So, musing about silence, ceremony, fashion and his own place in society, Kabe arrived at the ornately carved gangway that led from the quayside into the gently lit extravagance in gilded wood that was the ancient ceremonial barge Soliton. The snow here had been tramped down by many feet, the trail leading to a nearby sub-trans access building. Obviously he was odd, enjoying walking in the snow. But then he didn’t live in this mountain city; his own home here hardly ever experienced snow or ice, so it was a novelty for him.
Just before he went aboard, the Homomdan looked up into the night sky to watch a V-shaped flock of big, pure white birds fly silently overhead, just above the barge’s signal rigging, heading inland from the High Salt Sea. He watched them disappear behind the buildings, then brushed the snow off his coat, shook his hat and went aboard.
“It’s like holidays.”
“Holidays?”
“Yes. Holidays. They used to mean the opposite of what they mean now. Almost the exact opposite.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hey, is this edible?”
“What?”
“This.”
“I don’t know. Bite it and see.”
“But it just moved.”
“It just moved? What, under its own power?”
“I think so.”
“Well now, there’s a thing. Evolve from a real predator like our friend Ziller and the instinctive answer’s probably yes, but—”
“What’s this about holidays?”
“Ziller was—”
“—What he was saying. Opposite meaning. Once, holidays meant the time when you went away.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I remember hearing that. Primitive stuff. Age of Scarcity.”
“People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society and so they couldn’t afford to take very much time off. So they worked for, say, half the day, most days of the year and then had an allocation of days they could take off, having saved up enough exchange collateral—”
“Money. Technical term.”
“—in the meantime. So they took the time off and they went away.”
“Excuse me, are you edible?”
“Are you really talking to your food?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if it is food.”
“In very primitive societies there wasn’t even that; they got only a few days off each year!”
“But I thought primitive societies could be quite—”
“Primitive industrial, he meant. Take no notice. Will you stop poking that? You’ll bruise it.”
“But can you eat it?”
“You can eat anything you can get into your mouth and swallow.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Ask, you idiot!”
“I just did.”
“Not it! Grief, what are you glanding? Should you be out? Where’s your minder, terminal, whatever?”
“Well, I didn’t want to just—”
“Oh, I see. Did they all go away at once?”
“How could they? Things would stop working if they all did nothing at the same time.”
“Oh, of course.”
“But sometimes they had days when a sort of skeleton crew operated infrastructure. Otherwise, they staggered their time off. Varies from place to place and time to time, as you might expect.”
“Ah ha.”
“Whereas nowadays what we call holidays, or core time, is when you all stay home, because otherwise there’d be no period when you could all meet up. You wouldn’t know who your neighbours were.”
“Actually I’m not sure that I do.”
“Because we’re just so flighty.”
“One big holiday.”
“In the old sense.”
“And hedonistic.”
“Itchy feet.”
“Itchy feet, itchy paws, itchy flippers, itchy barbels—”
“Hub, can I eat this?”
“—itchy gas sacs, itchy ribs, itchy wings, itchy pads—”
“Okay, I think we get the idea.”
“Hub? Hello?”
“—itchy grippers, itchy slime cusps, itchy motile envelopes—”
“Will you shut up?”
“Hub? Come in? Hub? Shit, my terminal’s not working. Or Hub’s not answering.”
“Maybe it’s on holiday.”
“—itchy swim bladders, itchy muscle frills, itchy—mmph! What? Was there something stuck in my teeth?”
“Yes, your foot.”
“I think that’s where we kicked off.”
“Appropriate.”
“Hub? Hub? Wow, this has never happened to me before…”
“Ar Ischloear?”
“Hmm?” His name had been spoken. Kabe discovered that he must have gone into one of those strange, trance-like states he sometimes experienced at gatherings like this, when the conversation—or rather when several conversations at once—went zinging to and fro in a dizzying, alienly human sort of way and seemed to wash over him so that he found it difficult to follow who was saying what to whom and why.
He’d found that later he could often remember exactly the words that had been said, but he still had to work to determine the sense behind them. At the time he would just feel oddly detached. Until the spell was broken, as now, and he was awakened by his name.
He was in the upper ballroom of the ceremonial barge Soliton with a few hundred other people, most of them human though not all in human form. The recital by the composer Ziller—on an antique Chelgrian mosaikey—had finished half an hour earlier. It had been a restrained, solemn piece, in keeping with the mood of the evening, though its performance had still been greeted with rapturous applause. Now people were eating and drinking. And talking.
He was standing with a group of men and women centred on one of the buffet tables. The air was warm, pleasantly perfumed and filled with soft music. A wood and glass canopy arced overhead, hung with some ancient form of lighting that was a long way from anybody’s full-spectrum but which made everything and everybody look agreeably warm.
His nose ring had spoken to him. When he had first arrived in the Culture he hadn’t liked the idea of having com equipment inserted into his skull (or anywhere else for that matter). His family nose ring was about the only thing he always carried with him, so they had made him a perfect replica that happened to be a communications terminal as well.
“Sorry to disturb you, Ambassador. Hub here. You’re closest; would you let Mr Olsule know he is speaking to an ordinary brooch, not his terminal?”
“Yes.” Kabe turned to a young man in a white suit who was holding a piece of jewellery in his hand and looking puzzled. “Ah, Mr Olsule?”
“Yeah, I heard,” the man said, stepping back to look up at the Homomdan. He appeared surprised, and Kabe formed the impression that he had been mistaken for a sculpture or an article of monumental furniture. This happened fairly often. A function of scale and stillness, basically. It was one hazard of being a glisteningly black three-and-a-bit-metre-tall pyramidal triped in a society of slim, matte-skinned two-metre-tall bipeds. The young man squinted at the brooch again. “I could have sworn this…”
“Sorry about that, Ambassador,” said the nose ring. “Thank you for your help.”
“Oh, you’re welcome.”
A gleaming, empty serving tray floated up to the young man, dipped its front in a sort of bow and said, “Hi. Hub again. What you have there, Mr Olsule, is a piece of jet in the shape of a ceerevell, explosively inlaid with platinum and summitium. From the studio of Ms Xossin Nabbard, of Sintrier, after the Quarafyd school. A finely wrought work of substantial artistry. But unfortunately not a terminal.”
“Damn. Where is my terminal then?”
“You left all your terminal devices at home.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You asked me not to.”
“When?”
“One hundred and—”
“Oh, n
ever mind. Well, replace that, umm… change that instruction. Next time I leave home without a terminal… get them to make a fuss or something.”
“Very well. It will be done.”
Mr Olsule scratched his head. “Maybe I should get a lace. One of those implant things.”
“Undeniably, forgetting your head would pose considerable difficulties. In the meantime, I’ll second one of the barge’s remotes to accompany you for the rest of the evening, if you’d like.”
“Yeah, okay.” The young man put the brooch back on and turned to the laden buffet table. “So, anyway; can I eat this… ? Oh. It’s gone.”
“Itchy motile envelope,” said the tray quietly, floating off.
“Eh?”
“Ah, Kabe, my dear friend. Here you are. Thank you so much for coming.”
Kabe swivelled to find the drone E. H. Tersono floating at his side at a level a little above head height for a human and a little below that of an Homomdan. The machine was a little less than a metre in height, and half that in width and depth. Its rounded-off rectangular casing was made of delicate pink porcelain held in a lattice of gently glowing blue lumenstone. Beyond the porcelain’s translucent surface, the drone’s internal components could just be made out; shadows beneath its thin ceramic skin. Its aura field, confined to a small volume directly underneath its flat base, was a soft blush of magenta, which, if Kabe recalled correctly, meant it was busy. Busy talking to him?
“Tersono,” he said. “Yes. Well, you did invite me.”
“Indeed I did. Do you know, it occurred to me only later that you might misinterpret my invitation as some sort of summons, even as an imperious demand. Of course, once these things are sent…”
“Ho-ho. You mean it wasn’t a demand?”
“More of a petition. You see, I have a favour to ask you.”
“You do?” This was a first.
“Yes. I wonder if we might talk somewhere we’d have a little more privacy?”
Privacy, thought Kabe. That was a word you didn’t hear very often in the Culture. Probably more used in a sexual context than any other. And not always even then.
“Of course,” he said. “Lead on.”
“Thank you,” the drone said, floating towards the stern and rising to look over the heads of the people gathered in the function space. The machine turned this way and that, making it clear it was looking for something or someone. “Actually,” it said quietly, “we are not yet quite quorate… Ah. Here we are. Please; this way, Ar Ischloear.”
They approached a group of humans centred on the Mahrai Ziller. The Chelgrian was nearly as long as Kabe was tall, and covered in fur that varied from white around his face to dark brown on his back. He had a predator’s build, with large forward-facing eyes set in a big, broad-jawed head. His rear legs were long and powerful; a striped tail, woven about with silver chain, curved between them. Where his distant ancestors would have had two middle-legs, Ziller had a single broad midlimb, partially covered by a dark waistcoat. His arms were much like a human’s, though covered in golden fur and ending in broad, six-digit hands more like paws.
Almost as soon as he and Tersono joined the group around Ziller, Kabe found himself engulfed by another confusing babble of conversation.
“—of course you don’t know what I mean. You have no context.”
“Preposterous. Everybody has a context.”
“No. You have a situation, an environment. That is not the same thing. You exist. I would hardly deny you that.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Yeah. Otherwise you’d be talking to yourself.”
“You’re saying we don’t really live, is that it?”
“That depends what you mean by live. But let’s say yes.”
“How fascinating, my dear Ziller,” E. H. Tersono said. “I wonder—”
“Because we don’t suffer.”
“Because you scarcely seem capable of suffering.”
“Well said! Now, Ziller—”
“Oh, this is such an ancient argument…”
“But it’s only the ability to suffer that—”
“Hey! I’ve suffered! Lemil Kimp broke my heart.”
“Shut up, Tulyi.”
“—you know, that makes you sentient, or whatever. It’s not actually suffering.”
“But she did!”
“An ancient argument, you said, Ms Sippens?”
“Yes.”
“Ancient meaning bad?”
“Ancient meaning discredited.”
“Discredited? By whom?”
“Not whom. What.”
“And that what would be… ?”
“Statistics.”
“So there we are. Statistics. Now then, Ziller, my dear friend—”
“You are not serious.”
“I think she thinks she is more serious than you, Zil.”
“Suffering demeans more than it ennobles.”
“And this is a statement derived wholly from these statistics?”
“No. I think you’ll find a moral intelligence is required as well.”
“A prerequisite in polite society, I’m sure we’d all agree. Now, Ziller—”
“A moral intelligence which instructs us that all suffering is bad.”
“No. A moral intelligence which will incline to treat suffering as bad until proved good.”
“Ah! So you admit that suffering can be good.”
“Exceptionally.”
“Ha.”
“Oh, nice.”
“What?”
“Did you know that works in several different languages?”
“What? What does?”
“Tersono,” Ziller said, turning at last to the drone, which had lowered itself to his shoulder level and edged closer and closer as it had tried to attract the Chelgrian’s attention over the past few moments, during which time its aura field had just started to shade into the blue-grey of politely held-in-check frustration.
Mahrai Ziller, composer, half outcast, half exile, rose from his crouch and balanced on his rear haunches. His midlimb made a shelf briefly and he put his drink down on the smoothly furred surface while he used his forelimbs to straighten his waistcoat and comb his brows. “Help me,” he said to the drone. “I am trying to make a serious point and your compatriot indulges in word play.”
“Then I suggest you fall back and regroup and hope to catch her again later when she is in a less trenchantly flippant mood. You’ve met Ar Kabe Ischloear?”
“I have. We are old acquaintances. Ambassador.”
“You dignify me, sir,” the Homomdan rumbled. “I am more of a journalist.”
“Yes, they do tend to call us all ambassadors, don’t they? I’m sure it’s meant to be flattering.”
“No doubt. They mean well.”
“They mean ambiguously, sometimes,” Ziller said, turning briefly to the woman he had been talking to. She raised her glass and bowed her head a fraction.
“When you two have entirely finished criticising your determinedly generous hosts…” Tersono said.
“This would be the private word you mentioned, would it?” Ziller asked.
“Precisely. Indulge an eccentric drone.”
“Very well.”
“This way.”
The drone continued past the line of food tables towards the stern of the barge. Ziller followed the machine, seeming to flow along the polished deck, lithely graceful on his single broad midlimb and two strong rear legs. The composer still had his crystal full of wine balanced effortlessly in one hand, Kabe noticed. Ziller used his other hand to wave at a couple of people who nodded to or greeted him as they passed.
Kabe felt very heavy and lumbering in comparison. He tried drawing himself up to his full height so as to appear less stockily massive, but nearly collided with a very old and complicated light fitting hanging from the ceiling.
The three sat in a cabin which extended from the stern of the great barge, looking out over the ink-dark
waters of the canal. Ziller had folded himself onto a low table, Kabe squatted comfortably on some cushions on the deck and Tersono rested on a delicate-looking and apparently very old webwood chair. Kabe had known the drone Tersono for all the ten years he had spent on Masaq’ Orbital, and had noticed early on that it liked to surround itself with old things; this antique barge, for example, and the ancient furniture and fittings it contained.
Even the machine’s physical make-up spoke of a sort of antiquarianism. It was a generally reliable rule that the bigger a Culture drone appeared, the older it was. The first examples, dating from eight or nine thousand years ago, had been the size of a bulky human. Subsequent models had gradually shrunk until the most advanced drones had, for some time, been small enough to slip into a pocket. Tersono’s metre-tall body might have suggested that it had been constructed millennia ago when in fact it was only a few centuries old, and the extra space it took up was accounted for by the separation of its internal components, the better to exhibit the fine translucency of its unorthodox ceramic shell.
Ziller finished his drink and took a pipe from his waistcoat. He sucked on it until a little smoke rose from the bowl while the drone exchanged pleasantries with the Homomdan. The composer was still trying to blow smoke rings when Tersono finally said, “…which brings me to my motive in asking you both here.”
“And what would that be?” Ziller asked.
“We are expecting a guest, Composer Ziller.”
Ziller gazed levelly at the drone. He looked round the broad cabin and stared at the door. “What, now? Who?”
“Not now. In about thirty or forty days. I’m afraid we don’t know exactly who quite yet. But it will be one of your people, Ziller. Someone from Chel. A Chelgrian.”
Ziller’s face consisted of a furred dome with two large, black, almost semicircular eyes positioned above a grey-pink, furless nasal area and a large, partially prehensile mouth. There was an expression on it now that Kabe had never seen before, though admittedly he had known the Chelgrian only casually and for less than a year. “Coming here?” Ziller asked. His voice was… icy, was the word, decided Kabe.
“Indeed. To this Orbital, possibly to this Plate.”
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