Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks
The figure seemed to coalesce out of nothing, out of the air. Anyone or anything watching would have needed more than natural senses to have noticed the slow fall of dust spread out over an hour of time and a radial kilometer of the grasslands; that anything out of the ordinary was happening would only have become obvious a little later when an odd sort of wind seemed to stir itself out of the gentle breeze, disturbing the grass on the broad plain and producing what appeared to be a slowly revolving dust devil, whirling quietly in the air and gradually shrinking and tightening and darkening and speeding up until, suddenly, it disappeared, and where it had been there stood what looked like a tall and graceful Chelgrian female, dressed in the country day clothes of the Given caste.
The first thing she did when she felt she was complete was to crouch down and dig into the earth beneath the grass with her fingers. Her claws slid out, spearing the ground. She ripped out a handful of the soil and grass. She held the handful of earth and vegetation up to her broad, dark nose, and sniffed slowly.
She was waiting. She had nothing better to do for the moment, and so she thought that she would take a good hard look and a good long sniff at the ground she stood on.
There were so many different tones and flavors to the smell. The grass held a spectrum of odors of its own, all of them fresher and brighter than the heavy notes of the soil, giving it a scent of the air and the winds rather than the ground.
She raised her head, letting the breeze ruffle her head fur. She took in the view. It was almost perfectly simple; ankle-high grass stretching in every direction. There was a hint of cloud to the far northeast, where the Xhesseli Mountains were. She had seen them on the way down. Above, and everywhere else in the sky, just aquamarine clarity. No sign of contrails. That was good. The sun was halfway up the southern sky. To the north, both moons shone full face, and a single day star twinkled near the eastern horizon.
She was aware of some part of her mind using the information in the sky to calculate her position, the time and the precise compass direction she was facing in. The resulting knowledge made its existence felt, but did not force itself upon her; it was like the presence of somebody in an anteroom, signaled by a polite knock on the door. She called up another layer of data and was presented with an overlay across the sky; suddenly she could see a grid superimposed across the heavens, and drawn on it were the paths of numerous satellites and a few sub-orbital transport craft, with identities attached and a further stratum of more finely detailed information on each implied. The satellites whose images were slowly flashing were the ones which had been interfered with.
Then she saw a couple of dots on the eastern horizon, and turned to them, her eyes adjusting. Inside her, something exactly like a heart thumped hard and fast for a single beat before she could control it again. Some of the earth fell from the handful she held.
The dots were birds, a few hundred meters away.
She relaxed.
The birds rose into the air, facing each other and flapping wildly. They were half displaying, half fighting. There would be a female sitting crouched in the grass nearby watching the two males. The scientific and common names of the species, their range, feeding and mating habits and a variety of other information about the creatures seemed to hover at the back of her mind. The two birds fell back into the grass again. Their calls came thinly through the air. She had never heard their voices before, but knew that they sounded as they ought to.
Of course, it was still possible that the birds were not as innocent and unthreatening as they appeared. They might be real but altered animals, or not biological at all; in either case they might be part of a surveillance system. Well, there was nothing to be done. She would go on waiting a little longer.
She returned her attention to the clump of turf she held, bringing it up to her eyes, soaking up the sight. There were many different types of grasses and tiny plants in the handful, most of them a pale yellow-green color. She saw seeds, roots, tendrils, petals, husks, blades and stems. The relevant information describing each different species duly made its existence known at the back of her mind.
She was, by now, also aware that the data presenting itself had already been evaluated by some other part of her mind. If anything had looked wrong or seemed out of place—if, for example, those birds had moved in a manner so as to imply that they were heavier than they were supposed to be—then her attention would have been drawn to the anomaly. So far, everything seemed to be reassuringly normal. The data was a distant, comforting awareness, patiently lingering on the outskirts of her perception.
A few tiny animals moved within the mass of soil and on the surfaces of the vegetation. She knew their names and details, too. She watched a pale, thread-thin worm waving about blindly in the humus.
She put the divot back, pressing the clump of soil into the hole it had left and patting it down. She dusted off her hands while she looked around once more. Still no sign of anything amiss. The birds in the distance rose into the air again, then descended. A warm wave of air unfolded itself across the surface of the grass and flowed around her, stroking her fur where it was not covered by her plain hide waistcoat and pants. She picked up her cloak and fastened it around her shoulders. It became part of her, just like the waistcoat and pants.
The wind came from the west. It was freshening, taking the cries of the displaying birds away, so that when they rose in the distance for a third time, they seemed to do so quite silently.
There was just a hint, a faint tang of salt in the wind. It was sufficient to decide her. Enough of waiting.
She looped the cloak’s tail-loop over her long tawny tail, then turned her face to the wind.
She wished that she had chosen a name. If she had she would have spoken it now; voiced it to the clear air like some declaration of intent. But she did not have a name, because she was not what she appeared to be; not a Chelgrian female; not a Chelgrian, not even a biological creature at all. I am a Culture terror weapon, she thought; designed to horrify, warn and instruct at the highest level. A name would have been a lie.
She checked her orders, just to be sure. It was true. She had complete discretion in the manner. A lack of instruction could be interpreted as a quite specific instruction. She could do anything; she was off the leash.
Very well.
She leaned back on her rear legs and brought her arms up to slip them into the glove pouches at the top of her waistcoat, then—with an initial bound very like a pounce—she set off, settling quickly into an easy-looking lope that carried her away across the grass in a series of long, smoothly sinuous bounds that stretched and compressed her powerful back and brought her heavily muscled rear legs and broad midlimb almost together then pushed them flying apart with every surging leap.
She felt the joy of the run and understood the ancient rightness of the wind in her face and fur. To run, to chase, to hunt, to bring down and kill.
The cloak rippled across her back in the slipstream. Her tail flicked from side to side.
9
Pylon Country
I’d almost forgotten this place existed myself.”
Kabe looked at the silver-skinned avatar. “Really?”.
“Nothing much has happened here for two hundred years apart from gentle decay,” the creature explained.
“Couldn’t that be said of the whole Orbital?” Ziller asked, in what was probably meant to be a falsely innocent tone. The avatar pretended to look hurt.
The antique cable car creaked around them as it swung around a tall pylon. It rumbled and squeaked through a system of overhead points hanging from a ring around the mast’s top and then tacked away on a new heading toward a distant pylon on a small hill across the fractured plain.
“Do you ever forget anything, Hub?” Kabe asked the avatar.
“Only if I choose to,” it said in its hollow voice. It was half sitting, half lying on one of the plump red polished hide couches, its booted feet up on the brass rail which separated the rear pass
“And do you ever choose to?” Kabe asked. He was squatting trefoil on the floor; there was just enough headroom for him in the ornate cabin like that. The car was designed to carry about a dozen passengers and two crew.
The avatar frowned. “Not that I can recall.”
Kabe laughed. “So you might choose to forget something then choose to forget forgetting it?”.
“Ah, but then I’d have to forget forgetting the original forgetting.”
“I suppose you would.”
“Is this conversation going anywhere?” Ziller shouted over his shoulder.
“No,” said the avatar. “It’s like this journey; drifting.”
“We are not drifting,” Ziller said. “We are exploring.”
“You might be,” the avatar said. “I’m not. I can see exactly where we are from Hub central. What do you want to see? I can provide detailed maps if you’d like.”
“The spirit of adventure and exploration is obviously alien to your computer soul,” Ziller told it.
The avatar reached out and flicked a speck of dust from the top of one boot. “Do I have a soul? Is that meant to be a compliment?”.
“Of course you don’t have a soul,” Ziller said, pulling hard on one rope and tying it off. The cable car picked up speed, swaying gently as it crossed the scrub-strewn plain. Kabe watched the car’s shadow as it undulated over the dustily fawn and red ground below. The dark outline slid away and lengthened as they crossed a dry, gravel-braided river bed. A gust of wind raised eddies of dust on the ground below, then hit the car and tipped it fractionally, making the glass windows rattle in their wooden frames.
“That’s good,” the avatar said. “Because I didn’t think I had one and if I did I must have forgotten.”
“Ah ha,” said Kabe.
Ziller made an exasperated sound.
They were in a wind-powered cable car crossing the Epsizyr Breaks, a huge area of semi-wilderness on Canthropa Plate, nearly a quarter-way spinwards around the Orbital from Ziller and Kabe’s homes on Xaravve and Osinorsi. The Breaks were a vast dried-up river system a thousand kilometers broad and three times that in length. From space they looked thrown across the dun plains of Canthropa like a million twisted lengths of gray and ocher string.
The Breaks rarely carried much water. There was the occasional rain shower over the plains, but the region remained semi-arid. Every hundred or so years a really big storm managed to cross the Canthrops, the mountain range between the plains and Sard Ocean which occupied the whole of the Plate to spinward, and only then did the river system live up to its name, transporting the fallen rain from the mountains to the Epsizyr Pans, which filled and shimmered for a few days and supported a brief riot of plant and animal life before drying to salty mud flats again.
The Breaks had been designed to be that way. Masaq’ had been modeled and planned as carefully as any other Orbital, but it had always been envisaged as a big world, and a varied one. It contained just about every form of geography possible, given its apparent gravity and human-friendly atmosphere, and most of that geography was human-friendly too, but it was rare for any self-respecting Orbital Hub to be happy without at least some wilderness around. Humans tended to complain after a while, too.
Filling every available bit of each and every Plate with gently rolling hills and babbling brooks, or even spectacular mountains and broad oceans, was not seen as producing a properly balanced Orbital environment; there ought to be wastes, there should be badlands.
The Epsizyr Breaks were just one of hundreds of different types of wasteland scattered about Masaq’. They were dry and windy and barren but otherwise one of the more hospitable badlands. People had always come to the Breaks; they came to walk, to camp out under the stars and the far-side light and feel themselves apart from things for a while, and though a few people had tried living there, almost nobody had stayed for more than a few hundred days.
Kabe was looking out over Ziller’s head through the front windscreen of the car. From the tall pylon they were heading for, cables stretched away in six different directions along lines of masts disappearing into the distance, some in straight lines, others in lazy curves. Looking out over the fractured landscape all around, Kabe could see the pylons—each between twenty and sixty meters high and shaped like an inverted L—everywhere. He could see why the Epsizyr Breaks were also known as Pylon Country.
“Why was the system built in the first place?” Kabe asked. He had been quizzing the avatar about the cable-car system when it had made its remark about almost forgetting the place existed.
“All down to a man called Bregan Latry,” the avatar said, stretching out across the couch and clasping its hands behind its head. “Eleven hundred years ago he got it into his head that what this place really needed was a system of sailing cable cars.”
“But why?” Kabe asked.
The avatar shrugged. “No idea. This was before my watch, don’t forget; back in the time of my predecessor, the one who Sublimed.”
“You mean you didn’t inherit any records from it?” Ziller asked incredulously.
“Don’t be ridiculous, of course I inherited a full suite of records and archives.” The avatar stared up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Looking back, it’s very much as though I was there.” It shrugged. “There just wasn’t any record of exactly why Bregan Latry decided to start covering the Breaks in pylons.”
“He just thought there should be … this … here?”.
“Apparently.”
“Perfectly fine idea,” Ziller said. He pulled on a line, tightening one of the sails underneath the car with a squeak of wheels and pulleys.
“And so your predecessor built it for him?” Kabe asked.
The avatar snorted derisively. “Certainly not. This place was designed as wilderness. It couldn’t see any good reason to start running cables all over it. No, it told him to do it himself.”
Kabe looked around the haze horizon. He could see hundreds of pylons from here. “He built all this himself?”
“In a manner of speaking,” the avatar said, still staring up at the ceiling, which was painted with scenes of ancient rustic life. “He asked for manufacturing capacity and design time and he found a sentient airship which also thought it would be a hoot to dot pylons all over the Breaks. He designed the pylons and the cars, had them manufactured and then he and the airship and a few other people he’d talked into supporting the project started putting the pylons up and stringing the cables in between.”
“Didn’t anyone object?”.
“He kept it quiet for a surprisingly long time, but yes, people did object.”
“There are always critics,” Ziller muttered. He was studying a huge paper chart through a magnifying glass.
“But they let him go ahead?”.
“Grief, no,” the avatar said. “They started taking the pylons down. Some people like their wilderness just as it is.”
“But obviously Mr. Latry prevailed,” Kabe said, looking around again. They were approaching the mast on the low hill. The ground was rising toward the car’s lower sails and their shadow was growing closer all the time.
“He just kept building the pylons and the airship and his pals kept planting them. And the Preservationeers—” the avatar turned and glanced at Kabe, “they had a name by this time; always a bad sign—kept taking them down. More and more people joined in on both sides until the place was swarming with people putting up pylons and hanging cable off them, rapidly followed by people tearing everything down and carting it away again.”
“Didn’t they vote on it?” Kabe knew this was how disputes tended to be settled in the Culture.
The avatar rolled its eyes. “Oh, they voted.”
?
“No, he lost.”
“So, how come—?”.
“Actually they had lots of votes. It was one of those rolling campaigns where they had to vote on who would be allowed to vote; just people who’d been to the Breaks, people who lived on Canthropa, everybody on Masaq’, or what?”.
“And Mr. Latry lost.”
“He lost the first vote, with those eligible to vote restricted to those who’d been to the Breaks before—would you believe there was one proposal to weight everybody’s votes according to how many times they’d been here, and another to give them a vote for each day they’d been here?” The avatar shook its head. “Believe me; democracy in action can be an unpretty sight. So he lost that one and in theory my predecessor was then mandated to stop the manufacturing, but then the people who hadn’t been allowed to vote were complaining and so there was another ballot and this time it was the whole Plate population, plus people who’d been to the Breaks.”
“And he won that one.”
“No, he lost that one, too. The Preservationeers had some very good PR. Better than the Pylonists.”
“They had a name too by this time?” Kabe asked.
“Of course.”
“This isn’t going to be one of those idiotic local disputes that end up being put to a vote of the whole Culture, is it?” Ziller said, still poring over his chart. He looked up briefly at the avatar. “I mean, that doesn’t really happen, does it?” he asked.
“It really happens,” the avatar said. Its voice sounded particularly hollow. “More often than you’d think. But no, in this case the quarrel never went out of Masaq’s jurisdiction.” The avatar frowned, as though finding something objectionable in the painted scene overhead. “Oh, Ziller, by the way; mind that pylon.”
“What?” the Chelgrian said. He glanced up. The pylon on the hill was only five meters away. “Oh, shit.” He dropped the chart and the magnifying glass and moved quickly to adjust the levers controlling the car’s overhead steering wheels.
There was a clanking, grinding noise from overhead; the stubby pylon whooshed past to starboard, its foametal girders streaked with bird droppings and dotted with lichen. The cable car shook and rattled as it crunched over the first set of points while Ziller loosened his ropes, letting the sails flap free. The car was now on a sort of ring around the top of the pylon from which the other cable routes left; a set of vanes on the top of the pylon powered a chain drive set into the ring, pulling the car around.