Local news; there was a brief follow-up report basically saying that the mysterious explosion which had happened in dock 807b on the third day of the Festival was still a mystery; the Affronter cruiser Furious Purpose had been lightly damaged by a small, pure energy detonation which had done nothing more than locally burn off a layer of its scar-hull. An over-enthusiastic Festival prank was suspected.
Not quite so locally, the arguments were still going on about the creation of a new Hintersphere a few kiloyears anti-spinward. A Hintersphere was a volume of space in which FTL flights were banned except in the direst of emergencies, and life generally moved at a slower pace than elsewhere in the Culture. Genar-Hofoen shook his head at that one. Pretentious rusticism.
Nearer home again, back-up craft were only a day away from the location of the possible anomaly near Esperi. The discovering GCU was still reporting no change in the artifact. Despite requests from Contact section, various other Involved civilisations had sent or were sending ships to the general volume, but Tier itself had forgone dispatching a craft. To the surprise of most observers, the Affront had criticised the reaction of those who had decided to be nosy and had stayed severely away from the anomaly, though there were unconfirmed reports of increased Affront activity in the Upper Leaf Swirl, and just today four ships-
‘Off,’ Genar-Hofoen said quietly, and the screen duly vanished. One of the erotroupe stirred against him. He looked at her.
The girl’s face was the very image of that belonging to Zreyn Tramow, one-time captain of the good ship Problem Child. Her body was different from the original, altered in the direction of Genar-Hofoen’s tastes, but subtly. There were two like her and three who looked exactly like famous personalities – an actress, a musician and a lifestyler. Zreyn and Enhoff, Shpel, Py and Gidinley. They had all been perfectly charming as well as being quite plausible impersonators, but Genar-Hofoen thought you had to wonder at the mentality of people who actually chose to alter their appearance and behaviour every few days just to suit the tastes – usually though not always sexual – of others. But maybe he was just being a bit fuddy-duddyish. Perhaps they were slightly boring people otherwise, or perhaps they just liked a deal more variety in such matters than other people.
Whatever their motivations, all five had fallen politely asleep on the AG bed after the fun, which had been preceded by a meal and a party. The troupe’s Exemplary Couple, Gakic and Leleeril were asleep too, lying in each other’s arms on the carpet-like lawn between the bed platform and the stream which threaded its way from the tinkling waterfall and the pool. Detumesced, the man’s prick was almost normal looking. Genar-Hofoen felt slightly sleepy himself, but he was determined to stay awake for the whole holiday; he brushed the sleepiness back under the edges of his mind with a glandular release of gain. Doing this for three days solid would leave him needing lots of sleep, but there would be a week on the Grey Area/Meat fucker; plenty of time to recover. The buzz of gain coursed through him, clearing his head and ridding his body of the effects of fatigue. Gradually a feeling of rested, ready peacefulness washed over and through him.
He clasped his hands behind his neck and gazed happily upwards past the fronds of a couple of overhanging trees at the blue, cloud-strewn sky. Just that movement, performed in the gravity of Tier’s standard-G level, gave him a good, light, almost childishly enjoyable sensation. Affronter standard gravity was more than twice the Culture-promoted human norm, and he supposed it was a sign of how well and how easily his body had adapted to conditions on God’shole habitat that he had quickly and long since stopped noticing how much heavier he had felt from day to day.
A thought occurred to him. He closed his eyes briefly, going quickly into the semi-trance that the average Culture adult employed, when they needed to and could be bothered, to check on their physiological settings. He dug around inside various images of his body until he saw himself standing on a small sphere. The sphere was set at one standard gravity; his subconscious had registered the fact that he had been in a steady, reduced gravity field for longer than a few hours and had re-set itself. Left to its own devices, his body would now start to lose bone and muscle mass, thin the walls of his blood vessels and perform a hundred other tiny but consequential alterations the better to suit his frame, tissues and organs to that reduced severity of weight. Well, his subconscious was only doing its job, and it didn’t know he would be back in Affronter gravity again in a month or so. He increased the size of the sphere his image stood upon until it was back to the two point one gravities his body would have to readjust itself to once he returned to God’shole. There, that should do it. He cast a quick look round his internal states while he was here, not that there ought to be anything amiss; warning signs made themselves obvious automatically. Sure enough, all was well; fatigue being dealt with, presence of gain noted, blood sugar returning to normal, hormones generally being gathered back to optimum levels.
He came out of the semi-trance, opened his eyes and looked over at where the pen terminal lay on a sculpted, smoothly varnished tree stump at the bedside. So far he had mostly used it to check up on the replies from his Contact contacts, confirming what they could concerning this – so far – pleasantly undemanding mission. The terminal was supposed to blink a little light if it had a message stored for him. He was still waiting to hear from the GSV Not Invented Here, the Incident Coordinator for the Excession. The terminal lay where he’d left it, dull. No new messages. Oh well.
He looked away and watched the clouds move in the sky for a while, then wondered what it looked like turned off.
‘Sky, off,’ he said, keeping his voice low.
The sky disappeared and the true ceiling of the penthouse suite was revealed; a slickly black surface studded with projectors, lights and miscellaneous bumps and indentations. The few gentle animal sounds faded away. In the View Hotel, every suite was a penthouse corner suite; there were four per floor, and the only floor which didn’t have four penthouse suites was the very top one, which, so that nobody in the lower floors would feel they were missing out on the real thing when it was available, was restricted to housing some of the hotel’s machinery and equipment. Genar-Hofoen’s was called a jungle suite, though it was entirely the most manicured, pest-free and temperately, temperature-controlled and generally civilised jungle he had ever heard of.
‘Night sky, on,’ he said quietly. The slick black ceiling was replaced by blackness scattered with sharply bright stars. Some animal noises resumed, sounding different compared to those heard in the daylight. They were real animals, not recordings; every now and again a bird would fly across the clearing where the bed was situated, or a fish would splash in the bathing pool or a chattering simian would swing across the forest canopy or a huge, glittering insect would burr delicately through the air.
It was all terribly tasteful and immaculate, and Genar-Hofoen was already starting to look forward to the evening, when he intended to dress in his best clothes and hit the town, which in this case was Night City, located one level almost straight down, where, traditionally, anything on Tier that could breathe a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and tolerate one standard gravity – and had any sort of taste for diversion and excitement – tended to congregate.
A night in Night City would be just the thing to complete this first mad rush of fun at the onset of his short holiday. Calling ahead and ordering up a fabulously expensive erotroupe to act out his every sexual fantasy was one thing – one extremely wonderful and deeply satisfying thing, beyond all doubt, he told himself with all due solemnity – but the idea of a chance meeting with somebody else, another free, independent soul with their own desires and demands, their own reservations and requirements; that, just because it was all up to chance and up to negotiation, just because it all might end in nothing, in rejection, in the failure to impress and connect, in being found wanting rather than being wanted, that was a more valuable thing, that was an enterprise well worthy of the risk of rebuff.
He glanded charge. That ought to do it.
Seconds later, filled to bursting with the love of action, movement and the blessed need to be doing something, he was bouncing out of bed, laughing to himself and apologising to the sleepily grumbling but still palatably comely cast of the erotroupe.