"I don't know," the boy said, sitting forward and putting his elbows on his knees and his head into his hands, staring at the polished wood of the deck. "Sometimes I think they just tell you that so you won't feel bad when they reject you. I think they do maybe take the very best. But I think they've made a mistake. But because they won't tell you why you've failed, what can you do about it?"
… She was thinking about failure too.
Jase had congratulated her on her idea about finding the Changer. Only that morning, when they were on the ancient steam funicular down from the lodge, they had heard about the events at Vavatch, when the Changer called Bora Horza Gobuchul had appeared and escaped on the pirate ship, taking their agent Perosteck Balveda with him. Her hunch had been right, and Jase was effusive in its praise, making the point that it wasn't her fault the man had got away. But she was depressed. Sometimes being right, thinking the correct thing, predicting accurately, depressed her.
It had all seemed so obvious to her. It hadn't been a supernatural omen or anything silly like that when Perosteck Balveda suddenly turned up (on the battle-damaged but victorious GCU Nervous Energy, which was towing most of a captured Idiran cruiser), but it had seemed so… so natural that Balveda ought to be the one to go in search of the missing Changer. By that time they'd had more information about what had been going on in that volume of space when that particular duel had been going on; and the reported, possible and probable movements of various ships had pointed (again, she thought, fairly obviously) to the privateer craft called the Clear Air Turbulence. There were other possibilities, and they were followed up, too, as far as the already stretched resources of Contact's Special Circumstances section would allow, but she was always certain that if any of the branching possibilities was going to bear fruit it would be the Vavatch connection. The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was called Kraiklyn; he played Damage. Vavatch was the most obvious site for a full Damage game in years. Therefore the most likely place to intercept the vessel — apart from Schar's World if the Changer already had control — was Vavatch. She had stuck her neck out by insisting that Vavatch was the most likely place, and that the woman agent Balveda should be one of those to go there, and now it had all come true and she realised it wasn't really her neck she had stuck out at all. It was Balveda's.
But what else could be done? The war was accelerating throughout an immense volume; there were many other urgent missions for the few Special Circumstances agents, and anyway Balveda was the only really good one within range. There was one young man they'd sent in with her, but he was only promising, not experienced. Fal had known all along that if it came to it, Balveda would risk her own life, not the man's, if infiltrating the mercenaries was the only chance of getting to the Changer and through him to the Mind. It was brave but, Fal suspected, it was mistaken. The Changer knew Balveda; he might well recognise her, no matter how much she'd altered her own appearance (and there hadn't been time for Balveda to undergo radical physical change). If the Changer realised who she was (and Fal suspected he had), Balveda had far less chance of completing her mission than even the most callow and nervous but unsuspected rookie agent. Forgive me, lady, Fal thought to herself. I'd have done better by you if I could…
She had tried to hate the Changer all that day, tried to imagine him and hate him because he had probably killed Balveda, but apart from the fact that she found it hard to imagine somebody when she had no idea what he might look like (the ship's captain, Kraiklyn?), for some reason the hatred would not materialise. The Changer did not seem real.
She liked the sound of Balveda; she was brave and daring, and Fal hoped against hope that Balveda would live, that somehow she would survive it all and that one day, maybe, they would meet, perhaps after the war…
But that didn't seem real, either.
She couldn't believe in it; she couldn't imagine it the way she had imagined, say, Balveda finding the Changer. She had seen that in her mind, and had willed it to happen… In her version, of course, it was Balveda who won, not the Changer. But she couldn't imagine meeting Balveda, and somehow that was frightening, as though she had started to believe in her own prescience so much that the inability to imagine something clearly enough meant that it would never happen. Either way, it was depressing.
What chance had the agent of living through the war? Not a good one at the moment, Fal knew that, but even supposing Balveda did somehow save herself this time, what were the chances she'd wind up dead anyway, later on? The longer the war went on, the more likely it was. Fal felt, and the general concensus of opinion among the more clued-up Minds was, that the war would last decades rather than years.
Plus or minus a few months, of course. Fal frowned and bit her lip. She couldn't see them getting the Mind; the Changer was winning, and she had all but run out of ideas. All she had thought of recently was a way — perhaps, just maybe — of putting Gobuchul off: probably not a way of stopping him completely, but possibly a way of making his job harder. But she wasn't optimistic, even if Contact's War Command agreed to such a dangerous, equivocal and potentially expensive plan…
"Fal?" Jase said. She realised she was looking at the island without seeing it. The glass was growing warm in her hand, and Jase and the boy were both looking at her.
"What?" she said, and drank.
"I was asking what you thought about the war," the boy said. He was frowning, looking at her with narrowed eyes, the sunlight sharp on his face. She looked at his broad, open face and wondered how old he was. Older than her? Younger? Did he feel like she did — wanting to be older, yearning to be treated as responsible?
"I don't understand. What do you mean? Think about it in what way?"
"Well," the boy said, "who's going to win?" He looked annoyed. She suspected it had been very obvious that she hadn't been listening. She looked at Jase, but the old machine didn't say anything, and with no aura field there was no way of telling what it was thinking or how it was feeling. Was it amused? Worried? She drank, gulping down the last of the cool drink.
"We are, of course," she said quickly, glancing from the boy to Jase. The boy shook his head.
"I'm not so sure," he said, rubbing his chin. "I'm not sure we have the will."
"The will?" Fal said.
"Yes. The desire to fight. I think the Idirans are natural fighters. We aren't. I mean, look at us…" He smiled, as though he was much older and thought himself much wiser than she, and he turned his head and waved his hand lazily towards the island, where the boats lay tilted against the sand.
Fifty or sixty metres away Fal saw what looked like a man and woman coupling, in the shallows under a small cliff; they were bobbing up and down, the woman's dark hands clasped round the man's lighter neck. Was that what the boy was being so urbane about?
Good grief, the fascination of sex.
No doubt it was great fun, but then how could people take it so seriously? Sometimes she felt a sneaking envy for the Idirans; they got over it; after a while it no longer mattered. They were dual hermaphrodites, each half of the couple impregnating the other, and each usually bearing twins. After one or occasionally two pregnancies — and weanings — they changed from their fertile breeder stage to become warriors. Opinion was divided on whether they increased in intelligence or just underwent a personality alteration. Certainly they became more cunning but less open-minded, more logical but less imaginative, more ruthless, less compassionate. They grew by another metre; their weight almost doubled; their keratinous covering became thicker and harder; their muscles increased in bulk and density; and their internal organs altered to accommodate these power-increasing changes. At the same time, their bodies absorbed their reproductive organs, and they became sexless. All very linear, symmetrical and tidy, compared to the Culture's pick-your-own approach.