People shifted, went away, relationships ended. She asked one of her female mentors about how one changed from female to male. Another treatment. Over most of a year she grew slightly, bulked out further, grew hair in strange places, and watched, fascinated, as her genitals went from fissure to spire. She did wake up a couple of nights covered in sweat, appalled at what was happening to her, feeling herself, wondering if this was all some enormously laboured joke and she was being made a freak of deliberately, for sport, but there were always people to talk to who had been through the same experience — both in person and via screens and sims — and no shortage of archived material to explain and reassure.
She kept a couple of intermittent, unbothered lovers even as she changed, then, as a man, took many more, mostly female. It was true: one made a better, more considerate lover when one had once been as one’s partner. He woke up one morning after a strenuous night with a small group of old friends and just-mets, blinking in the sunshine of a brilliant new day, looking out over a broad balcony and a sparkling sea to a great columnar mountain that reminded him of a Tower back home, and woke everybody else up with his laughter.
He was never sure why he decided to change back. For a long time he thought to return to Sursamen as a man, see what they made of him then. Apart from anything else, there had been a couple of ladies at the court he had always been fond of, and now felt something more for. By that point he knew his brother Elime had been killed and he was the eldest child of the King; the next king, indeed, if you looked at it in a certain way. He might return, claim the throne, in time. By then, with further treatments, he might have martial skills and attributes beyond those of any warrior who had ever lived on the Eighth. He’d be unstoppable; he could take the throne if he wanted. That would be hilarious. Oh, the looks on certain faces!
But that would be cruel at best, he thought. At worst, the results might be something between melodrama and the bloodiest of tragedies. Anyway, to be king of the Sarl no longer seemed like the greatest thing a soul might aspire to, not by some long measure.
He changed, became a she again. The lesson regarding being a considerate lover did not change.
She took her Full Name. In her father’s kingdom, she had been called Djan Seriy Hausk’a yun Pourl, yun Dich — this translated as Djan, Prince-Consort Hausk’s daughter of Pourl, of the Eighth.
Here, now that she thought of herself as a Culture citizen — albeit still one that had been born and brought up elsewhere — she took the name Meseriphine-Sursamen/VIIIsa Djan Seriy Anaplian dam Pourl.
Marain, the Culture’s exquisitely formed meta-language, used its Secondary Numbering Series to denote Shellworld levels. The Anaplian part came from her mother’s name: Anaplia. The word Seriy — indicating she had been raised to be fit to be married to a prince — she kept for a laugh. She expressed disappointment that there was no ceremony to mark the taking of one’s Full Name. Her friends and colleagues invented one for her.
She had further treatments, to give her control of many more aspects of her body and mind. Now she would age very slowly, and did not really need to age at all. Now she was proof against any natural disease under this or any other sun, and even losing something as major as a limb would prove only a temporary inconvenience, as a new one would simply grow back. Now she had the full panoply of drug glands, with all the benefits and responsibilities that entailed. Now she gained fully augmented senses — so that, for example, her vision became sharper and brought her information about the infrared and the ultraviolet — now she could sense radio waves, now she was able to interface directly with machines via a thing called a neural lace that had grown about and through her brain like a flimsy, three-dimensional net, now she could switch off pain and fatigue (though her body seemed to scorn them anyway), now her nerves changed to become more like wires, shifting impulses far faster than before, while her bones accreted strands of carbon to make them stronger and her muscles went through chemical and microscopically scaled mechanical changes that made them more effective and more powerful. Every major internal organ grew more efficient, more tolerant, more capable, resilient and adaptable, even as many of them grew smaller.
She became part of Contact and joined the crew of the General Contact Unit Transient Atmospheric Phenomenon. She’d had the luxury of a choice in the matter and had turned down the Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall and the Pure Big Mad Boat Man just because of their ridiculous names. She served with distinction for only five years aboard the GCU before the invitation to join Special Circumstances arrived. A surprisingly short period of additional training ensued; almost all the new skills she would now need were already there, pre-implanted. She was reunited with the drone Turminder Xuss, who had always been intended as her companion. She discovered the old machine came complete with a small squadron of knife, attack and scout missiles and was effectively a little arsenal of wide-spectrum destruction all on its own.
SC added its own final, finessed layers of additional characteristics to her already heady mix of bodily enhancements, empowering her still further: here were fingernails that could lase, to signal, blind or kill, here was a tiny reactor within her skull that, amongst other things, could provide the power to keep her alive and conscious for years without oxygen, here was a whole-body fibre structure welded to her very bones that could sense distortions in the skein of space itself; here was a level of conscious control over her own body and, almost incidentally, over any merely electronic machine within fifty metres which exceeded that of any rider over their mount or any champion swordsman over his blade…
She felt, she realised one day, like a god.
She thought then of Sursamen, and her old self, and knew there was no going back.
She was going back. And she was losing some of those skills and attributes, some of those martial enhancements.
“You’re gelding me,” she said to Jerle Batra.
“I’m sorry. The Morthanveld are very wary of Special Circumstances agents.”
“Oh, really.” She shook her head. “We’re no threat to them.” She looked at the man who looked like a small bush. “Well, we’re not, are we?”
“Of course not. On the contrary.” Batra made a shrugging motion. “It’s a courtesy.”
“It feels like a discourtesy to me.”
“That is unfortunate.”
“We may be overdoing the coddling thing here, you know,” she said.
“All the same.”
They were on the platform Quonber, riding frigid waves of air above a high mountain range; kilometres beneath, a grey-white glacier streaked with lines of shattered rock curved and corrugated its way towards the limits of a tungsten sky.
The coddling Djan Seriy was referring to involved the almost exaggerated respect the Culture as a whole had recently been showing the Morthanveld. The Morthanveld were technologically on a par with the Culture and the two civilisations had co-existed on good terms since they had encountered each other thousands of years earlier, sharing extensive cultural links and co-operating on a variety of projects. They were not exactly allies — the waterworlders had kept scrupulously neutral during the Idiran war, for example — but they were of a mind on most matters.
Djan Seriy’s discomfiture was being caused by the fact that some of the Culture’s more self-congratulatingly clever Minds (not in itself an underpopulated category), patently with far too much time on their platters, had come up with the shiny new theory that the Culture was not just in itself completely spiffing and marvellous and a credit to all concerned, it somehow represented a sort of climactic stage for all civilisations, or at least for all those which chose to avoid heading straight for Sublimation as soon as technologically possible (Sublimation meant your whole civilisation waved farewell to the matter-based universe pretty much altogether, opting for a sort of honorary godhood).