“Azad is not the sort of place it’s easy to think about coldly, Jernau Gurgeh. They have done things the average Culture person would find… unspeakable. A program of eugenic manipulation has lowered the average male and female intelligence; selective birth-control sterilization, area starvation, mass deportation and racially based taxation systems produced the equivalent of genocide, with the result that almost everybody on the home planet is the same color and build. Their treatment of alien captives, their societies and works is equally—”
