a man and whose sperm had done the original fertilising. The man who had been a woman then changed back again. If the woman who had been a man also delayed the development of he
r fertilised egg, then it was possible to synchronise the growth of the two fetuses and the birth of the babies.
To some people in the Culture this — admittedly rather long-winded and time-consuming — process was quite simply the most beautiful and perfect way for two people to express their love for one another. To others it was slightly gross and, well, tacky.
The odd thing was that until he'd met and fallen in love with Dajeil, Genar-Hofoen had been firmly of the latter opinion. He'd decided twenty years earlier, before he was even fully sexually mature and really knew his own mind about most things, that he was going to stay male all his life. He could see that being able to change sex was useful and that some people would even find it exciting, but he thought it was weak, somehow.
But then Dajeil had changed Byr's mind.
They had met aboard the General Contact Unit Recent Convert.
She was approaching the end of a twenty-five-year Contact career, he just starting a ten-year commitment which he might or might not request to extend when the time came. He had been the rake, she the unavailable older woman. He had decided when he'd joined Contact that he'd try to bed as many women as possible, and from the first had set about doing just that with a single-minded determination and dedication many women found highly fetching just by itself.
Then on the Recent Convert he cut his usual swathe through the female half of the ship's human crew, but was brought to a sudden stop by Dajeil Gelian.
It wasn't that she wouldn't sleep with him — there had been lots of women he'd asked who'd refused him, for a variety of reasons, and he'd never felt any resentment towards them or been any less likely to eventually count them as friends than the women he had made love to — it was that she told him she did find him attractive and ordinarily would have invited him to her bed, but wasn't going to because he was so promiscuous. He'd found this a slightly preposterous reason, but had just shrugged and got on with life.
They became friends; good friends. They got on brilliantly; she became his best friend. He kept expecting that this friendship would as a matter of course include sex — even if it was just once — but it didn't. It seemed so obvious to him, so natural and normal and right that it should. Not falling into bed together after some wonderfully enjoyable social occasion or sports session or just a night's drinking seemed positively perverse to him.
She told him he was destroying himself with his licentiousness. He didn't understand her. She was destroying him, in a way; he was still seeing other women but he was spending so much time with her — because they were such friends, but also because she had become a challenge and he had decided he would win her, whatever it took — that his usual packed schedule of seductions, affairs and relationships had suffered terribly; he wasn't able to concentrate properly on all these other women who were, or ought to be demanding his attention.
She told him he spread himself too thinly. He wasn't really destroying himself, he was stopping himself from developing. He was still in a sort of childish state, a boy-like phase where numbers mattered more than anything, where obsessive collecting, taking, enumerating, cataloguing all spoke of a basic immaturity. He could never grow and develop as a human being until he went beyond this infantile obsession with penetration and possession.
He told her he didn't want to get beyond this stage; he loved it. Anyway, even though he loved it and wouldn't care if he remained promiscuous until he was too old to do it at all, the chances were that he would change, sometime, eventually, over the course of the next three centuries or so of life which he could expect… There was plenty of time to do all this damned growing and developing. It would take care of itself. He wasn't going to try and force the pace. If all this sexual activity was something he had to get out of his system before he could properly mature, then she had a moral duty to help him get rid of it as quickly as possible, starting right now…
She pushed him away, as ever. He didn't understand, she told him. It wasn't a finite supply of promiscuity he was draining, it was an ever-replenishing fixation that was eating up his potential for future personal growth. She was the still point in his life he needed, or at least a still point; he would probably need many more in his life, she had no illusions about that. But, for now, she was it. She was the rock the river of his turbulent passion had to break around. She was his lesson.
They both specialised in the same area; exobiology. He listened to her talk sometimes and wondered whether it was possible to feel more truly alien towards another being than it was to someone of one's own species who ought to think in an at least vaguely similar way, but instead thought utterly differently. He could learn about an alien species, study them, get under their skin, under their carapaces, inside their spines or their membranes or whatever else you had to penetrate (ha!) to get to know them, get to understand them, and he could always, eventually, do that; he could start to think like them, start to feel things the way they would, anticipate their reactions to things, make a decent guess at what they were thinking at any given moment. It was an ability he was proud of.
Just by being so different from the creature you were studying you started out at a sufficiently great angle, it seemed to him, to be able to make that penetration and get inside their minds. With somebody who was ninety-nine per cent the same as you, you were too close sometimes. You couldn't draw far enough away from them to come in at a steep enough angle; you just slid off, every time in a succession of glancing contacts. No getting through. Frustration upon frustration.
Then a post had come up on a world called Telaturier. A long-term situation, spending anything up to five years with an aquatic species called the "Ktik which the Culture wanted to help develop. It was the sort of non-ship-based Contact post people were often offered at the end of their career; Dajeil was regarded as a natural for it. It would mean one, maybe two people staying on the planet, otherwise alone save for the "Ktik, for all that time. There would be the occasional visit from others, but little time off and no extended holidays; the whole point was to establish a long-term personal relationship with "Ktik individuals. It wasn't something to be entered into lightly; it would mean commitment. Dajeil asked to be considered for the post and was accepted.
Byr couldn't believe Dajeil was leaving the Recent Convert. He told her she was doing it to annoy him. She told him he was being ridiculous. And unbelievably self-centred. She was doing it because it was an important job and it was something she felt she'd be good at. It was also something she was ready for now; she had done her bit scudding round the galaxy in GCUs and enjoyed every moment, but now she had changed and it was time to take on something more long-term. She would miss him, and she hoped he would miss her — though he certainly wouldn't miss her for as long as he claimed he would, or even as long as he thought he would — but it was time to move on, time to do something different. She was sorry she hadn't been able to stick around longer, being his still point, but that was just the way it was, and this was too great an opportunity to miss.
Later, he could never remember exactly when he'd made the decision to go with her, but he did. Perhaps he had started to believe some of the things she'd been telling him, but he too just felt that it was time to do something different, even if he had only been in Contact for a short while.
It was the hardest thing he'd ever done, harder than any seduction (with the possible exception of hers). To start with, he had to convince her it was a good idea. She wasn't even initially flattered, not for a second. It was a terrible idea, she told him. He was too young, too inexperienced, it was far, far too early in his Contact stint. He wasn't impressing her; he was being stupid. It wasn't romantic, it wasn't sensible, it wasn't flattering, it wasn't practical, it was just idiotic. And if by some miracle they did let him go along with her, he needn't assume that just making this great commitment would ensure she'd sleep with him.
This didn't prove anything except that he was as foolish as he was vain.
III
The General Contact Unit
Grey Area didn't hold with avatars; it spoke through a slaved drone. "Young lady-"
'Don't you "young lady" me in that patronising tone!" Ulver Seich said, putting her hands on her suited, gem-encrusted hips. She still had the suit helmet on, though with the visor plate hinged up. They were in the GCU's hangar space with a variety of modules, satellites and assorted paraphernalia. It looked like the space was fairly crowded at the best of times, but it was even more cluttered-now with the small module that had belonged to the ROU Frank Exchange of Views sitting in it.
"Ms Seich," the drone purred on, unaffected. "I was not supposed to pick up you or your colleague Dn Churt Lyne. I have done so because you were effectively adrift in the middle of a war zone. If you really insist-"
"We weren't adrift!" Ulver said, waving her arms around and pointing back at the module. "We were in that! It's got engines, you know!"
"Yes, very slow ones. I did say effectively adrift." The ship-slaved drone, a casingless assemblage of components floating at head height, turned to the drone Churt Lyne. "Dn Churt Lyne. You too are welcome. Would it be possible for you to attempt to persuade your colleague Ms Seich-"
"And don't talk about me as if I'm not here either!" Ulver said, stamping one foot. The deck under Genar-Hofoen's feet resounded.
He had never been more glad to see a GCU. Release from that damned module and Ulver Seich's abrasive moodiness. Bliss. The Grey Area had welcomed him first, he'd noticed.
Finally he was back on course. From here to the Sleeper, get the job done and then — if the war wasn't totally fucking things up — off for some R&R somewhere while things were settled. He still found it hard to believe the Affront had actually declared war on the Culture, but assuming they really had then — once it was all over and the Affront had been put in their place — Culture people with Affront experience would be needed to help manage the peace and the Culturisation of the Affront. In a way he would be sorry to see it; he liked them the way they were. But if they were crazy enough to take on the Culture… maybe they did need teaching a lesson. A bit of enforced niceness might do them some good.
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