Well, Churt had been right; this was her big chance. She had been and would be unamendedly beautiful, she was intelligent, charming and attractive and she had common sense by the bucket-load, but she couldn't expect to breeze this the way she had breezed everything else in her, life so far; she'd work at it, she'd study, she'd be diligent, assiduous and industrious and all the other things she'd worked so hard at not being while ensuring that her university results had sparkled as brilliantly as her social life.
Maybe she had been a spoiled brat; maybe she still was a spoiled brat, but she was a ruthlessly determined spoiled brat, and if that ruthless determination dictated ditching spoiled brathood, then out it would go, faster than you could say 'Bye.
Ulver dried her eyes, collected herself — still without the help of any glandular secretions — then got up and left the cabin. She would sit in the lounge where there was more space, and there she would find out all she could about Tier, this man Genar-Hofoen, and anything else that might be relevant to what they wanted her to do.
II
Leffid Ispanteli eased himself into the seat beside the vice-consul for the AhForgetlt Tendency, carefully hooking his wings over the seat back and smiling at the vice-consul, who regarded him with that particular kind of vacant look people tend to assume when they're communicating by neural lace.
Leffid held up his hand. "Words, I'm afraid, Lellius," he said. "Had my lace removed for the Festival."
"Very primitive," vice-consul Lellius said approvingly, nodding gravely and returning his attention to the race.
They were sitting in a carousel suspended beneath a vast carbon-tubed structure sculpted in the image of a web tree; the thousands of viewing carousels dangled like fruit from the canopy and were multifariously connected by a secondary web of delicate, swaying cable bridges. The view beneath and to either side was of a series of great steps of stone dotted with vegetation and moving figures; it was very like looking at an ancient amphitheatre which had been lifted from the horizontal to the vertical and each of whose seat levels was able to rotate independently. The moving figures were ysner-mistretl combinations; the ysners were the huge two-legged flightless (and almost brainless) birds doing the running while their thinking was done by the mistretl jockey each carried on its back. Mistretls were tiny and almost helpless but brainy simians and the combination of one of them per ysner was a naturally occurring one from a planet in the Lower Leaf Spiral.
Ysner-mistretl races had been a part of life on Tier for millennia, and running them on a giant mandala two kilometres across composed of steps or levels all rotating at different speeds had been traditional for most of that time. The huge slowly turning race-course looked a little like Tier itself, which took its name from its shape.
Tier was a stepped habitat; its nine levels all revolved at the same speed, but that meant that the outer tiers possessed greater apparent gravity than those nearer the centre. The levels themselves were sectioned into compartments up to hundreds of kilometres long and filled with atmospheres of different types and held at different temperatures, while a stunningly complicated and dazzlingly beautiful array of mirrors and mirrorfields situated within the staggered cone of the world's axis provided amounts of sunlight precisely timed, attenuated and where necessary altered in wavelength to mimic the conditions on a hundred different worlds for a hundred different intelligent species.
This environmental diversity and the civilisational co-dependence it implied and intermingling it encouraged had been Tier's raison d'être, the very foundation of its purpose and fame for the seven thousand years it had existed. Its original builders were, perhaps, unknown; they were believed to have Sublimed shortly after building it, leaving behind a species — or model, depending how you defined these things — of biomechanical sintricate which ran and maintained the place, were individually dull but collectively highly intelligent, took the shape of a small sphere covered with long articulated spines, were between half a metre and two metres in size and had seemed to have an intense suspicion of anything possessing less of a biological basis than they did themselves. Drones and other AIs were tolerated on Tier but very closely watched, followed everywhere and their every communication and even thought monitored. Minds were immune to this sort of treatment of course, but their avatars tended to attract a degree of intense physical observation which bordered on harassment, and so they rarely bothered entering the world itself, sticking to the outer docks where they were made perfectly welcome and afforded every hospitality. Tier, after all, was a statement, a treasure, a symbol, and as such any small discriminatory foibles it chose to display were considered perfectly tolerable.
The ysner-mistretl race track was one level up from the tier where the Homomdan mission was housed and three levels down from Leffid's home circumference.
"Leffid," the vice consul said. He was a rotund, massy male of apparently indeterminate species, vaguely human in shape but with a triangular head and an eye at each corner. His skin was bright red; the flowing robes he wore were a vivid but gradually shifting shade of blue. He turned his head slightly so that two of his eyes regarded Leffid while the third continued to watch the race. "Did I see you at the Homomdan do last night? I can't remember."
"Briefly," Leffid said. "I waved Hello but you were busy with the Ashpartzi delegate."
Vice-consul Lellius wheezed with laughter. "Trying to hold the blighter down. It was having buoyancy problems inside its new suit; automatics weren't really up to the job with the AI removed. Terrible thing when one of these gas-giant floater beasties suffers from flatulence, you know."
Leffid recalled that Lellius had rather looked as though he'd been wrestling with the bow-rope for what appeared to be a small airship at the Homomdan ambassador's party. "Not as terrible as it must be for the inhabitant of the suit, I'd guess."
"Ha, indeed," Lellius chuckled, nodding and wheezing. "May I order you some refreshment?"
"No, thank you."
"Good; I have given up emoter-keyed foods and drinks for the duration of the Festival and would only be jealous." He shook his head. "I thought primitives were supposed to have more fun, but everything I could think of changing the better to partake in the Festival's spirit seemed to make life less fun," he said, then made a tutting noise at something on the race course.
Leffid looked to see one of the ysner-mistretl pairs failing to make a jump, hitting the ramp just behind and falling down to another level. They picked themselves up and ran on, but they'd need to be very lucky to win now. Lellius shook his head and used the flat end of a stylo to smooth a number off the wood-bordered wax tablet he held in his broad red hand.
"You winning?" Leffid asked him.
Lellius shook his head and looked sad.
Leffid smiled, then made a show of inspecting the race track and the contending ysner-mistretl pairs. "They don't look very festive to me," he said. "I expected something more… well, festive," he concluded, lamely.
"I believe the race authorities regard the Festival with the same misanthropic dubiety as I," Lellius said. "The festival is — what? — two days old?"
Leffid nodded.
"And already I am tired of it," Lellius said, scratching behind one of his three ears with the wax tablet stylo. "I thought of taking a holiday while it was occurring, but I am expected to be here, of course. A month of challenging, ground-breaking art and ruthlessly enforced fun." Lellius shook his head heavily. "What a prospect."
Leffid put his chin in his cupped hand. "You've never really been a natural for the AhForgetlt Tendency, have you, Lellius?"
"I joined hoping it would make me more…" Lellius looked up contemplatively at the broad spread of the tree sculpture hanging above them. "… cavort-prone," he said, and nodded. "I wished to be more prone to cavorting and so I joined the Tendency hoping that the natural hedonism of people like your good self would somehow infect my own more deliberate, phlegmatic soul." He sighed. "I still live in hope."
Leffid laughed lightly
, then looked slowly around. "You here alone, Lellius?"
Lellius looked thoughtful. "My incomparably efficient Clerical Assistant Number Three visits the latrines, I believe," he wheezed. "My wastrel son is probably trying to invent new ways of embarrassing me, my mate is half a galaxy away — very nearly enough — and my current darling stays at home, indisposed. Or rather, disposed not to come to what she terms a boring bird-and-monkey race." He nodded slowly. "I could reasonably be said to be alone, I suppose. Why do you ask?"
Leffid sat a little closer, arms on the carousel's small table. "Saw something strange last night," he said.
"That young thing with the four arms?" Lellius asked, at least one eye twinkling. "I did wonder if any other of her anatomical features were also doubled-up."
"Your prurience flatters me," Leffid said. "Ask her nicely and she will probably furnish you with a copy of a recording which proves both our relevant bits were quite singular."
Lellius chuckled and drank from a strawed flask. "Not that, then. What?"
'Are we alone?" Leffid asked quietly.
Lellius stared blankly at him for a moment. "Yes; my lace is now turned off. There is nothing else I know of watching or listening. What is this thing you saw?"
"I'll show you." Leffid took a napkin from the table's slot and from a pocket in his shirt extracted the terminal he was using instead of the neural lace. He looked at the markings on the instrument as though trying to remember something, then shrugged and said, "Umm, terminal; become a pen, please."
Leffid wrote on the napkin, producing a sequence of seven pendant rhombi each composed of eight dots or tiny circles. When he'd finished he turned the napkin towards Lellius, who looked carefully down at it and then equally deliberately up at Leffid.
"Very pretty," he wheezed. "What is it?"
Leffid smiled. He tapped the rightmost symbol. "First, it's an Elench signal because it's base eight and arranged in that pattern. This first symbol is an emergency distress mark. The other six are probably — almost certainly, by convention — a location."
"Really?" Lellius did not sound especially impressed. "And the location of this location?"
"About seventy-three years into the Upper Swirl from here."
"Oh," Lellius said with a sort of rumbling noise that probably meant he was surprised. "Just six digits to define such a precise point?"
"Base two-five-six; easy," Leffid said, shrugging his wings. "But what's interesting is where I saw this signal."
"Mm-hmm?" Lellius said, momentarily distracted by something happening on the race track. He took another drink then returned his attention to the other man.
"It was on an Affronter light cruiser," Leffid said quietly. "Burned into its scar-hull. Very lightly, very shallowly; at an angle across the blades-"
"Blades?" Lellius asked.
Leffid waved one hand. "Decoration. But it was there. If I hadn't been very close to the ship — in a yacht — as it was approaching Tier I'd never have seen it. And the intriguing possibility exists, of course, that the ship doesn't know it bears this message."
Lellius stared at the napkin for a moment. He sat back. "Hmm," he said. "Mind if I turn on my lace?"
"Not at all," Leffid said. "I already know the ship's called the Furious Purpose and it's back here unscheduled, in Dock 807b. If it's a mechanical problem it's got, I can't imagine it's anything to do directly with the scarring. As for the location in the signal; it's about half way between the stars Cromphalet I/II and Esperi… slightly closer to Esperi. And there's nothing there. Nothing that anybody knows about, anyway."
Leffid tapped at the pocket terminal and after some experimentation got the beam to brighten until it ignited the napkin he'd written on. He let it burn and was about to sweep the ashes into the table's disposal slot when Lellius — who was slumped back in the seat, looking blank — reached out one red hand and absently ground the ashes under his palm before scattering them to the breeze; they fell floating away from the carousel in an insubstantial cloud, towards the seats and private boxes stacked below.
"Some minor running-gear problem," Lellius said. "The Affronter ship." He was silent a moment longer. "The Elench may have had a problem," he said, nodding slowly. "A clan-fleet — eight ships — left here a hundred days ago to investigate the Swirl."
"I remember," Leffid said.
"There have been," Lellius paused, "… indications — barely even rumours — that not all has been right with them."
"Well," Leffid said, placing his palms flat on the table and making to rise from his seat, "it may be nothing, but I just thought I'd mention it."
"Kind," Lellius wheezed, nodding. "Not sure what the Tendency can do with it; last ship we had coming here went Sabbatical on us, ungrateful cur, but we might be able to trade it to the Mainland."
"Yes, the dear old Mainland," Leffid said. It was the term the AhForgetlt Tendency usually employed to refer to the Culture proper. He smiled. "Whatever." He held his wings away from the seat-back as he stood.
"Sure you won't stay?" Lellius said, blinking. "We could have a betting competition. Bet you'd win."
"No thanks; this evening I'm playing host to a lady who needs two place settings at a time and I have to go polish my cutlery and make sure my flight feathers are fettled for ruffling."
"Ah. Have armfuls of fun."
"I suspect I shall."
"Oh, damn," Lellius said sadly, as a great shout went up from below and to most sides; the race was over.
Lellius leant over and scratched out another couple of numbers on the wax tablet.
"Never mind," Leffid said, patting the vice-consul on his ample shoulder as he headed for the swaying cable bridge that would take him back to the main trunk of the huge artificial tree.
"Yes," Lellius sighed, looking at the smudge of ash on his hand. "I'm sure there'll be another race starting in a while."
III
The black bird Gravious flew slowly across the re-creation of the great sea battle of Octovelein, its shadow falling over the wreckage-dotted water, the sails and decks of the long wooden ships, the soldiers who stood massed on the decks of the larger vessels, the sailors who hauled at ropes and sheets, the rocketeers who struggled to rig and fire their charges, and the bodies floating in the water.
A brilliant, blue-white sun glared from a violet sky. The air was crisscrossed by the smoky trails of the primitive rockets and the sky seemed supported by the great columns of smoke rising from stricken warships and transports. The water was dark blue, ruffled with waves, spattered with the tall feathery plumes of crashing rockets, creased white at the stem of each ship, and covered in flames where oils had been poured between ships in desperate attempts to prevent boarding.
The bird flew over the edge of the sea scene, where the water ended like a still, liquid cliff and the unadorned floor of the general bay resumed, just five metres below, its surface also covered with what looked like wreckage — as though the tide had somehow gone out in this part of the bay but not the other — but which on closer inspection proved to be objects — parts of ships, parts of people — which had been in the process of construction. The incomplete sea battle filled less than half of the bay's sixteen square kilometres. This would have been the Sleeper Service's master-work, its definitive statement. Now it might never be finished.
The black bird flew on, passing a few of the ship's drones on the surface of the bay, gathering the construction debris and loading it onto an insubstantial conveyor belt which appeared to consist of a thin line of shady air. It kept beating. Its goal lay on the far end of the doubled general bay, between this internal section and the bay that opened to the rear of the ship. Damn the woman for choosing to stay at the bows, nearest to where the tower had been. Bad luck the place it had to be was so close to the stern.
It had already flown through twenty-five kilometres of interior space, down the gigantic, dark internal corridor in the centre of the ship, between closed bay doors where a few dim lights glow
ed and utter silence reigned, a kilometre of air below its gently flapping wings, another above and one to each side.
The bird had looked about it, taking in the huge, gloomy volumes and supposing it ought to feel privileged; the ship had kept it out of these places for the last forty years, restricting it to the upper kilometre of its hull which housed the old accommodation areas and the majority of its Storees. Gravious had senses beyond those normally available to an ordinary animal, and it had employed a couple of them in an attempt to probe the bay doors and find out what lay behind them, if anything. As far as it could tell, the thousands of bays were empty.
That had only taken it as far as the general bay engineering space, the biggest single volume in the ship with the divisions down; nine thousand metres deep, nearly twice that across and filled with noise and flickering lights and blurringly fast motion as the ship created thousands of new machines to do… who-knew-what.
Most of the engineering space wasn't even filled with air; the material, components and machines could move faster that way. Gravious was flying down a transparent traveltube set into the ceiling. Nine kilometres of that took it to a wall which led into the relative serenity — or at least, stillness — of the sea battle tableau. It was halfway across that now; just another four thousand metres to go. Its wing muscles ached.
It landed on the parapet of a balcony which looked out into the rear of this set of general bays. Beyond were thirty-two cubic kilometres of empty air; a perfectly empty general bay, the sort of place where a normal GSV of this size would be building a smaller GSV, playing host to one which was visiting, housing an alien environment like a gigantic guests" room, turning over to some sports venue, or sub-dividing into smaller storage or manufacturing spaces.
Gravious looked back at the modest tableau on the balcony, which in its previous existence, before the GSV had decided to go Eccentric, had been part of a cafe with a fine view of the bay. Here were posed seven humans, all with their backs to the view of the empty bay and facing the hologram of a calm, empty swimming pool. The humans wore trunks; they sat in deck chairs around a couple of low tables full of drinks and snacks. They had been caught in the acts of laughing, talking, blinking, scratching their chin, drinking.
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