Genar-Hofoen had arrived a few days after the end of Tier's annual Festival. There was an air of autumnal desuetude mixed with high-summer torpor about the place when he arrived; people were cleaning up, calming down, getting back to normal and generally behaving themselves. He'd signalled ahead and succeeded in booking the services of an erotroupe as well as reserving a garden penthouse in the View, the best hotel on Level Three.
All in all, entirely worth passing up the rather too obvious advances of his perfect woman for (well, no it wasn't… except it was when your perfect woman was almost certainly a Special Circumstances agent altered to look like the creature of your fantasies and sent to look after you, keep you happy and safe, when what you actually wanted was a bit of variety, some excitement and some un-Culture-like danger; his perfect partner certainly looked like the very splendid Verlioef Schung, but she was even more positively not SC, not Contact, and probably not even Culture either. It was that desire for strangeness, for apartness, for alienness they probably couldn't understand).
He lay in bed, pleasantly exhausted, the odd muscle quivering now and again of its own accord, surrounded by sleeping pulchritude, his head buzzing with the after-effects of some serious glanding and watched the Tier news (Culture bias) channel on a screen hanging in the air in front of the nearest tree. An ear-pip relayed the sound.
Still leading with the Blitteringueh-Deluger saga. Then came a feature on the increase in Fleeting in Culture ships. Fleeting was when two or more ship Minds decided they were fed up being all by themselves and only being able to exchange the equivalent of letters; instead they got together, keeping physically close to each other so that they could converse. Operationally most inefficient. Some older Minds were worried it represented their more recently built comrades going soft and wanted the premise-states of Minds which would be constructed in the future to be altered to deal with this weak, overly chummy decadence.
Local news; there was a brief follow-up report basically saying that the mysterious explosion which had happened in dock 807b on the third day of the Festival was still a mystery; the Affronter cruiser Furious Purpose had been lightly damaged by a small, pure energy detonation which had done nothing more than locally burn off a layer of its scar-hull. An over-enthusiastic Festival prank was suspected.
Not quite so locally, the arguments were still going on about the creation of a new Hintersphere a few kiloyears anti-spinward. A Hintersphere was a volume of space in which FTL flights were banned except in the direst of emergencies, and life generally moved at a slower pace than elsewhere in the Culture. Genar-Hofoen shook his head at that one. Pretentious rusticism.
Nearer home again, back-up craft were only a day away from the location of the possible anomaly near Esperi. The discovering GCU was still reporting no change in the artifact. Despite requests from Contact section, various other Involved civilisations had sent or were sending ships to the general volume, but Tier itself had forgone dispatching a craft. To the surprise of most observers, the Affront had criticised the reaction of those who had decided to be nosy and had stayed severely away from the anomaly, though there were unconfirmed reports of increased Affront activity in the Upper Leaf Swirl, and just today four ships-
"Off," Genar-Hofoen said quietly, and the screen duly vanished. One of the erotroupe stirred against him. He looked at her.
The girl's face was the very image of that belonging to Zreyn Tramow, one-time captain of the good ship Problem Child. Her body was different from the original, altered in the direction of Genar-Hofoen's tastes, but subtly. There were two like her and three who looked exactly like famous personalities — an actress, a musician and a lifestyler. Zreyn and Enhoff, Shpel, Py and Gidinley. They had all been perfectly charming as well as being quite plausible impersonators, but Genar-Hofoen thought you had to wonder at the mentality of people who actually chose to alter their appearance and behaviour every few days just to suit the tastes — usually though not always sexual — of others. But maybe he was just being a bit fuddy-duddyish. Perhaps they were slightly boring people otherwise, or perhaps they just liked a deal more variety in such matters than other people.
Whatever their motivations, all five had fallen politely asleep on the AG bed after the fun, which had been preceded by a meal and a party. The troupe's Exemplary Couple, Gakic and Leleeril were asleep too, lying in each other's arms on the carpet-like lawn between the bed platform and the stream which threaded its way from the tinkling waterfall and the pool. Detumesced, the man's prick was almost normal looking. Genar-Hofoen felt slightly sleepy himself, but he was determined to stay awake for the whole holiday; he brushed the sleepiness back under the edges of his mind with a glandular release of gain. Doing this for three days solid would leave him needing lots of sleep, but there would be a week on the Grey Area/Meat fucker; plenty of time to recover. The buzz of gain coursed through him, clearing his head and ridding his body of the effects of fatigue. Gradually a feeling of rested, ready peacefulness washed over and through him.
He clasped his hands behind his neck and gazed happily upwards past the fronds of a couple of overhanging trees at the blue, cloud-strewn sky. Just that movement, performed in the gravity of Tier's standard-G level, gave him a good, light, almost childishly enjoyable sensation. Affronter standard gravity was more than twice the Culture-promoted human norm, and he supposed it was a sign of how well and how easily his body had adapted to conditions on God'shole habitat that he had quickly and long since stopped noticing how much heavier he had felt from day to day.
A thought occurred to him. He closed his eyes briefly, going quickly into the semi-trance that the average Culture adult employed, when they needed to and could be bothered, to check on their physiological settings. He dug around inside various images of his body until he saw himself standing on a small sphere. The sphere was set at one standard gravity; his subconscious had registered the fact that he had been in a steady, reduced gravity field for longer than a few hours and had re-set itself. Left to its own devices, his body would now start to lose bone and muscle mass, thin the walls of his blood vessels and perform a hundred other tiny but consequential alterations the better to suit his frame, tissues and organs to that reduced severity of weight. Well, his subconscious was only doing its job, and it didn't know he would be back in Affronter gravity again in a month or so. He increased the size of the sphere his image stood upon until it was back to the two point one gravities his body would have to readjust itself to once he returned to God'shole. There, that should do it. He cast a quick look round his internal states while he was here, not that there ought to be anything amiss; warning signs made themselves obvious automatically. Sure enough, all was well; fatigue being dealt with, presence of gain noted, blood sugar returning to normal, hormones generally being gathered back to optimum levels.
He came out of the semi-trance, opened his eyes and looked over at where the pen terminal lay on a sculpted, smoothly varnished tree stump at the bedside. So far he had mostly used it to check up on the replies from his Contact contacts, confirming what they could concerning this — so far — pleasantly undemanding mission. The terminal was supposed to blink a little light if it had a message stored for him. He was still waiting to hear from the GSV Not Invented Here, the Incident Coordinator for the Excession. The terminal lay where he'd left it, dull. No new messages. Oh well.
He looked away and watched the clouds move in the sky for a while, then wondered what it looked like turned off.
"Sky, off," he said, keeping his voice low.
The sky disappeared and the true ceiling of the penthouse suite was revealed; a slickly black surface studded with projectors, lights and miscellaneous bumps and indentations. The few gentle animal sounds faded away. In the View Hotel, every suite was a penthouse corner suite; there were four per floor, and the only floor which didn't have four penthouse suites was the very top one, which, so that nobody in the lower floors would feel they were missing out on the real thing when it was available, was re
stricted to housing some of the hotel's machinery and equipment. Genar-Hofoen's was called a jungle suite, though it was entirely the most manicured, pest-free and temperately, temperature-controlled and generally civilised jungle he had ever heard of.
"Night sky, on," he said quietly. The slick black ceiling was replaced by blackness scattered with sharply bright stars. Some animal noises resumed, sounding different compared to those heard in the daylight. They were real animals, not recordings; every now and again a bird would fly across the clearing where the bed was situated, or a fish would splash in the bathing pool or a chattering simian would swing across the forest canopy or a huge, glittering insect would burr delicately through the air.
It was all terribly tasteful and immaculate, and Genar-Hofoen was already starting to look forward to the evening, when he intended to dress in his best clothes and hit the town, which in this case was Night City, located one level almost straight down, where, traditionally, anything on Tier that could breathe a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and tolerate one standard gravity — and had any sort of taste for diversion and excitement — tended to congregate.
A night in Night City would be just the thing to complete this first mad rush of fun at the onset of his short holiday. Calling ahead and ordering up a fabulously expensive erotroupe to act out his every sexual fantasy was one thing — one extremely wonderful and deeply satisfying thing, beyond all doubt, he told himself with all due solemnity — but the idea of a chance meeting with somebody else, another free, independent soul with their own desires and demands, their own reservations and requirements; that, just because it was all up to chance and up to negotiation, just because it all might end in nothing, in rejection, in the failure to impress and connect, in being found wanting rather than being wanted, that was a more valuable thing, that was an enterprise well worthy of the risk of rebuff.
He glanded charge. That ought to do it.
Seconds later, filled to bursting with the love of action, movement and the blessed need to be doing something, he was bouncing out of bed, laughing to himself and apologising to the sleepily grumbling but still palatably comely cast of the erotroupe.
He skipped to the warm waterfall and stood under it. As he showered he told a blue-furred, wise-looking little creature dressed in a dapper waistcoat and sitting on a nearby tree what clothes he wished prepared for the evening. It nodded and swung off through the branches.
VI
"It's nothing to worry about, Gestra," the drone told him as he stepped out of the bulky suit in the vestibule beyond the airlocks. Gestra Ishmethit leant against a maniple field which the drone extended for him. He looked down the corridor to the main part of the accommodation unit, but there was no sign of anybody yet. "The ship has come with new codes and updated security procedures," the drone continued. "It's some years before these were due to be altered, but there has been some unusual activity in a nearby volume — nothing threatening as such, but it's always best to be careful — so it's been decided to move things along a bit and perform the update now rather than later." The drone hung the man's suit up near the airlock doors, its surface sparkling with frost.
Gestra rubbed his hands together and accepted the trousers and jacket the drone handed him. He kept glancing down the corridor.
"The ship has been verified and authenticated by the necessary outside referees," the drone told him, "so it's all above-board, you see?" The machine helped him button up the jacket and smoothed his thin, fair hair. "The crew have asked to come inside; just curious, really."
Gestra stared at the drone, obviously distressed, but the machine patted him on the shoulder with a rosy field and said, "It'll be all right, Gestra. I thought it only polite to grant their request, but you can stay out of their way if you like. Saying hello to them at first would probably go down well, but it isn't compulsory." The Mind had its drone study the man for a moment, checking his breathing, heart rate, pupil dilation, skin response, pheromone output and brain-waves. "I know what," it said soothingly, "we'll tell them you've taken a vow of silence, how's that? You can greet them formally, nod, or whatever, and I'll do the talking. Would that be all right?"
Gestra gulped and said, "Y-y-yes! Yes," he said, nodding vigorously. "That… that would be good… good idea. Tha-thank you!"
"Right," the machine said floating at the man's side as they headed down the corridor for the main reception area. "They'll Displace over in a few minutes. Like I say; just nod to them and let me say whatever has to be said. I'll make your excuses and you can go off to your suite if you like; I'm sure they won't mind being shown round by this drone. Meanwhile I'll be receiving the new ciphers and routines. There's a lot of multiple-checking and bureaucratic book-keeping sort of stuff to be done, but even so it should only take an hour or so. We won't offer them a meal or anything; with any luck they'll take the hint and head off again, leave us in peace, eh?"
After a moment, Gestra nodded at this, vigorously. The drone swivelled in the air at the man's side to show him it was looking at him. "Does all this sound acceptable? I mean, I could put them off completely; tell them they're just not welcome, but it would be terribly rude, don't you think?"
"Y-yes," Gestra said, frowning and looking distinctly uncertain. "Rude. Suppose so. Rude. Mustn't be rude. Probably come a long way, should think?" A smile flickered around his lips, like a small flame in a high wind.
"I think we can be pretty sure of that," the drone said with a laugh in its voice. It clapped him gently on the back with a field.
Gestra was smiling a little more confidently as he walked into the accommodation unit's main reception area.
The reception area was a large round room full of couches and chairs. Gestra usually paid it no attention; it was just a largish space he had to walk through on his way to and back from the airlocks which led to the warship hangars. Now he looked at each of the plumply comfortable-looking seats and sofas as though they represented some terrible threat. He felt his nervousness return. He wiped his brow as the drone stopped by a couch and indicated he might like to sit.
"Let's have a look, shall we?" the drone said as Gestra sat. A screen appeared in the air on the far side of the room, starting as a bright dot, quickly widening to a line eight metres long then seeming to unroll so that it filled the four-metre space between floor and ceiling.
Blackness; little lights. Space. Gestra realised suddenly how long it had been since he'd seen such a view. Then, sweeping slowly into view came a long, dark grey shape, sleek, symmetrical, double-ended, reminding Gestra of the axle and hubs of a ship's windlass.
"The Killer class Limited Offensive Unit Attitude Adjuster," the drone said in a matter-of-fact, almost bored-sounding voice. "Not a type we have here."
Gestra nodded. "No," he said, then stopped to clear his throat a few times. "No pattern… patterns on it… its hull."
"That's right," the drone said.
The ship was stopped now, almost filling the screen. The stars wheeled slowly behind it.
"Well, I-" the drone said, then stopped. The screen on the far side of the room flickered.
The drone's aura field flicked off. It fell out of the air, bouncing off the seat beside Gestra and toppling heavily, lifelessly, to the floor.
Gestra stared at it. A voice like a sigh said, "… sssave yourssselfff…" then the lights dimmed, there was a buzzing noise from all around Gestra, and a tiny tendril of smoke leaked out of the top of the drone's casing.
Gestra leapt up out of the seat, staring wildly around, then jumped up on the seat, crouching there and staring at the drone. The little wisp of smoke was dissipating. The buzzing noise faded slowly. Gestra squatted, hugging his knees with both arms and looking all about. The buzzing noise stopped; the screen collapsed to a line hanging in the air, then shrank to a dot, then winked out. After a moment, Gestra reached forward with one hand and prodded the drone's casing with one hand. It felt warm and solid. It didn't move.
A sequence of thuds from the far side of t
he room shook the air. Beyond where the screen had hung in the air, four tiny mirror spheres bloated suddenly, growing almost instantly to over three metres in diameter and hovering just above the floor. Gestra jumped off the seat and started back away from the spheres. He rubbed his hands together and glanced back at the corridor to the airlock. The mirror spheres vanished like exploding balloons to reveal complicated things like tiny space-ships, not much smaller than the mirror spheres themselves.
One of them rushed towards Gestra, who turned and ran.
He pelted down the corridor, running as fast as he could, his eyes wide, his face distorted with fear, his fists pumping.
Something rushed up behind him, crashed into him and knocked him over, sending him sprawling and tumbling along the carpeted floor. He came to a stop. His face hurt where it had grazed along the carpet. He looked up, his heart twitching madly in his chest, his whole body shaking. Two of the miniature ship things had followed him into the corridor; each floated a couple of metres away, one on either side of him. There was a strange smell in the air. Frost had formed on various parts of the ship things. The nearer one extended a thing like a long hose and went to take him by the neck. Gestra ducked down and doubled himself up, lying on his side on the carpet, face tucked into his knees, arms hugging his shins.
Something prodded him about the shoulders and rump. He could hear muffled noises coming from the two machines. He whimpered.
Then something very hard slammed into his side; he heard a cracking noise and his arm burned with pain. He screamed, still trying to bury his face in his knees. He felt his bowels relax. Warmth flooded his pants. He was aware of something inside his head turning off the searing pain in his arm, but nothing could turn off the heat of shame and embarrassment. Tears filled his eyes.
There was a noise like, "Ka!" then a whooshing noise, and a breeze touched his face and hands. After a moment he looked up and saw that the two machines had gone down to the airlock doors. There was movement in the reception area, and then another one of the machines came down the corridor; it slowed down as it approached him. He ducked his head down again. Another whoosh and another breeze.
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