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 uph
ill-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.