We are nothing to them: mere biotomatons, and the most terrible example of the type. The Culture must seem like some fiendish

amalgam of everything the Idirans have ever found repugnant.

We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted

empires

and cruel, wasteful diasporas. Our ancestors were the lost-and-found of the galaxy, continually breeding and breeding

and milling and

killing, their societies and civilizations forever falling apart and reforming…. There had to be something

wrong with us, something mutant in

the system, something too quick and nervous and frantic for our own good or anybody else’s.

We are such pathetic, fleshy things, so short

lived, swarming and confused. And dull, just so stupid, to an Idiran.

Physical repugnance, then, but worse to come. We are self-altering, we meddle with the code of life itself, re-spelling the

Word which is

the Way, the incantation of being. Interfering with our own inheritance, and interfering in the development

of other peoples (ha! an interest we

share)… And worse still, worst of all, not just producing, but embracing and giving ourselves

over totally to the ultimate anathema: the

Minds, the sentient machines; the very image and essence of life itself, desecrated.

Idolatry incarnate.

No wonder that they despise us. Poor sick mutations that we are, petty and obscene, servants of the machine-devils that we

worship. Not

even sure of our own identity: just who is Culture. Where exactly does it begin and end. Who is and who isn’t.

The Idirans know exactly who

they are: purebred, the one race, or nothing. Do we. Contact is Contact, the core, but after

that. The level of genofixing varies; despite the

ideal, not everybody can mate successfully with everybody else. The Minds.

No real standards; individuals, too, and not fully predictable—

precocious, independent. Living on a Culture-made Orbital,

or in a Rock, another sort of hollowed world, small wanderer. No; too many

claiming some kind of independence. No clear boundaries

to the Culture, then; it just fades away at the edges, both fraying and spreading.

So who are we.

The buzz of meaning and matter about her, the mountains’ song of light, seemed to rise around her like a cauldron tide, drenching

and

engulfing. She felt herself as the speck she was: a mote, a tiny struggling imperfect chip of life, lost in the surrounding

waste of light and space.

She sensed the frozen force of the ice and snow around her, and felt consumed by the skin-burning chill of it. She felt the

sun beat, and

knew the crystals’ fracturing and melting, knew the water as it dripped and slithered and became dark bubbles

under ice and dewdrops on the

icicles. She saw the fronded trickles, the tumbling streams and the cataracted rivers; she sensed

the winding and unwinding loops as the river

slowed and ox-bowed, calm, esturial… into lake, and sea, where vapor rose once

more.

And she felt lost within it, dissolved within it, and for the first time in her young life was truly afraid, more frightened

there and then than she

had been when she’d fallen and broken her leg, during either the brief moments of falling, the stunning

instant of impact and pain, or the long

cold hours afterward, crumpled in the snow and rocks, sheltering and shivering and

trying not to cry. That was something she had long before

prepared herself for; she knew what was happening, she had worked

out the effects it might have and the ways she might react. It was a risk

you took, something you understood. This was not,

because now there was nothing to understand, and maybe nothing—including her—to

understand it.

Help!

Something wailed inside her. She listened, and could do nothing.

We are ice and snow, we are that trapped state.

We are water falling, itinerant and vague, ever seeking the lowest level, trying to collect and connect.

We are vapor, raised against our own devices, made nebulous, blown on whatever wind arises. To start again, glacial or not.

(She could come out, she felt the sweat bead on her brow, sensed her hands create their own molds in the crisp crunching snow,

and knew

there was a way out, knew she could come down… but with nothing, having found nothing, done nothing, understood nothing.

She would stay,

then, she would fight it out.)

The cycle began again, her thoughts looping, and she saw the water as it flowed down gorges and valleys, or collected lower

in trees, or fell

straight back to lakes and the sea. She saw it fall on meadowland and on the high marshes and the moors,

and she fell with it, terrace to

terrace, over small lips of rock, foaming and circling (she felt the moisture on her forehead

start to freeze, chilling her, and knew the danger,

wondered again whether to come out of the trance, wondered how long she

had sat here, whether they were watching over her or not). She felt

dizzy again, and grabbed deeper at the snow around her,

her gloves pressuring the frozen flakes; and as she did that, she remembered.

She saw the pattern of frozen foam once more; she stood again beside that ledge on the moor’s cold surface, by the tiny waterfall

and the

pool where she had found the lens of frothed ice. She remembered holding it in her hands, and recalled that it did

not ring when she flicked it

with her finger, that it tasted of water, no more, when she touched it with her tongue… and that

her breath blew across it in a cloud, another

swirling image in the air. And that was her.

That was what it meant. Something to hold on to.

Who are we.

Who we are. Just what we’re taken as being. What we know and what we do. No less or more.

Information being passed on. Patterns, galaxies, stellar systems, planets, all evolve; matter in the raw changes, progresses

in a way.

Life is a faster force, reordering, finding new niches, starting to shape; intelligence—consciousness—an order quicker,

another new plane.

Beyond was unknown, too vague to be understood (ask a Dra’Azon, perhaps, and wait for the answer)… all just refining, a process

of getting it

more right (if right itself was right)….

And if we tamper with our inheritance, so what. What is more ours to tamper with. What makes nature more right than us. If

we get it

wrong that’s because we are stupid, not because the idea was bad. And if we are no longer on the breaking edge of

the wave, well, too bad.

Hand on the baton; best wishes; have fun.

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing;

that’s the

bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant

ones, the most

enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms. Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr. Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure

and have fashioned

ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you. What does that

make you.

Who are you.

What

are you.

A weapon. A thing made to deceive and kill, by the long-dead. The whole subspecies that is the Changers is the remnant of

some

ancient war, a war so long gone that no one willing to tell recalls who fought it, or when, or over what. Nobody even

knows whether the

Changers were on the winning side or not.

But in any event, you were fashioned, Horza. You did not evolve in a way you would call “natural"; you are the product of

careful thought

and genetic tinkering and military planning and deliberate design… and war; your very creation depended on

it, you are the child of it, you

are its legacy.

Changer change yourself… but you cannot, you will not. All you can do is try not to think about it. And yet the knowledge

is there, the

information implanted, somewhere deep inside. You could—you should—live easy with it, all the same, but I don’t

think you do.

…

And I’m sorry for you, because I think I know now who you really hate.