manner so as to imply that they were heavier than they were supposed to be—then her attention would have been drawn to the anomaly. So far, everything seemed to be reassuringly normal. The data was a distant, comforting awareness, patiently lingering on the outskirts of her perception.
A few tiny animals moved within the mass of soil and on the surfaces of the vegetation. She knew their names and details, too. She watched a pale, thread-thin worm waving about blindly in the humus.
She put the divot back, pressing the clump of soil into the hole it had left and patting it down. She dusted off her hands while she looked around once more. Still no sign of anything amiss. The birds in the distance rose into the air again, then descended. A warm wave of air unfolded itself across the surface of the grass and flowed around her, stroking her fur where it was not covered by her plain hide waistcoat and pants. She picked up her cloak and fastened it round her shoulders. It became part of her, just like the waistcoat and pants.
The wind came from the west. It was freshening, taking the cries of the displaying birds away, so that when they rose in the distance for a third time, they seemed to do so quite silently.
There was just a hint, a faint tang of salt in the wind. It was sufficient to decide her. Enough of waiting.
She looped the cloak’s tail-loop over her long tawny tail, then turned her face to the wind.
She wished that she had chosen a name. If she had she would have spoken it now; voiced it to the clear air like some declaration of intent. But she did not have a name, because she was not what she appeared to be; not a Chelgrian female; not a Chelgrian, not even a biological creature at all. I am a Culture terror weapon, she thought; designed to horrify, warn and instruct at the highest level. A name would have been a lie.
She checked her orders, just to be sure. It was true. She had complete discretion in the manner. A lack of instruction could be interpreted as a quite specific instruction. She could do anything; she was off the leash.
Very well.
She leant back on her rear legs and brought her arms up to slip them into the glove pouches at the top of her waistcoat, then—with an initial bound very like a pounce—she set off, settling quickly into an easy-looking lope that carried her away across the grass in a series of long, smoothly sinuous bounds that stretched and compressed her powerful back and brought her heavily muscled rear legs and broad midlimb almost together then pushed them flying apart with every surging leap.
She felt the joy of the run and understood the ancient rightness of the wind in her face and fur. To run, to chase, to hunt, to bring down and kill.
The cloak rippled across her back in the slipstream. Her tail flicked from side to side.
Pylon Country
“I’d almost forgotten this place existed myself.”
Kabe looked at the silver-skinned avatar. “Really?”
“Nothing much has happened here for two hundred years apart from gentle decay,” the creature explained.
“Couldn’t that be said of the whole Orbital?” Ziller asked, in what was probably meant to be a falsely innocent tone. The avatar pretended to look hurt.
The antique cable car creaked around them as it swung past a tall pylon. It rumbled and squeaked through a system of overhead points hanging from a ring round the mast’s top and then tacked away on a new heading towards a distant pylon on a small hill across the fractured plain.
“Only if I choose to,” it said in its hollow voice. It was half sitting, half lying on one of the plump red polished hide couches, its booted feet up on the brass rail which separated the rear passenger compartment from the pilot’s control deck, where Ziller was standing, watching the various instruments, adjusting levers and fiddling with a variety of ropes that emerged from a slot in the car’s floor and were tied off on cleats mounted on the forward bulkhead.
“And do you ever choose to?” Kabe asked. He was squatting trefoil on the floor; there was just enough headroom for him in the ornate cabin like that. The car was designed to carry about a dozen passengers and two crew.
The avatar frowned. “Not that I can recall.”
Kabe laughed. “So you might choose to forget something then choose to forget forgetting it?”
“Ah, but then I’d have to forget forgetting the original forgetting.”
“I suppose you would.”
“Is this conversation
“No,” said the avatar. “It’s like this journey; drifting.”
“We are not drifting,” Ziller said. “We are exploring.”
“You might be,” the avatar said. “I’m not. I can see exactly where we are from Hub central. What do you want to see? I can provide detailed maps if you’d like.”
“The spirit of adventure and exploration is obviously alien to your computer soul,” Ziller told it.
The avatar reached out and flicked a speck of dust from the top of one boot. “Do I have a soul? Is that meant to be a compliment?”
“Of course you don’t have a soul,” Ziller said, pulling hard on one rope and tying it off. The cable car picked up speed, swaying gently as it crossed the scrub-strewn plain. Kabe watched the car’s shadow as it undulated over the dustily fawn and red ground below. The dark outline slid away and lengthened as they crossed a dry, gravel- braided river bed. A gust of wind raised eddies of dust on the ground below, then hit the car and tipped it fractionally, making the glass windows rattle in their wooden frames.
“That’s good,” the avatar said. “Because I didn’t think I had one and if I did I must have forgotten.”
“Ah ha,” said Kabe.
Ziller made an exasperated sound.
They were in a wind-powered cable car crossing the Epsizyr Breaks, a huge area of semi-wilderness on Canthropa Plate, nearly a quarter-way spinwards round the Orbital from Ziller and Kabe’s homes on Xarawe and Osinorsi. The Breaks were a vast dried-up river system a thousand kilometres broad and three times that in length. From space they looked thrown across the dun plains of Canthropa like a million twisted lengths of grey and ochre string.
The Breaks rarely carried much water. There was the occasional rain shower over the plains, but the region remained semi-arid. Every hundred or so years a really big storm managed to cross the Canthrops, the mountain range between the plains and Sard Ocean which occupied the whole of the Plate to spinward, and only then did the river system live up to its name, transporting the fallen rain from the mountains to the Epsizyr Pans, which filled and shimmered for a few days and supported a brief riot of plant and animal life before drying to salty mud flats again.
The Breaks had been designed to be that way. Masaq’ had been modelled and planned as carefully as any other Orbital, but it had always been envisaged as a big world, and a varied one. It contained just about every form of geography possible, given its apparent gravity and human-friendly atmosphere, and most of that geography was human-friendly too, but it was rare for any self-respecting Orbital Hub to be happy without at least some wilderness around. Humans tended to complain after a while, too.
Filling every available bit of each and every Plate with gently rolling hills and babbling brooks, or even spectacular mountains and broad oceans, was not seen as producing a properly balanced Orbital environment; there ought to be wastes, there should be badlands.
The Epsizyr Breaks were just one of hundreds of different types of wasteland scattered about Masaq’. They were dry and windy and barren but otherwise one of the more hospitable badlands. People had always come to the Breaks; they came to walk, to camp out under the stars and the far-side light and feel themselves apart from things for a while, and though a few people had tried living there, almost nobody had stayed for more than a few hundred days.
Kabe was looking out over Ziller’s head through the front windscreen of the car. From the tall pylon they were heading for, cables stretched away in six different directions along lines of masts disappearing into the distance, some in straight lines, others in lazy curves. Looking out over the fractured landscape all around, Kabe could see the
