The alien was called Chori, he found out later. It was only due to a chance remark that he discovered Chori was a female, which at the time seemed hilariously funny.
He woke up the next morning lying soaked as well as soused half underneath a small waterfall in one of the ace section valleys; Chori was suspended from a nearby railing by all eight leg-hooks, making a sporadic clattering noise that he decided was snoring.
The first night he spent with a woman, he thought she was dying; he thought he’d killed her. She seemed to climax at almost the same time as he did, but then – apparently – had a seizure; screaming, clutching at him. He had an awful, sickening idea that despite the seeming similarity of their physiology, his race and the mongrel-species that was the Culture were somehow quite different, and for a few ghastly moments entertained the idea that his seed was like acid inside her. It felt like she was trying to break his back with her arms and legs. He tried to pull himself away from her, calling her name, trying to see what was wrong, what he had done, what he could do.
‘What’s wrong?’ she gasped.
‘What? With me; nothing! What’s wrong with you?’
She made a sort of shrugging motion, looked puzzled. ‘I came; that’s all; what’s the… Oh.’ She put one hand to her mouth, eyes wide. ‘I forgot. I’m sorry. You’re not… Oh dear.’ She giggled. ‘How embarrassing.’
‘What?’
‘Well, we just… you know; it takes… it goes on… longer, you know?’
He didn’t think he had quite believed what he had heard about the Culture’s altered physiology until then. He hadn’t accepted that they had changed themselves so. He had not believed that they really had chosen to extend such moments of pleasure, let alone breed into themselves all the multifarious drug glands that could enhance almost any experience (not least sex).
Yet – in a way – it made sense, he told himself. Their machines could do everything else much better than they could; no sense in breeding super-humans for strength or intelligence, when their drones and Minds were so much more matter- and energy-efficient at both. But pleasure… well, that was a different matter.
What else was the human form good for?
He supposed such single-mindedness was admirable, in a way.
He took the woman in his arms again. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Quality not quantity. Let’s try that again, shall we?’
She laughed and took his face in her hands. ‘Dedication; that’s a good quality in a man.’
(The cry in the summerhouse that had attracted; ‘Hello, old chap.’ Tanned hands on the pale hips…)
He was away five nights, just wandering. As far as he could tell, he never crossed his own trail, and never visited the same section twice. He ended up with different women on three of those nights, and politely turned down one young man.
‘Any more at your ease, Cheradenine?’ Sma asked him, stroking up the pool ahead of him. She turned on her back to look at him. He swam after her.
‘Well, I have stopped offering to pay for things in bars.’
‘That’s a start.’
‘It was a very easy habit to break.’
‘Par for the course. That all?’
‘Well… also, your women are very friendly.’
‘So are the men,’ Sma arched one eyebrow.
‘The life here seems… idyllic.’
‘Well, you have to like crowds, perhaps.’
He looked round the almost deserted pool complex. ‘That’s relative, I suspect.’
(And thought: the garden; the garden. They have made their life in its image!)
‘Why,’ Sma smiled. ‘Are you tempted to stay?’
‘Not even slightly.’ He laughed. ‘I’d go crazy here, or slip forever into one of your shared dream-games. I need… more.’
‘But will you take it from us?’ Sma said, stopping, treading water. ‘Do you want to work with us?’
‘Everybody seems to think I should; they believe you’re fighting the good fight. It’s just that… I get suspicious when everybody agrees about something.’
Sma laughed. ‘How much would it matter if we weren’t fighting the good fight, Cheradenine? If all we were offering was pay and excitement?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘It would make it even harder. I’d just like… I’d like to believe, to finally know, to finally be able to prove that I was…’ He shrugged, grinned. ‘… doing good.’
Sma sighed. In the water, this meant that she bobbed up then sank down a little. ‘Who knows, Zakalwe? We don’t know that; we think we’re right; we even think we can prove it, but we can never be sure; there are always arguments against us. There is no certainty; least of all in Special Circumstances, where the rules are different.’
‘I thought the rules were meant to be the same for everybody.’
‘They are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws – the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe – break down; beyond those metaphysical event-horizons, there exist… special circumstances.’ She smiled. ‘That’s us. That’s our territory; our domain.’
‘To some people,’ he said, ‘that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behaviour.’
Sma shrugged. ‘And perhaps they would be right. Maybe that is all it is.’ She shook her head, pulled one hand through her long wet hair. ‘But if nothing else, at least we need an excuse; think how many people need none at all.’
She swam off.
He watched her stroke powerfully away through the water for a moment. One of his hands went, without him really realising it, to a small puckered scar on his chest, just over where his heart was, and rubbed it, while he frowned, staring at the glittering, unsteady surface of the water.
Then he swam after the woman.
He spent a couple of years on the Size Isn’t Everything, and on a few of the planets, rocks, habitats and orbitals it stopped at. He was being trained, and learning to use some of the new abilities he had let them give him. When he eventually left the craft, to go on his first tour of duty for the Culture – a series of missions which culminated in him taking the Chosen to the Perfumed Palace on the cliff – it was on a ship just starting its second tour of duty; the General Contact Unit Sweet and Full of Grace.
He never saw Chori again, and heard that she’d been killed on active service some fifteen years later. He was told this news while they were regrowing his body on the GSV Congenital Optimist after he’d been beheaded on – and then rescued from – a planet called Fohls.
* * *
Eleven
He crouched behind the parapet, at the far edge of the old observatory from the single approaching plane. Behind him, down a steep slope, were bushes and trees and a collection of roofless, overgrown buildings. He watched the aircraft come closer, checked for more coming from other directions, but couldn’t find any. Inside the suit, watching the transmitted view, he frowned as the aircraft came closer, slowing all the time, its obese arrowhead shape silhouetted against the sunset as it approached.
He watched it drop slowly towards the observatory platform; a ramp hinged from the craft’s belly; three legs flexed out. He took some effector readings from the machine, then shook his head, ducked and ran back down the slope.
Tsoldrin was sitting in one of the ruined buildings. He looked surprised when the suited figure entered through the creeper-choked doorway.
‘Yes, Cheradenine?’
‘It’s a civilian craft,’ he said, pushing the face-plate up. He was grinning. ‘I don’t think it’s looking for us after all. Might still provide an escape route, though.’ He shrugged. ‘Worth a try.’ He gestured back up the slope. ‘You coming along?’
Tsoldrin Beychae looked through the dusk at the matt black figure in the doorway. He had been sitting here wondering what he ought to do, and had not yet come up with any answers. Part of him just wanted to get back to the peace and quiet and certainty of the university library, where he could live happily, without fuss, ignore the world, and immerse himself in the old books, trying to understand ancient ideas and histories, hoping to make sense of them, one day, and perhaps explain his own ideas, try to point out the lessons of these elder histories, perhaps make people think again about their own times and ideologies. For a time – for a long time, there – it had seemed entirely and definitely the most worthwhile and productive thing he could do… but he was not sure of that any longer.
Perhaps, he thought, there were more important things to be done which he could have a hand in. Perhaps he ought to go with Zakalwe, as the man – and the Culture – wanted.