"Surface Detail" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banks Iain M)

Ten

A what?”

“A hymen.”

There were things to do, Lededje had decided, and she might only have one night on the GSV to get them done. Getting laid was not the most important item on her list, but it didn’t feel like the least important either.

The attractive young man looked puzzled. “How would I know?”

At least she thought that was what he’d just said. The music was very loud. There were these zones scattered throughout the space that were called sound fields where the music magically dropped away to nothing. She saw the vague blue glow in the air that betrayed the presence of one a couple of metres away and – rather daringly, she felt – putting her hand on the attractive young man’s puffy sleeve, part encouraged and part dragged him in that direction.

Maybe it was her, she thought; she was talking Marain, the Culture’s own language, and while it felt bizarrely natural to just launch out and express herself in it, every time she stopped to think about what she was doing she sort of tripped over herself and stuttered to a stop. Sometimes specific word-choice had her stumbling too; there seemed to be an awful lot of not-quite synonyms in Marain.

The very loud, insistently beaty music – it was called Chug, apparently, though she had yet to establish whether this was the title of the composition, the name of the performer/s or the musical form itself – faded almost to nothing. The attractive young man still looked puzzled.

“You look puzzled,” she told him. “Can’t you just look the word up in your neural lace?”

“I don’t have a lace,” he said, running his hand over one side of his face and through some of his long, dark, curly hair. “Right now I don’t even have a terminal on me; I’m out to play.” He looked up to where the cone of the noise-reducing sound field seemed to be emanating, from the ceiling of the space, unseen in the darkness above. “Ship, what’s a hayman?”

“A hymen,” she corrected.

“A hymen is a thin membrane partially obstructing the vagina of a mammal, especially a human,” the ship said from the long silver ring on her finger. “It is found in approximately twenty-eight per cent of the pan-human meta-species and its presence is often taken as signifying the individual concerned has yet to be subject to penetrative sex. However-”

“Thanks,” the attractive young man curled his fingers round the ring on her finger, muffling the ship’s voice and causing it to stop.

Lededje smiled as he took his fingers away. It had been quite an intimate act, she felt. Promising. She lowered her head to her hand a little. “Do I have a hymen?” she asked quietly.

“No,” the ring said. “Please hold me up to one of your ears.”

“Excuse me,” Lededje said to the attractive young man. He shrugged, drank his drink, looked away.

“Lededje, Sensia here,” the ring said. “The body blank I used didn’t come with defined genitalia at all; it was told to become female at the same time as the basic Sichultian characteristics were programmed in. The default setting is no hymen. Why? Do you want one?”

She brought the ring round to her mouth. “No!” she whispered. She frowned, watching the attractive young man smile and nod to somebody nearby.

He didn’t look Sichultian, of course, but he looked… different; a bit the way she looked different. When she had come up with her general plan of action, hours earlier, sitting in front of the wall screen in her room after Sensia had left her, she had asked about and quickly found various scheduled social gatherings of those amongst the ship’s not-quite quarter of a billion population who did not look like the average Culture human. In a ship with that many people aboard there were always going to be plenty of individuals who didn’t conform to the Culture norm.

The way to think of the ship’s living space, she’d decided, was as a single giant city, fifty kilometres long by twenty across and a uniform kilometre in height. With a perfect, free and rapid public transport system composed of what she thought of as small, luxurious, one-carriage ultra-fast underground trains crossed with elevator cars. She was used to the idea of cities attracting the eccentric and the strange, the people who would be ostracised or even attacked in the countryside or smaller towns and villages if they behaved as they really wanted to behave but who could become themselves, amongst others of whatever kind they were, when they came to the city. She’d known she would find some people somewhere who would find her attractive.

There was still the matter of finding what she was coming to think of as The Alternative Ship, though, and that did take priority. This place – Divinity In Extremis – was some sort of combination of semi-regular social event, performance space and drug bar.

It had a reputation. When she’d started asking the screen about it Sensia had butted in, the avatar’s voice suddenly coming out of the screen in place of the more neutral ship voice she’d just been getting used to, advising her that Divinity In Extremis wasn’t the sort of place somebody new to the Culture necessarily wanted to get involved with. Lededje had bit back her annoyance, thanked Sensia for her advice and politely asked her not to interrupt again.

So: Divinity In Extremis. Ship avatars were known to come here.

“You’re interrupting again,” she whispered into the ring. She smiled at the attractive young man as he frowned into his now empty glass.

“I could have pretended I was just the ship,” Sensia’s voice replied reasonably, sounding annoyingly unannoyed. “I assumed you wanted more detail on the physical process that led to your current incarnation. Sorry, dear girl. If you’re worried about whether your body was somehow sexually interfered with while in the grow tank, I can assure you it wasn’t.”

The attractive young man reached out to a passing tray as it floated past, depositing his empty glass and scooping up a fuming drug bowl. He brought it up to his face and inhaled deeply.

“Never mind,” Lededje said. “Sensia?”

“What?”

“Please go away now.”

“Duly gone. One tip though: don’t you think it’s time you asked him his name?”

“Goodbye.”

“Talk to you later.”

Lededje looked up, still smiling. The attractive young man went to hand her the drug bowl. She was about to take it with her right hand but he pulled it away again, gesturing to her left hand. She took the bowl with her left hand instead and raised it tentatively towards her face.

The attractive young man took her right hand and curled his fingers round the ring again. While she was still sucking in the fragrant grey smoke from the bowl, he pulled the terminal ring off her finger and threw it high over his shoulder.

“That was mine!” she protested. She looked in the direction the ring had gone but it must have landed ten metres away over the mass of people in the place and there was no sign of anybody catching it and bringing it back. “Why did you do that?”

He shrugged. “I felt like it.”

“Do you do everything you feel like doing?”

He shrugged again. “Pretty much.”

“How am I supposed to speak to the ship now?”

He looked even more puzzled. He inhaled from the drug bowl. She hadn’t realised he’d taken it back. “Shout?” he suggested. “Talk to the air? Ask somebody else?” He shook his head, looked at her critically. “You’re really not from around here, are you?”

She thought about this. “Yes,” she said. She wasn’t sure she approved of somebody who just assumed it was all right to manhandle her, remove something that wasn’t his and just throw it away like it was something worthless.

His name was Admile. She told him her name was Led because she thought Lededje was too much of a mouthful.

“I am looking for a ship’s avatar,” she told him.

“Oh,” he said. “I thought you were, you know, cruising.”

“Cruising?”

“For sex.”

“Possibly that too,” she said. “Well, definitely, though…” She had been going to say definitely but possibly not with him, but then thought that might be too blunt.

“You want to have sex with a ship’s avatar?”

“Not necessarily. The two quests are separate.”

“Hmm,” Admile said. “Follow me.”

She frowned, then followed him. The place was busy, packed with people of a variety of body shapes, though mostly pan-human. Outside the sound fields it was very noisy with Chug, which she was starting to suspect was the type of music rather than anything more specific. Knots of people got in their way and they pushed through. Clouds of fragrant fumes created smoke-screens across the space; she nearly lost Admile twice. They passed one cleared circle where two naked men, hobbled by short ropes tied round their ankles, were bare-knuckle fighting, then another where a man and a woman, both wearing only masks, were fighting with long, curved swords.

They came to a sort of deep, sunken, wide alcove where, amongst a plethora of cushions, bolsters and other padded-looking bits of furniture, a startling variety of people, perhaps twenty in all, were indulging in enthusiastic sex. A semicircle of people were gathered around the perimeter, laughing, clapping, shouting comments and offering advice. One couple amongst those looking on were just getting undressed, apparently about to start taking part.

Lededje was not especially shocked; she had witnessed and been obliged to take part in orgies back on Sichult; Veppers had gone through a stage of enjoying them. She had not appreciated the experience, though she supposed that might have been more to do with the lack of choice involved than the surfeit of numbers. She hoped Admile wasn’t about to suggest that they, or even just she, ought to join in the group sex. She felt that a rather more romantic setting might be more appropriate for this body’s first sexual experience.

“There he is,” Admile said. Probably; it was noisy again.

She followed him to the far side of the semicircle of voyeurs, where a fat little man stood surrounded by mostly young people. He was dressed in what looked like a shiny, highly patterned dressing gown. His hair was thin and lank and his face was jowly and covered in sweat. He was, she realised when she thought about it, the fattest person she had seen since she’d been here, by some margin.

The fat little man was repeatedly spinning a coin in the air and catching it. Each time the coin landed on his pudgy palm its top surface flashed red. “It’s skill,” he kept saying as the people around him shouted and called out. “It’s skill, that’s all. Look. I’ll make it green this time.” This time when the coin landed it flashed green instead of red. “See? Skill. Muscle control, concentration: skill. That’s all.” He looked up. “Admile. Tell these people this is just skill, won’t you?”

“Anything riding on this?” Admile asked. “Any bets been taken?”

“Nothing!” the little fat man said, tossing the coin again. Red.

“Okay,” Admile said. “It’s just skill,” he told the people.

“See?” the little fat man said. Red.

“That doesn’t make it fair though,” Admile added.

“Oh, you’re no use,” the little fat man tutted. Red again.

“Led, this is Jolicci. He’s an avatar. You’re an avatar, aren’t you, Jolicci?”

“I’m an avatar.” Red. “Of the good ship Armchair Traveller.” Red. “A more than averagely peripatetic GCU of the…” Red. “Mountain class…” Red. “An avatar who I swear is using nothing…” Red. “But muscular skill to make this coin come up red.” Red. “Every…” Red. “… single…” Red. “… time!” Green. “Oh, fuck!”

There was jeering. He bowed – sarcastically, Lededje thought, if such a thing was possible. He tossed the coin one last time, watched it flip in the air and then held open the breast pocket of his extravagantly decorated dressing gown. The coin dropped into the pocket. He extracted a kerchief from it and mopped his face as some of the people who’d been watching started to drift away.

“Led,” he said, nodding to her. “Pleased to meet you.” He looked at her, toe to top. She had dressed very conservatively at first, then changed her mind and opted for a short sleeveless dress, deciding to revel in the freedom to do so without displaying her legally approved, Veppers-designed tattoo. Jolicci shook his head. “You don’t look like anything I have stored up here,” he said, tapping his head. “Excuse me while I consult my better half. Oh, you’re Sichultian, is that right?”

“Yes,” she said.

“She wants to have sex with a ship’s avatar,” Admile told him.

Jolicci looked surprised. “Really?” he asked.

“No,” she told him. “I am looking for a disreputable ship.”

“Disreputable?” Jolicci looked even more surprised.

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

Perhaps, she thought – avatar or not – he was just one of those people who thought it the height of wit to constantly ask questions when they weren’t called for. “Would you know of one?” she asked.

“Many. Why do you want a disreputable ship?”

“Because I think the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly means to send me away on one that will be too well behaved.”

Jolicci scrunched up one eye, as though this answer had hit him with the force of a spit.

She had been flicking through various documents and presentations she had discovered through her room’s screen, looking at what the Culture knew about and thought of the Enablement, when the ship had called back. “Lededje, I’ve found you a ship,” the vessel’s neutral voice had told her straight out of the screen.

“Oh, thank you.”

The image of what she supposed must be a Culture spaceship had appeared on the screen, pasted over what she’d been looking at. It resembled a rather featureless skyscraper lying on its side. “It’s called The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory.”

“Is it?”

“Don’t worry about the name. The point is, it’s heading in your direction and it’s agreed to take you. It’s setting off late tomorrow afternoon.”

“It will take me to Sichult?”

“Most of the way. It’ll drop you at a place called Bohme, a transfer station and dock complex just outside the Enablement itself. I’ll arrange local transport from there while you’re en route.”

“Won’t I need money to pay for that?”

“Leave that to me. Would you like to talk to the ship? Arrange when to board?”

“Okay.”

She’d talked to The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory. It had sounded cheery but boring. She’d thanked it, thanked the GSV again and then had sat frowning at the screen once control of it was returned to her.

She’d started looking for document sites about Culture spaceships. They appeared to be almost without number; there were millions of ships, each seemed to have what was in effect its own public log book and its own fan club – often more than one – and there were innumerable documents/presentations on particular types and classes of ships or those which had been constructed by specific manufacturies or other ships. It was bewildering. She could understand why Culture people just asked their local AI or Mind for whatever information they wanted; trying to work your way down through all the detail yourself was daunting.

Perhaps she should just ask. That seemed to be the way you did things in the Culture. On Sichult you had to think about what subjects and people it was safe to ask certain things about, but not here, apparently. On the other hand, doing it yourself felt more secure.

She was already fairly au fait with how you did all this; it wasn’t vastly different from the way the Enablement arranged access to the data it was prepared to share with the general public, plus she’d had practice while she’d still been in the ship’s Virtual Environment, before she’d be revented into this body.

Here in the Real, using the screen, she knew how to monitor the level of machine intelligence she was talking to. A side bar at the edge of the screen changed according to whether she was talking to, or just using, a completely dumb program, a smart but witless set of algorithms, one of three different levels of AI, an intelligent outside entity or was linked directly to the main personality of the GSV itself. The bar had ascended to its maximum when Sensia had broken in earlier with her warning about Divinity In Extremis.

She’d asked the level-one AI to bring up sites which rated ships and soon found one run by a small collective of ship fans which gave both the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly and the Me, I’m Counting what she thought sounded like fair assessments. She asked about The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory. Boring, obedient. Well behaved. Possibly with ambitions of being chosen for more exotic service, though if it thought it was ever going to get into SC it was deceiving itself. She wasn’t sure what SC was – maybe she’d come back to that.

She’d called up a list of ships currently on the GSV. She’d shaken her head. There were nearly ten thousand named vessels aboard right now, including two of a smaller class of GSV, themselves containing other ships. The exact number changed as she watched it, the final digit flickering up and down, presumably as vessels arrived and departed in real time. Four GSVs under construction. Less than 50 per cent Bay Occupancy Rate.

She was still assuming that she was under some form of surveillance and had noticed that the more complicated was the question you asked, the further up the smartness-bar you went towards the ship’s own personality. She wanted to avoid that, so rather than just ask, Which are the bad-boy ships? she found short cuts that let her sort the ships currently aboard according to the dubiousness of their reputations.

A handful of the ships aboard had worked for or been plausibly associated with something called Special Circumstances. They didn’t publish their ship’s logs or course schedules, she’d noticed. SC, again. Whatever Special Circumstances was, it seemed to be closely linked with the kind of qualities she was looking for.

She’d looked up Special Circumstances. Military intelligence, espionage, deep interference, dirty tricks. This, she’d thought, sounded promising. It seemed to have almost as many people interested in it – a lot of them profoundly critical – as all the ships did put together. She’d looked a little closer at some of the anti-SC sites. Profoundly critical; say that kind of thing about similar organisations within the Enablement and you’d be on a sharp end of a visit from them and quite probably never heard of again.

None of the handful of ships she’d wanted to talk to had been immediately available. She’d found out how to leave messages with them, and had done so.

“Over there, to your left. Further left. Straight on for about five metres,” said a neutral voice rapidly coming closer to where she stood with Admile and the fat little avatar. “That’s her, talking to the rotund gentleman.”

Lededje turned and saw a cross-looking lady walking smartly towards her, holding something small and silver in her fingers. She marched up to Lededje. “This thing,” she said, brandishing the ring in Lededje’s face, “will not shut up. Even in a sound field.”

“That’s her,” the ring said primly.

Admile waved some drug fumes out of the way and peered at the ring before turning to Lededje. “Want me to throw it away again? Further?”

“No, thank you,” Lededje said, taking the ring from the woman. “

Thank-” she began, but the woman was already walking away. Lededje held the ring in her hand.

“Hello again,” the ship’s neutral voice said.

“Hello.”

“I was thinking of going body surfing,” Jolicci announced. “Anybody want to go body surfing?”

Admile shook his head.

“Good,” Lededje said, slipping the ring onto one of his fingers. “Perhaps I’ll see you later.”

Body surfing meant taking off most of your clothes and throwing yourself down a great curved slope of upward-charging water, either on your back, front, behind or, if you were especially skilled, feet. This all happened in a great half-dark hall full of whoops and happy screams, overlooked by bars and party spaces. Some people did it naked, others donned swimwear. Jolicci, fitted with what looked like a pair of eye-wateringly tight trunks, was spectacularly bad at it. He found it hard to exercise any control even when he was flat on his back with all four limbs extended.

Lededje discovered she was quite good as long as she didn’t try to stand up. She was coasting on her behind in a tidy spray of water, holding on to Jolicci’s left ankle with her right hand to stop him spinning out of control and keep them within talking distance of each other.

“So you want to go somewhere you won’t reveal for reasons you want to keep secret but you don’t want to take the ship the GSV’s suggested.”

“That’s broadly it,” she agreed. “Also, I would like to talk to the ships aboard here which have or had links to Special Circumstances.”

“Really?” Jolicci wobbled, spraying his face with water. “Are you sure?” He wiped his face with one hand, oscillating to and fro until he placed the hand back on the watery slide. “I mean, really sure?”

“Yes,” she told him. “You’re not the avatar of one of them, are you?” He’d said he was the avatar of the Armchair Traveller; that hadn’t been a name she’d recognised, but for all she knew these ships changed their names, or had several different names they used as it suited them.

“No,” he said. “Humble General Contact Unit, me, going about standard Contact business, honest. Nothing to do with SC.” He squinted at her (she thought – it might just have been the water).

“You sure you want to talk to SC?”

“Yes.”

They pirouetted slowly, caught by a localised rush of uphill-headed water. Jolicci looked thoughtful. He nodded to the side. “It seems I have no skill in this. Enough. Let’s try another sort of surfing.”

“What is this?” Lededje asked. They were standing in a short, broad, carpeted corridor one wall of which was punctuated by five sets of plain double doors. Jolicci, back in his colourful dressing gown, had pulled the central set of double doors apart with some effort and was stopping them from sliding back by wedging the left one with his slipper-shod foot. Lededje was looking through the opened doors into a dark, echoing space laced with vertical cables and cross-beamed with girders. She heard rumbling noises, sensed movement, felt a draught on her face. The air smelled oily, half familiar.

She and the fat little avatar had been whisked here by the usual slick process of traveltube with only minute-long walks at either end. What she was looking at here felt somehow much older, much cruder.

“Re-creation of a tall building elevator shaft,” he told her. “Don’t you have these?”

“We have skyscrapers,” she said, holding on to the right-hand door as she leant in. “And elevators.’ There was the rather grimy-looking top of an elevator car reassuringly close beneath, only a metre or so down. Looking up she saw the shafts and cables climbing into the darkness. “I’ve just never seen inside a lift shaft before. Except in a screen, I suppose. Then there’s always just the one, you know, shaft.”

“Uh-huh,” Jolicci said. “Jump on; I’ll let go the doors. Careful, though; no safety net.”

She jumped onto the roof of the car beneath. Jolicci followed her, making the roof’s surface quiver. The doors above hissed closed and the car started to ascend immediately. She held on to one of the cables – it was greasy with dark, gritty oil – and looked over the edge. The great dark shaft held space for ten elevators, five on each side. The car accelerated smartly, the slipstream tugging at her hair and making Jolicci’s dressing gown flap as they whizzed upwards. She looked down, leaning a little further out as they shot past sets of closed double doors, almost too fast to count. The bottom of the shaft was lost in the darkness.

She was grabbed from behind by one shoulder.

She heard herself yelp as she thudded into Jolicci’s surprisingly solid body. An instant later a dark shape plunged past her in a storm of disturbed air. She had narrowly missed getting decapitated by a rapidly descending car. Jolicci released his hold on her. “Like I said; no safety net. This is a dangerously faithful physical re-creation. No sensors on the cars to stop them hitting or crushing you, no AG down the bottom if you fall. Nobody to see you fall, let alone stop you. You backed-up?”

She found she was shaking a little. “You mean my, my self? My personality?” He just looked at her. She suspected it was just as well it was so gloomy it was hard to tell precisely what his expression was. “I’m only a day out of a… a thing, a jar, a body tank.” She swallowed. “But no.”

The car was slowing, drawing to a stop. Jolicci looked upwards from the far side of the car. “Right. Here comes the fun bit.” He glanced at her. “You ready?”

“What for?” she asked.

“Get over here. Jump when I say. Don’t hesitate. You’ll need to let go of that cable first.”

She let go of the cable, stepped to stand beside him at the other side of the elevator roof. Looking up, tentatively, she saw the bottom of another dark car descending quickly towards them. She heard some sudden, distant whoops and then laughter from further down in the great depth of shadows; the sounds echoed and re-echoed. Their car was still slowing. “Okay, steady, steady…” Jolicci said as their car and the one above approached each other.

“Should I hold your hand?” she asked.

“Do not hold my hand,” he said. “Okay, okay, steady…”

Their car had come almost to a stop; the one coming towards them from above whooshed past.

“Jump!” Jolicci shouted as the car’s roofs were almost level.

He jumped. She jumped too a moment later, but found that she’d jumped as though to land where the other car’s roof had been when she’d leapt, not where it was going to be as she dropped after it. She landed awkwardly and would have fallen against the car’s cables if Jolicci hadn’t caught her. Lededje heard herself gasp.

She held on to the little fat avatar for a moment as they steadied on the roof of the car. The one they’d jumped from was stopped several storeys above and getting further away all the time as their car descended. It too was starting to slow now.

“Wow!” she said, letting go of Jolicci. Her fingers had left dark, greasy marks on his dressing gown lapels. “That was… exciting!” She frowned at him. “Do you do this a lot?”

“Never before,” he told her. “Heard of it.”

That shook her a little. She had rather assumed she was in safe or at least experienced hands. The car drew to a stop. Beneath, she could feel and hear its doors open; a bar of light shone from that edge of the roof, showing Jolicci’s face. He was looking at her oddly, she thought. She felt a strange little frisson of fear.

“This Special Circumstances thing,” he said.

“Yes?” she said as he took a step closer to her. She stepped backward, tripped on a piece of the roof’s cross-bracing and staggered. He grabbed her again, pulling her to the rear edge of the roof.

Deep below, she could see the car whose rear faced their car’s rear rising quickly towards them. The two sets of five cars per side were separated by nearly two metres; three or four times the separation of the cars on each side of the shaft.

Jolicci nodded down, indicating the approaching car. “Think we can make that jump when it comes?” he said into her ear. She could feel his warm breath on her skin. “No safety nets, remember. Not even any surveillance inside here.” He pulled her a little closer to the edge, brought his mouth closer to her ear. “What do you think? Think we can do it?”

“No,” she told him. “And I think you should let go of me.”

Before she could do anything to stop him he gripped her hard by one elbow and pushed her out over the drop, only her feet still in contact with the car’s roof. “Still want me to let go?”

“No!” she shouted, grabbing his arm with her free hand. “Don’t be stupid! Of course not!”

He pulled her in towards him, though still not out of danger. “If you had a terminal it would hear you scream if you happened to fall,” he told her. He made a show of looking down. He shrugged. “Might be just enough time for the ship to realise what was happening and get a drone to you before you hit the bottom.”

“Stop doing this, please,” she said. “You’re frightening me.”

He pulled her close to him, his breath in her face now. “Everybody thinks SC is so glamorous, so… sexy!” He shook her, rubbed his groin against her leg. “Thrilling fun, all danger and excitement, but not too much danger. Is that what you think? Heard the rumours, absorbed the propaganda? Read the right assessments, listened to the relevant experts, self-proclaimed, have we?”

“I’m just trying to find out-”

“You feel frightened?” he asked her.

“I just said-”

He shook his head. “This isn’t dangerous.” he shook her again. “I’m not dangerous. I’m a nice roly-poly GCU avatar; I wouldn’t drop somebody down an antique lift shaft to let them splatter on the concrete. I’m one of the good guys. But you still feel frightened, don’t you? You do feel frightened, don’t you? I hope you feel frightened.”

“I already told you,” she said coldly, trying to keep any expression from her face or voice as she stared into his eyes.

He smiled, pulled her inwards as he stepped back. He let go of her and held on to the cables as the car started downwards again. “As I say, I’m one of the good guys, Ms. Y’breq.”

She gripped another of the cables, hard. “I never told you my full name.”

“Well spotted. Seriously though, I really am one of the good guys. I’m the sort of ship who’d always do everything to save somebody, not kill them, not let them die. SC – its ships, its people – might be on the side of the angels, but that doesn’t mean they always behave like the good guys. In fact, as you’re falling down the metaphorical lift shaft, I can virtually guarantee it will feel like they’re the bad guys, no matter how ethically sound the carefully worked out moral algebra was that led to them chucking you into it in the first place.”

“You have made your point, sir,” she told him frostily. “Perhaps we might abandon this pastime now.”

He looked at her for a few moments longer. Then he shook his head, looked away.

“Well, so you’re tough,” he said. “But you’re still a fool.” He let out a deep breath. The elevator car was pulling to a stop. “I’ll take you to an SC ship.” He smiled without any humour. “If and when it all goes horribly wrong, feel free to blame me, if you still can. It’ll make no difference.”

“The Forgotten,” the Bodhisattva told Yime Nsokyi. “Also known as Oubliettionaries.”

There were times, Yime might occasionally be forced to admit, when a neural lace would indeed be useful. If she had one she could be quizzing it now, asking it for mentions, references, definitions. What the hell was an Oubliettionary? Of course, the ship would know she was making such inquiries – she was on the ship now, not the Orbital, so any lace or terminal business would be conducted through the Bodhisattva’s Mind or its sub-systems – but at least with a lace you could have the relevant knowledge just dumped into your head rather than have to listen to it one word at a time.

“I see,” Yime said. She folded her arms. “I’m listening.”

“They’re ships of a certain… predisposition, shall we say, normally a GSV, usually with a few other ships and a small number of active drones aboard and often containing no humans at all,” the Bodhisattva told her. “They resign from the day-to-day informational commerce of the Culture, stop registering their position, take themselves off into the middle of nowhere and then they just sit there, doing nothing. Except listen, indefinitely.”

“Listen?”

“They listen to one or more – probably all, I’d imagine – of the handful of widely scattered broadcast stations which send out a continual update on the general state of matters in the greater galactic community in general and the Culture in particular.”

“News stations.”

“For want of a better word.”

“Broadcasting.”

“It’s a wasteful and inefficient way to communicate, but the advantage of a broadcast in this context is precisely that it goes everywhere and nobody can tell who might be listening.”

“How many of these ‘Forgotten’ are there?”

“Good question. To most people they appear simply as ships that have gone into an especially uncommunicative retreat, an impression the ships concerned do nothing to contradict, of course. At any time anything up to one per cent of the Culture ship fleet might be on a retreat, and perhaps point three or point four per cent of those have been silent since quitting what one might call the main sequence of normal ship behaviour. I hesitate to call it discipline. It’s not a much-studied field, so even the quality of the relatively few guesstimates is hard to evaluate. There might be as few as eight or twelve of these ships, or possibly as many as three or four hundred.”

“And what’s the point of all this?”

“They’re back-up,” the Bodhisattva said. “If, through some bizarre and frankly unfeasibly widespread and complete calamity, the Culture somehow ceased to be, then any one of these ships could re-seed the galaxy – or a different one, perhaps – with something that would be recognisably the Culture. This does beg the question what would be the point if it had been so comprehensively expunged in the first place, but I suppose you could argue some lesson might have been learned that might make version two more resilient somehow.”

“I thought the entire Contact fleet was supposed to represent our ‘back-up’,” Yime said. In its relationships with other civilisations, especially with those that were encountering it for the first time, much tended to be made of the fact – or at least the assertion – that each and every GSV represented the Culture in its entirety, that each one held all the knowledge the Culture had ever accumulated and could build any object or device that the Culture was capable of making, while the sheer scale of a General Systems Vehicle meant they each contained so many humans and drones they were more or less guaranteed to hold a reasonably representative sample of both even without trying to.

The Culture was deliberately and self-consciously very widely distributed throughout the galaxy, with no centre, no nexus, no home planet. Its distribution might make it easy to attack, but it also made it hard to eradicate altogether, at least in theory. Having hundreds of thousands of vessels individually quite capable of rebuilding the entire Culture from scratch was generally held to be safeguard enough against civilisational oblivion, or so Yime had been led to believe. Obviously others thought differently.

“The Contact fleet is what one might call a second line of defence,” the ship told her.

“What’s the first?”

“All the Orbitals.” the ship said reasonably. “And other habs; Rocks and planets included.”

“And these Forgotten are the last ditch.”

“Probably. So one might imagine. As far as I know.”

That, in ship-speak, Yime thought, probably meant No. Though she knew better than to try to coax a less ambiguous answer out of a Mind.

“So they just sit there. Wherever ‘there’ might be.”

“Oort clouds, interstellar space, within or even beyond the outer halo of the greater galaxy itself; who knows? However, yes, that is the general idea.”

“And indefinitely.”

“Indefinitely until now, at least,” the Bodhisattva said.

“Waiting for a catastrophe that’ll probably never happen but which if it did would indicate either the existence of a force so powerful it could probably discover these ships regardless and snuff them out too, or an existential flaw in the Culture so deep it would certainly be present in these ‘Forgotten’ as well, especially given their… representativeness.”

“Put like that, the entire strategy does sound a little forlorn,” the ship said, sounding almost apologetic. “But there we are. Because you never know, I suppose. I think a part of the whole idea is that it provides a degree of comfort for those who might otherwise worry about such matters.”

“But most people don’t know about these ships in the first place,” Yime pointed out. “How can you be comforted by something you don’t know about?”

“Ah,” the Bodhisattva said. “That’s the beauty of it: only people who do worry are likely to seek out such knowledge, and so are suitably reassured. They also tend to appreciate the need not to make the knowledge too well known, and indeed take additional pleasure in helping to keep it from becoming so. Everybody else just gets happily on with their lives, never fretting in the first place.”

Yime shook her head, frustrated. “They can’t be completely secret,” she protested. “They must be mentioned somewhere.”

The Culture was notoriously bad at keeping secrets, especially big ones. It was one of the very few areas where most of the Culture’s civilisational peers and even many much less advanced societies thoroughly eclipsed it, though, being the Culture, this was regarded as being the legitimate source of a certain perverse pride. That didn’t stop it – the “it” in such contexts usually meaning Contact, or (even more likely) SC – from trying to keep secrets, every now and again, but it never worked for very long.

Though sometimes, of course, not very long was still long enough.

“Well, naturally,” the Bodhisattva said. “Let’s just say the information is there, but little notice is taken. And by the very nature of the whole… program – if one can even dignify it with a name implying such a degree of organisation – confirmation is almost impossible to find.”

“So this isn’t what you might call official?” Yime asked.

The ship made a sighing noise. “There is no Contact department or committee that I know of which devotes itself to such matters.”

Yime pursed her lips. She knew when a ship was basically saying, Let’s leave it at that, shall we?

Well, one more thing to have to take account of.

“So,” she said, “the Me, I’m Counting may be aboard the GSV Total Internal Reflection, which is on retreat and is probably one of these Forgotten.”

“Indeed.”

“And the Me, I’m Counting holds an image of Ms. Y’breq.”

“Probably the image of Ms. Y’breq,” the Bodhisattva said. “We have intelligence, from another individual the ship took an image of subsequently, that it was happy to guarantee any image it took remained unique, for its own collection only, never to be shared or even backed up. It would appear that it has stuck to this.”

“So you think… what? That Y’breq will attempt to recover her image, even though it’s ten years old?”

“It has been judged to be a distinct possibility.”

“And Quietus knows where the Me, I’m Counting and the Total Internal Reflection are?”

“We believe we have a rough idea. More to the point, we have occasional contact with a representative of the Total Internal Reflection.”

“We do, do we?”

“The Total Internal Reflection is relatively unusual amongst the Forgotten – we think – in that it plays host to a small population of humans and drones who seek a more than usually severe form of seclusion than the average retreat offers. Such commitments are usually quite long term in nature – decades, on average – however, there is a continual if fluctuating churn in both populations, so people need to be ferried to and from the GSV. There are three semi-regular rendezvous points and a fairly reliable rendezvous programme. The next scheduled meeting is in eighteen days at a location in the Semsarine Wisp. Ms. Y’breq should be able to get there in time, and so should you and I, Ms. Nsokyi.”

“Does she know about this rendezvous?”

“We believe so.”

“Is she heading in that direction?”

“Again, we believe so.”

“Hmm.” Yime frowned.

“That is the generality of the situation, Ms. Nsokyi. A more comprehensive briefing awaits, obviously.”

“Obviously.”

“May I take it that you are agreeable to taking part in this mission?”

“Yes,” Yime said. “Are we under way yet?”

The image of the old Hooligan-class warship vanished to be replaced with the sight of stars again, some of them reflected in the polished-looking black body of the ship hanging above and others gleaming through the hardness beneath her feet that looked like nothing at all. The stars were moving, now.

“Yes, we are,” the Bodhisattva said.

Lededje was introduced to the avatar of the Special Circumstances ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints in a war bar where the only lighting apart from the screens and holos came from broad curtains of amphoteric lead falling down the walls from slots in the dark ceiling.

The continual sputtering yellow-orange blaze of the reaction gave the light in the place an unsteady, flickering quality a lot like firelight and made the space feel stickily warm. A strange, bitter smell hung in the air.

“Lead, the element, very finely ground, just dropped through the air,” Jolicci had muttered to her as they’d entered the place and she’d remarked upon the strange sight.

Just getting in hadn’t been that easy, either. The venue was housed in a stubby, worn-looking Interstellar-class ship housed in one of the GSV’s Smallbays and the ship itself made it very clear – as they stood in the darkly echoing depths of the Bay – that this was essentially a private club, one that the GSV had no immediate jurisdiction over and a place that was certainly not under any obligation to admit anybody who any one of its patrons took exception to.

“My name is Jolicci, avatar of the Armchair Traveller,” Jolicci told the single small drone floating by the ship’s closed lower hatchway. “I think you know who I’ve come to see. Please let him know.”

“I’m doing so,” the boxy little drone said.

The ship was called the Hidden Income. It was maybe a hundred metres in length. Looking round, squinting into the gloomily cavernous depths of the Bay, Lededje reckoned the Smallbay could have squeezed in at least another three ships the same size without them touching fins or engine pods or whatever all the various bits were. Small was obviously a relative term when it came to ships and the vast hangars required to accommodate them.

Lededje looked at the little drone, hanging in front of them at head height. Well, this was a new experience, she thought. Whenever she’d been taken somewhere by Veppers – the most expensive new restaurant, the most exclusive new club, bar or venue – he and his entourage had always been ushered straight in, whether he’d had a reservation made or not, even to the ones which he didn’t own. How odd to have to come to the reputedly obsessively egalitarian Culture finally to experience the phenomenon of hanging around outside a club waiting to see if she’d be allowed in.

The hatchway dropped without warning, immediately behind the little drone. It fell so fast she expected a clang when it met the finely ridged floor of the Bay, but it seemed to cushion its descent at the last moment and landed silently.

The drone said nothing but it floated out of their way.

“Thank you,” Jolicci said as they stepped on.

Jolicci held her arm as the hatch rose smoothly up towards a small, barely lit hangar volume inside the Hidden Income. “Demeisen is a little odd,” he told her. “Even by ship avatar standards. Just be honest with him. Or her. Or it.”

“You’re not sure?”

“We haven’t met for a while. The Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints changes avatars fairly frequently.”

“What is this place anyway?”

Jolicci looked awkward. “War porn club, I think.”

Lededje would have asked more but they were met by another small drone and escorted into the place.

“Demeisen, may I present Ms. Lededje Y’breq,” Jolicci said to the man sitting at the table near the middle of the room.

The place looked like a sort of strange restaurant with substantial round tables scattered about, each featuring at their centre a trio or more of screens or a tankless holo display. A variety of people, mostly human, sat or lounged around the tables. In front of most of them, drug bowls, drinks glasses, chill pipes and small trays of food lay arranged, scattered or abandoned. The screens and holos all showed scenes of warfare. At first Lededje assumed they were screen; just movies; but after a few moments, and a few grisly sequences, she decided they might be real.

Most of the people in the room weren’t looking at the screens and holos; they were looking at her and Jolicci. The man Jolicci had addressed was at a table with several other young men, all of them with that air that implied they were, within their own subset of pan-human physiognomy, quite strikingly handsome.

Demeisen stood. He looked cadaverous, hollow-cheeked. Dark eyes with no whites, two ridges instead of eyebrows, a flat nose and mid-dark skin, scarred in places. He was only medium tall but his height was emphasised by his thinness. If his physiology was the same as a Sichultian’s then the slight bagginess about his face implied the weight loss had been recent and rapid. His clothes were dark, perhaps black: skinny trews and a tight-fitting shirt or jacket, partially closed at the neck by a thumb-sized, blood-red glittering jewel on a loosened choker.

Lededje saw him look at her right hand and so put it out to him. His hand clasped her hand, fingers with too many joints closing around like a bony cage. His touch felt very warm, almost feverish, though perfectly dry, like paper. She saw him wince and noticed that two of his fingers were crudely splinted together with a small piece of wood or plastic and what looked like a piece of knotted rag. Somehow the wince didn’t travel all the way to his face, which regarded her without obvious expression.

“Good evening,” Lededje said.

“Ms. Y’breq.” His voice sounded dry and cold. He nodded at Jolicci then indicated the seats on either side of him. “Wheloube, Emmis. If you would.”

The two young men seemed about to protest, but then did not. They rose together with a sort of brisk contempt and walked proudly away. She and Jolicci took their places. The other handsome young men stared at them. Demeisen waved one hand; the table’s holo display, which had been depicting a gruesomely realistic skirmish between some horsemen and a larger force of archers and other foot-soldiers, faded to blank.

“A rare privilege,” Demeisen murmured to Jolicci. “How goes the business of General Contacting?”

“Generally well. How’s life as a security guard?”

Demeisen smiled. “Night watching is unfailingly illuminating.”

There was a small gold tube in front of him which Lededje had assumed was the mouthpiece of an under-table chill or water pipe – there were several other mouthpieces lying or cradled on the table – but which proved to be a stick with a glowing end, un -attached to anything else. Demeisen put it to his lips and sucked hard. The golden tube crackled, shortened and left a fiery glowing tip beneath a lofting of silky grey smoke.

Demeisen saw her looking and offered the stick to her. “A drug. From Sudalle. Called narthaque. The effect is similar to winnow, though harsher, less pleasant. The hangover can be severe.”

“‘Winnow’?” Lededje asked. She got the impression she’d been expected to know what this was.

Demeisen looked both surprised and unimpressed.

“Ms. Y’breq does not possess drug glands,” Jolicci explained.

“Really?” Demeisen said. He frowned at her. “Are you suffering some form of punishment, Ms. Y’breq? Or are you of that demented persuasion that believes enlightenment is to be found in the shadows?”

“Neither,” Lededje told him. “I am more of a barely legal alien.” She had hoped this might be amusing, but if it was, nobody round the table seemed to find it so. Maybe her understanding of Marain wasn’t as flawless as she’d been assuming.

Demeisen looked at Jolicci. “I’m told the young lady looks for passage.”

“She does,” Jolicci said.

Demeisen gestured with both hands, sending loops of smoke into the air from the hand holding the golden stick. “Well, Jolicci, for once you have the better of me. What on earth gives you the idea that I have turned into a taxi? Do tell. Can’t wait to hear.”

Jolicci just smiled. “There is a little more to the matter, I believe. Ms. Y’breq,” he said to her. “Over to you.”

She looked at Demeisen. “I need to get home, sir.”

Demeisen glanced at Jolicci. “Very taxi-sounding so far.” He turned back to her. “Go on, Ms. Y’breq. I cannot wait for this to achieve escape velocity from the mundanity well.”

“I intend to kill a man.”

“That’s a little more uncommon. Again though, one imagines a taxi would suffice, unless the gentleman concerned can only be dispatched using a warship. A state-of-the-art Culture warship, at that, if I may make so immodest. For some reason the word ‘overkill’ leaps to mind.” He smiled icily at her. “You may not be doing quite as well here as you thought you might at this point.”

“I’ve been told that I’ll be slap-droned.”

“So you were stupid enough to let slip that you intend to kill this man.” He frowned. “Oh dear. Might I suggest that this does not bode terribly well should your murderous plans include more than the absolute minimum of guile, subterfuge or, dare I say it, intelligence? My – trust me – highly limited empathic capacities remain resolutely un-engaged.” He turned to Jolicci again. “Have you quite finished humiliating yourself here, Jolicci, or do you really require me to-?”

“The man I intend to kill is the richest man in the world, the richest and most powerful man in my whole civilisation,” Lededje said. Even she could hear the edge of desperation creeping into her voice.

Demeisen looked at her, one eye-crease raised. “Which civilisation?”

“The Enablement,” she told him.

“The Sichultian Enablement,” Jolicci said.

Demeisen snorted. “Again,” he told Lededje, “not saying as much as you might think.”

“He killed me,” she told him, doing all she could to keep her voice under control. “Murdered me with his own hands. We have no soul-keeping technology but I was saved because a Culture ship called the Me, I’m Counting put a neural lace in my head ten years ago. I was revented here only today.”

Demeisen sighed. “All very melodramatic. Your feud may inspire a not terribly good screen presentation at some point in the future, hopefully distant. I look forward to missing it.” He smiled thinly again. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind excusing yourselves?” He nodded to the two young men who’d vacated their seats for Lededje and Jolicci earlier. They were standing nearby now, looking on, quietly triumphant.

Jolicci sighed. “I’m sorry I wasted your time,” he said as he rose.

“Still, I hope to make you sorrier,” Demeisen said with an insincere smile.

“I was talking to Ms. Y’breq.”

“And I was not,” Demeisen said, standing as Lededje did. He turned to her, put the gold smoking stick to his pale lips and pulled hard. He looked at her and said, “Best of luck finding a ride,” as he exhaled.

He smiled more broadly and ground the yellow-red glowing tip of the stick into the open palm of his other hand. There was a distinct sizzling noise. Again, his body seemed to flinch, though his face remained serene.

“What, this?” he said, looking down at the ash-dark burn on his skin as Lededje stared at it, openly aghast. “Don’t worry; I don’t feel a thing.” He laughed. “The idiot inside here does though.” He tapped the side of his head, smiled again. “Poor fool won some sort of competition to replace a ship’s avatar for a hundred days or a year or something similar. No control over either body or ship whatsoever, obviously, but the full experience in other respects – sensations, for example. I’m told he practically came in his pants when he learned an up-to-date warship had volunteered to accept his offer of body host.” The smile became broader, more of a grin. “Obviously not the most zealous student of ship psychology, then. So,” Demeisen said, holding up his hand with the splinted finger and studying it, “I torment the poor fool.” He put his other hand to the one with the splinted fingers, waggled them. His body shuddered as he did so. Lededje found herself wincing with vicarious pain. “See? Powerless to stop me,” Demeisen said cheerily. “He suffers his pain and learns his lesson while I… well, I gain some small amusement.”

He looked at Jolicci and Lededje. “Jolicci,” he said with obviously feigned concern, “you look offended.” He nodded, creased his eyes. “It’s a good look, trust me. Sour opprobrium: suits you.”

Jolicci said nothing.

Wheloube and Emmis resumed their seats. Standing there, Demeisen put out both hands and stroked the hair of one and the shaved head of the other, then cradled the finely chiselled chin of the one with the shaved head using his unsplinted hand. “And fascinatingly, the fellow” – he used his splinted fingers to tap the side of his head again, hard – “is quite defiantly heterosexual, with a fear of bodily violation that borders on outright homophobia.”

He looked round the table of young men, winking at one of them, then gazed radiantly at Jolicci and Lededje.

Lededje stamped across the floor of the dimly lit Smallbay. “There must be other SC ships,” she said furiously.

“None that will talk to you,” Jolicci said, hurrying after her.

“And the only one that would seemed solely to want to shock and demean me.”

Jolicci shrugged. “The Abominator class of General Offensive Unit, to which our friend belongs, is not known for its mildness or sociability. Probably specced when the Culture was going through one of its periods of feeling that nobody was taking it seriously because it was somehow too nice. Even amongst those, though, that particular ship is known as something of an outlier. Most SC ships conceal their claws and keep the psychopathy switched to Full Off except when it’s judged to be absolutely necessary.”

In the traveltube, deflated but calmer, Lededje said, “Well, thank

you for trying.”

“You are welcome. Was all that you said in there true?”

“Every word.” She looked at him. “I trust you’ll treat what you heard just now as in confidence.”

“Well, that is something you might have thought to say before-hand, but, all right, I promise what you said will go no further.” The fat little avatar looked thoughtful. “I realise it might not feel like it, but you may have just had a narrow escape, Ms. Y’breq.”

She looked coldly at him. “Then that makes two this evening, doesn’t it?”

Jolicci appeared unconcerned. If anything he looked amused. “As I said, I was never going to let you fall. What I did was a stunt. What you just saw in there was real.”

“The ship would really be allowed to treat a human like that?”

“If it was done voluntarily, if the bargain was struck with eyes open, as it were, yes.” Jolicci made an expansive gesture with both hands. “It’s what can happen if you put yourself in harm’s way by treating with SC.” The fat little avatar appeared to think for a moment. “Perhaps a rather extreme example, admittedly.”

Lededje took a deep breath, let it out. “I have no terminal. May I use you as one?”

“Feel free. Who would you like to contact?”

“The GSV. To tell it I’ll take its suggested ship tomorrow.”

“No need. It’ll be assuming so anyway. Anybody else?”

“Admile?” she said, her voice small.

There was a pause, then Jolicci shook his head regretfully. “I’m afraid he is otherwise engaged.”

Lededje sighed. She looked at Jolicci. “I desire a meaningless sexual encounter with a male, preferably one as good-looking as one of those young men round Demeisen’s table.”

Jolicci smiled, then sighed. “Well, the night is yet middle-aged.”

Yime Nsokyi lay awake in the darkness of her small cabin, waiting for sleep. She would give it another few minutes and then gland softnow to bring it on not-entirely-naturally. She possessed the same suite of drug glands as most Culture humans, the default set that you tended to be born with, but she preferred not to use them unless genuinely necessary, and almost never for pleasure, only to accomplish something of practical value.

She might have got rid of them completely, she supposed, just told them all to wither away and be absorbed into her body, but she had chosen not to. She knew of some within Quietus who had gone through with this, in some spirit of denial and asceticism that she thought was taking matters too far. Also, it was arguably more disciplined still to possess the glands but not to use them than it was to remove them and their temptations altogether.

But then the same might be said of her choice to become neuter. She put one hand down between her legs, to feel the tiny slotted bud – like a third, bizarrely placed nipple – which was all that was left of her genitals. When she had been younger, when her drug glands had still been maturing, that too had been a way of bringing on sleep: masturbate and then drift off in the rosy afterglow.

She rubbed the tiny bud absently, remembering. There was no hint of pleasure in touching herself there any more; she might as well have caressed a knuckle or an ear lobe. In fact there was more sensuality to be found in her ear lobes. The nipples of her reduced, near-flat breasts were similarly unresponsive.

Oh well, she thought, clasping her hands over her chest; it had been her choice. A way of making real to herself her dedication to Quietus. Nun-like, she supposed. On that reckoning, there were a lot of nuns and monks within Quietus. And, of course, the decision was entirely reversible. She wondered about changing back, becoming properly female again. She still thought of herself as female, always had.

Or she might become male; she was exactly poised between the two standard genders. She touched the little bud at her groin again. Just as much like a tiny penis as a relocated nipple, she supposed.

She clasped her hands over her chest once more, then sighed, turned on her side.

“Ms. Nsokyi?” the ship’s voice said quietly.

“Yes?”

“My apologies. I sensed you were still some way from sleep.”

“You sensed correctly. What?”

“I have been asked by a number of my colleagues whether your earlier comment regarding informing Special Circumstances about the matter in hand represented what one might call a formal suggestion or request.”

She waited a moment before replying. “No,” she said. “It did not.”

“I see. Thank you. That’s all. Good night. Sleep well.”

“Good night.”

Yime wondered whether she ship would even have bothered to ask had she not had the history she did with SC.

She had been drawn to Quietus even when she’d been a little girl. A serious, reserved, slightly withdrawn little girl who had been interested in dead things found in the woods and keeping insects in terraria. A serious, reserved, slightly withdrawn little girl who knew that she was easily capable of joining Special Circumstances if she wanted to, but who had only ever wanted to be part of the Quietudinal Service.

Even then she had known that Quietus – like Restoria and the third of Contact’s relatively recently specialist services, Numina, which dealt with the Sublimed – was seen by many people and machines as being second best to Special Circumstances.

SC was the pinnacle, the service that attracted the absolutely best and brightest of the Culture; in a society that held few positions of individual power, SC represented the ultimate goal for those both blessed and cursed with the sort of vaunting, hungry ambition to succeed in the Real that could not be bought off by the convincing but ultimately artificial attractions of VR. If you genuinely wanted to prove yourself, there was no question that SC was where you wanted to be.

Even then, still a child, she had known she was special, known that she was capable of doing pretty much whatever it was possible to do within the Culture. SC would have seemed like the obvious target for her aims and aspirations. But she hadn’t wanted to be in SC; she wanted to be in Quietus, the service everybody seemed to feel was a second best. It was unfair.

She had made her decision then, way back, before her drug glands were developed enough to use with any skill or finesse, before she was sexually mature at all.

She studied, trained, learned, grew a neural lace, applied to join Contact, was accepted, applied herself, both diligently and imaginatively within Contact, and all the while waited for the invitation to join SC.

The invitation duly came, and she declined it, so joining an exclusive club many orders of magnitude smaller than that of the elite of the elite that was SC itself.

She applied immediately to Quietus instead, having made her point, and was accepted with alacrity. She began to curtail her use of her drug glands and started the slow changes in her body that would turn her from female to neuter. She also abandoned her use of the neural lace, beginning an even longer process that saw the biomechanical tracery of the device gradually shrink and wither and disappear, the minerals and metals that had composed the bulk of it being slowly reabsorbed into her body. The last few parti-cles of exotic matter it had contained exited in her urine via the tiny sexless bud between her legs, a year later.

She was free of SC, committed to Quietus.

Only it could never be that simple. There was no sudden yes-or-no point when it came to joining SC. You were sounded out first, your intentions were questioned and your motivations and seriousness were weighed in the balance, at first through apparently innocuous, informal conversations – often with people you would have no idea were in any way associated with SC – then only later in rather more formalised settings and contexts where SC’s interest was made clear.

So, in a sense, she had had to lie – or at least constructively deceive – to get what she wanted, which was the formal invitation to join which she could then turn down but use in the future as proof that Quietus had been no second choice, no consolation prize, but rather something she had valued beyond the merits of SC right from the start.

She had finessed it as best she could at the time, giving answers that seemed straight and unambiguous when they were given and which only later, in the light of that obviously planned refusal, revealed a degree of dissemblance. Still, she had been guilty of a lack of openness if nothing else, and of simple dishonesty if you were judging severely.

SC considered itself above bearing grudges, but was patently disappointed. You did not come to the stage of being asked to join it without establishing quite strong relationships with people who had become mentors and friends while in Contact; relationships which normally would be expected to go on developing once you were in SC itself, and it was to those individuals, and even a couple of ship Minds, that she felt she owed apologies.

She duly said sorry and the apologies were duly accepted, but those had been her darkest hours, the moments in her life the memories of which still kept her awake when she wanted to sleep, or woke her up in the middle of the night, and she could never quite shake the feeling that this was the single least-resolved issue in her life, the loose end whose niggling presence would trouble her to the end of her days.

And, even though she had foreseen it, it had still come as something of a disappointment to her that her behaviour meant she existed within Quietus under a faint but undeniable cloud of suspicion. If she would turn down SC to prove a point, might she not repudiate Quietus too? How could you ever fully trust somebody like that?

And, was it not possible that she had never really resigned from SC at all? Might Yime Nsokyi not still be a Special Circumstances agent, but a secret one, planted within Quietus, either for reasons too arcane and mysterious to divine until some point of crisis arrived, or just as a sort of insurance for some set of circumstances still unenvisaged… or even with no clear motive at all beyond establishing that SC could do such a thing simply because it chose to, to prove it could?

She had miscalculated there. She had thought the whole bluff with SC would only prove how utterly dedicated to Quietus she was, and her subsequent flawless behaviour and exemplary service would serve to reinforce the point. It hadn’t worked out like that. She was of more value to Quietus as a symbol – subtly but effectively publicised – of its equality of worth with SC than she was as a functioning and fully trusted Quietus operative.

So she spent a lot of time frustrated; unused, twiddling her thumbs and kicking her heels (when she might have been kicking other people’s ass with SC, as at least one of her friends had pointed out). She had taken part in a few missions for Quietus and had been reassured that she had done well – indeed, near perfectly. Still, she was less used than she might have been, less used than inferior talents who had joined at the same time, less used than her skills and abilities would have implied she ought to be; offered occasional scraps, never anything of real substance.

Until now.

Now at last she felt she was being asked to behave like a true Quietus operative, on a mission of genuine importance, even if it might only be because where she lived happened to be quite close to the place where a Quietus agent was suddenly required.

Well, arguably she’d had bad luck in the way Quietus had chosen to react to her attempt to prove how much she valued it. Maybe that bad luck was just being balanced now. Luck came into it. Even SC recognised a place for chance, and being in the right place at the right time was, if not a gift, certainly a blessing.

Contact even had a phrase for it: Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.

Yime sighed, turned over, and fell asleep.

Eleven

Auer. Lovely to see you. Radiant as ever. And Fuleow; this gorgeous creature still putting up with you?”

“So far, Veppers. Got your eye on her yourself, have you?”

“Never taken it off, you know that, Fuleow.” Veppers clapped the other man’s stout shoulder and winked at his slender wife.

“Oh, your poor nose!” Auer said, pushing back locks of soot-black hair to display glittering earrings.

“Poor? Nonsense; never richer.” Veppers flicked one finger against the new cover over his nose, which was still slowly growing back underneath. “This is pure gold!” He smiled, turned away. “Sapultride! Good to see you; glad you could make it.”

“What’s it look like, under there?” Sapultride asked, nodding at Veppers’ nose. He pulled down his sunglasses, revealing small green eyes above his own thin, expensively sculpted nose. “I was studying medicine before I was lassoed back into the family firm,” he said. “I could take a look. Wouldn’t be shocked.”

“My dear Sapultride, it looks great under this. Face facts; I look better mutilated than most men do at their very best, whole and hearty after a long day in the grooming salon.”

“Jasken,” Sapultride’s wife Jeussere said to the man standing behind Veppers, one arm in a cast and a sling, “did you really do this to our dear, lovely Veppers?”

“I regret to say so, ma’am,” Jasken said, bowing gently to the slim, exquisitely dressed and manicured woman. He pushed his slung arm out a little. “Mr. Veppers more than had his revenge though. What a blow he-!”

“His revenge?” Jeussere said, a tiny frown spoiling her otherwise quite perfect face. “The story I heard was that he struck first.”

“He did, ma’am,” Jasken said, aware that Veppers was watching him. “It was only his shock at having hit me so sharply, and his natural urge to stop, putting up his sword and inquiring to make sure that he had not injured me too severely, that allowed me the opportunity to deliver my own blow, the one that – more by luck than skill – so assaulted Mr. Veppers’ nose.”

Jeussere smiled conspiratorially. “You are too modest, Jasken.”

“Not so, ma’am.”

“What, you weren’t wearing masks?” Sapultride asked.

Veppers snorted. “Masks are for weaklings, aren’t they, Jasken?” “Perhaps, sir. Or for those of us who have such a lack of looks that we can’t afford to lose even a little of them. Unlike your good self.”

Veppers smiled.

“My, Veppers,” Jeussere said slyly, “do you have all your servants flatter you so?”

“Absolutely not. I work to prevent it,” Veppers told her. “But the truth will out.”

Jeussere laughed delicately. “You’re lucky he didn’t run you through, Jasken,” she told him, her eyes wide. She slipped her arm through her husband’s. “Sappy here beat Joiler at some sport at school and he near throttled him, didn’t he, dear?”

“Ha! He tried,” Sapultride said, running a finger round his collar.

“Nonsense,” Veppers said, turning to somebody else. “Raunt! You ancient withered old rogue! That committee still hasn’t jailed you yet? Who’ve you had to bribe?”

“Nobody that you haven’t already got to, Veppers.”

“And Hilfe; still an accessory?”

“More of a bauble, Joiler.” The woman, much younger than her husband, though still in expensively well-preserved middle-age, coolly regarded his nose. “Well now, dear me. Think you’ll still be able to sniff out trouble?”

“Better than ever,” he told her.

“I’m sure. Anyway, good to see you back in the land of the sociable.” She held one hand out to be kissed. “Can’t have you hiding away; what shall we all do for fun?”

“You tell him. He spends too much time away on business trips,” Jeussere contributed, leaning in.

“My only aim is to keep your good selves entertained,” Veppers told the two women. “Ah, Peschl, we’ll have a word later, yes?”

“Certainly, Joiler.”

Jasken put one finger to an ear bud. “The boats are ready, sir.”

“They are? Good.” He looked round the other people in the slim barge. He clapped his hands, stopping most of the other conversations in the open vessel. “Let’s enjoy the fun, shall we?”

He raised his hands above his head, clapped them again, loudly. “Listen!” he hollered, attracting the attention of people in the other two barges behind. “Your attention please! Place your bets, choose your favourites! Our game begins!”

There was some cheering. He took his place in the seat – raised just a little higher than the rest – in the bows of the slim craft.

Astil, Veppers’ butler, saw to his master’s needs while other servants moved down the central aisles of the barges, dispensing drinks. Above the seated VIPs, sun canopies rippled in the breeze. In the distance, over tree-dotted pastureland, the serried neatness of the kitchen orchards and the formal gardens of the estate, the turrets and ornamental battlements of the mansion house of Espersium were visible.

Some birds flew up from the network of small lakes, ponds and channels beneath.

The great torus-shaped mansion of Espersium sat near the centre of the estate of the same name. Espersium was easily the largest private estate in the world. Had it been a country its land area would have ranked it as the fifty-fourth largest out of the sixty-five states that still had some administrative significance in the unified world that was Sichult.

It was the centre of, and central to, the Veppers family fortune in more than merely symbolic ways. The original source of the family’s vast wealth had been computer and screen games, followed by increasingly immersive and convincing Virtual Reality experiences, sims, games, proactive fictions and multiply-shared adventures, as well as further games of every sort and every level of intricacy, from those given away as free samples on smart-paper food wrappers, through those playable on devices as small as watches or jewellery, all the way to those which demanded either total bodily immersion in semi-liquid processor goo or the more simple – but even more radical – soft-to-hard-wiring of biological brain to computational substrate.

The house had long been ringed with comms domes, kept just out of sight of the house itself but linking it – and the buried masses of computer substrate it sat on – via satellites and system-edge relay-stations to further distant processor cores and servers all over the hundreds of planets that made up Enablement space and even beyond, to similar – if as a rule not quite so developed – civilisat -ions that, with surprisingly little translation and alteration, found the games of the Veprine Corporation just as enjoyable and fascin -ating as Sichultians themselves had.

Still zealously guarding their original code, many of those games effectively reported back, eventually – via all those intervening arrays, servers, processors and substrates – to the still potent seat of power that was Espersium. From the estate house itself whole worlds and systems could be rewarded or punished according to how assiduously the local law-enforcement agencies applied anti-piracy legislation, billions of users could be granted access to the latest upgrades, tweaks and bonus levels, and lucrative personal on-line and in-game behaviour, preference and predilection data could be either used by the Veprine Corporation itself or sold on to other interested parties, either of a governmental or commercial nature.

Word had it that this sort of micro-managed operationality was no longer quite so centrally controlled, and the house had ceased to be the place that all versions of all games came to to get their latest updates – certainly there were fewer obvious satellite domes and programming geeks about the place than in the old days – but it was still much more than just a fancy country house.

The birds disturbed from the network of waterways beneath the barges wheeled in the sky, calling plaintively.

The little convoy of barges moved along a network of aqueducts poised above the watery landscape below. A couple of dozen skinny stone towers anchored the supporting stonework of delicate arches and flying buttresses which held the airborne canals aloft. At each of the towers the viaducts broadened out into circular basins collaring the slim spires and allowing the barges – individually, or joined as a tiny fleet – to change direction onto other channels. Half a dozen thicker towers held lifts within them and had quaysides where people could embark and disembark from the barges. The viaducts were only a couple of metres wide, with thin stone walls and no walkways alongside, so that one could look almost straight down.

Twenty metres beneath, in the channels, pools and lakes below, a dozen miniature battleships were just setting out from their individual start positions.

Each warship was the length of a large single-person canoe and had been designed to resemble a capital ship from the age when armour plate and large-calibre guns had ruled the seas of Sichult. Each ship contained a man, who powered his vessel by pedalling – turning a single propeller at the stern – steered it with a tiller attached to a bracket round his waist, and used his hands to aim and fire the three or four gun turrets his ship carried, each equipped with two or three guns.

Where the bridge would have been on the superstructure of the full-size vessels there was a series of slits, very like those in an ancient armoured helmet from the days of swords, lances and arrows. These provided the only way for the man inside the vessel to see out. Gun aiming was accomplished by nothing more sophisticated than dead reckoning and skill, the crewman of the miniature warship traversing the turrets and elevating their guns by way of a set of wheels and levers contained within his cramped compartment. Each ship also came equipped with a set of miniature torpedoes and a system of lights – the searchlights of the original ships – that let the vessels communicate with each other, to form temporary alliances and swap information.

Pennants flew from their masts, identifying who commanded them. The crewmen were far more highly trained than mere jockeys, Veppers contended. He had piloted the ships himself quite often, from when he had first come up with the idea, and still held the occasional amateurs-only battle for himself and similarly rich and competitive friends, but the truth was there was a great deal of skill involved; more than it was worth acquiring for a mere pastime.

These days the amateur versions of the ships were fitted with engines, which made life a little easier, but it was still taxing enough just manoeuvring the damned things without running aground or crashing into the banks of the channels, never mind the surprisingly difficult task of aiming the guns accurately. The amateur versions had better armour and less powerful weapons than the ships they were watching now.

Two ships caught a brief glimpse of each other from either end of a long channel connecting pools close to their start positions; disappearing from view again, they each elevated and fired their guns towards where they thought the other would shortly be, more in hope than with any expectation of a hit. Both sets of shells landed scattered amongst the low grassy hills of islands, in miniature reed beds and in the channels, raising skinny spouts of water. Neither part of either salvo landed closer than a ship length from its intended target.

“Something of a waste,” Veppers muttered, watching through a pair of field glasses.

“Are the bullets terribly expensive?” Jeussere asked.

Veppers smiled. “No, I mean, they only have so many.”

“Do they load the guns themselves?” Fuleow asked.

“No, automatic,” Veppers said.

The ships’ main weapons were almost more like grenade launchers than true guns; certainly they had nothing like the range they should have had, had that too been scaled proportionately. The little shells they fired fizzed and left a trail of smoke as they curved out across the waters, but they were explosive and could do real damage, piercing the armour of a ship and starting a fire within, or – hitting near the waterline – holing them so that they started to sink, or disabling turrets or the rudder or prop if they hit the right place.

A handful of pilots had been killed over the years, either struck by lucky shots that squeezed through the viewing slits, or drowning when their vessel turned over and the damage they had sustained had made it impossible to work the escape hatches, or choking or burned to death. Usually you could put out a fire by scuttling your ship – the channels, pools and most of the single large lake were generally little more than half a metre deep, so the command citadel, where the pilot’s head was, would still be just above water even when the ship was sitting on the bottom – but valves jammed, or men were knocked unconscious, and accidents happened. There were rescue teams of helpers and divers standing by, but they were not infallible. Twice, ships had blown up completely, the contents of their magazines detonating all at once. Most spectacular, though on one occasion fragments of wreckage had flown far enough to threaten the spectators, which had been worrying.

The pilots – all part of Veppers’ general staff, with other, part-time duties – were well paid, especially if they won their battles, and the risk of real injury and even death made the sport more interesting for the spectators.

Today’s match was a team game: two ships to a side, the winning team being whoever was first to sink four of their opponents. The first thing the six sets of ships had to do was find each other; each ship started individually from one of the dozen floating boat-houses scattered round the perimeter of the watery complex at any of several dozen randomly chosen locations.

The miniature naval battle itself – ship against ship or fleet against fleet, guns flashing and roaring, smoke drifting, shots landing, pieces getting blown off the ships, fountains of water bursting into the air when a torpedo hit – was only part of the delight of watching, Veppers found. Much of the enjoyment came from having this god-like overview of the whole battle arena and being able to see what the men in the ships couldn’t see.

Most of the islands and the channel banks were too high to see over when you were sitting in one of the miniature battleships; however, from the network of aqueducts above, pretty much every part of the watery maze could be seen. It could be almost unbearably exciting to see ships converging on the same pool from different directions, or to watch a damaged vessel, limping home and nearly there, being caught by another ship lying in wait for it.

“You should have smoke, you know, Veppers,” Fuleow told him as they all watched the ships cruise down the channels leading away from their starting points. They went at different speeds, some favouring high speed to get to some tactically important pool or junction before anybody else, some favouring a more stealthy approach; where the geography allowed, you could learn a lot by causing few waves yourself but watching for signs of the wakes of others as you passed side channels. “You know; from their funnels. That would make it look more realistic, don’t you think?”

“Smoke,” Veppers said, raising the pair of binoculars to his eyes. “Yes. Sometimes we have smoke, and they can put down smoke-screens.” He lowered the glasses, smiled at Fuleow, who had not been to one of these displays before. “Makes it hard to see from up here though, that’s the trouble.”

Fuleow nodded. “Ah, of course.”

“Don’t you think you ought to have pretty little bridges linking all the islands?” Auer asked.

Veppers looked at her. “Pretty little bridges?”

“Between the islands,” she said. “Little arched bridges; you know, bowed. It would look so much prettier.”

“Little too unrealistic,” Veppers informed her, smiling insincerely. “Also, they’d get in the way of the shells; too many ricochets. There are wading routes between the islands for when the staff need to access them; sort of submerged paths.”

“Ah, I see. Just a thought.”

Veppers went back to watching his own two ships. They had been started far enough apart for it all to look convincingly random, though a quiet word had been had to let the two pilots know where the other was starting out from, so they were beginning with a slight advantage over the other five teams. Their pennants were silver and blue, the Veppers’ family colours.

One of his ships chanced upon one of the Red team, powering down a channel forming the stem of a T-junction just as the other vessel was crossing ahead, allowing it to loose a salvo from its A and B turrets. Veppers always favoured ships with two forward-facing turrets and one rear-facing; it seemed more attacking, more adventurous. It also meant that a broadside consisted of nine shells rather than eight.

It was the first proper engagement of the afternoon. Cheers rang out as the targeted ship rocked to one side under the fusillade; bits of superstructure spun off the vessel as it lost its signalling lights. Two dark holes appeared near the waterline at mid-ships. Veppers ordered a round of celebratory cocktails for all. Arriving at the next tower, with its encircling girdle of water and choice of three different viaducts to take, the three barges split up and went their separate ways.

Veppers was in control of the first barge, steering it with pedals at his feet and ignoring the pleas of his passengers to watch the ships they’d placed bets on so that he could watch the progress of his own vessels.

There was a roar and some lady-like screams from some distance away as another two ships met side-on just beneath, but even closer than in the first engagement; one rammed the other, forcing it sideways onto a sandbank through the attacking vessel’s momentum and trapping it there, firing point-blank into its super-structure; shells whizzed away, ricocheting.

The grounded vessel brought all four twin-gun turrets to bear and let off a broadside that blasted into the other ship’s command citadel, where the torso, shoulders and head of the opposing pilot would be. Veppers, watching through his binoculars, made a whistling noise.

“That looks like it could well hurt!” Raunt said.

“The poor man’s just inside there!” Auer said.

“They sit in an armoured tub,” Veppers told her. “And they wear flak vests. Yes, Jasken?” he said as the other man leaned in towards him, Enhancing Oculenses glittering in the sunlight.

“The house, sir,” Jasken said quietly, nodding.

Veppers frowned, wondering what he was talking about. He looked towards the distant mansion and saw a small dark arrow-head shape lowering itself towards the central courtyard. He brought the binoculars up in time to see the familiar alien craft disappearing behind the stonework. He put the field glasses down.

“Fuck,” he said. “Chooses his moments.”

“Shall I ask him to wait?” Jasken said, his mouth very close to Veppers’ ear.

“No. I want the news, good or bad. Call Sulbazghi, get him to come too.” He looked behind. They were a lot closer to the tower to their rear than the one ahead. They’d disembark there. He put the barge into full astern. “Sorry ladies, gentlemen,” he shouted, over questions and protests. “Duty calls. I must go, but I shall return. To collect my winnings, I imagine. Sapultride, you’re captain.”

“Splendid! Do I get a special hat?”

“So, have we decided exactly what it is?” Veppers asked. He, Jasken, Dr. Sulbazghi and Xingre, the Jhlupian, were in the shielded, windowless drawing room in the sub-basement of the Espersium mansion which Veppers used for especially secret meetings or delicate negotiations.

Somewhat to Veppers’ surprise, it was Xingre, the usually reticent Jhlupian, who spoke, the translation filtering from the silvery cushion the alien sat upon, voice pitched to the scratchy, tinkly tones it favoured. “I believe it to be consistent with an inter-membranial full-spectrum cranial-event/state germinatory processor matrix with singular condensate-collapse indefinite-distance signalling ability, Level Eight (Player) in manufacture, bilateral carboniform pan-human sub-design.”

Veppers stared at the twelve-limbed creature. Its three stalk eyes stared back. One dipped down, let itself be cleaned and wetted by its mouth parts, then flipped jauntily upright again. The alien had returned with the thing that had been in the girl’s head, the thing that might or might not be a neural lace. Xingre had had its own techs analyse the device using Jhlupian technology.

If Veppers was being honest with himself he would have to admit that over the handful of days that the device had been with the Jhlupians he had quite happily let thoughts of the thing and its implications slip from his mind. Jasken had been unable to establish any more useful facts about it beyond what they already knew and on the couple of occasions they had talked about it they had largely convinced themselves that it must be a fake, or just something else, maybe alien, maybe not, that had somehow found its way into the furnace.

The alien extended one bright green limb towards Sulbazghi, giving him the device back inside a little transparent cylinder. The doctor looked at Veppers, who nodded. Sulbazghi poured the shimmering, blue-grey thing into his palm.

“My dear Xingre,” Veppers said after a moment, with a tolerant smile. “I think I understood every single word you said there, but, sadly, only as single words. Put together like that they made no sense at all. What are you talking about?” He looked at Jasken, who was frowning mightily.

“I told you,” the alien said. “Probably it is what remains of an inter-membranial full-spectrum cranial-event/state germinatory-”

“Yes, yes,” Veppers said. “As I say, I heard the words.”

“Let me translate,” said Sulbazghi. “It’s a Culture neural lace.”

“You’re sure, this time?” Jasken asked, looking from the doctor to the alien.

“Certainly Level Eight (Player) in manufacture,” Xingre said.

“But who put it in her?” Veppers asked. “Definitely not the clinicians?”

Sulbazghi shook his head. “Definitely not.”

“Agreed,” the Jhlupian said. “Not.”

“Then who? What? Who could have?”

“Nobody else that we know of,” Sulbazghi said.

“Level Eight (Player) manufacture is absolutely certain,” Xingre said. “Level Eight (Player) so-called ‘Culture’ manufacture likely to ratio of one hundred and forty-three out of one hundred and forty-four in total.”

“Almost certainly, in other words,” the doctor said. “I suspected it was from the start. It’s Culture.”

“Only to ratio of one hundred and forty-three out of one hundred and forty-four chances,” Xingre pointed out again. “Additionally, device implantation might have occurred at any time from immediately subsequent to birth event to within last two local years approximately but not closer to present. Probably. Also; only remains of. Very most fine cilia-like twiggings likely burned off in furnace.”

“But the kicker,” Sulbazghi said, “is in the one-time signalling capacity.”

Xingre bounced once on its silvery cushion, the Jhlupian equivalent of a nod. “Singular condensate-collapse bi-event indefinite-distance signalling ability,” it said. “Used.”

“Signalling?” Veppers said. He wasn”t sure if he was simply being slow here or if a deep part of him just didn’t want to know what might be the truth. He already had the feeling he usually got before people delivered particularly bad news. “It didn’t signal her…?” He heard his own voice trail off as he looked again at the tiny, nearly weightless thing that lay in his palm.

“Mind-state,” Jasken said. “It might have signalled her mindstate, her soul, to somewhere else. Somewhere in the Culture.”

“Malfunction rate of said process betrays ratio of equal to or higher than four out of one hundred and forty-four in total,” Xingre said.

“And that really is possible?” Veppers asked, looking at all three of them in turn. “I mean, total, full… transferring of a real person’s consciousness? This isn’t just a cosy myth or alien propaganda.”

Jasken and Sulbazghi looked at the alien, which sat floating silently for a short while, then – suddenly fixing them with the gaze from one eye each – seemed to realise it was the one they all expected to answer. “Yes,” it blurted. “Positively. A full affirmation.”

“And bringing them back to life; they can do that too?” Veppers asked.

Xingre was quicker this time. After a moment, when nobody else answered, it said, “Yes. Also most possible, availability of appropriate and compatible processing and physique substrate shell being assumed.”

Veppers sat for a moment. “I see,” he said. He put the neural lace down on the glass top of a nearby table, letting it drop from a half-metre up to see what noise it made.

It seemed to fall slightly too slowly, and landed silently.

“Bad luck, Veppers!” Sapultride told him when he got back to the naval battle. “Both your ships got sunk!”