A titanic, bone-resounding tremor shook the ground and rumbled over the tower while huge clouds of dust leapt billowing into the chilly air as the rock disappeared. Dajeil shook her head – her wet hair flapping on the sodden shoulders of her robe – then walked towards the doorway which led to the rest of the tower, intending to retreat there before the clouds of stone dust arrived.
The black bird Gravious made to settle on her shoulder; she shooed it off and it landed flapping uproariously on the edge of the opened trap door.
‘My tree!’ it screamed, hopping from leg to leg. ‘My tree! They’ve – I – my – it’s gone!’
‘Too bad,’ she said. The sound of another great tumble of falling rock split the skies. ‘Stay wherever it puts me,’ she told the bird. ‘If it’ll let you. Now get out of my way.’
‘But my food for the winter! It’s gone!’
”Winter has gone, you stupid bird,’ she told it. The black bird stopped moving and just perched there, head thrown forward and to one side, right eye staring at her, as though trying to catch some more meaningful echo of what she had just told it. ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’ll be accommodated.’ She waved it off its perch and it flapped noisily away.
A last earthquake of sound rolled under and over the tower. The woman Dajeil Gelian looked round at the twilight-lit rolling grey dust clouds to see the light from opened bays beyond shine through, as the pretence at natural form was dispensed with and the overall shape of the craft’s fabric began to reveal itself.
The Culture General Systems Vehicle Sleeper Service. No longer just her gallant protector and a grossly over-specified mobile game reserve… It seemed that the great ship had finally found something to become involved with which was more in keeping with the extent of its powers. She wished it well, though with trepidation.
The sea like stone, she thought. She turned and stepped down into the warmth of the tower, patting the bulge that was her sleeping, undreaming child. A stern winter indeed; harder than any of us had anticipated.
VI
Leffid Ispanteli was trying desperately to remember the name of the lass he was with. Geltry? Usper? Stemli?
‘Oh, yes, yes, ffffuck! Gods, yes! More, more; now, yes! There! There! Yes! That’s oohhh… !’
Soli? Getrin? Ayscoe?
‘Oh, fuck! There! More! Harder! Right… right… now! …Aah!’
Selas? Serayer? (Grief; how ungallant of him!)
‘Oh, sweet providence! Oh FUCK!’
No wonder he couldn’t think of her name; the girl was kicking up such a racket he was surprised he could think at all. Still, a chap shouldn’t grumble, he supposed; always nice to be appreciated. Even if it was the yacht that was doing most of the work.
The diminutive hire yacht continued to shudder and buck beneath them, spiralling and curving through space a few hundred kilometres away from the huge stepped world that was Tier.
Leffid had used these little yachts for this sort of thing before; if you fed a nicely jagged course into their computers they’d do most of the bumping and grinding for you while leaving just enough apparent gravity to brace oneself without leaving one feeling terribly heavy. Programming in the odd power-off interval gave moments of delicious free-fall, and drew the small craft further away from the great world, so that gradually the view beyond the viewing ports increased in majesty as more and more of the conical habitat was revealed, turning slowly and glittering in the light of the system’s sun. Altogether a wonderful way of having sex, really, providing one found a suitable and willing partner.
‘Aw! Aw! Aaawww! Force! Push, push, push; yes!’
She held his thrusting hips, smoothed his feathered scalp and used her other hand turned out to stroke his lower belly. Her huge dark eyes glittered, myriad tiny lights sparkling somewhere inside them in pulsing vortexes of colour and intensity that varied charmingly with the intensity of her pleasure.
‘Come on! Yes! Come on up; further! Further! Aaarrrhh.’
Dammit all; what was her name?
Geldri? Shokas? Esiel?
Grief; what if it wasn’t even a Culture name? He’d been certain it was but now he was starting to think maybe it wasn’t after all. That made it even more difficult. More excusable, maybe, too, but certainly more difficult too.
They’d met at the Homomdan Ambassador’s party to celebrate the start of the six-hundred and forty-fifth Festival of Tier. He’d resolved to have his neural lace removed for the month of the Festival, deciding that as this year’s theme was Primitivism he ought to give up some aspect of his amendments. The neural lace had been his choice because although there was no physical alteration and he looked just the same to everybody else, he’d reckoned he’d feel more different.
Which he did. It was oddly liberating to have to ask things or people for information and not know precisely what the time was and where he was located in the habitat. But it also meant that he was forced to rely on his own memory for things like people’s names. And how imperfect was the unassisted human memory (he’d forgotten)!
He’d even thought of having his wings removed too, at least partly to show that he was taking part in the spirit of the Festival, but in the end he’d stuck with them. Probably just as well; this girl had made a big thing about the wings; headed straight for him, masked, body glittering. She was nearly as tall as he was, perfectly proportioned, and she had four arms! A drink in each hand, too. His kind of female, he’d decided instantly, even as she was looking admiringly at his folded, snow-white wings. She wore some sort of gelsuit; basically deep blue but covered with a pattern like gold wire wrapped all over it and dotted with little diamonds of contrasting, subtly glowing red. Her whiskered mask was porcelain-bone studded with rubies and finished with iridescent badra feathers. Stunning perfume.
She handed him a glass and took off her mask to reveal eyes the size of opened mouths; eyes softly, blackly featureless in the lustrous lights of the vibrantly decorated dome until he’d looked carefully and seen the tiny hints of lights within their curved surfaces. The gelfield suit covered her everywhere except those heavily altered eyes and a small hole at the back of her head where a plait of long, shiningly auburn hair spilled out. Wrapped in gold wire, it ended at the small of her back and was tethered to the suit there.
She’d said her first name; the gelsuit’s lips had parted to show white teeth and a pink tongue.
‘Leffid,’ he’d replied, bowing deeply but watching her face as best he could while he did so. She’d looked up at his wings as they’d risen up and towards her over the plain black robe he’d worn. He’d seen her take a deep breath. The lights in her eyes had sparkled brightly.
Ah-ha! he’d thought.
The Homomdan ambassador had turned the riotously decorated, stadium-sized bowl that was her residential quarters into an old-fashioned fun-fair for the party. They had wandered through the acts, tents and rides, he and she, talking small talk, passing comment on other people they passed, celebrating the refreshing absence of drones at the party, discussing the merits of whirligigs, shubblebubs, helter-skelters, ice-flumes, quittletraps, slicicles, boing-braces, airblows, tramplescups and bodyflaggers, and bemoaning the sheer pointlessness of inter-species funny-face competitions.
She was on an improving tour from her home Orbital, cruising and learning with a party of friends on a semi-Eccentric ship that would be here as long as the Festival lasted. One of her aunts had some Contact contacts and had swung an invitation to the ambassador’s celebration; her friends were so jealous. He guessed she was still in her teens, though she moved with the easy grace of somebody older and her conversation was more intelligent and even shrewder than he’d have expected. He was used to being able to almost switch off talking to most teenagers but he was having to race after her meanings and allusions at time. Were teenagers getting even smarter? Maybe he was just getting old! No matter; she obviously liked the wings. She asked to stroke them.
He told her he was a resident of Tier, Culture or ex-Culture depending how you wanted to look at it; it wasn’t something he bothered about, though he supposed if forced he felt more loyalty to Tier, where he’d lived for twenty years, than to the Culture, where he’d lived for the rest of his life. In the AhForgetlt Tendency, that was, not the Culture proper, which the Tendency regarded as being far too serious and not nearly as dedicated to hedonistic pursuits as it ought to be. He’d first come here as part of a Tendency cultural mission, but stayed when the rest returned back to their home Orbital. (He’d thought about saying, Well, actually I was in the Tendency’s equivalent of Special Circumstances, kind of a spy, really, and I know lots of secret codes and stuff… but that probably wasn’t the sort of line that would work with a sophisticated girl like this.)