‘No. What?’
‘They got him elected, too. Same tactics. Basic bribery.’
‘Oh.’
‘And what are they saying now?’
Quilan shook his head.
‘They’re saying they didn’t know he was going to go crazy, that it never occurred to them that a bit of equality – exactly what these people had been shouting for all this time – might not be enough for them, that some of them might just be stupid and vicious enough to want revenge. Never dawned on them that their shit-caste friends might want to do some score-settling, no. That wouldn’t make sense, that wouldn’t be logical.’ The colonel almost spat that last word. ‘So when it all blew up in our faces they were still moving their own ships and military people away from us. Didn’t have the forces to intervene, couldn’t find nine-tenths of the people they’d been paying off and whispering to because they were dead, like Muonze, or being held hostage or in hiding.’
The Colonel sat back again. ‘So our civil war wasn’t really one at all; it was all these do-gooders’ work. Frankly I don’t know that even this is the truth. How do we really know they’re as powerful and advanced as they claim? Maybe their science is little better than ours and they were getting frightened of us. Maybe they meant all this to happen.’
Quilan was still trying to take all this in. After a few moments, while the Colonel sat there, nodding, he said, ‘Well, if they had they wouldn’t suddenly admit it, would they?’
‘Ha! Maybe it was about to come out anyway, so they tried to look as good as they could by confessing.’
‘But if they told both us and the Invisibles in the first place, to stop the war-’
‘Same thing; maybe we were about to find out on our own. They were just making the best of a bad job. I mean,’ Dimirj said, tapping one claw on the side of Quilan’s bed, ‘can you believe they’ve actually had the gall to quote figures, statistics at us? Telling us that this hardly ever happens, that ninety-nine per cent or whatever of these “interferences” go according to plan, that we’ve just been really unlucky and they’re really sorry and they’ll help us rebuild?’ The Colonel shook his head. ‘The nerve of them! If we hadn’t lost most of our best in that insane fucking war that they caused I’d be tempted to go to war with them!’
Quilan stared at the other male. The Colonel’s eyes were wide, his head fur was standing straight as he shook his head. He found that his own head was shaking too, in disbelief. ‘Is all this true?’ he asked. ‘Really?’
The Colonel stood up, as though impelled by his anger. ‘You should watch the news, Quil.’ He looked around, as though for something to take his rage out on, then took a deep breath. ‘Won’t be the end of this, I tell you, Major. Not the end, not by a long, long way.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll see you later, Quil. Goodbye for now.’ He slammed the door on his way out.
And so Quilan did switch on a screen, for the first time in months, and discovered that it was indeed all very much as the Colonel had said, and that the pace of change in his own society had truly been forced by the Culture, and it by its own confession had offered what they called help and others might have called bribes to get elected the people it thought ought to be elected, and advised and cajoled and wheedled and arguably threatened its way to what it thought was best for the Chelgrians.
It had started to slacken off its involvement, and stand down the forces it had secretly brought up to near the Chelgrian sphere of influence and colonisation in case things went wrong, when, without any warning, it had all gone quite spectacularly wrong.
Their excuses were as the Colonel had laid out, though there was also, Quilan thought, a hint that they weren’t as used to predator-evolved species as they were to others, and that had been a factor in their failure to anticipate either the catastrophic behaviour change which started with Muonze and cascaded down through the restructured society, or the suddenness and ferocity with which it occurred once it had begun.
He could hardly believe it, but he had to. He watched a lot of screen, he talked to the Colonel and to some other patients who’d started to come to visit him. It was all true. All of it.
One day, the day before he was to be allowed out of his bed for the first time, he heard a bird singing in the grounds outside his window. He clicked at the buttons on the bed’s control panel, and made it turn and raise him up so that he could look out of the window. The bird must have flown off, but he saw the cloud-scattered sky, the trees on the far side of the glittering lake, the breaking waves on the rocky shore, and the wind-stroked grasses of the hospital grounds.
(Once, in a market in Robunde, he had bought her a caged bird because it sang so beautifully. He took it to the room they were hiring while she completed her thesis paper on temple acoustics.
She thanked him graciously, walked to the window, opened the cage’s door and shooed the little bird out; it flew away over the square, singing. She watched the bird for a moment until it disappeared, then looked round to him with an expression that was at once apologetic, defiant and concerned. He was leaning against the door frame, smiling at her.) His tears dissolved the view. 7
Peer Group
Important visitors to Masaq were usually trans-shipped by a giant ceremonial barge of gilded wood, glorious flags and generally fabulous aspect encased within an ellipsoid envelope of perfumed air sewn with half a million perfumed candle balloons For the Chelgrian emissary Quilan, Hub thought that such flagrant ostentation might strike a discordant, overly celebratory note, and so instead a plain but stylish personnel module was sent to rendezvous with the ex-warship Resistance Is Character-Forming. The welcoming party consisted of one of the Hub’s thin, silver-skinned avatars, the drone E. H. Tersono, the Homomdan Kabe Ischloear and a human female representative from the Orbital’s General Board called Estray Lassils who both looked and was old. She had long white hair, currently gathered into a bun, and a very tanned, deeply lined face, and for all her age she was tall and slim and carried herself very upright. She wore a formal-looking plain black dress with a single brooch. Her eyes were bright and Kabe formed the impression that a lot of the grooves on her face were smile and laughter lines. He immediately liked her, and – given that the General Board had been elected by the human and drone population of the Orbital, and itself had duly chosen her to represent it – decided that so must everybody else.
‘Hub,’ Estray Lassils said in an amused-sounding voice. ‘Your skin looks more matte than usual.’
The Orbital’s avatar wore white trousers and a tight jacket over its silvery skin, which did indeed, Kabe thought, seem less reflective than it usually appeared.
The creature nodded. ‘There are Chelgrian source tribes which once had superstitious beliefs concerning mirrors,’ it said in its incongruously deep voice. Its wide black eyes blinked. Estray Lassils found herself looking at a pair of tiny images of herself depicted in the avatar’s eyelids, which it had briefly turned fully reflective. ‘I thought, just to be on the safe side .
‘I see.’
‘And how is everybody on the Board, Ms Lassils?’ the drone Tersono asked. It appeared, if anything, more reflective than usual, its rosy porcelain skin and lacy lumenstone frame looking highly polished.
The woman shrugged. ‘As ever. I haven’t seen them for a couple of months. The next meeting’s …‘ She looked thoughtful.
‘In ten days’ time,’ supplied her brooch.
‘Thank you, house,’ she said. She nodded at the drone. ‘There you are.
The General Board was supposed to represent the inhabitants of the Orbital to Hub at the highest level; it was pretty much an honorary office given that each individual could talk directly to Hub whenever they wanted, but as that carried even the most thinly theoretical possibility that a mischievous or deranged Hub could play every single person on an Orbital off against each to further some unspecified nefarious scheme, it was usually thought sensible to have a conventionally elected and delegated set-up as well. It also meant that visitors from more autocratic or layered societies were provided with somebody they could identify as an official representative of the whole population.
The main reason that Kabe decided he liked Estray Lassils was that despite being there in this arguably quite consequential ceremonial role – she did represent nearly fifty billion people, after all – she had, apparently on a whim, brought along one of her nieces, a six-year-old child called Chomba.