Affronter society rested on a huge base of ruthlessly exploited juvenile geldings and a sub-class of oppressed females who unless born to the highest families - and not always even then - could count themselves lucky if they were only raped by the males from their own tribe. It was generally regarded as significant - within the Culture if nowhere else - that one of the few aspects of their own genetic inheritance with which the Affront had deemed it desirable to meddle had been in the matter of making the act of sex a somewhat less pleasurable and considerably more painful act for their females than their basic genetic legacy required; the better, it was claimed, to further the considered good of the species rather than the impetuously selfish pleasure of the individual.

When an Affronter went hunting for the artificially fattened treehurdlers, limbcroppers, paralice or skinstrippers that were their favoured prey, it was in a soar-chariot pushed by the animals called swiftwings which lived in a state of perpetual dread, their nervous systems and pheromone receptors painstakingly tuned to react with ever increasing levels of dread and the urge to escape as their masters became more and more excited and so exuded more of the relevant odours.

The hunted animals themselves were artificially terrified as well, just by the very appearance of the Affronters, and so driven to ever more desperate manoeuvres in their frantic urge to escape.

When an Affronters’ skin was cleaned it was by the small animals called xysters, whose diligence had been vastly improved by giving them such a frenetic hunger for an Affronter’s dead skin cells that unless they were overcome by exhaustion they were prone to bloating themselves literally to the point of bursting.

Even the Affront’s standard domesticated food animals had long since been declared as tasting much more interesting when they betrayed the signs of having been severely stressed, and so had also been altered to such a pitch of highly strung anxiety - and husbanded in conditions diligently contrived to intensify the effect - that they inevitably produced what any Affronter worth his methylacetylene would agree was the most inspiringly tasty meat this side of an event horizon.

The examples went on; in fact, reviewing their society, it was more or less impossible to avoid manifestations of the Affronters’ deliberate, even artistic use of genetic manipulation to produce through a kind of ebulliently misplaced selfishness - which to them was indistinguishable from genuine altruism - the sort of result it took most societies paroxysms of self-destructive wretchedness to generate.

Hearty but horrible; that was the Affront. ‘Progress through pain!’ It was an Affronter saying. Genar-Hofoen had even heard Fivetide say it. He couldn’t recall exactly, but it had probably been followed by a bellowed, ‘Ho ho ho!’