The Hydrogen Sonata

Twelve (S -16)

“This isn’t Ospin! These aren’t the Dataversities! What the fuck’s going on?”

Cossont had woken from a very deep and pleasant sleep, ordered breakfast and then asked the ship to show her where they were; ahead view or whatever it was called. The Mistake Not… had obliged, presenting the semblance of a deep screen across the bottom of her billow bed, just above her toes. The image it displayed was of a yellow-orange sun apparently setting behind a large rocky planet with dark striated clouds half obscuring a surface of mottled dark-tan land and deep-blue seas. Given that Ospin was a red giant system devoid of any rocky planets, this was all wrong.

“Eh? What?” Pyan yelped, fluttering untidily up from where it had settled on the floor during the night. “Not another emergency! My processing isn’t built to take this!”

The ship appeared to be sinking quickly through a multiply banded set of assorted manufacturies, small habs and other planetary satellites, dipping rapidly into the shadow of the planet so that the sun winked out. A bright spread of the satellites continued to shine against the dark surface beneath, then the ship was beneath them too.

“Change of plan,” Berdle told her, the Mistake Not…’s avatar appearing in one corner of the holo, face absurdly big against the landscape below. “You’d better get dressed.”

The image continued to show the planet getting nearer; they were almost in the atmosphere. The place looked familiar somehow. Also, there was something wrong about something here but she hadn’t worked out what yet.

“Where the hell are we?” she wailed.

“Xown, in the Mureite system.”

“What!”

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” Pyan said dramatically, and flopped over backwards, spread out over the bed, lying limp.

“I just fucking left Xown!” Cossont yelled, watching the landscape whip past underneath. “That’s where I started out!”

“Welcome back,” Berdle said, deadpan. “Are you getting dressed yet?”

“Wait a moment…” Cossont was staring at a black line filling the horizon ahead. Entirely filling the horizon ahead, from one extent to the other, like a vast dam across the sky. “Is that the fucking Girdlecity?”

“We’re just a few minutes away. Better get dressed fast.”

She jumped out of bed, started pulling on clothes, muttering and cursing. She stopped, frowned, sniffed, looked carefully at the Lords of Excrement jacket. Everything had been cleaned, and repaired. “Not so much as a by-your-fucking-leave,” she muttered, pulling on freshly polished boots.

She glanced at the screen again. Thin wispy cloud, not far below. Sea beneath. Dark-blue sky above. Still sea beneath. A few filmy wisps of cloud shot past, level.

“Wait a fucking—” she said, just as she’d started pushing her fingers through her unkempt hair. “We’re not even on the fucking ship, are we? It’d never come this far down—”

“No, we’re not,” Berdle said. “We left about five minutes ago.”

“We’re still on the shuttle.”

“Yes.”

She looked round the cabin. “So where are you?”

A double door parted in one wall and Berdle, sat in some sort of complicated seat with a giant screen in front, turned and looked back at her. “Hello.” The avatar waved.

“Why the fuck are we — why am I — back on Xown?” She strode through to what proved to be a flight deck or something and threw herself down in the seat beside Berdle’s. She glared at him as hard as she could but the avatar appeared impervious.

The wrap-screen showed the Girdlecity as a black mass filling most of the view. Spread across the huge, near-vertical cliff confronting them there were hints and slivers of something lighter than its pitch-black surface where patches of dark-blue sky were visible through its filigree of open-work sections.

“We are here,” Berdle told her, “because while you were asleep, more information came in, as information is prone to do, and one particular detail passed on by another ship involved happened to be the Culture full name of your friend Mr QiRia. Which would be Tursensa Ngaroe Hgan QiRia dam Yutton.”

“But I didn’t—!” Cossont started to say, then stopped herself.

Berdle nodded. “No, you didn’t say who the Culture person was you were talking about earlier, but we’d already kind of worked that out.”

“Oh, had you now?” Cossont said, trying to sound defiant, but feeling herself sink a little further into the seat.

“First thing I did with the full name was plug it into all the data I’ve been soaking up since I’ve been here; Gzilt stuff,” Berdle said. “All the Gzilt stuff; everything not officially private, anyway. And in amongst the passenger manifests for people making a trip to Xown five years ago a name popped out; Yutten Turse. Claimed to be Peace Faction Culture and to have come all the way from somewhere called Neressi, which, on closer inspection, is somewhere that doesn’t exist, or is perhaps a colloquial name for a place nobody’s catalogued properly.” Berdle glanced at her, grinning. “Tut, tut.”

The Girdlecity really did fill the screen now. Cossont had to crane her neck to see anything that wasn’t the vast, dark mass of it. Right at the top she could see the sky, speckled with stars and orbiting sats, but it was just a thin band above the striated black curtain of the structure. Below, there were waves; the Girdlecity was crossing sea. She knew it did, in two places. Here, its colossal architecture was even more mind-boggling than anywhere else on its circuit of the planet. It extended undersea, still growing in girth, descending an extra kilometre beneath the waves if this was the Hzu Sea, an extra two and half thousand metres if this was Ocean.

“Doesn’t that count as an amateur mistake if he’s trying to keep off everybody’s sensors?” Cossont asked.

Berdle shrugged. “I suppose, but in the end he’s just an old guy trying to stay out of the limelight, not some SC super-agent on a mission. Not the end of the world for him if he is discovered, anyway; not like he’s going to get slung into prison or have his memories wiped. He’d become the object of some unwanted media attention for a while and there’d be a bunch of Minds who’d love to talk to him, but he’d be able to disappear again fairly quickly with the cooperation of a Mind and ship or two.” Berdle paused, looked quizzically at her. “You’ve met him; maybe he’d like to get caught briefly, just to get to feel important, like he’s not been forgotten.”

“Maybe.” Cossont crossed all four of her arms, forming a cage across her chest. “Are you saying he really is the age he says he is?”

Berdle nodded. “Looks like it.”

“And you think this is going to be him. Have been him. This Yutten Turse guy?”

“Ran all this past a few stats packages,” Berdle said, “and, even allowing for appropriate fuzzinesses of intra-species spelling, phonetics and pronunciation, the match chances are better than seventy per cent.” The avatar nodded at a sub-screen set into the haptic band set across the centre of the encompassing main screen. “Got some screen of him.” A holo leapt out, miniaturised. The first item was a still image of a man in late middle age, wearing a big silly grin, a loud shirt and a grass hat.

“Is that supposed to be him?” Cossont asked. She was still feeling cross.

Berdle nodded. “That is Mr Yutten Turse, of who-knows-whereville.”

“Looks nothing like him,” she snorted. Though, zooming in on the face, there might have been something familiar about his eyes.

“Hmm,” Berdle said, obviously unconcerned. “Still, he was coming here, to the Girdlecity.”

Cossont snorted again. “You might be surprised how little that narrows things down, spaceship.”

Berdle smiled but didn’t look at her. “I am aware of the structure’s dimensions.”

On the sub-screen, some moving footage followed: the man seemed to get slightly lost in the transit lounge, apparently unsure which way to go, until he left, led by a modest amount of luggage on a helpful float-trolley. Maybe he did walk a little like QiRia. Maybe. He disappeared. A still of his face came back, then was replaced by another set of screen images which seemed to show him leaving again, dressed similarly but wearing big dark glasses. If anything, he looked even less sure where he was going on the way back. The images faded away and the sub-screen went dark.

Ahead, the view was all Girdlecity; even sitting forwards, craning her neck, there was no sign of sky or sea. A few tiny, dim lights were only now starting to prick the obsidian surface of the structure. Berdle must have thought an instruction to the shuttle, because the screen extended smoothly, silently backwards, so that the view now took in directly overhead and a little further back. Looking straight up, she could see the sky again. She nearly said thank you, but didn’t.

“Hello, that looks familiar,” Pyan said, flapping and hopping through to sit on her lap. “Girdlecity?”

“Huh,” Cossont said.

“Oh,” Pyan said. “Hzu coast. That’ll be pretty.”

How fucking dare QiRia come back to where she lived — not just the civilisation but the system, the planet where she lived — and not look her up? What sort of friend was that?

“So, do we think he was looking for somebody?” she asked.

“According to his subsequent movements, happily documented by your fearsomely watchful Aliens Bureau, it seems he was looking for a particular person or for a particular artefact/location,” Berdle said. “Which he seems to have found.”

“Where in the Girdlecity?” Cossont asked. This wasn’t the bit she knew; this was about a third of the way round the planet from Kwaalon and the great plains.

“He was going to Launch Falls,” Berdle said.

“That’s nowhere near here,” she told him.

“I know. The artefact/location concerned has moved.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yes. It’s an airship.”

“One of the internals?”

“Only one still moving, apparently.”

“I’ve heard of it,” she told the avatar.

“Apparently it’s famous,” Berdle confirmed. “Well, notorious.”

“Hope you’re ready for a party,” she told the avatar, one eyebrow hoisted even though it wasn’t looking at her.

The avatar’s head tipped briefly. “Ready for anything.”

Cossont was silent for a moment as the Girdlecity drifted closer and more detail began to show on the dark textures of its surface. “It really didn’t look all that much like him,” she said.

“What has that got to do with anything?” The avatar glanced at her. “Seventy per cent represents a good chance.”

Cossont frowned suddenly. “Where did you say he claimed to have come from?”

“Neressi.”

“Spell that?” The avatar spelled it for her. “In Marain?” she asked, frown deepening. She listened again, nodded. Ahead, whole constellations of lights were brightening into existence against the surface of the Girdlecity as they continued to draw closer. They were still fifteen or twenty kilometres out. She sighed. “It’s probably better than seventy per cent,” she told the avatar. “When he was on Perytch IV he was… you know… transplanted, had his consciousness transferred into this gigantic sea creature. He took the name… Isseren.”

Berdle nodded. “Ah-ha,” the avatar said, softly.

“Oh!” Pyan said, after a moment. “Backwards!”

“Yes,” Cossont said sourly. “Fucking backwards.”

Jelwilin Keril, the Iwenick Cultural Mission Director, left the Strategic Outreach Element CH2OH.(CHOH)4.CHO in his private yacht.

At least he was able to call his yacht something sensible. He’d named it Iberre, in honour of his father-mother. And he was allowed to refer to it as a yacht, not a Space-Capable Inter-Element Transportation Component, or something of similar over-literal awkwardness. He looked back at the Strategic Outreach Element CH2OH.(CHOH)4.CHO. It hung against the star-flecked blackness, a svelte grey flattened ellipsoid.

Strategic Outreach Element. Everybody else would just call it a ship.

Still, this was modern-day thinking. “Ship” just sounded a bit crude, apparently — redolent of bulbous wooden things rolling around on the high seas, infested with parasites and stinking with drunken, seasick sailors. Even the Culture’s partiality to the term “unit” — used by the Iwenick until recently in a slightly cringing attempt at flattery — was seen as not fully expressing the powers and capabilities of the vessels it was attached to. Apparently, according to the advisors who made their living thinking about this sort of thing, “unit” was for ever associated with the words “light industrial”.

He turned back. Never mind. But he knew exactly why he was thinking about names.

The Liseiden flagship, the Collective Purposes vessel Gellemtyan-Asool-Anafawaya (the name of some ancient Liseiden hero, so acceptable, if unpronounceable) swelled in the screen, a well-lit hangar already open for the yacht. The ship was a jumbled mass of planes and edges, barely even symmetrical from certain angles. It was supposed to appear complicated and impressive but to Jelwilin it just looked like a confused slump of different-sized boxes, like the result of an accident in a warehouse.

Jelwilin inspected his image in a screen. Full uniform, perfectly groomed, manicured and made-up. He looked great — not that an alien would notice or care. This could all have been done in a few minutes, of course, by him simply holo-ing in to the Liseiden ship’s command deck and talking to them that way, but there were times when a personal appearance — even a personal appearance inside a glorified fish bowl — was the only way to show the desired portion of respect, and the Liseiden were certainly expecting the full serving, to compensate for the wound to their pride and expectations they’d just experienced at the hands of the perfidious Gzilt. Hence the ship rendezvous and the face-to-face.

Cultural Mission Director Jelwilin patted down his uniform jacket, adjusted a cuff. He felt the need to urinate, but he had already done so before leaving the ship, and knew this was simply the result of nerves.

“He wants more?” Team Principal Tyun roared. “The son-of-a-runt!”

Sitting — comfortably enough, but very conscious that he was contained within a perfectly transparent sphere, exposed to inspection from every side — in front of the array of sinuously floating Liseiden, their bodies waving to and fro like fat scarves in a slow-motion breeze, Cultural Mission Director Jelwilin set his face as well as he could in an expression of understanding and shared pain. The Liseiden might not have any officers capable of interpreting his species’ facial expressions, but they would probably have AIs which could; might as well make the effort. Anyway, it was all integral to the part he was playing here. Method diplomacy.

“The septame tells us that he is confident that he can overturn the decision,” Jelwilin said calmly. “And Ambassador Mierbeunes is very — and very encouragingly — insistent that the septame will be able to make this happen. Ambassador Mierbeunes is one of our most senior and most experienced diplomats, as well as one of the most successful. I have known him for many years and I don’t think I have ever seen him more confident in the abilities of another person. The thing is that to achieve what he believes he can, Septame Banstegeyn assures us that he needs to take greater risks than those he has taken until now. Accordingly, he asks for a greater reward. And, frankly, Team Principal, what he asks for is something it costs you next to nothing to agree to. And I emphasise ‘agree to’ rather than, say, ‘grant’ or even ‘fully commit to in your soul’.”

Tyun’s voice seemed to come from somewhere underneath the little stalk-seat Jelwilin was sitting on. It was disconcerting, as was being able to hear the Liseiden’s actual words, booming liquidly — if muffled — against the surface of the transparent sphere, a sort of continuous guttural bubbling that barely preceded the translated version.

“I’m taking the point that it might seem to cost us next to nothing to agree to renaming a local star,” the Team Principal said, “but what I want to ask is: is that actually relevant? I think we risk being seen to reward failure if we concede this, Cultural Mission Director. We are not here to indulge that sort of shit.”

“If I might liken this to a military campaign, Team Principal,” Jelwilin said, “what we have suffered here is a reverse, and a battle lost, certainly, but it is not final defeat, and the war remains winnable. Of course I appreciate that one might, in theory, be seen to be rewarding failure, but a side that shoots its generals after every lost battle would quickly run out of good generals as well as bad, or end up with a population of generals who did everything they could to avoid all battles, even the most winnable, just in case.”

“But that is not the alternative, Jelwilin,” Tyun said. “The alternative is to take a more robust attitude to securing the acquisition of the technology and infrastructure we’ve been seeking and thought we’d been promised. Let me be clear. We have the fire-power to enforce the bargain that was already arrived at. We cannot, and we will not, be seen to be weak in this.”

Jelwilin looked pained. “Obviously, we all hope that using force of arms would be regarded as very much the last resort. I need hardly tell you, sir, that hostilities are always expensive, of reputation as well as materiel, and it would, I am sure you would agree, be better to settle this without recourse to the uncertainties and chaos of war, particularly given the already engaged interest of another level-eight civ in the shape of the Culture, and especially following the still unexplained attack on the regimental HQ of the Fourteenth on Eshri; things are very delicately poised after that, and even without the involvement of the Culture I need hardly point out that, although much depleted, the Gzilt fleet remains an extremely powerful force. Please, Team Principal, let me report back to Ambassador Mierbeunes that I have your permission to continue to pursue a more peaceful solution.”

“Yes, well, the Culture appears to have lost interest in us,” Tyun said. “The ship they sent as escort apparently found more pressing matters to attend to.”

“I understood that a Thug-class Fast Picket was on its way to join you,” Jelwilin said.

“Hmm. Not if I can help it. We’re going to try throwing them off with some judicious re-dispositioning. A moment,” Tyun said. The transparent sphere surrounding Jelwilin suddenly became opaque, leaving the Cultural Mission Director staring at a fuzzy representation of the Liseiden ship’s command centre. He could make out some deep, distant-sounding bubbling noises that were doubtless the Liseiden discussing the matter amongst themselves.

“The fire-power to enforce the bargain”, indeed. That was overly aggressive. What were they playing at? Hadn’t the Liseiden simmed this? If there was a proper shooting war between the Liseiden and the Ronte, even the victor would probably come out of it worse off in the long term. Never mind any formal censure from the Galactic Council; high-level players like the Culture would take a dim view of a situation that looked entirely soluble by peaceful means suddenly tipping into the mayhem of a war, no matter how small. Whoever instigated that would find themselves on the wrong end of not just one short leash but several, as a bunch of their betters suddenly decided they ought to keep a closer eye on these semi-barbarians who’d had the temerity to threaten the galactic peace.

And all for some territory and left-behind tech. Or at least a cut of it, in the Iwenick’s case.

Jelwilin had always respected those civilisations that left their achievements behind, intact, when they Sublimed, so that the results of their labour and intellects could be put to use by others, but he could appreciate that there were reasons — beyond a childish desire to take your toys with you — for razing your structures, flattening your cities, collapsing your habitats, deleting all the hi-tech-enabling information you possessed and destroying anything else that people might fight over. Well, save for planets, he supposed.

Some species did it that way, and apparently a proportion always had, ever since Subliming began, so there was no particular disgrace in it. The Gzilt, though, had never been big on razing or burning; certainly not just for the sake of it. They were, and had always been, pragmatic rather than revengeful. Supposedly this was one of the behaviours they’d contributed to the demeanour of the Culture right at the beginning, even though they hadn’t actually joined it.

The sphere went transparent again. Discussions had obviously been concluded. Jelwilin sat up straight and assumed an expression of cautious optimism.

“Mission Director,” Tyun said. “We have come to a decision.” The Liseiden sounded curt, severe. Jelwilin felt relief. Tyun would be compensating for a decision to keep talking rather than to get threatening. A conciliatory, regretful or solemn tone would have augured very badly. “You may authorise Ambassador Mierbeunes to continue negotiations and continue our earlier course regarding the septame.”

Jelwilin bowed. “Thank you, Team Principal.”

“Furthermore, to reinforce the perception of our commitment to a successful outcome regarding the totality of this matter, we shall re-disposition the main portion of our fleet to Zyse.”

Jelwilin assumed his pained expression again.

“Team Principal, if I might make a suggestion—”

“No, thank you, Mission Director,” the Liseiden said, politely but firmly. “You may not. Kindly don’t make the mistake of imagining you’re entering this discussion anywhere else than following its conclusion. The actions I’ve outlined are settled. They will not be subject to further negotiation. We thank you for your assistance and valued advice.”

Jelwilin knew when to give way with grace. “I understand, Team Principal,” he said. “I wish us both the best fortune in these endeavours.”

“Thank you,” Tyun said, his body making slow S shapes in some unseen current. “You may return to your… Element.”

As far as anybody could tell, the Girdlecity of Xown had been built by the long-Sublimed Werpesh simply because they could. Nearly thirty thousand kilometres long, the structure formed a single vast bracelet round the equator of the world. A-shaped in cross-section, over a hundred kilometres across at the base, dozens at the top and just under two hundred klicks high — so tall that it protruded above almost all the atmosphere, providing Xown with a spaceport sufficiently prodigious to have served a thousand such worlds — the Girdlecity was a single colossal barricade, an everywhere-pierced wall, halving the planet.

Even building on this extraordinary scale, there were touches of elegance to its design; because Xown was a planet with little wobble and the Girdlecity straddled the equator, it effectively sat between the narrow tropic lines, only ever casting a shadow on lower parts of itself, never on the planet’s surface.

And it could easily have been bigger. As a Non-Gravitationally Constrained Self-Supporting Artefact, or, colloquially, just an NG — which sort of stood for Neutral-Gravity structure — it was formed from a mix of ordinary and exotic materials that meant only a tiny fraction of its mass actually imposed itself as weight upon either its own lower reaches or on the crust of the planet beneath. Had they wanted, the Werpesh could have arranged it so that where the mighty structure’s foundations met Xown’s bedrock, they exerted a gentle upward pull, rather than a modest load. Artefacts constructed using this sort of technology could be extended indefinitely, with no annoying tendency to collapse in on themselves. Most such structures were in space, and some were much bigger.

The Girdlecity had the additional problem of needing to keep its structural elements tuned for their precise place within the slope of the planet’s gravity well, but this had proved trivial. Even so, while nearly weightless, the artefact still had colossal mass, and its effect on Xown’s total angular momentum had been to slow down the planet’s rotation by nearly a second a year.

As was the case with each of their impressive if arguably rather pointless Sculpt worlds, the main point of the Girdlecity, as far as its builders had been concerned, appeared to have been the building of it, rather than any subsequent use it might have been put to. The Werpesh — famously secretive and opaquely motivated — had never chosen to elaborate on their reasons for constructing it. Some of them had lived in portions of it and it did function as a kind of grossly over-engineered spaceport, but the main use it might have had — attracting alien tourists — wasn’t one the Werpesh had ever chosen to promote. Most of the time, before the Werpesh finally did the decent thing and Sublimed, the sparsely populated, barely used Girdlecity had just sort of sat there.

The Gzilt had made better use of it, but even then, in nearly eleven thousand years of custodianship, they had never even come close to filling it entirely, and rarely ventured into the sections above the level where there was natural atmosphere to breathe, leaving over ninety per cent of it empty of life. Space habitats, for all their even greater intrinsic artificiality, were capable of providing far more agreeable, pleasantly rural, less brutally industrial-feeling places in which to live.

Still, the Girdlecity had contained many billions, and even now contained hundreds of millions of Gzilt. And in a sense, of course, it still contained those billions, except the vast majority of them were Stored, existing in a state of suspended animation, awaiting the pre-waking just before the Instigation that would itself lead to their new life in the Sublime.

There had always been open tunnels within the Girdlecity; routes — some never less than half a kilometre in diameter — within the length of it that stretched throughout its fretwork of vast tubes, girders, walls and components both structural and habitative to provide a kind of large-scale transport network for airships. The great dirigibles had plied the vast tunnels for millennia, carrying people and occasionally goods, even though there were many faster, more efficient systems built into the Girdlecity. Airship travel was seen as romantic.

Now, as far as was known, there was only one airship still making its way through the structure, and it was home to the Last Party.

The Last Party was a five-year-long Debaucheriad aboard the airship Equatorial 353; it circled the Girdlecity once a year, the last revolution being timed to coincide with the Instigation, when, a day or two earlier, the Equatorial 353 would arrive back at Launch Falls, the section of the Girdlecity where it had begun its voyage.

The Equatorial 353 was a fairly conventional vacuum dirigible two kilometres long and four hundred metres across; it had always been a kind of contained cruise ship, slipping through the structure of the Girdlecity, taking one or other of the various routes made available through the structure by the network of tunnels, throughways and assorted larger spaces dispersed within it.

Nominally owned by one of the many collectives which had been set up within the Girdlecity, it had been due to cease flying with all the other ships as the waking population of the structure dwindled to less than five per cent of what it had once been. Then a small group within the collective — one based on the pursuit of art and experimental living, so it had been pretty eccentric even at the best of times — had suggested keeping the thing flying, right to the end, and making a proper going-away party of its last flight.

The original idea had been to have a year-long party, one that would have started over four years after the suggestion was first put forward, but such was the excitement the idea produced, nobody could stand to wait that long so the plan was altered: it would be a five-year-long party, and fate help all who dared to sail on it.

The small group within the collective had been led, or at least fronted, by a man called Ximenyr, who’d been into a variety of radical body arts and amendment. He was one of the founding members of the Last Party, and one of a few dozen out of the original few hundred who had started out who was still determinedly partying; most of the rest had given up, burned out, been hospitalised or died. A few had even got religion. The party hadn’t fizzled out, though; quite the opposite. It had grown in size over the years as more and more people heard about it and arrived to sample its delights until it entirely filled the two thousand accommodation and social units aboard the ship and there was supposedly a waiting list if you wanted to stay overnight. Though, given that one of the (few) guiding principles of the Last Party was that all things ought to be as shambolic as possible at all times — and it had entirely lived up to this rule — nobody really took this restriction especially seriously. Unless, of course, the sheer weight of bodies aboard led to the airship starting to bump along the bottom of its open-work tunnel, in which case it was time to restore buoyancy by disposing of any blatantly unnecessary items, such as articles of furniture.

“Are we clear?”

“Consider me briefed. How close do you have to get?”

“Just inside might make all the difference, though the closer to the man himself the better. ROAT, preferably.”

“Roat?”

“Reach Out And Touch. This sort of distance.”

“Okay.”

~Hear me via the earbud?

“Yes,” she said. She’d never been great at sub-vocalising.

“Do you want me to wake the android Eglyle Parinherm?”

“Not especially.”

“And how necessary is it that your familiar accompanies us?”

“Very!”

“I wasn’t really talking to you. Ms Cossont?”

“Let’s compromise on moderately. It can be useful.”

“‘Useful’?” Pyan screeched. “Is that all?”

“Can you ask it to be discreet?”

“Certainly. Pyan; until further notice, shut the fuck up.”

“Well, really!”

Cossont took a step back. “Is your face…?” she said. “Your head’s changing!”

Berdle shrugged. In the last few moments the avatar had gone from its earlier appearance to looking like a tall, handsome Gzilt male with a dramatically sculpted facial bone structure.

“Just fitting in,” the avatar said reasonably. Berdle definitely looked masculine now, Cossont thought. Its whole body had altered; it/he looked like a strikingly attractive and leanly fit Gzilt male.

“How are you doing this?” she asked.

“Skilfully,” Berdle replied, expressionless.

WHAT WANT? said the face in front of them.

“You can hear, can’t you?” Cossont said, speaking loudly and clearly and even bending forward a little.

The person in front of them appeared to have a round flat face exactly like a large plate of alphabet soup: a yellow-brown liquid holding lots of little white letters, somehow held at ninety degrees to vertical when it looked convincingly as though the whole lot should be spilling to the floor of the balcony hangar. It could, Cossont supposed, be a screen or more likely a holo, but when she’d first bent forward to look at it she’d have sworn it was real; there was vapour coming off it and she could smell the soup. Otherwise the person looked physically relatively normal; either a thin female or a rather hippy male of average height dressed in a motley of violently spray-painted military gear. The top, sides and chin of his/her head flowed seemingly naturally into the bowl making up their face.

The letters in the soup bowl rearranged themselves: COURSE HEAR!

Berdle, standing alongside Cossont, crossed one leg over the other, put his arm over her shoulders and drew deeply on a fat drug stick. He held the breath, grinned at the person with the soup-bowl face. Berdle was dressed like a badly lagged pipe; a thick, red, pillowy material wrapping his limbs and torso was held in place by loose-looking black straps.

“We’d like to talk to The Master of the Revels,” Cossont said, a little more quietly. This was the title Ximenyr had taken nearly a year earlier, for the last circuit of the Girdlecity and the planet before the Big Enfold.

WHO?

Cossont sighed. “Ximenyr.”

Berdle brushed some ash off Cossont’s jacket. She hadn’t even seen Berdle change; in some moment between the module touching down on a deserted piazza about a kilometre above the waves and them walking off the deck into the structure he’d gone from whatever he’d been wearing earlier (she couldn’t remember) to what he was wearing now.

She’d looked back, frowned, and started wondering if this was some projection. She’d stepped towards him as they’d walked, rubbed his sleeve fabric between thumb and finger. Nope; real.

“Sorry,” she’d said.

“None taken,” he’d replied. She’d looked askance.

Maybe, she’d thought, it was some ultra-clever and adaptable piece or pieces of clothing, or — along with his whole face-and-body-altering thing earlier — maybe it meant the entire avatar was some sort of swarm-being, made up of tiny machines. She’d looked him hard in the eye, from very close up, but he’d still contrived to look like flesh and blood.

She’d pulled away. “Sorry, again.”

“Still none taken.”

She was dressed as she had been, freshly repaired Lords of Excrement jacket included, with Pyan rolled into a scarf shape and draped over her shoulders.

They’d walked through the empty tubularity of the local architecture, their way lit by a few small and distant lights. They’d come to a long gallery where the nose of the airship was just starting to slide past like a colossal walking-speed tube train. It was moving so slowly she’d thought it had stopped, but it was still going, if only at a slow stroll. Thirty thousand klicks in a year; she supposed that did equate to strolling speed. The tunnel the ship moved in looked like a gigantic woven basket of dark filaments, stretching to a hazed curve within the greater structural and architectural elements of the Girdlecity. A few random lights shone; so few the average unaided eye would have interpreted the gloom as something close to utter darkness. Good to have augmentation, she’d thought. She’d glanced at the avatar. Berdle probably had eyes that could see through planets.

A thin metal net strung on stanchions protected them from the drop into the curve of tunnel.

The molecule-thin hull of the ship was probably red underneath, though it was hard to tell in the paltry light because the surface was so thoroughly splattered with a berserk variety of patterns, diagrams, logos and drawings, some illuminated, some moving — some looping, some not — and covered with flowing, bedraggled banners, gently waving pennants and ragged flags.

The nose pushed slowly out past them, right to left, the ship seeming to broaden out to meet them, metre by metre, until it looked like the airship was going to collide with the gallery she and Berdle stood on. There was what looked like a trench gouged in the side of the ship, level with the gallery they stood on.

~Lateral hangar-balcony, the avatar had sent. Then he looked down, and she had the very strong impression Berdle was looking somehow through the airship. ~Hmm. Taking on a lot of water. Interesting.

The hangar-balcony was closed off with what were probably lengths of diamond film. One of these had slid aside just as that part of the trench had started to pass them. Berdle had reached down, lifted the metal net away. The floor of the hangar-balcony was so close they could just step onto it across a half-metre gap. That had been when the soup-faced person had come, almost tumbling, out of a nearby door and asked them WHAT WANT?

~Combat arbite just behind the door, Berdle had told Cossont. ~One-legged combat arbite with no ammunition and the mechanical equivalent of arthritis, but just so’s you know.

The letters forming the word WHO! had taken their time drifting apart. Now they slipped beneath the yellow-brown surface while others surfaced and rearranged themselves.

ASLEEP said the word now seemingly floating on the soup-face.

The avatar was exhaling, blowing the smoke out his ears.

~No, he’s not, he said quietly via Cossont’s earbud. Berdle claimed to have something called a scout missile within metres of Ximenyr, inserted into his cabin without him noticing while the module had still been approaching the Girdlecity. ~Shall I call him now?

“We could just call him,” Cossont said to the soup-face, glancing at Berdle. “Or we could wait. That would only be polite. Tell him an old friend of Mr QiRia is here to see him.”

~We ought to call him. Time’s a-wasting.

APPOINTMENT?

“That’s very kind,” Cossont said. “But we won’t need one. I’m sure he’ll see us as soon as he can.”

The soup-face jerked back a little as though surprised. New letters arranged themselves quickly, struggling to find enough room in the space available.

NODOYO UHAV EAPP Some letters disappeared; the rest rearranged themselves again. NO. YOU HAVE APP?

“No, we don’t,” Cossont said patiently. “This is, in its own small way, urgent. You don’t have appointments for urgent things, as a rule, do you?”

NO APPOINT?

“We’d be terribly obliged if you’d just let him know we’re here, right now. Don’t forget to mention Mr QiRia’s name.”

SORRY.

“Sorry?” Cossont said. She tapped one booted foot while the letters swam about.

STILL ASLEEP

~Call? Berdle sent.

“We’ll call him ourselves,” Cossont said.

~Thank you. Calling.

YBL

“Cheers, I’m sure we will be lucky,” Cossont said.

~Ringing.

Somewhere beyond the open-work wall behind them, the grey light of dawn was introducing a wash of colour into the detail of the giant multiply pierced tunnel.

~About to get bright, Berdle sent via the earbud. ~Little danger. Still ringing.

An instant later, light burst and flooded all around them and a cacophony assailed Cossont’s ears. She looked round and saw the basket-work of the great open tunnel and the parts of the structure immediately beyond all lit up with stuttering pulses of multi-coloured light. Deep thuds were followed by the crackling boom and partial echo of air explosions.

DAWN FIREWKS

“How quaint,” Cossont said.

~He’s picked up. Over to you.

“Mr Ximenyr?” Cossont said, turning slightly away from the soup-face.

“Who is this?” a deep male voice drawled. He sounded sleepy or just stoned.

“My name is Vyr Cossont. I’m—”

“Wait, wait, girl; how did you get through to — nobody’s supposed to be—”

~Privacied, Berdle sent to her, voice quick and clipped. ~Continues: “—able to get through on this without…” Cossont heard Ximenyr’s voice continue, even though the connection was quiet. “You any…?” the human voice said. “Yeah, check the bases, pull it off replay. Veer Kossin or something.”

“Yeah,” the man said via the earbud again. “How’d you get through to me here? Not supposed to accept…” His voice trailed off. It sounded like he’d been distracted.

~An acolyte is performing a sexual act on Mr Ximenyr, Berdle reported.

Cossont listened to some heavy breathing for a moment or two, then said, quite loudly, “I’m an old friend of Mr QiRia; he visited you five years ago, at the start of the party. Do you remember him?”

The heavy breathing stopped.

~Mr Ximenyr has pushed the acolyte away, Berdle reported. ~The sexual act has ceased.

“Well, if I don’t, something or somebody will remember for me, I’m sure,” Ximenyr said. “Assuming this actually happened. Who did you say again?”

“My name is Vyr Cossont. Friend of Ngaroe QiRia. I’d like to meet with you.”

“Yeah… How did you get through?”

~Mr Ximenyr is gesturing to call up a video feed from here, the avatar sent. Berdle sucked on the drug stick, bent close to Cossont’s ear and said, “With great difficulty!” Cossont coughed, waved the resulting smoke away. The avatar smiled up at the corner of the hangar-balcony. Cossont looked too but couldn’t see anything. “Hi,” the avatar said, and waved. The rest of the smoke came out of his ears again.

“Uh-huh,” the deep voice said. “And you would be?”

“Dying to meet you, Master of the Revels, sir,” Berdle said cheerily. “My name’s Berdle.”

Cossont heard silence on the connection for a moment.

~He’s saying: “‘Berdle’?… Nothing? Vyr Cossont? Mil reserve? Just civilian?… Muso, yeah? Wearing an Excrements top; that’s cool enough. And look at her; I’d — Wait a fucking minute. I remember that name. No, QiRia. Fucking QiRia fella. Fuck, him. Fuck. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Fucking… welcome aboard, classical girl. Yeah. Right.”

“Hello?”

“Mr Ximenyr.”

“Come on in. Welcome. Hope you’re broad-minded.”

PLEASE COME IN

The wide door behind the soup-faced person was swung open by a one-legged combat arbite which made a slight creaking noise as it gestured for them to enter. Berdle handed the machine the stub of his blunt and it stood there looking at the drug stick as they followed the soup-faced person into the body of the airship.

The Last Party had grown to become several parties. There were at least four party cycles happening at any one point, roughly aligned with the times of the day/night cycle, so that no matter when you felt like partying — even if it was immediately after your own randomly houred breakfast — there would be a party just started or just about to start.

Led by the soup-faced person, they walked through broad open spaces, red-lit, where it looked like the party had been over for some time; small floating machines were picking up litter, the air was full of strange scents and the space part-full of ceiling-suspended pods and shallow platforms and things like giant hammocks, many of them transparent or translucent. There was quite a lot of sex happening, Cossont noticed, in and on the hammocks, and the air was also full of soft cries, the occasional piercing scream and all the other sounds associated with physical passion, unreservedly expressed. Cossont felt herself becoming surprisingly hot and bothered by it all; usually she had pretty good control of herself.

~The atmosphere is saturated with compounds sexually stimulating to your species, Berdle sent as they ducked underneath an especially large hammock where several frolicking bed-fellows were contorting themselves in particularly inventive combinations.

“Sex-scent city!” Pyan agreed, through the earbud.

A male face and torso swung down from a nearby platform. Sweating, breathing hard, the man smiled at Vyr. “Like the arms,” he said, breathlessly. “You’d be so very welcome.” Then, with a look of slight surprise, he was pulled back up onto the platform by a couple of grinning naked women, who blew kisses at an uncomprehending Berdle.

A short dark corridor led to another wide room where extravagantly costumed, masked people danced; some to a space-filling song of powerful beats and trembling ululations, some to rhythms they were hearing through earbuds, their wildly eccentric motions at odds with everybody else around them.

DARK SOUND… SPACE AHEAD the soup-faced person told them, walking backwards down another intervening corridor, face turned towards them.

“About to get really loud,” Cossont told Berdle.

“I can feel it through my feet,” he told her.

Cossont closed her ears.

Double doors led to the dark-sound dance floor, where the whole point was to hear with every part of your body except your ears. It was night-dark, strobe-lit; with each staccato pulse of light the near-naked dancers looked like marionettes frozen in poses of either ecstasy or torment. Cossont heard the wild, thudding music through the jelly in her eyes, via her lungs, resonating in the long bones of her arms and legs.

“Fuck me, that’s loud,” Pyan said in her ear, voice made high and tinny to get through.

Cossont opened her mouth a little to say “Shh,” to the creature. As she did so it was as though her mouth filled with noise; she felt her teeth vibrate.

Berdle looked unaffected.

Away from the dark-sound room, they passed a large circular oil swimming pool with a screen ceiling where people seemed to be practising synchronised floating in giant flower-like patterns. They climbed through a couple of levels where tired-but-happy-looking people were eating at tables — though one section seemed to be set aside for food-fights, with one just starting — then ascended via an adventurously steep and long escalator to a tall, broad corridor with what appeared to be a transparent ceiling showing the fretwork of tunnel moving slowly past above.

Ximenyr’s quarters lay through a sequence of intestinally curved, squishily floored round-section corridors hung with what looked like folds and strands of gaudy, hallucinatory vivid seaweeds, all moving and waving on invisible currents.

~That’s interesting, Berdle sent. ~Just lost feed from my scout missile. That is a little worrying.

Finally, at a doorway bearing an unmistakable resemblance to a vulva, the soup-faced person bowed and left them. The vulva irised, opening.

“This is a bit gross, isn’t it?” Pyan whispered. “It’s not just me thinking this, no?”

Cossont followed Berdle down a short, narrow corridor. Cossont’s earbud beeped to signal it was losing all external reception — something it had never done anywhere else in or on the Girdlecity, in all the years she’d lived within it.

They arrived into a chamber where a large, barrel-chested, handsome-looking man with vivid red skin and an unfeasible number of phalluses reclined on a giant, tipped bed. He was smiling at them. He wore a roomy-looking pair of shorts, so the penis he’d likely been born with was perhaps the only one not visible, but he had plenty of others, sprouting — short, stubby, flaccid — from at least forty points on his body, including four on his calves, six on each thigh, similar numbers on his upper and lower arms and one each where the nipples would have been on a mammal. His head, feet and hands looked normal. Around his thick neck lay something like a giant charm bracelet, weighed down with chunky trinkets, mostly jewel encrusted. He was attended by naked people — mostly females — all of whom had the heads of animals and mythical creatures.

~Again, Berdle sent, ~The atmosphere is full of sexually stimulating compounds. And I’ve found my scout missile. Oh-oh, as we say. I’m going to stop communicating like this for now, unless there’s an emergency. May no longer be secure.

“Oh-oh?” Cossont was thinking.

“Again,” Pyan whispered, “overdosing on sheer vulgarity.”

The roof above was not transparent but fashioned from some luxuriantly thick, crimson ruched material, centrally gathered so that it looked like a sphincter, and glistening as though dripping wet.

“Ms Berdle, Ms Cossont,” the man said in his deep, thick voice. “Pleased to meet you.” Then he opened his mouth a little wider and let a very long tongue snake out and delicately lick at first one eyebrow then the other, shaping them both neatly into place. The tongue disappeared again. He opened his eyes wide; he had fabulously pale blue irises, almost shining. His eyeballs rolled back into their sockets, the blue irises disappearing. They were replaced from below by dark red irises which rose into place and steadied. “Excuse me,” he said. “These pupils work better in daylight.” He smiled widely, showing very white teeth. “And to your familiar, Ms Cossont. Pyan, isn’t it? Welcome to you too.”

“Permission to speak?” Pyan said, sounding excited.

“No,” Cossont said quietly, then to Ximenyr said, “Hello. Thank you for seeing us.”

“And thank you for watching me,” Ximenyr said, and unhooked something from his collar of trinkets, holding it up in front of his face and inspecting it. It looked like a short thin pen or stylus of some sort, barely bigger than a child’s finger. Ximenyr looked at Berdle. “Your life signs are weirder than the lady’s familiar, so I’m guessing this belongs to you.”

“It does,” Berdle said. “My apologies. I was concerned you might refuse to see us initially and we might need some help in securing an audience. Also, I am impressed you were able to sense its presence and capture it. Congratulations.”

“Thank you. Flattery is always so satisfying,” Ximenyr said with what certainly appeared to be a sort of beatific sincerity. “Especially from…” he waved one long, elegant hand, exquisitely manicured “… an avatar, avatoid? Something of that nature?”

“Indeed, of the Culture vessel Mistake Not…”

There was just a hint of a pause; Cossont was fairly sure their host was listening on his own earbud.

“Voyeured upon by a Culture Mind,” Ximenyr said, sounding impressed. “I really am flattered. Though there is an all-hours feed from about eight different cameras all centred on this bed right here, so I’m not entirely sure why you bothered. Video only at points, so maybe you wanted the audio? Yeah? Anyway.” He nodded behind them. “Please; take a seat.”

Two of the animal-headed people — the heads looked as real, alive and functional as every other part of their human bodies — set two tall chairs behind them. Cossont and Berdle both sat. The dozen or so unusually headed people stood, arms folded, round the curved wall of the cabin.

Ximenyr held the tiny scout missile out. “I’m going to keep this, okay?” The little machine was secured to his charm necklace by an extendible chain.

“I would prefer to have it returned,” Berdle said.

“Don’t doubt,” Ximenyr said. “But you did invade my privacy.” There was some muffled spluttering and laughing at this from the people looking on, and Ximenyr’s face split into a smile again. He glanced round some of the animal-headed people. “Hey, you know what I mean.” He looked back at Berdle, grinning. “Anyway. Might let you have this back. But you need something from me, I’m sort of supposing, otherwise why, in an entirely cogent sense, would you be here in the first place? Hmm?” He set the tiny missile back where it had been, resting on his chest between what looked like an android’s thumb and a thick crystal cylinder, striped with encrusted jewels.

“It’s about Ngaroe QiRia,” Cossont said, glancing at Berdle.

“Gathered.” Ximenyr nodded at her. “Like the arms, incidentally. Who did that for you?”

“Frex Gerunke.”

“Know him. Helped teach him. Nice work? All working fine?”

“Perfectly.”

“And a Lords jacket. You really into them?”

“I played with them,” she confessed. “Briefly.” She really might have to change out of the Lords of Excrement jacket at some point, she realised.

“Really? You’re not mentioned in the playgraphy.” He seemed to think. “Unless you’re Sister Euphoria.”

Cossont sighed. “Guilty.”

Ximenyr smiled broadly. “Estimable, Ms Cossont. I’ve played tenser, a little sling, never the volupt. Hear it’s harder.”

“A little.”

“Four arms make it easier?”

“No; that’s for the elevenstring.”

“Ha! The Undecagonstring? I’ve heard they’re fucking insane.”

“No, that’s just those who play them.”

Ximenyr laughed. “Nobody’s played an elevenstring for the Party; you could audition while you’re here. That would help round things off.”

“Thank you, but we have more urgent business,” she told him.

“Yes, my friend Mr QiRia.”

“My friend too,” Cossont said.

“Really?” Ximenyr looked sceptical. “Can’t recall him mentioning you.”

Cossont sighed again. “That does not surprise me.”

Ximenyr grinned, stroked his chin. “Well, his memories are a little… compartmentalised. How do you know him?”

“I met him twenty years ago, just after he’d been a leviathid — a sea monster — for decades, on a place called Perytch IV. We only met up for a few days, but we talked a lot. How about you?”

“Oh, I knew him before then, back when I was horribly young and doing…” he held up one arm and stroked a couple of the penises on it “… this kind of thing for what passes for a living, amongst us.” He shrugged. “Rather than a profound artistic statement both exploring and interrogating the prospect of a willed self-extinctive event being sold as a civilisational phase-change cum level upgrade.”

“When he was here five years ago,” Berdle said, “was Mr QiRia having some sculption carried out?”

The man in the bed frowned. “Sculption; now there’s a word I haven’t heard for a while. Technically correct, I guess. Used to be called plastic surgery or bodily amendment or, well, lots of things.” He waved one arm again. “Anyway, I’m afraid that’s a private matter, Mr Berdle; I can neither confirm nor deny, and… all that shit.”

“May we simply ask why was he here, then?” Berdle asked.

“Still not going to tell you, fella,” Ximenyr said, shaking his head. “QiRia and I are old pals, that’s all I can say. Met him a few times, last time just as the Party was starting. But he was friends with my mother, and with her father before her, so I guess he’s pretty ancient even by Culture standards — and I won’t be giving away too much if I say he’s sort of a profound throwback physiologically anyway, by true Culture genetech criteria. I don’t know what sort of weird congenital mixture of geriatric blood-lines he draws his particular bucketful of the vital fluids from, but it’s pretty end-spectrum whatever it is, I can tell you that.”

“Did he leave anything with you?” Cossont asked.

The Master of the Revels shrugged. “Nothing important, maybe a present or two. He was sort of… intermittently generous. Anyway, why? Is he in some sort of trouble?” Ximenyr looked from Cossont to Berdle. “How… official is this visit?”

Cossont leaned forward. “He didn’t leave you a mind-state device or anything?”

Ximenyr laughed. “Why on Zyse, Xown or anywhere would he do that?”

“He…” Cossont began, about to say that QiRia had given her such a device, then remembering that she hadn’t told Berdle this was what she was looking for at the Ospin Dataversities. She’d nearly given that away. She wondered how much she already had.

Berdle had already cut in. “He might have wanted to back himself up.”

Ximenyr shook his head. “Doubt that. He was always kind of resistant regarding that sort of duplicated soul stuff.”

“Do you know where else he might have gone when he was in Gzilt?” Cossont asked.

“No,” Ximenyr said. “Secretive old boy. How about you, Vyr, did he come to visit you?”

“No,” she admitted.

“Oh, feeling jilted?” Ximenyr said softly, with a look of exaggerated sympathy.

“We were never friends like that.”

“You don’t have to be. You just have to care what people think of you.” He brought his blue irises rolling down for a moment, looked at her, then let them roll back up again to be replaced by the red ones. “If it’s any consolation, I know he visited Gzilt at least once without bothering to come see me. Didn’t even call.” He looked at Berdle. “We never did settle how official this visit is.”

Berdle nodded. “Officiality is a slippery concept, in the Culture.”

Ximenyr laughed. “Well,” he said, arching his back and stretching — all the penises gave a little jerk, as though they were separate tiny animals just waking — “this has all been very interesting; however, things have recharged and there is, frankly, pleasure to be secured. You may have to excuse me, shortly.” He looked at Cossont and Berdle, as all the animal- and beast-headed people joined him on the bed, kneeling by him and reaching out to stroke and caress him. All the phalluses dotted over Ximenyr’s body started, very slowly, to fatten and lever themselves upright. Wavy lines like veins that probably did not all carry blood were beginning to show all over his body, bulging and rippling beneath his ruby-red skin. “Unless you’d like to join in, of course?” he said brightly. “Both, either of you? You’d be very welcome. Plenty of time, plenty of places. We’ll turn the AG on shortly, I’ll start my last heart and we can get things going on my back…”

“I would,” Pyan said in Cossont’s earbud.

Cossont looked down at the creature. “Okay. I could just leave you here,” she told it.

“Never mind.”

“Thank you,” she said to Ximenyr. “But we’d best be on our way.”

“Mr Berdle,” Ximenyr said, taking one hand from between the legs of one of the girls stroking him. He detached the little scout missile from his neck-chain. “You may have this back. Excuse the, ah…”

Berdle had to kneel one-legged on the bed between Ximenyr’s legs and two naked bodies to retrieve the scout missile. “Thank you,” he said.

“Always keep on the right side of the Culture,” Ximenyr murmured dreamily, his face just becoming obscured by a young man straddling him. Very little of his body was visible now, though what was was clearly quite excited.

“You really are no fun,” Pyan said, petulant, as they descended the alarmingly long and steep escalator with the soup-faced person leading the way. In the cavernous space above and in front of them, an energetic game of sorball had begun, with people in transparent spherical suit-spheres leaping about in a zero-G volume, pinging off the inside walls of a giant diamond glass sphere forty metres across.

“Tough,” Cossont said, then turned to Berdle, but could only get to the point where she opened her mouth to speak before he turned to her and said,

“Later.”

“So?” she said. They were back aboard the module. It had met them on a landing platform which cantilevered out from the mass of the Girdlecity like a round tray on an outstretched arm. The craft started to pull away, going astern to avoid some overhanging architecture a few kilometres above.

“Mr Ximenyr has access to some surprisingly sophisticated tech,” Berdle said, lowering himself onto a lounge couch and examining the scout missile. “And some 4D shielding, of course, which is why we had to get in there.”

“Not just prurience, then,” Pyan said, aloud, but was ignored.

“They found and disabled this with embarrassing ease,” Berdle said, rolling the scout missile around on his palm. “Ah!” The little machine suddenly came alive and leapt into the air above his hand. It twisted quickly this way and that, as though confused at having just woken up.

Most of the walls of the module’s living area had seemingly turned transparent, allowing a vertiginous view of the Hzu coast beneath as the module tipped, twisted and then reared suddenly upwards. Ribbons of ochre and jade stitched by slow-spreading breakers of alabaster white, the land and the shallow margins of the sea seemed to sink away beneath them like something dropped; the Girdlecity was a dark wall they climbed magically without touching, hurtling silently back to the stars. Cossont tore her gaze from the view and said, “But did you find anything?”

Berdle frowned. “No. I was rather hoping for some sort of data store with information on Mr Q, something that would be kept close to Ximenyr, but there was nothing relevant anywhere on the airship. I’ve copied everything I found to the ship Mind to see if there’s some really clever cryptography in the storage, but it doesn’t look promising.”

“Nothing in all that stuff round his neck?”

“There was a minimal amount of processing left in the android digit, which was anyway unpowered, there was a dedicated, digital time-to device, functioning and correctly synchronised to the millisecond, but with zero spare capacity, a defunct model of an ancient Waverian Zoehn Dynasty spaceship, itself based on a primitively early form of processor technology called a vacuum tube, again with minimal and extremely crude processing, long burned out, a crystal container holding some animal or vegetable matter– two or three berries or small fruits, I believe — the baculum from a Vimownian Woller with an embedded particle-chip, probably from a hunter’s homing round, and a LastDitch Corp minicollar subsaver, hair-triggered to intervene should any of the gentleman’s hearts give out—”

“Yeah. He said something about starting his last heart.”

“He has four.” The avatar looked thoughtful. “That is a lot of vaso-congestive tissue to support.”

“I suppose.”

“Again, minimal processing involved; just enough to do its job and no more. Everything else was just dumb matter; process-free.”

“So, nothing.”

“Nothing relevant, as far as I can tell.” The avatar smiled at Cossont. “So, onwards and outwards to Ospin and the Dataversities.”

She found herself smiling back. “One request?” she said.

“What?”

“Could you keep that look?”

“If you like.” Berdle looked puzzled. “Why?”

“It suits — well, it just looks good.”

The avatar shrugged. “Okay.”

“Are you still being affected by those sexually stimulating compounds?” Pyan asked through her earbud.

Cossont used a finger to flick one corner of the creature. It yelped and unwound itself from round her neck, flapping away from her in a flurry of melodramatic movement.

“The Culture craft continues to adhere to local legal velocity limitations but is about to leave the atmosphere,” the combat arbite Uhtryn said. “If it is to be engaged, this would be the last chance.”

Colonel Agansu felt like he was suspended in space just above the planet of Xown, staring down at its brown/green land, the white-lined coast of Hzu and the green/blue waters of the sea. The Girdlecity was a thick dark rim round the world, hazing and disappearing to the horizon in each direction. He watched the dot that was the Culture module rising quickly upwards through the atmosphere.

“Count down that time, would you, Uhtryn?” he asked the arbite. “What do we have from the Girdlecity?”

“Eight seconds. Screen just coming in.” As the combat arbite spoke the words, a virtual screen appeared in front of Agansu, showing, from above, an elegant piazza with a small Culture craft sitting on it and two people walking away from it. “Two people: male unidentified, female… Cossont, Vyr. Lieutenant Commander reserve, the Fourteenth. Seven. Additional: mattiform familiar or pet present, wrapped round the female’s neck.”

“Where did they go?”

“As projected, the airship Equatorial 353. It has shielding making it impossible to surveille from outside. They spent twenty-two minutes inside. Six. Additional: male figure negative bio. Likely avatar, type unclear. Probing resistant without sensorial aggression.”

Colonel Agansu watched the tiny Culture ship rise towards space, seemingly almost straight at him. Of course, he was not really exposed to the void; he was floating instead within his virtual environment, deep inside the 7*Uagren. He spent most of his time here now, revved up to maximum speed, absorbed by the utterly fascinating view of space ahead and around, as enhanced by the ship’s sensor arrays. The full radiation spectrum was signified by textures implicit in the spread of colours, information in every form leapt out when you inspected something, and vectors and relative speeds were displayed around every object.

When not gazing out, fascinated, at this, the colonel dived deeper into the data reservoirs, trying to find and match up any details of relevance to the mission. This contributed relatively little in absolute terms to the efforts the ship’s own subsidiary AIs and virtual-crew data-mining specialists and their sub-routines were making, but it was still worthwhile additional work, and had the effect of continually reinforcing his own understanding.

He spent little time genuinely in his own body now, conscious of lying on the couch beside the combat arbite, buried deep in the ship. He was still aware that his physical body resided there and was being looked after — fed, evacuated, made to twitch so that his muscles did not start to atrophy — but he really lived in this virtual environment now; he felt cleaner and more pure in here, somehow, and quicker (though still so much slower than the ship crew!). The combat arbite Uhtryn had begun to help him.

“Colonel,” the captain of the Uagren communicated, “that Culture ship’s getting ready to head off. We need to decide whether we’re going to keep on following or not.”

“Who might be—?”

“Five,” Uhtryn said.

“—on the airship?”

“It is the location for a long-term celebration,” the arbite told him. “No known participants known to be known to the female.”

“Spool up, Captain,” Agansu said. “Make us ready to go.”

“Spooling up.”

“Everything on the female?”

“Musician,” Uhtryn said. “Classed resident of Girdlecity, Xown, Section Kwaalon Greater Without 3004/396. Absent from residence for the past six nights. Four. Girdlecity systems unable to provide more data on recent whereabouts. Female’s mother is Warib—”

“Any sign they picked anything up from the airship?”

“No. Additional: data from Girdlecity interior accessed. Screen, audio.” The same couple were visible from some distance away, standing on a long balcony set into the side of a messily accoutred and barely moving red airship. They were talking to somebody with an odd-looking face and wearing a strange combination of semi-military clothing. A hissy, slightly phased version of a woman’s voice said, “We’d… to talk to The Master of… Revels…” There was another word a little later, but it was too faint to catch. “Three.”

“Improve on that final word she says?”

“Already fully processed; unable to improve. Data AIs indicate hypothesised title ‘The Master of the Revels’ probably refers to one Ximenyr, artist, nominal spokesperson for ‘The Last Party’ as long-term celebration known.”

Agansu had to decide what to do: follow the Culture ship or investigate where the avatar and the female had gone and who they might have seen. In theory both could be accomplished, but only if he entrusted one of the tasks to somebody else, and he was loath to do this. He might go down to the planet himself and investigate this Master of the Revels fellow while the combat arbite stayed with the Uagren, or he might stay with the ship as it continued to follow the Culture vessel and delegate the on-planet job to some other entity from the ship — as well as the various different types of combat and other arbites, it held androids capable of passing for bio, all fully programmable.

He wanted to do both at once. He wanted to be in two places at once. In theory this was possible, in a way, using mind-state recording and transcription technology and one of the more specialised androids at the ship’s disposal; he could replicate himself, putting his consciousness into the machine… but he didn’t like the idea — never had — and felt that it constituted a security risk as well; with every copying event, more than one person — one entity, at least — suddenly knew what only he was supposed to know.

Or he could leave a copy of himself on board the ship, perhaps even one living and thinking at the same speed as the virtual crew, while he — this physical body — removed itself from its haven, its little kernel-space in the heart of the ship, and took a small craft down to the surface of the world below.

“Two,” said the combat arbite.

The Culture ship had appeared to be heading somewhere quite different when it had suddenly veered off-course and crash-stopped here at Xown. It had been impossible to tell exactly where it had been heading — ships rarely just flew straight for their destination, choosing to introduce long, random curves into their courses, just to frustrate anybody trying to work out where they were going. It meant they travelled a few per cent further than they would have done taking a perfectly direct route, but it was usually judged to be worth the time penalty.

The Uagren too had had to make an unexpected crash-stop, the very violence of which might have betrayed its presence to the Culture ship. The crew thought they had got away with it, but there was no way to be sure yet.

“One.”

“Captain, you have my mind-state mapped?”

“Yes.”

“Implant it into one of the bio-plausible androids forthwith and send it down to the planet. Have it walk a little way ahead of the airship, ready to board it on our future signal. Leave a liaise instruction with the local authorities and keep the android updated with—”

“Ze—”

“Stand down. There will be no need to attack or disable the Culture craft.”

“It has left the—” the arbite started to say, then paused. “It is gone; it has been Displaced.”

“Woh,” the disloc officer said. “Look at those distances. Heavy duty.”

“Ship moving off, fast,” the navigation officer said.

“As I was saying; leave a liaise instruction with the local authorities and keep the android updated with all relevant information.”

“Faster than it was.” The captain sounded worried. “Can we stay with that?”

“Marginal,” the drives officer said.

“Random spiralling,” the targeting officer said. “Maybe it did see us.”

“The android mind-state imprinting is not instant,” the external-tech officer told Agansu. “Eighty seconds required from now to disloc for imprint and ready-body.”

“Captain?” Agansu said. “Is there time?”

“Have we eighty seconds to spare before having to move off? Including move then disloc under acceleration, increasing distance?” the captain said. “Nav. Disloc?”

“Talked,” said the navigation officer. “No. Not even twenty.”

“Disloc agrees.”

“Already starting to lose the quarry’s track,” the targeting officer said. “Ninety per cent we can take same general heading and still find, but no guarantees.”

“Track still fading,” the navigation officer said. “It’s building in more random.”

“Eighty-nine per cent.”

“Colonel,” the captain said, “we can’t program the android and be sure we can still follow the ship.”

“Eighty-seven per cent.”

Agansu thought. “Percentage likelihood of reacquiring the Culture ship if we stay to the eighty-second mark?”

“Less than one.”

“Program android,” Agansu said, “despatch back to Xown in small craft?”

“That works. Back here in a few hours.”

“Let’s do that. Please move off immediately, Captain.”

“Moving.”

“Could still plonk the oid now, zap the col’s m-s to it after,” the special tactics officer said. He was, Agansu had noticed, prone to such compressive communication.

“I realise,” Agansu said. “I am unwilling to do that.”

“Your choice.”

“Captain,” Agansu said. “Do you think the Culture vessel has seen us?”

“Too early to tell. It moved off in a hurry, and it did Displace — disloc — the module rather than wait for it, so either it did or thinks it might have, or it’s suddenly in a real hurry.”

“It’d have disloc’d the craft in-atmosphere if it had been in a real hurry, sir,” the disloc officer said.

“Or mo’ff, remote-dee’d the individs, left the mod,” the special tactics officer contributed opaquely.

“All true,” the captain said. “Or fresh news just came in, or it half suspected it had a tail and wanted to catch us off guard. Drives, how smooth was our move-off?”

“Pretty good. In our top centile.”

“Good as theirs?”

“Not quite. That was tight. As efficient a kick-away as I’ve seen.”

“Think we have to assume it might have seen us,” the captain announced. “Suggest we follow anyway, act as though not. Colonel?”

“I agree,” Agansu said, then shifted to a one-to-one private channel. “But, Captain, if it is the case that we have been discovered, was it anyone aboard’s fault?”

“No, not in my opinion, Colonel.”

“Really?”

“Really. We are carving right up hard against the operational envelope of this ship, Colonel, fractions away from our never-exceeds and even a little over the factory settings in some cases where we know she can take it. And the crew are better than the ship; they always are. If our crash-stop alerted the Culture ship this time then you could replay it a million times over with other crews or fresher crews or more experienced crews and it always would; that’s just how the physics works.”

“I take comfort in the loyalty and faith you display towards your crew, Captain.”

“My crew are loyal to me, Colonel; I am only loyal to the regiment and Gzilt. Also, faith is belief without reason; we operate on reason and nothing but. I have zero faith in my crew, just absolute confidence.”

“Hmm. That is well said. I happily withdraw any suggestion that part of your crew might have been at fault, and I am happy to match and share that confidence.”

“Glad to hear it. Shall we rejoin the congregation?”

“Amusing. Let’s.”