He found that he could not move at all. Another moment of terror, at his paralysis and the fact he was at the mercy of somebody else.
Sorry. You were speaking there, not communicating There; you’re, ah, back in charge.
Quilan moved on the curl-pad and cleared his throat, checking that he controlled his own body again.
-~ All I was going to say was, No, no need. No need to talk about it.
-~ You sure? You haven’t been that distressed until now, not in the whole time we’ve been together.
I’m telling you I’m fine, all right?
Okay, all right.
Even if I wasn’t it wouldn’t matter anyway, would it? Not after tonight. I’m going to try and get more sleep now. We can talk later.
Whatever you say. Sleep well.
I doubt it.
He lay back and watched the dry-looking dark flurries of snow fling themselves whirling at the domed skylight in a soundless fury that seemed poised in meaning exactly halfway between comic and threatening: He wondered if the snow looked the same way to the other intelligence watching through his eyes.
He didn’t think any more sleep would come, and it did not.
The dozen or so civilisations which would eventually go on to form the Culture had, during their separate ages of scarcity, spent vast fortunes to make virtual reality as palpably real and as dismissibly virtual as possible. Even once the Culture as an entity had been established and the use of conventional currency had come to be seen as an archaic hindrance to development rather than its moderating enabler, appreciable amounts of energy and time – both biological and machine – had been spent perfecting the various methods by which the human sensory apparatus could be convinced that it was experiencing something that was not really happening.
Thanks largely to all this pre-existing effort, the level of accuracy and believability exhibited as a matter of course by the virtual environments available on demand to any Culture citizen had been raised to such a pitch of perfection that it had long been necessary – at the most profoundly saturative level of manufacturedenvironment manipulation – to introduce synthetic cues into the experience just to remind the subject that what appeared to be real really wasn’t.
Even at far less excessive states of illusory permeation, the immediacy and vividness of the standard virtual adventure was sufficient to make all but the most determinedly and committedly corporeal of humans quite forget that the experience they were having wasn’t authentic, and the very ubiquity of this common- place conviction was a ringing tribute to the tenacity, intelligence, imagination and determination of all those individuals and organ- isations down the ages who had contributed to the fact that, in the Culture, anybody anytime could experience anything anywhere for nothing, and never need worry themselves with the thought that actually it was all pretend.
Naturally, then, there was, for almost everybody occasionally and for some people pretty well perpetually, an almost ines- timable cachet in having seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt or generally experienced something absolutely and definitely for real, with none of this contemptible virtuality stuff getting in the way.
The avatar gave a snort. ‘They’re really doing it.’ It laughed with surprising heartiness, Kabe thought. It was not the sort of thing you expected a machine, or even the human-form representative of a machine, to do at all.
‘Doing what?’ he asked.
‘Reinventing money,’ the avatar said, grinning and shaking its head.
Kabe frowned. ‘Would that be entirely possible?’
‘No, but it’s partially possible.’ The avatar glanced at Kabe. ‘It’s an old saying.’
‘Yes, I know. “They’d reinvent money for this”,’ Kabe quoted. ‘Or something similar.’
‘Quite.’ The avatar nodded. ‘Well, for tickets to Ziller’s concert, they practically are. People who can’t stand other people are invit- ing them to dinner, booking deep-space cruises together – good grief – even agreeing to go camping with them. Camping!’ The avatar giggled. ‘People have traded sexual favours, they’ve agreed to pregnancies, they’ve altered their appearance to accommodate a partner’s desires, they’ve begun to change gender to please lovers; all just to get tickets.’ It spread its arms. ‘How wonderfully, bizarrely, romantically barbaric of them! Don’t you think?’
‘Absolutely,’ Kabe said. ‘Are you sure about “romantically”?’
‘And they have indeed,’ the avatar continued, ‘come to agree- ments that go beyond barter to a form of liquidity regarding future considerations that sounds remarkably like money, at least as I understand it.’
‘How extraordinary.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ the silver-skinned creature said. ‘Just one of those weird flash-fashions that jumps out of the chaos for an instant every now and again. Suddenly everybody’s a live symphonic music fan.’ It looked puzzled. ‘I’ve made it clear there’s no real room to dance.’ It shrugged, then swept an arm round to indicate the view. ‘So. What do you think?’
‘Most impressive.’
The Stullien Bowl was practically empty. The preparations for that evening’s concert were on schedule and under way. The avatar and the Homomdan stood on the lip of the amphitheatre near a battery of lights, lasers and effects mortars each of which quite dwarfed Kabe and, he thought, looked a lot like weapons.
The crisp blue day was a couple of hours old, the sun rising at their back. Kabe could just make out the tiny shadows he and the avatar were casting across a pattern of seats four hundred metres away.
The Bowl was over a kilometre across: a steeply raked coli- seum of spun carbon fibres and transparent diamond sheeting whose seats and platforms focused around a generously circular field which could adapt itself to accommodate various sports and a variety of concert and other entertainment configurations. It did have an emergency roof, but that had never been used.
The whole point of the Bowl was that it was open to the sky, and if the weather had to be of a certain type, well then Hub would do something it almost never did, and interfere meteorologically, using its prodigious energy projection and field-management capabilities to manipulate the elements until the desired effect was arrived at. Such meddling was inelegant, untidy and blunderingly coercive, but it was accepted that it had to be done to keep people happy, and that was, ultimately, Hub’s whole reason for being.
Technically, the Bowl was a giant specialised barge. It floated within a network of broad canals, slowly flowing rivers, broad lakes and small seas which stretched across one of Masaq’s more varied continent-Plates and along, through and across which it could – albeit rather slowly – navigate itself, so providing a wide choice of external backgrounds visible through the supporting
structure and above the stadium’s lip, including jagged, snow- strewn mountains, giant cliffs, vast deserts, carpeting jungles, towering crystal cities, vast waterfalls and gently swaying blimp tree forests.
For a particularly wild event, there was a rapids course; a giant, quickly flowing river the Bowl could descend like a monstrous inflatable riding the world’s biggest flume, monu- mentally spinning, tipping and bobbing until it encountered the vast cliff-encircled whirlpool at the bottom, where it simply revolved atop a swirling column of spiralling water being sucked plunging into a set of colossal pumps capable of emptying a sea, until one of Hub’s Superlifters came to hoist it bodily back up to its normal elevation among the waterways above.
For tonight’s performance the Bowl would be staying where it was, at the point of a small peninsula on the shores of Bandel Lake, Guerno Plate, a dozen continents to spinward from Xaravve. The peninsula’s point housed a collection of underground access points, various elegantly disguised storage and support buildings, a broad concourse lined with bars, cafes, restaurants and other entertainment venues, and a giant bracket-shaped dock where the Bowl underwent any necessary maintenance and repair.
The Bowl’s in-built strategic tactile, sound and light systems, even without any in-person participatory enhancement, were as good as they could possibly be; Hub took responsibility for the remaining external conditions.
The Bowl was one of six, all specifically constructed to provide venues for events which needed to be held outside. They were distributed across the world so that there ought always to be one in the right place at the right time, no matter what the required conditions.
‘Though of course,’ Kabe felt bound to point out, ‘you could have just one, and then slow down or speed up the whole Orbital, to synchronise.’
‘Been done,’ the avatar said sniffily.
‘I rather thought it might.’
The avatar looked up. ‘Ah ha.’ Directly overhead, just visible through the morning haze above, a tiny roughly rectangular shape was glowing with reflected sunlight.
‘What is that?’.
‘That is the Equator Class General Systems Vehicle Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall,’ the avatar said. Kabe saw its eyes narrow fractionally and a small smile formed about its lips and eyes. ‘It changed its course schedule to come and see the concert too.’ The avatar watched the shape grow bigger, and frowned. ‘It’ll have to move from there though; that’s where my air-burst meteorites are coming through.’