‘None that I either can’t guess the answer to or imagine you’d answer truthfully,’ the avatar said. ‘Your jurisdiction is accepted under force of arms alone. Your actions while this situation persists will be recorded. Nothing less than the total destruction of this vessel atom by atom will wipe out that record, and when in due course-‘
‘Yes, yes. I’ll contact my lawyers now. Now take me to your best suite fitted out for Affront physiology.’
The girl was indignant with a kind of ferocity probably only somebody from the Peace faction could muster in such a situation. ‘But we’re the Peace faction,’ she protested for the fifth or sixth time. ‘We’re… we’re like the true Culture, the way it used to be…’
‘Ah,’ Leffid said, grimacing as somebody pushed behind him and forced his chest into the front of the bar. He glanced round, scowling, and ruffled his wings back into shape. The Starboard lounge of the Xoanon was crowded – the ship was crowded – and he could see his wings were going to end up in a terrible shape by the time this was over. Mind you, there were compensations; somebody pushed into the bar and squeezed the Peace faction girl closer to him, so that her bare arm touched him and he could feel the warmth of her hip against his. She smelled wonderful. ‘Now that could be your problem,’ he said, trying to sound sympathetic. ‘Calling yourselves the true Culture, you see? To the Tier Sintricates, and even to the Affront, that could sound, well confusing.’
‘But everybody knows we won’t have anything to do with war. It’s just so unfair? She flicked her short black hair and stared into the drug bowl she held. It was fuming too. ‘Fucking war!’ She sounded close to tears.
Leffid judged the time right to put his arm round her. She didn’t seem to mind. He thought the better of hinting that in his own small way he might have helped start the war. Sort of thing some people might be impressed with, but not all.
Besides, he’d given his word, and the Tendency had been rewarded for its tip-off to the Mainland with this very ship, currently engaged in the highly humanitarian task of helping to evacuate Tier habitat of all Temporarily Undesirable Aliens, not to mention earning the Tendency some much-needed cordiality credit with a whole raft of other Involveds and strands of the Culture. The girl sighed deeply and held the drug bowl to her face, letting some of the heavy grey smoke tip towards her exceedingly pretty little nose. She glanced round at him with a small brave smile, her gaze rising over his shoulder.
‘Like your wings,’ she said.
He smiled. ‘Why, thank you…’ (Damn!) ‘… ah, my dear.’
The professor blinked. Yes, it really was an Affronter floating at the far end of the room, near the windows. Suit like a small, tubby spacecraft, all gleaming knobbly bits, articulated limbs and glistening prisms. The gauzy white curtains blew in around it, letting bright, high-angled sunlight flow in waves across the carpet. Oh dear, was that her underwear draped over a hassock in the Affronter’s shadow?
‘I beg your pardon?’ she said. She wasn’t sure she’d heard right.
‘Phoese Cloathel-Beldrunsa Khoriem lei Poere da’Merire, you have been deemed the senior human representative on the Orbital named Cloathel. You are hereby informed that this Orbital is claimed in the name of the Affront Republic. All Culture personnel are now Affront citizens (third class). All orders from superiors will be obeyed. Any resistance will be treated as treason.’
The professor rubbed her eyes.
‘Cloudsheen, is that you?’ she asked the Affronter. The destroyer Wingclipper had arrived the day before with a cultural exchange group the university had been expecting for some weeks. Cloudsheen was the ship’s captain; they’d had a good talk about pan-species semantics at the party just the night before. Intelligent, surprisingly sensitive creature; not remotely as aggressive as she’d expected. This looked like him, but different. She had a disquieting feeling the extra bits on his suit were weapons.
‘Captain Cloudsheen, if you please, professor,’ the Affronter said, floating closer. It was directly above her skirt, lying crumpled on the floor. Heavens, she had been messy last night.
‘Are you serious?’ she asked. She had a strong urge to fart but she held it in; she was oddly concerned that the Affronter would think she was being insulting.
‘I am perfectly serious, professor. The Affront and the Culture are now at war.’
‘Oh,’ she said. She glanced over at her terminal brooch, lying on an extension of the bed’s headboard. Well, the Newsflash light was winking, right enough; practically strobing in fact; must be urgent indeed. She thought. ‘Shouldn’t you be addressing this to the Hub?’
‘It refuses to communicate,’ the Affronter officer said. ‘We have surrounded it. You have been deemed most senior Culture – ex-Culture, I should say – representative in its place. This is not a joke, professor, I’m sorry to say. The Orbital has been mined with AM warheads. If it proves necessary, your world will be destroyed. The full cooperation of yourself and everybody else on the Orbital will help ensure this does not happen.’
‘Well, I don’t accept this honour, Cloudsheen. I-‘
The Affronter had turned and was floating back towards the windows again. It swivelled in the air as it retreated. ‘You don’t have to,’ it said. ‘As I said, you have been deemed.’
‘Well then,’ she said, ‘I deem you to be acting without any authority I care to recognise and-‘
The Affronter darted through the air towards her and stopped directly above the bed, making her flinch despite herself. She smelled… something cold and toxic. ‘Professor,’ Cloudsheen said. ‘This is not an academic debate or some common room word-game. You are prisoners and hostages and all your lives are forfeit. The sooner you understand the realities of the situation, the better. I know as well as you that you are in no way in charge of the Orbital, but certain formalities have to be observed, regardless of their practical irrelevance. I consider that duty has now been discharged and frankly that’s all that matters, because I have the AM warheads; and you don’t.’ It drew quickly away, sucking a cool breeze behind it. It stopped just before the windows again. ‘Lastly,’ it said, ‘I am sorry to have disturbed you. I thank you personally and on behalf of my crew for the reception party. It was most enjoyable.’
He left. The curtains soughed in and out, slowly golden.
Her heart, she was surprised to discover, was pounding.
The Attitude Adjuster woke them one by one, telling each the same story; Excessionary threat near Esperi, Deluger craft mimicking Culture ship configurations, cooperation of Affront, extreme urgency; obey me, or our Affront allies if I should be lost. Some of the vessels were immediately suspicious, or at least puzzled. The confirmatory messages from other craft – the No Fixed Abode, the Different Tan and the Not Invented Here – convinced them in every case.
Part of the Attitude Adjuster felt sick. It knew it was doing the right thing, in the end, but at a simple, surface level it felt disgust at the deception it was having to foist upon its fellow ships. It tried to tell itself that it would all end with little or no blood spilled and few or no Mind-deaths, but it knew that there was no guarantee. It had spent years thinking all this through, shortly after the proposition had been put to it seventy years earlier, and had known then, accepted then that it might come to this, but it had always hoped it would not. Now the moment was at hand it was starting to wonder if it had made a mistake, but knew it was too late to turn back now. Better to believe that it had been right then and now it was merely being short-sighted and squeamish.
It could not be wrong. It was not wrong. It had had an open mind and it had become convinced of the rightness of the course which was being suggested and in which it would play such an important part. It had done as it had been asked to do; it had watched the Affront, studied them, immersed itself in their history, culture and beliefs. And in all that time it had achieved a kind of sympathy for them, an empathy, even, and at the start perhaps a degree of admiration for them, but it had also built up a cold and terrible hatred of their ways.
In the end, it thought it understood them because it was just a little like them.
It was a warship, after all. It was built, designed to glory in destruction, when it was considered appropriate. It found, as it was rightly and properly supposed to, an awful beauty in both the weaponry of war and the violence and devastation which that weaponry was capable of inflicting, and yet it knew that attractiveness stemmed from a kind of insecurity, a sort of childishness. It could see that – by some criteria – a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation, of weapons was a kind of tragedy.