Then she saw a couple of dots on the eastern horizon, and turned to them, her eyes adjusting. Inside her, something exactly like a heart thumped hard and fast for a single beat before she could control it again. Some of the earth fell from the handful she held.
The dots were birds, a few hundred metres away. She relaxed.
The birds rose into the air, facing each other and flapping wildly. They were half displaying, half fighting. There would
be a femak sitting crouched in the grass nearby watching the two males. The scientific and common names of the species,
their range, feeding and mating habits and a variety of other information about the creatures seemed to hover at the back of her mind. The two birds fell back into the grass again. Their calls came thinly through the air. She had never heard their voices before, but knew that they sounded as they ought to.
Of course, it was still possible that the birds were not as innocent and unthreatening as they appeared. They might be real but altered animals, or not biological at all; in either case they might be part of a surveillance system. Well, there was nothing to be done. She would go on waiting a little longer.
She returned her attention to the clump of turf she held, bringing it up to her eyes, soaking up the sight. There were many different types of grasses and tiny plants in the handful, most of them a pale yellow-green colour. She saw seeds, roots, tendrils, petals, husks, blades and stems. The relevant infor- mation describing each different species duly made its existence known at the back of her mind.
She was, by now, also aware that the data presenting itself had already been evaluated by some other part of her mind. If anything had looked wrong or seemed out of place – if, for example, those birds had moved in a manner so as to imply that they were heavier than they were supposed to be – then her attention would have been drawn to the anomaly. So far, everything seemed to be reassuringly normal. The data was a distant, comforting awareness, patiently lingering on the outskirts of her perception.
A few tiny animals moved within the mass of soil and on the surfaces of the vegetation. She knew their names and details, too. She watched a pale, thread-thin worm waving about blindly in the humus.
She put the divot back, pressing the clump of soil into the hole it had left and patting it down. She dusted off her hands while she looked around once more. Still no sign of anything amiss. The birds in the distance rose into the air again, then descended. A warm wave of air unfolded itself across the surface of the and flowed around her, stroking her fur where it was not covered by her plain hide waistcoat and pants. She picked up her cloak and fastened it round her shoulders. It became part of her, just like the waistcoat and pants.
The wind came from the west. It was freshening, taking the cries of the displaying birds away, so that when they rose in the distance for a third time, they seemed to do so quite silently.
There was just a hint, a faint tang of salt in the wind. It was sufficient to decide her. Enough of waiting.
She looped the cloak’s tail-loop over her long tawny tail, then turned her face to the wind.
She wished that she had chosen a name. If she had she would have spoken it now; voiced it to the clear air like some declaration of intent. But she did not have a name, because she was not what she appeared to be; not a Chelgrian female; not a Chelgrian, not even a biological creature at all. I am a Culture terror weapon, she thought; designed to horrify, warn and instruct at the highest level. A name would have been a lie.
She checked her orders, just to be sure. It was true. She had complete discretion in the manner. A lack of instruction could be interpreted as a quite specific instruction. She could do anything; she was off the leash.
Very well.
She leant back on her rear legs and brought her arms up to slip them into the glove pouches at the top of her waistcoat, then – with an initial bound very like a pounce – she set off, settling quickly into an easy-looking lope that carried her away across the grass in a series of long, smoothly sinuous bounds that stretched and compressed her powerful back and brought her heavily muscled rear legs and broad midlimb almost together then pushed them flying apart with every surging leap.
She felt the joy of the run and understood the ancient rightness of the wind in her face and fur. To run, to chase, to hunt, to bring down and kill.
The cloak rippled across her back in the slipstream. Her tail flicked from side to side.
9
Pylon Country
‘I’d almost forgotten this place existed myself.’ I Kabe looked at the silver-skinned avatar. ‘Really?’
‘Nothing much has happened here for two hundred years apart from gentle decay,’ the creature explained.
‘Couldn’t that be said of the whole Orbital?’ Ziller asked, in what was probably meant to be a falsely innocent tone. The avatar pretended to look hurt.
The antique cable car creaked around them as it swung round a tall pylon. It rumbled and squeaked through a system of overhead points hanging from a ring round the mast’s top and then tacked away on a new heading towards a distant pylon on a small hill across the fractured plain.
‘Do you ever forget anything, Hub?’ Kabe asked the avatar.
‘Only if I choose to,’ it said in its hollow voice. It was half sitting, half lying on one of the plump red polished hide couches, its booted feet up on the brass rail which separated the rear passenger compartment from the pilot’s control deck, where Ziller was standing, watching the various instruments, adjusting levers and fiddling with a variety of ropes that emerged from a slot in the car’s floor and were tied off on cleats mounted on the forward bulkhead.
‘And do you ever choose to?’ Kabe asked. He was squatting trefoil on the floor; there was just enough headroom for him in the ornate cabin like that. The car was designed to carry about a dozen passengers and two crew.
The avatar frowned. ‘Not that I can recall.’
Kabe laughed. ‘So you might choose to forget something then choose to forget forgetting it?’
‘Ah, but then I’d have to forget forgetting the original for- getting.’
‘I suppose you would.’
‘Is this conversation going anywhere?’ Ziller shouted over his shoulder.
‘No,’ said the avatar. ‘It’s like this journey; drifting.’
‘We are not drifting,’ Ziller said. ‘We are exploring.’
‘You might be,’ the avatar said. ‘I’m not. I can see exactly where we are from Hub central. What do you want to see? I can provide detailed maps if you’d like.’
‘The spirit of adventure and exploration is obviously alien to your computer soul,’ Ziller told it.
The avatar reached out and flicked a speck of dust from the top of one boot. ‘Do I have a soul? Is that meant to be a compliment?’
‘Of course you don’t have a soul,’ Ziller said, pulling hard on one rope and tying it off. The cable car picked up speed, swaying gently as it crossed the scrub-strewn plain. Kabe watched the car’s shadow as it undulated over the dustily fawn and red ground below. The dark outline slid away and lengthened as they crossed a dry, gravel-braided river bed. A gust of wind raised eddies of dust on the ground below, then hit the car and tipped it fractionally, making the glass windows rattle in their wooden frames.
‘That’s good,’ the avatar said. ‘Because I didn’t think I had one and if I did I must have forgotten.’
‘Ah ha,’ said Kabe.
Ziller made an exasperated sound.
They were in a wind-powered cable car crossing the Epsizyr Breaks, a huge area of semi-wilderness on Canthropa Plate, nearly a quarter-way spinwards round the Orbital from Ziller and Kabe’s homes on Xaravve and Osinorsi. The Breaks were a vast dried-up river system a thousand kilometres broad and three times that in length. From space they looked thrown across the dun plains of Canthropa like a million twisted lengths of grey and ochre string.
The Breaks rarely carried much water. There was the occasional rain shower over the plains, but the region remained semi-arid. Every hundred or so years a really big storm managed to cross the Canthrops, the mountain range between the plains and Sard Ocean which occupied the whole of the Plate to spinward, and only then did the river system live up to its name, transporting the fallen rain from the mountains to the Epsizyr Pans, which filled and shimmered for a few days and supported a brief riot of plant and animal life before drying to salty mud flats again.