This wasn’t turning out as she’d hoped at all; no friends, no pets, no fun, and the more she thought about it, the riskier it all might be, the less certain she was what she was getting into. This whole thing was supposed to be an adventure, but this part on the ship was just boring and so would the return journey be as well, and in the middle lay who-knew-what? Everybody knew how devious SC was; what were they really up to, what did they really want her to do? Even if it did turn out to be somehow exciting and even fun, she wouldn’t be allowed to tell anybody about it, and where was the point in fun if you couldn’t talk about it later?
Of course, she could tell other people, but then she wouldn’t be able to stay in Contact. Hell, Churt was being ambiguous about whether she was in it now or not. Well was she or wasn’t she? Was this a real Contact and even SC mission she was engaged in – as she’d dreamed of, fantasised about since early childhood – or some extracurricular wheeze, even a test of some sort?
She bit the pillow, and the particular texture of the fabric in her mouth and between her teeth, and the sensation of her face being puffed-up while her eyes stung with tears, took her back to childhood again.
She raised her head, licking her top lip clear of the salty fluid, and then snorted and sniffed back both the tears and the snot that was filling her nose. She thought about glanding some calm, but decided not to. She did some deep breathing, then swivelled round on the bed and sat up and looked at herself in the reverser, raising her chin at the hideous image it showed and sniffing again and wiping her face with her hands and swallowing hard and fluffing out her hair (at least it could stay as it was), sniffing again, and stared herself in the eyes and forbade herself to cry or look away.
After a few minutes, her cheeks had dried and her eyes were coming clear again, losing their red puffiness. She was still abhorrently ugly and even disfigured by her own high standards, but she was not a child and she was still the same person inside. Ah well. She supposed a little suffering might do her some good.
She had always been pampered; all her hardships had been self-inflicted and recreational in the past. She had gone hungry and unwashed when hiking somewhere primitive, but there had always been food at the end of the day, and a shower or at the very least a peelspray to remove the grime and sweat.
Even the pain of what had felt on occasion like an irretrievably broken heart had consistently proved less lasting than she’d initially imagined and expected; the revelation that a boy’s taste was so grotesquely deficient he could prefer somebody else to her always reduced both the intensity and the duration of the anguish her heart demanded be endured to mark such a loss of regard.
She had always known there were too few real challenges in her life, too few genuine risks; it had all been too easy, even by Culture standards. While her life-style and material circumstances in Phage had been no different from that of any other person her age, it was true that just because the Culture was so determinedly egalitarian, what little hierarchic instinct remained in the population of the Rock manifested itself in the ascription of a certain cachet to belonging to one of the Founder Families.
In a society in which it was possible to look however one wanted to look, acquire any talent one wished to acquire and have access to as much property as one might desire, it was generally accepted that the only attributes which possessed that particular quality of interest which derives solely from their being difficult to attain were entry into Contact and Special Circumstances, or having some familial link with the Culture’s early days.
Even the most famous and gifted of artists – whether their talents were congenital or acquired – were not regarded in quite the same hallowed light as Contact members (and, somewhere really old, like Phage, direct descendants of Founders). Being a famous artist in the Culture meant at best it was accepted you must possess a certain gritty determination; at worst it was generally seen as pointing to a pitiably archaic form of insecurity and a rather childish desire to show off.
When there were almost no distinctions to be drawn between people’s social standing, the tiny differences that did exist became all the more important, to those who cared.
Ulver’s feelings about her family’s ancient name were mostly negative. Admittedly, possessing an old name meant some people were prepared to make an advance on any respect they might come to feel was rightly your due, but on the other hand Ulver wanted to be admired, worshipped and lusted after for herself, just her, just this current collection of cells, right here, with no reference to the inheritance those cells carried.
And what was the point of having what was sometimes insultingly referred to as an advantage in life if it couldn’t even smooth your way into Contact? If anything, it had been hinted, it was a disadvantage; she would have to do better than the average person, she would have to be so completely, utterly, demonstrably perfect for the Contact Section that there could be no question of anybody ever thinking she’d got in because the people and machines on the admissions board knew the name Seich from their history lessons.
Well, Churt had been right; this was her big chance. She had been and would be unamendedly beautiful, she was intelligent, charming and attractive and she had common sense by the bucket-load, but she couldn’t expect to breeze this the way she had breezed everything else in her, life so far; she’d work at it, she’d study, she’d be diligent, assiduous and industrious and all the other things she’d worked so hard at not being while ensuring that her university results had sparkled as brilliantly as her social life.
Maybe she had been a spoiled brat; maybe she still was a spoiled brat, but she was a ruthlessly determined spoiled brat, and if that ruthless determination dictated ditching spoiled brathood, then out it would go, faster than you could say ‘Bye.
Ulver dried her eyes, collected herself – still without the help of any glandular secretions – then got up and left the cabin. She would sit in the lounge where there was more space, and there she would find out all she could about Tier, this man Genar-Hofoen, and anything else that might be relevant to what they wanted her to do.
II
Leffid Ispanteli eased himself into the seat beside the vice-consul for the AhForgetlt Tendency, carefully hooking his wings over the seat back and smiling at the vice-consul, who regarded him with that particular kind of vacant look people tend to assume when they’re communicating by neural lace.
Leffid held up his hand. ‘Words, I’m afraid, Lellius,’ he said. ‘Had my lace removed for the Festival.’
‘Very primitive,’ vice-consul Lellius said approvingly, nodding gravely and returning his attention to the race.
They were sitting in a carousel suspended beneath a vast carbon-tubed structure sculpted in the image of a web tree; the thousands of viewing carousels dangled like fruit from the canopy and were multifariously connected by a secondary web of delicate, swaying cable bridges. The view beneath and to either side was of a series of great steps of stone dotted with vegetation and moving figures; it was very like looking at an ancient amphitheatre which had been lifted from the horizontal to the vertical and each of whose seat levels was able to rotate independently. The moving figures were ysner-mistretl combinations; the ysners were the huge two-legged flightless (and almost brainless) birds doing the running while their thinking was done by the mistretl jockey each carried on its back. Mistretls were tiny and almost helpless but brainy simians and the combination of one of them per ysner was a naturally occurring one from a planet in the Lower Leaf Spiral.
Ysner-mistretl races had been a part of life on Tier for millennia, and running them on a giant mandala two kilometres across composed of steps or levels all rotating at different speeds had been traditional for most of that time. The huge slowly turning race-course looked a little like Tier itself, which took its name from its shape.
Tier was a stepped habitat; its nine levels all revolved at the same speed, but that meant that the outer tiers possessed greater apparent gravity than those nearer the centre. The levels themselves were sectioned into compartments up to hundreds of kilometres long and filled with atmospheres of different types and held at different temperatures, while a stunningly complicated and dazzlingly beautiful array of mirrors and mirrorfields situated within the staggered cone of the world’s axis provided amounts of sunlight precisely timed, attenuated and where necessary altered in wavelength to mimic the conditions on a hundred different worlds for a hundred different intelligent species.