and down, the woman’s dark hands clasped round the man’s lighter neck. Was that what the boy was being so urbane

about.

Good grief, the fascination of sex.

No doubt it was great fun, but then how could people take it so

seriously.

Sometimes she felt a sneaking envy for the Idirans; they got over

it; after a while it no longer mattered. They were dual

hermaphrodites, each half of the couple impregnating the other, and each usually bearing

twins. After one or occasionally

two pregnancies—and weanings—they changed from their fertile breeder stage to become warriors. Opinion

was divided on whether

they increased in intelligence or just underwent a personality alteration. Certainly they became more cunning but less

open-minded,

more logical but less imaginative, more ruthless, less compassionate. They grew by another meter; their weight almost doubled;

their keratinous covering became thicker and harder; their muscles increased in bulk and density; and their internal organs

altered to

accommodate these power-increasing changes. At the same time, their bodies absorbed their reproductive organs,

and they became sexless.

All very linear, symmetrical and tidy, compared to the Culture’s pick-your-own approach.

Yes, she could see why this gangly idiot sitting in front of her with his nervously superior smile would find the Idirans

impressive. Young fool.

“This is—" Fal was annoyed, enough to be a little stuck for words. “This is just us now. We haven’t evolved… we’ve changed

a lot, changed

ourselves

a lot, but we haven’t evolved at all since we were running around killing ourselves. I mean each other." She sucked her breath

in,

annoyed with herself now. The boy was smiling tolerantly at her. She felt herself blushing. “We

are

still animals," she insisted. “We’re natural

fighters just as much as the Idirans."

“Then how come they’re winning." the boy smirked.

“They had a head start. We didn’t begin properly preparing for war until the last moment. Warfare has become a way of life

for them; we’re

not all that good at it yet because it’s been hundreds of generations since we had to do it. Don’t worry,"

she told him, looking down at her empty

glass and lowering her voice slightly, “we’re learning quite fast enough."

“Well, you wait and see," the boy said, nodding at her. “I think we’ll pull out of the war and let the Idirans get on with

their expansion—or

whatever you want to call it. The war’s been sort of exciting, and it’s made a change, but it’s been nearly

four years now, and…" He waved one

hand again. “… we haven’t even

won

anything much yet." He laughed. “All we keep doing is running away!"

Fal stood up quickly, turning away in case she started to cry.

“Oh shit," the boy was saying to Jase. “I suppose I’ve gone and said something now…. Did she have a friend or a relation…."

She walked down the deck, limping a little as the newly healed leg started to hurt again with a distant, nagging ache.

“Don’t worry," Jase was saying to the boy. “Leave her alone and she’ll be all right…."

She put her glass inside one of the dark, empty cabins of the yacht, then kept going, heading for the forward superstructure.

She climbed up a ladder to the wheelhouse, then up another ladder to its roof, and sat there with her legs crossed (the recently

broken leg

hurt, but she ignored it) and looked out to sea.

Far away, almost on the haze-limit, a ridge of whiteness shimmered in the near-still air. Fal ’Ngeestra let out a long, sad

breath and

wondered if the white shapes—probably only visible because they were high up, in clearer air—were snowy mountaintops.

Maybe they were

just clouds. She couldn’t remember the geography of the place well enough to work it out.

She sat there, thinking of those peaks. She remembered when once, high in the foothills where a small mountain stream leveled

out onto a

marshy plateau for a kilometer or so, arcing and swerving and bowing over the sodden, reed-covered land like an

athlete stretching and flexing

between games, she had found something which had made that winter day’s walk memorable.

Ice had been forming in clear, brittle sheets at the side of the flowing stream. She had spent some time happily marching

through the

shallows of the water, crunching the thin ice with her boots and watching it drift downstream. She wasn’t climbing

that day, just walking; she had

waterproofs on and carried little gear. Somehow the fact she wasn’t doing anything dangerous

or physically demanding had made her feel like

a young child again.

She came to a place where the stream flowed over a terrace of rock, from one level of moor down to another, and there a small

pool had

carved itself into the rock just beneath the rapids. The water fell less than a meter, and the stream was narrow

enough to jump: but she

remembered that stream and that pool because there in the circling water, caught beneath the splashing

rapids, floated a frozen circle of foam.

The water was naturally soft and peaty, and a yellow-white foam sometimes formed in the mountain streams of that area, blown

by the

winds and caught in the reeds, but she had never seen it collected into a circle like that and frozen. She laughed

when she saw it. She waded in

and carefully picked it up. It was only a little greater in diameter than the distance between

her outstretched thumb and little finger and a few

centimeters thick, not as fragile as she had at first feared.

The frothy bubbles had frozen in the cold air and almost freezing water, making what looked like a tiny model of a galaxy:

a fairly common

spiral galaxy, like this one, like hers. She held the light confection of air and water and suspended chemicals

and turned it over in her hands,

sniffing it, sticking her tongue out and licking it, looking at the dim winter sun through

it, flicking her finger to see if it would ring.

She watched her little rime galaxy start to melt, very slowly, and saw her own breath blow across it, a brief image of her

warmth in the air.

Finally she put it back where she had found it, slowly revolving in the pool of water at the base of the small rapids.

The galaxy image had occurred to her then, and she thought at the time about the similarity of the forces which shaped both

the little and the

vast. She had thought,

And which is really the most important.

but then felt embarrassed to have thought such a thing.

Every now and again, though, she went back to that thought, and knew that each was exactly as important as the other. Then

later she would

go back to her second thoughts on the matter and feel embarrassed again.

Fal ’Ngeestra took a deep breath and felt a little better. She smiled and raised her head, closing her eyes for a moment and

watching the red

sun-haze behind her eyelids. Then she ran a hand through her curly blond hair and wondered again if the distant,

wavering, unsure shapes over

the shimmering water were clouds, or mountains.