Of course, the Affront’s ships were as self-repairing as any other reasonably advanced civilisation’s, and the marks that had been left on the vessels were just that; they would be no thicker than a coat of paint and have negligible effect on the ships’ operational capability. However, the Affront thought that it was only right that their ships should - like themselves - bear the scars of honour that battle brings, and so allowed their warships’ self-repair mechanisms to stop just short of perfection, the better to display the provenance of their war fleets’ glorious reputations.
The car stopped directly underneath the middle warcraft in the midst of a forest of giant pipes and tubes which disappeared into the belly of the ship. Crunches, thumps and hisses from outside the car announced all was being made safe. A wisp of vapour burst from a seal, and the car’s door swung out and up. There was a corridor beyond. An honour guard of Affronters jerked to attention; not for him, of course, but for Fivetide and the Affronter at his side dressed in the uniform of a Navy Commander. Both of them were half floating, half walking along towards him, paddles rowing and dangling limbs pushing.
‘And here’s our guest!’ Fivetide shouted. ‘Genar-Hofoen; allow me to present Commander Kindrummer VI of both the Blades-corner tribe and the Battle-Cruiser Kiss The Blade. So, human; ready for our little jaunt?’
‘Yup,’ he said, and stepped out into the corridor.
IV
Ulver Seich, barely twenty-two, famed scholastic overachiever since the age of three, voted Most Luscious Student by her last five University years and breaker of more hearts on Phage Rock than anybody since her legendary great-great-great grandmother, had been summarily dragged away from her graduation ball by the drone Churt Lyne.
‘Churt!’ she said, balling her fists in her long black gloves and nodding her head forward; her high heels clicked along the inlaid wood of the vestibule floor. ‘How dare you; that was a deeply lovely young man I was dancing with! He was utterly, utterly gorgeous; how could you just drag me away like that?’
The drone, hurrying at her back, dived round in front of her and opened the ancient, manually operated double doors leading from the ballroom vestibule, its suitcase-sized body rustling against the bustle of her gown as it did so. ‘I’m sorry beyond words, Ulver,’ it told her. ‘Now, please let’s not delay.’
‘Mind my bustle,’ she said.
‘Sorry.’
‘He was gorgeous,’ Ulver Seich said vehemently as she strode down a stone-flagged hallway lined with paintings and urn plants, following the floating drone as it headed for the traveltube doors.
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ it said.
‘And he liked my legs,’ she said, looking down at the slashed front of the gown. Her long, exposed legs were sheathed in sheer blackness. Violet shoes matched her deep-cut gown; its short train hurried after her in quick, sinuous flicks.
‘They’re beautiful legs,’ the drone agreed, signalling ahead to the traveltube controls to hurry things up.
‘Damn right they are,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘He was gorgeous.’
‘I’m sure.’
She stopped abruptly. ‘I’m going back.’ She turned on her heel, just a little unsteadily.
‘What?’ yelped Churt Lyne. The drone darted round in front of her; she almost bumped into it. ‘Ulver!’ the machine said, sounding angry. Its aura field flashed white. ‘Really!’
‘Get out the way. He was gorgeous. He’s mine. He deserves me. Come on; shift.’
It wouldn’t get out of the way. She balled her fists again and beat at its snout, stamping her feet. She hiccuped.
‘Ulver, Ulver,’ the drone said, gently taking her hands in its fields. She stuck her head forward and frowned as hard as she could at the machine’s front sensory band. ‘Ulver,’ it said again. ‘Please. Please listen; this is--’
‘What is it, anyway?’ she cried.
‘I told you; something you have to see; a signal.’
‘Well, why can’t you show it to me here?’ She looked round the hallway, at the softly lit portraits and the variegated fronds, creepers and parasols of the urn plants. ‘There isn’t even anybody else around!’
‘Because it just doesn’t work that way,’ Churt Lyne said, sounding exasperated. ‘Ulver, please; this is important. You still want to join Contact?’
She sighed. ‘I suppose so,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Join Contact and go exploring . . .’
‘Well, this is your invitation.’ It let go of her hands.
She stuck her head forward at it again. Her hair was an artful tangle of massed black curls studded with tiny helium-filled globes of gold, platinum and emerald. It brushed against the drone’s snout like a particularly decorative thundercloud.
‘Will it let me go exploring on that young man?’ she asked, trying to keep her face straight.
‘Ulver, if you will just do as I ask there is every chance Contact will happily provide you with entire ships full of gorgeous young men. Now, please turn round.’
She snorted derisively and went on tip-toes to look wobblingly over the machine’s casing in the direction of the ballroom. She could still hear the music of the dance she’d left. ‘Yeah, but it was that one I was interested in . . .’
The drone took her hands again in fields coloured yellow green with calm friendliness, bringing her down off her toes. ‘Young lady,’ it said. ‘I shall never say anything more truthful to you than these two things. One; there will be plenty more gorgeous young men in your life. Two; you will never have a better chance of getting into Contact, even Special Circumstances, and with them owing you a favour; or two. Do you understand? This is your big chance, girl.’
‘Don’t you “girl” me,’ she told it sniffily. The drone Churt Lyne had been a family friend for nearly a millennium and parts of its personality were supposed to date back to when they’d been programs in a house-systems computer nine thousand years earlier. It wasn’t in the habit of pulling age on her like this and reminding her that she was a mere day-fly to its creakingly venerable antiquity, but it wasn’t above doing so when it thought the situation demanded it, either. She closed one eye and looked closely at the machine. ‘Did you say “Special Circumstances” just there?’
‘Yes.’
She drew back. ‘Hmm,’ she said, her eyes narrowing.
Behind her, the traveltube chimed and the door rolled open. She turned and started walking towards it. ‘Well, come on, then!’ she said over her shoulder.
Phage Rock had been wandering the galaxy for nearly nine thousand years. That made it one of the Culture’s oldest elements. It had started out as a three-kilometre-long asteroid in a solar system which was one of the first explored by a species that would later form part of the Culture; it had been mined for metals, minerals and precious stones, then its great internal voids had been sealed against the vacuum and flooded with air, it had been spun to provide artificial gravity and it had become a habitat orbiting its parent sun.
Later, when the technology made it possible and the political conditions prevailing at the time made it advisable to quit that system, it had been fitted with fusion-powered steam rockets and ion engines to help propel it into interstellar space. Again due to those political conditions, it armed itself with up-rated signal lasers and a number of at least partially targetable mass launchers which doubled as rail guns. Some years later, scarred but intact, and finally accepted as personally sentient by its human inhabitants, it had been one of the first space-based entities to declare for the new pan-civilisational, pan-species grouping which was calling itself the Culture.
Over the years, decades, centuries and millennia that had followed, Phage had journeyed through the galaxy, wandering from system to system, concentrating on trading and manufacturing at first and then on a gradually more cultural, educatory role as the advances in technology the Culture was cultivating began to distribute the society’s productive capacity so evenly throughout its fabric that the ability to manuf
acture almost anything developed almost everywhere, and trade became relatively rare.
And Phage Rock - by now recognised as one of a distinct category of Culture artifacts which were neither ships nor worlds but something in between - had grown, accruing new bits of systemic or interstellar debris about it as its needs required and its population increased, securing the chunks of metal, rock, ice and compacted dust to its still gnarled outer surface in a slow process of acquisition, consumption and evolution, so that within just a millennium of its transition from mine to habitat its earlier, original self wouldn’t have recognised it; it was thirty kilometres long by then, not three, and only the front half of that initial body still peeped out from the prow of the knobbly collection of equipment-scattered mountains and expanded, balloon-like hangar and accommodation rotundae that now formed its roughly conical body.
Phage Rock’s rate of accretion had slowed after that, and it was now just over seventy kilometres long and home to one hundred and fifty million people. It looked like a collection of craggy rocks, smooth stones and still smoother shells brought from a beach and cemented into a rough cairn, all dotted with what looked like a museum collection of Culture Equipment Through the Ages: launch pads, radar pits, aerial frames, sensory arrays, telescope dishes, rail-gun pylons, crater-like rocket nozzles, clamshell hangar doors, iris apertures and a bewildering variety of domes large and small, intact and part-dismantled or just ruined.
As its size and its population had grown, so had the speeds Phage Rock was capable of. It had been successively fitted with ever-more efficient and powerful drives and engines, until eventually it was able to maintain a perfectly respectable velocity either warping along the fabric of space-time or creating its own induced-singularity pathway through hyperspace beneath or above it.
Ulver Seich’s had been one of the Rock’s Founding Families; she could trace her ancestry back through fifty-four generations on Phage itself and numbered amongst her ancestors at least two forebears who were inevitably mentioned in even one-volume Histories of the Culture, as well as being descended from - as the fashions of the intervening times had ordained - people who had resembled birds, fish, dirigible balloons, snakes, small clouds of cohesive smoke and animated bushes.
The tenor of the time had generally turned against such outlandishness and people had mostly returned to looking more like people over the last millennium, albeit assuredly pretty good-looking people, but still, some part of one’s appearance was initially at least left to luck and the random nature of genetic inheritance, and it was a matter of some pride to Ulver that she had never had any form of physical alteration carried out (well, apart from the neural lace of course, but that didn’t count). It would have been a brave or deranged human or machine who told Ulver Seich to her face that the give-or-take-a-bit human-basic form was not almost unimprovably graceful and alluring, especially in its female state, and even more especially when it was called Ulver Seich.
She looked round the room the drone had brought her to. It was semicircular and moderately big, shaped like an auditorium or a shallowly sloped lecture hall, but most of the steps or seats seemed to be filled with complicated-looking desks and pieces of equipment. A huge screen filled the far wall.
They’d entered the room through a long tunnel which she’d never seen before and which was blocked by a series of thick, mirror-coated doors which had rolled silently back into recesses as they’d approached, and revolved back into place behind them once they’d passed. Ulver had admired her reflection in every one of them, and drawn herself up even straighter in her spectacular violet gown.
The lights had come on in the semicircular room as the last door had rolled back into place. The place was bright, but dusty. The drone whooshed off to one side and hovered over one of the desks.
Ulver stood looking round the space, wondering. She sneezed.
‘Bless you.’
‘Thank you. What is this place, Churt?’ she asked.
‘Emergency Centre Command Space,’ the drone told her, as the desk beneath it lit up in places and various panes and panels of light leapt up to waver in the air above its surface.
Ulver Seich wandered over to look at the pretty displays.
‘Didn’t even know this place existed,’ she said, drawing one black-gloved finger along the desk’s surface. The displays altered and the desk made a chirping noise; Churt Lyne slapped her hand away, going ‘tssk’ while its aura field flashed white. She glowered at the machine, inspected the grey rim of dust on her finger tip, and smeared it on the casing of the drone.
Normally Churt Lyne would have slicked that part of its body with a field and the dust would just have fallen off, having literally nothing to cling to, but this time it ignored her and just kept on hovering over the desk and its rapidly changing displays, obviously controlling both it and them. Ulver crossed her black-gloved arms in annoyance.
The sliding panels of lights hanging in the air changed and rotated; figures and letters slid across their surfaces. Then they all disappeared.
‘Right,’ the drone said. A maniple field coloured formal blue extended from the machine’s casing and dragged a small sculpted metal seat over, placing it behind her and then shoving it quickly forward; she had no choice but to plonk down into it.
‘Ow,’ she said, pointedly. She adjusted her bustle and glared at the drone but it still wasn’t paying attention.
‘Here we go,’ it said.
What looked like a pane of brown smoked glass suddenly leapt into existence above the desk. She studied it, attempting to see her reflection.
‘Ready?’ the drone asked her.
‘Mm-hmm,’ she said.
‘Ulver, child,’ the drone said, in a voice she knew it had spent centuries investing with gravitas. It swivelled through the air until it was directly in front of her.
She rolled her eyes. ‘Yes? What?’
‘Ulver, I know you’re a little--’
‘I’m drunk, drone, I know,’ she told it. ‘But I haven’t lost my wits.’
‘Well, good, but I need to know you’re fit to make this decision. What you’re about to see might change your life.’
She sighed and put her gloved elbow on the surface of the desk, resting her chin on her hand. ‘I’ve had a few young fellows tell me that before,’ she drawled. ‘It always turns out to be a disappointment, or a joke of the grossest nature.’
‘This is neither. But you must understand that just seeing what I’m about to show you might give Special Circumstances an interest in you that will not pass; even if you decide you don’t want to join Contact, or even if you do but you’re still refused, it is possible they might watch you for the rest of your life, just because of what you’re about to see. I’m sorry to sound so melodramatic, but I don’t want you to enter into anything you don’t understand the full implications of.’
‘Me neither.’ She yawned. ‘Can we get on with this?’
‘You’re sure you’ve understood what I’ve said?’
‘Hell yes!’ she exclaimed, waving her arms around. ‘Just get on with it.’
‘Oh; just one other thing--’
‘What?’ she yelled.
‘Will you travel to a distant location in the guise of somebody else and - probably - help kidnap somebody, another Culture citizen?’
‘Will I what?’ she said, wrinkling her nose and snorting with laughter and disbelief.
‘Sounds like a “No” to me,’ the drone said. ‘Didn’t think you would. Had to ask though. That means I have no choice but to show you this.’ It sounded relieved.
She put both her black-gloved arms on the desk, rested her chin on them and looked as soberly as she could at the drone. ‘Churt,’ she said. ‘What is going on here?’
‘You’ll see,’ it told her, getting out of the way of the screen. ‘You ready?’
‘If I get any more ready I’ll be asleep.’
‘Good. Pay attention.’
‘Oh yes, sir,’ she said, g
lancing narrow-eyed at the machine.
‘Watch!’ it said.
She sat back in the seat with her arms folded.
Words appeared on the screen:
(“TextTrans” Obscure Term/Acronym Explanation function running, instances flagged thus: {}.)
(Signal sequence received at Phage Rock:) ∞
1) [skein broadcast, Mclear {standard nonary Marain}, received@ n4.28.855.0065+]:
‘What’s “nonary” mean?’
‘Based on nine. Ordinary Marain; the stuff you learned in kindergarten, for goodness’ sake; the three-by-three dot grid.’
‘Oh.’
The text scrolled on:
*!c11505.* {trans.: (“*” = broadcast) (“!” = warning) Galaxy sector
number; whole comprises standard-format High-Compression Factor
Emergency Warning Signal}
∞
2) [swept beam M1 {Basic Culture Intragalactic Ship Language}, received
@n4.28.855.0079-]:
SDA {trans.: Significant Developmental Anomaly}.
c2314992+52 {trans.:4th-level-of-accuracy galactic location}
x {from} FATC {trans.: (General Contact Unit) Fate Amenable To
Change} @ n4.28.855.*.
‘Could we lose all these strings of figures?’ she asked the drone. ‘They’re not really telling me anything I need to know, are they?’
‘I suppose not. There.’
(Command: “TextTrans” Long-Numeral Stripping function enabled, set at five numerals or more, instances flagged thus: •) ∞
3) [swept beam, M2 {StandardContact Section Idiom},relay, received
Excession Page 12
