The twittering batball bounced off the centre of the high-scoring wall and flew straight towards Genar- Hofoen. The creature's tiny, clipped wings paddled frantically at the atmosphere as it tried to right itself and flee. One of its stumpy wings was ragged, perhaps even broken. It started to curve away as it approached the human. He took a good back-swing with his bat and slammed it into the little creature, sending it yelping and spinning away. He'd intended it to head for the high-scoring wall, but the stroke had been slightly off-target, resulting in the spin he'd given the thing and its course towards the corner between the high-scoring wall and the right-side forfeit baffle. Shit, he thought; the batball thrashed at the atmosphere and curved further towards the forfeit baffle.
Fivetide darted forward and with a flip of the bat strapped to one of his front limbs — and a resounding, 'Ha!' — snapped the batball into the centre of the high-scoring wall again; it thudded against the roundel and ricocheted off at an angle Genar-Hofoen knew he wasn't going to be able to intercept. He lunged at it anyway, but the creature sailed slackly past, half a metre away from his outstretched bat. He fell to the floor and rolled, feeling the gelfield suit tensing and squeezing him as it absorbed the shock. He picked himself up to a sitting position and looked around. He was breathing hard and his heart was hammering; playing this sort of game against another human would have been no joke in Affronter gravity. Playing it against an Affronter, even one with half his tentacles sportingly tied round its back, was even harder work.
'Hopeless!' Fivetide roared, crossing towards where the batball lay motionless near the back of the court. As he passed the human he flicked a tentacle under Genar-Hofoen's chin and levered him up. The gesture was almost certainly meant to be helpful, but it would have broken the average unprotected human neck. Genar-Hofoen merely found himself propelled off the floor like a rock out of a catapult and sent sailing towards the ceiling of the court, arms flailing.
—
A tentacle wrapped itself round his waist like a whip. 'Oops!' Fivetide said, and lowered him safely to the floor with surprising gentleness. 'Sorry about that, Genar-Hofoen,' he yelled. 'You know what they say; 'It's a wise lad knows his own strength when he's having fun,' eh!' He patted the human relatively gently on the head, then continued over to the motionless body of the batball. He prodded it with the bat.
'Don't breed them like they used to,' he said, then made a noise Genar-Hofoen had learned to interpret as a sigh.
—
— Suit, really! he thought, amused.
—
The suit was not in the best of moods. He and it were spending a lot more time together; the suit didn't trust the containment around Genar-Hofoen's quarters in the ship and had insisted that the human keep it on, even when he was asleep. Genar-Hofoen had grumbled, but not over-much; there were too many funny smells in his quarters for him to have complete faith in the Affront's attempt at a human life-support system. The most the gelfield suit would let him do at night was peel aside its head section so that he could sleep with his face exposed; that way, even if his environment collapsed suddenly and totally, the suit would be able to protect him.
Fivetide flicked the batball up with the end of his bat and flicked it over the transparent wall of the court, into the spectators' seats. Then he banged on the wall, waking the snoozing form of the gelding on the far side.
'Wake up, you dozy
The neutered Affronter adolescent jumped to its tentacle tips, its eye stalks waving around wildly, then it reached into a small cage by its side with one limb while another tentacle opened the door in the court wall. It picked one batball out of the dozen or so tied up in the cage and handed the squirming creature to the adult Affronter, who accepted it then jerked forward and hissed at the adolescent, making it flinch. It closed the door quickly.
'Ha!' Fivetide shouted, putting the trussed, wriggling batball to his forebeak and tearing the cord that had held it immobile. 'Another game, Genar-Hofoen?' Fivetide spat the short length of cord away and patted the batball up and down in one of his limbs while the little animal flexed its abbreviated wings.
'Why not?' Genar-Hofoen said coolly. He was exhausted, but he wasn't going to let Fivetide know.
'Nine-nil to me, I believe,' the Affronter said, holding the batball up to his eyes. 'I know,' he said. 'Let's make it more interesting.' He put the struggling batball into the tip of his forebeak, his eye stalks bent forward and down to look at what he was doing. There was a delicate movement around Fivetide's beak-fronds and a tiny screech, accompanied by a faint pop.
Fivetide withdrew the creature from his beak and inspected it, apparently satisfied. 'There,' he said. 'Always good for a change, playing with a blinded one.' He threw the writhing, mewling creature to Genar-Hofoen. 'Your serve, I believe.'
The Culture had a problem with the Affront. The Affront had a problem with the Culture, too, for that matter, but it was a pretty plain thing in comparison; the Affront's problem with the Culture was simply that the older civilisation stopped it doing all the things it wanted to do. The Culture's problem with the Affront was like an itch they couldn't scratch; the Culture's problem with the Affront was that the Affront existed at all and the Culture couldn't in all conscience do anything about it.
The problem stemmed from an accident of galactic topography and a combination of bad luck and bad timing.
The fuzzily specified region which had given rise to the various species that had eventually made up the Culture had been on the far side of the galaxy from the Affront home planet, and contacts between the Culture and the Affront had been unusually sparse for a long time for a variety of frankly banal reasons. By the time the Culture came to know the Affront better — shortly after the long distraction of the Idiran war — the Affront were a rapidly developing and swiftly maturing species, and short of another war there was no practical way of quickly changing either their nature or behaviour.
Some Culture Minds had argued at the time that a quick war against the Affront was exactly the right course of action, but even as they'd started setting out their case they'd known it was already lost; for all that the Culture was just then at a peak of military power it had never expected to attain at the start of that long and terrible conflict, just so there was a corresponding determination at all levels that — the task of stopping the Idirans' relentless expansion having been accomplished — the Culture would neither need nor seek to achieve such a martial zenith again. Even while the Minds concerned had been contending that a single abrupt and crushing blow would benefit all concerned — including the Affront, not just ultimately, but soon — the Culture's warships were being stood down, deactivated, componented, stored and demilitarised by the tens of thousands, while its trillions of citizens were congratulating themselves on a job well done and returning with the relish of the truly peace-loving to the uninhibited enjoyment of all the recreational wonders the resolutely hedonism-focused society of the Culture had to offer.
There had probably never been a less propitious time for arguing that more fighting was a good idea, and the argument duly foundered, though the problem remained.
Part of the problem was that the Affront had the disturbing habit of treating every other species they encountered with either total suspicion or amused contempt, depending almost entirely on whether that civilisation was ahead of or behind them in technological development. There had been one developed species — the Padressahl — in that same volume of the galaxy which had been sufficiently like the Affront in terms of evolutionary background and physical appearance to be treated almost as friends by the Affront and which yet had a moral outlook similar enough to the Culture's to consider it worth the effort of chaperoning the Affront with the other local species, and, to their eternal credit, the Padressahl had been doggedly endeavouring to nudge the Affront into something remotely resembling decent behaviour for more centuries than they cared to remember or admit.
It was the Padressahl who had given the Affront their name; originally the Affront had called themselves after their home world, Issorile. Calling them the Affront — following an episode involving a Padressahl trade mission to Issorile which the recipients had treated more as a food parcel — had been most decidedly intended as an insult, but the Issorilians, as they then were, thought that «Affront» sounded much better and had steadfastly refused to drop their new name even after they had formed their loose patron/protege alliance with the Padressahl.
However, a century or so after the end of the Idiran War, the Padressahl had had what the Culture regarded as the gross bad manners to suddenly sublime off into Advanced Elderhood at just the wrong time, leaving their
