Iain Banks: Look to Windward

That would seem strange; in theory the event was open to all — what was not, in theory? — but the ways of Culture people, especially drones, and most especially old drones, like E. H. Tersono, could still surprise Kabe. No laws or written regulations at all, but so many little… observances, sets of manners, ways of behaving politely. And fashions. They had fashions in so many things, from the most trivial to the most momentous.

Trivial: that paper message delivered on a salver; did that mean that everybody was going to start physically moving invitations and even day-to-day information from place to place, rather than have such things transmitted normally, communicated to one’s house, familiar, drone, terminal or implant? What a preposterous and deeply tedious idea! And yet just the sort of retrospective affectation they might fall in love with, for a season or so (ha! At most).

Momentous: they lived or died by whim! A few of their more famous people announced they would live once and die forever, and billions did likewise; then a new trend would start amongst opinion-formers for people to back-up and have their bodies wholly renewed or new ones regrown, or to have their personalities transferred into android replicas or some other more bizarre design, or… well, anything; there was really no limit, but the point was that people would start doing that sort of thing by the billion, too, just because it had become fashionable.

Was that the sort of behaviour one ought to expect from a mature society? Mortality as a life-style choice? Kabe knew the answer his own people would give. It was madness, childishness, disrespectful of oneself and life itself; a kind of heresy. He, however, was not quite so sure, which either meant that he had been here too long, or that he was merely displaying the shockingly promiscuous empathy towards the Culture that had helped bring him here in the first place.

So, musing about silence, ceremony, fashion and his own place in society, Kabe arrived at the ornately carved gangway that led from the quayside into the gently lit extravagance in gilded wood that was the ancient ceremonial barge Soliton. The snow here had been tramped down by many feet, the trail leading to a nearby sub-trans access building. Obviously he was odd, enjoying walking in the snow. But then he didn’t live in this mountain city; his own home here hardly ever experienced snow or ice, so it was a novelty for him.

Just before he went aboard, the Homomdan looked up into the night sky to watch a V-shaped flock of big, pure white birds fly silently overhead, just above the barge’s signal rigging, heading inland from the High Salt Sea. He watched them disappear behind the buildings, then brushed the snow off his coat, shook his hat and went aboard.

“It’s like holidays.”

“Holidays?”

“Yes. Holidays. They used to mean the opposite of what they mean now. Almost the exact opposite.”

“What do you mean?”

“Hey, is this edible?”

“What?”

“This.”

“I don’t know. Bite it and see.”

“But it just moved.”

“It just moved ? What, under its own power?”

“I think so.”

“Well now, there’s a thing. Evolve from a real predator like our friend Ziller and the instinctive answer’s probably yes, but—”

“What’s this about holidays?”

“Ziller was—”

“—What he was saying. Opposite meaning. Once, holidays meant the time when you went away.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I remember hearing that. Primitive stuff. Age of Scarcity.”

“People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society and so they couldn’t afford to take very much time off. So they worked for, say, half the day, most days of the year and then had an allocation of days they could take off, having saved up enough exchange collateral—”

“Money. Technical term.”

“—in the meantime. So they took the time off and they went away.”

“Excuse me, are you edible?”

“Are you really talking to your food?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it is food.”

“In very primitive societies there wasn’t even that; they got only a few days off each year!”

“But I thought primitive societies could be quite—”

“Primitive industrial, he meant. Take no notice. Will you stop poking that? You’ll bruise it.”

“But can you eat it?”

“You can eat anything you can get into your mouth and swallow.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Ask, you idiot!”

“I just did.”

“Not it! Grief, what are you glanding? Should you be out? Where’s your minder, terminal, whatever?”

“Well, I didn’t want to just—”

“Oh, I see. Did they all go away at once?”

“How could they? Things would stop working if they all did nothing at the same time.”

“Oh, of course.”

“But sometimes they had days when a sort of skeleton crew operated infrastructure. Otherwise, they staggered their time off. Varies from place to place and time to time, as you might expect.”

“Ah ha.”

“Whereas nowadays what we call holidays, or core time, is when you all stay home, because otherwise there’d be no period when you could all meet up. You wouldn’t know who your neighbours were.”

“Actually I’m not sure that I do.”

“Because we’re just so flighty.”

“One big holiday.”

“In the old sense.”

“And hedonistic.”

“Itchy feet.”

“Itchy feet, itchy paws, itchy flippers, itchy barbels—”

“Hub, can I eat this?”

“—itchy gas sacs, itchy ribs, itchy wings, itchy pads—”

“Okay, I think we get the idea.”

“Hub? Hello?”

“—itchy grippers, itchy slime cusps, itchy motile envelopes—”

“Will you shut up?”

“Hub? Come in? Hub? Shit, my terminal’s not working. Or Hub’s not answering.”

“Maybe it’s on holiday.”

“—itchy swim bladders, itchy muscle frills, itchy — mmph! What? Was there something stuck in my teeth?”

“Yes, your foot.”

“I think that’s where we kicked off.”

“Appropriate.”

“Hub? Hub? Wow, this has never happened to me before…”

“Ar Ischloear?”

“Hmm?” His name had been spoken. Kabe discovered that he must have gone into one of those strange, trance-like states he sometimes experienced at gatherings like this, when the conversation — or rather when several conversations at once — went zinging to and fro in a dizzying, alienly human sort of way and seemed to wash over him so that he found it difficult to follow who was saying what to whom and why.

He’d found that later he could often remember exactly the words that had been said, but he still had to work to determine the sense behind them. At the time he would just feel oddly detached. Until the spell was broken, as now, and he was awakened by his name.

He was in the upper ballroom of the ceremonial barge Soliton with a few hundred other people, most of them human though not all in human form. The recital by the composer Ziller — on an antique Chelgrian mosaikey — had finished half an hour earlier. It had been a restrained, solemn piece, in keeping with the mood of the evening, though its performance had still been greeted with rapturous applause. Now people were eating and drinking. And talking.

He was standing with a group of men and women centred on one of the buffet tables. The air was warm, pleasantly perfumed and filled with soft music. A wood and glass canopy arced overhead, hung with some ancient form of lighting that was a long way from anybody’s full-spectrum but which made everything and everybody look agreeably warm.