The Hydrogen Sonata

Seventeen (S -8)

xLSV You Call This Clean?

oLOU Caconym

oGCU Displacement Activity

oGSV Empiricist

oGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

oUe Mistake Not…

oMSV Passing By And Thought I’d Drop In

oMSV Pressure Drop

oGSV Contents May Differ

Hello. Bad news. Mr QiRia has been tracked down but would appear no longer to have the information we seek. See attached report.

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

Ms Tefwe seems to have been unable to take any steps which might have confirmed whether he was telling the truth or not. Are we simply going to take his word for this? I had gathered that the gentleman was/is notoriously unreliable.

∞

xLSV You Call This Clean?

Correct. However, determining whether he was telling the truth or not would have meant kidnapping Mr QiRia. That would have been difficult and wrong. And it is hard to see what his motivation might be in lying about this. He certainly had the ability to compartmentalise his memories in the way described, and his eyes were genuinely missing. As the report’s appendices make clear, Ms Tefwe carried analytical capacity which independently verified both that this was the real person and that his eyes had been surgically excised. Short of removing him entirely from the hearkenry to carry out a full body scan, it is not easy to see what more could be done. I think we have to take this as it appears.

∞

xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

And it appears that the problem recedes over the horizon once again, its solution still out of our reach. Are we really determined to pursue this chimera regardless of cost?

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

I suspect the consensus remains much as it was. Has anyone changed their opinion since the last vote?… No? All right, then; we are as we were.

∞

xGSV Just The Washing Instruction Chip In Life’s Rich Tapestry

Thinking, I hope, of what we do if and when we discover whatever there is to discover. Personally, I would vote for not telling the Gzilt, no matter what we find, and I suspect I am not alone in feeling that way. Which is why I question the point of looking so insistently in the first place. I don’t want to appear presumptuous, but perhaps we might all think a little along these lines?

∞

xLOU Caconym

Gee, thinking ahead. Whom’d a thunk a that?

∞

xGSV Contents May Differ

Mistake Not…, it would appear to be up to you and Lieutenant Commander Cossont.

∞

xUe Mistake Not…

Yup. Little busy.

The elegance of conventional Orbitals lay in the fact that their diameter — they were usually about three to four million kilometres across — meant that the speed you had to rotate them at to produce what would feel like standard gravity to your average Culture person — not to mention a generous statistical spread of non-Culture humanoids and other species — also automatically produced a day/night cycle that was right in the middle of what the Culture regarded as the acceptable spectrum of values.

The artificial, inside-out worlds usually orbited their stars on roughly circular paths, generally following orbits set between those of any planets present, though sometimes taking up the same orbit, socketed into safe, non-collisionary lock-step tracks in and around the planet’s Trojan points. Some Orbitals flew more ellipsoidal paths, swinging further out and closer in to their star, to produce seasons, if desired. Spinning them almost but not quite edge-on to their parent sun prevented the far side from eclipsing whatever part lay in sunlight at the time.

The Culture hadn’t invented Orbitals like this, but it had taken them up with an enthusiasm nobody else had ever displayed, the Minds attracted both by the grandiosity of the concept — this was engineering on an epic scale, and even the skinniest full O had the surface area of twenty or thirty standard one-G planets — and by its sheer chronocyclic, material-frugal elegance; compared to planets, Orbitals represented a very matter-cheap way of providing generous amounts of pleasantly rural and even wild-looking living space, plus you could usually build your Orbitals from exactly the asteroidal debris you’d want to get rid of in a solar system anyway, to stop bits of it flying around and hitting your fancy new worlds.

Microrbitals were, as the name implied, much smaller versions of the same basic idea; they could be any diameter you wanted because the spin speed wasn’t rigidly linked to both the force experienced at their surface and their day/night cycle. You spun a microrbital at the appropriate rate to produce whatever apparent gravity you required, set it circumference-on to the sunlight, then put a suite of angled mirrors at its centre to reflect the light, rotating these independently to give you the desired light/dark periodicity.

The microrbital of Bokri was tiny; barely more than a thousand kilometres across. This was so small that the retaining side walls of sheet diamond which kept the atmosphere in would have met in the middle had the world been filled with a significantly denser atmosphere or spun much slower. As it was, the central mirrors were so close to the top of the walls that they rested on struts running along their inside edges so that the whole assemblage looked like the axle and spokes of a giant wheel.

The world was almost as long down its axis as it was wide and was conventionally arranged — by the relaxed, abundantly provisioned standards of a post-scarcity humanoid civilisation — with parkland, forests, lakes and aesthetically pleasing built-up areas and isolated grand architectural statements spread across its nearly three million square kilometres of interior surface.

The Gzilt had never entirely turned their backs on the ideas of both private ownership and money, though the latter had been demoted to being of mostly ceremonial value and both had been detached from what most people regarded as being the most important measure of a person’s worth; there had been enough of everything to go around everybody in the Gzilt civilisation for many millennia, and while a degree of self-interest and acquisitiveness was taken as being only natural, outright self-obsession and full-on greed were regarded as signs of weakness of character, if not a symptom of actual psychological damage.

The Bokri microrbital was joint-owned by a group of Secular Collectionary orders: institutionalised obsessive, only para-religious organisations, each devoted to one or other aspect of preservation.

One order collected ancient farming implements, another chemical rockets and antique space craft, while another had specialised in household dust; its sheds and warehouses were packed with billions and billions of vials and other containers collected from worlds and habitats throughout the Gzilt realm over thousands of years and filled with nothing more than the sort of stuff that collected in the corners of rooms and cabins and which had been picked, swept, sucked or electro-staticked up by volunteers or enthusiasts to be sent to the Little Siblings of the Detritus, on Bokri.

This had seemed idiotic, even perverse to many people, right from the start, but had turned out to be surprisingly if modestly useful, providing the raw material for many an undergraduate paper on, for example, changing patterns of casual domestic ambient surface debris through the ages.

The Incast were a philosophical order dedicated to storing as much of the disputed, superseded or just plain long-proved-wrong knowledge that the Gzilt civilisation and species had built up over the millennia, and any artefacts associated therewith. Housed in multiply backed-up and distributed memory storage facilities across Bokri and various other microrbitals throughout the Ospin system and beyond were entire libraries of ancient conspiracy theories, crackpot physics hypotheses, unutterably antique speculations on anatomy, chemistry and astronomy, and — as a sort of sideline — devices holding the mind-states of untold numbers of individuals and group-minds — mostly Gzilt but from other species as well.

Some were static back-ups for the dynamic originals, held and running elsewhere, some were being retained under the instructions of the people whose personalities and memories they held encoded, to be re-energised and their inhabitants woken at some specific date or when something especially noteworthy occurred to the Gzilt — the Subliming naturally representing pretty much the ultimate example of that criterion — and some had effectively been lost or abandoned.

In the Culture, stuff like this would be collected by Minds with an interest in just such societal flotsam and jetsam and stored in the specially adapted bays and hangars of GSVs, or in the subsidiary structures of Orbital Hubs. In the Gzilt, the Centralised Dataversities of Ospin were the place; they acted as the sump, the filtered, partitioned bilges of the civilisation.

The main Incast Facility within Bokri lay in the centre of a broad, circular lake; it was a spherical building a kilometre across looking like a sort of reversed image of an iceberg, with barely a tenth of its bulk seemingly lying beneath the surface of the lake. It was mostly white, wore its multi-storey nature on its surface with obvious horizontal divisions but possessed relatively few piercings, windows or balconies.

It was generally reached by an evacuated travel-tube system set on a long, elegantly thin bridge extending from the shore of the lake, a kilometre away. The Mistake Not… reckoned they didn’t really have the time to indulge in such niceties, so deposited Cossont, the android Eglyle Parinherm and its own avatar Berdle near the centre of the building, Displacing them neatly into an empty elevator car and using a small collection of similarly dropped-off comms and effector gear to start interfacing/interfering with the facility’s own administrational data complexes.

The ship itself, though much slowed for its erratic transit of the system, hadn’t paused as it passed Bokri. It had already taken a wild, almost jagged route through the cloud of habitats and dataversities, pinging from one to another like a ball down a nail-board, just to confuse anybody following; having got Cossont and the others to their destination, and feeling fairly sure that it had indeed shaken off any pursuing craft, it raced off to continue its eccentric join-the-dots loop through the system.

It had promised to be back within the hour; that ought to be long enough.

“Still not getting anything?” Cossont asked the avatar.

Berdle shook his head. “Pinging away merrily,” he said quietly, “but nothing’s answering.”

The avatar and the various pieces of gear the ship had Displaced into and around the facility were trying to locate the device with QiRia’s mind-state inside it by sending out signals it might respond to, assuming it possessed any normal Culture processing. The Mistake Not… had tried to contact the Warm, Considering — the ship believed to have helped QiRia encode his mind-state within the cube — to get whatever technical details about the device it could, but the other ship had yet to reply. From what it could gather, nobody willing to tell even knew where the Warm, Considering was.

“Why exactly are we here?” the android Parinherm asked, looking round the pleasantly wide, softly carpeted and very slightly curving corridor they’d found on exiting the lift. The corridor’s white-with-a-hint-of-blue walls glowed very gently with the fake daylight of a lightly overcast day and were covered in thin grooves, some of which indicated doorways with hermetic-quality shut-lines.

“You are here to protect Ms Cossont,” the ship’s avatar explained, also looking round. “She is here because she is looking for something.”

“May I help?” the android asked brightly. Like Cossont and Berdle, it wore well-cut if nondescript civilian clothes. Cossont wore a thick necklace of what looked like brushed silver.

“Just be prepared to step in to protect Ms Cossont,” Berdle told it patiently, “in case I am unable to.”

Parinherm stared at the avatar. “You are remarkably opaque to my senses,” he remarked. “What are you?”

“An avatar, Parinherm,” Berdle said, smiling. “Surely you guessed that?”

“Yes,” Parinherm said, nodding. “Good to have it confirmed. Would this be a joint Culture–Gzilt scenario?”

Berdle nodded. “Feel free to treat it as such.”

“And I,” Cossont said, “am a human. With a low boredom threshold. I’m almost starting to regret leaving Pyan back on the ship.” She spread all four arms. “Can we… do something?”

Berdle nodded. “We’re going to have to,” it said. “There’s nothing coming back.” He smiled at Cossont. “This will require you to make an official request to locate and retrieve your property from the facility.”

“Yippee. Do I have to fill out a form?”

“You have to submit a formal application five days in advance,” Berdle told her.

She stared at him. “Five days? I assume you have some clever—”

“The formal application was emplaced two seconds ago,” the avatar told her. “Suitably, if illegally, back-dated.” Berdle bowed. “Please follow me,” he said, turning on his heel.

“Ms Cossont,” the Executive Recoupments Officer said, coming to stand before them. He nodded at her companions, bowed to her. The waiting area was extensive, pale, lush with potted plants, filled with the sound of water trilling in fountains and pools and dotted with very comfortable seating. Cossont lounged in what she trusted was a suitably proprietorial fashion, upper arms spread, her lower set concealed by her formal jacket, legs crossed, a small shoulder bag lying on her lap. Berdle and the android had chosen to remain standing, looking slowly about all the time. “May we offer you a beverage?”

“No, thank you.”

“I wasn’t even aware there were any arrivals today,” the Incast officer said, glancing at a projected screen hanging in mid-air down and to one side of his straight-ahead sight-line.

“Ms Cossont arrived by private craft,” Berdle said smoothly.

“Ah, I see,” the officer said. “And you’ve come in from…?” he continued, looking at Cossont, who was listening on her earbud as Berdle said,“Please, let me,” to her at the same time as he said, to the officer, “Ms Cossont’s application to retrieve her property is in order, I take it?”

The officer was dressed in vaguely ecclesiastic-looking pale robes. He looked from Cossont’s stony expression to Berdle’s agreeably open one. He checked his screen, one hand moving and his eyes flicking. “… Yes, yes, it’s all in order.” He smiled emptily at Berdle. “The object has been located and is being retrieved as we speak.”

“Splendid,” Berdle said quietly.

The officer looked back to Cossont. “We usually ask our clients if there is a particular reason for them wishing to recoup an object.”

“Again, allow me,” Berdle said to Cossont as he said, “How commendable,” to the Incast officer. “What is the most common reason given?”

“Ah,” the officer said, distracted again. “Sadly, due to client confidentiality strictures, we are unable to share that information.”

“What a terrible pity,” Berdle said, looking sympathetic. He put one hand gently on the officer’s forearm and said, “I am sure then that you will fully understand that Ms Cossont has equally valid reasons for being unable to share with you her reasons for being unable to share with you the information that you seek and request. I trust I am not mistaken in proceeding on the assumption that this request is of a non-compulsory, voluntary opt-in nature?”

The Executive Recoupments Officer looked like he was processing this. After a moment he said, “Well, indeed.” He glanced at his screen. “Excuse me; the requested object is in transit.” He smiled at the unresponsive Cossont. “I’ll fetch it. One moment.” He turned and walked back to the curved sweep of desks where they’d found him earlier, sitting with his feet up, listening to music.

Berdle watched him go, then turned back to Cossont, who raised her eyebrows.

“All going smoothly,” Berdle told her through the earbud.

Parinherm was staring intently at a water feature ten metres away. The feature’s central fountain closed down suddenly, collapsing with a sort of relaxed decorum; the watery tinkling sounds filling the reception and waiting space quietened very slightly.

~Parinherm… Berdle sent.

The android turned to look at the ship’s avatar. ~Just testing, he replied.

~I trust the test has been completed to your satisfaction.

~It has.

~Then, if you’d be so kind…

~Certainly.

The fountain burst into life again, leaping higher into the air than it had before and causing some water to go splashing over the edge of the pool and onto the carpet.

~Oops.

The fountain settled back to normal.

The Executive Recoupments Officer returned holding a white half-metre cube. “Here we are,” he said, presenting it to Cossont with a bow.

“Thank you,” she told him, glancing at Berdle, who came forward and accepted the box as Cossont rose to her feet.

“Ms Cossont herself will need to open the…” the officer said, as Cossont opened the box, looked inside and lifted out a silver-grey cube.

“Also, the storage container remains our…” the officer said, as Berdle handed the white box back to the officer and Cossont slipped the cube into her shoulder bag.

“Thank you for your help,” Berdle told the officer. “We’ll be on our way.”

“My pleasure,” the Executive Recoupments Officer said, as the three walked towards the elevators.

“We still have two-thirds of an hour before the ship returns,” Berdle said through Cossont’s earbud as they stepped into the lift. “I thought we might leave the facility and find a hostelry of some sort on the lake shore, to wait there.”

Cossont nodded as the doors closed.

The car started its descent, then its soft lighting seemed to flicker delicately. It drew smoothly to a stop, settling, finally, with what Cossont heard as a single click and the two non-humans present both heard as three distinct snicking noises. A background susurrus Cossont had hardly noticed consciously ceased, suddenly.

The android and the avatar exchanged looks.

“Ah-hah!” Parinherm said, with a smile.

“This is,” Berdle said aloud, and then seemed to think about what it was, “un-promising,” he concluded.

~Is that you? he was asking the android at the same time.

~Facility mainframe / material systems / motile systems / general elevator control suite / basement-to-mid-section shaft complex / core-central / faults / fault notification / fault confirmation / fault over-ride / safe fault work-arounds…?

~Yes, all that. Please leave that to me. You’re getting in the way. And stop trying to remove the block on the car’s external AV feed; I did that nearly a quarter of a second ago.

~Very well. What may I do?

~Please remain/be on full alert within the immediate physical environment with particular regard to extraneous anomalous audible and general vibration signals, extending your sensor/effector abilities no further than the elevator car’s and the shaft’s own monitoring and activation circuits. I’ll continue monitoring and trying to affect further afield.

~My on-board expert systems precedents set indicates strongly we might be in a definitional pre-attack phase and so close to the point at which some sort of physical measure may become advisable.

~Agreed. Currently eliminating all chances this could be happenstance before taking any irretrievably physical action.

~We should warn/prepare Ms Cossont.

~Also agreed. I am in the process of interrupting her.

“‘Un-promis—’?” Cossont was saying as Berdle talked over her, saying,

“Strong likelihood this is hostile. I’m activating your eSuit and neck-helmet. Please do not be alarmed and remember to put all your weight first on one foot and then the other.”

“‘—ing’?” Cossont finished, as something happened all over her body.

Her underwear consisted of a millimetre-thin body suit which only left her feet, hands and head uncovered. The ship had insisted she wear it, and that they perform a drill before she left to see what would happen if it deployed. Before her eyes, even before she’d put it on, the eSuit had grown an extra set of arms as easily as though it was a big complicated balloon the ship was blowing up, and these had been the last bits to unstick themselves and inflate.

As it had during the practice on the ship, the suit puffed up a little all over, while the thick hems at ankles and wrists unrolled, the suit quickly covering all her hands and fingers in thin gloves and slipping between her feet and shoes in turn as she did as she’d been told and performed a side-to-side stepping motion to allow this to happen; what felt like thin bootees now enveloped her feet.

The thick necklace had unrolled at the same time, extending quickly downward to bond with the collar of the suit while blossoming and closing round her head before shrinking back again to rest lightly on her scalp and most of her face, leaving her eyes, nostrils and lips free under small bulges in the material; the bulges over her eyes were transparent. The first thing she did was tear off the restrictive formal jacket, freeing her lower set of arms. She got tangled in the strap of the shoulder bag, finally setting it securely back in place over her head.

~The problem is located in the primary shaft control node, Berdle told Parinherm. ~It is under continual and dynamic effector load from apparatus it is beyond the abilities of our local assets to counter. I am sending a missile component to the location to attempt some sort of intervention.

~A missile? Are we escalating to—?

~Your pardon. Missile as in, for example, scout missile. Decimetre-scale, field-powered, non-expendable.

One hundred metres away horizontally from the arrested lift and fifty metres higher, within a service space in a suspended ceiling over a dark, unoccupied lecture theatre, a stubby cylinder the size of a fat pen jerked into motion. It lifted and stabbed forward, flourishing an angstrom-fine cutting field that sank into and peeled back the thin metal covering of an air duct.

The missile was one of three Displaced into the spherical Incast facility by the Mistake Not…, along with various other bits and pieces of potentially useful equipment, almost all of which were rapidly redeploying to suit the current situation.

The missile slipped into the duct and accelerated hard, within metres achieving speeds which caused a wave of expansion and compression to travel down the ducting with it, making the duct’s metal creak and its supports groan. Razor-sharp grilles inside the ducting, stationed every few tens of metres to stop animal pests using the ducts as runs, were despatched in field-sliced showers of glittering shards, barely slowing the device at all.

“Fuck,” Cossont breathed, looking from Parinherm to Berdle. “This isn’t good, is it?”

“No, it isn’t,” the avatar agreed, then its head flicked — impossibly fast for a real human — towards the lift’s manual control panel, an instant before a gentle beeping noise came from the speaker grille.

Parinherm seemed to be about to speak, but Berdle held up one finger. In a neutral voice, he said, “Yes?”

The missile came to the end of the useful part of the air duct in a last burst of grille components, exiting into a parallel elevator shaft, flying straight across as it twisted and slowed, bouncing off the shaft’s ceramic surface hard enough to leave a crush-indentation then pulsing up the shaft at maximum acceleration, towards the under-surface of an ascending elevator car. It adjusted its course, jolting across the shaft, aiming for near one corner of the car and bursting through it.

It had time to register three humans present in the lift through the shower of debris, then it was bursting out through the roof. It used its already deployed cutting field like an air-screw to provide a tiny amount of extra lift, then as a fender to cushion the next blow on the roof of the shaft as it twisted and turned again and darted down an access tunnel to the next shaft, braking hard at the last moment as it neared the offending control unit. Below, in the shaft it had just left, it could hear screams. These would likely be associated with its incursion into the elevator car two seconds earlier and probably indicated extreme surprise as well as some shrapnel injuries.

“Is that Ms Cossont, Vyr, Lieutenant Commander, Reserve?” a male voice asked from the grille in a conversational tone.

~Getting some air movement, compression, in the shaft out there, Parinherm sent.

~That’s my missile, Berdle sent back at the same time as he said, “It is not,” to the grille. “Why has this lift stopped?”

“Ah. Then I must be addressing one of the two gentlemen who accompanied the lady. My name is Colonel Agansu, of the Home System Regiment, on special secondment, unspecified. I’d like to talk to Ms Cossont.”

“Did you stop this lift?” Berdle said, voice clipped and severe. “Set in motion again immediately.”

Fifty metres over Berdle’s head, the missile floated in mid-air in front of a control unit barely bigger than itself, inspecting the quivering cage of bizarrely spectrumed energies enclosing the unit and the cables leading to and from it.

~Effector-targeted component and ancillaries highly ext-shielded, it reported to the avatar. ~Actions to control/defeat unclear.

Berdle briefly reviewed the poor-quality video the device was sending, and the missile’s available weaponry. It was the least well armed of the three that had been Displaced, reducing the options. ~Close-entrain all 2-mm mini-rounds, the avatar sent. Set for point, centred, kinetic assist.

~Copy, the missile sent, and squirted all its tiny shells at the field-wrapped control unit at once, far too close together to work properly had they been travelling further than a few tens of metres; as they were travelling less than a metre before impact and detonation, this didn’t matter. It used its maniple and cutting fields to kick them forward at the same time, imparting a little extra kinetic energy and throwing itself backwards as a result. Light erupted around the control unit, temporarily blinding the missile as it extended its forward fields to fend off the blast wave and pieces of debris and used its rear field components to help cushion it against the blow as it hit the far side of the shaft it had flown up seconds earlier.

“First I need to talk to—” the voice from the grille was saying.

~Wow! Parinherm sent. ~Sub-gramme AM explosion fifty up! Correction; series of same but smaller.

The air in the lift seemed to pulse gently as the shock wave travelled down the shaft’s structure. Berdle put his hand out and took hold of Cossont’s elbow. She appeared to have noticed the pulse of infra sound and was opening her mouth to speak as the thud from above came. The blast wave slammed down onto the roof of the car, sending the human, avatar and android briefly up into the air as the whole lift was rammed down a notch on its trio of side ratchets; the three dropped to the floor again, steadied themselves.

~Debris approaching you, the missile sent. ~Medium sub-sonic. It sidled back through the dust and smoke choking the debris-littered access tunnel to inspect the control unit. ~Target unharmed.

It’s a ship, Berdle thought. The unit’s being effectorised by a ship, or a unit as strong as one a warship would carry.

~Pause, he told the missile. ~Prepare full personal destruct, immediately under unit.

“Wh—?” Cossont had time to say, before a series of titanic claps shook the elevator car from above. Her helmet had inflated itself and gone to triple layer above the crown of her head. Berdle watched the lift’s ceiling dent in a couple of places.

Fifty metres above, still in a storm of smoke and dust and a faint snowfall of ceramic flakes filtering from the shaft’s summit, the missile positioned itself carefully.

The voice of Colonel Agansu, from the grille, did a little better than Cossont, getting out the whole of “What—?” before matters proceeded.

~That’s a scout missile? Parinherm asked Berdle. ~Really?

~No, that’s a knife missile, Berdle replied. ~And expendable, as it turns out.

The roof/ceiling above would take more, the avatar decided, and the elevator car appeared structurally sound.

Alarms were warbling in the distance, and the local networks, where not under attack, were buzzing with sudden traffic. The Incast facility was not without protection or resources, and was fighting back as best as its automatics knew how against the effector onslaught from outside and inside its walls. That the other side had such powerful assets in place so quickly was not a good sign though, the avatar knew.

~We’ll need to protect Ms Cossont physically now, from above, Berdle told Parinherm, double- and then treble-checking the state of the missile’s anti-matter battery before — to the missile — sending the signal,~At 35 per cent AM yield; prepare, confirm.

~Copy 35 per cent AM yield.

~Enact.

The knife missile blew itself up.

Cossont felt herself go utterly limp, from the outside in, somehow. Had she had the time, she’d have worried about her bowels relaxing, but instead she was fascinated to find that she now had no control whatsoever over any of her major muscles, which, having been lost to her, now seemed to have developed minds of their own and taken the decision to roll her up into a foetal ball, while Parinherm and Berdle, perhaps similarly afflicted, were arching over the top of her. If she’d seen this done on stage, she thought, it might have looked quite an elegant ballet move.

“Blast-from-above-coming-apologies,” Berdle said in her earbud, talking very fast and clipped.

There was an almighty crack of sound, she felt briefly weightless, though still held down by the two bodies spread over her, and then the floor came smacking up towards her, slapping her feet, creaking her bones and making her insides feel bruised. Her chin, on her tight-together knees, tried to bury itself between her calves. The shoulder bag with the cube in it pressed painfully into her back. It all went very dark. She expected to find her ears ringing but they weren’t. Something cracked above her, making the whole lift shudder.

“Okay?” Berdle asked her, as the avatar and the android pulled up away from her and her suit started bringing her quickly to her feet. Standing, she suddenly found she had control of her body again. There was a haze of dust in the car, and the centre of the roof had caved in to the extent that the three of them had to stand back near the walls.

“Yeah,” she said. “What was—?”

“Knife missile self-destructing directly above us,” Berdle said. “Excuse me.” The avatar squatted, his hands seemed to sink into the surface of the soft plastic floor, and then he pulled back. There was the sound of tearing, protesting metal, and Berdle’s feet sank deep enough into the plastic tiles to cause ripples round the soles of his shoes, which themselves seemed to be deforming. Parinherm jerked suddenly, seemed to stagger.

Cossont stared at it. “You okay?”

~I just tried activating some AG, Parinherm sent to Berdle. ~I think I got targeted; non-viable. “Fine!” it told Cossont brightly, at the same time.

~Our adversaries are able to manipulate the topography of the local gravitational environment, when we give them a target, Berdle told the android.

Parinherm thought about this. ~Neat, he sent.

~The other Displaced components are experiencing the same problems, Berdle told the android, ~only the knife missiles are unaffected. AG is a little subtle for their purposes; they just use naked force fields.

Pulled by the avatar, a giant flap of metal and plastic came peeling and screeching back from the floor, showing the shaft underneath, sinking away into darkness several hundred metres below.

Berdle dropped head-first into it, his feet remaining hooked onto the floor.

~Parinherm, the avatar sent, along with a simple diagram of what it wanted the android to do. ~If you would.

~Certainly, Parinherm replied, and dropped through the hole too, also head-first, feeling Berdle catch his ankles as he fell past and then cooperating in a swinging motion that within two oscillations allowed his hands to reach the upper edge of an open doorway where a tiny missile the size of a human thumb was floating, two delicate-looking outstretched field components fending off the twin doors, which were sliding back and forth continually, trying to close.

“Vyr,” Berdle shouted. “Make sure the cube is secure within your bag, then climb down my body. Lie on my back and hold on very tightly. The suit will help.”

“What?” Cossont said, kneeling by the side of the hole in the lift floor and staring down the bottomless-looking shaft. Berdle was stretched across the shaft at forty-five degrees; she couldn’t see Parinherm at all.

“Climb down me first,” Berdle said reasonably. “We’ll tackle the rest as we go.”

Quaking, Cossont checked the shoulder bag was fastened, then lowered herself down the body of the avatar, feet first, holding on to his legs, then turned round on her knees on the slope of Berdle’s back. She had never been more thankful for having four arms. Also, the suit did seem to be helping, but not as much as she’d have liked. She lowered herself to lie on his back, shaking, blood pounding in her ears. The bag slid round her shoulder, hitting Berdle on the head. Her hand was shaking as she went to grab it.

“Sorry!” she yelled.

“No, I’m sorry,” Berdle said. “Are you afraid of heights?”

“No,” she said through clenched teeth, “just of dying generally.” She put the bag over her shoulder again and hugged the avatar from behind, so hard that had he been human she’d have worried about cracking his ribs.

~Okay? Berdle sent to Parinherm.

~Ready.

The little missile floating between the doors on its gyre of fields withdrew, letting the doors start to close as Parinherm let go of the top lip of the doorway and immediately flicked his hands around to grasp the edges of the closing doors.

~Secure hold, the android sent as the doors pressed into his fingers.

“Really tight now, Vyr,” Berdle said quietly, then brought his feet together, letting him and Cossont fall from the under-surface of the elevator car. They pendulumed in the air, their combined mass sending them both swinging thudding into the shaft wall. The avatar took most of the impact and the suit’s gloves protected Cossont’s hands, but it still hurt.

Parinherm, fingers jammed, now had his own weight and that of the two people clinging to him on his arms, hands and fingers, which were being forced to slide down the narrow gap between the almost fully closed doors. Even in a fairly optimistic, human-flattering virtuality, Parinherm thought, a real human would be screaming head-over-heels down the shaft at this point, the bloody stumps of their fingers still trapped between the doors.

Happily, I am not human, Parinherm thought, and this is only a simulation.

~Climbing, Berdle sent, and quickly hauled himself up the android’s body, hand over hand, taking Cossont with him. He stood braced on the lower lip of the doorway and swept the doors open — Parinherm dropped a metre but held on to the lower lip easily enough — stepped forward and turned to let Cossont jump off his back and then stooped to grasp the android’s hand just as, with a creak and a sudden rush of air, the elevator car dropped down the shaft in front of the open doors, hit and severed Parinherm’s fingers and then shuddered on downwards to sweep the rest of his body away.

~Damn, the android sent. ~I was enjoying that!

Cossont caught her breath, started forward towards the open shaft, looking down at the fast-retreating roof of the battered lift as air sucked out all around her.

Berdle reached, pulled her backwards, away from the shaft. “You know,” the avatar said, stepping round her and looking out from the alcove where the lift doors were set, then taking another step out into the gently bowed corridor, “Parinherm will probably be okay, but we have to—”

Something seemed to strike the avatar full in the upper abdomen; Berdle was jerked backwards as a blinding light burst out all around him and something exploded further down the broad curve of corridor; Cossont was sent flying back towards the open doors and the shaft, staggering and skidding right to the edge, all four arms windmilling desperately as she stood teetering, heels-on to the drop. Her eyes were going crazy, reacting mostly too late to the star-burst of light that had erupted from the avatar, filling her vision with black dots. Berdle still seemed to be there, in front of her, his body shuddering, wrapped in flames.

She felt herself start to tip backwards, into the void.

“Oh, fuck,” she heard herself say, and thought what pathetic words those were. And not even remotely original and unique, she thought, as she canted backwards, arms still hopelessly wheeling.

Berdle, enveloped in fire, stepped forward and caught the strap of her shoulder bag one-handed. He stopped her, held her, then grabbed her round the waist with his other hand and pulled her forward, back into the alcove.

“Best get down,” he said, kneeling within the alcove. She dropped to her haunches, taking cover behind the metre of wall between the jammed-opened doors and the corridor. Berdle stripped the remains of his burning clothes off and threw them down the elevator shaft. His skin had gone silvery. There was no mark on his back at all; she’d have expected an exit wound. Actually, she’d have expected him to be blown in half.

“What the fuck?” she asked. She was trying hard not to shriek.

“Didn’t quite see that coming in time,” Berdle said, turning and grinning at her. “Managed to…” a hole appeared, instantly, in his back; she could see straight through his body to his silvery thighs. The hole was big enough for her to have put her fist in. The smooth hole closed up again, just as quickly. “… but not quite fast enough; caught some round the edges. Sorry about that.” He nodded at the floor. “Lost the scout missile.” Cossont looked at the floor, where half of the little scout missile that had been holding the doors open earlier lay, gently smoking.

The avatar put one finger to the edge of the alcove, flicked it out and brought it back just as another bright beam came lancing past where his finger had been an instant earlier. The edge of wall flared and a heavy detonation came from somewhere past them down the corridor; a blast of light followed by a body-shaking tremble beneath their feet and a pulse of blast, forcing Cossont to lower her head briefly. Grey smoke was drifting along the ceiling and a whole spectrum of alarms went squawking, warbling and howling all around them.

Then there was a dull, seemingly very distant thud, almost infra-sound deep. The ribbon of dark smoke in the lift shaft, extending from the burning clothes Berdle had discarded, trembled in the column of air.

~Oof! Hit bottom, Parinherm sent. ~95 per cent disabled, but still alive! End-run, I’m guessing. Nice working with you. Powering dow—

“Parinherm is still alive,” Berdle told Cossont. “We are being fired at by some sort of military arbite stationed just at the line-of-sight curve-limit of the corridor to the right. To the left, eighty metres away, one corridor higher, advancing this way at jogging speed, is a Gzilt person in a full battle suit armed with a laser assault rifle. This may be the Colonel Agansu person who contacted us earlier. I have two knife missiles to the left, within this corridor. They are holding fire while Gzilt civilians on a tour are evac— Wait. I’m being contacted. Excuse me.”

~Android/avatar entity, this is Colonel Agansu. Do you read? Come in.

“Colonel Agansu wishes to talk,” Berdle told Cossont. “Given our situation and the time we have to wait for the ship to return, I believe keeping him talking is to be preferred to having him or his adjuncts shooting at us.”

“The ship,” Cossont said. Her teeth wanted to chatter. She tried to stop them. “How long? It was still two-thirds of an hour away—”

“It is returning a little faster now,” the avatar said. “Though we still need to stall the Colonel. I intend, therefore, to engage him in conversation.”

“You engage away,” she told him.

~Android/avatar entity, in the corridor, this is Colonel Agansu. Do you read? Come in.

~Colonel Agansu, Berdle sent. ~To what do we owe such destructive attention?

~Ah. And who might I have the pleasure of addressing?

~You knowing my name; is that really necessary, Colonel?

~My knowing it is strictly speaking unnecessary, I’ll grant, Agansu sent. ~However, purely for form’s sake, we might as well exchange names; sobriquets, at least.

~I fail to see how this will make any material difference to our exchanges, of information or fire.

~I don’t mean to imply we are at all likely to become friends, sir. But a degree of civilised politeness should not prevent us discharging our duties.

~Or our weapons.

~Of which you seem to possess rather few, following the destruction of your knife missile, not to mention the demise of your fellow at the bottom of the elevator shaft. I am somewhat tempted to send the arbite up the corridor towards you, just to see what you are able to put in its way to stop it; however, I am aware that Ms Cossont is relatively vulnerable compared to your good self, and may come to some harm in any resulting fire-fight, even while you might remain quite hale and hearty. The arbite is already in a state of some confusion following what it thought was a centre-body 100 per cent kill-shot which you seem, nevertheless, to have survived. Is Ms Cossont well?

~Well enough.

~You know, I think I am going to—

~My name is Berdle, Colonel Agansu. Interesting to make your acquaintance.

~Likewise, Berdle.

~I did ask, earlier, to what we might owe such destructive attention, if you recall?

~Indeed you did, Agansu sent. ~Well then, Berdle, the answer would be: to Ms Cossont, and possibly the device which the facility’s records show she recovered a few minutes ago. As I said earlier, I would like to talk to Ms Cossont. Face to face; human to human. Also, I think it might be germane if I were to be allowed to inspect the device she retrieved. I strongly suspect you will have to accede to my requests in time, Berdle. We do rather have you at a disadvantage, wouldn’t you say? There was a pause, and then the colonel sent, ~I certainly would.

Berdle looked at Cossont, glanced at the ceiling and said quietly, “The person in full battle gear — who I’m assuming is Colonel Agansu — is now almost overhead, possibly ready to make ingress here, either down the shaft behind you or straight through the floor. The tour party near the combat arbite’s position is still not quite clear of the likely destruction volume, were I to let the two knife missiles off the leash. Excuse me; I must let Colonel Agansu talk at me some more.”

~You might benefit from being a little more cautious, Colonel, Berdle sent. ~We are less at a loss than you appear to imagine.

~Are you really? The colonel sounded amused.

~We are. We are currently mustering and preparing our forces, Colonel. You have my word.

~I’m sure I do, Agansu said, with mock seriousness. ~And that it is worth everything in the current situation, I feel certain. Nevertheless, the fact remains that you do not benefit from the presence of a friendly ship nearby, whereas I do. As well as, as you may have noticed, a very capable combat arbite.

~Yes. I trust the combat arbite is not in any way… precious to you, Colonel?

Berdle heard the colonel laugh. ~Ah, dear. How fine the line is between acceptably defiant bravado and hopelessly delusional boasting. You were doing so terribly well up until that point.

~I am sorry to be such a disappointment to you, Colonel Agansu.

Berdle glanced at Cossont again. “The tour party near the combat arbite’s position is now clear of the likely destruction volume and the knife missiles are cleared to fire,” the avatar told her. “Due to the nature of the munitions being used, the corridor is about to become extremely bright. We are trying to keep damage to a minimum, but — ah; here we go…”

The air in the corridor seemed to fill and streak with fanned white light, intensely bright; it almost looked like the smoke-hazed air was being lit by lasers, but something about the quality of the light itself and the way the smoke in the corridor was tugged after whatever it was that was making its way down the corridor argued against this. Cossont had never paid all the attention she might have in weaponry identification or whatever they’d called it back in military academy.

It really was astoundingly bright; it was as though part of the surface of a blue-white sun had suddenly appeared in the corridor, searing, bleaching everything. The light cut off; what had seemed like a brightly lit space in front of them suddenly looked dull.

An instant later a series of colossal, still greater outbursts of light — just barely distinguishable as being made up of hundreds of small, searingly bright flares rather than being a single massive eruption — made a white sun of the end of the corridor to their right. In the instant between the light and the trailing sound of the fusillade, what probably was laser light came flicking through the hazed air, filling the patch of corridor Cossont could see with sparkling bars of cerise light.

Explosions shook and battered her from both sides. She put her head down, wondering if she’d have had any hearing left without the suit.

Something touched her on one ear and Berdle said, “We have only one knife missile remaining to our left now. The person above us is either waiting or hesitating. I have instructed the remaining knife missile to mount a frontal attack; it will fly past us at just under ceiling height in approximately six seconds and fire over us and through the lift-shaft doorway. The munitions being used, though tiny, are both powered by and payloaded with anti-matter, so some radiation exposure at such close quarters is inescapable. Immediately after the missile has passed, you must stand and grasp me as you did before, from behind, arms round my body. Preferably legs wrapped round mine over my shins, too. Keep the bag with the mind-state device in it at your side, not over your back, do you understand?”

She nodded. More bars of pink light filled the air in front of the alcove, creating a screaming, tearing noise as the laser light impacted the swirling smoke and dust particles. Her mouth had gone very dry.

There was a further furious burst of cerise light and then the impression of almost invisibly quick motion high up, as though the corridor ceiling itself was rippling. Then the eSuit just turned the lights off; everything went completely dark while sound and blast-fronts seemed to detonate everywhere, pummelling her body from every side.

“Up!” Berdle shouted through her earbud. The suit helped her stand, she gripped the avatar from behind with three arms, brought her legs round his at the knee, made sure the shoulder bag was at her hip with her remaining hand and then put that round the avatar’s body too. She could see again. The corridor was full of light, both white and pink.

Then something seemed to erupt from Berdle’s chest and they were both flung away from the corridor and through the shallow alcove and into the lift shaft.

Cossont experienced what felt like the start of her head getting ripped off, then somebody slammed a sledge-hammer the size of a ship into her back and she blacked out.

Awake again; sore-headed, sore-backed, aching all over. She seemed to be still on Berdle’s back, looking over his shoulder through a ragged, dusty gap across the elevator shaft to the doorway on the far side. Through the smoke and dust there, a thing lumbered like a bad dream of a man; massive, reverse-kneed, arms thick with weapon clusters, saucer-headed, it stood, straightening a little, seemingly looking straight at them. If the little knife missile’s frontal attack had caused it any damage, it wasn’t visible. Cossont didn’t recognise the model; frankly it looked retro. Something rotated on its chest.

Then — silently, because her hearing didn’t seem to be working properly — another explosion seemed to go off just above the part of the shaft she could see, and debris rained down, falling past and showering into the depths. A man in a bulky glittering suit and holding a large gun, also seemingly made of mirror stuff, came floating down, as though sitting in an invisible chair. He looked very relaxed.

Cossont looked around. She and Berdle seemed to have been blown through a wall and into a storage area; everywhere she looked in the dusty gloom she saw towering stacks of shelves full of pale boxes similar to the one that had held the glittering grey cube with QiRia’s mind-state inside. They had ended up crumpled together in the remains of a set of shelves, half lying, half held standing by the twisted debris around them.

A couple of the pale, half-metre cube boxes came tumbling from somewhere overhead, bouncing and clattering down to join the jumble of debris already covering the floor. The combat arbite illuminated each of the falling boxes in turn with a thin beam of laser light from its weapon clusters, but let each fall and bounce without firing at them.

Cossont looked idly, groggily down at her hip. The shoulder bag wasn’t there. It must have been ripped away.

Shit, she thought.

The man in the glittering suit was floating, stationary, in the middle of the elevator shaft, looking in at them. He tipped his head to one side, as though wondering what to make of them. The combat arbite shuffled to one side, to keep a clear field of fire.

“We really are fucked, aren’t we?” Cossont said, her voice sounding odd inside her head and the helmet. She could taste what was probably her own blood in her mouth.

“Not necessarily,” Berdle replied through the earbud, sounding, as ever, relatively unconcerned. “Still one knife missile left.”

“But I thought it…”

“It left. It was not destroyed,” Berdle told her. “It went the long way round the building. I suspect they assumed any combat missiles we had left would just burst through anything in their way; certainly that would be the first thing to occur to a knife missile. So — although this has taken longer, nevertheless — the element of surprise is with the missile. Here we are; that’ll be it now,” the avatar announced, as light erupted all around the combat arbite.

The man in the glittering suit started to whirl round to where the combat arbite was throwing its arms up and disappearing and disintegrating inside a consuming torrent of white fire. Then the view went dark.

More battering and pummelling. It was like being slung into a big metal drum with a bunch of sharp rocks and being kicked down a steep mountainside studded with boulders.

“The knife missiles in use here are from the Miniaturised Drone Advanced Weapon System,” Berdle told her as floor, the shelves and the air itself all seemed to shake and quiver and beat. “Though it bears mention that it was ‘Advanced’ rather a long time ago. Still. And AM power is very crude, really. Raw, ragged stuff. Not really suitable for this kind of civilian-environment, in-structure work — far too battlefield — but it was all I had. Interestingly, the nanomissiles doing the damage are only a millimetre long and a tenth of that in diameter; too small to see for most unaided eyes; astonishing what you can do with anti-matter. There. Oh. Here—” Just as the battering seemed to be tailing off, there was another single, thudding, titanic impact, then Berdle said, “Ouch. Bet that hurt. Oh well, down you go…”

The view came back. The elevator shaft and the lit corridor beyond were full of dust and smoke. The doorway where the combat arbite had been standing was no longer a neat rectangle; it was practically circular, and most of the shattered, ragged edges were glowing. One or two shattered bits of machinery lying smoking, flaming or sputtering on the floor of the corridor might have been parts of the arbite. Of the man in the glittering suit, there was no sign. Something flashed briefly in the shaft.

“Yes, I wouldn’t go sticking your head into the lift shaft,” Berdle said, over a distant cacophony of alarm noises and some deep booming noises coming from the shaft. “Colonel Agansu is down there, largely disabled but patently still capable of firing.” Berdle stepped out of the compacted debris of the shelves they’d smashed into, taking Cossont with him. He peeled her arms away, then turned to face her as she stood, swaying slightly. She suspected the suit was doing most of the work involved in keeping her upright.

She focused on the avatar. The whole front of his chest was a shallow silver bowl. It swam back into shape only slowly. “Hmm,” the avatar said, looking down at this as another bright flash lit up the elevator shaft behind him. “Powerful laser your man had.” He stooped, came back up holding the shoulder bag with the cube in it. “Here.” He tied a knot in the burst strap, almost too quickly for her to see. “You okay?” he asked.

Cossont cleared her throat, nodded. “Fucking peachy.”

Berdle looked innocently pleased. “Good. Well, there don’t appear to be any other forces wishing to engage with us, so we may be through the worst of it.” There was another flash of light in the shaft behind.

“Shouldn’t you be finishing off this colonel guy?” Cossont asked.

Berdle shook his head. “No need. I have a scout missile down there with him, monitoring. He shouldn’t cause us any more trouble.”

“What about Parinherm?”

“I’ve tried contacting; he’s powered down. We’ll try and Displace him too when the ship gets back. Walk this way.”

Cossont, following the avatar, stepped shakily into a debris-strewn corridor between towering shelves. It seemed to stretch for ever into the distance. Something zipped past her from behind, coming through the smoke at head height and making her flinch. The thing stopped right alongside Berdle.

It was a thin cylinder about as thick as a thumb and as long as a hand, its front end shaped like an angular, blunted arrowhead and its dull silver surface marked with hair-fine dark lines and tiny dots. Berdle cocked one silvery eyebrow at it and said, “Yes, well done. So that Ms Cossont might be included in the conversation. Oh, both our lives. Inelegant use of rather too many nanos, though. Well, so you say, but it could have been accomplished more economically. Even so; had there been a whole section of those things, could you successfully have taken on all of them too? Well, there you are then.”

The missile moved off so fast it was as though it was a shell in a perfectly transparent gun barrel; it just disappeared, leaving behind only an after-image and the vaguest of impressions it had headed away in the direction its sharp end had been pointing. Berdle’s head jerked back in the blast of air and Cossont was only saved from being blown off her feet by the avatar reaching back with one silvery hand and grabbing her by the bag’s strap again. The thunder-clap echoed off the surrounding shelves and the ceiling.

Berdle shook his head as he resumed walking. “Knife missiles,” he said over his shoulder, with what sounded like affection.

“Yeah, knife missiles,” Cossont agreed, like she knew what she was talking about. She glanced back, but could see little through the smoke. “You sure there’s nobody else coming after us?”

“Not completely, no,” Berdle admitted, “but there doesn’t seem to be.” He sounded thoughtful. “The Gzilt ship present here is at least a sixth-level heavy cruiser, possibly a seventh-level battle-cruiser; that’d mean between one and three platoons of marines available, at least, but they aren’t being used. So that might say something about the secrecy and… well, authorisation of the mission involved.” He shrugged. “Anyway. Onwards; I should warn you there will be some tramping, and we may have to hide.”

The ship was led a merry dance, trying to get sufficiently close to the microrbital for long enough to get its avatar and the human off. Quickly getting the measure of each other, and each correctly guessing that its opposite number had no intention of being the first to open fire, neither ship resorted to serious targeting behaviour or the sort of hair-trigger weapon-readiness status that might have led to a misunderstanding. The whole tussle was conducted without signalling, as though neither vessel wanted to admit it was actually happening.

Eventually the Mistake Not… outwitted/out-field-managed the Gzilt ship and snapped the two humanoid figures off the habitat and back inside itself. It saw the Gzilt ship Displace/disloc one human-size entity off the little world a moment later. Having successfully retrieved its two primary Displace targets, the Mistake Not… tried to get a lock on the remains of the android Eglyle Parinherm, but found it had been beaten to it; a disloc field from the Gzilt ship was already starting to envelop the creature’s crushed and broken body at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

Before the Gzilt vessel could complete the operation, the Mistake Not… applied a spatter of plasma fire to various parts of the android’s body, cauterising all processing and memory/data storage nodes within the machine.

∞

xUe Mistake Not…

oGSV Contents May Differ

Right. What?… Oh; the stuff from the You Call This Clean?… Okay. The memories were in his eyes and they’ve been removed. How severe with himself. Just as well we successfully retrieved Mr Q’s mind-state, then. At no small risk to life and limb, I might add.

∞

Congratulations. With what result?

∞

Just about to find out…

Cossont felt sleepy, sore, elated, all at once. Her pain-management systems were telling her to move gently, slowly, with no sudden movements. She would be bathing rather than showering, she had already decided, but first, the ship had insisted, they needed to talk to the stored mind-state inside the silvery grey cube.

The Mistake Not… was powering away from the Ospin system on a wildly erratic course, having decided — after its jinking, ducking and diving, field-to-field tussle with the Gzilt ship — that it was the faster. So far at least, the Gzilt vessel had shown no sign of following.

Cossont sat down in the lounge area of the shuttle that had become her home over the last few days, clad only in the eSuit with its hands and feet components retracted to cuffs again and the helmet collapsed back into its necklace form. Pyan had gone ooh and ah over her and wrapped itself round her neck, rubbing gently at her bruised skin. Berdle, back to looking like a handsome Gzilt male again, entirely gave the impression he’d just strolled out of a grooming parlour; not a hint of tiredness or a hair out of place.

“You have been in the wars, you poor thing,” Pyan told Cossont, wrapping itself tighter.

“Yes. No need to throttle me.”

“Apologies. There. And where is that silly android?”

“We had to leave him behind,” Cossont said, glancing at Berdle as she extracted the silver-grey cube from the battered shoulder bag. “Under a wrecked elevator car at the bottom of a lift shaft.”

“The Gzilt ship disloc’d him aboard itself,” Berdle said. “It took Colonel Agansu too.”

“Were they both still alive?” Cossont asked.

“I think Agansu was,” the avatar said.

“Not Parinherm?”

“No.” Berdle shook his head, held Cossont’s gaze until she looked away.

She put the silvery cube on the low table in front of her, then reached out, touched it on.

“Ngaroe?” she asked.

“Ms Cossont,” QiRia’s voice said immediately.

Cossont realised she had been tense, hunched over the table. She relaxed a little. “Good to speak to you again,” she said, smiling.

“How long has it been? Oh. Quite a few years, I see. And are we on… a Culture ship?”

Cossont wasn’t sure what to say. She glanced at Berdle, who shrugged, unhelpfully.

“Yes,” she said. “Umm… I didn’t realise you could…”

“I’m not completely without senses in here,” QiRia’s voice said. “I may only be switched on for fractions of an hour at a time, but I can tell roughly what my circumstances are, how much time has elapsed since I was last activated, and I have sufficient appreciation of the radiative and general sensory ambience of my surroundings to tell when I am, for example, on a ship.”

“We were on a ship the last time we spoke,” Cossont said.

“I know. So what? Hardly remarkable. But this is a Culture ship; a GCU or a warship or something similar. That is remarkable. So I remarked upon it. That it? We done? You going to shut me off for another sixteen years?”

“No, no,” Cossont said quickly. “Sorry. Very sorry. But… look. We need to ask you something.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Hello, Mr QiRia,” Berdle said pleasantly. “My name is Berdle. I’m the avatar of the ship you’re on, the Mistake Not… Pleased to meet you.”

“Yes. Delighted. You sound stressed, by the way, Cossont.”

“Do I? Well, it’s been—”

“Yes. That’s why I said it,” the voice said, with only a touch of acid. “Berdle, I’d like to interface. May I see through your eyes, or some other visual sensor immediately hereabouts?”

“Be my guest,” Berdle said, and looked first at Cossont, then in a steady sweep round the rest of the lounge.

“Cossont! You have four arms,” QiRia’s voice said.

“To play the elevenstring,” she said.

“Ah. You weren’t put off playing it by the Warm, Considering after all. Good for you. So; what is it you want to know?”

She took a deep breath. “Ngaroe, we need to ask you something about… long ago. Going right back. It is… it’s very important. It might affect how the Subliming goes. Our Subliming. The Gzilt Subliming.” She took another deep breath. “There was a message, a signal from the Zihdren, saying that the Book of Truth might all be a lie, and you were mentioned as—”

“Wait, wait, wait,” QiRia’s voice said. Cossont fell silent. “How far back? Are you asking me to remember things from—”

“The time of the conference that set up the Culture, sir,” Berdle said.

“Ah,” QiRia’s voice said. “That far back. Can’t help you.”

“What?” Cossont said. She and the avatar exchanged looks.

“I said,” the voice from the cube told them, slowly, “that I cannot help you. My memories only go back to… about seventy years standard after that time. The memories in here begin at midnight on the 44th of Pereid, 8023, Koweyn calendar. Before that, I’ve nothing.”

“Seriously?” Cossont said. She could hear her own voice start to rise in tone and volume. “You’re missing—?”

“Must ask you to check, sir,” Berdle said, in a pained voice.

“Check for yourself. You’re a ship; you’ll have the ability. I’m giving you permission. I’m not a biological, not in here, so take a look for yourself. Scan all the data in this cube. Go on; feel free.”

“You’re sure?” the avatar said. He looked at Cossont, who found it was her turn to shrug.

“Yes!” QiRia’s voice said sharply.

Berdle sighed. He smiled at Cossont. “This might take a moment,” the avatar told her.

She sat back slumped in the seat, rubbed her face with two of her hands. She sighed heavily. “Take all the—”

“Ah,” Berdle said, sounding resigned. He looked at Cossont. “I’m afraid it’s just as Mr QiRia’s mind-state has claimed.”

“Told you,” the voice from the cube said.

“The memories aren’t there?” Cossont felt suddenly tired, full of aches, and depressed.

“I’m afraid not,” Berdle told her. “And even the memories of the times when Mr QiRia thought back to those times, before the source memories were edited out, have been expunged, too.” Berdle looked at the cube. “That’s quite a thorough job, Mr QiRia.”

“Sounds like it,” the voice agreed.

Berdle smiled faintly, shook his head as he said, “Would you have any idea why you—?”

“No. None at all. Guess I must have thought I had something to hide. If so, glad I’ve done a good job of it, or made sure somebody else did.”

Cossont was sitting, looking deflated, eyes closed, shaking her head gently. “They can’t just have gone,” she said, as though to herself. “They can’t just have gone.” She looked at Berdle. “What now? Can we look for… the real QiRia, for the old guy himself? He might… he should still know.” She shook her head again. “Shouldn’t he?”

“We’ve already tried that,” the avatar told her. “They found him, but he’d had the memories encoded site-specific in his body, and then had those sites removed.”

“What?” Cossont said, frowning.

“Mr QiRia looks like this, now,” Berdle said, and a screen appeared in mid-air, of a man in a dark room, wearing a pair of dark, slatted glasses. “The person who tracked him down,” Berdle said; “their suit took this.” The screen image moved and the man took off the glasses, revealing that it was QiRia, but also that where his eyes should have been, there were the inner parts of ears.

The clip looped and the screen split to show different versions of the same sequence, in infra-red, slow motion, with the eye sockets zoomed in on, and combinations thereof.

Cossont just stared.

“How gross!” Pyan said.

“What are you looking at?” QiRia’s voice asked.

Cossont reached out and turned the cube off, then slumped back in her seat, eyes closed again. She had a feeling she might be about to cry.

“Do you remember this?” Berdle said softly, and when Cossont opened her eyes again the screen was showing a view that looked familiar, though at first she couldn’t quite place it. It was of a man looking slightly lost in what might have been a transit lounge. Then he left, following a modest amount of luggage on a float-trolley.

Of course: QiRia, arriving on Xown, five years ago. Then a similar set of images which seemed to show him in the same place, dressed similarly but wearing big dark glasses. If anything, he looked even less sure about where he was going this time. The images faded away and the screen went dark.

“And this?” The screen shone out again to show Ximenyr, the man with the many penises on the airship Equatorial 353, in the Girdlecity. It was almost exactly the view she recalled having at the time, though then the view flicked round and showed Cossont’s own face, before flicking back to the man in the bed again. So this had been Berdle’s point of view. This was the sight through his eyes, recorded.

“Mr Berdle, Ms Cossont,” Ximenyr said in his deep, thick voice. “Pleased to meet you.” He opened his mouth and a long tongue snaked out and delicately licked at first one eyebrow then the other, shaping them both neatly into place. The tongue disappeared again. He opened his eyes wide; he had bright, pale blue irises. His eyeballs went back into their sockets, the blue irises disappearing. They were replaced from below by dark red irises which rolled into place and steadied. “Excuse me,” he said. “These pupils work better in daylight.” He smiled widely, showing very white teeth.

Cossont was nodding now. “Mr Ximenyr, the body-amendment specialist,” she said.

This would be why QiRia had looked like he had, the second time in the transit lounge; wearing big dark glasses, seemingly — perversely — less sure of his surroundings than before: he’d been blind.

The screen view now was doing something she hadn’t done at the time, zooming in to a close-up of Ximenyr’s face; the teeth and the eyes at first, then down, to the necklace of trinkets adorning his neck.

The view came to rest and freeze on the tiny — at the time deactivated — scout missile that the ship had sent into the man’s bed-chamber. It was resting on Ximenyr’s chest between what looked like an android’s thumb and a thick crystal cylinder, striped with encrusted jewels.

The frozen image jerked to one side, zoomed in further on the cylinder, showing a hazy view of what looked like semi-transparent crystal with what might have been a pair of berries inside. They were pale green, and looked like they were floating in some sort of off-white surround.

“What colour were Mr QiRia’s eyes?” Berdle asked.

Cossont still had to think, just to be sure. Then she remembered. “When he was there, they were the colour of the ocean on Perytch IV,” she said. “The ocean could be lots of colours,” she told the avatar, “but mostly, in daylight, it was the colour of beach jade. Pale green.” She nodded at the extreme close-up of the jewel-encrusted cylinder with its imperfectly transparent little windows and the two soft-looking things inside that might have been berries. “That colour.”