State of play: three

Fal ’Ngeestra was where she liked being most: on top of a mountain. She had just made her first real climb since she’d broken

her leg. It was a

relatively unforbidding peak, and she had taken the easiest route, but now, here at the summit, drinking

in the view, she was dismayed at how

unfit she had become. The healed leg hurt a little deep inside, of course, but so did

the muscles in both legs, as though she’d just climbed a

mountain twice the height, and with a full pack. Just out of condition,

she guessed.

She sat on the summit of the ridge, looking out over smaller white summits to the sharp, forested creases of the higher foothills

and the

rolling downs beyond, where grassland and trees combined. In the distance was the plain, rivers sparkling in the sunlight

and—marking its far

side—the hills where the lodge was, her home. Birds wheeled far away, in the high valleys beneath her,

and sometimes light glinted from the

plain, as some reflective surface moved.

A part of her listened to the distant bone-ache, assessing it, then switched the nagging sensation off. She wanted no distractions;

she

hadn’t climbed all this way

just

to enjoy the view. She’d come up here for a purpose.

It meant something to climb, to haul this sack of bones and flesh all this way, and then look, then think, then be. She could

have taken a flyer

here any time when she’d been recovering, but she hadn’t, even though Jase had suggested it. That was too

easy. Being here wouldn’t have

meant anything.

She concentrated, her eyelids drooping, going through the quiet internal chant, the unmagical spell that called up the spirits

buried in her

genofixed glands.

The trance came on with an initial rush of dizzying force that made her put her hands out to each side, steadying herself

when she didn’t

need steadying. The sounds in her ears, of her own blood coursing, of her breath’s slow tide, loudened, took

on strange harmonies. The light

beyond her eyelids pulsed in time to the blood-beat. She felt herself frown, imagining her

brow creasing like the folding hills, and one part of

her, still distant, watching, thought,

Still not very good at this

…

She opened her eyes, and the world had changed. The far hills were forever rolling brown and green waves with a crest of breaking

white

foam. The plain fumed with light; the pattern of pastureland and copses in the foothills looked like camouflage, moving

but not moving, like a tall

building seen against quick clouds. The forested ridges were buckled divisions in some huge busy

tree-brain, and the snow-and ice-covered

peaks about her had become vibrating sources of a light that was sound and smell

as well. She experienced a dizzying sense of concentricity,

as though she was the nucleus of the landscape.

Here in an inside-out world, an inverted hollowness.

Part of it. Born here.

All she was, each bone and organ, cell and chemical and molecule and atom and electron, proton and nucleus, every elementary

particle,

each wave-front of energy, from here… not just the Orbital (dizzy again, touching snow with gloved hands), but the

Culture, the galaxy, the

universe…

This is our place and our time and our life, and we should be enjoying it. But are we. Look in from outside; ask yourself….

Just what are

we doing.

Killing the immortal, changing to preserve, warring for peace… and so embracing utterly what we claimed to have renounced

completely, for our own good reasons.

Well, it was done. Those people in the Culture who had really objected to the war were gone; they were no longer Culture,

they were not part

of the effort. They had become neutrals, formed their own groupings and taken new names (or claimed to

be the real true Culture; yet another

shading of confusion along the Culture’s inchoate boundaries). But for once the names

did not matter; what did matter was the disagreement,

and the ill feeling produced by the split.

Ah, the contempt of it. The glut of contempt we seem to have achieved. Our own disguised contempt for “primitives," the contempt

of

those who left the Culture when war was declared for those who chose to fight the Idirans; the contempt so many of our

own people feel for

Special Circumstances… the contempt we all guess the Minds must feel for us… and elsewhere; the Idirans’

contempt for us, all of us

humans; and human contempt for Changers. A federated disgust, a galaxy of scorn. Us with our busy,

busy little lives, finding no better way

to pass our years than in competitive disdain.

And what the Idirans must feel toward us. Consider: near-immortal, singular and unchanged. Forty-five thousand years of history,

on one

planet, with one all-embracing religion/philosophy; whole steady eons of contented study, a calm age of devotion on

that one worshipped

place, uninterested in anything outside. Then, millennia ago in another ancient war, invasion; suddenly

finding themselves pawns in

somebody else’s squalid imperialism. From introverted peacefulness, through ages of torment and

repression—a forging force indeed—to

extroverted militancy, determined zeal.

Who could blame them. They had tried to keep themselves apart, and been shattered, almost made extinct, by forces greater

than those

they could muster. No surprise that they decided the only way to protect themselves was to attack first, expand,

become stronger and stronger,

push their boundaries as far from the treasured planet of Idir as possible.

And there is even a genetic template for that catastrophe change from meek to fierce, in the step from breeder to warrior….

Oh, a

savage and noble species, justifiably proud of themselves, and refusing to alter their genetic code, not far wrong in

claiming perfection

already. What they must feel for the swarming biped tribes of humankind!

Repetition. Matter and life, and the materials that could take change—that could evolve—forever repeating: life’s food talking

back to it.

And us. Just another belch in the darkness. Sound but not a word, noise without meaning.