"Come on! Yes! Come on up; further! Further! Aaarrrhh."
Dammit all; what was her name?
Geldri? Shokas? Esiel?
Grief; what if it wasn't even a Culture name? He'd been certain it was but now he was starting to think maybe it wasn't after all. That made it even more difficult. More excusable, maybe, too, but certainly more difficult too.
They'd met at the Homomdan Ambassador's party to celebrate the start of the six-hundred and forty-fifth Festival of Tier. He'd resolved to have his neural lace removed for the month of the Festival, deciding that as this year's theme was Primitivism he ought to give up some aspect of his amendments. The neural lace had been his choice because although there was no physical alteration and he looked just the same to everybody else, he'd reckoned he'd feel more different.
Which he did. It was oddly liberating to have to ask things or people for information and not know precisely what the time was and where he was located in the habitat. But it also meant that he was forced to rely on his own memory for things like people's names. And how imperfect was the unassisted human memory (he'd forgotten)!
He'd even thought of having his wings removed too, at least partly to show that he was taking part in the spirit of the Festival, but in the end he'd stuck with them. Probably just as well; this girl had made a big thing about the wings; headed straight for him, masked, body glittering. She was nearly as tall as he was, perfectly proportioned, and she had four arms! A drink in each hand, too. His kind of female, he'd decided instantly, even as she was looking admiringly at his folded, snow-white wings. She wore some sort of gelsuit; basically deep blue but covered with a pattern like gold wire wrapped all over it and dotted with little diamonds of contrasting, subtly glowing red. Her whiskered mask was porcelain-bone studded with rubies and finished with iridescent badra feathers. Stunning perfume.
She handed him a glass and took off her mask to reveal eyes the size of opened mouths; eyes softly, blackly featureless in the lustrous lights of the vibrantly decorated dome until he'd looked carefully and seen the tiny hints of lights within their curved surfaces. The gelfield suit covered her everywhere except those heavily altered eyes and a small hole at the back of her head where a plait of long, shiningly auburn hair spilled out. Wrapped in gold wire, it ended at the small of her back and was tethered to the suit there.
She'd said her first name; the gelsuit's lips had parted to show white teeth and a pink tongue.
"Leffid," he'd replied, bowing deeply but watching her face as best he could while he did so. She'd looked up at his wings as they'd risen up and towards her over the plain black robe he'd worn. He'd seen her take a deep breath. The lights in her eyes had sparkled brightly.
Ah-ha! he'd thought.
The Homomdan ambassador had turned the riotously decorated, stadium-sized bowl that was her residential quarters into an old-fashioned fun-fair for the party. They had wandered through the acts, tents and rides, he and she, talking small talk, passing comment on other people they passed, celebrating the refreshing absence of drones at the party, discussing the merits of whirligigs, shubblebubs, helter-skelters, ice-flumes, quittletraps, slicicles, boing-braces, airblows, tramplescups and bodyflaggers, and bemoaning the sheer pointlessness of inter-species funny-face competitions.
She was on an improving tour from her home Orbital, cruising and learning with a party of friends on a semi-Eccentric ship that would be here as long as the Festival lasted. One of her aunts had some Contact contacts and had swung an invitation to the ambassador's celebration; her friends were so jealous. He guessed she was still in her teens, though she moved with the easy grace of somebody older and her conversation was more intelligent and even shrewder than he'd have expected. He was used to being able to almost switch off talking to most teenagers but he was having to race after her meanings and allusions at time. Were teenagers getting even smarter? Maybe he was just getting old! No matter; she obviously liked the wings. She asked to stroke them.
He told her he was a resident of Tier, Culture or ex-Culture depending how you wanted to look at it; it wasn't something he bothered about, though he supposed if forced he felt more loyalty to Tier, where he'd lived for twenty years, than to the Culture, where he'd lived for the rest of his life. In the AhForgetlt Tendency, that was, not the Culture proper, which the Tendency regarded as being far too serious and not nearly as dedicated to hedonistic pursuits as it ought to be. He'd first come here as part of a Tendency cultural mission, but stayed when the rest returned back to their home Orbital. (He'd thought about saying, Well, actually I was in the Tendency's equivalent of Special Circumstances, kind of a spy, really, and I know lots of secret codes and stuff… but that probably wasn't the sort of line that would work with a sophisticated girl like this.)
Oh, much older than her; quite middle-aged, at one hundred and forty. Well, that was kind of her to say so. Yes, the wings worked, in anything less than 50 % standard gravity. Had them since he was thirty. He lived on an air level here with 30 % gravity. Huge web-trees up there. Some people lived in their hollowed-out fruit husks, though he preferred a sort of wispy house-thing made from sheets of chaltressor silk stretched over hi-pressure thinbooms. Oh yes, she'd be very welcome to see it.
Had she seen much of Tier? Arrived yesterday? Such good timing for the Festival! He'd love to be her guide. Why not now? Why not. They could hire a yacht. First though they would go and make their apologies to the Ambassador. Of course; he and she were old pals. Something to tell that aunt of hers. And they'd call by the cruise ship; bring the others? Oh, just a little camera drone? Well why not? Yes, Tier's rules could be tiresome at times, couldn't they?
"Yes! Yes! Yeeehhhsss…"
That was him; she'd given one final, ear-splitting shriek and then gone limp, with just a huge grin on her gelsuited face (she'd kept it on, another aperture had obligingly opened). Time to bring this bout to a climax…
The yacht had served him before; it heard what he said and took that as a signal to cut engines and go into free-fall. He loved technology.
The neural lace would have handled his orgasm sequence better, controlling the flow of secretions from his drug glands so that they more precisely matched and enhanced the extended human-basic physiological process taking place, but it was still pretty damn good all the same; his didn't last quite as long as hers obviously had, but he'd put it at over a minute, easily.
He floated, still joined to her, watching the smile on her face and the tiny, dim lights in the huge dark eyes. Her fabulous chest heaved now and again; her four arms waved round with a graceful, under-sea motion. After a while, one of her hands went to the nape of her neck. She took the gelsuit's head off and let it float free.
The deep dark eyes stayed; the rest of her face was brown flushed with red, and quite beautiful. He smiled at her. She smiled back.
With the gelsuit's head removed, a little sweat beaded on her forehead and top lip. He gently fanned her face with his wings, bringing them sweeping softly from behind his shoulders and then back. The huge eyes regarded him for a while, then she put her head back, stretching and sighing. A couple of pink cushions floated past, bumping into her floating arms and ricocheting slowly away.
The yacht's hire-limit warning chimed; it wasn't allowed to stray too far from Tier. He'd already told it to cruise back in when it hit the limit; it duly fired its engines and they were pressed back into the slickly warm surfaces of the couches and cushions in a delicious tangle of limbs for a while. The girl wriggled with a succulent slowness, eyes quite dark now.
He looked over to one side and saw the little camera drone she'd brought, sitting on the ledge under one of the diamond view ports, its one beady eye still fastened on the two of them. He winked at it.
Something moved outside, in the darkness, amongst the slow wheeling turn of stars. He watched it for a while. The yacht murmured, engine firing quietly; some apparent gravity stuck him and the girl to the ceiling for a second or two, then weightlessness returned.
The girl made a couple of small noises that might have indicated she was asleep, and seemed to relax inside, letting go of him. He pulled her closer with his arms while his wings beat once, twice, bringing them both closer to the view port.
Outside, close, by, a ship was passing by, heading inbound on its final approach for Tier. They must have been almost directly in its path; the yacht's engine-burn had been avoidance action. Leffid looked down at the sleeping girl, wondering if he ought to wake her so that she could watch; there was something magical about seeing this great craft going sliding silently by, its dark, spectacularly embellished hull slicing space just a hundred metres away.
He had an idea, and grinned to himself and stretched out his hand to take the little camera drone — currently getting a fine view of the lass's backside and his balls — and turn it round, point it out the view port at the passing ship, so that she would have a surprise when she watched her recording, but then something else caught his attention, and his hand never did touch the camera drone.
Instead he stared out of the port, his eyes fastened on a section of the vessel's hull.
The ship passed on by. He kept staring out into space.
The girl sighed and moved; two of her arms went out and drew his face towards hers; she squeezed him from inside.
"Wooooo," she breathed, and kissed him. Their first real kiss, without the gelsuit over her face. Eyes still enchanting, oceanically deep and enchanting…
Estray. Her name was Estray. Of course. Common enough name for an uncommonly attractive girl. Here for a month, eh? Leffid congratulated himself. This could end up being a good Festival.
They started caressing each other again.
It was just as good as the first time, but no better because he still wasn't able to give the proceedings his full attention; now, instead of trying to remember what the girl's name was, he couldn't stop wondering why there was an Elencher emergency message spattered minutely across the scar-hull of an Affronter light cruiser.
6. Pittance
I
Ulver Seich sobbed into her pillow. She had felt bad before; her mother had refused her something, some lad had — unbelievably — preferred somebody else to her (admittedly very rare), she had felt terribly alone, exposed and vulnerable the first time she had camped out under the stars on a planet, and various pets had died… but nothing as terrible as this.
She raised her tear-marked face up from the sodden pillow and looked again at her reflection in the reverser field on the walk-in across the horribly small cabin. She saw her face again and howled with anguish, burying her head in the pillow once again and bashing her feet up and down on the under-cover, which wobbled like a jelly in the AG field, trying to compensate.
Her face had been altered. While she'd slept, during the night, one day out from Phage. Her face, her beautiful, heart-shaped, heart-winning, heart-melting, heart-breaking face, the face which she had sat and gazed at in a mirror or a reverser field for hours at a time on occasion when she'd been old enough for her drug glands to come on line and young enough to experiment with them, the face she had gazed at and gazed at not because she was stoned but because she was just so damned lovely… her face had been made to look like somebody else's. And there was worse.
It might be hurting a little now if she wasn't keeping the pain turned off, but that wasn't what mattered; what mattered was that her face was: a) puffy, swollen and discoloured after the nanotechs had done their work, b) not her own any longer, and, c) older! The woman she was supposed to look like was older than she! Much older! Sixty years older!
People claimed that nobody in the Culture really changed much in appearance between about twenty-five and two hundred and fifty (then there was a slow but sure ageing to the three-fifty, four hundred mark, by which time your hair would be white (or gone!) your skin would be wrinkled like some basic's scrotum and your tits swinging round your belly-button — ugh!) but she had always been able to tell how old people were; she was rarely more than five or ten years out — never more than twenty, at any rate — and she could see how old she was now, even beneath the puffiness and shadowy bruising; she was seeing how she would look when she was older, and it didn't matter that it wasn't her own face, it didn't matter that she would probably look much better than this by the time she was in her mid-eighties (she had pictures of 99.9 per cent certain projections prepared for her by the house AI which showed exactly how she'd look at every decade for two centuries ahead, and they looked great); what mattered was that she looked old and dowdy and that would make her feel old and dowdy and therefore that would make her behave old and dowdy, and that feeling and that way of behaving and therefore that look might not go away when she was returned to her normal, her natural, her own appearance.
This wasn't turning out as she'd hoped at all; no friends, no pets, no fun, and the more she thought about it, the riskier it all might be, the less certain she was what she was getting into. This whole thing was supposed to be an adventure, but this part on the ship was just boring and so would the return journey be as well, and in the middle lay who-knew-what? Everybody knew how devious SC was; what were they really up to, what did they really want her to do? Even if it did turn out to be somehow exciting and even fun, she wouldn't be allowed to tell anybody about it, and where was the point in fun if you couldn't talk about it later?
Of course, she could tell other people, but then she wouldn't be able to stay in Contact. Hell, Churt was being ambiguous about whether she was in it now or not. Well was she or wasn't she? Was this a real Contact and even SC mission she was engaged in — as she'd dreamed of, fantasised about since early childhood — or some extracurricular wheeze, even a test of some sort?
She bit the pillow, and the particular texture of the fabric in her mouth and between her teeth, and the sensation of her face being puffed-up while her eyes stung with tears, took her back to childhood again.
She raised her head, licking her top lip clear of the salty fluid, and then snorted and sniffed back both the tears and the snot that was filling her nose. She thought about glanding some calm, but decided not to. She did some deep breathing, then swivelled round on the bed and sat up and looked at herself in the reverser, raising her chin at the hideous image it showed and sniffing again and wiping her face with her hands and swallowing hard and fluffing out her hair (at least it could stay as it was), sniffing again, and stared herself in the eyes and forbade herself to cry or look away.
After a few minutes, her cheeks had dried and her eyes were coming clear again, losing their red puffiness. She was still abhorrently ugly and even disfigured by her own high standards, but she was not a child and she was still the same person inside. Ah well. She supposed a little suffering might do her some good.
She had always been pampered; all her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past. She had gone hungry and unwashed when hiking somewhere primitive, but there had always been food at the end of the day, and a shower or at the very least a peelspray to remove the grime and sweat.
Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she'd initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy's taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.
She had always known there were too few real challenges in her life, too few genuine risks; it had all been too easy, even by Culture standards. While her life-style and material circumstances in Phage had been no different from that of any other person her age, it was true that just because the Culture was so determinedly egalitarian, what little hierarchic instinct remained in the population of the Rock manifested itself in the ascription of a certain cachet to belonging to one of the Founder Families.
In a society in which it was possible to look however one wanted to look, acquire any talent one wished to acquire and have access t
o as much property as one might desire, it was generally accepted that the only attributes which possessed that particular quality of interest which derives solely from their being difficult to attain were entry into Contact and Special Circumstances, or having some familial link with the Culture's early days.
Even the most famous and gifted of artists — whether their talents were congenital or acquired — were not regarded in quite the same hallowed light as Contact members (and, somewhere really old, like Phage, direct descendants of Founders). Being a famous artist in the Culture meant at best it was accepted you must possess a certain gritty determination; at worst it was generally seen as pointing to a pitiably archaic form of insecurity and a rather childish desire to show off.
When there were almost no distinctions to be drawn between people's social standing, the tiny differences that did exist became all the more important, to those who cared.
Ulver's feelings about her family's ancient name were mostly negative. Admittedly, possessing an old name meant some people were prepared to make an advance on any respect they might come to feel was rightly your due, but on the other hand Ulver wanted to be admired, worshipped and lusted after for herself, just her, just this current collection of cells, right here, with no reference to the inheritance those cells carried.
And what was the point of having what was sometimes insultingly referred to as an advantage in life if it couldn't even smooth your way into Contact? If anything, it had been hinted, it was a disadvantage; she would have to do better than the average person, she would have to be so completely, utterly, demonstrably perfect for the Contact Section that there could be no question of anybody ever thinking she'd got in because the people and machines on the admissions board knew the name Seich from their history lessons.
Excession c-5 Page 21
