“No; your younger brother is deemed too young to inherit all your father’s power immediately. A man called Mertis tyl Loesp is regent until your brother’s next birthday.”
“Tyl Loesp,” Anaplian said thoughtfully. She nodded. “At least he’s still around. He should be all right.”
“Your younger brother won’t be in any danger, will he?”
“Danger?”
Batra’s impersonated face configured a weak smile. “It has been my understanding that, like wicked stepmothers, ambitious regents do not usually come out well from such contexts. Perhaps that is only in tales.”
“No,” Anaplian said with what sounded like relief. She wiped her eyes. “Tyl Loesp’s been my father’s best friend since they were children. He’s always been loyal, fastened his ambitions to my father’s. God knows, they were grand enough for two. Grand enough for a host.” Anaplian looked away to one side, where the bright, tropic air of this place that she had almost come to think of as home over the last two years now seemed as far away as it had when she’d first arrived. “Though what do I know? It’s been fifteen years.”
She wondered how much Ferbin had changed in that time, and Oramen. Her father, she strongly suspected, would hardly have changed at all — he had been the same forbidding, occasionally sentimental, rarely tender, utterly focused individual for as long as she’d known him. Utterly focused, yet with one eye always on history, on his legacy.
Had she ever known him? Most of the time he wasn’t there to be known in the first place, always away fighting his distant wars. But even when he had returned to Pourl, his palace, concubines and children, he had been more interested in the three boys, especially Elime, the eldest and by far the most like him in character. Second in age, her gender and the circumstances of her birth had fixed the King’s only daughter firmly last in his affections.
“Should I leave you, Djan Seriy?” Batra asked.
“Hmm?” She looked back at him.
“I thought you may need time alone. Or do you need to talk? Either is—”
“I need you to talk to me,” she told him. “What is the situation now?”
“On what is called the Eighth? Stable. The King is mourned with all due—”
“Has he been buried?”
“He was due to be, seven days ago. My information is eight or nine days old.”
“I see. Sorry. Go on.”
“The great victory is celebrated. Preparations for the invasion of the Deldeyn continue apace. The invasion is widely expected to take place between ten and twenty days from now. The Oct have been censured by their Nariscene mentors, though they have blamed everybody else for what has happened, including elements within their own people. The Aultridia have, as I have said, threatened retaliation. The Nariscene are trying to keep the peace. The Morthanveld are so far not involved, though they have been kept informed.”
She pinched her lower lip with her fingers. She took a breath and said, “How long would it take for me to get back to Sursamen?”
“A moment, please,” Batra said, falling silent for a moment while, she imagined, he consulted the course schedules of whole networks of distant ships. She had time to wonder why he hadn’t already memorised or at least accessed this information, and whether this possibly deliberate hesitation implied a criticism of her for even thinking of abandoning her post here.
“Between one hundred and thirty and one hundred and sixty days,” Batra told her. “The uncertainty comes from the changeover to Morthanveld space.”
Morthanveld space. The Morthanveld were the highest-level Involved species around Sursamen. As part of her training Anaplian had studied, and been suitably stunned by, the full three-dimensional map of all the various species that inhabited the galaxy and had spread sufficiently far from their homes to discover that they were profoundly Not Alone.
The standard star chart detailing the influence of the better-travelled players was fabulously complex and even it only showed major civilisations; those with just a few solar systems to their name didn’t really show up, even with the holo-map filling one’s entire field of vision. Generally overlapping, often deeply interconnected, slowly shifting, subject to continual gradual and very occasionally quite sudden change, the result looked like something committed by a madman let loose in a paint factory.
The Morthanveld held sway over vast regions of space, one tiny pocket of which happened to include the star around which her home planet orbited. They had been there, or spreading slowly out in that direction, for longer than the Culture had existed, and the two civilisations had long since settled into a comfortable and peaceful co-existence, though the Morthanveld did expect all but the most pressing business crossing their sphere of influence to be conducted using their own spacecraft.
Having immersed herself in the politics, geography, technology and mythology of Prasadal for over two intense, demanding years, and having almost ignored outside events for the same amount of time, Anaplian realised she had half forgotten that the Culture was not somehow the totality of the galactic community — that it was, indeed, a relatively small part, even if it was a powerful and almost defiantly widespread one.
“Would I be excused here?” she asked Batra.
“Djan Seriy,” the metallic bush said, and for the first time something other than its pretended face moved, its sides expanding in a gesture that looked a lot like a human spreading their arms, “you are a free agent. Nothing keeps you here but you. You may go at any time.”
“But would I be welcome back? Would I still have a place in SC if I did return home? Could I come back here, to Prasadal?”
“None of that is for me finally to decide.”
The creature was being evasive. It would have a say, even if the final decision might be made by some tiny clique of ship Minds spread throughout the Culture and across the galaxy.
Anaplian arched one eyebrow. “Take a guess.”
“SC, I’d imagine, yes. Here? I can only imagine. How long would you be going for, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” Anaplian admitted.
“And neither would we. It is unlikely you would start any return journey within a few days of arriving. You might be gone a standard year, all told. Perhaps longer; who can say? We would have to replace you here.”
There was a degree of margin in the system here, of course. Her colleagues could fill in for her, for a while at least. Leeb Scoperin especially knew what Anaplian had been doing in her part of the planet and seemed to have the sort of natural understanding of her aims and techniques that would let him take over her role with as little turbulence as possible, plus he was one of those training an assistant, so the overall burden wouldn’t be too great. But that sort of arrangement would not do for ever. A little slack was one thing, but leaving people feeling useless for extended amounts of time was pointless and wasteful, so the platform was not overstaffed for the task in hand. Batra was right; they’d have to replace her.
“You could give me a ship,” Anaplian said. That would get her there and back quicker.
“Ah,” Batra said. “That is problematical.” This was one of his several ways of saying no.
The Culture was being especially careful not to offend the Morthanveld at the moment. The reason was officially moot, though there had been some interesting suggestions and one in particular that had become the default explanation.
Anaplian sighed. “I see.”
Or she could just stay here, she supposed. What good, after all, could she do back home? Avenge her father? That was not a daughter’s duty, the way the Sarl saw things, and anyway it sounded like the Deldeyn were about to have more than sufficient vengeance visited upon them long before she would be able to get there. Her father would have been the aggressor in all this, anyway; she had no doubt that the pre-emptive attack the Deldeyn had launched was anything other than just that — an attempt to stop the Sarl under King Hausk invading them.