Look to Windward (v2.0) by Iain M. Banks

Author:Iain M. Banks [Banks, Iain M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781841971834
Publisher: * Clean Text
Published: 2001-08-15T07:00:00+00:00

~ All right?

~ Yes. Thank you for that.

~ You are very welcome, Huyler sent, impersonating the deep voice of the Hub avatar. I was almost too busy taking stuff in to pass any comments anyway.

~ Well, it wasn’t really necessary as it turned out.

They had been worried that Quilan’s welcome might be overwhelming, either accidentally or deliberately. His momentary slip when they had first boarded the Resistance Is Character-Forming and had spoken aloud in reply to a transmitted thought of Huyler’s had made them wary, and so they’d agreed that, for the first part of Quilan’s reception at least, Huyler would stay in the background, keeping silent unless he spotted something alarming that he felt he had to draw Quilan’s attention to.

~ So, Huyler; anything interesting?

~ Bit of a menagerie, don’t you think? Only one of them’s human.

~ What about the child?

~ Well, and the child. If it really is a child.

~ Let us not become paranoid, Huyler.

~ Let us not become complacent either, Quil. Anyway, it looks like they’re going for the cuteness angle rather than the top-brass approach.

~ There is a sense in which Estray Lassils is President of the World. And the silver-skinned avatar is under the direct control of the god which holds the power of life or death over the Orbital and everybody on it.

~ Yes, and there is a sense in which the woman is a powerless temporary figurehead and the avatar is just a puppet.

~ And the drone, and the Homomdan?

~ The machine claims to be from Contact so that may well mean it’s from Special Circumstances. The big three-legged guy seems genuine so I’d give him the benefit of the doubt for now; they probably think he’s a suitable host because he’s got more than the number of legs they’re used to. He’s got three legs, we’ve got three counting the midlimb; it could be that simple.

~ I suppose.

~ Anyway, we’re here.

~ Indeed we are. And quite an impressive ‘here’ it is, don’t you think?

~ It’s all right, I suppose.

Quilan smiled thinly. He leant on the deck-side rail, and looked around. The river stretched into the distance, the view dropped away to either side.

Masaq’ Great River was a single loop of water stretching unbroken right round the Orbital and flowing slowly as a result of nothing more than the huge spinning world’s coriolis effect.

Fed by tributary rivers and mountain streams throughout its length, it was depleted by evaporation where it ran through deserts, drained by overflow waterfalls and the run-offs into seas, swamps and irrigation networks, and absorbed into giant lakes, vast oceans and entire continent-wide river systems and networks of canals, only to reappear via great converse estuaries which eventually bundled it into a single gathered current once again.

It ran its unending course through labyrinths of caverns under raised continents, their depths lit sporadically by plunging holes and immense troughs deep as the roots of mountains. It traversed the slowly decreasing numbers of yet unformed Plate topographies within transparent tunnels which

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