“Well,” tyl Loesp told the knights, “there is one tongue I’d have stilled as you propose, though it must look as though the gentleman has been careless with his own life, rather than had it surgeried from him. However, the scholars will be left alone. The family of the spy who alerted us will be rewarded. The family, though, not the boy. He will already be jealoused and despised quite sufficiently already, if the others truly suspect who was there.”
“If it was who we think it might have been. We still cannot be sure,” Vollird said.
“I have not the luxury of thinking otherwise,” tyl Loesp told him.
“And the fugitive himself?” Baerth asked.
“Lost, for the moment.” Tyl Loesp glanced at the telegraphed report he’d received that morning from the captain of the lyge squadron who had come so close to capturing or killing Ferbin and his servant — assuming it was them — at the D’neng-oal Tower just the night before. One of their quarry wounded, possibly, the report said. Too many possibles and probables for his liking. “However,” he said, smiling broadly at the two knights, “I too now have the documents to get people to the Surface. The fugitive and his helper are running away; that is the second best thing they can do, after dying.” He smiled. “Vollird, I imagine you and Baerth would like to see the Surface and the eternal stars again, would you not?”
The two knights exchanged looks.
“I think we’d rather ride with the army against the Deldeyn,” Vollird said. The main part of the army had already left the day before to form up before the Tower through which they would attack the Ninth. Tyl Loesp would leave to join them tomorrow for the descent.
Baerth nodded. “Aye, there’s honour in that.”
“Perhaps we’ve killed enough just for you, tyl Loesp,” Vollird suggested. “We grow tired of murdering with every second glance directed over our backs. Might it not be time for us to serve Sarl less obliquely, on the battlefield, against an enemy all recognise?”
To serve me is to serve the Sarl; I am the state, tyl Loesp wanted to say, but did not, not even to these two. Instead he frowned and pursed his lips momentarily. “Let us three agree a compact, shall we? I shall forgive you for being obtuse, disloyal and selfish if you two forgive me for seeming to have expressed my orders by way of a question, with the implication that there is any choice whatsoever on your part. What d’you say?”
Depth of Field
10. A Certain Lack
She had been a man for a year.
That had been different. Everything had been different. She had learned so much: about herself, about people, about civilisations.
Time: she came to think in Standard years, eventually. To her, at first, they were about one and a half short-years or very roughly half a long-year.
Gravity: she felt intolerably heavy and worryingly fragile at once. A treatment she had already agreed to started to thicken her bones and reduce her height before she left the Eighth, but even so, for the time she was on the ship that took her from the Surface and during the first fifty days or so after her arrival, she towered over most people and felt oddly delicate. Allegedly, the new clothes she had chosen had been reinforced to save her from breaking any bones if she fell badly in the stronger gravity. She had assumed this was a lie to make her feel less frightened, and just took care instead.
Only the measures of human-scale length were roughly as she knew them; strides were near enough metres, and she already thought in kilometres, even if she’d grown up with ten raised to the power of three rather than two to the power of ten.
But that was just the start of it.
For the first couple of years after arriving in the Culture she had been simply as she was, save for that amendment of thickening and shortening. Meanwhile she got to know the Culture and it got to know her. She learned a lot, about everything. The drone Turminder Xuss had accompanied her from the day she’d stepped from the ship she’d arrived on, the space vessel called Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill (she found their ships’ names absurd, childish and ridiculous at first, then got used to them, then thought she kind of understood them, then realised there was no understanding the Mind of a ship, and went back to finding them annoying). The drone answered any questions she had and sometimes talked on her behalf.
Those first three years had been spent on the Orbital Gadampth, mostly on the part called Lesuus, in a sort of extended, teased-out city built on a group of islands scattered across a wide bay on the edge of a small inland sea. The city was named Klusse, and it had some similarities to an ordinary city, despite being much cleaner and lacking any curtain walls or other defensive components that she could discern. Mostly, though, it seemed to be a sort of vast Scholastery.
It took her some time to work out why, as she went walking about the boulevards, terraces, promenades and piazzas of the place, she had felt — not initially, but gradually, just when she ought to have felt herself getting used to the place — an odd mixture of comfort and disturbance at the same time. Eventually she realised it was because in all the faces that she saw there, not one held a disfiguring tumour or had been eaten half away by disease. She had yet to see even a mildly disfiguring skin condition or a lazy eye. Similarly, in all the bodies she moved among, not one was limping or supporting itself on a crutch or trolley, or went hobbling past on a club foot. And not a single madman, not one poor defective standing flecked screaming on a street corner howling at the stars.
She hadn’t appreciated this at first because at the time she was still being amazed at the sheer bewildering physical variation of the people around her, but once she had become used to that, she started to notice that although there was near infinite physical variety here, there was no deformity, and while there was prodigious eccentricity, no dementia. There were more facial, bodily and personality types than she could have imagined, but they were all the product of health and choice, not disease and fate. Everyone was, or could be if they so desired, beautiful in both form and character.
Later she would find that, as this was the Culture after all, of course there were people who embraced ugliness and even the appearance of deformity or mutilation just to be different or to express something inside that they felt ought to be broadcast to their peers; however — once she had passed over her initial sense of irritation and exasperation at such people (did they not, even if unknowingly, mock those truly afflicted, those with no choice in how hideous they looked?) — she realised that even that deliberate adoption of unsightliness displayed a kind of societal confidence, a thumbing of the collective nose at the workings of crude providence and the ancient tyranny, now itself long overthrown, of genetic aberration, gross injury and transmissible pestilence.
A star named Aoud shone down upon the ten-million-kilometre bracelet of the Orbital. This sun was what everybody else seemed to regard as a real star; one which had been naturally formed. To her it sounded incredibly old and absurdly, almost wastefully enormous.
There, in Klusse, she learned about the history of the Culture and the story of the galaxy itself. She learned about the other civilisations that she had been taught as a child were called the Optimae. They generally referred to themselves as the Involveds or the In-Play, though the terms were loose and there was no exact equivalent of the Sarl word Optimae, with its implication of supremacy. “High-level Involved” was probably as close as you could get.