Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks
He daydreamed. Mostly he daydreamed about catching up with Worosei without her having heard that he had survived, so that when she saw him it would come as a complete surprise. He tried to imagine the look on her face, the succession of expressions he might see.
Of course it would never happen that way. She would be like him, if their circumstances were reversed; she would try to find out for sure what had happened to him, hoping, no matter how hopelessly, that by some miracle he had survived. So she would find out, or she would be told, once news of his escape became known, and he would not see that look on her face. Still, he could imagine it, and spent hours doing just that, as the truck squealed and thumped and rumbled its way across the sintered plains.
He had told them his name, once he’d been able to speak, but they hadn’t seemed to pay any attention; all that appeared to matter was that he was a noble, with a noblemale’s markings and armor. He wasn’t sure whether to remind them of his name or not. If he did, and it was communicated to their superiors, then Worosei might find out all the quicker that he was alive, but there was a superstitious, cautious part of him that was afraid of doing that, because he could imagine her being told—that hope against hope fulfilled—and imagine the look on her face at that point, but he could also imagine himself dying even yet, because they hadn’t been able to treat his injuries properly and he was feeling weaker and weaker all the time.
That would be too cruel, to be told that he had survived against all the odds, and then discover later he had died of his wounds. So he did not press the point.
Had there been any chance of paying for rescue or even faster passage he might have made more of a fuss, but he had no immediate means of payment, and the Loyalist forces—along with any privateers that might have been acceptable to both sides—had dropped even further back into home space around Chel, regrouping. It didn’t matter. Worosei would be there, with them. Safe. He kept on imagining the look on her face.
He lapsed into a coma before they got to what was left of the city of Golse. The ransom and transfer took place without him being aware that anything was going on. It was quarter of a year later, the war was over and he was back on Chel before he discovered what had befallen the Winter Storm, and that Worosei had died in it.
• • •
He left during the GSV’s night, when the sun-line had dimmed and disappeared and a deep red light bathed the three great ships and the few lazily flying machines weaving about them.
He was on yet another vessel, a thing called a Very Fast Picket, on the last leg of his journey to Masaq’ Orbital. The craft disappeared through the interior stern fields of the Sanctioned Parts List and a little later exited and separated from the silvery ellipsoid’s exterior, curving away to set course for the star and system of Lacelere and leaving the GSV to begin its long loop back to Chelgrian space, a vast bright cave of air flashing through the void between the stars.
Airsphere
Uagen Zlepe, scholar, hung from the left-side sub-ventral foliage of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus by his prehensile tail and his left hand. He held a glyph-writing tablet with one foot and wrote inside it with his other hand. His remaining leg hung loose, temporarily surplus to requirements. He wore baggy cerise pantaloons (currently rolled up above the knee) secured with a stout pocket-belt, a short black jacket with a stowed cape, chunky mirror-finish ankle-bracelets, a single-chain necklace with four small, dull stones and a tasselled box hat. His skin was light green, he was about two meters standing straight on his hind legs and a little longer measured from nose to tail.
Around him, beyond the hanging fronds of the behemothaur’s slipstream-ruffled skin foliage, the view faded away to a hazy blue nothing in every direction except up, where the creature’s body filled the sky.
Two of the seven suns were dimly visible, one large and red to right and just above Assumed Horizon, one small and yellow-orange to left about a quarter off directly below. No other mega fauna were visible, though Uagen knew that there was one nearby, just above Yoleus’ top surface. The dirigible behemothaur Muetenive was in heat and had been for the last three standard years. Yoleus had been following the other creature for all that time, diligently cruising after it, always hanging just below and behind, paying court, arguing its case, patiently waiting to reach its own season and insulting, infecting or just ramming out of the way all other potential suitors.
By dirigible behemothaur standards a three-year courtship indicated little more than an infatuation, arguably no more than a passing fancy, but Yoleus seemed committed to the pursuit and it was this attraction that had brought them so low in the Oskendari airsphere over the last fifty standard days; usually such mega fauna preferred to stay higher up where the air was thinner. Down here, where the air was so dense and gelatinous that Uagen Zlepe had noticed his voice sounded different, it took a great deal of a dirigible behemothaur’s energy to control its buoyancy. Muetenive was testing Yoleus’ ardor, and its fitness.
Somewhere above and ahead of the two—perhaps another five or six days at this slow rate of drift—was the gigalithine lenticular entity Buthulne, where the pair might eventually mate, but more likely would not.
It was far from certain that they would even get to the great living continent in the first place. Messenger birds had brought news of a massive convection bubble that was looking likely to well up from the airsphere’s lower reaches in the next few days and which would, if intercepted correctly, provide a rapid and easy ascent to the floating world that was Buthulne; however the timing was tight.
Gossip amongst Muetenive and Yoleus’ assorted populations of slaved organisms, symbiotes, parasites and guests indicated there was a good chance that Muetenive would dawdle for the next two or three days and then make a sudden maximum-speed dash for the air space just above the convection bubble, to see if Yoleus was capable of keeping up. If it was and they both made it, then they would make a splendidly dramatic entrance into Buthulne’s presence, where a huge parliament of thousands of their peers would be able to witness their glorious arrival.
The problem was that over the last few tens of thousands of years Muetenive had proved itself to be something of an incautious gambler when it came to such matters. Often it left such sportive or mating sprints until too late.
So they might not make it to the appropriate region until the bubble had gone, and the two mega fauna and all their crawlers-inside, hangers-on and floaters-about would be left with nothing but turbulence or even—worse still—descending air currents, while the bubble rose upwards in the airsphere.
Even more alarmingly for those committed to Yoleus, given the fabulous, legendary reputation of the gigalithine lenticular entity Buthulne, the messenger birds reckoned it was going to be a particularly big bubble and that Buthulne was in the mood for a change of scenery, and therefore likely to position itself directly above the up-welling air, to ride it to the airsphere’s upper reaches. If that happened it might be years or even decades before they encountered another gigalithine lenticular entity, and centuries—Possibly millennia—before Buthulne itself hove into view again.
Yoleus’ Invited Guests’ Quarters consisted of a gourd-shaped growth situated just ahead of the creature’s third dorsal fin complex, not far from its summit. It was inside this structure, which reminded Uagen of a hollowed-out fruit, albeit one fifty meters across, that he had his rooms.
Uagen had stayed there, observing Yoleus, the other mega fauna and the entire ecology of the airsphere, for thirteen years. He was now thinking about drastically altering both his life expectancy and his shape to suit better the scale of the airsphere and the length of its larger inhabitants’ lives.
Uagen had been fairly human-basic for most of the ninety years he’d lived in the Culture. His present simian form—plus the use of some Culture technology, though no field-based science, which the mega fauna had a never entirely specified objection to—had seemed a sensible adaption strategy for the airsphere.
Recently, h
If, say, Yoleus and Muetenive did mate, exchanging and merging personalities, what would the two resulting behemothaurs be called? Yoleunive and Mueteleus? How exactly did this off-springless coupling affect the two protagonists? How would they each change? Was it an equal trade or did one partner dominate the other? Were there ever any offspring? Did behemothaurs ever die of natural causes? Nobody knew. These and a thousand other questions remained unanswered. The mega fauna of the airspheres were scrupulous in keeping their own counsel on such matters, and in all recorded history—or at least all that he’d been able to access through the notoriously immodest data reservoirs of the Culture—the evolution of a behemothaur had never been recorded.
Uagen would give almost anything to be the person who witnessed such a process and came up with those answers, but just the chance of doing so would mean a huge long-term commitment.
He supposed if he was to do any of this he’d have to go back to his home Orbital and talk it over with his professors, mother, relations, friends and so on. They were expecting him back for good in another ten or fifteen years, but he was increasingly certain that he was one of those scholars who devoted their lives to their work, rather than one of those who use a period of intense study to make themselves more rounded beings. He felt no great sense of loss at such a prospect; by original humanoid standards of life-expectancy he had already lived a long, full life by the time he’d decided to become a student in the first place.
The long trip back home, however, did seem slightly daunting. The airsphere Oskendari was not in regular contact with the Culture (or anybody else for that matter) and—the last Uagen had heard—the next Culture ship with a course schedule that brought it anywhere near the system wasn’t due for another two years. There might be other craft calling by before then, but it would take even longer to get home if he had to start out on an alien vessel, assuming they’d take him.
Even taking a Culture ship, there would be at least a year traveling home, say a year once he got there, and then for the return journey … no vessels had even course-scheduled that far ahead when he’d last checked.
He had been offered his own ship, fifteen years earlier, when news had arrived that a dirigible behemothaur had consented to play host to a Culture scholar, but tying up a star craft for a single person who would use it twice in twenty or thirty years had seemed, well, overly profligate, even by Culture standards. Nonetheless, if he was going to stay and possibly never see his friends and family alive again, then he really had no choice about returning. In any event, he needed to think about it.
Yoleus’ Invited Guests’ Quarters had been sited where they were to give the creature’s visitors a pleasant and airy view. With the courtship of Muetenive, and Yoleus’ tactic of following the other creature just below and behind, the quarters had become overshadowed and oppressive. A lot of people had left, and the remaining guests seemed excessively gossipy and nervous to Uagen, who was, in the end, there to study. So he spent less time socializing than he had done, and more time either in his study or roaming the behemothaur’s bulbous surfaces.
He hung from the foliage, working quietly.
Flocks of falficores roamed the spin winds about the two huge creatures; columns and clouds of infinitesimal dark shapes. It was the flight of a falficore flock Uagen was attempting to describe in the glyph-writing tablet.
Writing, of course, was hardly the right word for what Uagen was doing. You did not merely write within a glyph-writing tablet; you reached inside its holo’d space with the digital stylo and carved and shaped and colored and textured and mixed and balanced and annotated all at once. Glyphs of this sort were solid poetry, fashioned from nothing solid. They were real spells, perfect images, ultimate cross-system intellectualizations.
They had been invented by Minds (or their equivalent) and there was an infamous rumor that they had only been thought up to provide a means of communication that humans (or their equivalent) would be unable ever to understand or produce. People like Uagen had devoted their lives to proving that the Minds were either not as differentially smart as they thought, or that the paranoid cynics had been wrong.
“There, finished,” Uagen said, holding the tablet away from his face and squinting at it. He turned it and inclined his head. He showed the tablet to his companion, the Interpreter 974 Praf, who was hanging from a nearby branch at Uagen’s shoulder.
974 Praf was a fifth-order Decider in the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus’ IIth Foliage Gleaner Troupe who had been given upgraded autonomous intelligence and the title Interpreter when she’d been assigned to Uagen. She inclined her head at the same angle and stared into the tablet.
“I see nothing.” She spoke in Marain, the Culture’s language.
“You are hanging upside down.”
The creature shook its wings. Her eye pit band looked straight at Uagen. “Does that make a difference?”.
“Yes. It’s polarized. Observe.” Uagen turned the tablet straight onto the Interpreter and inverted it.
974 Praf flinched, her wings jerking halfway out and her body hunching as though getting ready to fly. She collected herself and settled back, swaying to and fro. “Oh yes, there they are.”
“I was attempting to use the phenomenon whereby one is looking at a flock of—for example—falficores from a great distance but is unable to see them because of one’s inability to distinguish individual creatures at such a range, whereupon they suddenly coalesce and flock together, gathering into a tighter grouping and becoming suddenly visible as though out of nothing, as a metaphor for the often equally precipitous experience of conceptual comprehension.”
974 Praf turned her head, opened her beak, flicked out her tongue to groom a twisted skin-leaf straight, then looked at him again. “That is done how?”.
“Umm. With great skill,” Uagen said, and then gave a delicate, slightly surprised laugh. He stowed the stylo and clicked the tablet to store the glyph.
The stylo must not have been properly stowed, because it clicked out of its housing in the side of the tablet and fell away into the blueness below.
“Oh, damn,” Uagen said, “I knew I should have replaced that lanyard.”
The stylo swiftly became a dot. They both watched it.
974 Praf said, “That is your writing instrument.”
Uagen took hold of his right foot. “Yes.”
“Do you have another?”.
Uagen chewed on one of his toenails. “Umm. Not really, no.”
974 Praf tilted her head. “Hmm.”
Uagen scratched his head. “I suppose I’d better go after it.”
“It is your only one.”
Uagen let go with his hand and tail, dropping into the air to follow the instrument. 974 Praf released her claw holds and followed him.
The air was very warm and thick; it roared around Uagen’s ears, buffeting.
“I am reminded,” 974 Praf said as they plummeted together.
“What?” Uagen said. He clipped the writing tablet to his belt, popped a pair of wind-goggles over his already watering eyes and twisted in the air to keep an eye on the stylo, which was almost out of sight. Such styli were small but very dense and also effectively, if unintentionally, quite streamlined. It was falling alarmingly quickly. His clothes fluttered and snapped like a flag in a gale.
Uagen’s tasselled hat flew off; he grabbed at it but it floated away upwards. Above, the cloud-sized bulk of the dirigible behemothaur Yoleus drew slowly away as they fell.
“Shall I get your hat?” 974 Praf shouted over the wind roar.
“No, thank you,” Uagen yelled. “We can retrieve it on the way back up.”
Uagen twisted back around and peered into the blue depths. The stylo was tearing through the air like a
974 Praf drifted closer to Uagen until her beak was close to his right ear and her body feathers were fluttering in the disturbed air just past his shoulder. “As I was saying,” she said.
“Yes?”.
“The Yoleus would know more of your conclusions regarding your theory on the effects of gravitational susceptibility influencing the religiosity of a species with particular reference to their eschatological beliefs.”
Uagen was losing sight of the stylo. He glanced around, frowning at 974 Praf. “What, now?”.
“I just remembered.”
“Umm, well. Just wait a moment, can’t you … ? I mean, this thing’s fairly hurtling away down here.” Uagen fingered a button on his left wrist cuff; his clothes sucked in about him and stopped flapping. He assumed a diving position, placing his hands together and wrapping his tail around his legs. By his side, 974 Praf drew her wings in tighter and also took on a more aerodynamic aspect.
“I cannot see the thing you dropped.”
“I can. Just. I think. Oh, bugger and blast.”
It was getting away from him. The stylo’s air resistance must be just that little less than his, even in a head-down dive. He looked at the Interpreter for a moment. “I think I’ll have to power down to it,” he shouted.
974 Praf seemed to draw herself in, bringing her wings even closer to her body and stretching her neck. She gained very slightly on Uagen, starting to move past him downwards, then relaxed, and drifted back up. “I cannot go any faster.”
“Right, then. I’ll see you in a bit.”
Uagen clicked a couple of buttons on his wrist. Tiny motors in his ankle bracelets swung out and revved up. “Keep clear!” he shouted to the Interpreter. The motors’ propeller blades were expandable, and while he would not need much extra power to increase his rate of fall sufficiently to catch up with the stylo, he had a horror of accidentally mincing one of Yoleus’ most trusted servants.