‘You can’t take them,’ the drone said loudly. ‘They’re not included in the invitation.’
‘I heard what you said yesterday, you know,’ Ulver said, shaking her head and leaning forward at the drone. ‘”Keep it secret”; I haven’t told them where we’re going.’
‘That’s not the point. When I said don’t tell a soul I meant don’t tell a soul you’re going, not don’t tell a soul exactly where you’re going.’
She laughed, throwing her head back. ‘Churt; real space here! My diary is a public document, hadn’t you noticed? There are at least three channels devoted to me – all run by rather desperate young men, admittedly, but nevertheless. I can’t change my eye colour without anybody on the Rock who follows fashion knowing about it within the hour. I can’t just disappear! Are you mad?’
‘And I don’t think the animals can come either,’ Churt Lyne said smoothly, ignoring her question. ‘The protira certainly can’t. There isn’t room on the ship.’
‘Isn’t room?’ she roared. ‘What size is this thing? Are you sure it’s safe?’
‘Warships don’t have stables, Ulver.’
‘It’s an ex- war ship!’ she exclaimed, waving her arms around. ‘Ow!’ She sucked at the knuckle she’d hit against the field cylinder.
‘Sorry. But still.’
‘What about my clothes?’
‘A cabin full of clothes is perfectly all right, though I don’t know for whose benefit you’re going to be wearing them.’
‘What about when I get to Tier?’ she cried. ‘What about this guy I’m not supposed to fuck? Am I supposed to just wander past him naked?’
‘Take two roomsful; three. Clothes are not a problem, and you can pick up more when you get there – no, wait a minute, I know how long it takes you to choose new clothes; just take what you want. Four cabins; there.’
‘But my friends!’
‘Tell you what; I’ll show you the space you’ve got to work with. Okay?’
‘Oh, okay,’ she said, shaking her head and sighing heavily.
The drone fed convincing-looking pictures of the ex-warship’s interior into Ulver’s brain through the neural lace.
She caught her breath. Her eyes were wide when the display stopped. She stared at the drone. ‘The rooms!’ she exclaimed. ‘The cabins; they’re so small!’
‘Quite. Still think you want to take your friends?’
She thought for a second. ‘Yes!’ she yelled, thumping a fist on the little tray floating at her side. It wobbled, trying not to spill the fruit juice. ‘It’d be cozy!’
‘What if you fall out?’
That stopped her for a moment. She tapped her lips with one finger, frowning into space. She shrugged. ‘I can cut people dead in a traveltube, Churt. I can ostracise people in the same bed.’ She leant towards the machine again then glanced round at the grey walls of the field cylinder. ‘I can ostracise people in something this big,’ she said pointedly, her hands on her hips. She put her head back, narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. ‘I could just refuse to go, you know.’
‘You could,’ the machine said with a pronounced sigh. ‘But you’d never get into Contact, and SC would be forced to try and get a double – a synthetic entity – to impersonate this woman on Tier. The authorities there wouldn’t be amused if they found out.’
She gazed levelly at the machine for a moment. She sighed and shook her head. ‘Bugger,’ she breathed, snatching the glass of fruit juice from the floating tray and looking in distaste at where the juice had run down the outside of the glass. ‘I hate this acting adult shit.’ She knocked the juice back, set the glass back down and licked her lips. ‘Okay; let’s go, let’s go!’
The goodbyes took a while. Churt Lyne glowed greyer and greyer with frustration until it turned into a sort of off-black sphere; then it dropped its aura field altogether and sped out of the nearest opened window. It raced around in the air outside for a while; a couple of sonic booms nearly had the mounts bolting.
Eventually, though, Ulver had said her farewells, decided to leave all her animals and two trunks of clothes behind and then – having remained serene in the midst of much hullabaloo and some tears from Klatsli – entered a traveltube with a frostily blue Churt Lyne and was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her.
Ulver laughed. ‘It looks,’ she snorted, ‘like a dildo!’
‘That’s appropriate,’ Churt Lyne said. ‘Armed, it can fuck solar systems.’
She remembered when she was a little girl and had stood on a bridge over a gorge in one of the other Interior Spaces; she had a stone in her hand and her mother had held her up to the bridge parapet so that she could look over the edge and drop the stone into the water below. She’d held the stone – it was about the same size as her little fist – right up to one eye and closed her other eye so that the dark stone had blotted out everything else she could see. Then she’d let it go.
She and Churt Lyne stood in the ship’s tiny hangar area, surrounded by her cases, bags and trunks as well as a deal of plain but somehow menacing-looking bits and pieces of military equipment. The way that stone had fallen towards the dark water then, shrinking and shrinking, was very like the way Phage Rock fell silently away from the old warship now.
This time, of course, there was no splash.
When Phage had entirely disappeared, she switched out of the view her neural lace had imported into her head and turned to the drone, thinking a thought that would have occurred to her a lot earlier, she hoped, if she’d been sober and unimpassioned over the last day.
‘When was this ship sent to Phage, Churt, and from where?’
‘Why don’t you ask it yourself?’ it said, turning to indicate a small drone approaching over the jumble of equipment.
~ Churt? she asked via the neural lace.
~ Yes?
~ Damn; I was hoping the ship’s rep might be a dazzling handsome young man. Instead it’s something that looks like a-
Churt Lyne interrupted:
~ Ulver; you are aware that the ship itself acts as exchange hub for these communications?
~ Oh dear, she thought, and felt herself colour as the little drone approached. She smiled broadly at it.
‘No offence,’ she said.
‘None taken,’ said the little machine as it came to a halt in front of her. It had a reedy but reasonably melodious voice.
‘For the record,’ she said, still smiling, and still blushing, ‘I thought you looked a bit like a jewellery box.’
‘Could have been worse,’ chipped in Churt Lyne. ‘You should hear what she calls me sometimes.’
The little drone’s snout dipped once in a sort of bow. ‘That’s quite all right, Ms Seich,’ it said. ‘Delighted to meet you. Allow me to welcome you aboard the Very Fast Picket Frank Exchange of Views.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, also nodding slowly. ‘I was just asking my friend where you’d come from, and when you’d been dispatched.’
‘I didn’t come from anywhere except Phage,’ the ship told her.
She felt her eyes widen. ‘Really?’
‘Really,’ it said laconically. ‘And the answer to your next three questions, I’d guess, are: because I was very well hidden and that’s actually quite easy in a conglomeration of matter the size of Phage; getting on for five hundred years; and there are another fifteen like me back home. I trust you are reassured rather than shocked and that we may rely on your discretion in the future.’
‘Oh, golly, absolutely,’ she said, nodding, and felt half inclined to click her heels and salute.
V
Dajeil had been spending a lot more time with the beasts. She swam with the great fish and the sea-evolved mammals and reptiles, she donned a flyer suit and cruised high above the sea with her wide wings extended alongside the dirigible creatures in the calm currents of air and the cloud layers, and she donned a full gelfield suit with a secondary AG unit and carved her way amongst the poison gases, the acid clouds and the storm bands of the upper atmosphere, surrounded by noxiousness and the ferocious beauty of the ecosystem there.
She even spent some time walking in the ship’s top-side parks, the nature reserves which the Sleeper Service had possessed even when it had been a regular, well-behaved GSV and diligent member of the Contact section; the parks – complete landscapes with hills, forests, plains, river and lake systems and the remains of small resort villages and hotels – covered all the great ship’s flat top surfaces and together measured over eight hundred square kilometres. With the humans gone from the ship there were fairly large populations of land animals in the park lands, including grazers, predators and scavengers.