The Unfallen Bulbitian within the Semsarine Wisp lay in the trailing Lagrangian point of a gas giant protostar, itself a part of a brown-dwarf binary system, leaving the giant double-cake of the Bulbitian bathed in the long-frequency radiations of the whole, still hazily dusty system and its artificially maintained skies punctuated by the blue-white glares of the Wisp’s younger stars, where their light was able to struggle through the great slow-swirling clouds and nebulas of dust still in the process of building new suns.
This particular Bulbitian had been colonised by several different species over the milleons, the current nominal occupiers being nobody in particular. Some long time ago the structure had had a stabilised singularity placed at its hollowed-out centre, a black hole which provided about a third of what pan-humans chose to deem one standard gravity. This was very close to the limit that an Unfallen Bulbitian could take without the whole structure collapsing in on itself. It didn’t help that the structure had ori -ginally been spun to provide the semblance of gravity, but no longer did so, meaning that – due to the absence of spin and the presence of the singularity – up had become down, and down up.
People had tried to do this sort of thing to Bulbitians before and paid, usually very messily, with their lives; the structures themselves seemed to object to being messed around with, and either activated defence systems nobody had known were there in the first place or had been somehow able to call on somebody else’s highly effective resources.
This one had allowed the contained singularity to be placed at its core but – given that in every other respect it was just as eccentric, wilful and occasionally murderously unpredictable as any other Bulbitian – nobody had ever dared to try and remove the black hole, even though it did arguably make the structure as unstable physically as it had always been behaviourally.
Nobody knew who had last been in charge of the place, or what had happened to them. This was, obviously, worrying, though no more worrying than any random phenomenon associated with any other Bulbitian.
Whoever it had been, they had obviously liked it hot, hazy and wet.
The Bodhisattva entered the six-thousand-kilometre-wide bubble of cloudy air surrounding the Bulbitian very slowly, like a thick needle somehow persuading the balloon it was penetrating not to pop, out of sheer politeness.
Yime watched the ship’s careful, gentle progress via a screen in her quarters as she packed a bag, in case she had to quit the Bodhisattva on little notice. Finally, the dripping rear end of the ship’s outermost horizon field parted company with the glisteningly adhesive internal surface of the Bulbitian’s atmospheric bubble. The view started to tilt as the ship rotated to position itself compatibly with the structure’s own gentle gravity field.
“Safely inside?” Yime asked, snapping her bag shut.
“… Inside,” the ship replied.
There were no confirmed reports of Culture ships suffering injury or destruction at the behest of a Bulbitian, but the space craft of other civilisations on the same technological level – and arguably of no less moral worth – had very occasionally been bizarrely crippled or had outright disappeared, at least allegedly, and so even Culture vessels – not normally known for their caution in such matters – tended to think twice before breezing up to your average Bulbitian with a cheery Hail fellow-entity!
The Bodhisattva moved on through a hothouse atmosphere of slow-swirling weather systems, giant grey-brown blister-clouds and long sweeping swathes of darkly torrential rain.
“Yime Nsokyi, I presume,” the elderly lady said. “Welcome to the Unfallen Bulbitian, Semsarine Wisp.”
“Thank you. And you …?”
“Fal Dvelner,” the woman said. “Here, have an umbrella.”
“Allow me,” said the ship’s drone, taking the offered device before Yime could accept it. They were still under the ship itself, so sheltered from the rain for the moment. It was so dark the main light came from the big drone’s aura field, which was formal blue mixed with green good humour.
The Bodhisattva had backed carefully up to the structure’s only in-use landing entrance, hovering a few metres above the puddled surface of the landing pier itself, which was made of ancient, pitted metals the colour of mud. From the part of the ship nearest to the wide, bowed entryway into the Bulbitian to the entrance itself was only twenty metres, but the deluge was so heavy it would soak anybody crossing the rain-hazed surface of the pier.
“I was expecting somebody else,” Yime said as they walked splashing along under the jet-black under-surface of the ship. In the low gravity, she found herself imitating the floaty, bouncing gait of the older woman. The rain-drops were huge, slow-falling, slightly oblate spheres. Splashes from below, she noted, could soak you quite thoroughly in low gravity. Her ankle boots and trousers were already quite wet. Ms. Dvelner wore glossy thigh boots and a slick-looking shift, both of which were doubtless much more practical in the conditions. Yime carried her own bag. The air felt warm, and as humid as having a soaking, blood-temperature cloth applied to the face. The atmosphere seemed to press in and down, as though the floating bulk of the million-tonne ship directly above was somehow truly bearing down on her, for all that in reality it was supported within a dimension not even visible, and weighed, right now, within the frame of reference accessible to her, precisely nothing.
“Ah, yes; Mr. Nopri,” Fal Dvelner said, nodding. “He’ll be being unavoidably detained, I dare say.” Dvelner looked to be in about the last quarter of her life; spry, but delicately thin and white haired with a face that contained distinct lines. “He’s your Quietus rep here. I’m with the Numina mission.”
Numina was the part of the Culture’s Contact section that concerned itself with the Sublimed, or at least tried to. It was sometimes known as the Department Of What The Fuck?
“Why might Mr. Nopri be unavoidably detained?” Yime asked, raising her voice over the noise of the downpour. They were coming close to where the great snub nose of the ship rose like an obsidian cliff through the rain-filled air above. The ship had extended a field to shelter them from the rain; a dry corridor three metres wide extended all the way across the pier to the brightly lit entrance.
“Funny old places, Bulbitians,” Dvelner said quietly, arching one brow. She shook her umbrella out and opened it, nodded to the ship-drone, which was a soap-bar smooth, old-fashioned design nearly a metre long. The drone made a noise that might been “Hmm,” and flicked the umbrella open over Yime as they walked out from beneath the nose of the Bodhisattva.
The ship rocked; the whole three-hundred-metre length of it wobbled visibly in the air as the corridor it had made for them through the rain just disappeared, letting the rain thunder down around them. The downpour was so heavy Yime saw Dvelner’s arm sink appreciably as the weight of water hit the umbrella she was carrying. Given that they were bouncing along in only a third of standard G, this implied a lot of water, or a very weak old lady, Yime supposed.
“Here,” Yime said, taking the umbrella protecting her from the drone’s maniple field. She inclined her head towards Dvelner and the drone moved smoothly through the torrent, gently taking the handle of the umbrella from the older woman.
“Thank you,” Dvelner said.
“Did I just see you move?” Yime asked the ship’s drone.
“You did.”
“So what was all that about?”
“Anywhere else, I’d treat that as an attack,” the ship said through the drone, casually. “You don’t interfere with a GCU’s fields, even if all they’re doing is keeping the rain off somebody.”
Beside her, Ms. Dvelner snorted. Yime glanced at her, then said to the drone, “It can do that?”
“It can try to,” the drone said, its voice pitched to affable reasonableness, “with the implicit threat that if I didn’t let it it would get upset and try harder, which, as I say, anywhere else I’d take as tantamount to a challenge. However. My own field enclosures were never put under threat, I am a Quietus ship after
all, and this is a particularly sensitive and special Bulbitian, so I chose to let it have its way. This is its turf, after all, and I am the guest-cum-intruder.”
“Most ships stay outside the bubble,” Dvelner said, also raising her voice over the rain as they neared the entrance way and the sounds of the cataracts of water falling off the towering facade above increased in volume. The yellow lights inside shone through the thick, trembling bubbles of the rain as though through a rippled, transparent curtain.
“So I understand,” the ship said. “As I say, though; I am a Quietus ship. However, if the Bulbitian would rather I stayed beyond its atmospheric sphere, I will be happy to oblige.” The drone made a show of turning to Yime. “I’ll leave a shuttle.”
With a last crash of drumming rain straining the bowing material of the umbrellas, they walked into the wide entrance to be met by a tall young man dressed quite similarly to Yime, though much less smartly. He was struggling and failing to open another umbrella. He was swearing quietly, then looked up, saw them, stopped swearing, smiled instead and threw the umbrella aside.
“Ms. Dvelner, thank you,” he said, nodding to the older woman, who was frowning suspiciously at him. “Ms. Nsokyi,” he said, taking her hand in his; “welcome.”
“Mr. Nopri?” Yime said.
He sucked air through his teeth. “Well, yes and no.” He looked pained.
Yime looked at Dvelner, who had closed her eyes and might have been shaking her head. Yime looked back at Nopri. “What would constitute the grounds for the ‘no’ part?”
“Technically the person you were expecting – the me you were expecting – is dead.”
The television was old, its casing made of wood, its thick glass screen bulbous and the image displayed on it monochrome. It showed a half-dozen dark shapes like long, jagged spear points hurtling down from a black sky riven with lightning. He reached over and turned it off.
The doctor tapped her pen on the side of her clipboard. She was pale, had short brown hair, wore glasses; she looked half his age. She wore a dull grey suit and a white coat, like doctors were meant to. He wore standard army fatigues.
“You should really watch it to the end,” she said.
He looked at her, sighed, then reached over and turned the set back on again. The dark spearhead shapes fell, formation splitting up as they twisted and wove their way through what might have been air or not. The camera stayed with one of the spearheads in particular, remaining on it after the others had disappeared. It fell past wherever the camera was watching all this from and as the view tipped, following it. The screen filled with light.
It was a poor representation; the image was too small, too grainy and smeary to do justice to the sight, even if it had been in colour. In vaguely green-tinged black-and-white it was just a mess. You could hardly see the spearhead shape now; its presence was only revealed by its quickly shrinking shadow occluding some parts of the flares and pools and rivers of light beneath.
Then a point of light seemed to detach from the lights below and rise to meet the spearhead shape, which rolled and flicked and twisted ever more desperately until the rising point of light flashed past both the spearhead and the camera. A dozen more points of light rose from the lightscape, followed by another, bigger barrage, and another. Just visible at the distorted edge of the screen, more sets of sparks rose fanning out towards the other spearheads. The spearhead the camera was following dodged three of the incoming lights, then one of them winked out just behind it; a moment later the spearhead shape was silhouetted, caught three-quarters to side on in a flare of light bursting all around it, drowning out the view below.
The screen washed out with light. Even on the old, muddy looking screen the flash of brilliance somehow startled the eye.
The screen went dark.
“Satisfied?” Vatueil asked.
The young doctor said nothing, made a note.
They were in an anonymous office filled with anonymous furniture. They sat in two cheap chairs in front of a desk. The crude looking television was perched on the surface of the desk, between them; a power cable made S shapes across the desk and floor to a wall socket. A window with half-open vertical blinds looked out onto a white-tiled lightwell. The white tiles looked grimy; the lightwell let in little light. A buzzing fluorescent lamp was set diagonally across the ceiling, shedding a flat glare that gave the young doctor’s pale face an unhealthy pallor. Probably his too, though he had darker skin.
A faint rising and falling feeling, and a sensation that the whole room and lightwell were moving a little from side to side, clashed with the obvious impression that they were in a conventional building on land. There was a degree of regularity, a periodicity to the various oscillations, and Vatueil was trying to work out the intervals involved. There seemed to be at least two: a long one lasting about fifteen or sixteen heartbeats and a shorter one of about a third of that. He was using heartbeats because he had no watch or phone or terminal and there wasn’t a clock visible anywhere in the room either. The doctor wore a watch but it was too small for him to make out.
They must be on a ship or barge. Maybe some sort of floating city. He had no idea; he’d just woken up here, sitting in this cheap looking chair in this bland office room, being made to watch lo-fi video on an ancient screen device called a television. He’d already had a prowl round the space; the door was locked, the lightwell went down another four storeys to a small, leaf-litter-filled courtyard. The young doctor had just sat there, asking him to sit down and making notes on her clipboard while he’d looked round. The drawers in the room’s single desk – wood, battered-looking – were locked too, as was the single dented grey mild steel filing cabinet. No telephone, comms screen, terminal or sign that there was anything intelligent and helpful listening or present. There was even a switch for the ceiling light, for fate’s sake.
He’d looked over the doctor’s shoulder at the notes she was taking, but they were in a language he didn’t recognise. He wondered how long he was expected to give it before he tried threatening the doctor or shoulder-charging the flimsy-looking door.
He looked up at what was obviously a suspended ceiling. Maybe he could crawl his way out.
“Just tell me what you want to know,” he said.
The doctor made another note, crossed her legs, said, “What do think we might want to know?”
He put his hands to his face, wiped back from his nose to his cheeks and then ears. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know, do I?”
“Why did you think we might want to know anything?”
“I attacked you,” he told her, pointing at the wooden box that held the screen. “That was me, in that – I was that thing attacking you.” He waved his hands, looked around. “But I got shot down. I’m guessing we all got intercepted. And now I’m here. Whatever you saved of me, you must have been able to learn all you needed to directly, just looking at the code, running bits of it. You don’t need me so I’m just puzzled why I’m here. All I can think of is you still want to know something else. Or is this just the first circle of Hell? Do I stay here for ever being bored to death?”
She made another note. “Maybe we should watch the screen again,” she suggested. He sighed. She turned the television back on. The black spearhead shape fell from the lightning-cracked sky.
“It’s nothing – just a death.”
Yime smiled thinly. “I think you make light of our calling, Mr. Nopri, if you treat the cessation of life in quite so off-hand a fashion.”
“I know, I know, I know,” he said, agreeing heartily and nodding vigorously. “You’re absolutely right, of course. But it is in a good cause. It is necessary. I do take the whole Quietus ethic seriously; very seriously. These are – ha-ha! – well, special circumstances.”
Yime looked at him levelly. Nopri was a skinny, dishevelled looking young man with bright blue eyes, pale skin and a gleamingly bald head. They were in what was apparently entitled the Officers’ Club, the main social space for
the forty or so Culture citizens who made up about a half per cent of the Bulbitian’s highly diverse – and dispersed – population. The Club was part of what had once been some sort of games hall for the Bulbitian species, what had been its ceiling – and was now its floor – studded with enormous multi-coloured cones like gaudy versions of fat stalagmites.
Food, drink and – for Nopri – a drug bowl were brought by small wheeled drones which roamed the wide space; apparently the Bulbitian could display unpredictable reactions when it came to other entities using fields inside it, so the drones used wheels and multi-jointed arms instead of just levitating by AG and using maniple fields. Still, Yime noticed, the ship’s drone seemed to be doing all right, floating level with their table.
She and Nopri sat alone with the drone, Dvelner having returned to her own duties. There were two other tables occupied in the warm but pleasantly dehumidified space. Both supported little groups of four or five people huddled round them, all of whom looked rather drab by the normal standards of Culture sartorial acceptability and all of whom seemed to be keeping themselves to themselves. Yime had guessed, before Nopri had told her anyway, that these were people who were here to rendezvous with the ship which would arrive, sometime in the next two or three days, from the Total Internal Reflection, the GSV which was one of the Culture’s Oubliettionaries, its Forgotten fleet of supposedly ultra-hidden post-posited-catastrophe seed-craft.
“What ‘special circumstances’, Mr. Nopri?” she asked.
“I’ve been trying to talk to the Bulbitian,” Nopri told her.
“Talking to it involves dying?”
“Yes, all too often.”
“How often?”
“Twenty-three times so far.”
Yime was appalled. She took a drink before saying, “You’ve been killed by this thing twenty-three times?” she said, her voice dropping to a shocked whisper without her meaning it to. “You mean in a virtual environment?”
“No, really.”
“Killed really?”