But she didn’t; she jumped out of the bed, kicking up through the air and raising her arms above her head to dive through the loose gatherings of the chamber’s tented ceiling and out into the bedroom beyond, arcing out over the padded platform around the bed chamber and falling gently back into the clutches of its standard gravity. She ran down the curved steps to the bedroom floor and almost bumped into the drone Churt Lyne.
‘I know!’ she yelled, flapping one hand at it.
It lifted out of her way, then turned smoothly and followed her across the floor of the bedroom towards the bathroom, its fields formal blue but tinged with a rosy humour.
Ulver broke into a run. She’d always liked big rooms; the bedroom one was twenty metres square and five high. One wall was window. It looked out onto a tightly curved landscape of fields and wooded hills dotted with towers and ziggurats. This was Interior Space One, the central and longest cylinder of a cluster of independently revolving five-kilometre diameter tubes which formed the main living areas in the Rock.
‘Anything I can do?’ the drone asked as Ulver ran into the bathroom. Behind it, there was a shout and then a series of curses as the young man tried to exit the bed chamber in the same way Ulver had and got the gravity-transition wrong. The drone turned briefly towards the disturbance, then swivelled back as Ulver’s voice floated out through the noise of rushing fluids. ‘Well, you could throw him out . . . Nicely, mind.’
‘What?’ Ulver screamed. ‘You get me to ditch a luscious new guy after one night, you make me scrap all my engagements for a month and then you won’t even let me take a few pets? Or a couple of pals?’
‘Ulver, can I talk to you alone?’ Churt Lyne said calmly, rotating to point at a room off the main gallery.
‘No you can’t!’ she yelled, throwing down the cloak she’d been carrying. ‘Anything you have to say to me you can damn well say in front of my friends.’
They were in the outer gallery of Iphetra, a long reception area lined with windows and old paintings; it looked out to the formal gardens and Interior Space One beyond. A couple of traveltubes waited beyond doors set into the wall full of portraits. She’d told everybody to rendezvous here. She’d missed the noon deadline by over an hour, but there were certain things about one’s toilet that simply couldn’t be rushed, and - as she’d told a briefly but fetchingly incandescently furious Churt Lyne from her milk-bath - if she was really that important to all these top-secret plans, SC had no choice but to wait. As a concession to the urgency of the situation she had left her face unadorned, tied her hair back into a simple bun and slipped into a conservatively patterned loose pants and jacket combination; even choosing her jewellery for the day had taken no more than five minutes.
The gallery had got quite busy; her mother was here, tall and tousled in a jellaba, three cousins, seven aunts and uncles, about a dozen friends - all house-guests and a little bleary-eyed after the Graduation party - and a couple of house-slaved drones attempting to control the animals; a brace of tawny speytlid hunters looking about at everybody and snuffling and slavering with excitement and her three hooded but still restless alseyns which kept stretching their wings and giving their piercing, plangent cry. Another drone waited outside the nearest window with Brave, her favourite mount, saddled up and pawing the ground, while the three drones she’d decided were the minimum she could manage with were taking care of her luggage trunks, which were still appearing from the house lift. A tray floated at her side with breakfast; she’d just started munching on a chislen segment when the drone had told her she had to make this journey alone.
Churt Lyne didn’t reply in speech. Instead - astonishingly - it spoke through her neural lace:
~ Ulver, for pity’s sake, this is a secret mission for Special Circumstances, not a social outing with your girlfriends.
‘And don’t secret-talk me!’ Ulver hissed through clenched teeth. ‘Grief, that’s so rude!’
‘Quite right, dear,’ muttered her mother, yawning.
A couple of her friends laughed lightly.
Churt Lyne came right up to her until it was almost touching her, and then the next thing she knew there was a sort of grey cylinder around her and the machine; it stretched from wooden floor to stone-carved ceiling and it was about a metre and a half in diameter, neatly enclosing her, Churt and the tray carrying breakfast. She stared at the drone, her mouth open, eyes wide. It had never done anything like this before! Its aura field had disappeared. It hadn’t even had the decency to square the field and put the field on a mirror finish; at least she could have checked her appearance.
‘Sorry about this, Ulver,’ the machine said. Its voice sounded flat in the narrow cylinder. Ulver closed her mouth and prodded the field the drone had slung around them. It was like touching warm stone. ‘Ulver,’ the drone said again, taking one of her hands in a maniple field, ‘I apologise; I ought to have made the point earlier. I just assumed . . . Well, never mind. I’m supposed to come with you to Tier, but not anybody else. Your friends have to stay here.’
‘But Peis and I always go deep space together! And Klatsli is my new protégé; I promised her she could stick around me; I can’t just abandon her! Do you have any idea what that could do to her development? To her social life? People might think I’ve dumped her. Besides, she’s got an utterly exquisite older brother. If I--’
‘You can’t take them,’ the drone said loudly. ‘They’re not included in the invitation.’
‘I heard what you said yesterday, you know,’ Ulver said, shaking her head and leaning forward at the drone. ‘“Keep it secret”; I haven’t told them where we’re going.’
‘That’s not the point. When I said don’t tell a soul I meant don’t tell a soul you’re going, not don’t tell a soul exactly where you’re going.’
She laughed, throwing her head back. ‘Churt; real space here! My diary is a public document, hadn’t you noticed? There are at least three channels devoted to me - all run by rather desperate young men, admittedly, but nevertheless. I can’t change my eye colour without anybody on the Rock who follows fashion knowing about it within the hour. I can’t just disappear! Are you mad?’
‘And I don’t think the animals can come either,’ Churt Lyne said smoothly, ignoring her question. ‘The protira certainly can’t. There isn’t room on the ship.’
‘Isn’t room?’ she roared. ‘What size is this thing? Are you sure it’s safe?’
‘Warships don’t have stables, Ulver.’
‘It’s an ex-warship!’ she exclaimed, waving her arms around. ‘Ow!’ She sucked at the knuckle she’d hit against the field cylinder.
‘Sorry. But still.’
‘What about my clothes?’
‘A cabin full of clothes is perfectly all right, though I don’t know for whose benefit you’re going to be wearing them.’
‘What about when I get to Tier?’ she cried. ‘What about this guy I’m not supposed to fuck? Am I supposed to just wander past him naked?’
‘Take two roomsful; three. Clothes are not a problem, and you can pick up more when you get there - no, wait a minute, I know how long it takes you to choose new clothes; just take what you want. Four cabins; there.’
‘But my friends!’
‘Tell you what; I’ll show you the space you’ve got to work with. Okay?’
‘Oh, okay,’ she said, shaking her head and sighing heavily.
The drone fed convincing-looking pictures of the ex-warship’s interior into Ulver’s brain through the neural lace.
She caught her breath. Her eyes were wide when the display stopped. She stared at the drone. ‘The rooms!’ she exclaimed. ‘The cabins; they’re so small!’
‘Quite. Still think you want to take your friends?’
She thought for a second. ‘Yes!’ she yelled, thumping a fist on the little tray floating at her side. It wobbled, trying not to spill the fruit juice. ‘It’d be cozy!’
‘What if you fall out?’
That stopped he
r for a moment. She tapped her lips with one finger, frowning into space. She shrugged. ‘I can cut people dead in a traveltube, Churt. I can ostracise people in the same bed.’ She leant towards the machine again then glanced round at the grey walls of the field cylinder. ‘I can ostracise people in something this big,’ she said pointedly, her hands on her hips. She put her head back, narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. ‘I could just refuse to go, you know.’
‘You could,’ the machine said with a pronounced sigh. ‘But you’d never get into Contact, and SC would be forced to try and get a double - a synthetic entity - to impersonate this woman on Tier. The authorities there wouldn’t be amused if they found out.’
She gazed levelly at the machine for a moment. She sighed and shook her head. ‘Bugger,’ she breathed, snatching the glass of fruit juice from the floating tray and looking in distaste at where the juice had run down the outside of the glass. ‘I hate this acting adult shit.’ She knocked the juice back, set the glass back down and licked her lips. ‘Okay; let’s go, let’s go!’
The goodbyes took a while. Churt Lyne glowed greyer and greyer with frustration until it turned into a sort of off-black sphere; then it dropped its aura field altogether and sped out of the nearest opened window. It raced around in the air outside for a while; a couple of sonic booms nearly had the mounts bolting.
Eventually, though, Ulver had said her farewells, decided to leave all her animals and two trunks of clothes behind and then - having remained serene in the midst of much hullabaloo and some tears from Klatsli - entered a traveltube with a frostily blue Churt Lyne and was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her.
Ulver laughed. ‘It looks,’ she snorted, ‘like a dildo!’
‘That’s appropriate,’ Churt Lyne said. ‘Armed, it can fuck solar systems.’
She remembered when she was a little girl and had stood on a bridge over a gorge in one of the other Interior Spaces; she had a stone in her hand and her mother had held her up to the bridge parapet so that she could look over the edge and drop the stone into the water below. She’d held the stone - it was about the same size as her little fist - right up to one eye and closed her other eye so that the dark stone had blotted out everything else she could see. Then she’d let it go.
She and Churt Lyne stood in the ship’s tiny hangar area, surrounded by her cases, bags and trunks as well as a deal of plain but somehow menacing-looking bits and pieces of military equipment. The way that stone had fallen towards the dark water then, shrinking and shrinking, was very like the way Phage Rock fell silently away from the old warship now.
This time, of course, there was no splash.
When Phage had entirely disappeared, she switched out of the view her neural lace had imported into her head and turned to the drone, thinking a thought that would have occurred to her a lot earlier, she hoped, if she’d been sober and unimpassioned over the last day.
‘When was this ship sent to Phage, Churt, and from where?’
‘Why don’t you ask it yourself?’ it said, turning to indicate a small drone approaching over the jumble of equipment.
~ Churt? she asked via the neural lace.
~ Yes?
~ Damn; I was hoping the ship’s rep might be a dazzling handsome young man. Instead it’s something that looks like a--
Churt Lyne interrupted:
~ Ulver; you are aware that the ship itself acts as exchange hub for these communications?
~ Oh dear, she thought, and felt herself colour as the little drone approached. She smiled broadly at it.
‘No offence,’ she said.
‘None taken,’ said the little machine as it came to a halt in front of her. It had a reedy but reasonably melodious voice.
‘For the record,’ she said, still smiling, and still blushing, ‘I thought you looked a bit like a jewellery box.’
‘Could have been worse,’ chipped in Churt Lyne. ‘You should hear what she calls me sometimes.’
The little drone’s snout dipped once in a sort of bow. ‘That’s quite all right, Ms Seich,’ it said. ‘Delighted to meet you. Allow me to welcome you aboard the Very Fast Picket Frank Exchange of Views.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, also nodding slowly. ‘I was just asking my friend where you’d come from, and when you’d been dispatched.’
‘I didn’t come from anywhere except Phage,’ the ship told her.
She felt her eyes widen. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ it said laconically. ‘And the answer to your next three questions, I’d guess, are: because I was very well hidden and that’s actually quite easy in a conglomeration of matter the size of Phage; getting on for five hundred years; and there are another fifteen like me back home. I trust you are reassured rather than shocked and that we may rely on your discretion in the future.’
‘Oh, golly, absolutely,’ she said, nodding, and felt half inclined to click her heels and salute.
V
Dajeil had been spending a lot more time with the beasts. She swam with the great fish and the sea-evolved mammals and reptiles, she donned a flyer suit and cruised high above the sea with her wide wings extended alongside the dirigible creatures in the calm currents of air and the cloud layers, and she donned a full gelfield suit with a secondary AG unit and carved her way amongst the poison gases, the acid clouds and the storm bands of the upper atmosphere, surrounded by noxiousness and the ferocious beauty of the ecosystem there.
She even spent some time walking in the ship’s top-side parks, the nature reserves which the Sleeper Service had possessed even when it had been a regular, well-behaved GSV and diligent member of the Contact section; the parks - complete landscapes with hills, forests, plains, river and lake systems and the remains of small resort villages and hotels - covered all the great ship’s flat top surfaces and together measured over eight hundred square kilometres. With the humans gone from the ship there were fairly large populations of land animals in the park lands, including grazers, predators and scavengers.
She’d never really paid any of them much attention - her interests had always been with the larger, buoyant animals of the fluid environments - but now that they were all likely to suffer the same exile or unconsciousness as the rest, she had started to take a belated, almost guilty interest in them (as though, she thought ruefully, her attention bestowed some special significance on the behaviour she witnessed, or meant anything at all to the creatures concerned).
Amorphia did not come for its regular visit; another couple of days passed.
When the avatar came to her again, she had been swimming with the purple-winged triangular rays in the shallow part of the sea extending beyond the sheer, three-kilometre cliff which was the rear of the craft. Returning, she had taken the flyer which the ship habitually put at her disposal, but asked it to drop her at the top of the scree slope beneath the cliff facing the tower.
It was a bright, cold day and the air tasted sharp; this part of the ship’s environment was cycling towards winter; all the trees save for a few everblues had lost their leaves, and soon the snows would come.
The air was very clear and from the top of the scree slope she could see the Edge islands, thirty kilometres away, out close to where the inner containment field of the ship came down like a wall across the sea.
She had scrambled down the scree in small rattles of stones like dry, fanning rivers of pebbles and dust. She had long ago learned how to use her altered centre of gravity to her advantage in this sort of adventure, and had never yet fallen badly. She got to the bottom, her heart beating hard, her leg muscles warm with the effort expended and her skin bright with sweat. She walked quickly back through the salt marsh, along the paths the ship had fashioned for her.
The sun-line was near setting when she returned to the tower, breathless and still perspiring. She took a shower and was sitting by the log fire the tower had lit for her, letting he
r hair dry naturally, when Gravious the black bird rapped once on the window and then disappeared again.
She pulled her robe tighter about her as the tall, dark-dressed figure of Amorphia climbed the stairs and entered the room.
‘Amorphia,’ she said, tucking her wet hair into the hood of the robe. ‘Hello. Can I get you anything?’
‘No. No, thank you,’ the avatar said, looking nervously around the circular living room.
Dajeil indicated a chair while she sat on a couch by the fire. ‘Please.’ She pulled her legs up underneath her. ‘So, what brings you here today?’
‘I--’ the avatar began, then stopped, and pulled at its lower lip with its fingers. ‘Well, it seems,’ it started again, then hesitated once more. It took a breath. ‘The time,’ it said, then stopped, looking confused.
‘The time?’ Dajeil Gelian said.
‘It’s . . . it’s come,’ Amorphia said, and looked ashamed.
‘For the changes you talked about?’
‘Yes,’ the avatar said, sounding relieved. ‘Yes. For the changes. They have to start now. In fact, they have already begun. The rounding-up of the creatures comes first, and the . . .’ It looked unsure again, and frowned deeply. ‘The . . . the de-landscaping,’ it gulped. It tripped up on the next words in its rush to say them. ‘The un-geometri-- . . . The un-geomorphologising. The . . . the pristinisation!’ it said, almost shouting.
Dajeil smiled, trying not to show the alarm she felt. ‘I see,’ she said slowly. ‘So it is all definitely going to happen?’
‘Yes,’ Amorphia said, breathing heavily. ‘Yes, it is.’
‘And I will have to leave the ship?’
‘Yes. You’ll have to leave the ship. I . . . I’m sorry.’ The avatar looked suddenly crestfallen.
‘Where am I to go?’