if Quike and the
What was going on here? All she wanted to do was go back home and pay her respects to her late father and her presumed-deceased brother, reconnect with her past a bit and perhaps lay something to rest (she was not entirely sure what, but maybe that would come to her later). She doubted she’d be able to provide much help to her surviving brother, Oramen, but if she could offer some small service or other, she would. But that was kind of it. After that she’d be off; away back to the Culture — and, if they’d take her, back to SC and the job that, for all its frustrations, dilemmas and heartbreaks, she loved.
Why was a Culture ship trying to get involved in her returning to Sursamen in the first place? At most, this was still all about a pretty paltry thing; a grubby dispute regarding the succession of power within a very minor and embarrassingly violent and undemocratic tribe whose principal claim on the interest of others was that they happened to live inside a relatively rare and exotic world-type. Was she expected to
Well, she didn’t know. She strongly suspected she’d be crazy to do anything other than keep her head down, do what she’d said she was going to do and no more. She was in enough trouble already just for quitting the mission on Prasadal and heading home on compassionate leave without adding to the charge-sheet. SC training was full of stories of agents who’d gone dramatically off-piste and had taken on bizarre missions all of their own devising. They usually ended badly.
There were only a few stories leaning in the other direction, of agents who had passed up obvious opportunities to make some beneficial intervention unbriefed, without some specific mandate or instruction. The implication was, as ever, to stick to the plan, but be prepared to improvise. (Also, listen to your drone or other companion; they were expected to be more levelheaded, less emotional than you — that was one of the main reasons they were there.)
Stick to the plan. Not just obey orders. If you were being asked to do something according to a plan, then the way the Culture saw it, you should have had at least some say in what that plan actually was. And if circumstances changed during the course of trying to follow that plan then you were expected to have the initiative and the judgement to alter the plan and act accordingly. You didn’t keep on blindly obeying orders when, due to an alteration in context, the orders were in obvious contradiction to the attainment of whatever goal it was you were pursuing, or when they violated either common sense or common decency. You were still responsible, in other words.
It sometimes seemed to SC trainees, and especially to SC trainees coming to the organisation having been raised in other societies, that those people sworn just to obey orders had the easier time of it, being allowed to be single-minded in whatever purpose they pursued rather than having to do that
So she would stick to the plan. And the plan was: go home, behave, return, apply herself. That ought to be fairly simple, ought it not?
She joined in Mr Quike’s laughter as he reached the end of a story she’d been barely half listening to. They drank more of the spirit from the delicate, tinkling little bell-goblets and she felt herself grow pleasantly tipsy, her head ringing in a sort of woozy, complicit sympathy with the crystals.
“Well,” she said at last. “I had better go. It has been interesting talking to you.”
He stood up as she did. “Really?” he said. He looked suddenly anxious, even hurt. “I wish you’d stay.”
“Do you now?” she asked coolly.
“Kind of hoping you would,” he confessed. He gave a nervous laugh. “I thought we were getting on really well there.” He looked at the puzzled expression on her face. “I thought we were flirting.”
“You did?” she said. She felt like rolling her eyes; this was not the first time this had happened. It must be her fault.
“Well, yes,” he said, almost laughing. He waved one arm to an internal door. “My sleeping quarters are more, well, welcoming than this rather spare space.” He smiled his little-boy smile.
“I’m sure they are,” she said.
She noticed the room lights were dimming. A little late, she thought.
So; another about-turn. She inspected her own feelings and knew that, despite the abruptness and the fact she was tired, she was at least a little interested.
He came up to her and took one of her hands in his. “Djan Seriy,” he said quietly, “no matter what image of ourselves we try to project upon the world, upon others, even back upon ourselves, we are still all human, are we not?”
She frowned. “Are we?” she said.
“We are. And to be human, to be anything like human, is to know what one lacks, to know what what one needs, to know what one must look for to find some semblance of completeness amongst strangers, all alone in the darkness.”
She looked into his languidly beautiful eyes and saw in them — well, being cold about it, more precisely in the exact set of his facial features and muscle state — a hint of real need, even genuine hunger.
How close to fully, messily, imperfectly human did an avatoid have to be to pass the close inspection afforded by an equiv-tech civilisation like the Morthanveld? Perhaps close enough to have all the usual failings of meta-humanity, and the full quota of needs and desires. Whether he was a sophisticated avatar constructed from the cellular level up, a subtly altered clone of an original human being or anything else, Mr Quike, it seemed, was still very much a man, and in looking into his eyes and seeing that craving desperation, that anxious desire (with its undertone of pre-prepared sullenness, aching yearning ready to become hurt contempt on the instant of rejection), she was only experiencing what untold generations of females had experienced throughout the ages. And, oh, that smile, those eyes, that skin; the warm, enveloping voice.
She thought, A real Culture girl would definitely say yes at this point.
She sighed regretfully. However, I am still — deep down, and for my sins — both my father’s daughter and a Sarl.
“Perhaps some other time,” she told him.
She left in an all-species pod taxi. She sat there in the damp, strange-smelling air, closed her eyes and laced in to the Great Ship’s public information systems to review the next few days. There had been no recent schedule changes; they were still on course for the Morthanveld Nestworld of Syaung-un, due there in two and a half days.
She considered looking at humanoid dating/quick-contact sites (there were over three hundred thousand humanoids aboard — you’d think there would be somebody…), but still felt both too tired, and restless in the wrong way.
She returned to her own quarters, where the twice-disguised drone whispered good night to her.
She thought good night back to it, then lay, eyes closed but unable or unwilling to sleep, continuing to use her neural lace to interrogate the ship’s dataverse. She checked up — at a remove, over distances and system translations that introduced delays of five or six seconds — on the agents she’d left running in the Culture’s dataverse. She was both slightly disappointed and highly relieved to find that there was no known intrusive, close- observational recordage from the Eighth or indeed any of Sursamen’s interior levels. Whatever happened there happened once and was never seen again.
She clicked out of the Culture’s interface. One last roving agent system was waiting to report back from the local dataverse. It told her that her brother Ferbin was not dead after all; he was alive, he was on a Morthanveld tramp ship and he was due to arrive on the Nestworld of Syaung-un less than a day after her.
