He shrugged. “For my own private collection of images which I find pleasing.”
“Uh-huh.”
“For whatever it might be worth, Ms. Y’breq, I can assure you that my motivation is absolutely not sexual.”
“Right.”
Himerance sighed. “You are a remarkable work, if I may say so, Ms. Y’breq,” he told her. “I realise that you are a person, and a very intelligent, pleasant and – to those of your own kind, of course – an attractive one. However, I shan’t pretend that my interest in you is anything other than purely due to the intagliation you have suffered.”
“Suffered?”
“Undergone? I did think about the exact word to employ.”
“No, you were right the first time. I suffered it,” she said. “Not something I got to have any choice about, anyway.”
“Quite.”
“What do you do with these images?”
“I contemplate them. They are works of art, to me.”
“Got any other ones you can show me?”
Himerance sat forward. “Would you really like to see some?” He appeared genuinely keen.
“Do we have the time?”
“We do!”
“So show me.”
A bright, 3D image appeared in the air in front of her. It showed … well, she wasn’t sure. It was an insane swirl of lines, black against yellow-orange, bewilderingly complex, levels of implied detail disappearing into enfolded spaces it was not quite possible to see.
“This is just the three-dimensional view one would have of a stellar field-liner entity,” he told her. “Though with the horizontal scale reduced to make it look roughly spherical. Really they look more like this.” The image suddenly stretched, teasing out until the assemblage of dark lines she’d been looking at became a single line, maybe a metre long and less than a millimetre across. A tiny symbol, looking like a sort of microscopic shoe box with the edges chamfered off, was probably meant to indicate scale, though as she had no idea what it was meant to represent it didn’t really help. The vanishingly thin line was shown silhouetted against what looked like a detail of the surface of a star. Then the line plumped up to become an absurdly complicated collection of lines once more.
“It’s hard to give an impression of the effect in 4D with all the internals shown,” Himerance said apologetically. “But it’s something like this.” Whatever he did with the image, it left her feeling glad she was sitting down; the image seemed to peel off into a million different slices, sections flickering blurringly past her like snowflakes in a blizzard. She blinked, looked away, feeling disoriented.
“Are you all right?” Himerance asked, sounding concerned. “It can be a bit intense.”
“I’m fine,” she told him. “What exactly was that?”
“A particularly fine specimen of a stellar field liner; creatures who live within the magnetic lines of force in, mostly, the photospheres of suns.”
“That thing was alive?”
“Yes. And it still is, I expect. They live for a very long time.”
She looked at the old man, his face illuminated by the glow coming from the image of the creature that was mostly black lines and somehow lived on the surfaces of suns. “Can you see it in proper 4D?”
“Yes,” he said, turning to look at her. He sounded proud and coy at once. Face glowing, enthusiasm seemingly pouring out of him, he suddenly looked about six.
“How is that possible?” she asked.
“Because I am not really a man, or any sort of human,” he told her, still smiling. “I am an avatar of a ship. It is the ship you are really addressing, and the ship which is able to take and appreciate images in 4D. The ship’s name, my true name, is the Me, I’m Counting, once fully part of the Culture, now an independent vessel within what is sometimes known as the Ulterior. I am a wanderer; an explorer, if you will, and it is my pleasure, on occasion, to offer my services as a cultural translator – a facilitator of smooth relations between profoundly different species and civilisations – to whoever might feel the need for such assistance. And – as I say – I am also a collector of images of whatever I consider to be the most exquisite beings, wherever my travels take me.”
“Couldn’t you just take one of these images without me knowing?”
“In the practical sense, yes. Nothing would be easier.”
“But you wanted to ask permission first.”
“It would be rude, dishonourable, not to, don’t you think?”
She looked at him for a moment. “I suppose,” she said eventually. “So. Would you be sharing this image with anybody?”
“No. Until now, showing you this one of the field-liner creature, I have never shared one of these images with anybody. I have many more. Would you like to—?”
“No,” she said, smiling and holding up one hand. “That’s all right.” The image disappeared, dimming the room again.
“I give you my word that, in the unlikely event I do decide I want to share your image, I would not do so without your express permission.”
“In each case?”
“In each case. With a similar precondition applying to—”
“And if you do it, if you take the image, will I feel anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Hmm.” Still hugging her shins, she lowered her face to her
robed knees, stuck her tongue out to touch the soft material, then bit at it, taking a tiny fold of it into her mouth.
Himerance watched her for a few moments, then said, “Lededje, may I have your permission to take the image?”
She spat out the fold of material, raised her head. “I asked you before: what’s in it for me?”
“What may I offer?”
“Get me out of here. Take me with you. Help me escape. Rescue me from this life.”
“I can’t do that, Lededje, I’m sorry.” Himerance sounded regretful.
“Why not?”
“There would be consequences.”
She let her head drop again. She stared at the rug at the foot of the shuttered windows. “Because Veppers is the richest man in the world?”
“In the whole Sichultian Enablement. And the most powerful.” Himerance sighed. “There are limits to what I can do anyway. You have your own way of living here, on this world and within the hegemony you call the Enablement; your own rules, mores, customs and laws. It is not regarded as good form to go interfering in the societies of others unless one has a very good reason, and an agreed-on strategic plan. However much we might wish to, we cannot simply indulge our own sentimental urges. I am genuinely sorry, but, sadly, what you ask is not within my gift.”
“So, nothing in it for me,” she said, and knew that she sounded bitter.
“I’m sure I could set up a bank account with a sum in it that might help you—”
“Like Veppers will ever let me have any sort of independent life,” she said, shaking her head.
“Well, perhaps—”
“Oh, just do it,” she said. She hugged her legs tighter, looked at him. “Do I need to stand up or anything?”
“No. Are you sure—?”
“Just do it,” she repeated fiercely.
“I might still be able to suggest some kind of compensatory—”
“Yes, yes. Whatever you think fit. Surprise me.”
“Surprise you?”
“You heard.”
“You are sure about this?”
“I’m sure, I’m sure. Have you done it yet?”
*
“Ah-ha,” Sensia purred, nodding her head slowly. “That does
sound like it.”
“That ship put the neural lace thing in my head?”
“Yes. Well … it would have planted the seed of one; they grow.”
“I didn’t feel anything at the time.”
“Well, you wouldn’t.” Sensia looked out towards the desert. “Yes, the Me, I’m Counting,” she said, and Lededje got the impression Sensia was really talking
to herself. “Hooligan-class LOU. Declared as an Eccentric and Ulteriored itself over a millennium ago. Dropped out of view completely a couple of years back. Probably on a retreat.”
Lededje sighed heavily. “My own fault for saying “Surprise me”, I guess.” Inside, though, she was elated. The mystery was solved, almost certainly, and it had been a good bargain; she had been saved from death, in a sense at least.
But what is to become of me? she thought. She looked at Sensia, still staring out into the shimmering warmth of distance where dust devils danced and the horizon quivered in a mirage of lake or sea.
What is to become of me? she wondered. Did she depend upon the charity of this virtual woman? Was she subject to some legal agreement between the Culture and the Enablement? Was she now somebody or something else’s possession or plaything? She might as well ask, she supposed.
She immediately found herself preparing to use what she thought of as her little voice: the meek, low, soft, childlike tone she used when she was trying to make her own vulnerability and powerlessness known, when she was trying to play upon somebody’s sympathies, make them feel sorry for her and so less likely to hurt or demean her and perhaps even let her have something she wanted. It was a technique she had used on everyone from her mother to Veppers, mostly with a lot more success than failure. But she hesitated. It had never been a ruse she had been very proud of, and here the rules had changed, everything was different. For her own pride, for the sake of what might be a fresh start, she would ask it straight, without deliberate inflection.
“So,” she said, looking not at Sensia but out at the desert, “what is to become of me, Sensia?”
The older woman looked at her. “Become of you? You mean what happens now, where do you go?”
Still not daring to meet the other woman’s gaze, she nodded. “Yes.”
What a strange, almost absurd situation to be in, she thought. To be in this perfect but … self-confessed simulation, talking to a glorified computer about her fate, her life from this point on. What would happen next? Would she be left free to wander and somehow make a life within this virtual world? Would she be in some sense returned to Sichult, even to Veppers? Could she simply be turned off as just a program, nothing genuinely alive at all? The following few seconds, the next sentence out of Sensia’s unreal, virtually modelled mouth, would like as not turn her life one way or the other: to despair, to triumph, to outright annihilation. It all came down – unless she was already being deeply deceived about where she was and who she was really talking to – to what was said in the next moment.
Sensia blew her cheeks out. “Largely up to you, Lededje. You’re in a nearly unique situation so there’s no particular precedent, but zero documentation or not you’re essentially a fully functioning, viable independent mind-state and incontrovertibly sentient, with all that that implies regarding rights and so on.”
“What does that imply?” Lededje asked. She was already feeling relieved but she wanted to be sure.
Sensia grinned. “Only good things, really. The first thing I imagine you might want to do is to be revented.”
“What does that mean?”
“Technical term for being brought back to life in a physical body back in the Real.”
For all that she had no real heart or mouth, that all this was a simulation, she felt her heart leap, her mouth start to go dry. “That is possible?”
“Possible, advisable, kind of standard in such situations.” Sensia gave a sort of throttled-back laugh and waved out at the desert. As she swept her arm across the view, Lededje caught brief glimpses of what she guessed were other virtual worlds within or alongside this one: great gleaming cities, a mountain range at night criss-crossed with a tangle of tubes and lights, a vast ship or mobile city sailing on a creamy white sea beneath a cerulean sky, a limitless-looking vista of nothing but air full of vast striped trees like green-blue curlicues, and views and structures that she saw but could hardly have described, which she guessed were possible in a virtual reality but impractical in what Sensia blithely called the Real. Then the desert resumed. “You could stay here, of course,” Sensia told Lededje. “In whatever environment or mix of them you find congenial, but I’d expect you might want a real physical body.”
Lededje nodded. Her mouth was still dry. Could it really be this easy? “I think,” she said, “I would.”
“Sensible. There are, believe me, innumerable other things you could be revented into, in theory, but if I were you I’d stick with the form you’re used to, at first at least. Context is everything, and the first context we find ourselves in is that of our own body.” She looked Lededje down and up. “You happy with the way you look now?”
Lededje opened the blue robe she still wore, looked down at herself. She closed the robe again. Its hems fluttered in the hot breeze. “Yes.” She hesitated. “I can’t decide if I want some form of tattoo or not.”
“Easy to add later, though not at the genetic level you’ve been used to. Can’t really sort you out with that. That info didn’t travel.” Sensia shrugged. “I’ll leave you with an image you can manipulate until you’re happy with it, take a spec from that.”
“You’ll grow a body for me?”
“Complete a suspended one.”
“How long will that take?”
“Here, as little or as much time as you like. In the Real, about eight days.” Sensia shrugged again. “My standard stock of mindless bods doesn’t include the Sichultian form – sorry.”
“Is there a body I could be put into now, without waiting?”
Sensia smiled. “Can’t wait, eh?”
Lededje shook her head, felt her skin grow warm. The truth was that if this was some cruel joke, she wanted to know as quickly as possible. If it was all genuine then she didn’t want to wait to have a real body to take her back to Sichult.
“It’ll still take about a day or so,” Sensia said. She nodded at a female human figure suddenly suspended in the air in front of them; naked, eyes closed. It looked vaguely Sichultian. Its skin was a sort of muddy grey. Then it changed to pure black, then to near white, then shifted through a modest spectrum of different colours. At the same time the girth and height of the figure increased and then decreased. The shape of the head and the facial features changed a little too. “That’s the parameters you can play with, given the time available,” Sensia told her.
Lededje was thinking. She recalled Veppers’ own skin tone. “How long might it take to make it look properly Sichultian, and not black, but sort of reddish-gold?”
Sensia’s eyes might have narrowed a fraction. “A few hours more; a full day in total perhaps. You’d look Sichultian, but you wouldn’t really be so all the way through, not inside. A blood test, tissue sample or almost any invasive medical procedure would quickly reveal that.”
“That’s all right. I think that’s what I’d like,” Lededje said. She looked Sensia in the eye. “I have no money to pay for this.” She had heard that the Culture survived without money, but hadn’t believed a word of it.
“That’s as well,” Sensia said reasonably, “I have no charge to levy.”
“You would do this out of kindness, or for my obligation?”
“Let’s call it kindness, but it’s my pleasure.”
“Then, thank you,” Lededje said. She bowed formally. Sensia smiled. “I would also,” Lededje said, “need to work my passage back to Sichult.”
Sensia nodded. “I’m sure that can be arranged. Though the word ‘work’ doesn’t really mean quite the same in the Culture as it does in the Enablement.” Sensia paused. “May I ask what you intend to do when you get back?”
Kill Mr. Joiler Fucking Veppers, of course, Lededje thought grimly. And— … but there were some things, some thoughts which were so secret, so potentially dangerous, she had learned in effect to keep them even from herself.
She smiled, wondered if this friendly-seeming virtual creature could read her thoughts, in here.
“
I have business to conclude there,” she said smoothly.
Sensia nodded, expressionless.
They both looked out towards the desert again.
Six
Prin ignored the departing air vehicle. The giant black beetle ignored him in return. Its great wings unfolded to their full extent – a grinning, death’s head pattern was displayed on each – and then blurred into motion. The giant beetle lumbered upwards. The storm of air its wings produced kicked up dust and tiny shards of bone as Prin, still holding the tiny, petrified form of Chay against his massive chest with one of his forelimbs, reached the flat landing area and dashed across it for the door of the blood-powered mill.
He threw open the door, then had to duck and squeeze though the doorway to get inside. He straightened up, roaring, the wind and dust from the departing aircraft’s wings blowing a stormy haze about him and before him, sweeping over the dark, uneven floor-boards to where the group of grinning demons and terrified Pavuleans were standing before a tall glowing doorway of cool blue set into the bone-and-sinew machinery of the mill’s creaking, quietly shrieking interior.
Somebody said, “Three.”
Caught in the double whirlwind produced by the beetle’s wings, the door behind Prin slammed shut, shaking the mill and reducing by half the little light that came from outside. Prin paused, taking stock. Chay remained stiff in his forelimb. He thought he could feel her trembling against his chest, and hear her whimpering. The demons and the Pavuleans presented a static tableau.
A shallow ramp led down from the floor of the mill to the blue haze of the tall doorway, which trembled, light level fluctuating, as though it was made up of mist inside. Prin thought he caught a glimpse of movement beyond it, but it was impossible to be sure. There were six demons before him. They were of the smaller, four-legged kind; no match for him individually but capable of over-whelming him en masse. Two of them were the ones who had come out of the mill to watch the beetle-shaped flier land. The other four, each holding one of the Pavuleans, had come in on the beetle itself. Four Pavuleans left; four must already have gone through the gateway, back to the Real.
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