The ship passed on by. He kept staring out into space.
The girl sighed and moved; two of her arms went out and drew his face towards hers; she squeezed him from inside.
‘Wooooo,’ she breathed, and kissed him. Their first real kiss, without the gelsuit over her face. Eyes still enchanting, oceanically deep and enchanting . . .
Estray. Her name was Estray. Of course. Common enough name for an uncommonly attractive girl. Here for a month, eh? Leffid congratulated himself. This could end up being a good Festival.
They started caressing each other again.
It was just as good as the first time, but no better because he still wasn’t able to give the proceedings his full attention; now, instead of trying to remember what the girl’s name was, he couldn’t stop wondering why there was an Elencher emergency message spattered minutely across the scar-hull of an Affronter light cruiser.
6
Pittance
I
Ulver Seich sobbed into her pillow. She had felt bad before; her mother had refused her something, some lad had - unbelievably - preferred somebody else to her (admittedly very rare), she had felt terribly alone, exposed and vulnerable the first time she had camped out under the stars on a planet, and various pets had died ... but nothing as terrible as this.
She raised her tear-marked face up from the sodden pillow and looked again at her reflection in the reverser field on the walk-in across the horribly small cabin. She saw her face again and howled with anguish, burying her head in the pillow once again and bashing her feet up and down on the under-cover, which wobbled like a jelly in the AG field, trying to compensate.
Her face had been altered. While she’d slept, during the night, one day out from Phage. Her face, her beautiful, heart-shaped, heart-winning, heart-melting, heart-breaking face, the face which she had sat and gazed at in a mirror or a reverser field for hours at a time on occasion when she’d been old enough for her drug glands to come on line and young enough to experiment with them, the face she had gazed at and gazed at not because she was stoned but because she was just so damned lovely . . . her face had been made to look like somebody else’s. And there was worse.
It might be hurting a little now if she wasn’t keeping the pain turned off, but that wasn’t what mattered; what mattered was that her face was: a) puffy, swollen and discoloured after the nanotechs had done their work, b) not her own any longer, and, c) older! The woman she was supposed to look like was older than she! Much older! Sixty years older!
People claimed that nobody in the Culture really changed much in appearance between about twenty-five and two hundred and fifty (then there was a slow but sure ageing to the three-fifty, four hundred mark, by which time your hair would be white (or gone!) your skin would be wrinkled like some basic’s scrotum and your tits swinging round your belly-button - ugh!) but she had always been able to tell how old people were; she was rarely more than five or ten years out - never more than twenty, at any rate - and she could see how old she was now, even beneath the puffiness and shadowy bruising; she was seeing how she would look when she was older, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t her own face, it didn’t matter that she would probably look much better than this by the time she was in her mid-eighties (she had pictures of 99.9 per cent certain projections prepared for her by the house AI which showed exactly how she’d look at every decade for two centuries ahead, and they looked great); what mattered was that she looked old and dowdy and that would make her feel old and dowdy and therefore that would make her behave old and dowdy, and that feeling and that way of behaving and therefore that look might not go away when she was returned to her normal, her natural, her own appearance.
This wasn’t turning out as she’d hoped at all; no friends, no pets, no fun, and the more she thought about it, the riskier it all might be, the less certain she was what she was getting into. This whole thing was supposed to be an adventure, but this part on the ship was just boring and so would the return journey be as well, and in the middle lay who-knew-what? Everybody knew how devious SC was; what were they really up to, what did they really want her to do? Even if it did turn out to be somehow exciting and even fun, she wouldn’t be allowed to tell anybody about it, and where was the point in fun if you couldn’t talk about it later?
Of course, she could tell other people, but then she wouldn’t be able to stay in Contact. Hell, Churt was being ambiguous about whether she was in it now or not. Well was she or wasn’t she? Was this a real Contact and even SC mission she was engaged in - as she’d dreamed of, fantasised about since early childhood - or some extracurricular wheeze, even a test of some sort?
She bit the pillow, and the particular texture of the fabric in her mouth and between her teeth, and the sensation of her face being puffed-up while her eyes stung with tears, took her back to childhood again.
She raised her head, licking her top lip clear of the salty fluid, and then snorted and sniffed back both the tears and the snot that was filling her nose. She thought about glanding some calm, but decided not to. She did some deep breathing, then swivelled round on the bed and sat up and looked at herself in the reverser, raising her chin at the hideous image it showed and sniffing again and wiping her face with her hands and swallowing hard and fluffing out her hair (at least it could stay as it was), sniffing again, and stared herself in the eyes and forbade herself to cry or look away.
After a few minutes, her cheeks had dried and her eyes were coming clear again, losing their red puffiness. She was still abhorrently ugly and even disfigured by her own high standards, but she was not a child and she was still the same person inside. Ah well. She supposed a little suffering might do her some good.
She had always been pampered; all her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past. She had gone hungry and unwashed when hiking somewhere primitive, but there had always been food at the end of the day, and a shower or at the very least a peelspray to remove the grime and sweat.
Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.
She had always known there were too few real challenges in her life, too few genuine risks; it had all been too easy, even by Culture standards. While her life-style and material circumstances in Phage had been no different from that of any other person her age, it was true that just because the Culture was so determinedly egalitarian, what little hierarchic instinct remained in the population of the Rock manifested itself in the ascription of a certain cachet to belonging to one of the Founder Families.
In a society in which it was possible to look however one wanted to look, acquire any talent one wished to acquire and have access to as much property as one might desire, it was generally accepted that the only attributes which possessed that particular quality of interest which derives solely from their being difficult to attain were entry into Contact and Special Circumstances, or having some familial link with the Culture’s early days.
Even the most famous and gifted of artists - whether their talents were congenital or acquired - were not regarded in quite the same hallowed light as Contact members (and, somewhere really old, like Phage, direct descendants of Founders). Being a famous artist in the Culture meant at best it was accepted you must possess a certain gritty determination; at worst it was generally seen as pointing to a pitiably archaic form of insecurity and a rather childish desire to show off.
When there were almost no distinctions to be drawn between people’s social standing, the tiny differences that did exist became all the more important, to those who cared.
Ulver’s feelings about her family’s ancient name were mostly negative. Admittedly, possessing an old name meant some people were prepared to make an adva
nce on any respect they might come to feel was rightly your due, but on the other hand Ulver wanted to be admired, worshipped and lusted after for herself, just her, just this current collection of cells, right here, with no reference to the inheritance those cells carried.
And what was the point of having what was sometimes insultingly referred to as an advantage in life if it couldn’t even smooth your way into Contact? If anything, it had been hinted, it was a disadvantage; she would have to do better than the average person, she would have to be so completely, utterly, demonstrably perfect for the Contact Section that there could be no question of anybody ever thinking she’d got in because the people and machines on the admissions board knew the name Seich from their history lessons.
Well, Churt had been right; this was her big chance. She had been and would be unamendedly beautiful, she was intelligent, charming and attractive and she had common sense by the bucket-load, but she couldn’t expect to breeze this the way she had breezed everything else in her life so far; she’d work at it, she’d study, she’d be diligent, assiduous and industrious and all the other things she’d worked so hard at not being while ensuring that her university results had sparkled as brilliantly as her social life.
Maybe she had been a spoiled brat; maybe she still was a spoiled brat, but she was a ruthlessly determined spoiled brat, and if that ruthless determination dictated ditching spoiled brathood, then out it would go, faster than you could say ’Bye.
Ulver dried her eyes, collected herself - still without the help of any glandular secretions - then got up and left the cabin. She would sit in the lounge where there was more space, and there she would find out all she could about Tier, this man Genar-Hofoen, and anything else that might be relevant to what they wanted her to do.
II
Leffid Ispanteli eased himself into the seat beside the vice-consul for the AhForgetIt Tendency, carefully hooking his wings over the seat back and smiling at the vice-consul, who regarded him with that particular kind of vacant look people tend to assume when they’re communicating by neural lace.
Leffid held up his hand. ‘Words, I’m afraid, Lellius,’ he said. ‘Had my lace removed for the Festival.’
‘Very primitive,’ vice-consul Lellius said approvingly, nodding gravely and returning his attention to the race.
They were sitting in a carousel suspended beneath a vast carbon-tubed structure sculpted in the image of a web tree; the thousands of viewing carousels dangled like fruit from the canopy and were multifariously connected by a secondary web of delicate, swaying cable bridges. The view beneath and to either side was of a series of great steps of stone dotted with vegetation and moving figures; it was very like looking at an ancient amphitheatre which had been lifted from the horizontal to the vertical and each of whose seat levels was able to rotate independently. The moving figures were ysner-mistretl combinations; the ysners were the huge two-legged flightless (and almost brainless) birds doing the running while their thinking was done by the mistretl jockey each carried on its back. Mistretls were tiny and almost helpless but brainy simians and the combination of one of them per ysner was a naturally occurring one from a planet in the Lower Leaf Spiral.
Ysner-mistretl races had been a part of life on Tier for millennia, and running them on a giant mandala two kilometres across composed of steps or levels all rotating at different speeds had been traditional for most of that time. The huge slowly turning race-course looked a little like Tier itself, which took its name from its shape.
Tier was a stepped habitat; its nine levels all revolved at the same speed, but that meant that the outer tiers possessed greater apparent gravity than those nearer the centre. The levels themselves were sectioned into compartments up to hundreds of kilometres long and filled with atmospheres of different types and held at different temperatures, while a stunningly complicated and dazzlingly beautiful array of mirrors and mirrorfields situated within the staggered cone of the world’s axis provided amounts of sunlight precisely timed, attenuated and where necessary altered in wavelength to mimic the conditions on a hundred different worlds for a hundred different intelligent species.
This environmental diversity and the civilisational co-dependence it implied and intermingling it encouraged had been Tier’s raison d’être, the very foundation of its purpose and fame for the seven thousand years it had existed. Its original builders were, perhaps, unknown; they were believed to have Sublimed shortly after building it, leaving behind a species - or model, depending how you defined these things - of biomechanical sintricate which ran and maintained the place, were individually dull but collectively highly intelligent, took the shape of a small sphere covered with long articulated spines, were between half a metre and two metres in size and had seemed to have an intense suspicion of anything possessing less of a biological basis than they did themselves. Drones and other AIs were tolerated on Tier but very closely watched, followed everywhere and their every communication and even thought monitored. Minds were immune to this sort of treatment of course, but their avatars tended to attract a degree of intense physical observation which bordered on harassment, and so they rarely bothered entering the world itself, sticking to the outer docks where they were made perfectly welcome and afforded every hospitality. Tier, after all, was a statement, a treasure, a symbol, and as such any small discriminatory foibles it chose to display were considered perfectly tolerable.
The ysner-mistretl race track was one level up from the tier where the Homomdan mission was housed and three levels down from Leffid’s home circumference.
‘Leffid,’ the vice consul said. He was a rotund, massy male of apparently indeterminate species, vaguely human in shape but with a triangular head and an eye at each corner. His skin was bright red; the flowing robes he wore were a vivid but gradually shifting shade of blue. He turned his head slightly so that two of his eyes regarded Leffid while the third continued to watch the race. ‘Did I see you at the Homomdan do last night? I can’t remember.’
‘Briefly,’ Leffid said. ‘I waved Hello but you were busy with the Ashpartzi delegate.’
Vice-consul Lellius wheezed with laughter. ‘Trying to hold the blighter down. It was having buoyancy problems inside its new suit; automatics weren’t really up to the job with the AI removed. Terrible thing when one of these gas-giant floater beasties suffers from flatulence, you know.’
Leffid recalled that Lellius had rather looked as though he’d been wrestling with the bow-rope for what appeared to be a small airship at the Homomdan ambassador’s party. ‘Not as terrible as it must be for the inhabitant of the suit, I’d guess.’
‘Ha, indeed,’ Lellius chuckled, nodding and wheezing. ‘May I order you some refreshment?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Good; I have given up emoter-keyed foods and drinks for the duration of the Festival and would only be jealous.’ He shook his head. ‘I thought primitives were supposed to have more fun, but everything I could think of changing the better to partake in the Festival’s spirit seemed to make life less fun,’ he said, then made a tutting noise at something on the race course.
Leffid looked to see one of the ysner-mistretl pairs failing to make a jump, hitting the ramp just behind and falling down to another level. They picked themselves up and ran on, but they’d need to be very lucky to win now. Lellius shook his head and used the flat end of a stylo to smooth a number off the wood-bordered wax tablet he held in his broad red hand.
‘You winning?’ Leffid asked him.
Lellius shook his head and looked sad.
Leffid smiled, then made a show of inspecting the race track and the contending ysner-mistretl pairs. ‘They don’t look very festive to me,’ he said. ‘I expected something more . . . well, festive,’ he concluded, lamely.
‘I believe the race authorities regard the Festival with the same misanthropic dubiety as I,’ Lellius said. ‘The festival is - what? - two days old?’
Leffid nodded.
‘And already I am ti
red of it,’ Lellius said, scratching behind one of his three ears with the wax tablet stylo. ‘I thought of taking a holiday while it was occurring, but I am expected to be here, of course. A month of challenging, ground-breaking art and ruthlessly enforced fun.’ Lellius shook his head heavily. ‘What a prospect.’
Leffid put his chin in his cupped hand. ‘You’ve never really been a natural for the AhForgetIt Tendency, have you, Lellius?’
‘I joined hoping it would make me more . . .’ Lellius looked up contemplatively at the broad spread of the tree sculpture hanging above them. ‘. . . cavort-prone,’ he said, and nodded. ‘I wished to be more prone to cavorting and so I joined the Tendency hoping that the natural hedonism of people like your good self would somehow infect my own more deliberate, phlegmatic soul.’ He sighed. ‘I still live in hope.’
Leffid laughed lightly, then looked slowly around. ‘You here alone, Lellius?’
Lellius looked thoughtful. ‘My incomparably efficient Clerical Assistant Number Three visits the latrines, I believe,’ he wheezed. ‘My wastrel son is probably trying to invent new ways of embarrassing me, my mate is half a galaxy away - very nearly enough - and my current darling stays at home, indisposed. Or rather, disposed not to come to what she terms a boring bird-and-monkey race.’ He nodded slowly. ‘I could reasonably be said to be alone, I suppose. Why do you ask?’
Leffid sat a little closer, arms on the carousel’s small table. ‘Saw something strange last night,’ he said.
‘That young thing with the four arms?’ Lellius asked, at least one eye twinkling. ‘I did wonder if any other of her anatomical features were also doubled-up.’
‘Your prurience flatters me,’ Leffid said. ‘Ask her nicely and she will probably furnish you with a copy of a recording which proves both our relevant bits were quite singular.’