“Very easily.”
“Back to that later, but here’s another one; how the fuck do we get clean?”
“Also very easily. I’m switching you to sonar. Follow me. Swim.”
Cossont suddenly had a view to look at. It was like a drawing rather than a proper picture — everything was white, with fuzzy blue lines delineating edges and a sort of background green wash indicating surfaces.
She could, thankfully, see nothing of what actually surrounded her, but she could see a suited, streamlined version of Berdle a couple of metres away, turning away from her to swim towards the top of the large, cylindrical tank they were in. Beneath and to the side there were hints of tapered supports holding the tank, with further structure sketched in above and below showing where the decks were; these vanished into the distance. Cossont twisted, began to swim after Berdle.
She could feel her hands and limbs contacting semi-solids as she swam. It was like swimming through thick soup. She tried not to think about it. She was doing okay until she remembered the last time she and Berdle had been here on the airship, when they had been met by the strange person with the bowl-of-soup face.
Suddenly, she nearly threw up. Would have thrown up, but something inside her seemed to intervene at the last moment.
“Hey; calm,” Berdle said easily as he arrived at the top of the tank. “You’re triggering the suit’s medical unit.” He reached out to something on the under-surface that formed the ceiling.
“You be calm,” she told the avatar. “I’m swimming through shit here. You’re a fucking android, but this stuff is personal to us biologicals.”
“Fair enough. But… out in a trice,” Berdle said, both hands on a circular structure that Cossont sincerely hoped was a hatch. “One more sensor to fool… done. And a couple of little expander spheres to emplace, to take up our volume when we get out… There.” His arms twirled. The circular object swung up and away, hinging. She reached a surface she’d not even been aware was there, her top set of arms and her head suddenly in air. Or at least gas.
She was half a metre below the opened hatch. Berdle pulled himself up through it as easily as though they were in zero-G. Beside Cossont, as Berdle exited the tank, a tiny floating sphere expanded smoothly to over a metre in diameter, pressing against the surface of the tank and then down into the liquid.
Then a hand came down and pulled her up, though the suit made it feel like there was no weight or effort involved anyway. Having four arms probably helped too.
Once she was on her feet, the view switched. Conventional sight again. She was standing under a low, dark ceiling, on a dimly lit gantry facing Berdle — a spotless, conventionally clothed Berdle — across a side-hinged hatchway at their feet. She looked down. Her suit was also spotless, though it had gone back to looking like it was made of liquid mirror and soot again. She heard a tiny plopping noise in the tank beneath and then the suit snapped back to impersonating a normal-enough-looking pants and jacket combo.
“Oh,” she said, as Berdle lowered the hatch closed with his foot. Her voice sounded just as it had in the tank, which meant slightly odd. The suit’s helmet unit was still covering her face. This doubtless explained why she was being spared any smells she might not have cared for, and why she was still listening to her own voice as relayed through the suit’s earbuds.
Berdle nodded. “There you are; clean,” he said. “Happy now?” Though that was weird too, because his mouth didn’t move as she heard him say this.
“Ecstatic. Thanks.”
“Welcome. Suit-surface nanofields, Vyr,” the avatar said, turning and walking away from her towards a low doorway at the far end of the gantry, where it met a bulkhead. “Zero friction unsticky,” she heard him say. He shook his head. “Really.”
“Yeah,” Cossont said, following him. “Hey, I don’t want to disturb you but you were just starting to sound a bit dismissive there.”
Berdle was bent down, poking seemingly randomly at the area around the mechanical handle on the door, as though expecting to find a finger-sized keyhole. “Sorry.”
She joined him at the door. “Do you think there’s any field or area where I could make you feel small and a bit slow compared to me, Berdle? Ever?”
The avatar kept poking at the door with his finger. “Well, of course not,” he said patiently, his mouth still not moving. “I’m not a person, Vyr; I’m the walking, talking figurehead of a ship.” He squatted, staring at the door. “A Culture ship,” he added, sticking his finger out and poking again. “A Culture ship,” he muttered, “of some intellectual distinction and martial wherewithal… moreover.” His finger seemed to slip into the surface of the door as though it — or his finger — was a hologram.
Berdle withdrew his finger and stood up. Something clicked and the door swung open towards them. “Me first,” he said, conversationally. There was a pause. “Oh,” Berdle said. “They really have changed the place.”
“Well, we’ve changed the place a bit,” Ximenyr said, walking in front of the reporter arbite with its camera eyes. He was granting an exclusive interview, letting just one media representative in initially before the airship was opened up to everybody else. “The last eight days have been very busy with restructuring. Quite radical restructuring, involving pretty much everybody on board, which has been one reason for keeping people away, though mostly it’s just to make it a more exciting reveal.” He smiled at the arbite. Ximenyr was dressed in a plain white shift. Five of his fellow party-goers, similarly clad, accompanied him and the arbite along the dark, broad, gently downward-curving corridor. “Many of us have been doing our own personal restructuring too,” he said. Ximenyr waved one hand. “I had all sorts of weird shit going on with my body, but I’ve brought myself back to something much more standard, much more pure, even.”
“Do you regret your early excesses?” the arbite asked. It was taking instructions from a panel of bio-journalists spread across Xown and beyond. An AI was collating their queries and producing representative questions.
“Oh no,” Ximenyr said, looking almost serious. “One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.”
“Is it true your body was covered in over a hundred penises?”
“No. I think the most I ever had was about sixty, but that was slightly too many. I settled on fifty-three as the maximum. Even then it was very difficult maintaining an erection in all of them at the same time, even with four hearts. And most of them had to remain dry, or produce only, well, sort of sweat-gland quantities of ejaculate. Though it was very nice ejaculate; sort of slightly oily perfume, and not in the least icky. Unless you thought about it, of course.”
“Do you feel you are a more serious artist now?”
“No. I have claimed to be an artist in the past, but really all I’ve ever been is a sort of glorified surgeon. I would like to think I’ve been artistic at times and shown artistic flare and so on, but I think that, especially now that we’re nearly at the end of things, it’s all right to abandon claims and pretensions and just relax a bit. Maybe I’ve inspired artistry and artisticness in others; that’d be a happy assessment.”
“What is the greatest number of people you’ve had sex with at the same time?”
“About forty-four, forty-five, forty-six? It was hard to be sure, in the heat of the moment. We tried to get to the maximum, of fifty-three, obviously, but even in effective zero-G, all oiled up and most people just sticking their hands in from the outside of this heaving mass of bodies, we just couldn’t make it. Too close together. And also, frankly, I think some people got too excited and interested in each other rather than going for this record with me, you know? Still, it was a lot of fun trying. On the other hand, it was an effort, too, you know? So much preparation and set-up and planning and briefing. Sex should be about spontaneous fun, don’t you think? Anyway, here we are.”
Their little party had arrived at the bottom of the gently bowed corridor, where it briefly levelled out
and then started to rise again, heading aft. A small crowd of people — mostly dressed in plain white shifts like the one Ximenyr wore, so that they looked vaguely like they belonged to a religious order — were busy gathering up pieces of complicated-looking equipment and wrapping foam and loading everything onto a series of little flat-topped wheeled vehicles; one, fully loaded, was making its own way up the slope beyond, just about to disappear under the curve of ceiling.
Directly above where Ximenyr, his followers and the reporter arbite now stood there was a wide, new-looking circular staircase leading up to a cake-slice-shaped hole in the ceiling, where there was darkness punctured by a few tiny lights.
“Come on up,” Ximenyr said, leading the way. He started ascending the fan of stairway, followed by the arbite and the five people who’d accompanied them.
“Lights, please, and enhance,” Ximenyr said as he walked out into the space above. The reporter arbite arrived, looked up. The space above was a single enormous space which almost filled the remainder of the airship, right to the top. It was mostly dark, but lit by thousands of small lights pointing inwards at a vast, hazy, cylindrical space perhaps five hundred metres long and four hundred metres across. What looked like a small globular galaxy lay directly overhead, shining. The way the light moved within the space overhead suggested that it was full of water, or some sort of transparent liquid.
The space immediately round the stair-head held stacks and racks of lockers and shelves; beyond, shadows hid any walls. For all its obvious extent, the low ceiling, the darkness and the sensation of a great mass hanging immediately above made the place feel oddly oppressive.
Right in front of them there was one of six small, translucent spheres, each about three metres in diameter, all arranged around the very bottom of the vast container above and looking like hopelessly inadequate supports for its bulk. The dark walls around the vast lit space showed no other form of support, just the tiny floodlights.
“Now, we’re playing around with image a bit here,” Ximenyr said, reaching up and patting the surface of one of the small translucent spheres, “because you couldn’t see through that much of even the purest water, but this is a sort-of-true representation of what you’d see if the water wasn’t there.”
“So,” the arbite said, “what is this?”
“This is a giant water pool; you climb up those steps, get naked, stick one of these breathers in your gob…” Ximenyr picked up a stubby tube from one of the nearby shelves and waved it in front of his mouth, “…pass through one of these spheres and then float up to the bright lights up there at the top. That’s the ultimate party area; that’s like heaven, like our own little mini-Subliming. I mean, it’s just the usual stuff up there: comfy furniture, drink, drugs and lots of images and music — and dancing, and fucking, you’d imagine — but all a bit more quiet and contemplative, I guess, and all under this lovely clear dome under the top of the ship, and the whole point is this is the only way to get there, and — once you’re there — there’s no way out… but it doesn’t matter, because then comes the Subliming.” Ximenyr grinned at the arbite’s camera eyes. “This was my plan from the start of the Last Party and my original idea was to spend a year or years sort of milking myself for the fluids to go in here, but that proved impractical. Water it is. Perfumed water.” He winked at the arbite’s eye cameras.
“Fucking typical man,” Cossont muttered. “You know what he’s done in that water, don’t you?”
“Yes, but it’s art,” Berdle said, looking serious.
He and Cossont were holed up behind some lightweight furniture in a disused storage space one deck below the curving corridor Ximenyr and the reporter arbite had just walked down. They were watching the arbite’s feed along with who-knew-how-many people across Xown and the Gzilt domain; there was no shortage of fascinating screen to watch from all over the Gzilt hegemony in these end-days, for those with time to spare from their own preparations for the Subliming, but the Last Party had achieved a modest level of fame over the years, and allegedly many millions of people were watching.
“Lovely warm perfumed water,” Ximenyr was saying, “dosed with cutaneous-contact-hallucinogens, so it’ll be quite a crazy ride just getting to the top, and you can’t just float straight up either; there are baffles. So it’s more of a 3D maze, really.”
“So, is this symbolic of our struggle towards enlightenment, or a comment on our tortuous route to Subliming?”
Ximenyr shrugged. “Yeah, if you like. I just thought it’d be neat.”
“What about pressure?”
Ximenyr snapped his fingers. “Good question. You know, I didn’t think of that at first either? Just not of a practical or engineering turn of mind, I guess. But it’s much smarter than that; there are field projectors and AG units studded all around the cylinder; there are all these exotic matter particles or something dissolved into the water — whatever; don’t ask me the technical details — and you pass through these levels of pressure.” He slapped the taut-sounding surface of the nearest small sphere again. “The pressure is highest down here, but it’s only like being about eight metres down, not four hundred.”
“So, Ximenyr, anyone may join you in this?”
“Anyone but not everyone. We’ll have to be selective, let just a few people aboard at a time. We need to balance the extra weight of people coming in with our positive buoyancy… factor, or something. Anyway, there’s refuse we’ve got stored up and long-term supplies we’re not going to be using, all of which we’ll be dumping gradually as we take people on, so we’re going to have room for lots more people.” He looked up, nodding at the circular patch of bright lights directly overhead. “A few brave guys and gals are already up there, after doing the testing. Couple of panickers when it all took too long and they couldn’t work out the maze, but they’re fine by now and we’ve made it all a lot easier, with cheats and guidance available.” He smiled dazzlingly at the arbite’s camera eyes. “Should be a cool last ride.”
“That’s annoying,” Berdle said.
“Why?” Cossont asked. “Compared to the last tank of warm liquid we were in…”
“Yes, but if we have to get through that one, I’m going to show up. I’m too dense. If I support myself with AG or even field, they’ll spot me.”
Cossont was squatting beside him in her double-layer suit. She had watched the feed from the arbite on a wrist screen after deciding to risk rolling down the helmet parts of both suits. The air, she had been pleased to discover, smelled perfectly nice, though somehow you could sort of tell there had been construction work going on recently.
“Too dense? Like, too heavy?” she asked.
“Yes.” Berdle looked at Cossont, nodding at her suit. “And you’ll be, too. Those suits mass a lot more than they feel. Outer one especially. Inner might expand enough, though you might look a bit fat.”
Cossont shrugged. “I’m not my mother; I don’t care. More to the point, though, did you spot that our man doesn’t seem to have his necklace on any more?”
“Yes.” The avatar nodded. “That could be a problem.”
“We don’t even know how personal that stuff is for him,” Cossont said. “Might have just abandoned it; left it in a bedside cabinet or something. God, he might have thrown it out!”
“Maybe we should look back in the sewage tank,” Berdle suggested. Cossont looked at him. The avatar shrugged. “Just kidding; I checked it out as a matter of course when we were in there. Nothing.”
“Maybe it’s up at his… bedroom suite. Where we were when we saw him before,” Cossont suggested.
“That’s not there any more,” Berdle said. “I’ve found the remodelling plans in one of the airship’s data banks, such as they are. Whole volume was ripped out.” The avatar shook his head. “Their internal video monitoring is so patchy. There might be some record in here of what happened to all that stuff, but… found it. Ah.”
“Is that a good ‘Ah’?” Cossont asked.
&
nbsp; “Partially,” Berdle told her. “All his personal effects are more or less where they were; in some sort of chest or locker… yes, a big sort of upright wheeled chest thing, in this ‘heaven’ space, at the top of the giant liquid tank.”
“Think Mr Q’s missing bits are there?”
“Maybe. Ximenyr’s… had a temporary cabin near the main medical suite for the last eight days,” Berdle reported, still quizzing the airship’s systems.
“Probably having all his extra cocks removed,” Cossont muttered.
Berdle shook his head. “Very suspicious AIs on this thing. I am having to do so much track-covering-up as I go along here… Yes, he had a locker or something of some sort there too. Going to check that first.”
Cossont started to stand up but he pulled her back down again. “I’ve an insectile on that particular job.”
“If they’re not there, think we’ll have to swim through the big tank?”
“Perhaps.”
“Can’t we just come in from the top?”
“No. It’s all shielded. It looks transparent up there, like a big glass dome, but it isn’t; it’s a two-way screen, metres thick. Once the ship’s back, in about twelve minutes, we have the option of blasting the shielding out of the way and Displacing in, but that’s a last resort; wasting 4D without causing horrendous collateral in the associate flat-space is almost impossible. In 4D you think all you’ve done is kick down a door, and imagine you’ve done it really neatly, minimum force, but then you look back into 3D and realise you’ve blown down the whole building. Sometimes the whole block.”
“Twelve minutes till the ship’s back?”
“Just under. Though how easy the Gzilt battleship will make it for me to do anything as delicate as targeting bits of 4D shielding in the first place is very much open to question.”
“Is there going to be a fight?”
“Yeah, could be,” Berdle said. “There goes our boy,” he added.
Cossont switched her wrist screen on again to see Ximenyr placing his white shift on a shelf and then walking into a vaginal-looking vertical aperture in one of the translucent spheres, a breather tube gripped in his mouth. He was quite naked. Only one penis, as far as Cossont could see. And he didn’t seem to have anything else with him that might have contained the pair of eyes.
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