Consider Phlebas

might look like (the ship's captain, Kraiklyn?), for some reason the hatred would not materialise. The Changer did not seem real.

She liked the sound of Balveda; she was brave and daring, and Fal hoped against hope that Balveda would live, that somehow she would survive it all and that one day, maybe, they would meet, perhaps after the war…

But that didn't seem real, either.

She couldn't believe in it; she couldn't imagine it the way she had imagined, say, Balveda finding the Changer. She had seen that in her mind, and had willed it to happen… In her version, of course, it was Balveda who won, not the Changer. But she couldn't imagine meeting Balveda, and somehow that was frightening, as though she had started to believe in her own prescience so much that the inability to imagine something clearly enough meant that it would never happen. Either way, it was depressing.

What chance had the agent of living through the war? Not a good one at the moment, Fal knew that, but even supposing Balveda did somehow save herself this time, what were the chances she'd wind up dead anyway, later on? The longer the war went on, the more likely it was. Fal felt, and the general concensus of opinion among the more clued-up Minds was, that the war would last decades rather than years.

Plus or minus a few months, of course. Fal frowned and bit her lip. She couldn't see them getting the Mind; the Changer was winning, and she had all but run out of ideas. All she had thought of recently was a way — perhaps, just maybe — of putting Gobuchul off: probably not a way of stopping him completely, but possibly a way of making his job harder. But she wasn't optimistic, even if Contact's War Command agreed to such a dangerous, equivocal and potentially expensive plan…

'Fal?' Jase said. She realised she was looking at the island without seeing it. The glass was growing warm in her hand, and Jase and the boy were both looking at her.

'What?' she said, and drank.

'I was asking what you thought about the war,' the boy said. He was frowning, looking at her with narrowed eyes, the sunlight sharp on his face. She looked at his broad, open face and wondered how old he was. Older than her? Younger? Did he feel like she did — wanting to be older, yearning to be treated as responsible?

'I don't understand. What do you mean? Think about it in what way?'

'Well,' the boy said, 'who's going to win?' He looked annoyed. She suspected it had been very obvious that she hadn't been listening. She looked at Jase, but the old machine didn't say anything, and with no aura field there was no way of telling what it was thinking or how it was feeling. Was it amused? Worried? She drank, gulping down the last of the cool drink.

'We are, of course,' she said quickly, glancing from the boy to Jase. The boy shook his head.

'I'm not so sure,' he said, rubbing his chin. 'I'm not sure we have the will.'

'The will?' Fal said.

'Yes. The desire to fight. I think the Idirans are natural fighters. We aren't. I mean, look at us…' He smiled, as though he was much older and thought himself much wiser than she, and he turned his head and waved his hand lazily towards the island, where the boats lay tilted against the sand.

Fifty or sixty metres away Fal saw what looked like a man and woman coupling, in the shallows under a small cliff; they were bobbing up and down, the woman's dark hands clasped round the man's lighter neck. Was that what the boy was being so urbane about?

Good grief, the fascination of sex.

No doubt it was great fun, but then how could people take it so seriously? Sometimes she felt a sneaking envy for the Idirans; they got over it; after a while it no longer mattered. They were dual hermaphrodites, each half of the couple impregnating the other, and each usually bearing twins. After one or occasionally two pregnancies — and weanings — they changed from their fertile breeder stage to become warriors. Opinion was divided on whether they increased in intelligence or just underwent a personality alteration. Certainly they became more cunning but less open-minded, more logical but less imaginative, more ruthless, less compassionate. They grew by another metre; their weight almost doubled; their keratinous covering became thicker and harder; their muscles increased in bulk and density; and their internal organs altered to accommodate these power-increasing changes. At the same time, their bodies absorbed their reproductive organs, and they became sexless. All very linear, symmetrical and tidy, compared to the Culture's pick-your-own approach.

Yes, she could see why this gangly idiot sitting in front of her with his nervously superior smile would find the Idirans impressive. Young fool.

'This is-' Fal was annoyed, enough to be a little stuck for words. 'This is just us now. We haven't evolved… we've changed a lot, changed ourselves a lot, but we haven't evolved at all since we were running around killing ourselves. I mean each other.' She sucked her breath in, annoyed with herself now. The boy was smiling tolerantly at her. She felt herself blushing. 'We are still animals,' she insisted. 'We're natural fighters just as much as the Idirans.'

'Then how come they're winning?' the boy smirked.

'They had a head start. We didn't begin properly preparing for war until the last moment. Warfare has become a way of life for them; we're not all that good at it yet because it's been hundreds of generations since we had to do it. Don't worry,' she told him, looking down at her empty glass and lowering her voice slightly, 'we're learning quite fast enough.'

'Well, you wait and see,' the boy said, nodding at her. 'I think we'll pull out of the war and let the Idirans get on with their expansion — or whatever you want to call it. The war's been sort of exciting, and it's made a change, but it's been nearly four years now, and…' He waved one hand again.'… we haven't even won anything much yet.' He laughed. 'All we keep doing is running away!'

Fal stood up quickly, turning away in case she started to cry.

'Oh shit,' the boy was saying to Jase. 'I suppose I've gone and said something now… Did she have a friend or a relation…?'

She walked down the deck, limping a little as the newly healed leg started to hurt again with a distant, nagging ache.

'Don't worry,' Jase was saying to the boy. 'Leave her alone and she'll be all right…'

She put her glass inside one of the dark, empty cabins of the yacht, then kept going, heading for the forward superstructure.

She climbed up a ladder to the wheelhouse, then up another ladder to its roof, and sat there with her legs crossed (the recently broken leg hurt, but she ignored it) and looked out to sea.

Far away, almost on the haze-limit, a ridge of whiteness shimmered in the near-still air. Fal 'Ngeestra let out a long, sad breath and wondered if the white shapes — probably only visible because they were high up, in clearer air — were snowy mountain tops. Maybe they were just clouds. She couldn't remember the geography of the place well enough to work it out.

She sat there, thinking of those peaks. She remembered when once, high in the foothills where a small mountain stream levelled out onto a marshy plateau for a kilometre or so, arcing and swerving and bowing over the sodden, reed-covered land like an athlete stretching and flexing between games, she had found something which had made that winter day's walk memorable.

Ice had been forming in clear, brittle sheets at the side of the flowing stream. She had spent some time happily marching through the shallows of the water, crunching the thin ice with her boots and watching it drift downstream. She wasn't climbing that day, just walking; she had waterproofs on and carried little gear. Somehow the fact she wasn't doing anything dangerous or physically demanding had made her feel like a young child again.

She came to a place where the stream flowed over a terrace of rock, from one level of moor down to another, and there a small pool had carved itself into the rock just beneath the rapids. The water fell less than a metre, and the stream was narrow enough to jump: but she remembered that stream and that pool because there in the circling water, caught beneath the splashing rapids, floated a frozen circle of foam.

The water was naturally soft and peaty, and a yellow-white foam sometimes formed in the mountain streams of that area, blown by the winds and caught in the reeds, but she had never seen it collected into a circle like that and frozen. She laughed when she saw it. She waded in and carefully picked it up. It was only a little greater in diameter than the distance between her outstretched thumb and little finger and a few centimetres thick, not as