The car stopped directly underneath the middle warcraft in the midst of a forest of giant pipes and tubes which disappeared into the belly of the ship. Crunches, thumps and hisses from outside the car announced all was being made safe. A wisp of vapour burst from a seal, and the car’s door swung out and up. There was a corridor beyond. An honour guard of Affronters jerked to attention; not for him, of course, but for Fivetide and the Affronter at his side dressed in the uniform of a Navy Commander. Both of them were half floating, half walking along towards him, paddles rowing and dangling limbs pushing.
‘And here’s our guest!’ Fivetide shouted. ‘Genar-Hofoen; allow me to present Commander Kindrummer VI of both the Blades-corner tribe and the Battle-Cruiser Kiss The Blade. So, human; ready for our little jaunt?’
‘Yup,’ he said, and stepped out into the corridor.
IV
Ulver Seich, barely twenty-two, famed scholastic overachiever since the age of three, voted Most Luscious Student by her last five University years and breaker of more hearts on Phage Rock than anybody since her legendary great-great-great grandmother, had been summarily dragged away from her graduation ball by the drone Churt Lyne.
‘Churt!’ she said, balling her fists in her long black gloves and nodding her head forward; her high heels clicked along the inlaid wood of the vestibule floor. ‘How dare you; that was a deeply lovely young man I was dancing with! He was utterly, utterly gorgeous; how could you just drag me away like that?’
The drone, hurrying at her back, dived round in front of her and opened the ancient, manually operated double doors leading from the ballroom vestibule, its suitcase-sized body rustling against the bustle of her gown as it did so. ‘I’m sorry beyond words, Ulver,’ it told her. ‘Now, please let’s not delay.’
‘Mind my bustle,’ she said.
‘Sorry.’
‘He was gorgeous,” Ulver Seich said vehemently as she strode down a stone-flagged hallway lined with paintings and urn plants, following the floating drone as it headed for the traveltube doors.
‘I’ll take your word for it,’ it said.
‘And he liked my legs,’ she said, looking down at the slashed front of the gown. Her long, exposed legs were sheathed in sheer blackness. Violet shoes matched her deep-cut gown; its short train hurried after her in quick, sinuous flicks.
‘They’re beautiful legs,’ the drone agreed, signalling ahead to the traveltube controls to hurry things up.
‘Damn right they are,’ she said. She shook her head. ‘He was gorgeous.’
‘I’m sure.’
She stopped abruptly. ‘I’m going back.’ She turned on her heel, just a little unsteadily.
‘What?’ yelped Churt Lyne. The drone darted round in front of her; she almost bumped into it. ‘Ulver!’ the machine said, sounding angry. Its aura field flashed white. ‘Really!’
‘Get out the way. He was gorgeous. He’s mine. He deserves me. Come on; shift.’
It wouldn’t get out of the way. She balled her fists again and beat at its snout, stamping her feet. She hiccuped.
‘Ulver, Ulver,’ the drone said, gently taking her hands in its fields. She stuck her head forward and frowned as hard as she could at the machine’s front sensory band. ‘Ulver,’ it said again. ‘Please. Please listen; this is-‘
‘What is it, anyway?’ she cried.
‘I told you; something you have to see; a signal.’
‘Well, why can’t you show it to me here? She looked round the hallway, at the softly lit portraits and the variegated fronds, creepers and parasols of the urn plants. ‘There isn’t even anybody else around!’
‘Because it just doesn’t work that way,’ Churt Lyne said, sounding exasperated. ‘Ulver, please; this is important. You still want to join Contact?’
She sighed. ‘I suppose so,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Join Contact and go exploring…’
‘Well, this is your invitation.’ It let go of her hands.
She stuck her head forward at it again. Her hair was an artful tangle of masked black curls studded with tiny helium-filled globes of gold, platinum and emerald. It brushed against the drone’s snout like a particularly decorative thundercloud.
‘Will it let me go exploring on that young man?’ she asked, trying to keep her face straight.
‘Ulver, if you will just do as I ask there is every chance Contact will happily provide you with entire ships full of gorgeous young men. Now, please turn round.’
She snorted derisively and went on tip-toes to look wobblingly over the machine’s casing in the direction of the ballroom. She could still hear the music of the dance she’d left. ‘Yeah, but it was that one I was interested in…’
The drone took her hands again in fields coloured yellow green with calm friendliness, bringing her down off her toes. ‘Young lady,’ it said. ‘I shall never say anything more truthful to you than these two things. One; there will be plenty more gorgeous young men in your life. Two; you will never have a better chance of getting into Contact, even Special Circumstances, and with them owing you a favour; or two. Do you understand? This is your big chance, girl.’
‘Don’t you “girl” me,’ she told it sniffily. The drone Churt Lyne had been a family friend for nearly a millennium and parts of its personality were supposed to date back to when they’d been programs in a house-systems computer nine thousand years earlier. It wasn’t in the habit of pulling age on her like this and reminding her that she was a mere day-fly to its creakingly venerable antiquity, but it wasn’t above doing so when it thought the situation demanded it, either. She closed one eye and looked closely at the machine. ‘Did you say “Special Circumstances” just there?’
‘Yes.’
She drew back. ‘Hmm,’ she said, her eyes narrowing.
Behind her, the traveltube chimed and the door rolled open. She turned and started walking towards it. ‘Well, come on, then!’ she said over her shoulder.
Phage Rock had been wandering the galaxy for nearly nine thousand years. That made it one of the Culture’s oldest elements. It had started out as a three-kilometre-long asteroid in a solar system which was one of the first explored by a species that would later form part of the Culture; it had been mined for metals, minerals and precious stones, then its great internal voids had been sealed against the vacuum and flooded with air, it had been spun to provide artificial gravity and it had become a habitat orbiting its parent sun.
Later, when the technology made it possible and the political conditions prevailing at the time made it advisable to quit that system, it had been fitted with fusion-powered steam rockets and ion engines to help propel it into interstellar space. Again due to those political conditions, it armed itself with up-rated signal lasers and a number of at least partially targetable mass launchers which doubled as rail guns. Some years later, scarred but intact, and finally accepted as personally sentient by its human inhabitants, it had been one of the first space-based entities to declare for the new pan-civilisational, pan-species grouping which was calling itself the Culture.
Over the years, decades, centuries and millennia that had followed, Phage had journeyed through the galaxy, wandering from system to system, concentrating on trading and manufacturing at first and then on a gradually more cultural, educatory role as the advances in technology the Culture was cultivating began to distribute the society’s productive capacity so evenly throughout its fabric that the ability to manufacture almost anything developed almost everywhere, and trade became relatively rare.
And Phage Rock – by now recognised as one of a distinct category of Culture artifacts which were neither ships nor worlds but something in between – had grown, accruing new bits of systemic or interstellar debris about it as its needs required and its population increased, securing the chunks of metal, rock, ice and compacted dust to its still gnarled outer surface in a slow process of acquisition, consumption and evolution, so that within just a millennium of its transition from mine to habitat its earlier, original self wouldn’t have recognised it; it was thirty kilometres long by then, not three, and only the front half of that initial body still peeped out from the prow of the knobbly collection of equipment-scattered mountains and expanded, balloon-like hangar and accommodation rotundae that now formed its roughly conical body.
Phage Rock’s rate of accretion had slowed after that, and it was now just over seventy kilometres long and home to one hundred and fifty million people. It looked like a collection of craggy rocks, smooth stones and still smoother shells brought from a beach and cemented into a rough cairn, all dotted with what looked like a museum collection of Culture Equipment Through the Ages: launch pads, radar pits, aerial frames, sensory arrays, telescope dishes, rail-gun pylons, crater-like rocket nozzles, clamshell hangar doors, iris apertures and a bewildering variety of domes large and small, intact and part-dismantled or just ruined.