The Homomdan and the Chelgrian both wore devices which looked like they might have been either protective helmets of dubious effectiveness or rather garish head-jewellery.
Ziller snorted. ‘We look preposterous.’ ‘Perhaps that is one reason people take to implants.’
They each took the devices off. Kabe, sitting on a graceful, relatively flimsy-looking chaise longue with deep bays designed especially for tripeds, placed his head-set on the couch beside him.
Ziller, curled on a broad couch, set his on the floor. He blinked a couple of times then reached into his waistcoat pocket for his pipe. He wore pale-green leggings and an enamelled groin plate. The waistcoat was hide, jewelled.
‘This was when?’ he asked. ‘About eighty days ago. ‘The Hub Mind was right. They are all quite mad.’
‘And yet most of the people you saw there had lava-rafted before and had just as awful a time. I have checked up since and all but three of the twenty-three humans you saw there have taken part in the sport again.’ Kabe picked up a cushion and played with the fringing. ‘Though it has to be said that two of them have experienced temporary body-death when their lava canoe capsized and one of them — a one-timer, a Disposable -~ was crushed to death while glacier-caving.’
‘Completely dead?’
‘Very completely, and forever. They recovered the body and held a funeral service.’
‘Age?’
‘She was thirty-one standard years old. Barely an adult.’
Ziller sucked on his pipe. He looked towards the balcony windows. They were in a large house in an estate in the Tirian Hills, on Osinorsi Lower, the Plate to spinwards of Xaravve. Kabe shared the house with an extended human family of about sixteen individuals, two of them children. A new top floor had been built for him. Kabe enjoyed the company of the humans and their young, though he had come to realise that he was probably a little less gregarious than he’d thought he was.
He had introduced the Chelgrian to the half dozen other people present in and around the house and shown him round. From down-slope-facing windows and balconies, and from the roof garden, you could see, looming bluely across the plains, the cliffs of the massif that carried Masaq’ Great River across the vast sunken garden that was Osinorsi Lower Plate.
They were waiting for the drone E. H. Tersono, which was on its way to them with what it called important news.
‘I seem to recall,’ Ziller said, ‘that I said I agreed with Hub that they were all quite mad and you began your reply with the words “And yet”.’ Ziller frowned. ‘And then everything you said subsequently seemed to agree with what I had said.’
‘What I meant is that however much they appeared to hate the experience, and despite being under no pressure to repeat it—’
‘Other than pressure from their equally cretinous peers.’
‘—they nevertheless chose to, because however awful it might have seemed at the time, they feel that they gained something positive from it.’
‘Oh? And what would that be? That they lived through it despite their stupidity in undertaking this totally unnecessary traumatic experience in the first place? What one should gain from an unpleasant experience should be the determination not to repeat it. Or at least the inclination.’
‘They feel they have tested themselves—’
‘And found themselves to be mad. Does that count as a positive result?’
‘They feel they have tested themselves against nature—’
‘What’s natural around here?’ Ziller protested. ‘The nearest “natural” thing to here is ten light minutes away. It’s the fucking sun.’ He snorted. ‘And I wouldn’t put it past them to have meddled with that.’
‘I don’t believe they have. In fact it was a potential instability in .~acelere that produced the high back-up rate on Masaq’ Orbital in the first place, before it became famous for excessive fun.’ Kabe put the cushion down.
Ziller was staring at him. ‘Are you saying the sun could explode?’
‘Well, sort of, in theory. It’s a very—’ ‘You’re not serious!’ ‘Of course I am. The chances are—’ ‘They never told me that!’
‘Actually, it wouldn’t really blow up as such, but it might flare—’
‘It does flare! I’ve seen its flares!’
‘Yes. Pretty, aren’t they? But there is a chance — no more than one in several million during the time the star spends on the main-sequence — that it might produce a flare sequence that Hub and the Orbital’s defences would be unable to deflect or shelter everyone from.’
‘And they built this thing here?’
‘I understand it was a very attractive system otherwise. And besides, I believe that over time they’ve added extra protec- tion under-Plate which could stand up to anything short of a supernova, though of course any technology can go wrong and, sensibly, the culture of backing-up as a matter of course is still common.’
Ziller was shaking his head. ‘They could have mentioned this to me.
‘Perhaps the risk is deemed so tiny they have given up bothering.’
Ziller smoothed his scalp fur. He’d let his pipe go out. ‘I don’t believe these people.’
‘The chances of disaster are very remote indeed, especially for any given year, or even sentient lifetime.’ Kabe rose and lumbered over to a sideboard. He picked up a bowl of fruits. ‘Fruit?’
‘No, thank you.’
Kabe selected a ripe sunbread. He had had his intestinal flora altered to enable him to eat common Culture foods. More unusually, he had had his oral and nasal senses modified so that he could taste food as a standard Culture human would. He turned away from Ziller as he popped the sunbread into his mouth, chewed the fruit a couple of times and swallowed. The action of averting his face from others when eating had become habitual; members of Kabe’s species had very big mouths and some humans found the sight of him eating alarming.
‘But to return to my point,’ he said, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. ‘Let’s not use the word “nature” then; let us say they feel they have gained something from having pitted themselves against forces much greater than themselves.’
‘And this is somehow not a sign of madness.’ Ziller shook his head. ‘Kabe, you may have been here too long.’
The Homomdan crossed to the balcony, gazing out at the view. ‘I would say that these people are demonstrably not mad. They live lives that seem quite sane otherwise.’
‘What? Glacier-caving?’
‘That is not all they do.’
‘Indeed. They do lots of other insane things; naked blade- fencing, mountain free-climbing, wing-flying—’
‘Very few do nothing but take part in these extreme pastimes. Most have otherwise fairly normal lives.’
Ziller relit his pipe. ‘By Culture standards.’
‘Well, yes, and why not? They socialise, they have work- hobbies, they play in more gentle forms, they read or watch screen, they go to entertainments. They sit around grinning in one of their glanded drug states, they study, they spend time travelling—’
‘Ah-hah!’
‘—apparently just for the sake of it or they simply. . . potter. And of course many of them indulge in arts and crafts.’ Kabe made a smile and spread his three hands. ‘A few even compose music.
‘They spend time. That’s just it. They spend time travelling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they’ll find in the place they’re heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.~
Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. ‘Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of travelling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled.’
Kabe watched a springleg bounce from branch to branch through the trees outside, its ruddy fur and long tail dappled with leaf shadows. He could hear the shrill voices of human children, playing and splashing in the pool at the side of the house. ‘Oh, come, Ziller. Arguably any intelligent species feels that to some extent.’
‘Really? Does yours?’
Kabe fingered the soft folds of the drapes at the side of the balcony window. ‘We are much older than the humans, but I think we probably did, once.’ He looked back at the Chelgrian, crouched on the wide seat as though ready to pounce. ‘All natu- rally evolved sentient life is restless. At some scale or stage.’
Ziller appeared to consider this, then shook his head. Kabe was not yet sure if this gesture meant that he had said something too preposterous to be worth dignifying with an answer, perpetrated an appalling clich6, or made a point that the Chelgrian could not find an adequate reply to.
‘The point is,’ Ziller said, ‘that having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats—’ He paused and glanced sourly at the sunlight flaring off the gilt border of his seat. ‘—Well, almost all natural threats, these people then find their lives are so hollow they have to recreate false versions of just the sort of terrors untold generations of their ancestors spent their existences attempting to conquer.