Look to Windward (15 page)

“I understand it was a very attractive system otherwise. And besides, I believe that over time they've added extra protection under-Plate which could stand up to anything short of a supernova, though of course any technology can go wrong and, sensibly, the culture of backing-up as a matter of course is still common.”

Ziller was shaking his head. “They could have mentioned this to me.”

“Perhaps the risk is deemed so tiny they have given up bothering.”

Ziller smoothed his scalp fur. He'd let his pipe go out. “I don't believe these people.”

“The chances of disaster are very remote indeed, especially for any given year, or even sentient lifetime.” Kabe rose and lumbered over to a sideboard. He picked up a bowl of fruit. “Fruit?”.

“No, thank you.”

Kabe selected a ripe sunbread. He had had his intestinal flora altered to enable him to eat common Culture foods. More unusually, he had had his oral and nasal senses modified so that he could taste food as a standard Culture human would. He turned away from Ziller as he popped the sunbread into his mouth, chewed the fruit a couple of times and swallowed. The action of averting his face from others when eating had become habitual; members of Kabe's species had very big mouths and some humans found the sight of him eating alarming.

“But to return to my point,” he said, dabbing at his mouth with a napkin. “Let's not use the word ‘nature' then; let us say they feel they have gained something from having pitted themselves against forces much greater than themselves.”

“And this is somehow not a sign of madness.” Ziller shook his head. “Kabe, you may have been here too long.”

The Homomdan crossed to the balcony, gazing out at the view. “I would say that these people are demonstrably not mad. They live lives that seem quite sane otherwise.”

“What? Glacier-caving?”.

“That is not all they do.”

“Indeed. They do lots of other insane things; naked blade-fencing, mountain free-climbing, wing-flying—”

“Very few do nothing but take part in these extreme pastimes. Most have otherwise fairly normal lives.”

Ziller relit his pipe. “By Culture standards.”

“Well, yes, and why not? They socialize, they have work-hobbies, they play in more gentle forms, they read or watch screen, they go to entertainments. They sit around grinning in one of their glanded drug states, they study, they spend time traveling—”.

“Ah-hah!”.

“—apparently just for the sake of it or they simply … potter. And of course many of them indulge in arts and crafts.” Kabe made a smile and spread his three hands. “A few even compose music.”

“They spend time. That's just it. They spend time traveling. The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives. They persist in hoping that something they think they'll find in the place they're heading for will somehow provide them with a fulfilment they feel certain they deserve and yet have never come close to experiencing.”

Ziller frowned and tapped at his pipe bowl. “Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of traveling itself offers, if not fulfilment, then relief from the feeling that they should be feeling fulfilled”.

Kabe watched a springleg bounce from branch to branch through the trees outside, its ruddy fur and long tail dappled with leaf shadows. He could hear the shrill voices of human children, playing and splashing
in the pool at the side of the house. “Oh, come, Ziller. Arguably any intelligent species feels that to some extent.”

“Really? Does yours?”.

Kabe fingered the soft folds of the drapes at the side of the balcony window. “We are much older than the humans, but I think we probably did, once.” He looked back at the Chelgrian, crouched on the wide seat as though ready to pounce. “All naturally evolved sentient life is restless. At some scale or stage.”

Ziller appeared to consider this, then shook his head. Kabe was not yet sure if this gesture meant that he had said something too preposterous to be worth dignifying with an answer, perpetrated an appalling cliché, or made a point that the Chelgrian could not find an adequate reply to.

“The point is,” Ziller said, “that having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats—” He paused and glanced sourly at the sunlight flaring off the gilt border of his seat. “—Well, almost all natural threats, these people then find their lives are so hollow they have to recreate false versions of just the sort of terrors untold generations of their ancestors spent their existences attempting to conquer.”

“I think that is a little like criticizing somebody for owning both an umbrella and a shower,” Kabe said. “It is the choice that is important.” He rearranged the curtains more symmetrically. “These people control their terrors. They can choose to sample them, repeat them or avoid them. That is not the same as living
beneath the volcano when you've just invented the wheel, or wondering whether your levee will break and drown your entire village. Again, this applies to all societies which have matured beyond the age of barbarism. There is no great mystery here.”

“But the Culture is so insistent in its utopianism,” Ziller said, sounding, Kabe thought, almost bitter. “They are like an infant with a toy, demanding it only to throw it away.”

Kabe watched Ziller puff at his pipe for a while, then walked through the cloud of smoke and sat trefoil on the finger-deep carpet near the other male's couch.

“I think it is only natural, and a sign that one has succeeded as a species, that what used to have to be suffered as a necessity becomes enjoyed as sport. Even fear can be recreational.”

Ziller looked into the Homomdan's eyes. “And despair?”.

Kabe shrugged. “Despair? Well, only in the short term, as when one despairs of completing a task, or winning at some game or sport, and yet later does. The earlier despair makes the victory all the sweeter.”

“That is not despair,” Ziller said quietly. “That is temporary annoyance, the passing irritation of foreseen disappointment. I meant nothing so trivial. I meant the sort of despair that eats your soul, that contaminates your senses so that every experience, however pleasant, becomes saturated with bile. The sort of despair that drives you to thoughts of suicide.”

Kabe rocked back. “No,” he said. “No. They might hope to have put that behind them.”

“Yes. They leave it in their wake for others.”

“Ah.” Kabe nodded. “I think we touch upon what happened to your own people. Well, some of them feel remorse close to despair about that.”

“It was mostly our own doing.” Ziller crumbled some smoke block into his pipe, tamping it down with a small silver instrument and producing further clouds of smoke. “We would doubtless have contrived a war without the Culture's help.”

“Not necessarily.”

“I disagree. Regardless; at least after a war we might have been forced to confront our own stupidities. The Culture's involvement meant that we suffered the war's depredations while failing to benefit from its lessons. We just blamed the Culture instead. Short of our utter destruction the outcome could hardly have been worse, and sometimes I feel that even that is an unjustified exception.”

Kabe sat still for a while. Blue smoke rose from Ziller's pipe.

Ziller had once been Gifted-from-Tacted Mahrai Ziller VIII of Wescrip. Born into a family of administrators and diplomats, he had been a musical prodigy almost from infancy, composing his first orchestral work at an age when most Chelgrian children were still learning not to eat their shoes.

He had taken the designation Gifted—two caste levels below that he had been born into—when he dropped out of college, scandalizing his parents.

Despite garnering outrageous fame and fortune in his career he scandalized them still further, to the point of illness and breakdown, when he became a
radical Caste Denier, entered politics as an Equalitarian and used his prestige to argue for the end of the caste system. Gradually public and political opinion began to shift; it started to look as though the long talked-about Great Change might finally happen. After an unsuccessful attempt on his life Ziller renounced his caste altogether, and so was deemed the lowest of the non-criminal low; an Invisible.

A second assassination attempt very nearly succeeded; it left him near death and in hospital for quarter of a year. It was moot whether his months out of the political scrum had made any crucial difference, but unarguably by the time he was recovered the tide had turned again, the backlash had begun and any hope of significant change appeared to have vanished for at least a generation.

Ziller's musical output had suffered during the years of his political involvement, in quantity at least. He announced that he was quitting public life to concentrate on composition, so alienating his former liberal allies and delighting the conservatives who had been his enemies. Even so, despite great pressure he did not renounce his Invisible status—though increasingly he was treated as an honorary Given—and he never gave any sign of support for the status quo, save for that studied silence on all matters political.

His prestige and popularity increased still further; cascades of prizes, awards and honors were lavished upon him; polls proclaimed him the greatest living Chelgrian; there was talk of him becoming Ceremonial President one day.

With his celebrity and prominence at this unprecedented
crescendo of acclaim, he used what was supposed to be his acceptance speech for the greatest civilian honor the Chelgrian State could bestow—at a grand and glittering ceremony in Chelise, the Chelgrian State's capital, which would be broadcast over the whole sphere of Chelgrian space—to announce that he had never changed his views, he was and always would be a liberal and an Equalitarian, he was more proud to have worked with the people who still espoused such views than he was of his music, he had grown to loathe the forces of conservatism even more than he had in his youth, he still despised the state, the society and the people that tolerated the caste system, he was not accepting this honor, he would be returning all the others he had acquired, and he had already booked passage to leave the Chelgrian State immediately and forever, because unlike the liberal comrades he loved, respected and admired so much, he just did not have the moral strength to continue living in this vicious, hateful, intolerable regime any longer.

His speech was greeted with stunned silence. He left the stage to hisses and boos and spent the night in a Culture embassy compound with a crowd at the gates baying for his blood.

A Culture ship lifted him away the following day; he traveled extensively within the Culture over the next few years and finally made his home on Masaq' Orbital.

Ziller had remained on Masaq' even after the election of an Equalitarian President on Chel, seven years after he'd left. Reforms were put in place and the Invisibles and the other castes were fully enfranchised
at last, but still, despite numerous requests and invitations, Ziller had not returned to his home, and had offered little in the way of explanation.

People assumed it was because the caste system would still exist. Part of the compromise which had sold the reforms to the higher castes was that titles and caste names would be retained as part of one's legal nomenclature and a new property law would give ownership of clan lands to the immediate family of the house chief.

In return, people of all levels of society were now free to marry and procreate with whoever would have them, partnered couples would each take the caste of the highest-designated of the two, their young would inherit that caste, elected caste courts would oversee the redesignation of applying individuals, there would no longer be a law to punish people who claimed to be of a higher caste, and so, in theory, anybody could claim to be whatever they wanted to be, though a court of law would still insist on calling them as they had been born or redesignated.

It was an enormous legal and behavioral change from the old system, but it still included caste, and it did not seem to be enough for Ziller.

Then the ruling coalition on Chel had elected a Spayed as President as an effective but surprising symbol of how much had changed. The regime survived a coup attempt by some Guards officers and appeared strengthened by the experience, with power and authority seemingly being distributed even more fully and irrevocably down the ladder of original castes, yet still Ziller, arguably more popular than ever, had not
returned. He claimed to be waiting to see what would happen.

Then something terrible happened, and he saw, and still did not go home, even after the Caste War, which broke out nine years after he left and was, by its own admission, largely the Culture's fault.

Eventually Kabe said, “My own people fought the Culture once.”

“Unlike us. We fought ourselves.” Ziller looked at the Homomdan. “Did you profit from the experience?”. he asked tartly

“Yes. We lost much; many brave people and many noble ships, and we did not succeed in our initial war aims, directly, but we maintained our civilizational course, and gained in as much that we discovered that the Culture could be lived with honorably, and that it was what we had been worried it was not: another temperate dweller in the galactic house. Our two societies have since become companionable and we are occasionally allies.”

“They didn't crush you utterly, then?”.

“They didn't try to. Nor we them. It was never that sort of war, and besides, that is neither their way nor ours. It is not really anybody's way, these days. In any event, our dispute with the Culture was always a sideshow to the principal action, which was the conflict between our hosts and the Idirans.”

“Ah yes, the famous Twin Novae Battle,” Ziller said, sounding disparaging.