"EEEeee…"

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, 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 illfeeling 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 towards us. Consider: near-immortal, singular and unchanged. Forty-five thousand years of history, on one planet, with one all-embracing religion/philosophy; whole steady aeons 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.

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 civilisations 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: pure-bred, 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?