Ziller snorted. ‘Caste?’ he asked heavily.
‘We believe he is a Given of the house Itirewein. I have to point out that there is a degree of uncertainty in all this, however. Chel has not been very forthcoming with information.’
‘You don’t say,’ Ziller said, looking across the rear of the aircraft to watch the yellow-white sun complete its rise.
‘When do we expect the emissary to arrive now?’ Kabe asked.
‘In about thirty-seven days.’
‘I see. Well, thank you.’
‘You’re welcome. I or Dn Tersono will talk to you later, Kabe. I’ll leave you guys in peace.’
Ziller was adding something to the bowl of his pipe.
‘Does it make a difference, the caste status of this envoy?’ Kabe asked.
‘Not really,’ Ziller said. ‘I don’t care who or what they send. I don’t want to talk to them. Certainly dispatching somebody from one of the more militant ruling cliques who happens also to be some sort of holy boot-boy shows they aren’t trying particularly hard to ingratiate themselves with me. I don’t know whether to feel insulted or honoured.’
‘Perhaps he is a devotee of your music.
‘Yes, maybe he doubles or triples as a musicology professor for one of the more exclusive universities,’ Ziller said, sucking on the pipe again. Some smoke drifted from the bowl.
‘Ziller,’ Kabe said. ‘I’d like to ask you a question.’ The Chelgrian looked at him. He went on. ‘The extended piece you’ve been working on. Would it be to mark the end of the Twin Novae period, commissioned by Hub?’ He found himself glancing without meaning to in the direction of Portisia’s bright point.
Ziller smiled slowly. ‘Between ourselves?’ he asked.
‘Of course. You have my word.’
‘Then, yes,’ Ziller said. ‘A full-blown symphony to commemorate the end of Hub’s period of mourning and encompass both a meditation on the horrors of the war and a celebration of the peace which has, with only the most trivial of blemishes, reigned since. To be performed live just after sunset on the day the second nova ignites. If my conducting is of its usual accurate standard and I time it right, the light should hit at the start of the final note.’ Ziller spoke with relish. ‘Hub thinks it’s going to arrange some sort of light show for the piece. I’m not sure I’ll allow that, but we’ll see.’
Kabe suspected the Chelgrian was relieved that somebody had guessed and he could talk about it. ‘Ziller, this is wonderful news,’ he said. It would be the first full-length piece Ziller had completed since his self-imposed exile. Some people, Kabe included, had worried that Ziller might never again produce anything on the truly monumental scale he had proved such a master of. ‘I look forward to it. Is it finished?’
‘Nearly. I’m at the tinkering stage.’ The Chelgrian looked up at the light-point that was the nova Portisia. ‘It has gone very well,’ he said, sounding thoughtful. ‘Wonderful raw material. Something I could really get my teeth into.’ He smiled at Kabe without warmth. ‘Even the catastrophes of the other Involveds are somehow on another level of elegance and aesthetic refinement compared to those of Chel. My own species’ abominations are efficient enough in terms of the death and suffering produced, but pedestrian and tawdry. You’d think they’d have the decency to provide me with better inspiration.’
Kabe was silent for a few moments. ‘It is sad to hate your own people so much, Ziller.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Ziller agreed, looking out towards the distant Great River. ‘Though happily that hatred does produce vital inspiration for my work.’
‘I know there is no chance that you will go back with them, Ziller, but you should at least see this emissary.’
Ziller looked at him. ‘Should I?’
‘Not to do so will make it appear you are frightened of his arguments.’
‘Really? What arguments?’
‘I imagine he will say that they need you,’ Kabe said patiently.
‘To be their trophy instead of the Culture’s.’
‘I think trophy is the wrong word. Symbol might be better. Symbols are important, symbols do work. And when the symbol is a person then the symbol becomes … dirigible. A symbolic person can to some extent steer their own course, determine not just their own fate but that of their society. At any rate, they will argue that your society, your whole civilisation, needs to make peace with its most famous dissident so that it can make peace with itself, and so rebuild.’
Ziller gazed levelly at him. ‘They chose you well, didn’t they, Ambassador?’
‘Not in the way I think you mean. I am neither sympathetic nor unsympathetic to such an argument. But it is likely to be one they would wish to put to you. Even if you really haven’t thought about this, and haven’t tried to anticipate their propositions, then nevertheless you must know that if you had you would have worked this out for yourself.’
Ziller stared at the Homomdan. Kabe found that it was not quite as difficult as he’d imagined, meeting the gaze of those two large dark eyes. Nevertheless, it was not something he’d have chosen as a recreation.
‘Am I really a dissident?’ Ziller asked at last. ‘I’ve just got used to thinking of myself as a cultural refugee or a political asylum seeker. This is a potentially unsettling recategorisation.’
‘Your earlier comments have stung them, Ziller. As have your actions, firstly coming here at all, and then staying on after the background to the war became clear.’
‘The background to the war, my studious Homomdan pal, is three thousand years of ruthless oppression, cultural imperialism, economic exploitation, systematic torture, sexual tyranny and the cult of greed ingrained almost to the point of genetic inheritability.’
‘That is bitterness, my dear Ziller. No outside observer would make such a hostile summation of your species’ recent history.’
‘Three thousand years counts as recent history?’
‘You are changing the subject.’
‘Yes, I find it comical that three millennia count as “recent” to you. Certainly that’s more interesting than arguing over the exact degree of culpability ascribable to my compatriots’ behaviour since we came up with our exciting idea for a caste system.’
Kabe sighed. ‘We are a long-lived species, Ziller, and have been part of the galactic community for many millennia. Three thousand years are far from insignificant by our reckoning, but in the lifetime of an intelligent, space-faring species it does indeed count as recent history.’
‘You are disturbed by these things, aren’t you, Kabe?’
‘What things, Ziller?’
The Chelgrian pointed the stem of his pipe over the side of the aircraft. ‘You felt for that human female as she seemed to be about to plunge into the ground and splatter her un-backed-up brains across the landscape, didn’t you? And you find it uncomfortable — at least — that I am, as you put it, bitter, and that I hate my own people.’
‘All that is true.’
‘Is your own existence so replete with equanimity you find no outlet for worry except on behalf of others?’
Kabe sat back, thinking. ‘I suppose it appears so.
‘Hence, perhaps, your identification with the Culture.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘So, you would feel for it, in its current, oh, shall we say embarrassment regarding the Caste War?’
‘Encompassing all thirty-one trillion of the Cultures citizens might stretch even my empathy a little.’
Ziller smiled thinly and looked up at the line of the Orbital hanging in the sky. The bright ribbon began at the haze line to spinward, thinning and sweeping into the sky; a single strip of land punctuated by vast oceans and the ragged, ice-shored lines of the trans-atmospheric Bulkhead Ranges, its surface speckled green and brown and blue and white; waisted here, broadening there, usually hemmed by the Edge Seas and their scattered islands, though in places — and invariably where the Bulkhead Ranges reared — stretching right to the retaining walls. The line that was Masaq’ Great River was visible in a few of the nearer regions. Overhead, the Orbital’s far side was just a bright line, the details of its geography lost in that burnished filament.
Sometimes, if you had very good eyesight indeed and looked up to the far side directly above, you could just make out the tiny black dot that was Masaq’ Hub, hanging free in space, one and a half million kilometres away in the otherwise empty centre of the world’s vast bracelet of land and sea.
‘Yes,’ said Ziller. ‘They are so many, aren’t they?’
‘They could easily have been more. They have chosen stability.’ Ziller was still gazing into the sky. ‘Do you know there are people who’ve been sailing the Great River since the Orbital was completed?’
‘Yes. A few are on their second circuit now. They call themselves the Time Travellers because, heading against the spin, they are moving less quickly than everybody else on the Orbital, and so incur a reduced relativistic time dilation penalty, negligible though the effect is.