The interior of God’shole habitat was sectioned off into about forty individually isolable compartments, most of them crisscrossed by a web-work of frames, girders and tubular members, partly to provide additional strength for the structure but partly because these created a multitude of places for the Affront to anchor the nest spaces that were the basic cellular building-block of their architecture. There were more open compartments every few sections along the habitat, filled with little more than layers of cloud, a few floating nest space bundles and a selection of flora and fauna. These were the sections which more closely mirrored conditions on the sort of mainly methane-atmosphered planets and moons the Affront preferred, and it was in these the Affront indulged their greatest passion, by going hunting. It was one of these immense game reserves that the car was now crossing. Genar-Hofoen looked downwards again, but he couldn’t see a hunt in progress.

As much as a fifth of the whole habitat was devoted to hunting space, and even that represented a huge concession to practicality by the Affront; they’d probably have preferred the proportions to be about half-and-half hunting space and everything else, and even then have thought they were being highly responsible and self-sacrificing.

Genar-Hofoen found himself wondering again about the trade-off between skill-honing and distraction that took place in the development of any species likely to end up as one of those in play in the great galactic civilisation game. The Culture’s standard assessment held that the Affront spent far too much time hunting and not nearly enough time getting on with the business of being a responsible space-faring species (though of course the Culture was sophisticated enough to know that this was just its, admittedly subjective, way of looking at things; and besides, the more time the Affront spent dallying in their hunting parks and regaling each other with hunting tales in their carousing halls, the less they had for rampaging across their bit of the galaxy being horrible to people).

But if the Affront didn’t love hunting as much as they did, would they still be the Affront? Hunting, especially the highly cooperative form of hunting in three dimensions which the Affront had evolved, required and encouraged intelligence, and it was generally - though not exclusively - intelligence that took a species into space. The required mix of common sense, inventiveness, compassion and aggression required was different for each; perhaps if you tried to make the Affront just a little less enraptured by hunting you would only be able to do so by making them much less intelligent and inquisitive. It was like play; it was fun at the time, when you were a child, but it was also training for when you became an adult. Fun was serious.