Look to Windward

“Not quite total.”

“Not quite.”

“They don’t believe in the captain going down with the ship, then.”

“I understand that being last to abandon it is considered sufficient. But do you see? Masaq’ mourns and honours those it lost, those who died, and seeks to atone for whatever part it played in the war.”

Ziller shook his head. “The scummer might have told me some of this,” he muttered. Kabe pondered the wisdom of remarking that Ziller might have discovered all of this easily enough himself had he been so inclined, but decided against it. Ziller tapped his pipe out. “Well, let us hope it does not suffer from despair.”

“Drone E. H. Tersono is here,” the house announced.

“Oh, good.”

“About time.”

“Invite it in.”

The drone floated in through the balcony window, sunlight dappling its rosy porcelain skin and blue lumenstone frame. “I noticed the window was open; hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

“Eavesdropping outside, were we?” Ziller asked.

The drone settled delicately on a chair. “My dear Ziller, certainly not. Why? Were you talking about me?”

“No.”

“So, Tersono,” Kabe said. “It is very kind of you to visit. I understand we owe the honour to further news of our envoy.”

“Yes. I have learned the identity of the emissary being sent to us by Chel,” the drone said. “His full name is, and I quote, Called-to-Arms-from-Given Major Tibilo Quilan IV Autumn 47^th of Itirewein, griefling, Sheracht Order.”

“Good heavens,” Kabe said, looking at Ziller. “Your full names are even longer than the Culture’s.”

“Yes. An endearing trait, isn’t it?” Ziller said. He looked into his pipe, brows puckered. “So, our emissary’s a warlord-priest. A rich broker boy from one of the sovereign families who’s found a taste for soldiering, or been shunted into it to keep him out of the way, and then found Faith, or found it politic to find it. Parents traditionalists. And he’s a widower, probably.”

“You know him?” Kabe asked.

“Actually, I do, from a long time ago. We were at infant school together. We were friends, I suppose, though not particularly close. We lost touch after that. Haven’t heard of him since.” Ziller inspected his pipe and seemed to be contemplating lighting it again. Instead he replaced it in his waistcoat pocket. “Even if we weren’t once acquainted though, the rest of the name rigmarole tells you most of what you need to know.” He snorted. “Culture full names act as addresses; ours act as potted histories. And, of course, they tell you whether you should bow, or be bowed to. Our Major Quilan will certainly expect to be bowed to.”

“You may be doing him a disservice,” Tersono said. “I have a full biography you might be interested in —”

“Well, I’m not,” Ziller said emphatically, turning away to look at a painting hanging on one wall. It showed long-ago Homomdans riding enormous tusked creatures, waving flags and spears and looking heroic in a hectic sort of way.

“I’d like to look at it later,” Kabe said.

“Certainly.”

“So that’s, what, twenty-three, twenty-four days till he gets here?”

“About that.”

“Oh, I do so hope he’s having a pleasant journey,” Ziller said in a strange, almost childish voice. He spat into his hands and smoothed the tawny pelt over each forearm in turn, stretching each hand as he did so, so that the claws emerged; gleaming black curves the size of a human’s small finger, glinting in the soft sunlight like polished obsidian blades.

The Culture drone and the Homomdan male exchanged looks. Kabe lowered his head.

Resistance Is Character-Forming

Quilan wondered about their ship names. Perhaps it was some elaborate joke to send him on the final leg of his journey aboard a one-time warship—a Gangster class Rapid Offensive Unit which had been demilitarised to become a Very Fast Picket—called Resistance Is Character-Forming. It was a jokey name, yet pointed. So many of their ship names were like that, even if more were just jokey.

Chelgrian craft had romantic, purposeful or poetic names, but the Culture—while it had a sprinkling of ships with names of similar natures—usually went for ironic, meticulously obscure, supposedly humorous or frankly absurd names. Perhaps this was partly because they had so many craft. Perhaps it reflected the fact that their ships were their own masters and chose their own names.

The first thing he did when he stepped aboard the ship, into a small foyer floored with gleaming wood and edged with blue-green foliage, was to take a deep breath. “It smells like—” he began.

~ Home, said the voice in his head.

“Yes,” Quilan breathed, and experienced a strange, weakening, pleasantly sad sensation, and suddenly thought of childhood.

~ Careful, son.

“Major Quilan, welcome aboard,” the ship said from nowhere in particular. “I have introduced a fragrance into the air which should be reminiscent of the atmosphere around Lake Itir, Chel, during springtime. Do you find this agreeable?”

Quilan nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Good. Your quarters are directly ahead. Please make yourself at home.”

He’d been expecting a cabin as cramped as the one he’d been given on the Nuisance Value, but was pleasantly surprised; the Resistance Is Character-Forming’s interior had been refitted to provide comfortable accommodation for about half a dozen people rather than cramped quarters for four times that number.

The ship was uncrewed and chose not to use an avatar or drone to communicate. It just spoke to Quilan out of thin air, and carried out mundane house-keeping duties by creating internal maniple fields, so that clothes, for example, just floated around, seeming to clean and fold and sort and store themselves.

~ It’s like living in a fucking haunted house, Huyler said.

~ Good job neither of us is superstitious.

~ And it means it’s listening to you all the time, spying.

~ That could be interpreted as a form of honesty.

~ Or arrogance. These things don’t choose their names out of a hat.

Resistance is character-forming, If nothing else, as a motto it was a little insensitive, given the circumstances of the war.

Were they trying to tell him, and through him Chel itself, that they didn’t really care about what had happened, despite all their protestations? Or even that they did care, and were sorry, yet it had all been for their own good?

More likely the ship’s name was coincidence. There was a sort of carelessness about the Culture sometimes, a reverse side to the coin of the society’s fabled thoroughness and tenacity of purpose, as though every now and again they caught themselves being overly obsessive and precise, and tried to compensate by suddenly doing something frivolous or irresponsible.

Or might they not get bored being good?

Supposedly they were infinitely patient, boundlessly resourceful, unceasingly understanding, but would not any rational mind, with or without the capital letter, grow tired of such unleavened niceness eventually? Wouldn’t they want to cause just a little havoc, just once in a while, just to show what they could do?

Or did such thoughts merely betray his own inheritance of animal ferocity? Chelgrians were proud of having