years, but he was increasingly certain that he was one of those scholars who devoted their lives to their work, rather than one of those who use a period of intense study to make themselves more rounded beings. He felt no great sense of loss at such a prospect; by original humanoid standards of life-expectancy he had already lived a long, full life by the time he’d decided to become a student in the first place.
The long trip back home, however, did seem slightly daunting. The airsphere Oskendari was not in regular contact with the Culture (or anybody else for that matter) and—the last Uagen had heard—the next Culture ship with a course schedule that brought it anywhere near the system wasn’t due for another two years. There might be other craft calling by before then, but it would take even longer to get home if he had to start out on an alien vessel, assuming they’d take him.
Even taking a Culture ship, there would be at least a year travelling home, say a year once he got there, and then for the return journey… no vessels had even course-scheduled that far ahead when he’d last checked.
He had been offered his own ship, fifteen years earlier, when news had arrived that a dirigible behemothaur had consented to play host to a Culture scholar, but tying up a star craft for a single person who would use it twice in twenty or thirty years had seemed, well, overly profligate, even by Culture standards. Nonetheless, if he was going to stay and possibly never see his friends and family alive again, then he really had no choice about returning. In any event, he needed to think about it.
Yoleus’ Invited Guests’ Quarters had been sited where they were to give the creature’s visitors a pleasant and airy view. With the courtship of Muetenive, and Yoleus’ tactic of following the other creature just below and behind, the quarters had become overshadowed and oppressive. A lot of people had left, and the remaining guests seemed excessively gossipy and nervous to Uagen, who was, in the end, there to study. So he spent less time socialising than he had done, and more time either in his study or roaming the behemothaur’s bulbous surfaces.
He hung from the foliage, working quietly.
Flocks of falficores roamed the spin winds about the two huge creatures; columns and clouds of infinitesimal dark shapes. It was the flight of a falficore flock Uagen was attempting to describe in the glyph-writing tablet.
Writing, of course, was hardly the right word for what Uagen was doing. You did not merely write within a glyph-writing tablet; you reached inside its holo’d space with the digital stylo and carved and shaped and coloured and textured and mixed and balanced and annotated all at once. Glyphs of this sort were solid poetry, fashioned from nothing solid. They were real spells, perfect images, ultimate cross-system intellectualisations.
They had been invented by Minds (or their equivalent) and there was an infamous rumour that they had only been thought up to provide a means of communication that humans (or their equivalent) would be unable ever to understand or produce. People like Uagen had devoted their lives to proving that the Minds were either not as differentially smart as they thought, or that the paranoid cynics had been wrong.
“There, finished,” Uagen said, holding the tablet away from his face and squinting at it. He turned it and inclined his head. He showed the tablet to his companion, the Interpreter 974 Praf, who was hanging from a nearby branch at Uagen’s shoulder.
974 Praf was a fifth-order Decider in the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus’ 11th Foliage Gleaner Troupe who had been given upgraded autonomous intelligence and the title Interpreter when she’d been assigned to Uagen. She inclined her head at the same angle and stared into the tablet.
“I see nothing.” She spoke in Marain, the Culture’s language.
“You are hanging upside down.”
The creature shook its wings. Her eye pit band looked straight at Uagen. “Does that make a difference?”
“Yes. It’s polarised. Observe.” Uagen turned the tablet straight on to the Interpreter and inverted it.
974 Praf flinched, her wings jerking halfway out and her body hunching as though getting ready to fly. She collected herself and settled back, swaying to and fro. “Oh yes, there they are.”
“I was attempting to use the phenomenon whereby one is looking at a flock of—for example—falficores from a great distance but is unable to see them because of one’s inability to distinguish individual creatures at such a range, whereupon they suddenly coalesce and flock together, gathering into a tighter grouping and becoming suddenly visible as though out of nothing, as a metaphor for the often equally precipitous experience of conceptual comprehension.”
974 Praf turned her head, opened her beak, flicked out her tongue to groom a twisted skin-leaf straight, then looked at him again. “That is done how?”
“Umm. With great skill,” Uagen said, and then gave a delicate, slightly surprised laugh. He stowed the stylo and clicked the tablet to store the glyph.
The stylo must not have been properly stowed, because it clicked out of its housing in the side of the tablet and fell away into the blueness below.
“Oh, damn,” Uagen said, “I knew I should have replaced that lanyard.”
The stylo swiftly became a dot. They both watched it.
974 Praf said, “That is your writing instrument.”
Uagen took hold of his right foot. “Yes.”
“Do you have another?”
Uagen chewed on one of his toenails. “Umm. Not really, no.”
974 Praf tilted her head. “Hmm.”
Uagen scratched his head. “I suppose I’d better go after it.”
“It is your only one.”
Uagen let go with his hand and tail, dropping into the air to follow the instrument. 974 Praf released her claw holds and followed him.
The air was very warm and thick; it roared around Uagen’s ears, buffeting.
“I am reminded,” 974 Praf said as they plummeted together.
“What?” Uagen said. He clipped the writing tablet to his belt, popped a pair of wind-goggles over his already watering eyes and twisted in the air to keep an eye on the stylo, which was almost out of sight. Such styli were small but very dense and also effectively, if unintentionally, quite streamlined. It was falling alarmingly quickly. His clothes fluttered and snapped like a flag in a gale.
Uagen’s tasselled hat flew off; he grabbed at it but it floated away upwards. Above, the cloud-sized bulk of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus drew slowly away as they fell.
“Shall I get your hat?” 974 Praf shouted over the wind roar.
“No, thank you,” Uagen yelled. “We can retrieve it on the way back up.”
Uagen twisted back round and peered into the blue depths. The stylo was tearing through the air like a crossbow quarrel.
974 Praf drifted closer to Uagen until her beak was close to his right ear and her body feathers were fluttering in the disturbed air just past his shoulder. “As I was saying,” she said.
“Yes?”
“The Yoleus would know more of your conclusions regarding your theory on the effects of gravitational susceptibility influencing the religiosity of a species with particular reference to their eschatological beliefs.”
Uagen was losing sight of the stylo. He glanced round, frowning at 974 Praf. “What, now?”
“I just remembered.”
“Umm, well. Just wait a moment, can’t you… ? I mean, this thing’s fairly hurtling away down here.” Uagen fingered a button on his left wrist cuff; his clothes sucked in about him and stopped flapping. He assumed a diving position, placing his hands together and wrapping his tail round his legs. By his side, 974 Praf drew her wings in tighter and also took on a more aerodynamic aspect.
“I cannot see the thing you dropped.”
“I can. Just. I think. Oh, bugger and blast.”
It was getting away from him. The stylo’s air resistance must be just that little less than his, even in a head-down dive. He looked at the Interpreter for a moment. “I think I’ll have to power down to it,” he shouted.
974 Praf seemed to draw herself in, bringing her wings even closer to her body and stretching her neck. She gained very slightly on Uagen, starting to move past him downwards, then relaxed, and drifted back up. “I cannot go any faster.”
“Right, then. I’ll see you in a bit.”
