Did that make him a bad man? He didn’t think so. He’d provided, he’d given Senble six children, holding her to him when she’d wept, mourning the two they’d lost, and doing all he could to help her care for the four who’d survived. Where he’d grown up, the proportions of live to dead would have been reversed.
He’d never hit her, which made him unusual within his circle of friends. He’d never hit a woman at all, which by his count made him unique amongst his peers. He told people he reckoned his father had used up the family’s allowance of woman-hitting, mostly on Holse’s poor long-suffering mother. He’d wished his father dead every single day for many years, waiting until he grew big enough to hit him back and protect his mother, but in the end it had been his mother who’d gone; suddenly, one day, just dropping dead in the field during the harvest.
At least, he’d thought at the time, she’d been released from her torment. His father was never the same man again, almost as though he missed her, just possibly because he felt in some way responsible. At the time Holse had nearly felt himself big enough to stand up to his father, but his mother’s death had reduced his father so, and so quickly, that he’d never needed to. He’d walked away from home one day and never gone back, leaving his father sitting in his cold cottage, staring into a dying fire. He’d gone to the city and become a palace servant. Somebody from his village who’d made the same journey a long-year later had told him his father had hanged himself just a month earlier, after another bad harvest. Holse had felt no sympathy or sorrow at the news at all, only a kind of vindicated contempt.
And if he and Ferbin were gone so long he was declared officially dead, Senble might remarry, or just take up with another man. It would be possible. She might mourn him — he hoped she would, though frankly he wouldn’t have put his own money on it — but he couldn’t imagine her tearing her hair out in an apoplexy of grief or swearing on his cold unge pipe she’d never let another man touch her. She might be forced to find another husband if she was thrown out of the servants’ quarters. How would he feel then, coming back to find his place taken so, his children calling another man Daddy?
The truth was that he would almost welcome the opportunity to start again. He respected Senble and loved his children, but if they were being looked after by a decent sort of fellow then he wouldn’t throw a fit of jealousy. Just accept and walk on might be the best idea; wish all concerned well and make a fresh start, still young enough to enjoy a new life but old enough to have banked the lessons he’d learned from the first one.
Did that make him a bad man? Perhaps, though if so then arguably all men were bad. A proposition his wife would probably agree with, as would most of the women Holse had known, from his poor mother onwards. That was not his fault either, though. Most men — most women, too, no doubt — lived and died under the general weight of the drives and needs, expectations and demands they experienced from within and without, beaten this way and that by longings for sex, love, admiration, comfort, importance and wealth and whatever else was their particular fancy, as well as being at the same time channelled into whatever furrows were deemed appropriate for them by those on high.
In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.
He was still staring at the screen, though he hadn’t really been seeing it for some time, lost in this reverie of decidedly unromantic speculation. He looked for Sursamen, looked for the place — vast, multi-layered, containing over a dozen different multitudes — where he had lived all his life and left all he’d ever known quite entirely behind, but he couldn’t find it.
Gone; shrunk away to nothing.
He had already asked the Nariscene ship why it bore the name it did.
“The source of my name,” the vessel had replied, “The Hundredth Idiot, is a quotation: ‘One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.’ It is an old proverb.”
Holse had made sure Ferbin was not within earshot and muttered, “I think I’ve known a few hundredths in my time.”
The ship powered away in the midst of faraway stars, an infinitesimal speck lost in the vast swallowing emptiness between these gargantuan cousins of the Rollstars and Fixstars of home.
16. Seed Drill
Quitrilis Yurke saw the giant Oct ship immediately ahead and knew he was about to die.
Quitrilis was piloting his ship by hand, the way you were very much not supposed to, not in the presence of a relatively close-packed mass of other ships — in this case, a whole fleet of Oct Primarian Craft. Primarians were the biggest class of regular ships the Oct possessed. A skeletal frame around a central core, they were a couple of klicks long and usually employed more as a sort of long-distance travel aid for smaller ships than as fully fledged spacecraft in their own right. There was at least a suggestion that the Oct had ships of this size and nature because they felt they ought to rather than because they really needed them; they were a vanity project, something they seemed to think they were required to have to be taken seriously as a species, as a civilisation.
The Primarian fleet was twenty-two strong and stationed in close orbit directly above the city-cluster of Jhouheyre on the Oct planet of Zaranche in the Inner Caferlitician Tendril. They had arrived there in ones and twos over the course of the last twenty days or so, joining a single Primarian that had arrived over forty days before.
Quitrilis Yurke, a dedicated Culture traveller and adventurer, away from home for a good five hundred and twenty-six days now and veteran of easily a dozen major alien star systems, was on Zaranche to find out whatever he could about whatever there was to be found out there. So far he’d discovered that Zaranche was a boring planet of real interest only to the Oct and devoid of any humanoid life. That last bit had been bad news. It had seemed like really good news at first, but it wasn’t. He’d never been anywhere before where he was the only human. Only human on the planet; that was travelling. That was Wandering. That was exclusive. He’d like to see his fellow travellers beat that. He’d felt aloof for about a minute.
After that it was just boring and made him feel alone, but he’d told people — and especially his class- and village mates from back home (not that they were actually at home; they were mostly travelling too) — that he intended to stay on Zaranche for a hundred days or so, doing some proper studying and investigating that would lead to genuine peer-reviewable publishable kind of stuff and it would feel like defeat to squilch out now.
Of all his group, he was the luckiest; everybody agreed, including Quitrilis Yurke. He’d looked for and found an old ship that was up for a bit of vaguely eccentric adventure late in life, and so — rather than just bumming around, hitching, cadging lifts off GSVs and smaller ships the way everybody else was going to — he’d basically got his own ship to play with; estimable!
The Now We Try It My Way had been an ancient Interstellar-class General Transport Craft, built so long ago it could remember — directly; like, living memory — when the Culture had been, by civilisational standards, scrawny, jejune; positively callow. The ship’s AI (not a Mind — way too old and primitive and limited to be called a Mind, but most definitely still fully conscious and with a frighteningly sharp personality) had long since been transferred into a little one-off kind of runabout thing, the sort of ship that people referred to as Erratic-class, even though there wasn’t really any such class. (Only there sort of was now, because even Minds used the term.) Anyway. In its remodelled form it had been designed to serve as a sort of glorified shuttle (but faster than any ordinary shuttle), shifting people and things around the kind of mature system with more than one Orbital.