Neither ambition seemed to him all that much to ask, but he'd been thwarted in both desires until now. He'd thought he'd detected movement on the Affronter side of things before this Sleeper business had come up, but now, if all concerned were to be believed, he could more or less have whatever he wanted, no strings attached.
He found this suspicious in itself. Special Circumstances was not notorious for its desire to issue blank cheques to anyone. He wondered if he was being paranoid, or had just been living with the Affront for too long (none of his predecessors had lasted longer than a hundred days and he'd been here nearly two years already).
Either way, he was being cautious; he had asked around. He still had some replies to receive — they should be waiting for him when he arrived at Tier — but so far everything seemed to tally. He had also asked to speak to a representation of the Desert Class MSV Not Invented Here, the ship acting as incident coordinator for all this — again, this ought to happen on Tier — and he'd looked up the craft's own history in the module's archives and transferred the results to the suit's own AI.
The Desert Class had been the first type of General Systems Vehicle the Culture had constructed, providing the original template for the Very Large Fast Self-Sufficient Ship concept. At three-and-a-bit klicks in length it was tiny by today's standards — ships twice its length and eight times its volume were routinely constructed inside GSVs the size of the Sleeper Service and the whole class had been demoted to Medium Systems Vehicle status — but it certainly had the distinction of age; the Not Invented Here had been around for nearly two millennia and boasted a long and interesting career, coming as close as the Culture's distributed and democratic military command structure had allowed to being in advisory control of several fleets in the course of the Idiran War. It was now in that equivalent of serenely glorious senescence that affected some ancient Minds; no longer producing many smaller ships, taking relatively little to do with Contact's normal business, and keeping itself relatively sparsely populated.
It remained, nevertheless, a full Culture ship; it hadn't taken a sabbatical, gone into a retreat or become an Eccentric, nor had it joined the Culture Ulterior — the fairly recently fashionable name for the bits of the Culture that had split away and weren't really fully paid-up members any more. All the same, and despite the fact that the archive entry on the old ship was huge (as well as all the naked factual stuff, it contained one hundred and three different full-length biographies of the craft which it would have taken him a couple of years to read), Genar-Hofoen couldn't help feeling that there was a slight air of mystery about the old ship.
It also occurred to him that Minds wrote voluminous biographies of each other in order to cover the odd potentially valuable or embarrassing nugget of truth under a mountain of bullshit.
Also included in the archive entries were some fairly wild claims by a few of the smaller, more eccentric news and analyses journals and reviews — some of them one-person outfits — to the effect that the MSV was a member of some shadowy cabal, that it was part of a conspiracy of mostly very old craft which stepped in to take control of situations which might threaten the Culture's cozy proto-imperialist meta-hegemony; situations which proved beyond all doubt that the so-called normal democratic process of general policy-making was a complete and utter ultra-statist sham and the humans — and indeed their cousins and fellow dupes in this Mind-controlled plot, the drones — had even less power than they thought they had in the Culture… There was quite a lot of stuff like that. Genar-Hofoen read it until his head felt as if it was spinning, then he stopped; there came a point when if a conspiracy was that powerful and subtle it became pointless to worry about it.
Whatever; doubtless the old MSV was not itself in total command of the situation he was allowing himself to be dragged into, but just the tip of the iceberg, representing a collection, if not a cabal, of other interested and experienced Minds who'd all be having a say in the immediate reaction to the discovery of this artifact near Esperi.
As well as his request for a talk with a personality-state of the Not Invented Here, Genar-Hofoen had sent messages to ships, drones and people he knew with SC connections, asking them if what he'd been told was all true. A few of the nearer ones had got replies to him before he'd left God'shole habitat, each confirming that what they had been told of what he was asking about — which admittedly varied according to how much whatever collection of Minds the Not Invented Here was representing had chosen to tell the individuals concerned. The information he'd received looked genuine and the deal he'd been offered sounded good. At any rate, by the time he'd got to Tier and received all his replies he reckoned so many other people and Minds not irretrievably complicit with SC would have heard about what he'd been offered it would become impossible for SC to wriggle out of its deal with him without losing an unthinkable amount of face.
He still suspected there was a lot more to this than he was being told, and he had no doubt he was and would continue to be both manipulated and used, but providing the price they were paying him was right, that didn't bother him, and at least the job itself sounded simple enough.
He'd taken the precaution of checking up on the story his uncle had told him about the disappearing trillion-year-old sun and the orbiting artifact. Sure enough, there it was; a semi-mythological story set way back in the archives, one of any number of weird-sounding tales with frustratingly little evidence to back them up. Certainly nobody seemed able to explain what had happened in this case. And of course there was nobody around to ask anymore. Except for the lady he was travelling to talk to.
The captain of the good ship Problem Child had indeed been a woman; Zreyn Tramow. Honorary Contact Fleet Captain Gart-Kepilesa Zreyn Enhoff Tramow Afayaf dam Niskat-west, to give her her official title and Full Name. The archives held her picture. She'd looked proud and capable; a pale, narrow face, with close-set eyes, centimetre-short blonde hair and thin lips, but smiling, and with what appeared to him at least to be an intelligent brightness to those eyes. He liked the look of her.
He'd wondered what it would be like to have been Stored for two-and-a-bit millennia and then be woken up with no body to return to and a man you'd never seen before talking to you. And trying to steal your soul.
He'd stared at the photograph for a while, trying to see behind those clear blue mocking eyes.
They played another two games of batball; Fivetide won those as well. Genar-Hofoen was quivering with fatigue by the end. Then it was time to freshen up and head for the officers" mess, where there was a full-dress uniform celebration dinner that evening because it was Commander Kindrummer VI's birthday. The carousing went on long into the night; Fivetide taught the human some obscene songs, Genar-Hofoen responded in kind, two Atmosphere Force Wing Captains had an only semi-serious duel with grater muffs — much blood, no limbs lost, honour satisfied — and Genar-Hofoen did a tightrope walk over the commander's table pit while the scratchounds howled beneath. The suit swore it hadn't contributed to the feat, though he was sure it had steadied him a couple of times. However, he didn't say anything.
Around them, the Kiss The Blade and its two escorts powered their way through the spaces between the stars, heading for Tier habitat.
IV
Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way. She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss… to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now.
She toyed with the idea of pretending she was still asleep, but then he must just have touched exactly the right spot and she couldn't help making a noise and moving and clenching and so she rolled over and took his face in her hands and kissed it.
"Oh no," she croaked, laughing. "Don't stop; that's a fine way to say good morning."
"Nearly afternoon," the young man breathed. He was called Otiel. He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that c
ould raise bumps on your skin at a hundred metres, or, better still, millimetres. Metaphysics student. Swam a lot and free-climbed. The one she'd set her heart on the previous evening. The leg-liker. Long, sensitive fingers.
"Hmm… Really? Well… you know… maybe you can say that later, but meantime you just keep right on — WHAT?"
Ulver Seich jerked to a sitting position, eyes wide open. She slapped the young man's hand away and stared wildly around. She was in what she thought of as her Romantic bed. It was more of a chamber, really; a ruched, pavilion-ceilinged five-metre crimson hemisphere filled with billowy bolsters and slinky sheets which blended into puffy paddings forming the single wall of the chamber and which swelled out in places to form various projections, shelves, straps and little seat-like things. She had other beds; her childhood bed, still stuffed with toys; her Just Sleep bed, comfy and surrounded by nocturne plants; a huge grandly formal and terribly old-fashioned canopied Reception bed, for when she wanted to receive friends, and an oil bed, which was basically a four-metre sphere of warm oils; you had to put little nose-plug things in and the air was Displaced into you. Not to everybody's taste, sadly, but very erotic.
Her neural lace had woken up already with the adrenaline rush. It told her it was half an hour to noon. Shit. She'd thought she'd set an alarm to wake her an hour ago. She'd meant to. Must have slipped her mind due to the fun; hormonal re-prioritisation. Well, it happened.
"What…?" Otiel said, smiling. He was looking at her oddly. Like he was wondering whether this was part of some game. Twinkle in the eye. He reached out for her.
Damn, the gravity was still on. She commanded the bed controls to switch to one-tenth G. "Sorry!" she said, blowing him a kiss as the apparent gravity cut by ninety per cent. The padding beneath their bodies suddenly had a lot less weight to support; the effect was to produce a very gentle, padded pat on the bottom which was enough to send them both floating fractionally upwards. He looked surprised; it was such a sweet, boyish, innocent expression she almost stayed.
But she didn't; she jumped out of the bed, kicking up through the air and raising her arms above her head to dive through the loose gatherings of the chamber's tented ceiling and out into the bedroom beyond, arcing out over the padded platform around the bed chamber and falling gently back into the clutches of its standard gravity. She ran down the curved steps to the bedroom floor and almost bumped into the drone Churt Lyne.
"I know!" she yelled, flapping one hand at it.
It lifted out of her way, then turned smoothly and followed her across the floor of the bedroom towards the bathroom, its fields formal blue but tinged with a rosy humour.
Ulver broke into a run. She'd always liked big rooms; the bedroom one was twenty metres square and five high. One wall was window. It looked out onto a tightly curved landscape of fields and wooded hills dotted with towers and ziggurats. This was Interior Space One, the central and longest cylinder of a cluster of independently revolving five-kilometre diameter tubes which formed the main living areas in the Rock.
"Anything I can do?" the drone asked as Ulver ran into the bathroom. Behind it, there was a shout and then a series of curses as the young man tried to exit the bed chamber in the same way Ulver had and got the gravity-transition wrong. The drone turned briefly towards the disturbance, then swivelled back as Ulver's voice floated out through the noise of rushing fluids. "Well, you could throw him out… Nicely, mind."
"What?" Ulver screamed. "You get me to ditch a luscious new guy after one night, you make me scrap all my engagements for a month and then you won't even let me take a few pets? Or a couple of pals?"
"Ulver, can I talk to you alone?" Churt Lyne said calmly, rotating to point at a room off the main gallery.
"No you can't!" she yelled, throwing down the cloak she'd been carrying. "Anything you have to say to me you can damn well say in front of my friends."
They were in the outer gallery of Iphetra, a long reception area lined with windows and old paintings; it looked out to the formal gardens and Interior Space One beyond. A couple of traveltubes waited beyond doors set into the wall full of portraits. She'd told everybody to rendezvous here. She'd missed the noon deadline by over an hour, but there were certain things about one's toilet that simply couldn't be rushed, and — as she'd told a briefly but fetchingly incandescently furious Churt Lyne from her milk-bath — if she was really that important to all these top-secret plans, SC had no choice but to wait. As a concession to the urgency of the situation she had left her face unadorned, tied her hair back into a simple bun and slipped into a conservatively patterned loose pants and jacket combination; even choosing her jewellery for the day had taken no more than five minutes.
The gallery had got quite busy; her mother was here, tall and tousled in a jellaba, three cousins, seven aunts and uncles, about a dozen friends — all house-guests and a little bleary-eyed after the Graduation party — and a couple of house-slaved drones attempting to control the animals; a brace of tawny speytlid hunters looking about at everybody and snuffling and slavering with excitement and her three hooded but still restless alseyns which kept stretching their wings and giving their piercing, plangent cry. Another drone waited outside the nearest window with Brave, her favourite mount, saddled up and pawing the ground, while the three drones she'd decided were the minimum she could manage with were taking care of her luggage trunks, which were still appearing from the house lift. A tray floated at her side with breakfast; she'd just started munching on a chislen segment when the drone had told her she had to make this journey alone.
Churt Lyne didn't reply in speech. Instead — astonishingly — it spoke through her neural lace:
— Ulver, for pity's sake, this is a secret mission for Special Circumstances, not a social outing with your girlfriends.
"And don't secret-talk me!" Ulver hissed through clenched teeth. "Grief, that's so rude!"
"Quite right, dear," muttered her mother, yawning.
A couple of her friends laughed lightly.
Churt Lyne came right up to her until it was almost touching her, and then the next thing she knew there was a sort of grey cylinder around her and the machine; it stretched from wooden floor to stone-carved ceiling and it was about a metre and a half in diameter, neatly enclosing her, Churt and the tray carrying breakfast. She stared at the drone, her mouth open, eyes wide. It had never done anything like this before! Its aura field had disappeared. It hadn't even had the decency to square the field and put the field on a mirror finish; at least she could have checked her appearance.
"Sorry about this, Ulver," the machine said. Its voice sounded flat in the narrow cylinder. Ulver closed her mouth and prodded the field the drone had slung around them. It was like touching warm stone. "Ulver," the drone said again, taking one of her hands in a maniple field, "I apologise; I ought to have made the point earlier. I just assumed… Well, never mind. I'm supposed to come with you to Tier, but not anybody else. Your friends have to stay here."
"But Peis and I always go deep space together! And Klatsli is my new protege; I promised her she could stick around me; I can't just abandon her! Do you have any idea what that could do to her development? To her social life? People might think I've dumped her. Besides, she's got an utterly exquisite older brother. If I-"
"You can't take them," the drone said loudly. "They're not included in the invitation."
"I heard what you said yesterday, you know," Ulver said, shaking her head and leaning forward at the drone. ""Keep it secret"; I haven't told them where we're going."
"That's not the point. When I said don't tell a soul I meant don't tell a soul you're going, not don't tell a soul exactly where you're going."
She laughed, throwing her head back. "Churt; real space here! My diary is a public document, hadn't you noticed? There are at least three channels devoted to me — all run by rather desperate young men, admittedly, but nevertheless. I can't change my eye colour without anybody on the Rock who follows fashion knowing about it wit
hin the hour. I can't just disappear! Are you mad?"
"And I don't think the animals can come either," Churt Lyne said smoothly, ignoring her question. "The protira certainly can't. There isn't room on the ship."
"Isn't room?" she roared. "What size is this thing? Are you sure it's safe?"
"Warships don't have stables, Ulver."
"It's an ex- war ship!" she exclaimed, waving her arms around. "Ow!" She sucked at the knuckle she'd hit against the field cylinder.
"Sorry. But still."
"What about my clothes?"
"A cabin full of clothes is perfectly all right, though I don't know for whose benefit you're going to be wearing them."
"What about when I get to Tier?" she cried. "What about this guy I'm not supposed to fuck? Am I supposed to just wander past him naked?"
"Take two roomsful; three. Clothes are not a problem, and you can pick up more when you get there — no, wait a minute, I know how long it takes you to choose new clothes; just take what you want. Four cabins; there."
"But my friends!"
"Tell you what; I'll show you the space you've got to work with. Okay?"
"Oh, okay," she said, shaking her head and sighing heavily.
The drone fed convincing-looking pictures of the ex-warship's interior into Ulver's brain through the neural lace.
She caught her breath. Her eyes were wide when the display stopped. She stared at the drone. "The rooms!" she exclaimed. "The cabins; they're so small!"
"Quite. Still think you want to take your friends?"
She thought for a second. "Yes!" she yelled, thumping a fist on the little tray floating at her side. It wobbled, trying not to spill the fruit juice. "It'd be cozy!"
"What if you fall out?"
That stopped her for a moment. She tapped her lips with one finger, frowning into space. She shrugged. "I can cut people dead in a traveltube, Churt. I can ostracise people in the same bed. She leant towards the machine again then glanced round at the grey walls of the field cylinder. "I can ostracise people in something this big," she said pointedly, her hands on her hips. She put her head back, narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. "I could just refuse to go, you know."
Excession c-5 Page 19
