Excession

I

The Explorer Ship Break Even of the Stargazer Clan’s Fifth fleet, part of the Zetetic Elench, looped slowly around the outer limit of the comet cloud of the star system Tremesia I/II, scanning beams briefly touching on as many of the dark, frozen bodies as it could, searching for its lost sister vessel.

The double-sun system was relatively poor in comets; there were only a hundred billion of them. However, many of them had orbits well outside the ecliptic and that helped to make the search every bit as difficult as it would have been with a greater number of comet nuclei but in a more planar cloud. Even so, it was impossible to check all of them; ten thousand ships would have been required to thoroughly check every single sensor trace in the comet cloud to make sure that one of them was not a stricken ship, and the best the Break Even could do was briefly fasten its gaze on the most likely looking candidates.

Just doing that bare minimum would take a full day for this system alone, and it had another nine stars allocated to it as prime possibilities, plus another eighty less likely solar systems. The other six vessels of the Fifth fleet had similar schedules, similar allocations of stellar systems to attempt to search.

Elencher ships sent routine location and status reports back to a responsible and reliable habitat, facility or course-scheduled craft every sixteen standard days. The Peace Makes Plenty had signalled safely back to the Elench embassy on Tier along with the other seven ships of the fleet sixty-four days after they’d all left the habitat.

Day eighty had come, and only seven had reported in. The others immediately stopped heading any further away if that was the course they’d been set on; four days later, still with no word, and with no sign of anybody else having heard anything, the seven remaining ships of the Fifth fleet set their courses to converge on the last known position of the missing ship and accelerated to their maximum speed. The first of them had arrived in the general volume where the Peace Makes Plenty ought to be five days later; the last one appeared another twelve days after that.

They had to assume that the ship they were looking for had not travelled at that sort of speed since it had last signalled, they had to assume that it had been cruising, even loitering amongst the systems it had been investigating, they had to assume that it was somewhere within a stellar system, small nebula or gas cloud in the first place, and they had to assume that it was not deliberately trying to hide from them, or that somebody else was not deliberately trying to hide it from them.

The stars themselves were relatively easy to check; microscopic as it might be compared to the average sun, a half-million tonne ship containing a few tonnes of anti-matter and a variety of highly exotic materials falling into a star left a tiny but distinct and unmistakable flash behind it, and usually a mark on the stellar surface that lasted for days at least; one loop round the star could tell you if that kind of disaster had befallen a missing craft. Small solid planets were easy too, unless a ship was deliberately hiding or being hidden, which of course was perfectly possible in such situations and considerably more likely than a ship suffering some natural disaster or terminal technical fault. Large gaseous planets presented a bigger challenge. Asteroid belts, where they existed, could pose real problems, and comet clouds were a nightmare.

In the vast majority of solar systems the spaces between the inner system and the comet cloud were easy to search for big, obvious things and pointless to search for small things or anything trying to hide. Interstellar space was the same, but much worse; unless something was trying to signal you from out there, you could more or less forget about finding anything smaller than a planet.

The Break Even and its crew, like the rest of the fleet, the Clan and the Elench, had no illusions about the likelihood of success their search offered. They were doing it because you had to do something, because there was always just a chance, no matter how remote, that their sister ship was somewhere findable and obvious- orbiting a planet, sitting in a 1/6 Stabile round a big planet’s orbit — and you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself if you took the cold statistical view that there was next to zero hope of finding the ship intact, and then later discovered it had been there all along, savable at the time but later lost because nobody could be bothered to hope — and act — against the odds. Still, the statistics did not make optimistic reading, indicating that the whole task was as close to being impossible as made little difference, and there was a morbid, depressing quality about such searches, almost as though they were more a kind of vigil for the dead, part of a funeral ceremony, than a practical attempt to look for the missing.

The days went by; the ships, aware that whatever had befallen the Peace Makes Plenty might as easily happen to them, signalled their locations to each other every few hours.

Sixteen days after the first ship had started searching and hundreds of investigated star systems later, the quest began to be wound down. Over the next few days, five of the ships returned to the other parts of the Upper Leaf Spiral they had been exploring while two remained behind in the volume the Peace Makes Plenty ought still to be in, somewhere, carrying out more thorough explorations of the star systems as part of their normal mission profile, but always hoping that their missing sister ship might turn up, or at the very least that they might uncover some fragment of evidence, some hint of what had happened to their missing sibling.

The fact that the ship had disappeared would not be reported outside the fleet for another sixteen days; the Stargazer clan would pass the sad news on to the rest of the Elench eight days subsequently, and the outside galaxy would be informed, if it cared, another month after that. The Elench looked after their own, and kept themselves to themselves, as well.

The Break Even powered away from the last stellar system it had investigated, leaving the red giant astern with a kind of dismal relief. It was not one of the two craft who’d stay to continue the scaled-down search; it was heading back to the volume where it had been before the Peace Makes Plenty had gone missing. It kept all its sensors sweeping on full scan as it moved away from the giant sun, through the orbits of two small, cold planets and, further out, the dark, gelid bodies of the comet nuclei. Its course took it directly towards the next nearest star; on the way it swept interstellar space with its sensors too, still hoping, still half dreading… but nothing turned up. Esperi’s single, dim-red globe fell away astern, like an ember cooling to ash in the freezing night.

A few hours later the ship was out of the volume altogether, heading out-down-spinward back to its allotted crop of distant, anonymous stars.

II

[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28.860. 0446]

xGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

oEccentric Shoot Them Later

I think I have discovered something. Attached are course schedules for the Steely Glint and No Fixed Abode. (DiaGlyphs attached.) (The movements of the Not Invented Here can only be guessed at.) Note that both alter within hours of each other for no given reason, nineteen days ago. The GCU Fate Amenable To Change which discovered the Excession also made a sudden and acute course-change nineteen days ago; a new heading which took it almost straight to the Excession. Then there is a report from the GCU Reasonable Excuse — charged with oversight of our semidetached friend the GCU Grey-Area — that the ship left its most recent place of interest two days ago and was last detected heading in the direction of the Lower Leaf Swirl; possibly Tier.

oo

[tight beam, M32, tra. @n4.28.860.2426]

xEccentric Shoot Them Later

oGSV Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival, The

Yes?

oo

Do not be obtuse.

oo

I am not being obtuse.

You are being paranoid.

A lot of course schedules have been altered recently thanks to this thing.

I’m thinking about finding an excuse to edge in that direction myself.

And as you point out yourself, the Meatfucker is heading towards the Lower Swirl, not the Upper.

oo

There is a certain potential rendezvous implied in that direction; do I have to spell it out? And the point remains; these are the only three schedules which change at the same point.

oo

They alter over the course of five hours; hardly a 'point'. And even so; what if they do? And what’s so special about nineteen or even nineteen/two days ago?

oo

[stuttered tight point, M32]

It does not worry you that there might be a conspiracy in the highest levels of a Contact/SC committee? I am suggesting that there may be prior knowledge here; that some tip or clue was received by one of our colleagues which was not passed on to anybody else. That is what is so special about nineteen days ago; it is less than fifty-seven days ago, when whatever took place in the vicinity of the excession appears to have occurred.

oo

Yes yes yes. But: SO WHAT? My dear ship, which of us has not taken part in some scheme, some ruse or secret plan, some stratagem or diversion, sometimes of quite a sizable and labyrinthine nature and involving matters of considerable import? They’re what makes ordinary life worth living! So some of our chums in the Core Group may have had a sniff of something interesting in that region. Good for them, I say! Have you never had some clue, some lead, a hint of some potential sport, amusement, jape or focus of contemplation that was certainly worth acting upon but equally decidedly did not merit advertising due to some reservation concerning potential embarrassment, the wish not to seem vain or simply a desire for privacy?

Really, I think there is no conspiracy here whatsoever, and that even if there is, it is a benign one. Apart from anything else, there is one question you have not, I believe, addressed: What is the conspiracy for? If it was merely a couple of Minds getting wind of something odd in the Upper Leaf Spiral and finessing a search there, are they not simply to be congratulated?

oo

But there has been nothing this important before! This is perhaps our first real OCP and we may not be up to the challenge it represents. Meat it makes me ashamed! I just find this all so distressing! For millennia we have congratulated ourselves on our wisdom and maturity and revelled in our freedom from baser drives and from the ignobility of thought and action that desperation born of indigence produces. My fear — my terror! — is that our freedom from material concern has blinded us to our true, underlying nature; we have been good because we have never needed to make the choice between that and anything else.

Altruism has been imposed upon us!

Now suddenly we are presented with something we cannot manufacture or simulate, something which is to us as precious metals or stones or just other lands were to ancient monarchs, and we may find that we are prepared to cheat and lie and scheme and plot like any bloody tyrant and contemplate adopting any behaviour however reprehensible so that we may grab this prize. It is as if we have been children until this point, playing without care and dressing in but not filling adult clothes, blithely assuming that when we are grown we shall behave as we have done in the headlong, heedless innocence that has been our life so far.

oo

But, my dear friend, none of this has happened yet!

oo

Have you not carried out the projections? I took your advice to spend more time in metamathical pursuits, modelling the likely course of events, divining the shape of the future. The results worry me. What I feel myself worries me. I wonder what we may stop at, what we may not stop at to attain the prize this Excession may offer.

oo

I meant spend more time enjoying yourself, as you well know. Besides: simulations, abstractions, projections; these are only themselves, not the reality of what they claim to represent. Attend to the actuality of events. We have a fascinating phenomenon before us and we are taking all reasonable precautions as we deal, or prepare to deal, with it. Some of our colleagues show laudable enterprise and initiative while others — ourselves — exhibit caution just as commendable as — and in sum complementary to — their ambition. What is there to fear but the wild imaginings which may well be the result of looking too far beyond the scale of relevance?

oo

I suppose so. Perhaps it is me. Certainly I see worrying signs everywhere. I dare say it must be me. I may still make some further inquiries, but I take your point.

Make your inquiries if you must, but frankly I think it is this constant urge to inquire that causes you such pain; when one is able to scrutinise a subject as closely as we are — and to do so with the cross-referential capacity we possess, then the closer one looks into anything the more coincidences one finds, perfectly innocent though they may be.

What is the point of inquiring at such depth that one loses sight of the sunlit surface?

Lay up that magnifying glass and take up thy drink glass, my friend.

Slip off the academic gown and on with the antic pants!

oo

I thank you for your advice. I am reassured somewhat. I shall consider what you say. Do keep in touch. Farewell for now.

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.862.3465]

xEccentric Shoot Them Later

oLSV Serious Callers Only

The Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival was in touch again (signal file attached). I still think it could be one of them.

oo

[stuttered tight point, M32, tra. @n4.28.862.3980]

xLSV Serious Callers Only

oEccentric Shoot Them Later

And I still think you should let it in with us. It almost certainly now suspects you are part of the conspiracy.

oo

I have an image to maintain! And I would point out that we are still very much in the dark; we are not yet sure there is a conspiracy beyond the kind of normal outsmarting, outcliqueing nonsense in which all of us indulge from time to time. What purpose would formally extending the circumference of our concern serve, for now? Our sleuth is still behaving as though it is one of us but it knows nothing of our scepticism; we have naught to gain by bringing it aboard at present. If it is genuine it will apply itself to our purpose and if discovered the shadow of its guilt will not fall across us; if it is a test then it — they — may decide to bait us with more information of genuine interest, delivered at no cost to our virtue. Are we agreed? Have I convinced you? Anyway, enough of that; have we yet a plan? What was the result of your own investigations?

oo

Frustratingly vague. An exhaustive search has thrown up one remote possibility… but it remains an improbability predicated upon an uncertainty.

oo

Pray tell.

oo

Well… Let me ask you a question. What do you understand results by our communicating with our mutual friend?

oo

Why, that we are allowed to share in its inimitable objectivity. What else?

oo

That is the general volume of my concern. I’ll say no more.

oo

What? Don’t be ridiculous. Elaborate.

oo

No. You know what you said to our unwitting fellow in suspicion about not advertising lines of inquiry which might end in embarrassment…

oo

Unfair! After all I’ve shared with you!

oo

Yes, including the exciting opportunity to get involved with this in the first place. Thanks a lot.

oo

Cast that up to me again would you? I’ve said I’m sorry. Wish I’d never said anything now.

oo

Yes, but if the Anticipation Of A New Lover’s Arrival finds out who passed on the information which led to the Fate Amenable To Change’s search in the first place…

oo

I know, I know. Look; I’m doing all I can. I have requested a sympathetic ship to divert itself to Pittance, just in case. That’s where my prognostications indicate a site for possible future mischief.

oo

Death! If it comes to that…

III

The twittering batball bounced off the centre of the high-scoring wall and flew straight towards Genar-Hofoen. The creature’s tiny, clipped wings paddled frantically at the atmosphere as it tried to right itself and flee. One of its stumpy wings was ragged, perhaps even broken. It started to curve away as it approached the human. He took a good back-swing with his bat and slammed it into the little creature, sending it yelping and spinning away. He’d intended it to head for the high-scoring wall, but the stroke had been slightly off-target, resulting in the spin he’d given the thing and its course towards the corner between the high-scoring wall and the right-side forfeit baffle. Shit, he thought; the batball thrashed at the atmosphere and curved further towards the forfeit baffle.

Fivetide darted forward and with a flip of the bat strapped to one of his front limbs — and a resounding, “Ha!” — snapped the batball into the centre of the high-scoring wall again; it thudded against the roundel and ricocheted off at an angle Genar-Hofoen knew he wasn’t going to be able to intercept. He lunged at it anyway, but the creature sailed slackly past, half a metre away from his outstretched bat. He fell to the floor and rolled, feeling the gelfield suit tensing and squeezing him as it absorbed the shock. He picked himself up to a sitting position and looked around. He was breathing hard and his heart was hammering; playing this sort of game against another human would have been no joke in Affronter gravity. Playing it against an Affronter, even one with half his tentacles sportingly tied round its back, was even harder work.

“Hopeless!” Fivetide roared, crossing towards where the batball lay motionless near the back of the court. As he passed the human he flicked a tentacle under Genar-Hofoen’s chin and levered him up. The gesture was almost certainly meant to be helpful, but it would have broken the average unprotected human neck. Genar-Hofoen merely found himself propelled off the floor like a rock out of a catapult and sent sailing towards the ceiling of the court, arms flailing.

— Idiot! the suit said, as Genar-Hofoen reached the top of his trajectory. He assumed the suit was talking about Fivetide.

A tentacle wrapped itself round his waist like a whip. “Oops!” Fivetide said, and lowered him safely to the floor with surprising gentleness. “Sorry about that, Genar-Hofoen,” he yelled. “You know what they say; ‘It’s a wise lad knows his own strength when he’s having fun,’ eh!” He patted the human relatively gently on the head, then continued over to the motionless body of the batball. He prodded it with the bat.

“Don’t breed them like they used to,” he said, then made a noise Genar-Hofoen had learned to interpret as a sigh.

— Tentacled scumbag fuckwit, said the suit.

— Suit, really! he thought, amused.

— Well…

The suit was not in the best of moods. He and it were spending a lot more time together; the suit didn’t trust the containment around Genar-Hofoen’s quarters in the ship and had insisted that the human keep it on, even when he was asleep. Genar-Hofoen had grumbled, but not over-much; there were too many funny smells in his quarters for him to have complete faith in the Affront’s attempt at a human life-support system. The most the gelfield suit would let him do at night was peel aside its head section so that he could sleep with his face exposed; that way, even if his environment collapsed suddenly and totally, the suit would be able to protect him.

Fivetide flicked the batball up with the end of his bat and flicked it over the transparent wall of the court, into the spectators’ seats. Then he banged on the wall, waking the snoozing form of the gelding on the far side.

“Wake up, you dozy pellet!” Fivetide bellowed. “Another batball, dolt!”

The neutered Affronter adolescent jumped to its tentacle tips, its eye stalks waving around wildly, then it reached into a small cage by its side with one limb while another tentacle opened the door in the court wall. It picked one batball out of the dozen or so tied up in the cage and handed the squirming creature to the adult Affronter, who accepted it then jerked forward and hissed at the adolescent, making it flinch. It closed the door quickly.

“Ha!” Fivetide shouted, putting the trussed, wriggling batball to his forebeak and tearing the cord that had held it immobile. “Another game, Genar-Hofoen?” Fivetide spat the short length of cord away and patted the batball up and down in one of his limbs while the little animal flexed its abbreviated wings.

“Why not?” Genar-Hofoen said coolly. He was exhausted, but he wasn’t going to let Fivetide know.

“Nine-nil to me, I believe,” the Affronter said, holding the batball up to his eyes. “I know,” he said. “Let’s make it more interesting.” He put the struggling batball into the tip of his forebeak, his eye stalks bent forward and down to look at what he was doing. There was a delicate movement around Fivetide’s beak-fronds and a tiny screech, accompanied by a faint pop.

Fivetide withdrew the creature from his beak and inspected it, apparently satisfied. “There,” he said. “Always good for a change, playing with a blinded one.” He threw the writhing, mewling creature to Genar-Hofoen. “Your serve, I believe.”

The Culture had a problem with the Affront. The Affront had a problem with the Culture, too, for that matter, but it was a pretty plain thing in comparison; the Affront’s problem with the Culture was simply that the older civilisation stopped it doing all the things it wanted to do. The Culture’s problem with the Affront was like an itch they couldn’t scratch; the Culture’s problem with the Affront was that the Affront existed at all and the Culture couldn’t in all conscience do anything about it.

The problem stemmed from an accident of galactic topography and a combination of bad luck and bad timing.

The fuzzily specified region which had given rise to the various species that had eventually made up the Culture had been on the far side of the galaxy from the Affront home planet, and contacts between the Culture and the Affront had been unusually sparse for a long time for a variety of frankly banal reasons. By the time the Culture came to know the Affront better — shortly after the long distraction of the Idiran war — the Affront were a rapidly developing and swiftly maturing species, and short of another war there was no practical way of quickly changing either their nature or behaviour.

Some Culture Minds had argued at the time that a quick war against the Affront was exactly the right course of action, but even as they’d started setting out their case they’d known it was already lost; for all that the Culture was just then at a peak of military power it had never expected to attain at the start of that long and terrible conflict, just so there was a corresponding determination at all levels that — the task of stopping the Idirans’ relentless expansion having been accomplished — the Culture would neither need nor seek to achieve such a martial zenith again. Even while the Minds concerned had been contending that a single abrupt and crushing blow would benefit all concerned — including the Affront, not just ultimately, but soon — the Culture’s warships were being stood down, deactivated, componented, stored and demilitarised by the tens of thousands, while its trillions of citizens were congratulating themselves on a job well done and returning with the relish of the truly peace-loving to the uninhibited enjoyment of all the recreational wonders the resolutely hedonism-focused society of the Culture had to offer.

There had probably never been a less propitious time for arguing that more fighting was a good idea, and the argument duly foundered, though the problem remained.

Part of the problem was that the Affront had the disturbing habit of treating every other species they encountered with either total suspicion or amused contempt, depending almost entirely on whether that civilisation was ahead of or behind them in technological development. There had been one developed species — the Padressahl — in that same volume of the galaxy which had been sufficiently like the Affront in terms of evolutionary background and physical appearance to be treated almost as friends by the Affront and which yet had a moral outlook similar enough to the Culture’s to consider it worth the effort of chaperoning the Affront with the other local species, and, to their eternal credit, the Padressahl had been doggedly endeavouring to nudge the Affront into something remotely resembling decent behaviour for more centuries than they cared to remember or admit.

It was the Padressahl who had given the Affront their name; originally the Affront had called themselves after their home world, Issorile. Calling them the Affront — following an episode involving a Padressahl trade mission to Issorile which the recipients had treated more as a food parcel — had been most decidedly intended as an insult, but the Issorilians, as they then were, thought that “Affront” sounded much better and had steadfastly refused to drop their new name even after they had formed their loose patron/protégé alliance with the Padressahl.

However, a century or so after the end of the Idiran War, the Padressahl had had what the Culture regarded as the gross bad manners to suddenly sublime off into Advanced Elderhood at just the wrong time, leaving their less mature charges joyfully off the leash and both snapping at the heels of the local members of the Culture’s great long straggling civilisational caravan wending its way towards progress (whether they went wittingly or not), and positively savaging several of the even less well-developed neighbouring species which for their own good nobody else had yet thought fit to contact.

Suggestions by a few of the more cynical Culture Minds that the Padressahl decision to hit the hyperspace button and go for full don’t-give-a-damn-anymore god-head had been caused partially if not principally by their frustration and revulsion at the incorrigible ghastliness of Affront nature had never been either fully accepted or convincingly refuted.

Whatever; in the end, with a deal of arm and tentacle twisting, some deftly managed suitable-technology donation (through what the Affront Intelligence Regiment still gleefully but naively thought was some really neat high-tech theft on their part), the occasional instance of knocking heads together (or whatever anatomical feature was considered appropriate) and a hefty amount of naked bribery (woefully inelegant to the refined intellect of the average Culture Mind — their tastes generally ran to far more rarefied forms of chicanery — but undeniably effective) the Affront had — kicking and screaming at times, admittedly — finally been more or less persuaded to join the great commonality of the galactic meta-civilisation; they had agreed to abide by its rules almost all the time and had grudgingly accepted that other beings beside themselves might have rights, or at least tolerably excusable desires (such as those concerning life, liberty, self-determination and so on), which occasionally might even override the self-evidently perfectly natural, demonstrably just and indeed arguably even sacred Affronter prerogative to go wherever they wanted and do whatever they damn well pleased, preferably while having a bit of fun with the locals at the same time.

All that, however, represented only a partial solution to the least vexing part of the problem. If the Affront had been simply one more expansionist species of callously immature but technologically localised adventurers with bad contact manners, the problem they represented to the Culture would have subsided to the sort of level that would have gone more or less unnoticed; they would have become just another part of the general clutter of inventively obdurate species struggling to express themselves in the vast emptiness that was the galaxy.

The problem was rooted deeper, however; it went back further, it was more intrinsic. The problem was that the Affront had spent uncounted millennia long before they’d even got off their own fog-bound moon-planet tinkering with and carefully altering the flora and, especially, the fauna of that environment. They had discovered at a relatively early point in their development how to change the genetic make-up of both their own inheritance — which almost by definition needed little further amendment, given their manifest superiority — and that of the creatures with whom they shared their home world.

Those creatures had all, accordingly, been amended as the Affront saw fit, for their own amusement and delight. The result was what one Culture Mind had described as a kind of self-perpetuating, never-ending holocaust of pain and fear.

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!”

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).

Either way, he was being cautious; he had asked around. He still had some replies to receive — they should be waiting for him when he arrived at Tier — but so far everything seemed to tally. He had also asked to speak to a representation of the Desert Class MSV Not Invented Here, the ship acting as incident coordinator for all this — again, this ought to happen on Tier — and he’d looked up the craft’s own history in the module’s archives and transferred the results to the suit’s own AI.

The Desert Class had been the first type of General Systems Vehicle the Culture had constructed, providing the original template for the Very Large Fast Self-Sufficient Ship concept. At three-and-a-bit klicks in length it was tiny by today’s standards — ships twice its length and eight times its volume were routinely constructed inside GSVs the size of the Sleeper Service and the whole class had been demoted to Medium Systems Vehicle status — but it certainly had the distinction of age; the Not Invented Here had been around for nearly two millennia and boasted a long and interesting career, coming as close as the Culture’s distributed and democratic military command structure had allowed to being in advisory control of several fleets in the course of the Idiran War. It was now in that equivalent of serenely glorious senescence that affected some ancient Minds; no longer producing many smaller ships, taking relatively little to do with Contact’s normal business, and keeping itself relatively sparsely populated.

It remained, nevertheless, a full Culture ship; it hadn’t taken a sabbatical, gone into a retreat or become an Eccentric, nor had it joined the Culture Ulterior — the fairly recently fashionable name for the bits of the Culture that had split away and weren’t really fully paid-up members any more. All the same, and despite the fact that the archive entry on the old ship was huge (as well as all the naked factual stuff, it contained one hundred and three different full-length biographies of the craft which it would have taken him a couple of years to read), Genar-Hofoen couldn’t help feeling that there was a slight air of mystery about the old ship.

It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.

Also included in the archive entries were some fairly wild claims by a few of the smaller, more eccentric news and analyses journals and reviews — some of them one-person outfits — to the effect that the MSV was a member of some shadowy cabal, that it was part of a conspiracy of mostly very old craft which stepped in to take control of situations which might threaten the Culture’s cozy proto-imperialist meta-hegemony; situations which proved beyond all doubt that the so-called normal democratic process of general policy-making was a complete and utter ultra-statist sham and the humans — and indeed their cousins and fellow dupes in this Mind-controlled plot, the drones — had even less power than they thought they had in the Culture… There was quite a lot of stuff like that. Genar-Hofoen read it until his head felt as if it was spinning, then he stopped; there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.

Whatever; doubtless the old MSV was not itself in total command of the situation he was allowing himself to be dragged into, but just the tip of the iceberg, representing a collection, if not a cabal, of other interested and experienced Minds who’d all be having a say in the immediate reaction to the discovery of this artifact near Esperi.

As well as his request for a talk with a personality-state of the Not Invented Here, Genar-Hofoen had sent messages to ships, drones and people he knew with SC connections, asking them if what he’d been told was all true. A few of the nearer ones had got replies to him before he’d left God’shole habitat, each confirming that what they had been told of what he was asking about — which admittedly varied according to how much whatever collection of Minds the Not Invented Here was representing had chosen to tell the individuals concerned. The information he’d received looked genuine and the deal he’d been offered sounded good. At any rate, by the time he’d got to Tier and received all his replies he reckoned so many other people and Minds not irretrievably complicit with SC would have heard about what he’d been offered it would become impossible for SC to wriggle out of its deal with him without losing an unthinkable amount of face.

He still suspected there was a lot more to this than he was being told, and he had no doubt he was and would continue to be both manipulated and used, but providing the price they were paying him was right, that didn’t bother him, and at least the job itself sounded simple enough.

He’d taken the precaution of checking up on the story his uncle had told him about the disappearing trillion-year-old sun and the orbiting artifact. Sure enough, there it was; a semi-mythological story set way back in the archives, one of any number of weird-sounding tales with frustratingly little evidence to back them up. Certainly nobody seemed able to explain what had happened in this case. And of course there was nobody around to ask anymore. Except for the lady he was travelling to talk to.

The captain of the good ship Problem Child had indeed been a woman; Zreyn Tramow. Honorary Contact Fleet Captain Gart-Kepilesa Zreyn Enhoff Tramow Afayaf dam Niskat-west, to give her her official title and Full Name. The archives held her picture. She’d looked proud and capable; a pale, narrow face, with close-set eyes, centimetre-short blonde hair and thin lips, but smiling, and with what appeared to him at least to be an intelligent brightness to those eyes. He liked the look of her.

He’d wondered what it would be like to have been Stored for two-and-a-bit millennia and then be woken up with no body to return to and a man you’d never seen before talking to you. And trying to steal your soul.

He’d stared at the photograph for a while, trying to see behind those clear blue mocking eyes.

They played another two games of batball; Fivetide won those as well. Genar-Hofoen was quivering with fatigue by the end. Then it was time to freshen up and head for the officers’ mess, where there was a full-dress uniform celebration dinner that evening because it was Commander Kindrummer VI’s birthday. The carousing went on long into the night; Fivetide taught the human some obscene songs, Genar-Hofoen responded in kind, two Atmosphere Force Wing Captains had an only semi-serious duel with grater muffs — much blood, no limbs lost, honour satisfied — and Genar-Hofoen did a tightrope walk over the commander’s table pit while the scratchounds howled beneath. The suit swore it hadn’t contributed to the feat, though he was sure it had steadied him a couple of times. However, he didn’t say anything.

Around them, the Kiss The Blade and its two escorts powered their way through the spaces between the stars, heading for Tier habitat.

IV

Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way. She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss… to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now.

She toyed with the idea of pretending she was still asleep, but then he must just have touched exactly the right spot and she couldn’t help making a noise and moving and clenching and so she rolled over and took his face in her hands and kissed it.

“Oh no,” she croaked, laughing. “Don’t stop; that’s a fine way to say good morning.”

“Nearly afternoon,” the young man breathed. He was called Otiel. He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred metres, or, better still, millimetres. Metaphysics student. Swam a lot and free-climbed. The one she’d set her heart on the previous evening. The leg-liker. Long, sensitive fingers.

“Hmm… Really? Well… you know… maybe you can say that later, but meantime you just keep right on — WHAT?”

Ulver Seich jerked to a sitting position, eyes wide open. She slapped the young man’s hand away and stared wildly around. She was in what she thought of as her Romantic bed. It was more of a chamber, really; a ruched, pavilion-ceilinged five-metre crimson hemisphere filled with billowy bolsters and slinky sheets which blended into puffy paddings forming the single wall of the chamber and which swelled out in places to form various projections, shelves, straps and little seat-like things. She had other beds; her childhood bed, still stuffed with toys; her Just Sleep bed, comfy and surrounded by nocturne plants; a huge grandly formal and terribly old-fashioned canopied Reception bed, for when she wanted to receive friends, and an oil bed, which was basically a four-metre sphere of warm oils; you had to put little nose-plug things in and the air was Displaced into you. Not to everybody’s taste, sadly, but very erotic.

Her neural lace had woken up already with the adrenaline rush. It told her it was half an hour to noon. Shit. She’d thought she’d set an alarm to wake her an hour ago. She’d meant to. Must have slipped her mind due to the fun; hormonal re-prioritisation. Well, it happened.

“What…?” Otiel said, smiling. He was looking at her oddly. Like he was wondering whether this was part of some game. Twinkle in the eye. He reached out for her.

Damn, the gravity was still on. She commanded the bed controls to switch to one-tenth G. “Sorry!” she said, blowing him a kiss as the apparent gravity cut by ninety per cent. The padding beneath their bodies suddenly had a lot less weight to support; the effect was to produce a very gentle, padded pat on the bottom which was enough to send them both floating fractionally upwards. He looked surprised; it was such a sweet, boyish, innocent expression she almost stayed.

But she didn’t; she jumped out of the bed, kicking up through the air and raising her arms above her head to dive through the loose gatherings of the chamber’s tented ceiling and out into the bedroom beyond, arcing out over the padded platform around the bed chamber and falling gently back into the clutches of its standard gravity. She ran down the curved steps to the bedroom floor and almost bumped into the drone Churt Lyne.

“I know!” she yelled, flapping one hand at it.

It lifted out of her way, then turned smoothly and followed her across the floor of the bedroom towards the bathroom, its fields formal blue but tinged with a rosy humour.

Ulver broke into a run. She’d always liked big rooms; the bedroom one was twenty metres square and five high. One wall was window. It looked out onto a tightly curved landscape of fields and wooded hills dotted with towers and ziggurats. This was Interior Space One, the central and longest cylinder of a cluster of independently revolving five-kilometre diameter tubes which formed the main living areas in the Rock.

“Anything I can do?” the drone asked as Ulver ran into the bathroom. Behind it, there was a shout and then a series of curses as the young man tried to exit the bed chamber in the same way Ulver had and got the gravity-transition wrong. The drone turned briefly towards the disturbance, then swivelled back as Ulver’s voice floated out through the noise of rushing fluids. “Well, you could throw him out… Nicely, mind.”

“What?” Ulver screamed. “You get me to ditch a luscious new guy after one night, you make me scrap all my engagements for a month and then you won’t even let me take a few pets? Or a couple of pals?”

“Ulver, can I talk to you alone?” Churt Lyne said calmly, rotating to point at a room off the main gallery.

“No you can’t!” she yelled, throwing down the cloak she’d been carrying. “Anything you have to say to me you can damn well say in front of my friends.”

They were in the outer gallery of Iphetra, a long reception area lined with windows and old paintings; it looked out to the formal gardens and Interior Space One beyond. A couple of traveltubes waited beyond doors set into the wall full of portraits. She’d told everybody to rendezvous here. She’d missed the noon deadline by over an hour, but there were certain things about one’s toilet that simply couldn’t be rushed, and — as she’d told a briefly but fetchingly incandescently furious Churt Lyne from her milk-bath — if she was really that important to all these top-secret plans, SC had no choice but to wait. As a concession to the urgency of the situation she had left her face unadorned, tied her hair back into a simple bun and slipped into a conservatively patterned loose pants and jacket combination; even choosing her jewellery for the day had taken no more than five minutes.

The gallery had got quite busy; her mother was here, tall and tousled in a jellaba, three cousins, seven aunts and uncles, about a dozen friends — all house-guests and a little bleary-eyed after the Graduation party — and a couple of house-slaved drones attempting to control the animals; a brace of tawny speytlid hunters looking about at everybody and snuffling and slavering with excitement and her three hooded but still restless alseyns which kept stretching their wings and giving their piercing, plangent cry. Another drone waited outside the nearest window with Brave, her favourite mount, saddled up and pawing the ground, while the three drones she’d decided were the minimum she could manage with were taking care of her luggage trunks, which were still appearing from the house lift. A tray floated at her side with breakfast; she’d just started munching on a chislen segment when the drone had told her she had to make this journey alone.

Churt Lyne didn’t reply in speech. Instead — astonishingly — it spoke through her neural lace:

— Ulver, for pity’s sake, this is a secret mission for Special Circumstances, not a social outing with your girlfriends.

“And don’t secret-talk me!” Ulver hissed through clenched teeth. “Grief, that’s so rude!”

“Quite right, dear,” muttered her mother, yawning.

A couple of her friends laughed lightly.

Churt Lyne came right up to her until it was almost touching her, and then the next thing she knew there was a sort of grey cylinder around her and the machine; it stretched from wooden floor to stone-carved ceiling and it was about a metre and a half in diameter, neatly enclosing her, Churt and the tray carrying breakfast. She stared at the drone, her mouth open, eyes wide. It had never done anything like this before! Its aura field had disappeared. It hadn’t even had the decency to square the field and put the field on a mirror finish; at least she could have checked her appearance.

“Sorry about this, Ulver,” the machine said. Its voice sounded flat in the narrow cylinder. Ulver closed her mouth and prodded the field the drone had slung around them. It was like touching warm stone. “Ulver,” the drone said again, taking one of her hands in a maniple field, “I apologise; I ought to have made the point earlier. I just assumed… Well, never mind. I’m supposed to come with you to Tier, but not anybody else. Your friends have to stay here.”

“But Peis and I always go deep space together! And Klatsli is my new protégé; I promised her she could stick around me; I can’t just abandon her! Do you have any idea what that could do to her development? To her social life? People might think I’ve dumped her. Besides, she’s got an utterly exquisite older brother. If I—”

“You can’t take them,” the drone said loudly. “They’re not included in the invitation.”

“I heard what you said yesterday, you know,” Ulver said, shaking her head and leaning forward at the drone. “ ‘Keep it secret’; I haven’t told them where we’re going.”

“That’s not the point. When I said don’t tell a soul I meant don’t tell a soul you’re going, not don’t tell a soul exactly where you’re going.”

She laughed, throwing her head back. “Churt; real space here! My diary is a public document, hadn’t you noticed? There are at least three channels devoted to me — all run by rather desperate young men, admittedly, but nevertheless. I can’t change my eye colour without anybody on the Rock who follows fashion knowing about it within the hour. I can’t just disappear! Are you mad?”

“And I don’t think the animals can come either,” Churt Lyne said smoothly, ignoring her question. “The protira certainly can’t. There isn’t room on the ship.”

“Isn’t room?” she roared. “What size is this thing? Are you sure it’s safe?”

“Warships don’t have stables, Ulver.”

“It’s an ex- war ship!” she exclaimed, waving her arms around. “Ow!” She sucked at the knuckle she’d hit against the field cylinder.

“Sorry. But still.”

“What about my clothes?”

“A cabin full of clothes is perfectly all right, though I don’t know for whose benefit you’re going to be wearing them.”

“What about when I get to Tier?” she cried. “What about this guy I’m not supposed to fuck? Am I supposed to just wander past him naked?”

“Take two roomsful; three. Clothes are not a problem, and you can pick up more when you get there — no, wait a minute, I know how long it takes you to choose new clothes; just take what you want. Four cabins; there.”

“But my friends!”

“Tell you what; I’ll show you the space you’ve got to work with. Okay?”

“Oh, okay,” she said, shaking her head and sighing heavily.

The drone fed convincing-looking pictures of the ex-warship’s interior into Ulver’s brain through the neural lace.

She caught her breath. Her eyes were wide when the display stopped. She stared at the drone. “The rooms!” she exclaimed. “The cabins; they’re so small!”

“Quite. Still think you want to take your friends?”

She thought for a second. “Yes!” she yelled, thumping a fist on the little tray floating at her side. It wobbled, trying not to spill the fruit juice. “It’d be cozy!”

“What if you fall out?”

That stopped her for a moment. She tapped her lips with one finger, frowning into space. She shrugged. “I can cut people dead in a traveltube, Churt. I can ostracise people in the same bed.” She leant towards the machine again then glanced round at the grey walls of the field cylinder. “I can ostracise people in something this big,” she said pointedly, her hands on her hips. She put her head back, narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. “I could just refuse to go, you know.”

“You could,” the machine said with a pronounced sigh. “But you’d never get into Contact, and SC would be forced to try and get a double — a synthetic entity — to impersonate this woman on Tier. The authorities there wouldn’t be amused if they found out.”

She gazed levelly at the machine for a moment. She sighed and shook her head. “Bugger,” she breathed, snatching the glass of fruit juice from the floating tray and looking in distaste at where the juice had run down the outside of the glass. “I hate this acting adult shit.” She knocked the juice back, set the glass back down and licked her lips. “Okay; let’s go, let’s go!”

The goodbyes took a while. Churt Lyne glowed greyer and greyer with frustration until it turned into a sort of off-black sphere; then it dropped its aura field altogether and sped out of the nearest opened window. It raced around in the air outside for a while; a couple of sonic booms nearly had the mounts bolting.

Eventually, though, Ulver had said her farewells, decided to leave all her animals and two trunks of clothes behind and then — having remained serene in the midst of much hullabaloo and some tears from Klatsli — entered a traveltube with a frostily blue Churt Lyne and was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her.

Ulver laughed. “It looks,” she snorted, “like a dildo!”

“That’s appropriate,” Churt Lyne said. “Armed, it can fuck solar systems.”

She remembered when she was a little girl and had stood on a bridge over a gorge in one of the other Interior Spaces; she had a stone in her hand and her mother had held her up to the bridge parapet so that she could look over the edge and drop the stone into the water below. She’d held the stone — it was about the same size as her little fist — right up to one eye and closed her other eye so that the dark stone had blotted out everything else she could see. Then she’d let it go.

She and Churt Lyne stood in the ship’s tiny hangar area, surrounded by her cases, bags and trunks as well as a deal of plain but somehow menacing-looking bits and pieces of military equipment. The way that stone had fallen towards the dark water then, shrinking and shrinking, was very like the way Phage Rock fell silently away from the old warship now.

This time, of course, there was no splash.

When Phage had entirely disappeared, she switched out of the view her neural lace had imported into her head and turned to the drone, thinking a thought that would have occurred to her a lot earlier, she hoped, if she’d been sober and unimpassioned over the last day.

“When was this ship sent to Phage, Churt, and from where?”

“Why don’t you ask it yourself?” it said, turning to indicate a small drone approaching over the jumble of equipment.

— Churt? she asked via the neural lace.

— Yes?

— Damn; I was hoping the ship’s rep might be a dazzling handsome young man. Instead it’s something that looks like a—

Churt Lyne interrupted:

— Ulver; you are aware that the ship itself acts as exchange hub for these communications?

— Oh dear, she thought, and felt herself colour as the little drone approached. She smiled broadly at it.

“No offence,” she said.

“None taken,” said the little machine as it came to a halt in front of her. It had a reedy but reasonably melodious voice.

“For the record,” she said, still smiling, and still blushing, “I thought you looked a bit like a jewellery box.”

“Could have been worse,” chipped in Churt Lyne. “You should hear what she calls me sometimes.”

The little drone’s snout dipped once in a sort of bow. “That’s quite all right, Ms Seich,” it said. “Delighted to meet you. Allow me to welcome you aboard the Very Fast Picket Frank Exchange of Views.”

“Thank you,” she said, also nodding slowly. “I was just asking my friend where you’d come from, and when you’d been dispatched.”

“I didn’t come from anywhere except Phage,” the ship told her.

She felt her eyes widen. “Really?”

“Really,” it said laconically. “And the answer to your next three questions, I’d guess, are: because I was very well hidden and that’s actually quite easy in a conglomeration of matter the size of Phage; getting on for five hundred years; and there are another fifteen like me back home. I trust you are reassured rather than shocked and that we may rely on your discretion in the future.”

“Oh, golly, absolutely,” she said, nodding, and felt half inclined to click her heels and salute.

V

Dajeil had been spending a lot more time with the beasts. She swam with the great fish and the sea-evolved mammals and reptiles, she donned a flyer suit and cruised high above the sea with her wide wings extended alongside the dirigible creatures in the calm currents of air and the cloud layers, and she donned a full gelfield suit with a secondary AG unit and carved her way amongst the poison gases, the acid clouds and the storm bands of the upper atmosphere, surrounded by noxiousness and the ferocious beauty of the ecosystem there.

She even spent some time walking in the ship’s top-side parks, the nature reserves which the Sleeper Service had possessed even when it had been a regular, well-behaved GSV and diligent member of the Contact section; the parks — complete landscapes with hills, forests, plains, river and lake systems and the remains of small resort villages and hotels — covered all the great ship’s flat top surfaces and together measured over eight hundred square kilometres. With the humans gone from the ship there were fairly large populations of land animals in the park lands, including grazers, predators and scavengers.

She’d never really paid any of them much attention — her interests had always been with the larger, buoyant animals of the fluid environments — but now that they were all likely to suffer the same exile or unconsciousness as the rest, she had started to take a belated, almost guilty interest in them (as though, she thought ruefully, her attention bestowed some special significance on the behaviour she witnessed, or meant anything at all to the creatures concerned).

Amorphia did not come for its regular visit; another couple of days passed.

When the avatar came to her again, she had been swimming with the purple-winged triangular rays in the shallow part of the sea extending beyond the sheer, three-kilometre cliff which was the rear of the craft. Returning, she had taken the flyer which the ship habitually put at her disposal, but asked it to drop her at the top of the scree slope beneath the cliff facing the tower.

It was a bright, cold day and the air tasted sharp; this part of the ship’s environment was cycling towards winter; all the trees save for a few everblues had lost their leaves, and soon the snows would come.

The air was very clear and from the top of the scree slope she could see the Edge islands, thirty kilometres away, out close to where the inner containment field of the ship came down like a wall across the sea.

She had scrambled down the scree in small rattles of stones like dry, fanning rivers of pebbles and dust. She had long ago learned how to use her altered centre of gravity to her advantage in this sort of adventure, and had never yet fallen badly. She got to the bottom, her heart beating hard, her leg muscles warm with the effort expended and her skin bright with sweat. She walked quickly back through the salt marsh, along the paths the ship had fashioned for her.

The sun-line was near setting when she returned to the tower, breathless and still perspiring. She took a shower and was sitting by the log fire the tower had lit for her, letting her hair dry naturally, when Gravious the black bird rapped once on the window and then disappeared again.

She pulled her robe tighter about her as the tall, dark-dressed figure of Amorphia climbed the stairs and entered the room.

“Amorphia,” she said, tucking her wet hair into the hood of the robe. “Hello. Can I get you anything?”

“No. No, thank you,” the avatar said, looking nervously around the circular living room.

Dajeil indicated a chair while she sat on a couch by the fire.

“Please.” She pulled her legs up underneath her. “So, what brings you here today?”

“I—” the avatar began, then stopped, and pulled at its lower lip with its fingers. “Well, it seems,” it started again, then hesitated once more. It took a breath. “The time,” it said, then stopped, looking confused.

“The time?” Dajeil Gelian said.

“It’s… it’s come,” Amorphia said, and looked ashamed.

“For the changes you talked about?”

“Yes,” the avatar said, sounding relieved. “Yes. For the changes. They have to start now. In fact, they have already begun. The rounding-up of the creatures comes first, and the…” It looked unsure again, and frowned deeply. “The… the de-landscaping,” it gulped. It tripped up on the next words in its rush to say them. “The un-geometri-… The un-geomorphologising. The… the pristinisation!” it said, almost shouting.

Dajeil smiled, trying not to show the alarm she felt. “I see,” she said slowly. “So it is all definitely going to happen?”

“Yes,” Amorphia said, breathing heavily. “Yes, it is.”

“And I will have to leave the ship?”

“Yes. You’ll have to leave the ship. I… I’m sorry.” The avatar looked suddenly crestfallen.

“Where am I to go?”

“Where?” Confused.

“Where are you going to stop, or where will I be taken? Is it another ship, or a habitat, or an O or a planet, a rock? What?”

“I…” The avatar frowned again. “The ship does not know yet,” it said. “Things are being worked out.”

Dajeil looked at Amorphia for a while, her hands absently stroking the bulge of her belly under her robe. “What is happening, Amorphia?” she asked, keeping her voice soft. “Why is all this taking place?”

“I can’t… there is no need… no need for you to know,” the avatar said hesitantly. It looked exasperated, and shook its head as though angry, gaze flicking up and around the room, as though seeking something.

Finally it looked back at her. “I might be able to tell you more, later, if you will agree to stay on board until… until a time comes when I can only evacuate you by another vessel.”

She smiled. “That sounds like no great hardship. Does that mean I can stay here longer?”

“Not here; the tower and everything else will have gone; it will mean living inside. Inside the GSV.”

Dajeil shrugged. “All right. I suppose I can suffer that. When will that have to happen?”

“In a day or two,” Amorphia said. Then the avatar looked concerned, and sat forward on the seat. “There… it’s possible… it’s possible there… might be a slightly increased risk to you, staying aboard until then. The ship will do all it can to minimise that, of course, but the possibility exists. And it might be…” Amorphia’s head shook suddenly. “I — the ship, would like you to remain on board, if possible, until then. It might be… important. Good.” The avatar looked as though it had startled itself. Dajeil suddenly recalled having held a tiny baby when it had farted loudly; the look of utter, blinking surprise on its face was not dissimilar to that on Amorphia’s face now. Dajeil choked back an urge to laugh, and it disappeared anyway when, as though prompted by the thought, her child kicked within her. She clamped a hand to her belly. “Yes,” Amorphia said, nodding vigorously. “It would be good if you stayed on board… Good might come of it altogether.” It sat staring at her, panting as though from exertion.

“Then I had better stay, hadn’t I?” Dajeil said, again keeping her voice steady and calm.

“Yes,” said the avatar. “Yes; I’d appreciate that. Thank you.” It stood up suddenly from the seat, as though released by a spring within. Dajeil was startled; she almost jumped. “I must go now,” Amorphia said.

Dajeil swung her legs out and stood too, more slowly. “Very well,” she said as the avatar made its way to the staircase set onto the wall of the tower. “I hope you’ll tell me more later.”

“Of course,” the avatar mumbled, then it turned and bowed quickly and was gone, bootsteps clattering down the stairs.

The door slammed some moments later.

Dajeil Gelian climbed the steps to the parapet of the tower. A breeze caught her robe’s hood and spilled her heavy, still-wet hair out and down. The sun-line had set, throwing highlights of gold and ruby light across the sky and turning the starboard horizon into a fuzzy violet border. The wind stiffened. It felt cold.

Amorphia was not walking back this evening; after the creature had hurried up the narrow path through the tower’s walled garden and out of the land-gate, it just rose up into the air, without any obvious AG pack or flying suit, and then accelerated through the air in a dark, thin blur, curving through the air to disappear a few seconds later over the edge of the cliff beyond.

Dajeil looked up. There were tears in her eyes, which annoyed her. She sniffed them back angrily and wiped her cheeks. A few blinks, and the view of the sky was steady and unobscured again.

It had indeed already begun.

A flight of the dirigible creatures were dropping down from the red-speckled clouds above her, heading for the cliffs. Looking closely, she could see the accompanying drones that were their herders. Doubtless the same scene was being repeated at this moment both beneath the grey surface of the sea on the far side of the tower as well as above, in the region of furious heat and crushing pressure that was the gas-giant environment.

The dirigible creatures hesitated in the skies above; in front of them, a whole area of the cliff, perhaps a kilometre across and half that in height, simply folded in on itself in four parcel-neat sections and disappeared backwards into four huge, long glowing halls. The reassured dirigible creatures were shepherded towards one of the opened bays. Elsewhere, other parts of the cliffs were performing similar tricks; lights sparkled in the spaces revealed. The entire swathe of grey-brown scree — easily twenty kilometres across and a hundred metres in both depth and height — was folding and tipping in eight gigantic Vs and channelling several billion tonnes of real-enough rock into eight presumably reinforced ship bays, doubtless to undergo whatever transformational process was in store for the sea and the gas-giant atmosphere.

A titanic, bone-resounding tremor shook the ground and rumbled over the tower while huge clouds of dust leapt billowing into the chilly air as the rock disappeared. Dajeil shook her head — her wet hair flapping on the sodden shoulders of her robe — then walked towards the doorway which led to the rest of the tower, intending to retreat there before the clouds of stone dust arrived.

The black bird Gravious made to settle on her shoulder; she shooed it off and it landed flapping uproariously on the edge of the opened trap door.

“My tree!” it screamed, hopping from leg to leg. “My tree! They’ve — I — my — it’s gone!”

“Too bad,” she said. The sound of another great tumble of falling rock split the skies. “Stay wherever it puts me,” she told the bird. “If it’ll let you. Now get out of my way.”

“But my food for the winter! It’s gone!”

“Winter has gone, you stupid bird,” she told it. The black bird stopped moving and just perched there, head thrown forward and to one side, right eye staring at her, as though trying to catch some more meaningful echo of what she had just told it. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll be accommodated.” She waved it off its perch and it flapped noisily away.

A last earthquake of sound rolled under and over the tower. The woman Dajeil Gelian looked round at the twilight-lit rolling grey dust clouds to see the light from opened bays beyond shine through, as the pretence at natural form was dispensed with and the overall shape of the craft’s fabric began to reveal itself.

The Culture General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service. No longer just her gallant protector and a grossly over-specified mobile game reserve… It seemed that the great ship had finally found something to become involved with which was more in keeping with the extent of its powers. She wished it well, though with trepidation.

The sea like stone, she thought. She turned and stepped down into the warmth of the tower, patting the bulge that was her sleeping, undreaming child. A stern winter indeed; harder than any of us had anticipated.

VI

Leffid Ispanteli was trying desperately to remember the name of the lass he was with. Geltry? Usper? Stemli?

“Oh, yes, yes, ffffuck! Gods, yes! More, more; now, yes! There! There! Yes! That’s oohhh…!”

Soli? Getrin? Ayscoe?

“Oh, fuck! There! More! Harder! Right… right… now! …Aah!”

Selas? Serayer? (Grief; how ungallant of him!)

“Oh, sweet providence! Oh FUCK!”

No wonder he couldn’t think of her name; the girl was kicking up such a racket he was surprised he could think at all. Still, a chap shouldn’t grumble, he supposed; always nice to be appreciated. Even if it was the yacht that was doing most of the work.

The diminutive hire yacht continued to shudder and buck beneath them, spiralling and curving through space a few hundred kilometres away from the huge stepped world that was Tier.

Leffid had used these little yachts for this sort of thing before; if you fed a nicely jagged course into their computers they’d do most of the bumping and grinding for you while leaving just enough apparent gravity to brace oneself without leaving one feeling terribly heavy. Programming in the odd power-off interval gave moments of delicious free-fall, and drew the small craft further away from the great world, so that gradually the view beyond the viewing ports increased in majesty as more and more of the conical habitat was revealed, turning slowly and glittering in the light of the system’s sun. Altogether a wonderful way of having sex, really, providing one found a suitable and willing partner.

“Aw! Aw! Aaawww! Force! Push, push, push; yes!”

She held his thrusting hips, smoothed his feathered scalp and used her other hand turned out to stroke his lower belly. Her huge dark eyes glittered, myriad tiny lights sparkling somewhere inside them in pulsing vortexes of colour and intensity that varied charmingly with the intensity of her pleasure.

“Come on! Yes! Come on up; further! Further! Aaarrrhh.”

Dammit all; what was her name?

Geldri? Shokas? Esiel?

Grief; what if it wasn’t even a Culture name? He’d been certain it was but now he was starting to think maybe it wasn’t after all. That made it even more difficult. More excusable, maybe, too, but certainly more difficult too.

They’d met at the Homomdan Ambassador’s party to celebrate the start of the six-hundred and forty-fifth Festival of Tier. He’d resolved to have his neural lace removed for the month of the Festival, deciding that as this year’s theme was Primitivism he ought to give up some aspect of his amendments. The neural lace had been his choice because although there was no physical alteration and he looked just the same to everybody else, he’d reckoned he’d feel more different.

Which he did. It was oddly liberating to have to ask things or people for information and not know precisely what the time was and where he was located in the habitat. But it also meant that he was forced to rely on his own memory for things like people’s names. And how imperfect was the unassisted human memory (he’d forgotten)!

He’d even thought of having his wings removed too, at least partly to show that he was taking part in the spirit of the Festival, but in the end he’d stuck with them. Probably just as well; this girl had made a big thing about the wings; headed straight for him, masked, body glittering. She was nearly as tall as he was, perfectly proportioned, and she had four arms! A drink in each hand, too. His kind of female, he’d decided instantly, even as she was looking admiringly at his folded, snow-white wings. She wore some sort of gelsuit; basically deep blue but covered with a pattern like gold wire wrapped all over it and dotted with little diamonds of contrasting, subtly glowing red. Her whiskered mask was porcelain-bone studded with rubies and finished with iridescent badra feathers. Stunning perfume.

She handed him a glass and took off her mask to reveal eyes the size of opened mouths; eyes softly, blackly featureless in the lustrous lights of the vibrantly decorated dome until he’d looked carefully and seen the tiny hints of lights within their curved surfaces. The gelfield suit covered her everywhere except those heavily altered eyes and a small hole at the back of her head where a plait of long, shiningly auburn hair spilled out. Wrapped in gold wire, it ended at the small of her back and was tethered to the suit there.

She’d said her first name; the gelsuit’s lips had parted to show white teeth and a pink tongue.

“Leffid,” he’d replied, bowing deeply but watching her face as best he could while he did so. She’d looked up at his wings as they’d risen up and towards her over the plain black robe he’d worn. He’d seen her take a deep breath. The lights in her eyes had sparkled brightly.

Ah-ha! he’d thought.

The Homomdan ambassador had turned the riotously decorated, stadium-sized bowl that was her residential quarters into an old-fashioned fun-fair for the party. They had wandered through the acts, tents and rides, he and she, talking small talk, passing comment on other people they passed, celebrating the refreshing absence of drones at the party, discussing the merits of whirligigs, shubblebubs, helter-skelters, ice-flumes, quittletraps, slicicles, boing-braces, airblows, tramplescups and bodyflaggers, and bemoaning the sheer pointlessness of inter-species funny-face competitions.

She was on an improving tour from her home Orbital, cruising and learning with a party of friends on a semi-Eccentric ship that would be here as long as the Festival lasted. One of her aunts had some Contact contacts and had swung an invitation to the ambassador’s celebration; her friends were so jealous. He guessed she was still in her teens, though she moved with the easy grace of somebody older and her conversation was more intelligent and even shrewder than he’d have expected. He was used to being able to almost switch off talking to most teenagers but he was having to race after her meanings and allusions at time. Were teenagers getting even smarter? Maybe he was just getting old! No matter; she obviously liked the wings. She asked to stroke them.

He told her he was a resident of Tier, Culture or ex-Culture depending how you wanted to look at it; it wasn’t something he bothered about, though he supposed if forced he felt more loyalty to Tier, where he’d lived for twenty years, than to the Culture, where he’d lived for the rest of his life. In the AhForgetIt Tendency, that was, not the Culture proper, which the Tendency regarded as being far too serious and not nearly as dedicated to hedonistic pursuits as it ought to be. He’d first come here as part of a Tendency cultural mission, but stayed when the rest returned back to their home Orbital. (He’d thought about saying, Well, actually I was in the Tendency’s equivalent of Special Circumstances, kind of a spy, really, and I know lots of secret codes and stuff… but that probably wasn’t the sort of line that would work with a sophisticated girl like this.)

Oh, much older than her; quite middle-aged, at one hundred and forty. Well, that was kind of her to say so. Yes, the wings worked, in anything less than 50% standard gravity. Had them since he was thirty. He lived on an air level here with 30% gravity. Huge web-trees up there. Some people lived in their hollowed-out fruit husks, though he preferred a sort of wispy house-thing made from sheets of chaltressor silk stretched over hi-pressure thinbooms. Oh yes, she’d be very welcome to see it.

Had she seen much of Tier? Arrived yesterday? Such good timing for the Festival! He’d love to be her guide. Why not now? Why not. They could hire a yacht. First though they would go and make their apologies to the Ambassador. Of course; he and she were old pals. Something to tell that aunt of hers. And they’d call by the cruise ship; bring the others? Oh, just a little camera drone? Well why not? Yes, Tier’s rules could be tiresome at times, couldn’t they?

“Yes! Yes! Yeeehhhsss…”

That was him; she’d given one final, ear-splitting shriek and then gone limp, with just a huge grin on her gelsuited face (she’d kept it on, another aperture had obligingly opened). Time to bring this bout to a climax…

The yacht had served him before; it heard what he said and took that as a signal to cut engines and go into free-fall. He loved technology.

The neural lace would have handled his orgasm sequence better, controlling the flow of secretions from his drug glands so that they more precisely matched and enhanced the extended human-basic physiological process taking place, but it was still pretty damn good all the same; his didn’t last quite as long as hers obviously had, but he’d put it at over a minute, easily.

He floated, still joined to her, watching the smile on her face and the tiny, dim lights in the huge dark eyes. Her fabulous chest heaved now and again; her four arms waved round with a graceful, under-sea motion. After a while, one of her hands went to the nape of her neck. She took the gelsuit’s head off and let it float free.

The deep dark eyes stayed; the rest of her face was brown flushed with red, and quite beautiful. He smiled at her. She smiled back.

With the gelsuit’s head removed, a little sweat beaded on her forehead and top lip. He gently fanned her face with his wings, bringing them sweeping softly from behind his shoulders and then back. The huge eyes regarded him for a while, then she put her head back, stretching and sighing. A couple of pink cushions floated past, bumping into her floating arms and ricocheting slowly away.

The yacht’s hire-limit warning chimed; it wasn’t allowed to stray too far from Tier. He’d already told it to cruise back in when it hit the limit; it duly fired its engines and they were pressed back into the slickly warm surfaces of the couches and cushions in a delicious tangle of limbs for a while. The girl wriggled with a succulent slowness, eyes quite dark now.

He looked over to one side and saw the little camera drone she’d brought, sitting on the ledge under one of the diamond view ports, its one beady eye still fastened on the two of them. He winked at it.

Something moved outside, in the darkness, amongst the slow wheeling turn of stars. He watched it for a while. The yacht murmured, engine firing quietly; some apparent gravity stuck him and the girl to the ceiling for a second or two, then weightlessness returned. The girl made a couple of small noises that might have indicated she was asleep, and seemed to relax inside, letting go of him. He pulled her closer with his arms while his wings beat once, twice, bringing them both closer to the view port.

Outside, close, by, a ship was passing by, heading inbound on its final approach for Tier. They must have been almost directly in its path; the yacht’s engine-burn had been avoidance action. Leffid looked down at the sleeping girl, wondering if he ought to wake her so that she could watch; there was something magical about seeing this great craft going sliding silently by, its dark, spectacularly embellished hull slicing space just a hundred metres away.

He had an idea, and grinned to himself and stretched out his hand to take the little camera drone — currently getting a fine view of the lass’s backside and his balls — and turn it round, point it out the view port at the passing ship, so that she would have a surprise when she watched her recording, but then something else caught his attention, and his hand never did touch the camera drone.

Instead he stared out of the port, his eyes fastened on a section of the vessel’s hull.

The ship passed on by. He kept staring out into space.

The girl sighed and moved; two of her arms went out and drew his face towards hers; she squeezed him from inside.

“Wooooo,” she breathed, and kissed him. Their first real kiss, without the gelsuit over her face. Eyes still enchanting, oceanically deep and enchanting…

Estray. Her name was Estray. Of course. Common enough name for an uncommonly attractive girl. Here for a month, eh? Leffid congratulated himself. This could end up being a good Festival.

They started caressing each other again.

It was just as good as the first time, but no better because he still wasn’t able to give the proceedings his full attention; now, instead of trying to remember what the girl’s name was, he couldn’t stop wondering why there was an Elencher emergency message spattered minutely across the scar-hull of an Affronter light cruiser.