Look to Windward

the Caste War?”

“Encompassing all thirty-one trillion of the Culture’s citizens might stretch even my empathy a little.”

Ziller smiled thinly and looked up at the horizon of the Orbital hanging in the sky. The bright ribbon began at the haze line to spinward, thinning and sweeping into the sky; a single strip of and punctuated by vast oceans and the ragged, ice-shored barriers of the trans-atmospheric Bulkhead Ranges, its surface speckled green and brown and blue and white; waisted here, broadening there, usually hemmed by the Edge Seas and their scattered islands, though in places—and invariably where the Bulkhead Ranges reared—stretching right to the retaining walls. The thread that was Masaq’ Great River was visible in a few of the nearer regions. Overhead, the Orbital’s far side was just a bright line, the details of its geography lost in that burnished filament.

Sometimes, if you had very good eyesight indeed and looked up to the far side directly above, you could just make out the tiny black dot that was Masaq’ Hub, hanging free in space, one and a half million kilometres away in the otherwise empty centre of the world’s vast bracelet of land and sea.

“Yes,” said Ziller. “They are so many, aren’t they?”

“They could easily have been more. They have chosen stability.” Ziller was still gazing into the sky. “Do you know there are people who’ve been sailing the Great River since the Orbital was completed?”

“Yes. A few are on their second circuit now. They call themselves the Time Travellers because, heading against the spin, they are moving less quickly than everybody else on the Orbital, and so incur a reduced relativistic time dilation penalty, negligible though the effect is.”

Ziller nodded. The great dark eyes drank in the view. “I wonder if anyone goes against the flow?”

“A few do. There are always some.” Kabe paused. “None of them have yet completed a circuit of the entire Orbital; they would need to live a very long time to do so. Theirs is a harder course.”

Ziller stretched his midlimb and arms and put his pipe away. “Just so.” He made a shape with his mouth Kabe knew was a genuine smile. “Shall we return to Aquime? I have work to do.”

Scorched Ground

~ Are our own ships not good enough?

~ Theirs are faster.

~ Still?

~ I’m afraid so.

~ And I hate this chopping and changing. First one ship then another, then another, then a fourth. I feel like a delivery package.

~ This wouldn’t be some obscure form of insult, or way of trying to delay us, would it?

~ You mean not giving us our own ship?

~ Yes.

~ I don’t think so. In an obscure sort of way they may even be trying to impress us. They’re saying that they’re taking so much care to correct the mistakes they made that they won’t spare any ships from normal duty for anybody.

~ Sparing four ships at different times makes more sense?

~ It does the way they’ll have their forces set up. The first ship was very much a war craft. They’re keeping those close to Chel in case the war should begin again. They may loop a certain distance out, for example to ferry us, but no further. The one we are on now is a Superlifter, a sort of fast tug. The one we’re approaching is a General Systems Vehicle; a kind of giant depot or mother ship. It carries other warships they could deploy in the event of further hostilities, if they went beyond the scale their immediately available materiel could deal with. The GSV can loop further out than the war vessel but still can’t stray too far from Chelgrian space. The last ship is an old demilitarised war craft of a type commonly used throughout the galaxy for this sort of picket duty.

~ Throughout the galaxy. Somehow that still always comes as a shock.

~ Yes. Decent of them to take such an interest in our relatively puny well- being.

~ If you believe them, that is all they were ever trying to do.

~ Do you believe them, Major?

~ I think I do. I am just not convinced that that is sufficient excuse for what happened.

~ Damn right it isn’t.

The first three days of their journey had been spent aboard the Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit Nuisance Value. It was a massive, cobbled-together object; a bundle of gigantic engine units behind a single weapon pod and a tiny accommodation section that looked like an afterthought.

~ God that thing is ugly, Huyler said when they first saw it, riding across from the wreck of the Winter Storm in the tiny shuttle with the ship’s black-skinned, grey-suited avatar. ~ And these people are supposed to be decadent aesthetes?

~ There is a theory that they are ashamed of their weaponry. As long as it looks inelegant, rough and disproportionate they can pretend that is not really theirs, or not really a part of their civilisation, or only temporarily so, because everything else they make is so subtly refined.

~ Or it could just be form following function. However I confess that’s a new one on me. Which university whizz-kid came up with that theory?

~ You will be glad to know, Hadesh Huyler, that we now have a Civilisational Metalogical Profiling Section in Naval Intelligence.

~ I can see I have a lot of catching up to do with the latest terminology. What does metalogical mean?

~ It is short for psycho-physio-philosophilogical.

~ Well, naturally. Of course it is. Glad I asked.

~ It is a Culture term.

~ A fucking Culture term?

~ Yes, sir.

~ I see. And what the hell does this metalogical section of ours actually do?

~ It tries to tell us how other Involveds think.

~ Involveds?

~ Also one of their terms. It means space-faring species beyond a certain technological level which are willing and able to interact with each other.

~ I see. Always a bad sign when you start using the enemy’s terminology.

Quilan glanced at the avatar sitting in the seat next to him. It smiled uncertainly at him.

~ I would agree with that, sir.

He returned his gaze to the view of the Culture warship. It was, indeed, rather ugly. Before Huyler had expressed his own thoughts, Quilan had been thinking how brutally powerful the craft looked. How odd to have somebody else in your head who looked through the same eyes and saw exactly the same things you did and yet came to such different conclusions, experienced such dissimilar emotions.

The craft filled the screen, as it had since they had set off. They were approaching it quickly, but it had been a long way off; some few hundred kilometres. A read-out at the side of the screen was counting the magnification level back towards zero. Powerful, Quilan thought—entirely to himself—and ugly. Perhaps, in some sense, that was always the case. Huyler broke into his thoughts:

~ I take it your servants are already aboard?

~ I am not taking any servants, sir.

~ What?

~ I am going alone, sir. Apart from yourself, of course.

~ You’re going without servants? Are you some sort of fucking outcast or something, Major? You’re not one of these embryonicist Caste Deniers, are