Look to Windward (16 page)

Kabe was surprised at the tone. “Is your symphony past the tinkering stage yet?”.

“Pretty much.”

“You're still pleased with it?”.

“Yes. Very. There is nothing wrong with the music. However I do begin to wonder whether my enthusiasm got the better of me. Perhaps I was wrong to become so involved with our Hub Mind's memento mori.” Ziller fidgeted with his waistcoat, then waved one hand dismissively. “Oh, take no notice. I always become a little disheartened when I've just finished something this size, and I will confess to a degree of nervousness at the prospect of standing up and conducting in front of the sort of numbers Hub is talking about. Plus I'm still not sure about all the extraneous stuff Hub wants to add around the music.” Ziller snorted. “I may be more of a purist than I thought.”

“I am sure it will go wonderfully well. When does Hub intend to announce the concert?”.

“Very soon now,” Ziller said, sounding defensive. “It was one of the reasons I came over here. I thought I might be besieged if I stayed home.”

Kabe nodded slowly. “I am glad to be of service. And I cannot wait to hear the piece.”

“Thank you. I'm pleased with it, but I can't help feeling complicit with Hub's ghoulishness.”

“I wouldn't call it ghoulish. Old soldiers are rarely so. Depressed, disturbed and morbid sometimes, but not ghoulish. That is a civilian preoccupation.”

“Hub isn't a civilian?” Ziller asked. “Hub might be depressed and
disturbed?
Is this something else they didn't tell me about?”.

“Masaq' Hub has never been either depressed or disturbed to my knowledge,” Kabe said. “However, it was once the Mind of a war-adapted General Systems
Vehicle and it was there at the Twin Novae Battle at the end of the war and suffered near total destruction at the hands of an Idiran battle fleet.”

“Not quite total.”

“Not quite.”

“They don't believe in the captain going down with the ship, then.”

“I understand that being last to abandon it is considered sufficient. But do you see? Masaq' mourns and honors those it lost, those who died, and seeks to atone for whatever part it played in the war.”

Ziller shook his head. “The scummer might have told me some of this,” he muttered. Kabe pondered the wisdom of remarking that Ziller might have discovered all of this easily enough himself had he been so inclined, but decided against it. Ziller tapped his pipe out. “Well, let us hope it does not suffer from despair.”

“Drone E. H. Tersono is here,” the house announced.

“Oh, good.”

“About time.”

“Invite it in.”

The drone floated in through the balcony window, sunlight dappling its rosy porcelain skin and blue lumenstone frame. “I noticed the window was open; hope you don't mind.”

“Not at all.”

“Eavesdropping outside, were we?” Ziller asked.

The drone settled delicately on a chair. “My dear Ziller, certainly not. Why? Were you talking about me?”.

“No.”

“So, Tersono,” Kabe said. “It is very kind of you to
visit. I understand we owe the honor to further news of our envoy.”

“Yes. I have learned the identity of the emissary being sent to us by Chel,” the drone said. “His full name is, and I quote, Called-to-Arms-from-Given Major Tibilo Quilan IV Autumn 47th of Itirewein, griefling, Sheracht Order.”

“Good heavens,” Kabe said, looking at Ziller. “Your full names are even longer than the Culture's.”

“Yes. An endearing trait, isn't it?” Ziller said. He looked into his pipe, brows puckered. “So, our emissary's a warlord-priest. A rich broker boy from one of the sovereign families who's found a taste for soldiering, or been shunted into it to keep him out of the way, and then found Faith, or found it politic to find it. Parents traditionalists. And he's a widower, probably.”

“You know him?” Kabe asked.

“Actually, I do, from a long time ago. We were at infant school together. We were friends, I suppose, though not particularly close. We lost touch after that. Haven't heard of him since.” Ziller inspected his pipe and seemed to be contemplating lighting it again. Instead he replaced it in his waistcoat pocket. “Even if we weren't once acquainted though, the rest of the name rigmarole tells you most of what you need to know.” He snorted. “Culture full names act as addresses; ours act as potted histories. And, of course, they tell you whether you should bow, or be bowed to. Our Major Quilan will certainly expect to be bowed to.”

“You may be doing him a disservice,” Tersono said.
“I have a full biography you might be interested in—”.

“Well, I'm not,” Ziller said emphatically, turning away to look at a painting hanging on one wall. It showed long-ago Homomdans riding enormous tusked creatures, waving flags and spears and looking heroic in a hectic sort of way.

“I'd like to look at it later,” Kabe said.

“Certainly.”

“So that's, what, twenty-three, twenty-four days till he gets here?”.

“About that.”

“Oh, I do so hope he's having a pleasant journey,” Ziller said in a strange, almost childish voice. He spat into his hands and smoothed the tawny pelt over each forearm in turn, stretching each hand as he did so, so that the claws emerged; gleaming black curves the size of a human's small finger, glinting in the soft sunlight like polished obsidian blades.

The Culture drone and the Homomdan male exchanged looks. Kabe lowered his head.

6
Resistance Is Character-Forming

Q
uilan wondered about their ship names. Perhaps was some elaborate joke to send him on the final leg of his journey aboard a one-time warship—a Gangster class Rapid Offensive Unit which had been demilitarized to become a Very Fast Picket—called
Resistance Is Character-Forming
. It was a jokey name, yet pointed. So many of their ship names were like that, even if more were just jokey.

Chelgrian craft had romantic, purposeful or poetic names, but the Culture—while it had a sprinkling of ships with names of similar natures—usually went for ironic, meticulously obscure, supposedly humorous or frankly absurd names. Perhaps this was partly because they had so many craft. Perhaps it reflected the fact that their ships were their own masters and chose their own names.

The first thing he did when he stepped aboard the
ship, into a small foyer floored with gleaming wood and edged with blue-green foliage, was to take a deep breath. “It smells like—” he began.

~
Home,
said the voice in his head.

“Yes,” Quilan breathed, and experienced a strange, weakening, pleasantly sad sensation, and suddenly thought of childhood.

~ Careful, son.

“Major Quilan, welcome aboard,” the ship said from nowhere in particular. “I have introduced a fragrance into the air which should be reminiscent of the atmosphere around Lake Itir, Chel, during springtime. Do you find this agreeable?”.

Quilan nodded. “Yes. Yes, I do”.

“Good. Your quarters are directly ahead. Please make yourself at home.”

He'd been expecting a cabin as cramped as the one he'd been given on the
Nuisance Value,
but was pleasantly surprised; the
Resistance Is Character-Forming
's interior had been refitted to provide comfortable accommodation for about half a dozen people rather than cramped quarters for four times that number.

The ship was uncrewed and chose not to use an avatar or drone to communicate. It just spoke to Quilan out of thin air, and carried out mundane house-keeping duties by creating internal maniple fields, so that clothes, for example, just floated around, seeming to clean and fold and sort and store themselves.

~
It's like living in a fucking haunted house,
Huyler said.

~ Good job neither of us is superstitious.

~ And it means it's listening to you all the time, spying.

~ That could be interpreted as a form of honesty.

~ Or arrogance. These things don't choose their names out of a hat.

Resistance is character-forming. If nothing else, as a motto it was a little insensitive, given the circumstances of the war. Were they trying to tell him, and through him Chel itself, that they didn't really care about what had happened, despite all their protestations? Or even that they did care, and were sorry, yet it had all been for their own good?

More likely the ship's name was coincidence. There was a sort of carelessness about the Culture sometimes, a reverse side to the coin of the society's fabled thoroughness and tenacity of purpose, as though every now and again they caught themselves being overly obsessive and precise, and tried to compensate by suddenly doing something frivolous or irresponsible.

Or might they not get bored being good?

Supposedly they were infinitely patient, boundlessly resourceful, unceasingly understanding, but would not any rational mind, with or without the capital letter, grow tired of such unleavened niceness eventually? Wouldn't they want to cause just a little havoc, just once in a while, just to show what they could do?

Or did such thoughts merely betray his own inheritance of animal ferocity? Chelgrians were proud of having evolved from predators. It was a kind of double pride, too, even if a few people regarded it as contradictory in nature; they were proud that their distant ancestors had been predators, but they were also proud that their species had evolved and matured away from
the kind of behavior that inheritance might imply.

Maybe only a creature with that ancient inheritance of savagery would think the way he, in his mind, had accused the Minds of thinking. Maybe the humans—who could not claim quite such a purity of predatoriness in their past as Chelgrians, but who had certainly behaved savagely enough toward those of their own species and others since they began to become civilized—would also think that way, but their machines didn't. Perhaps that was even why they had handed over so much of the running of their civilization to the machines in the first place; they didn't trust themselves with the colossal powers and energies their science and technology had provided them with.

Which might be comforting, but for one fact that many people found worrying and—he suspected—the Culture found embarrassing.

Most civilizations that had acquired the means to build genuine Artificial Intelligences duly built them, and most of those designed or shaped the consciousness of the AIs to a greater or lesser extent; obviously if you were constructing a sentience that was or could easily become much greater than your own, it would not be in your interest to create a being which loathed you and might be likely to set about dreaming up ways to exterminate you.

So AIs, especially at first, tended to reflect the civilizational demeanor of their source species. Even when they underwent their own form of evolution and began to design their successors—with or without the help, and sometimes the knowledge, of their creators—there was usually still a detectable flavor of the
intellectual character and the basic morality of that precursor species present in the resulting consciousness. That flavor might gradually disappear over subsequent generations of AIs, but it would usually be replaced by another, adopted and adapted from elsewhere, or just mutate beyond recognition rather than disappear altogether.

What various Involveds including the Culture had also tried to do, often out of sheer curiosity once AI had become a settled and even routine technology, was to devise a consciousness with no flavor; one with no metalogical baggage whatsoever; what had become known as a perfect AI.

It turned out that creating such intelligences was not particularly challenging once you could build AIs in the first place. The difficulties only arose when such machines became sufficiently empowered to do whatever they wanted to do. They didn't go berserk and try to kill all about them, and they didn't relapse into some blissed-out state of machine solipsism.

What they did do at the first available opportunity was Sublime, leaving the material universe altogether and joining the many beings, communities and entire civilizations which had gone that way before. It was certainly a rule and appeared to be a law that
perfect AIs always Sublime
.

Most other civilizations thought this perplexing, or claimed to find it only natural, or dismissed it as mildly interesting and sufficient to prove that there was little point in wasting time and resources creating such flawless but useless sentience. The Culture, more or less alone, seemed to find the phenomenon almost a personal
insult, if you could designate an entire civilization as a person.

So a trace of some sort of bias, some element of moral or other partiality must be present in the Culture's Minds. Why should that trace not be what would, in a human or a Chelgrian, be a perfectly natural predisposition toward boredom caused by the sheer grinding relentlessness of their celebrated altruism and a weakness for the occasional misdemeanor; a dark, wild weed of spite in the endless soughing golden fields of their charity?

The thought did not disturb him, which itself seemed odd. Some part of him, some part that was hidden, dormant, even found the idea, if not pleasant, at least satisfactory, even useful.

He increasingly had the feeling that there was more to discover about the mission he had undertaken, and that it was important, and that he would be all the more determined to do whatever it was that had to be done.

He knew that he would know more about it, later; remember more, later, because he was remembering more now, all the time.

•   •   •   

“And how are we today, Quil?”.

Colonel Jarra Dimirj lowered himself into the seat by Quilan's bed. The Colonel had lost his midlimb and one arm in a flyer crash on the very last day of the war; these were regrowing. Some of the casualties in the hospital seemed unconcerned about wandering around with developing limbs exposed, and some, often the more grizzled and proudly scarred ones,
even made a joke of the fact that they had what looked exactly like a child's arm or midlimb or leg attached to themselves.