Then it located Amorphia – the avatar was wandering bemused through kilometres of tableaux exhibition space that had once been accommodation sections – and instructed it to re-visit the woman Dajeil Gelian.
IV
Genar-Hofoen was distinctly unimpressed with his quarters aboard the Battle-Cruiser Kiss The Blade. For one thing, they smelled.
~ What is that? he asked, his nose wrinkling. ~ Methane?
~ Methane is odourless, Genar-Hofoen, the suit said. ~ I believe the smell you find objectionable may be a mixture of methanal and methylamine.
~ Fucking horrible smell, whatever it is.
~ I’m sure your mucous membrane receptors will cease to react to it before long.
~ I certainly hope so.
He was standing in what was supposed to be his bedroom. It was cold. It was very big; a ten-metre square – plenty of headroom – but it was cold; he could see his breath. He still wore most of the gelfield suit but he’d detached all but the nape-part of the neck and let the head of the suit flop down over his back so that he could get a fresher impression of his quarters, which consisted of a vestibule, a lounge, a frighteningly industrial-looking kitchen-diner, an equally intimidatingly mechanical bathroom and this so-called bedroom. He was starting to wish he hadn’t bothered. The walls, floor and ceiling of the room were some sort of white plastic; the floor bulged up to create a sort of platform on which a huge white thing lay spread, like a cloud made solid. ~ What, he asked, pointing at the bed, ~ is that?
~ I think it is your bed.
~ I’d guessed. But what is that… thing lying on it?
~ Quilt? Duvet? Bed-covering.
~ What do you want to cover it for? he asked, genuinely confused.
~ Well, it’s more to cover you, I think, when you’re asleep, the suit said, sounding uncertain.
The man dropped his hold-all onto the shiny plastic floor and went forward to heft the white cloudy thing. It felt quite light. Possibly a little damp, unless the suit’s tactiles were getting confused. He pulled a glove-section back and touched the bed-cover thing with his bare skin. Cold. Maybe damp. ~ Module? Genar-Hofoen said. He’d get its opinion on all this.
~ You can’t talk to Scopell-Afranqui directly, remember? the suit said politely.
~ Shit, Genar-Hofoen said. He rubbed the material of the bedcover between his fingers. ~ This feel damp to you, suit?
~ A little. Do you want me to ask the ship to patch you through to the module?
~ Eh? Oh, no; don’t bother. We moving yet?
~ No.
The man shook his head. ~ Horrible smell, he said. He prodded the bed-cover thing again. He wished now he’d insisted that the module be accommodated on board the ship so that he could live inside it, but the Affronters had said this wasn’t possible; hangar space was at a premium on all three ships. The module had protested, and he’d made supportive noises, but he had been rather entertained by the idea that Scopell-Afranqui would have to stay here while he went zapping off to far-off parts of the galaxy on an important mission. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure.
There was a distant growling noise and a tremor underfoot; then there came a jerk that almost threw the human off his feet. He staggered to one side and had to sit down on the bed.
It made a squelching sound. He stared at it, aghast.
~ Now we’re moving, said the suit.
V
Singing softly to himself, the man tended the little fire he had started on the floor of the hall, beneath and between the stored ships, arrayed in the blackness like the trunks of enormous trees in a silent, petrified forest. Gestra Ishmethit was surveying his charges in the deep-buried darkness that was Pittance.
Pittance was a huge irregular lump of matter, two hundred kilometres across at its narrowest point and ninety-eight per cent iron by volume. It was the remnant of a catastrophe which had occurred over four billion years earlier, when the planet of whose core it had been part had been struck by another large body. Expelled from its own solar system by that cataclysm, it had wandered between the stars for a quarter of the life of the universe, uncaptured by any other gravity well but subtly affected by all it passed anywhere near. It had been discovered drifting in deep space a millennium ago by a GCU taking an eccentrically trajectorial course between two stellar systems, it had been given the brief examination its simple and homogeneous composition deserved and then had been left to glide, noted, effectively tagged, untouched, but given the name Pittance.
When the time came, five hundred years later, to dismantle the colossal war machine the Culture had created in order to destroy that of the Idirans, Pittance had suddenly been found a role.
Most of the Culture’s warships had been decommissioned and dismantled. A few were retained, demilitarised, to act as express delivery systems for small packages of matter – humans, for example – on the rare occasions when the transmission of information alone was not sufficient to deal with a problem, and an even smaller number were kept intact and operational; two hundred years after the war ended, the number of fully active warcraft was actually smaller than it had been before the conflict began (though, as the Culture’s critics never tired of pointing out, the average – and avowedly completely peaceful – General Contact Unit was more than a match for the vast majority of alien craft it was likely to bump into over the course of its career).
Never a civilisation to take too many risks, however, and priding itself on the assiduity of its bet-hedging, the Culture had not disposed of all the remaining craft; a few thousand – representing less than a per cent of the original total – were kept in reserve, fully armed save for their usual complement of Displacer-dispatched explosive warheads (a relatively minor weapon system anyway), which they and other craft would manufacture in the event of mobilisation. Most of the mothballed ships were retained within a scattering of Culture Orbitals, chosen so that if there ever was an emergency which the craft would be required to deal with, no part of the greater galaxy would be more than a month or so’s flight away.
Still guarding against threats and possibilities even it found difficult to specify, some of the Culture’s stored warvessels were harboured not in or around highly populated Orbitals full of life and the comings and goings of cruise ships and visiting GSVs, but in places as far out of the way as it was possible to find amongst the cavernously cold and empty spaces of the great lens; quiet, secret, hidden places; places off the beaten track, places possibly nobody else even knew existed.
Pittance had been chosen as one of those places.
The General Systems Vehicle Uninvited Guest and a fleet of accompanying warcraft had been dispatched to rendezvous with the cold, dark, wandering mass. It was found exactly where it had been predicted it ought to be, and work began. Firstly, a series of enormous halls had been hollowed out of its interior, then a precisely weighed and shaped piece of the matter mined from one of those giant hangars had been aimed with millimetric accuracy and fired at Pittance by the GSV, leaving a small new crater on the surface of the world, exactly as though it had been struck by another, smaller, piece of interstellar debris.
This was done because Pittance wasn’t spinning quite quickly enough or heading in exactly the right direction for the Culture’s purposes; the exquisitely engineered collision made both alterations at once. So Pittance spun a little quicker to provide a more powerful hint of artificial gravity inside and its course was altered just a fraction to deflect it from a star system it would otherwise have drifted through in five and a half thousand years or so.
A number of giant Displacer units were set within the fabric of Pittance and the warships were safely Displaced, one at a time, into the giant spaces the GSV had created. Lastly, a frightening variety and number of sensory and weapon systems had been emplaced, camouflaged on the surface of Pittance and buried deep underneath it, while a cloud of tiny, dark, almost invisible but apocalyptically powerful devices were placed in orbit about the slowly tumbling mass, also to watch for unwelcome guests, and – if necessary – welcome them with destruction.
Its work finished, the Uninvited Guest had departed, taking with it most of the iron mined from Pittance’s interior. It left behind a world that – save for that plausible-looking extra crater – seemed untouched; even its overall mass was almost exactly as it had been before, again, minus a little to allow for the collision it had suffered, the debris of which was allowed to drift as the laws of gravity dictated, most of it sailing like lazy shrapnel spinning into space but a little of it – captured by the tiny world’s weak gravitational field – drifting along with it, and so incidentally providing perfect cover for the cloud of black-body sentry devices.