Matter

receding fast, like they’d just exited from it, travelling very fast indeed.

“Did we dodge that thing?” he said, gulping.

“No,” the ship said. “We went right through it because it’s not a real ship; it’s little better than a hologram.”

“What?” Quitrilis said, shaking his head. “How? Why?”

“Good question,” the ship said. “I wonder how many of the others are just pretend too.”

“I’m fucking alive,” Quitrilis breathed. He clicked out of the command virtuality so he was sat in the couch properly with the physical controls in front of him and the wraparound display showing in slightly less detail what he’d been looking at seemingly directly. “We’re fucking alive, ship!” he yelled.

“Yes, we are. How odd.” The Now We Try It My Way sounded puzzled. “I’m sending a burst to my old Systems Vehicle about this. Something’s not right here.”

Quitrilis waved his arms around and waggled his toes. “But we’re alive!” he yelled, ecstatic. “We’re alive!”

“I am not disagreeing, Quitrilis. However… Wait. We’re being target-!”

The beam from the original, first-arrived Primarian ship burst all around them, turning the little craft and the single human inside it entirely into plasma within a few hundred milliseconds.

This time, Quitrilis Yurke didn’t have time to think anything at all.

* * *

Djan Seriy Anaplian, agent of the Culture’s renowned/notorious (delete to taste) Special Circumstances section, had her first dream of Prasadal while aboard the Seed Drill, an Ocean-class GSV. The details of the dream itself were not important; what exercised her on waking was that it was the kind of dream she had always associated with home. She had had dreams like that about the royal palace in Pourl and the estate at Moiliou, about the Eighth in general and even — if you counted the dreams of the Hyeng-zhar — about Sursamen as a whole for the first few years after she’d come to the Culture, and always woken from them with a pang of homesickness, sometimes in tears.

Those had slowly disappeared to be replaced by dreams of other places where she’d lived, like the city of Klusse, on Gadampth Orbital, where she had begun her long introduction to, induction into and acceptance of the Culture. These were, sometimes, profound, affecting dreams in their own way, but they were never imbued with that feeling of loss and longing that indicated the place being dreamt about was home.

She blinked awake in the grey darkness of her latest cabin — a perfectly standard ration of space in a perfectly standard Ocean-class — and realised with a tiny amount of horror, a degree of grim humour and a modicum of ironic appreciation that just as she had started to realise that she might finally be happy to be away from and free of Sursamen and all that it had meant to her, she had been called back.

* * *

She nearly caught the ball. She didn’t, and it hit her on the right temple hard enough to cause a spike of pain. It would, she was sure, have floored anybody human-basic. With all her SC stuff still wired in she’d have dodged it or caught it one-handed easily. In fact, with her SC stuff still on line she could have jumped and caught it in her teeth. Instead, Whack!

She’d heard the ball coming, caught the most fleeting glimpse of it arcing towards her, but hadn’t been quite quick enough. The ball bounced off her head. She shook her head once, spread her feet wide and flexed her knees to make her more stable in case she might be about to topple, but she didn’t. The pain flicked off, cancelled. She rubbed her head and stooped to pick up the hard little ball — a crackball, so just a solid bit of wood, basically — and looked for who had thrown it. A guy sailed out of the group of people by the small bar she’d been passing on one of the outer balcony decks.

“You all right?” he asked.

She threw the ball to him on a soft, high trajectory. “Yes,” she told him.

He was a small, round, almost ball-like man himself, very dark and with extravagant hair. He caught the ball and stood weighing it in his hand. He smiled. “Somebody said you were SC, that’s all. I thought, well, let’s see, so I threw this at you. Thought you’d catch it, or duck or something.”

“Perhaps asking would have been more effective,” Djan Seriy suggested. Some of the people at the bar were looking at them.

“Sorry,” the man said, nodding at the side of her head.

“Accepted. Good-day.” She made to walk on.

“Will you let me make you a drink?”

“That won’t be necessary. Thank you, all the same.”

“Seriously. It would make me feel better.”

“Quite. No, thank you.”

“I make a very good Za’s Revenge. I’m something of an expert.”

“Really. What is a Za’s Revenge?”

“It’s a cocktail. Please, stay; have one with us.”

“Very well.”

She had a Za’s Revenge. It was very alcoholic. She let it affect her. The round man and his friends were Peace Faction people, from the part of the Culture that had split away at the start of the Idiran War, hundreds of years earlier, renouncing conflict altogether.

She stayed for more Za’s Revenges. Eventually the man admitted that, although he liked her and found her highly personable, he just didn’t like SC, which he referred to — rather sneeringly, Anaplian thought — as “the good ship We Know What’s Good For You”.

“It’s still violence,” he told her. “It’s still what we ought to be above.”

“It can be violent,” Anaplian acknowledged, nodding slowly. Most of the man’s friends had drifted off. Beyond the balcony deck, in the open air surrounding the GSV’s hull, a regatta for human-powered aircraft was taking place. It was all very gay and gaudy and seemed to involve a lot of fireworks.

“We should be above that. Do you see?”

“I see.”

“We’re strong enough as it is. Too strong. We can defend ourselves, be an example. No need to go interfering.”

“It is a compelling moral case you make,” Anaplian told the man solemnly.

“You’re taking the piss now.”

“No, I agree.”

“But you’re in SC. You interfere, you do all the dirty tricks stuff. You do, don’t you?”

“We do, I do.”

“So don’t fucking tell me it’s a compelling moral case then; don’t insult me.” The Peace Faction guy was quite aggressive. This amused her.

“That was not my intention,” she told him. “I was telling you — excuse me.” Anaplian took another sip of her drink. “I was telling you I agree with what you say but not to the point of acting differently. One of the first things they teach you in SC, or…” She belched delicately. “Excuse me. Or get you to teach yourself, is not to be too sure, always to be prepared to acknowledge that there is an argument for not doing the things that we do.”

“But you still do them.”

“But we still do them.”

“It shames us all.”

“You are entitled to your view.”

“And you to yours, but your actions contaminate me in a way that mine do not contaminate you.”

“You are right, but then you are of the Peace Faction, and so not really the same.”

“We’re all still Culture. We’re the real Culture, and you’re the cancerous offspring, grown bigger than the host and more dangerous than when we split, but you resemble us well enough to make us all look the same to others. They see one entity, not different factions. You make us look bad.”