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file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks%20Iain%20M%20%20-%20Look%20To%20Windward.txt
 Major Quilan? the creature said. The skin above its eyes moved when it spoke
to him, but not its mouth.
 Yes, he said.
 How do you do. I am the avatar of the Rapid Offensive Unit Nuisance Value.
Pleased to meet you.
I ve come to take you on the first leg of your trip to Masaq Orbital.
 I see.
-~ Quick suggestion; ask how to address it.
 Do you have a name, or rank? What should I call you?
 I am the ship, it said, raising and dropping its narrow shoulders.  Call me
Nuisance, if you like. Its mouth twisted up at the edges.  Or Avatar, or just
Ship.
-~ Or just abomination.
 Very well, Ship.
 Okay. It held up its hands.  I just wanted to say hello personally. We ll be
waiting for you.
Let us know when you re ready to go. It let its gaze arc up and around.  They
said it was all right to come in here. I hope I didn t interrupt anything.
 I had finished in here. I was looking for something but I didn t find it.
 I m sorry.
-~ So you should be, you worm-fucker.
 Yes. Shall we go? He started towards the circle of night in the bow of the
ship. The avatar fell into step alongside. Its gaze took in the floor briefly.
 What happened to this ship?
 We don t know exactly, he told it.  It lost a battle. Something hit it very
hard. The hull survived but everything else inside it was destroyed.
The avatar nodded.  Compacted fused state, it stated.  And the crew?
 We are walking on them.
 I m sorry. The creature immediately floated off the floor by half a metre.
It stopped making the walking motion and posed itself as though sitting. It
crossed its legs and arms.  This happened in the war, I take it.
They came to the slope and started up it; he kept on walking. He turned
briefly to the creature.
 Yes, Ship, it happened during your war.
3
Infra Dawn
But you might die.
 That s the whole point.
 Really. I see.
 No, I don t think you do, do you?
 No.
The woman laughed and continued to adjust the flying harness. All about them
the landscape was the
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colour of drying blood.
Kabe stood on a rugged but still elegant platform made from wood and stone and
perched on the edge of a long escarpment. He was talking with Feli Vitrouv, a
woman with wild black hair and deep brown skin over hard-looking muscles. She
wore a tight blue body suit with a small belly pack and was in the process of
strapping herself into a wing harness, a complicated device full of
compressed, slatted fins that covered most of her rear surfaces, from ankles
to neck and down her arms. About sixty other people  half of them also
wing-fliers  were distributed about the platform, which was surrounded by the
blimp tree forest.
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Dawn was just starting to break anti-spinwards, throwing long slanting rays
across the cloud-
whisped indigo sky. The fainter stars had long since been submerged in the
slowly brightening vault; barely a handful still twinkled. The only other
heavenly objects visible were the lobed shape of Dorteseli, the larger of the
two ringed gas giants in the system, and the wavering white point that was the
nova Portisia.
Kabe looked around the platform. The sunlight was so red it almost looked
brown. It shone from the vastly distant atmospheres above the Orbital s
trailing plates, over the escarpment s edge, across the dark valley with its
pale islands of mist. and sank onwards to the low rolling hills and the
distant plains on the far side. The cries of the forest s nocturnal animals
had slowly disappeared over the past twenty minutes or so, and the calls of
birds were beginning to fill the night-
chilled air above the low forest.
The blimpers were dark domes scattered amongst the taller ground-hugging
trees. They looked threatening to Kabe, especially in this ruddy glow. The
giant black gas sacs loomed, shrivelled and deflated but still impressively
rotund, over the bloated bulk of the banner reservoir, while their strangler
roots snaked across the ground all around them like giant tentacles,
establishing their territory and keeping ordinary trees at bay. A breeze
stirred the branches of the ground trees and set their leaves rustling
pleasantly. The blimpers at first appeared not to be affected by the wind,
then moved slowly, creaking and crackling, adding to the effect of
monstrousness.
The crimson sunlight was just starting to catch the tops of the more distant
blimp trees, hundreds of metres away along the shallow side of the scarp; a
handful of wing-fliers had already disappeared and headed down barely
discernible paths into the forest. On the other side of the platform the view
sank over cliffs, scree and forest into the shadows of the broad valley, where
the meandering loops and oxbow lakes of Tulume River could be glimpsed through
the slowly drifting patches of mist.
 Kabe.
 Ah, Ziller.
Ziller wore a close-fitting dark suit, with only his head, hands and feet
showing. Where the suit s material covered the pad of his midlimb it had been
reinforced with hide. It had been the
Chelgrian who d wanted to come out here originally to see the wing-fliers.
Kabe had already watched this particular sport, albeit from a distance, a few
years earlier, shortly after he d first arrived on Masaq . Then he d been on a
long articulated river barge heading down the Tulume for the Ribbon Lakes, the
Great River and the city of Aquime, and had observed the distant dots of the
wing-fliers from the vessel s deck.
This was the first time Kabe and Ziller had met since the gathering on the
barge Soliton five days earlier. Kabe had completed or put on hold various
articles and projects he had been working on and had just begun to study the
material on Chel and the Chelgrians which the Contact drone E. H. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]