“Watch that oar!”
“It’s caught!”
“Well, push it!”
“Oh, shit!”
“What the-?”
“Aaah!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay!”
“Fuck!”
“…You are all quite mad, by the way. Happy rafting.” The raft itself—a flat-decked platform four metres by twelve with metre-high gunwales—was ceramic, the cover protecting the rafters from the heat of the lava tunnel they were now shooting down was aluminised plastic, and the steering oars were wood, to introduce a note of the corporeal.
“My hair!”
“Oh! I want to go home!”
“Water bucket!”
“Where’d that guy-?”
“Stop whining.”
“Good grief !”
Lava-rafting had always been exciting and dangerous. Once the eight Plates had been filled with air, it had become more of a hardship; radiated heat was joined by convected, and while people felt it was somehow more authentic to raft without breathing gear, having your lungs scorched was generally no more fun than it sounded.
“Ah! My nose! My nose!”
“Thanks.”
“Sprays!”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m with the other guy. I don’t believe this.”
Kabe sat back. He had to crouch; the wind-rippled under-surface of the raft’s foil cover was just above his head. The canopy was reflecting the heat of the tunnel’s ceiling, but the air temperature was still extreme. Some of the humans were pouring water over themselves or spraying it onto each other. Coils of steam filled the little mobile cave that the raft had become. The light was very dark red, spilling from either end of the pitching, bucking craft.
“This hurts!”
“Well, stop it hurting!”
“Zap me out too!”
“Nearly out!… Oh-oh. We got hang-spikes.”
The downstream mouth of the lava tunnel had teeth; it was strung with jagged protrusions like stalactites.
“Spikes! Get down!”
One of the hang-spikes ripped the raft’s flimsy protective cover away and flung it onto the yellow-glowing surface of the lava stream. The cover shrank, burst into flames and then, caught in the thermals coming off the braided flow, rose flapping like a burning bird. A blast of heat rolled over the raft. People screamed. Kabe had to fling himself back flat to avoid being hit by one of the pendulous spears of rock. He felt something give beneath him; there was a snap and another scream.
The raft flew out of the tunnel into a broad canyon of craggy cliffs whose basalt dark edges were lit by the broad stream of lava coursing between them. Kabe levered himself back up. Most of the humans were throwing or spraying water around, cooling themselves after the final blast of heat; many had lost hair, some were sitting or lying looking singed but uncaring, staring blankly ahead, blissed out on some secretion. One couple were just sitting hunched up on the flat deck of the raft, crying loudly.
“Was that your leg?” Kabe asked the man sitting on the deck behind him.
The man was holding his left leg and grimacing. “Yes,” he said. “I think it’s broken.”
“Yes. I think it is, too. I’m very sorry. Is there anything I can do?”
“Try not falling back like that again, not while I’m here.”
Kabe looked forward. The glowing river of orange lava meandered into the distance between the canyon walls. There were no more lava tunnels visible. “I think I can guarantee that,” Kabe said. “I do apologise; I was told to sit in the centre of the deck. Can you move?”
The man slid back on one hand and his buttocks, still holding his leg with the other hand. People were calming down. Some were still crying but one was shouting that it was okay, there were no more lava tunnels.
“You all right?” one of the females asked the man with the broken leg. The woman’s jacket was still smouldering. She had no eyebrows and her blonde hair looked uneven and had crisped-looking patches.
“Broken. I’ll live.”
“My fault,” Kabe explained.
“I’ll get a splint.”
The woman went to a locker near the stern. Kabe looked round. There was a smell of burned hair and old-fashioned clothing and lightly crisped human flesh. He could see a few people with discoloured patches on their faces, and a few had their hands submerged in water buckets. The crouched couple were still wailing. Most of the rest who hadn’t blissed out were comforting each other, tear-streaked faces lit by the livid light reflected from the glass-sharp black cliffs. High above, twinkling madly in the brown-dark sky, the nova that was Portisia gazed balefully down.
And this is meant to be fun, Kabe thought.
~ Does it become any more ridiculous?
“What?” somebody yelled from the raft’s bows. “Rapids?”
~ Not really.
Somebody started sobbing hysterically.
~ I’ve seen enough. Shall we?
~ By all means. Once was probably enough.
(Recording ends.)
Kabe and Ziller faced each other across a large, elegantly furnished room lit by golden sunlight that spilled through the opened balcony windows, already filtered through the gently waving branches of an everblue growing outside. A myriad of soft needle-shadows moved on the creamily tiled floor, lay across the ankle-deep, abstractly patterned carpets and fluttered silently on the sculpted surfaces of gleaming wooden sideboards, richly carved chests and plumply upholstered couches.
The Homomdan and the Chelgrian both wore devices which looked like they might have been either protective helmets of dubious effectiveness or rather garish head-jewellery.
Ziller snorted. “We look preposterous.”
“Perhaps that is one reason people take to implants.”
They each took the devices off. Kabe, sitting on a graceful, relatively flimsy-looking chaise longue with deep bays designed especially for tripeds, placed his head-set on the couch beside him.
Ziller, curled on a broad couch, set his on the floor. He blinked a couple of times then reached into his waistcoat pocket for his pipe. He wore pale-green leggings and an enamelled groin plate. The waistcoat was hide, jewelled.
“This was when?” he asked.
“About eighty days ago.”
“The Hub Mind was right. They are all quite mad.”
“And yet most of the people you saw there had lava-rafted before and had just as awful a time. I have checked up since and all but three of the twenty-three humans you saw there have taken part in the sport again.” Kabe picked up a cushion and played with the fringing. “Though it has to be said that two of them have experienced temporary body-death when their lava canoe capsized and one of them—a one-timer, a Disposable—was crushed to death while glacier-caving.”
“Completely dead?”
“Very completely, and forever. They recovered the body and held a funeral service.”
“Age?”
“She was thirty-one standard years old. Barely an adult.”
Ziller sucked on his pipe. He looked towards the balcony windows. They were in a large house in an estate in the Tirian Hills, on Osinorsi Lower, the Plate to spinwards of Xarawe. Kabe shared the house with an extended human family of about sixteen individuals, two of them children. A new top floor had been built for him. Kabe enjoyed the company of the humans and their young, though he had come to realise that he was probably a little less gregarious than he’d thought he was.
He had introduced the Chelgrian to the half dozen other people present in and around the house and shown him round. From down-slope-facing windows and balconies, and from the roof garden, you could see, looming bluely across the plains, the cliffs of the massif that carried Masaq’ Great River across the vast sunken garden that was Osinorsi Lower Plate.
They were waiting for the drone E. H. Tersono, which was on its way to them with what it called important news.
“I seem to recall,” Ziller said, �
�that I said I agreed with Hub that they were all quite mad and you began your reply with the words ‘And yet’.” Ziller frowned. “And then everything you said subsequently seemed to agree with my original point.”
“What I meant is that however much they appeared to hate the experience, and despite being under no pressure to repeat it—”
“Other than pressure from their equally cretinous peers.”
“—they nevertheless chose to, because however awful it might have seemed at the time, they feel that they gained something positive from it.”
“Oh? And what would that be? That they lived through it despite their stupidity in undertaking this totally unnecessary traumatic experience in the first place? What one should gain from an unpleasant experience should be the determination not to repeat it. Or at least the inclination.”
“They feel they have tested themselves—”
“And found themselves to be mad. Does that count as a positive result?”
“They feel they have tested themselves against nature—”
“What’s natural around here?” Ziller protested. “The nearest ‘natural’ thing to here is ten light minutes away. It’s the fucking sun.” He snorted. “And I wouldn’t put it past them to have meddled with that.”
“I don’t believe they have. In fact it was a potential instability in Lacelere that produced the high back-up rate on Masaq’ Orbital in the first place, before it became famous for excessive fun.” Kabe put the cushion down.
Ziller was staring at him. “Are you saying the sun could explode?”
“Well, sort of, in theory. It’s a very—”
“You’re not serious!”
“Of course I am. The chances are—”
“They never told me that!”
“Actually, it wouldn’t really blow up as such, but it might flare—”
“It does flare! I’ve seen its flares!”
“Yes. Pretty, aren’t they? But there is a chance—no more than one in several million during the time the star spends on the main-sequence—that it might produce a flare sequence that Hub and the Orbital’s defences would be unable to deflect or shelter everyone from.”
“And they built this thing here?”
“I understand it was a very attractive system otherwise. And besides, I believe that over time they’ve added extra protection under-Plate which could stand up to anything short of a supernova, though of course any technology can go wrong and, sensibly, the culture of backing-up as a matter of course is still common.”
Ziller was shaking his head. “They could have mentioned this to me.”
“Perhaps the risk is deemed so tiny they have given up bothering.”
Ziller smoothed his scalp fur. He’d let his pipe go out. “I don’t believe these people.”
“The chances of disaster are very remote indeed, especially for any given year, or even sentient lifetime.” Kabe rose and lumbered over to a sideboard. He picked up a bowl of fruits. “Fruit?”
“No, thank you.”
Kabe selected a ripe sunbread. He had had his intestinal flora altered to enable him to eat common Culture foods. More unusually, he had had his oral and nasal senses modified so that he could taste food as a standard Culture human would. He turned away from Ziller as he popped the sunbread into his mouth, chewed the fruit a couple of times and swallowed. The action of averting his face from others when eating had become habitual; members of Kabe’s species had very big mouths and some humans found the sight of him eating alarming.
“But to return to my point,” he said, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. “Let’s not use the word ‘nature’ then; let us say they feel they have gained something from having pitted themselves against forces much greater than themselves.”
“And this is somehow not a sign of madness.” Ziller shook his head. “Kabe, you may have been here too long.”
The Homomdan crossed to the balcony, gazing out at the view. “I would say that these people are demonstrably not mad. They live lives that seem quite sane otherwise.”
“What? Glacier-caving?”
“That is not all they do.”
“Indeed. They do lots of other insane things; naked blade-fencing, mountain free-climbing, wing-flying—”
“Very few do nothing but take part in these extreme pastimes. Most have otherwise fairly normal lives.”
Ziller relit his pipe. “By Culture standards.”
“Well, yes, and why not? They socialise, they have work-hobbies, they play in more gentle forms, they read or watch screen, they go to entertainments. They sit around grinning in one of their glanded drug states, they study, they spend time travelling—”
“Ah-hah!”
“—apparently just for the sake of it or they simply… potter. And of course many of them indulge in arts and crafts.” Kabe made a smile and spread his three hands. “A few even compose music.”
“They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time travelling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.”
Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. “Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of travelling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled.”
Kabe watched a springleg bounce from branch to branch through the trees outside, its ruddy fur and long tail dappled with leaf shadows. He could hear the shrill voices of human children, playing and splashing in the pool at the side of the house. “Oh, come, Ziller. Arguably any intelligent species feels that to some extent.”
“Really? Does yours?”
Kabe fingered the soft folds of the drapes at the side of the balcony window. “We are much older than the humans, but I think we probably did, once.” He looked back at the Chelgrian, crouched on the wide seat as though ready to pounce. “All naturally evolved sentient life is restless. At some scale or stage.”
Ziller appeared to consider this, then shook his head. Kabe was not yet sure if this gesture meant that he had said something too preposterous to be worth dignifying with an answer, perpetrated an appalling cliche, or made a point that the Chelgrian could not find an adequate reply to.
“The point is,” Ziller said, “that having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats—” He paused and glanced sourly at the sunlight flaring off the gilt border of his seat.’—Well, almost all natural threats, these people then find their lives are so hollow they have to recreate false versions of just the sort of terrors untold generations of their ancestors spent their existences attempting to conquer.”
“I think that is a little like criticising somebody for owning both an umbrella and a shower,” Kabe said. “It is the choice that is important.” He rearranged the curtains more symmetrically. “These people control their terrors. They can choose to sample them, repeat them or avoid them. That is not the same as living beneath the volcano when you’ve just invented the wheel, or wondering whether your levee will break and drown your entire village. Again, this applies to all societies which have matured beyond the age of barbarism. There is no great mystery here.”
“But the Culture is so insistent in its utopianism,” Ziller said, sounding, Kabe thought, almost bitter. “They are like an infant with a toy, demanding it only to throw it away.”
Kabe watched Ziller puff at his pipe for a while, then walked through the cloud of smoke and sat trefoil on the finger-deep carpet near the other male’s couch.
“I think it is only natural, and a sign that one has succeeded as a species, that what used to have to be suffered as a necessity becomes enjoyed as sport. Even fear can b
e recreational.”
Ziller looked into the Homomdan’s eyes. “And despair?”
Kabe shrugged. “Despair? Well, only in the short term, as when one despairs of completing a task, or winning at some game or sport, and yet later does. The earlier despair makes the victory all the sweeter.”
“That is not despair,” Ziller said quietly. “That is temporary annoyance, the passing irritation of foreseen disappointment. I meant nothing so trivial. I meant the sort of despair that eats your soul, that contaminates your senses so that every experience, however pleasant, becomes saturated with bile. The sort of despair that drives you to thoughts of suicide.”
Kabe rocked back. “No,” he said. “No. They might hope to have put that behind them.”
“Yes. They leave it in their wake for others.”
“Ah.” Kabe nodded. “I think we touch upon what happened to your own people. Well, some of them feel remorse close to despair about that.”
“It was mostly our own doing.” Ziller crumbled some smoke block into his pipe, tamping it down with a small silver instrument and producing further clouds of smoke. “We would doubtless have contrived a war without the Culture’s help.”
“Not necessarily.”
“I disagree. Regardless; at least after a war we might have been forced to confront our own stupidities. The Culture’s involvement meant that we suffered the war’s depredations while failing to benefit from its lessons. We just blamed the Culture instead. Short of our utter destruction the outcome could hardly have been worse, and sometimes I feel that even that is an unjustified exception.”
Kabe sat still for a while. Blue smoke rose from Ziller’s pipe.
Ziller had once been Gifted-from-Tacted Mahrai Ziller VIII of Wescrip. Born into a family of administrators and diplomats, he had been a musical prodigy almost from infancy, composing his first orchestral work at an age when most Chelgrian children were still learning not to eat their shoes.
He had taken the designation Gifted—two caste levels below that he had been born into—when he dropped out of college, scandalising his parents.
Despite garnering outrageous fame and fortune in his career he scandalised them still further, to the point of illness and breakdown, when he became a radical Caste Denier, entered politics as an Equalitarian and used his prestige to argue for the end of the caste system. Gradually public and political opinion began to shift; it started to look as though the long talked-about Great Change might finally happen. After an unsuccessful attempt on his life Ziller renounced his caste altogether, and so was deemed the lowest of the non-criminal low; an Invisible.
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