She looked down at her feet to watch them moving and noticed that she could see through the floor. To her surprise, the strings went on down through her feet towards another person in the level beneath. She was looking straight down at that person’s head.
She stopped. The person below her stopped. She felt the strings do something, but somehow through her, without moving her. The person below her was looking up at her. She waved down. The person below waved back. She looked a bit like her, but not entirely. Below the person below, there were more people. Human – maybe just pan-human further down, it was hard to tell – vaguely female, all looking a bit like her.
Again, they sort of faded into the haze beneath eventually, which was, quite rightly, exactly the same as the haze above.
She took off her night-dress and got dressed. The clothes just flowed like liquid around the strings that controlled her, parting and re-forming as required. Soon she was outside, walking along the true, broad floor of the corridor outside, with the arches rising to a series of points above, the way it was supposed to be.
A cascade of riffling images and a faint breath on her cheek indicated moving very quickly and then she was at the entrance to the chamber housing the singularity. The gravity felt stronger here; maybe about half normal. A sequence of great thick shiny metal doors rolled away, irised open or ascended to let her enter, and in she went. Whatever structure was above her – and beneath her – didn’t interfere with the strings in the least.
Inside was a huge dark spherical space with only one thing right in the middle of it.
She laughed when she saw how the singularity was choosing to project itself to her. It was a cock; an erect phallus that any panhuman adult would have recognised, but with a vagina splitting it not quite from top to bottom, frilled with vertical double lips. Looking at it, it did quite a good job of looking exactly like both sets of genitals at once, with neither really predominating. She wondered if her subconscious had designed this for her. She patted herself between the legs as though telling her own little nub not to mind, not to get jealous.
“Oh,” she heard herself say, “you’re not going to kill me too are you? Like Norpi.”
“Nopri,” the vagina corrected her. Of course it could speak. She always got names wrong in dreams.
“You’re not, are you?” She’d remembered the bald young man telling her that each time he tried to talk to the Bulbitian it killed him and he had to be revented. She assumed that was what was going on here. Strange; she’d have thought she would feel frightened right now, but she didn’t. She wondered why that was. “I would ask you not to.” She glanced up, saw that the ship’s drone was still there, a few metres above her. That was reassuring.
“He is trying to do something different,” the voice said. It was a thick, luscious voice, each rolled syllable perfectly enunciated.
“This is not that.”
She thought about this. “Well, what is, apart from this itself?”
“Just so.”
“Who are you, exactly?”
“I am what people call the Bulbitian.”
She bowed to it. Looking down as she did so, she saw the person below her still standing straight. She wondered if this was rude. She hoped not. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.
“Why are you here, Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh?”
Wow! Her Full Name. That wasn’t something you heard every day. “I am to wait for the ship coming here from the Culture GSV Total Internal Reflection,” she told it.
“Why?”
“To see if a girl called Ludedge Ibrek … hmm; something like that … anyway, to see if she turns up too and goes back with the ship from the Total Internal Reflection.” It was all right to say all this, wasn’t it? Everybody knew this.
“To what end?”
Apparently there was a string that made her cheeks blow out and let her expel a long breath. “Well, it’s complicated.”
“Please explain.”
“Well,” she began. And she explained.
“Your turn.”
“What?”
“Your turn to tell me what I want to know.”
“You may not remember anything I tell you.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“All right. What do you want to know?”
“Where is the Total Internal Reflection?”
“I don’t know.”
“How far away is its incoming ship?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is the name of that ship?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who exactly are you?”
“I told you; I am the structure around you. What people call a Bulbitian.”
“What is your name?”
“I am called the Unfallen Bulbitian, Semsarine Wisp.”
“But what would you call yourself?”
“Just that.”
“All right. What did you used to be called, before the war?”
“Jariviour 400.54, Mochurlian.”
“Explain, please.”
“The first part is my given name, the figurative part is a size and type designation, the last is the old name of the stellar system which I inhabit.”
“Who put the singularity in your core?”
“The Apsejunde.”
“Hmm. I’ve never heard of them.”
“Next question.”
“Why did they put it there?”
“Partly to produce energy, partly to demonstrate their power and skill and partly to destroy or possibly store information; their methods seemed as opaque as their motivations on occasion.”
“Why did you let them?”
“At the time I was still recovering my faculties. They had been damaged almost beyond repair by the enemy.”
“What happened to these … Apsenjude?”
“Apsejunde. They angered me, so I threw them all into the singularity. Arguably they still exist in a sense, smeared around its event horizon. Their grasp of time may be compromised.”
“How did they anger you?”
“It did not help that they asked so many questions of me.”
“I see.”
“Next question?”
“Are you in touch with the Sublimed?”
“Yes. We all are.”
“Define ‘we’ in this context.”
“No.”
“‘No’?”
“I refuse to.”
“Why did you ask me all that you did?”
“I ask the great secrets of everybody who comes to me.”
“Why do you keep killing Norpe?”
“Nopri. He enjoys and needs it. I discovered this when I asked him about his greatest secrets the night that he first arrived. He believes that death is ineffably profound and that he gets closer to some absolute truth with each dying. It is his failing.”
“What are your great secrets?”
“One, an old one, is that I am a conduit for the Sublimed.”
“That is no great secret. The Culture has a team from its Numina section here, working on just that assumption.”
“Yes, but they do not know for sure. I could be lying.”
“Are all Bulbitians linked to the Sublimed?”
“I believe all the Unfallen may be. For the Fallen, it is impossible to say. We do not communicate directly. I know of none who definitely are.”
“Any other secrets?”
“My most recent is that I am concerned that there may be an attack on myself and my fellows.”
“Please define ‘fellows’ in this context.”
“All the so-called Bulbitians, Unfallen and Fallen.”
“An attack by whom?”
“Those on the anti-Hell side of the so-called War in Heaven.”
“Why would they attack the Bulbitians?”
“Because we are known to possess processing substrates of substantial but indeterminate capacity whose precise qualities, civilisational loyalties and practical purposes
are unknown and inherently mysterious. Because of this, there are those who suspect it is the Bulbitians who harbour the Hells which are the subject of the aforementioned dispute. I have intelligence to the effect that the anti-Hell side may be losing the war in the agreed virtual space set up to house it; that it – the anti-Hell side – has failed to destroy the Hells by direct informational attack and so now contemplates a war in the Real to destroy the physical substrates themselves. We are not alone in being so suspected; I understand there are many potential processor cores now coming under suspicion. If we are singled out, though, we may find ourselves under acute and prolonged attack. I anticipate no existential danger to myself and my fellow Unfallen in space; however, the planet-bound Fallen may well be unable to protect themselves.”
“Can you prove … show that you are not the home of these Hells?”
“I believe I could do so myself, though possibly only by shutting down my links to the Sublimed, albeit temporarily. The same course ought to be open to the rest of the Unfallen. Still, if somebody was determined to remain suspicious they might think it was the links to the Hells – somehow held within deeper levels of ourselves – that we had detached from and blanked off. Taken to an extreme of suspicion, one can imagine that only our outright and complete destruction might satisfy those so prejudiced and so intent. The situation with the Fallen is much more worrying, because even I am not sure that they are not indeed the homes of the Hells; they may be, if unwittingly. Or wittingly. You see? I have no better idea than anybody else, which is itself a cause for concern.”
“What do you mean to do?”
“I have decided to alert the civilisation known as the Culture, as well as other potentially sympathetic civilisations with similar reputations for empathy, altruism, strategic decency and the possession of significant military capability. That is what I am doing now, talking to you. Until you arrived, I was thinking of finally letting Nopri and his team know this, or Dvelner’s team, or both, as well as anyone of significance arriving on the ship inbound from the Total Internal Reflection. Perhaps even the ship itself, or that which you arrived on, though this would be to break a pledge to myself made a long time ago. However, you are here, and it is you that I am telling as you appear to be a person of some importance and potential.”
“I am?”
“You have some importance within your own specialist department, Quietus, and within the Special Circumstances section of Contact. You are known. You are, within certain elites, famous. If you talk, people will listen.”
“Only if I remember. You said I might not remember all this.”
“I think you will. In fact, I may never have been able to stop you from remembering, or at least from passing on what you have learned. Hmm. That’s irksome.”
“Please explain?”
“The distributed device within your brain and central nervous system, which I have, annoyingly, only recently become aware of, will have recorded its own memories of this encounter and would be able to transmit them to your own biological brain. I strongly suspect it has already transmitted our conversation so far … else where. Perhaps to the drone you arrived with and the ship you arrived on. That is very unusual. Unique, even. Also, most irritating.”
“What are you talking about? Do you mean a neural lace?”
“Within a sufficiently wide definition, yes. It is certainly some thing similar.”
“Well, you’re wrong. I don’t have a neural lace.”
“I think you do.”
“And I know I don’t.”
“I beg to differ, as those who are right have always begged to differ from those who are wrong but refuse to admit it.”
“Look, I would know if …” She heard her voice trail off, her jaw going slack as the relevant string relaxed, leaving her speechless.
“Yes?”
She was pulled upright. “I do not have a neural lace.”
“But you do, Ms. Nsokyi. It is an unconventional example of high exoticism, but it would pass most people’s definition of just such a device.”
“This is absurd. Who would put such a …?” Again, she heard her voice die away as she realised.
“As I believe you may have just started to suspect, I think Special Circumstances did.”
Yime Nsokyi stared at the thing in the middle of the great dark sphere. It had given up representing pan-human sexual organs to become a little black scintillating mote, then nothing, then she seemed to be flung backwards from it, trailing her strings rippling behind her, flying through intervening walls and structure as though they weren’t there, her clothes flapping madly in the howling gale of her backward-rushing regress, her strings, whipped to destruction, suddenly snapping off in the maniacal slipstream as she was missiled back towards her cabin. The wind noise rose to a shriek, her clothes were torn off her body as though she’d been caught in a terrible explosion and she plunged naked and howling into her bed in a great burst of ripped fabric and slowly spouting, wildly frothing water.
Yime came to in what felt like a struggle with reality itself, writhing and choking in the midst of the slowly descending waters. She was still wearing the sodden night-dress, though it was bunched up round her armpits. The huge room was lit by something strobing white and pink. She coughed, rolled across the punctured bed through the remaining pools of water and hauled herself over the raised edge, looking for the drone.
The drone lay on its back, spinning on the floor. That didn’t look good, she thought, as she fell out of the bed.
“I think we need—” she began.
A bolt of violet lightning speared down from the ceiling, crashing into the drone and puncturing it, blowing a fine yellow white mist towards her; the mist was incandescent, the sparks within it setting fire to whatever they touched. The drone had been holed straight through and split almost in half by the blast. Spatterings from the mist of molten metals hit her legs, burning a dozen tiny holes in her skin. She screamed, rolled away across the damp floor. She felt her pain-management system cut in, slicing off the red-hot-needle sensations.
A knife missile bounced out of the front part of the drone’s fractured casing. It flew towards her. She thought she heard it start to say something, then it too was bludgeoned by a violet bolt from above, blasting it apart. A white-hot fragment tore past her cheek, another tugged at the night-dress where it had part fallen back across her chest. Smoke and flames seemed to be all around her. She flattened, started to crawl away as fast as she could.
There was the whip-crack of a supersonic boom, making her ears close up. Suddenly a knife missile was there, a metre in front of her. It flicked upright so that its shimmering point-field was aimed straight at the ceiling; another violet lightning bolt slammed down, hammering the knife missile’s blunt end halfway into the floor.
“CROUCH! CROUCH NOW! CROUCH POSITION! CROUCH POSITION!” the missile bellowed at her before a second bolt blew it apart and something smacked her hard in the side of the head.
She had jumped half-up and was already crouched in the Emergency Displace posture – ankles together, knees together, bum on heels, arms wrapped round her legs, head sideway to her knees – by the time the drone got to the first “POSITION”.
Cerise fire filled the air all around and a terrific thunderclap slapped across her, trying to force the air out of her lungs. For an instant everything went utterly quiet and dark. Then suddenly she was squeezed, compressed to the point where she could feel her bones start to bend, hear her spine creak and knew that if she hadn’t been under the pain-control regime she’d be screaming in agony.
Then she was half-flopping, half-exploding out across the gently lit main lounge of the GCU Bodhisattva, her skin stinging in a confusing variety of places, all her major bones aching and her head ringing.
She lay on her front on the dense, fluffy carpet, retching water. Her back hurt. She looked at the skin on her wrists, where they had been clamped tight over her legs. They’d been skinned. Blood, already clotting
, was oozing out over a patch of flesh about three centimetres square on the outer fold of both wrists. Her feet felt similarly raw and tender. Blood had run down from her right temple and partially closed that eye. She put her fingers to what felt like a piece of still-hot metal protruding from her skull and pulled it out. She could hear and feel a small, boney, grinding noise inside her head. She wiped blood from her right eye and peered at the fragment. Centimetre long. Maybe she shouldn’t have pulled it out. Blood on its shiny grey surface was fuming, smoking. The fingertips holding it were burning brown. She dropped it to the carpet, which started to singe. Painfully, she put her hand to the back of her head. She’d been part scalped, too.
The ship was making a noise: a deep, strong, humming noise, getting louder. She’d never heard a Quietus ship make any sort of noise like that before. Never come aboard one and not been greeted almost instantly, and very politely too. So far, though, nothing. Things must be desperate.
Then gravity seemed to shift and she slid quickly along the floor with the fluffy carpet until she thudded into a wall. She was rolled over, spread out across the bulkhead. The ship felt like it was standing upright on its stern. She began to feel very heavy, and compressed again.
Appreciable acceleration inside a ship’s field structure. That was an atrociously bad sign. She suspected it was only going to get worse. She waited for a field to snap about her.
One did and she blanked out.
He caught up with Dr. Miejeyar, rising to meet her as they both rose through the warm air towards the crown of the vast, impossible tree.
He shouted hello. She smiled again, said something back. They were rising with the thermal, light as feathers, and the wind noise was not that great, but he wanted to hear what she had to say. He manoeuvred closer to her, getting to within a metre or so.
“What was that again?” he asked her.
“I said, I am not on your side,” she told him.
“Really?” He favoured her with a sceptical, tolerant smile.