The Affront appalled the Culture; they appeared so unamendable, their attitude and their abominable morality seemed so secured against remedy. The Culture had offered to provide machines to do the kind of jobs the juvenile castrati did, but the Affront just laughed; why, they could quite easily build machines of their own, but where was the honour in being served by a mere machine?

Similarly, the Culture’s attempts to persuade the Affront that there were other ways to control fertility and familial inheritance besides those which relied on the virtual imprisonment, genetic mutilation and organised violation of their females, or to consume vat-grown meat - better, if anything, than the real thing - or to offer non-sentient versions of their hunting animals all met with equally derisive if brusquely good-humoured dismissals.

Still, Genar-Hofoen liked them, and had come even to admire them for their vivacity and enthusiasm; he had never really subscribed to the standard Culture belief that any form of suffering was intrinsically bad, he accepted that a degree of exploitation was inevitable in a developing culture, and leant towards the school of thought which held that evolution, or at least evolutionary pressures, ought to continue within and around a civilised species, rather than - as the Culture had done - choosing to replace evolution with a kind of democratically agreed physiological stasis-plus-option-list while handing over the real control of one’s society to machines.

It was not that Genar-Hofoen hated the Culture, or particularly wished it ill in its present form; he was deeply satisfied that he had been born into it and not some other humanoid species where you suffered, procreated and died and that was about it; he just didn’t feel at home in the Culture all the time. It was a motherland he wanted to leave and yet know he could always return to if he wanted. He wanted to experience life as an Affronter, and not just in some simulation, however accurate. Plus, he wanted to go somewhere the Culture had never been, and well, explore.

Neither ambition seemed to him all that much to ask, but he’d been thwarted in both desires until now. He’d thought he’d detected movement on the Affronter side of things before this Sleeper business had come up, but now, if all concerned were to be believed, he could more or less have whatever he wanted, no strings attached.

He found this suspicious in itself. Special Circumstances was not notorious for its desire to issue blank cheques to anyone. He wondered if he was being paranoid, or had just been living with the Affront for too long (none of his predecessors had lasted longer than a hundred days and he’d been here nearly two years already).