Surface Detail (24 page)

“Shouldn’t we tell SC?” she asked.

“I’m sure that is being considered. My immediate task is to brief and transport you. Yours, Ms. Nsokyi, is to attend to this briefing and, assuming you are agreeable, take part in this mission.”

“I see.” Yime nodded. That was her told. “What’s the other complication?”

The projection of the brown, red and yellow gas giant with its artificial ring system returned, replacing the image of the Sichultian female.

“Approximately two hundred and eight thousand years ago a proportion of the dormant fabricaria in the Tsungarial Disk suffered a smatter infection in the shape of the remains of a hege-monising swarm outbreak which took refuge there. The hegswarm was duly dealt with in the usual manner and annihilated by the cooperative of civilisations then responsible for overseeing that volume of space. The smatter infection was assumed to have been expunged from the Disk components at the same time. However, isolated recurrences of it have taken place over random intervals ever since. Due to its earlier success in dealing rapidly and effectively with these sporadic flare-ups, a small, specialist Culture presence was allowed to remain even after the Culture lost the mandate for the Disk’s protection.”

Yime nodded. “Ah. Pest Control.”

“The specialist Culture contingent in the Tsungarial Disk is indeed part of the Restoria section.”

Restoria was the part of Contact charged with taking care of hegemonising swarm outbreaks, when – by accident or design – a set of self-replicating entities ran out of control somewhere and started trying to turn the totality of the galaxy’s matter into nothing but copies of themselves. It was a problem as old as life in the galaxy and arguably hegswarms were just that; another legitimate – if rather over-enthusiastic – galactic life-form type.

Even the most urbanely sophisticated, scrupulously empathic and excruciatingly polite civilisation, it had been suggested, was just a hegswarm with a sense of proportion. Equally, then, those same sophisticated civilisations could be seen as the galaxy’s way of retaining a sort of balance between raw and refined, between wilderness and complexity, as well as ensuring that there was both always room for new intelligent life to evolve and that there was something wild, unexplored and interesting for it to gaze upon when it did. The Restoria section was the Culture’s current specialist contribution to this age-old struggle. As often known as Pest Control as by its official title, it was made up of experts in the management, amelioration and – if necessary – obliteration of hegswarms.

Quietus and Restoria worked together closely on occasion and both felt that they did so with mutual respect and on equal terms.

Restoria’s approach to its task and hence general demeanour was less punctilious than Quietus’, but then the ships, systems and humans in Pest Control generally spent their working lives rushing from hegswarm eruption to hegswarm eruption rather than communing with the honoured dead, so a buccaneering rather than considered and respectful bearing was only to be expected.

“The Restoria mission at the Tsungarial Disk has been kept informed regarding the potential for the fabricaria to come into play should the confliction spill over into the Real and has requested any help that might be available so long as it draws no extra external attention to the mission or the Disk. We are happy to provide and are lucky to have had assets, including but not limited to myself, and you, close by, given that the situation may become one of extreme urgency very quickly. Whether Restoria has also made such a request to Special Circumstances is not known to us.

“It is worth noting that the smatter infestation within the Disk has been in abatement for the last few decades and will, it is hoped, not enter into the equation.”

Smatter was the name given to the bitty remains of a hegswarm after it had been stamped out as any coherent threat. Usually it didn’t last significantly longer than the outbreak itself and just got mopped up. If some bits did persist then, while you could never afford to ignore the stuff, you didn’t really need to fear it. On the other hand, some of it getting into a mothballed system of a few hundred million ancient mothballed manufacturies did sound like awfully bad luck, Yime thought. Actually, it sounded like the kind of thing that woke Restoria people up at night, sweating and screaming.

The image of the gas giant planet and its glittering, artificial disk rotated slowly and silently in front of Yime.

“What was the possible link between the ‘components’ you mentioned earlier?” she asked.

“It is a potential link between the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly and the Sichultian Enablement in the shape of this vessel.’

The ringed gas giant disappeared to be replaced by the slim but chunky image of a Hooligan-class Limited Offensive Unit. It looked like a long, quite substantial bolt with various smoothed-off washers, nuts and longer collars screwed onto it.

“This is the Me, I’m Counting, an ex-LOU now of the Culture Ulterior,” the ship told her. “It was constructed by the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly shortly before the Idiran war and is thought to remain in sporadic contact with it. It is a self-declared Peripatetic Eccentric: a wanderer, a tramp vessel. It was last heard of with any formal degree of certitude some eight years ago when it declared it might go into a retreat. It is thought to have been present in the Sichultian Enablement two years earlier and so may constitute the mentioned link between it and the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly. There are indications that it accumulates images of strange and exotic creatures or devices and it may have chosen to collect such an image of Lededje Y’breq.”

“That would be a very comprehensive image.”

“It would.”

“And one which would be ten years younger than the female when she died. She wouldn’t know she’d been murdered, if she was.”

“She might simply have been told.”

Yime nodded. “I suppose she might.”

“We think we know, to a degree,” the ship said, a note of caution in its voice, “where the Me, I’m Counting is.”

“Do we?”

“It may well be with the GSV Total Internal Reflection.”

“And where is it?”

“That is not known. It is one of the Forgotten.”

“The what?”

“Ah.”

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.