This Genar-Hofoen person; I may make my own inquiries in that direction, if I can avoid stepping on the metaphorical toes of our co-concernee.
The Affront angle is the one that worries me. So aggressive! Such drive! For all our oft-repeated horror at their effects on others, there exists, I think, a kind of grudging admiration in many Culture folk for the Affront’s energy, not to mention their apparent freedom from the effects of moral conscience. Such an easy threat to see, and yet so difficult a problem to deal with. I dread to think what awful plan might be hatched with a thoroughly clear conscience by perfectly estimable Minds to deal with such a perceived menace.
Equally, given the qualitative scale of the opportunity which may be presented by the Excession, the Affront are just the sort of species - and at precisely the most likely stage in their development - to attempt some sort of mad undertaking which, however likely to fail, if it did succeed might offer rewards justifying the risk. And who is to say they would be wrong in making such a judgement?
∞
Look, the damned Excession hasn’t done anything yet. All this nuisance has been caused by everybody’s reaction to it. Serve us all right if it turned out it is a projection of some sort, some God’s jest. I’m growing impatient, I don’t mind telling you. The Fate Amenable To Change stands off, watching the Excession doing nothing and reporting on it every now and again, various low-level Involveds are puffing themselves up and girding their scrawny loins with a view to taking a sight-seeing trip to the latest show in town and in the vague hope that if there is some sort of action they’ll be able to pick up some of it, and all that the rest of us are doing is sitting around waiting for the big guns to arrive. I wish something would happen!
V
‘Good travelling with you, Genar-Hofoen,’ Fivetide boomed. They slapped limbs; the man had already braced one leg and the gelfield suit absorbed the actual impact, so he didn’t fall over. They were in the Entity Control area of the Level Eight docks, Affronter section, surrounded by Affronters, their slaved drones and other machines, a few members of other species who could tolerate the same conditions as the Affront, as well as numerous Tier sintricates - floating around like little dark balls of spines - all coming and going, leaving or joining travelators, spin cars, lifts and inter-section transport carriages.
‘Not staying for some rest and recreation?’ Genar-Hofoen asked the Affronter. Tier boasted a notoriously excellent Affront hunting reserve section.
‘Ha! On the way back, perhaps,’ Fivetide said. ‘Duty calls elsewhere in the meantime.’ He chuckled.
Genar-Hofoen got the impression he was missing a joke here. He wondered about this, then shrugged and laughed. ‘Well, I’ll see you back on God’shole, no doubt.’
‘Indeed!’ Fivetide said. ‘Enjoy yourself, human!’ The Affronter turned on his tentacle tips and swept away, back to the battle-cruiser Kiss The Blade. Genar-Hofoen watched him go, and watched the lock doors close on the transit tunnel, with a frown on his face.
~ What’s worrying you? asked the suit.
The man shook his head. ~ Ah, nothing, he said. He stooped and picked up his hold-all.
‘Human male Byr Genar-Hofoen plus gelfield suit?’ said a sintricate, floating up to him. It looked, Genar-Hofoen thought, like an explosion in a sphere of black ink, frozen an instant after it began.
He bowed briefly. ‘Correct.’
‘I am to escort you to the Entity Control, human section. Please follow me.’
‘Certainly.’
They found a spin car, little more than a platform dotted with seats, stanchions and webbing. Genar-Hofoen hopped on, followed by the sintricate, and the car accelerated smoothly into a transparent tunnel which ran out along the underside of the habitat’s outer skin. They were heading spinward, so that as the car gained speed they seemed to lose weight. A field shimmered over the car, seeming to mould itself to the curved roof of the tunnel. Gases hissed. They went underneath the huge hanging bulk of one of the other Affronter ships, all blades and darkness. He watched as it detached itself from the habitat, falling massively, silently away into space and the circling stars. Another ship, then another and another dropped away after it. They disappeared.
~ What was the fourth ship? the man asked.
~ The Comet class light cruiser Furious Purpose, the suit said.
~ Hmm. Wonder where they’re off to.
The suit didn’t reply.
It was getting misty in the car. Genar Hofoen listened to gases hiss around him. The temperature was rising, the atmosphere in the field-shrouded car changing from an Affronter atmosphere to a human atmosphere. The car zoomed upwards for lower, less gravity intense levels, and Genar-Hofoen, used to Affronter gravity for these last two years, felt as though he was floating.
~ How long before we rendezvous with the Meatfucker? he asked.
~ Three days, the suit told him.
~ Of course, they won’t let you into the world proper, will they? the man said, as though realising this for the first time.
~ No, said the suit.
~ What’ll you do while I’m off having fun?
~ The same; I’ve already inquired ahead and come to an arrangement with a visiting Contact ship GP drone. So I shall be in Thrall.
It was Genar-Hofoen’s turn not to say anything. He found the whole idea of drone sex - even if it was entirely of the mind, with no physical component whatsoever - quite entirely bizarre. Ah well, each to his own, he thought.
‘Mr Genar-Hofoen?’ said a stunningly, heart-stoppingly beautiful woman in the post-Entity Reception Area, Human. She was tall, perfectly proportioned, her hair was long and red and extravagantly curled and her eyes were a luminous green just the right side of natural. Her loose, plain tabard exposed smoothly muscled, glossily tanned skin. ‘Welcome to Tier; my name’s Verlioef Schung.’ She held out a hand and shook his, firmly.
Skin on skin; no suit, at last. It was a good feeling. He was dressed in a semi-formal outfit of loose pantaloons and long shirt, and enjoying the lushly sensual sensation of the glidingly smooth materials on his body.
‘Contact sent me to look after you,’ Verlioef Schung said with a hint of ruefulness. ‘I’m sure you don’t need it, but I’m here if you do. I, ah . . . I hope you don’t mind.’ Her voice . . . her voice was something to immerse yourself in.
He smiled broadly and bowed. ‘How could I?’ he said.
She laughed, putting one hand over her mouth - and, of course, her perfect teeth - as she did so. ‘You’re very kind.’ She held out a hand. ‘May I take your bag?’
‘No, that’s all right.’
She raised her shoulders and let them drop. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’ve missed the Festival, of course, but there’s a whole gang of us who did, too, and we’ve sort of decided to have our own over the next few days and, well, frankly we need all the help we can get. All I can promise you is luxurious accommodation, great company and more delectable preparations than you can shake a principle at, but if you care to make the sacrifice, I promise we’ll all try to make it up to you.’ She flexed her eyebrows and then made a mock-frightened expression, pulling down the corners of her succulently perfect mouth.
He let her hold the look for a moment, then patted her on the upper arm. ‘No, thank you,’ he said sincerely.
Her expression became one of hurt sadness. ‘Oh . . . are you sure?’ she said in a small, softly vulnerable voice.
‘’Fraid so. Made my own arrangements,’ he said, with genuine but determined regret. ‘But if there was anyone who was likely to tempt me away from them, it would be you.’ He winked at her. ‘I’m flattered by your generous offer, and do tell SC I appreciate the trouble they’ve gone to, but this is my chance to cut loose for a few days, you know?’ He laughed. ‘Don’t worry; I’ll have some fun and then I’ll be ready to ship on out when the time comes.’ He fished a small pen terminal out of one pocket and waved it in front of her face. ‘And I’ll keep my terminal with me at all times.
Promise.’ He put the terminal back in his pocket.
She gazed intently into his eyes for a few moments, then lowered her eyes and then her head and gave a small shrug. She looked back up, expression ironic. When she spoke, her voice had changed as well, modulating into something deeper and more considered, almost regretful. ‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘I hope you enjoy yourself, Byr.’ She grinned. ‘Our offer stands, if you wish to reconsider.’ Brave smile. ‘My colleagues and I wish you well.’ She looked furtively round the busy concourse and bit her bottom lip, frowning slightly. ‘Don’t suppose you fancy a drink or something anyway, do you?’ she said, almost plaintively.
He laughed, shook his head, and bowed as he backed off, hoisting his hold-all over his shoulder.
Genar-Hofoen had arrived a few days after the end of Tier’s annual Festival. There was an air of autumnal desuetude mixed with high-summer torpor about the place when he arrived; people were cleaning up, calming down, getting back to normal and generally behaving themselves. He’d signalled ahead and succeeded in booking the services of an erotroupe as well as reserving a garden penthouse in the View, the best hotel on Level Three.
All in all, entirely worth passing up the rather too obvious advances of his perfect woman for (well, no it wasn’t . . . except it was when your perfect woman was almost certainly a Special Circumstances agent altered to look like the creature of your fantasies and sent to look after you, keep you happy and safe, when what you actually wanted was a bit of variety, some excitement and some un-Culture-like danger; his perfect partner certainly looked like the very splendid Verlioef Schung, but she was even more positively not SC, not Contact, and probably not even Culture either. It was that desire for strangeness, for apartness, for alienness they probably couldn’t understand).
He lay in bed, pleasantly exhausted, the odd muscle quivering now and again of its own accord, surrounded by sleeping pulchritude, his head buzzing with the after-effects of some serious glanding and watched the Tier news (Culture bias) channel on a screen hanging in the air in front of the nearest tree. An ear-pip relayed the sound.
Still leading with the Blitteringueh-Deluger saga. Then came a feature on the increase in Fleeting in Culture ships. Fleeting was when two or more ship Minds decided they were fed up being all by themselves and only being able to exchange the equivalent of letters; instead they got together, keeping physically close to each other so that they could converse. Operationally most inefficient. Some older Minds were worried it represented their more recently built comrades going soft and wanted the premise-states of Minds which would be constructed in the future to be altered to deal with this weak, overly chummy decadence.
Local news; there was a brief follow-up report basically saying that the mysterious explosion which had happened in dock 807b on the third day of the Festival was still a mystery; the Affronter cruiser Furious Purpose had been lightly damaged by a small, pure energy detonation which had done nothing more than locally burn off a layer of its scar-hull. An over-enthusiastic Festival prank was suspected.
Not quite so locally, the arguments were still going on about the creation of a new Hintersphere a few kiloyears anti-spinward. A Hintersphere was a volume of space in which FTL flights were banned except in the direst of emergencies, and life generally moved at a slower pace than elsewhere in the Culture. Genar-Hofoen shook his head at that one. Pretentious rusticism.
Nearer home again, back-up craft were only a day away from the location of the possible anomaly near Esperi. The discovering GCU was still reporting no change in the artifact. Despite requests from Contact section, various other Involved civilisations had sent or were sending ships to the general volume, but Tier itself had forgone dispatching a craft. To the surprise of most observers, the Affront had criticised the reaction of those who had decided to be nosy and had stayed severely away from the anomaly, though there were unconfirmed reports of increased Affront activity in the Upper Leaf Swirl, and just today four ships--
‘Off,’ Genar-Hofoen said quietly, and the screen duly vanished. One of the erotroupe stirred against him. He looked at her.
The girl’s face was the very image of that belonging to Zreyn Tramow, one-time captain of the good ship Problem Child. Her body was different from the original, altered in the direction of Genar-Hofoen’s tastes, but subtly. There were two like her and three who looked exactly like famous personalities - an actress, a musician and a lifestyler. Zreyn and Enhoff, Shpel, Py and Gidinley. They had all been perfectly charming as well as being quite plausible impersonators, but Genar-Hofoen thought you had to wonder at the mentality of people who actually chose to alter their appearance and behaviour every few days just to suit the tastes - usually though not always sexual - of others. But maybe he was just being a bit fuddy-duddyish. Perhaps they were slightly boring people otherwise, or perhaps they just liked a deal more variety in such matters than other people.
Whatever their motivations, all five had fallen politely asleep on the AG bed after the fun, which had been preceded by a meal and a party. The troupe’s Exemplary Couple, Gakic and Leleeril were asleep too, lying in each other’s arms on the carpet-like lawn between the bed platform and the stream which threaded its way from the tinkling waterfall and the pool. Detumesced, the man’s prick was almost normal looking. Genar-Hofoen felt slightly sleepy himself, but he was determined to stay awake for the whole holiday; he brushed the sleepiness back under the edges of his mind with a glandular release of gain. Doing this for three days solid would leave him needing lots of sleep, but there would be a week on the Grey Area/Meatfucker; plenty of time to recover. The buzz of gain coursed through him, clearing his head and ridding his body of the effects of fatigue. Gradually a feeling of rested, ready peacefulness washed over and through him.
He clasped his hands behind his neck and gazed happily upwards past the fronds of a couple of overhanging trees at the blue, cloud-strewn sky. Just that movement, performed in the gravity of Tier’s standard-G level, gave him a good, light, almost childishly enjoyable sensation. Affronter standard gravity was more than twice the Culture-promoted human norm, and he supposed it was a sign of how well and how easily his body had adapted to conditions on God’shole habitat that he had quickly and long since stopped noticing how much heavier he had felt from day to day.
A thought occurred to him. He closed his eyes briefly, going quickly into the semi-trance that the average Culture adult employed, when they needed to and could be bothered, to check on their physiological settings. He dug around inside various images of his body until he saw himself standing on a small sphere. The sphere was set at one standard gravity; his subconscious had registered the fact that he had been in a steady, reduced gravity field for longer than a few hours and had re-set itself. Left to its own devices, his body would now start to lose bone and muscle mass, thin the walls of his blood vessels and perform a hundred other tiny but consequential alterations the better to suit his frame, tissues and organs to that reduced severity of weight. Well, his subconscious was only doing its job, and it didn’t know he would be back in Affronter gravity again in a month or so. He increased the size of the sphere his image stood upon until it was back to the two point one gravities his body would have to readjust itself to once he returned to God’shole. There, that should do it. He cast a quick look round his internal states while he was here, not that there ought to be anything amiss; warning signs made themselves obvious automatically. Sure enough, all was well; fatigue being dealt with, presence of gain noted, blood sugar returning to normal, hormones generally being gathered back to optimum levels.
He came out of the semi-trance, opened his eyes and looked over at where the pen terminal lay on a sculpted, smoothly varnished tree stump at the bedside. So far he had mostly used it to check up on the replies from his Contact contacts, confirming what they could concerning this - so far - pleasantly undemanding mission. The terminal was supposed to blink a little light if it had a message stored for him. He was still waiting to hear from the GSV No
t Invented Here, the Incident Coordinator for the Excession. The terminal lay where he’d left it, dull. No new messages. Oh well.
He looked away and watched the clouds move in the sky for a while, then wondered what it looked like turned off.
‘Sky, off,’ he said, keeping his voice low.
The sky disappeared and the true ceiling of the penthouse suite was revealed; a slickly black surface studded with projectors, lights and miscellaneous bumps and indentations. The few gentle animal sounds faded away. In the View Hotel, every suite was a penthouse corner suite; there were four per floor, and the only floor which didn’t have four penthouse suites was the very top one, which, so that nobody in the lower floors would feel they were missing out on the real thing when it was available, was restricted to housing some of the hotel’s machinery and equipment. Genar-Hofoen’s was called a jungle suite, though it was entirely the most manicured, pest-free and temperately, temperature-controlled and generally civilised jungle he had ever heard of.
‘Night sky, on,’ he said quietly. The slick black ceiling was replaced by blackness scattered with sharply bright stars. Some animal noises resumed, sounding different compared to those heard in the daylight. They were real animals, not recordings; every now and again a bird would fly across the clearing where the bed was situated, or a fish would splash in the bathing pool or a chattering simian would swing across the forest canopy or a huge, glittering insect would burr delicately through the air.
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