‘Thank you, Fivetide,’ Genar-Hofoen said, bowing. He thought himself rather overdressed. There was the gelfield suit itself of course, so much a second skin it was possible to forget he wore it all. Normally the suit was nowhere more than a centimetre thick and averaged only half that, yet it could keep him comfortable in environments even more extreme than that required for Affronter life.
Unfortunately, some idiot had let slip that the Culture tested such suits by Displacing them into the magma chambers of active volcanoes and letting them pop out again (not true; the laboratory tests were rather more demanding, though it had been done once and it was just the sort of thing a show-off Culture manufactory would do to impress people). This was definitely not the kind of information to bandy about in the presence of beings as inquisitive and physically exuberant as Affronters; it only put ideas into their minds, and while the Affront habitat Genar-Hofoen lived within didn’t re-create conditions on a planet to the extent that it had volcanoes, there had been a couple of times after Fivetide had asked the human to confirm the volcano story when he’d thought he’d caught the Diplomatic Force officer looking at him oddly, exactly as though he was trying to work out what natural phenomena or piece of apparatus he had access to he could use to test out this remarkable and intriguing protectivity.
The gelfield suit possessed something called a node-distributed brain which was capable of translating with seeming effortlessness every nuance of Genar-Hofoen’s speech to the Affronters and vice versa, as well as effectively rendering any other sonic, chemical or electromagnetic signal into human-meaningful information.
Unhappily, the processing power required for this sort of technical gee-whizzery meant that according to Culture convention the suit had to be sentient. Genar-Hofoen had insisted on a model with the intelligence fixed at the lower limit of the acceptable intellectual range, but it still meant that the suit literally had a mind of its own (even if it was ‘node-distributed’, – one of those technical terms Genar-Hofoen took some pride in having no idea concerning the meaning of). The result was a device which was almost as much a metaphorical pain to live with as it was in a literal sense a pleasure to live within; it looked after you perfectly but it couldn’t help constantly reminding you of the fact. Typical Culture, thought Genar-Hofoen.
Ordinarily Genar-Hofoen had the suit appear milkily silver to an Affronter over most of its surface while keeping the hands and head transparent.
Only the eyes had never looked quite right; they had to bulge out a bit if he was to be able to blink normally. As a result he usually wore sunglasses when he went out, which did seem a little incongruous, submerged in the dim photochemical fog characteristic of the atmosphere a hundred kilometres beneath the sun-lit cloud-tops of the Affront’s home world, but which were useful as a prop.
On top of the suit he usually wore a gilet with pockets for gadgets, gifts and bribes and a crotch-cupping hip holster containing a couple of antique but impressive-looking hand guns. In terms of offensive capability the pistols provided a sort of minimum level of respectability for Genar-Hofoen; without them no Affronter could possibly allow themselves to be seen taking so puny an outworlder seriously.
For the regimental dinner, Genar-Hofoen had reluctantly accepted the advice of the module in which he lived and dressed in what it assured him was a most fetching outfit of knee boots, tight trousers, short jacket and long cloak – worn off the shoulder – and (in addition to an even bigger pair of pistols than usual) had slung over his back a matched pair of what the module assured him were three-millimetre-calibre Heavy Micro Rifles, two millennia old but still in full working order, and very long and gleamingly impressive. He had balked at the tall, drum-shaped much betassled hat the module had suggested and they’d compromised on a dress/armoured half-helm which made it look as though something with six long metallic fingers was cradling his head from behind. Naturally, each article in this outfit was covered in its own equivalent of a gelfield, protecting it from the coldly corrosive pressure of the Affronter environment, though the module had insisted that if he wanted to fire the micro rifles for politeness’ sake, they would function perfectly well.
‘Sire!’ yelped the eunuch juvenile waiter, skittering to a stop on the nest-space surface at Fivetide’s side. Cradled in three of its limbs was a large tray full of transparent, multi-walled flasks of various sizes.
‘What?’ yelled Fivetide.
‘The alien guest’s foodstuffs, sir!’
Fivetide extended a tentacle and rummaged around on the tray, knocking things over. The waiter watched the containers topple, fall and roll on the tray it held with an expression of wide-eyed terror Genar-Hofoen needed no ambassadorial training to recognise. The genuine danger to the waiter of any of the containers breaking was probably small – implosions produced relatively little shrapnel and the Affronter-poisonous contents would freeze too quickly to present much of a danger – but the punishment awaiting a waiter who made so public a display of its incompetence was probably in proportion to that conspicuousness and the creature was right to be concerned. ‘What is this?’ Fivetide demanded, holding up a spherical flask three-quarters full of liquid and shaking it vigorously in front of the eunuch juvenile’s beak. ‘Is this a drink? Is it? Well?’
‘I don’t know, sir!’ the waiter wailed. ‘It – it looks like it is.’
‘Imbecile,’ muttered Fivetide, then presented the flask gracefully to Genar-Hofoen. ‘Honoured guest,’ he said. ‘Please; tell us if our efforts please you.’
Genar-Hofoen nodded and accepted the flask.
Fivetide turned on the waiter. ‘Well?’ he shouted. ‘Don’t just float there, you moron; take the rest to the Savage-Talker Battalion table!’ He flicked a tentacle towards the waiter, who flinched spectacularly. Its gas sac deflated and it ran across the floor membrane for the banqueting area of the nest space, dodging the Affronters gradually making their way in that direction.
Fivetide turned briefly to acknowledge the greeting slap of a fellow Diplomatic Force officer, then rotated back, produced a bulb of fluid from one of the pockets on his uniform and clinked it carefully against the flask Genar-Hofoen held. ‘To the future of Affront-Culture relations,’ he rumbled. ‘May our friendship be long and our wars be short!’ Fivetide squeezed the fluid into his mouth beak.
‘So short you could miss them entirely,’ Genar-Hofoen said tiredly, more because it was the sort of thing a Culture ambassador was supposed to say rather than because he sincerely meant it. Fivetide snorted derisively and dodged briefly to one side, apparently attempting to stick one tentacle-end up the anus of a passing Fleet Captain, who wrestled the tentacle aside and snapped his beak aggressively before joining in Fivetide’s laughter and exchanging the heartfelt hellos and thunderous tentacle-slaps of dear friends. There would be a lot of this sort of stuff this evening, Genar-Hofoen knew. The dinner was an all-male gathering and therefore likely to be fairly boisterous even by Affronter standards.
Genar-Hofoen put the flask’s nozzle to his mouth; the gelfield suit attached itself to the nozzle, equalised pressures, opened the flask’s seal and then – as Genar-Hofoen tipped his head back – had what for the suit’s brain was a good long think before it permitted the liquid inside to wash through it and into the man’s mouth and throat.
– Fifty-fifty water/alcohol plus traces of partially toxic herb-like chemicals; closest to Leisetsiker spirit, said a voice in Genar-Hofoen’s head. ~ If I were you I’d by-pass it.
~ If you were me, suit, you’d welcome inebriation just to mitigate the effects of having to suffer your intimate embrace, Genar-Hofoen told the thing as he drank.
~ Oh, we’re in tetchy mode are we! said the voice.
~ I don it with your good self.
‘It is good, by your bizarre criteria?’ Fivetide inquired, eye stalks nodding at the flask.
Genar-Hofoen nodded as the drink warmed its way down his throat to his stomach. He coughed, which had the effect of making the gelfield ball out round his mouth like silvery chewing gum for a moment – something which he knew Fivetide thought was the second funniest thing a human could do in a gelfield suit, only beaten for amusement value by a sneeze. ‘Unhealthy and poisonous,’ Genar-Hofoen told the Affronter. ‘Perfect copy. My compliments to the chemist.’
‘I’ll pass them on,’ Fivetide said, crushing his drinking bulb and flicking it casually at a passing servant. ‘Come now,’ he said, taking the human by the hand again. ‘Let’s to table; my stomach’s as empty as a coward’s bowels before battle.’
‘No no no, you have to flick it, like this, you stupid human, or the scratchounds’ll get it. Watch…’
Affronter formal dinners were held round a collection of giant circular tables anything up to fifteen metres across, each of which looked down into a bait-pit where animal fights took place between and during courses.