Batra – this bizarre, many-times-alien, two-thousand-year-old creature that still thought of itself as “he” – was expressing sincere emotion, or simply acting. She wondered this very briefly, having realised long ago the exercise was pointless.
“Well,” she said, “it is done.”
“And much more remains to be done,” Batra said.
“That’ll get done too,” Anaplian said, beginning to lose patience. She was short on patience. She had been told this was a fault. “I imagine,” she added.
The metallic bush rolled back a little, and the face on its surface seemed to nod. “Djan Seriy, I have news,” Batra said.
Something about the way the creature said this made her quail. “Really?” she said, feeling herself battening down, shrinking inward.
“Djan Seriy, I have to tell you that your father is dead and your brother Ferbin may also be deceased. I am sorry. Both for the news itself and to be the one who bears it.”
She sat back. She drew her feet up so that she was quite enclosed in the gently swinging egg of the suspended seat. She took a deep breath and then unfolded herself deliberately. “Well,” she said. “Well.” She looked away.
It was, of course, something she had tried to prepare herself for. Her father was a warrior. He had lived with war and battle all his adult life and he usually led from the front. He was also a politician, though that was a trade he’d had to train himself to do well rather than one that he had taken to entirely naturally and excelled at. She had always known he was likely to die before old age took him. Throughout the first year when she had come to live amongst these strange people that called themselves the Culture she had half expected to hear he was dead and she was required to return for his funeral.
Gradually, as the years had passed, she had stopped worrying about this. And, also gradually, she had started to believe that even when she did hear he was dead it would mean relatively little to her.
You had to study a lot of history before you could become part of Contact, and even more before you were allowed to join Special Circumstances. The more she’d learned of the ways that societies and civilisations tended to develop, and the more examples of other great leaders were presented to her, the less, in many ways, she had thought of her father.
She had realised that he was just another strong man, in one of those societies, at one of those stages, in which it was easier to be the strong man than it was to be truly courageous. Might, fury, decisive force, the willingness to smite; how her father had loved such terms and ideas, and how shallow they began to look when you saw them played out time and time again over the centuries and millennia by a thousand different species.
This is how power works, how force and authority assert themselves, this is how people are persuaded to behave in ways that are not objectively in their best interests, this is the kind of thing you need to make people believe in, this is how the unequal distribution of scarcity comes into play, at this moment and this, and this . . .
These were lessons anybody born into the Culture grew up with and accepted as being as natural and obvious as the progression of a star along the Main Sequence, or evolution itself. For somebody like her, coming in from outside, with a set of assumptions built up in a society that was both profoundly different and frankly inferior, such understanding arrived in a more compressed time frame, and with the impact of a blow.
And Ferbin dead too, perhaps. That she had not expected. They had joked before she’d left that he might die before his father, in a knife fight over a gambling game or at the hand of a cuckolded husband, but that had been the sort of thing one said superstitiously, inoculating the future with a weakened strain of afflictive fate.
Poor Ferbin, who had never wanted to be king.
“Do you need time to grieve?” Batra asked.
“No,” she said, shaking her head fiercely.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive,” she said. “My father. Did he die in battle?”
“Apparently so. Not on the battlefield, but of his wounds, shortly after, before he could receive full medical attention.”
“He’d rather have died on the field itself,” she told Batra. “He must have hated having to settle for second best.” She found that she