the furthest one could stray from what the Culture regarded as human basic. Other ex-humans who looked superficially a lot like Jerle Batra had had their entire consciousness transcribed from the biological substrate that was their brain into a purely non-biological form, so that, usually, an Aciculate of that type would have its intelligence and being distributed throughout its physical structure rather than having a central hub. Their contortionality factor could be off the scale compared to Batra’s.
Other people had assumed the shapes of almost anything mobile imaginable, from the relatively ordinary (fish, birds, other oxygen-breathing animals) to the more exotic, via alien life-forms – again, including those which were not normally in the habit of supporting a conscious mind – all the way to the truly unusual, such as taking the form of the cooling and circulatory fluid within a Tueriellian Maieutic seed-sail, or the spore-wisp of a stellar field-liner. These last two, though, were both extreme and one-way; there was a whole category of Amendations that were hard to do and impossible to undo. Nothing sanely transcribable had ever been shifted back from something resembling a stellar field-liner into a human brain.
A few genuine eccentrics had even taken the form of drones and knife missiles, though this was generally considered to be somewhat insulting to both machine- and human-kind.
“Djan Seriy Anaplian,” Batra said in a very human-sounding voice. “Good day. Oh. Do I congratulate?”
“This is Toark,” Anaplian said. “He is not mine.”
“Indeed. I thought I might have heard.”
Anaplian glanced at the drone. “I’m sure you would have.”
“And Handrataler Turminder Xuss. Good day to you too.”
“Delightful as ever,” muttered the drone.
“Turminder, this does not involve you initially. Would you excuse Djan Seriy and me? You might entertain our young friend.”
“I am becoming an accomplished child-minder. My skills grow with every passing hour. I shall hone them.”
The drone escorted the boy from the balcony. Anaplian glanced up at the overhanging bulk of the accommodation deck and took her hat off, throwing it into one suspended seat and herself into another. A drinks tray floated up.
Batra drifted nearer, a greyly skeletal bush about head-height. “You are at home here,” he stated.
Anaplian suspected she was being gently rebuked. Had she been overcasual in her hat-throwing and her seat-collapsing-into? Perhaps Batra was chiding her for not showing him sufficient deference. He was her superior, to the extent that this wilfully unhierarchic civilisation understood the idea of superiors and inferiors. He could have her thrown out of SC if he wanted to – or at the very least, make her restart the whole process – however, he wasn’t usually so sensitive regarding matters of etiquette.
“It serves,” she said.
Batra floated across the deck and settled into another of the seats hanging from the ceiling, resting in it like a sort of fuzzy, vaguely metallic ball. He had formed part of the side facing Anaplian into a kind of simulated face, so that his visual sensors were where the eyes should be and his voice came from where a human mouth would have been. It was disconcerting. Just having a fuzzy ball talking to you would have been much less alarming, Anaplian thought.
“I understand that events have not ended as well as they might with the Zeloy/Nuersotise situation.”
“A year ago we disabled and turned back an army on its way to sack a city,” Anaplian said wearily. “Today the would-be attackers became the attacked. The more progressive tendency, as we would put it, ought now to prevail. Though at a cost.” She pursed her lips briefly. “Part of which I have just witnessed.”
“I have seen some of this.” The image of the face suggested by Batra’s mass of steely-looking tendrils expressed a frown, then closed its eyes, politely indicating that he was reviewing data from elsewhere. Anaplian wondered if he was watching general views of the siege and sacking of the city, or something that included her unwarranted excursion on the seatrider.
Batra’s eyes opened again. “The knowledge that so much worse happens where we do nothing, and always has, long before we came along – and that so much worse might happen here were we to do nothing – seems of very little significance when one is confronted with the grisly reality of aggression we have failed to prevent. All the more so when we had a hand in allowing or even enabling it.” He sounded genuinely affected. Anaplian, who was innately suspicious of perfectly one hundred per cent natural, utterly unamended human-basic humans, wondered whether