She had, tentatively, entertained the idea of taking Demeisen as a lover. The more Sichultian he got, and the longer she was cooped up in here, fabulous fake scenery or not, the more attractive he looked and the itchier that subject got. She guessed, first, it would be pretty meaningless to the ship, second that she’d be indulged (it would say yes), third that it would be done with some style and sensitivity and – it occurred to her one day – fourth, it might just … just … make her safer, and her plan to kill Veppers more likely to succeed.
The Minds, the hyper AIs that commanded, that basically were the Culture’s capital ships, were unarguably sentient, and they had emotions, even if their feelings were always under the control of their intellects, never the other way round. The ship had already hinted that there might be trouble where it was taking her – the sort of trouble where its fearsome martial abilities might come into play – so was there not just a chance that having sex with its avatar might make it feel even the tiniest bit of extra commitment towards her?
How much would it mean to the ship if she and its avatar did fuck? Nothing whatsoever? Or would it be like a human stroking a domestic pet; indulgent, companionable, mildly pleasant … though with no possible component that might lead to feelings of ownership, commitment or jealousy?
It was calculation rather than emotion; she’d be whoring herself. But then Veppers had long ago removed any choice she might have had regarding who she fucked. She’d had to whore herself for him (and against him – not that that had worked). The only time she’d ever had sex simply because she’d wanted to had been on that single night aboard the GSV, with Shokas.
Anyway, she had not broached the subject. And besides, for all she knew, the ship would revert to type, the way it had been while it had been aboard the GSV, before it had had its sudden and still slightly suspicious change of mind. Then it had seemed to enjoy hurting people; so it might do so again, and take pleasure in having its avatar reject her.
Now he – it – was offering her a present: a tattoo, allegedly. She was sat in one of the three flight-deck seats; she’d been watching news reports out of Sichult on the module’s screen when Demeisen had popped into existence behind her. She leant forward. The thing lay in his palm; a looped, tangled assortment of thin grey-blue filaments looking a lot how she knew a fully grown neural lace looked.
“What makes you think I might want a tattoo?”
“You said you missed having one.”
“I did?”
“Eleven days ago. Then again yesterday. The first time, you said that sometimes you felt too naked when you woke up. You also mentioned that since you were revented you’d had dreams of walking down a city street thinking you were fully clothed but everybody looking at you weirdly and then you looking down at yourself and realising you were naked.”
“Apparently normal people have that dream.”
“I know.”
“Did I also say I was glad to be rid of the tattoo?”
“No. Maybe you just think you say that to people.”
She frowned, looked at the thing in his palm again. Now it looked like thin strands of oily mercury. “Anyway, that does not look like a tattoo,” she told him.
“Not like this. Watch.”
The assemblage of loops and lines started to move slowly, stirring itself. It began to flow out across Demeisen’s palm as though forming a sort of chain-mail glove. He turned his hand over for a moment to show it wrapping itself round his fingers, then turned it back as the lines moved like tiny waves up his wrist and arm, disappearing under his shirt. He rolled the sleeve back to show the filaments coursing along his upper arm, thinning fractionally and spreading out.
He undid his shirt a little to show the silver-blue lines tracking smoothly across his upper chest – it was smooth, hairless, like a child’s – then put his head back as the tattoo rose up his neck and over his face and then right round his head, a few tiny thin lines decorating his ears while others swept fabulously, precisely over his face, moving to within millimetres of his nostrils, mouth and eyes but stopping there. He raised his other hand to show the lines flowing down there too, then held both hands and forearms up to show that they were identically, symmetrically decorated in millimetrically spaced curls and swirls, curves and parabolas.
“I’m getting it to display just the upper-body section,” he explained. “It does the torso, legs and feet too; same spacing.” He admired his hands. “Or you can go for a more angular look …”
The mobile tattoo shifted everywhere, the curves becoming straight lines, the tight curls becoming right angles, zigzags. “Colour’s commandable too,” Demeisen muttered. The tattoo changed to soot black. Then to perfectly reflective silver, as though the whole tattoo was made of mercury teased impossibly fine. “Or sort of random.” Within seconds the tattoo had become a dark, random scribble across what she could see of his body. “Motifs, obviously,” Demeisen added. The tattoo became a series of nested, concentric silver circles on his skin, the largest a hand’s-breadth in diameter across his upper chest.
She reached out and took one of his hands, peering at the circles on the back of his hand. Looking extremely closely – she still thought her eyesight was significantly better than any normal Sichultian’s had ever been; more zoomable, for a start – she could just make out tiny silver lines running from one circle to another. Hair fine, she thought. No; down fine.
She gazed at all the silvery circles, spread across his skin like too-symmetrical ripples in a pond someone had thrown a few dozen pebbles into. The circles spread, merged, became a criss-cross pattern of thick lines that looked braided, and much finer lines which wove in between the braids. Changing from silver to gold, they made it look as though he was wrapped in a glittering wire cage.
“Of course, I’m able to alter it by just thinking,” he told her. “You’d need to control it through an interface; maybe have some sort of control section always manifest in the pattern, if you wanted to make it change appearance. One wrist with a sort of stylised key- or glyph-board on it would work, or even just coded fingertip sequences anywhere. Though a terminal would work too. Something to decide later.”
She was barely listening, still staring. “It’s astonishing,” she breathed.
“Like it? It’s yours,” he told her.
She kept hold of his hand. She looked up at him. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?”
He laughed. “Of course not.”
“Are there any catches?”
“Catches?” He looked confused for a moment. “Oh,” he said, “you mean any downside?”
“Anything I might wish I’d known, looking back on this moment from some point in the future?”
She worried that she might have insulted him, insulted the ship somehow, by being so cautious, even suspicious. But Demeisen just pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “None I can think of.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it’s yours if you want it.” The tattoo was already moving, all over him, changing from silver circles to wavy dark grey lines and sliding back the way it had come, up from one hand, down from his head, face and neck, away from his chest and back down the other arm until it rested coiled, grey-blue and immobile back in his palm again.
She still held that hand. “All right,” she said softly. “I’ll take it.”
“Keep your hand there,” he told her.
The tattoo moved up his palm, along two of his fingers and then onto her fingers, hand, wrist and forearm. She could only just feel it as it slid slowly along her tawny skin, faintly disturbing the fine, downy hairs on her arms. For some reason she had assumed it would be cool, but it was skin temperature.
“Any particular pattern you’d like it to assume?” Demeisen asked.
“That first one you had,” she said, watching it settle over her fingers on the hand it started on. She flexed her fingers. There was no resistance, no feeling of tightness, even where the lines seemed printed over her knuckles. The pattern he’d had first, the one with the whorls
and swirls, expressed itself over her arms. She pulled her sleeve up to see. “I can change it later?” she asked, glancing at him.
“Yes,” he said. He made a hand-shaking gesture. “You can let go now,” he said. She smiled at him, let go of his hand.
The tattoo went smoothly onto her upper chest; she could feel it go quite quickly across her back between her shoulder blades, heading for her other arm. It wrapped round her chest and torso and spread up over her neck and face and head. She stood up as it covered her belly and flowed down over her behind. She stepped down to where Demeisen stood. “Can I—?” she asked, and immediately Demeisen was holding a mirror, showing her her own face. She raised her other hand to watch it move down from her wrist to her fingers. It slid easily under the silvery ring which was her terminal. She looked back at her reflection.
“Mirror,” Demeisen said. He twirled the mirror’s handle, presenting her with the other side. “Or invertor; a screen, in other words.”
She gave a small laugh, shook her head as she watched the dark patterns settle over her face like tiny trajectories, like tracks in a bubble chamber, like the slightest, finest spiral-vines in a mini -ature forest. She touched her fingers to her cheek. It was as though it wasn’t there. Her fingertips felt as sensitive as they ever had and her cheek felt just as it always did. “Make it go silver,” she whispered.
“Your wish, ma’am,” he said.
It went silver. She regarded her face. Silver would never look as good as when her skin had been black. “Black, please,” she said.
It went perfectly black. She felt it complete its spread over her torso and back. It settled and joined between her legs, close by vagina and anus but not covering. It moved down her legs, spiralling towards her ankles and feet.
She pulled the material of her blouse out, looked down. “Is there any strength to it?” she asked. “Could it act as support, as a brassiere?”
“There is a little tensile strength to it, naturally,” Demeisen said quietly. She felt and – blouse neck still pulled open – watched as the tattoo pushed her breasts gently upwards. Now there was a slight tightness around her rib cage, just under her breasts. She let the material go, grinned at him. “Not that I’m vain,” she told him with a suddenly shy smile. “Or really need one. You can let it go back the way it was.”
She felt the tightness around her chest relax and disappear. For a moment she was aware of the weight of her breasts, then they just went back to feeling normal again.
Demeisen smiled. “Also, it can go skin coloured.”
She felt it squeeze between the soles of her feet and the thin slippers she wore. At the same time, the tattoo disappeared. She peered at her image in the invertor again. There was no sign of it whatsoever. She put her fingers to her face once more. Still nothing to be felt. “Bring it back?” she asked, missing it already.
It faded slowly up, from her precise skin tone to soot black again, like an ancient photograph.
“What’s it made of?” she asked.
“Mased-state transfixor atoms, woven long-chain molecular exotics, multi-phased condensates, nanoscale efines, advanced picogels … other stuff.” He shrugged. “You weren’t expecting anything simple like ‘plastic’ or ‘memory mercury’, were you?”
She smiled. “Did you make it yourself?”
“Certainly did. From pre-existing patterns, but tweaked.” The tattoo had settled everywhere upon her skin. It had stopped moving. She closed her eyes for a moment, flexed her fingers, rotated both arms in an exaggerated windmilling motion. She could feel nothing. As far as her skin was concerned, the tat might as well not be there.
“Thank you,” she said when she opened her eyes. “Can it come off as quickly?”
“Slightly quicker.”
She put one hand to the skin just under her eye. “But could it, say, stop somebody trying to poke me in the eye with a sharp stick?”
A tiny grid of dark lines leapt up in front of her right eye, near where her fingers were. She felt that all right; not exactly sore, but there had been real pressure on the skin all around her eye.
She grinned. “Any other orifices or bodily parts it protects?” she asked.
“It can probably dice your poo as it emerges,” Demeisen said, matter-of-factly. “And act as a chastity belt if you want. You’ll need to practise controlling it with your terminal; there’ll be something of a learning process for the more complicated stuff.”
“Anything else it can do?”
A pained expression crossed his face. “That’s about it. I wouldn’t go jumping off any tall buildings expecting it to save you, because it won’t. You’ll still end up squished.”
She stepped back, looked at her arms and hands, then came forward and hugged him.
“Thank you, Demeisen,” she said into his ear. “Thank you, ship.”
“My pleasure entirely,” the avatar said. He – it – returned the hug with – she’d have been prepared to bet – exactly the same amount of pressure she was putting into it. “I am very glad you like it.”
She loved it. She hugged the avatar a little longer, and was patted on the back. She gave it just one extra beat to see if there would be any more to it than that, but there wasn’t.
Any normal man, she thought … But that, of course, was precisely what he was not. She patted his upper arms and let go.
Seventeen
The Semsarine Wisp was an etiolated meander of young stars strewn amidst great gauzy veils of shadowing, shielding interstellar gas. It protruded from the main galactic mass like a single fuzzily curled hair from a tousled head. The General Contact Unit Bodhisattva OAQS brought Yime Nsokyi to the rendezvous point within the Wisp sixteen days after picking her up from her home Orbital. The rendezvous point itself was an Unfallen Bulbitian.
The Bulbitians had been the losers in a great war long ago. The things that people now called Bulbitians – Fallen or otherwise – had been the species’ primary habitats: substantial space structures which looked like two great, dark, heavily decorated cakes joined base to base. They averaged about twenty-five kilometres measured either across their diameter or from pinnacle to pinnacle, so were relatively small by habitat standards, though of respectable size compared to the spacecraft of most other civilisations. The Bulbitians themselves had been a pan-hopper species; small, monopedal and quite long-lived by the time they got involved in the great war that destroyed them. As far as was known, no verified biological trace of them still existed.
All that remained were their space structures, and almost all of them were no longer in space; they were the Fallen Bulbitians, the ships/habitats that had been deliberately and carefully lowered through the atmosphere of the nearest suitable solid-surface planet by the Hakandra – the winners of that particular war – to serve as monuments to their victory. Brought down to a planetary surface, the great structures were crushed by their own weight and crumpled into vast, city-sized, mountain-range-high ruins.
The Hakandra had not troubled to remove anything save the most advanced weapon systems from the structures before they’d run them aground on the planetary rocks they’d chosen, which meant that – the Bulbitian species themselves having been avid creators and collectors of all sorts of technologies, gifts and gadgets – the Fallen Bulbitian structures had proved quite fabulous – if highly dangerous – techno-treasure troves for any developing species lucky enough to be present when one was deposited in their midst (and also lucky enough not to have had any important cities of their own flattened by the structure’s sudden arrival – the Hakandra had not been as conscientious as they might have been when deciding exactly where to leave their triumphant droppings).
The AIs that had controlled the structures had either never been fully deactivated by the indifferent Hakandra or had somehow contrived to regain some sort of activity following their partial destruction, because the notorious thing about Fallen – and Unfallen – Bulbitians was that they remained in some sense alive, their computationa
l and processing substrates proving resistant to anything save the utter annihilation of the entire structure they inhabited. They were also, in every case, somewhere beyond eccentric in nature and arguably mad, as well as seemingly still possessed of powers that hinted at links to one or more of the Elder civil -isations or even to the realm of the Sublimed, despite there having been no hint that the species itself had even partially gone in that direction.
By the time these links or powers were fully recognised the Hakandra at least – regarded as a stylish but off-hand, semi-detached species even by those who were their friends – had become even more unconcerned regarding the whole issue, having hit the Sublime button themselves and so cashed in their civilisational chips in the realm of the Real where matter still mattered.
Fewer than one quarter of one per cent of the Bulbitians were Unfallen – in other words still left in space – and they displayed no more inherent rationality than their fallen kin. Their AIs too had seemingly been deactivated, they too had swept clear of any remaining biological vestige of the species that had created them, they too had been looted over the centieons – though in their case by those who already at least possessed space travel – and they too had seemingly come back on-line, centuries or millennia after they had been assumed to be as dead as their progenitor species.
All the Unfallen Bulbitians were in out-of-the-way galactic locations, far distant from the kind of rocky, atmosphered planets the Hakandra had chosen to lower the vast majority of the structures onto, and the suspicion had always been that they simply couldn’t be bothered going to the effort in every case.
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