‘I think one of your standard pen terminals would suffice.’
‘Major, I strongly suspect by the time you get to your house there’ll be one there waiting for you. Ah ha.’ They were approaching a broad upper deck scattered with wooden furniture, partially covered by awnings and dotted with people. ‘And it may well be a more welcome sight than this: a bunch of people all desperate to talk your ears off. Remember; bail out any time.’ -~ Amen.
Everybody turned to face him.
We must join the fray. Major.
There were indeed about seventy people there to meet him. They included three from the General Board – whom Estray Lassils recognised, hailed and went into a huddle with as soon as was decent – various scholars of matters Chelgrian or whose special- ity description included the word xeno – mostly professors – and a handful of other non-humans, none of whose species Quilan had even heard of, who coiled, floated, balanced or splayed about the deck, tables and couches.
The situation was complicated by various other non-human creatures which, but for the avatar, Quilan might easily have mistaken for other sentient aliens but that turned out to be no more than animal pets. All this was in addition to a bewildering variety of other humans who had titles that were not titles and job descriptions that had nothing to do with jobs.
Intra-cultural mimetic transcrzptioneer? What the hell does that mean? No idea. Assume the worst. File under Reporter.
The Hub’s avatar had introduced all of them; aliens, humans and drones, which really did seem to be treated as full citizens and people in their own right. Quilan nodded and smiled and nodded or shook hands and made whatever other gesture appeared appropriate.
I supposed this silver-skinned freak is just about the perfect host for these people. It knows all of them. And knows all of them intimately, too; foibles, likes, dislikes, everything.
-~ Not what we were told.
Oh, yes; all it knows is your name andthat you’re somewhere here within its jurisdiction. That’s the tale. It only knows what you want it to know. Ha! Don’t you find that just a little hard to believe?
Quilan didn’t know how close a watch on all its citizens a Culture Orbital Hub kept. It didn’t really matter. He did know a lot about such avatars, though, he realised, when he thought about it, and what Huyler had said about their social skills was perfectly true. Tireless, endlessly sympathetic, with a flawless memory and with what must seem like a telepathic ability to tell exactly who would get on with who, the presence of an avatar was understandably judged indispensable at every social occasion above a certain size.
With one of these silvery things and an implant people here – j probably never have to actually remember the name of a single other person.
-~ I wonder if they ever forget their own.
Quilan talked, guardedly, to a lot of people, and nibbled from the tables loaded with food, all of it served on plates and trays which were image-coded to indicate what was suitable for which species.
He looked up at one point and realised that they had left the K colossal aqueduct and were travelling across a great grassy plain punctuated by what looked like the frameworks of gigantically tall tents.
Dome tree stands. Ah ha.
The river had slowed here and broadened to over a kilometre from bank to bank. Ahead, just starting to show above and through the haze, another sort of massif was beginning to make itself visible.
What he had earlier assumed were clouds in the far dis- tance turned out to be the peaks of snow-covered mountains strung around the massif’s top. Deeply corrugated cliffs rose almost straight up, bannered with thin white veils that might be waterfalls. Some of these slender columns stretched all the way down to the base of the cliffs, while other, still thinner white threads faded and disappeared part-way down or vanished into and merged with layered clouds drifting slowly across the great serrated wall of rock.
-~ Aquime Massif. Apparently this little creek of theirs goes round both sides and straight through. Aquime City, in the middle, on the shores of the High Salt Sea, is where our friend Ziller lives.
He stared at the great folded sweep of snow-settled cliff and mountain as it materialised out of the haze, becoming more real with each beat of his heart.
In the Grey Mountains was the monastery of Cadracet, which belonged to the Sheracht Order. He went there on a retreat once he was released from the hospital, becoming a griefling. He was taking extended furlough from the Army, which allowed such compassionate leave at his rank. The offer of de-enlistment and an honourable discharge, plus a modest pension, had been left open for him.
He already had a batch of medals. He was given one for being in the Army at all, one for being a combatant who’d held a gun, another for being a Given who could easily have avoided fighting in the first place, another for being wounded (with a bar because he had been seriously wounded), yet another for having been on a special mission and a last medal which had been decreed when it had been realised that the war had been the Culture’s responsibility, not that of the Chelgrian species. The sol- diers were calling it the Not-Our-Fault prize. He kept the medals in a small box within the trunk in his cell, along with the post- humous ones awarded to Worosei.
The monastery sat on a rocky outcrop on the shoulder of a modest peak, within a small stand of sigh trees by a tumbling mountain stream. It looked across the forested gorge beneath to the crags, cliffs, snow and ice of the tallest peaks in the range. Behind it, crossing the stream by a modest but ancient stone bridge celebrated in songs and tales three thousand years old, passed the road from Oquoon to the central plateau, momen- tarily straightening from its series of precipitous hairpins.
During the war, a troupe of Invisible servants who had already put to death all their own masters at another monastery further up the road had taken over Cadracet and captured the half of the monks who had not fled – mostly the older ones. They had thrown them over the parapet of the bridge into the rock-strewn stream below. The fall was not quite sufficient to kill all the old males, and some suffered, moaning, throughout that day and into the night, only dying in the cold before dawn the following morning. Two days later, a unit of Loyalist troops had retaken the complex and tortured the Invisibles before burning their leaders alive.
It had been the same story of horror, malevolence and escalatory retribution everywhere. The war had lasted less than fifty days; many wars – most wars, even those restricted to one planet – barely properly began in that time because mobilisations had to be carried out, forces had to be put in place, a war footing had to be established within society and territory had to be attacked, captured and consolidated before further attacks could be prepared and the enemy could be closed with. Wars in space and between planets and habitats of any number could in theory effectively be over in a few minutes or even seconds but commonly took years and sometimes centuries or generations to come to a conclusion, depending almost entirely on the level of technology the civilisations involved possessed.
The Caste War had been different. It had been a civil war; a species and society at war with itself. These were notoriously amongst the most terrible conflicts, and the initial proximity of the combatants, distributed throughout the civilian and military population at virtually every level of institution and facility, meant that there was a kind of explosive savagery about the conflict almost the instant that it commenced, taking many of the first wave of victims utterly by surprise: noble fami- lies were knifed in their beds, unaware that any real problem existed, whole dormitories of servants were gassed behind locked doors, unable to believe those they’d devoted their lives to were murdering them, passengers or drivers in cars, captains of ships, pilots of aircraft or space vessels were suddenly assaulted by the person sitting next to them, or were themselves the ones who did the attacking.
Cadracet monastery itself had escaped relatively unscarred from the war, despite its brief occupation; some rooms had been ransacked, a few icons and holy books had been burned or desecrated, but there had been little structural damage.
Quilan’s cell was at the back of the building’s third courtyard, looking out onto the grooved cobbled roadway to the dank green mountainside and the sudden yellow of the gaunt sigh trees. His cell contained a curl-pad on the stone floor, a small trunk for his personal possessions, a stool, a plain wooden desk and a wash-stand.