‘The Just Testing will remain here in any event,’ the drone said. ‘The very fast picket Xenophobe has been put at your disposal. It can uplift tomorrow, a little after noon, earliest… should you wish.’
Sma stood still for a moment, feet together and arms crossed, her lips pursed and face pinched. Skaffen-Amtiskaw introspected for a moment, and decided it felt sorry for her.
The woman was immobile and silent for a few seconds; then, abruptly, she was striding towards the turbine hall doors, heels clattering on the brick pathway.
The drone swooped after her, falling in at her shoulder. ‘What I wish,’ Sma said, ‘is that you had a better sense of timing.’
‘I’m sorry. Did I interrupt something?’
‘Not at all. And what the hell’s a “very fast picket” anyway?’
‘New name for a (Demilitarised) Rapid Offensive Unit,’ the drone said.
She glanced at it. It wobbled, shrugging.
‘It’s supposed to sound better.’
‘And it’s called the Xenophobe. Well that’s just fine. Can the stand-in pick up immediately?’
‘Noon tomorrow; can you de-brief up to…?’
‘Tomorrow morning.’ Sma said, as the drone flicked round in front of her and sucked the tall doors open; she strode through and leapt up the steps into the turbine hall, skirts gathered in front her her. The hralzs came skidding round the corner from the hall and gathered yelping and bouncing around her. Sma stopped, while they milled around her, sniffing her hems and trying to lick her hands.
‘No,’ she told the drone. ‘On second thoughts, scan me tonight, when I tell you. I’ll get rid of this lot early if I can. I’m going to find Ambassador Onitnert now, have Maikril tell Chuzleis she’s to get the minister over to the bar at turbine one in ten minutes. Make my apologies to the System Times hacks, have them taken back to the city and released; give them a bottle of nightflor each. Cancel the photographer, give him one still camera and let him take… sixty-four snaps, strictly full permission required. Have one of the male staff find Relstoch Sussepin and invite him to my apartments in two hours. Oh, and-‘
Sma broke off suddenly and went down on her haunches to cradle the long snout of one of the whimpering hralzs in her hands. ‘Gainly, Gainly, I know, I know,’ she said, as the big-bellied animal keened and licked at her face. ‘I wanted to be here to see your babies born, but I can’t…’ she sighed, hugged the beast, then held its chin in one hand. ‘What am I to do, Gainly? I could have you put to sleep until I come back, and you’d never know… but all your friends would miss you.’
‘Have them all put to sleep,’ the drone suggested.
Sma shook her head. ‘You take care of them till I get back,’ she told the other hralz. ‘All right?’ She kissed the animal’s nose and got up. Gainly sneezed.
‘Two other things, drone,’ Sma said, walking through the excited pack.
‘What?’
‘Don’t call me “Toots” again, all right?’
‘All right. What else?’
They rounded the gleaming bulk of the long-stilled number six turbine, and Sma stopped for a moment, surveying the busy crowd in front of her, taking a deep breath and straightening her shoulders. She was already smiling as she started forward and said quietly to the drone, ‘I don’t want the stand-in screwing anybody.’
‘Okay,’ the drone said as they went towards the partying people. ‘It is, after all, in a sense, your body.’
‘That’s just it, drone,’ Sma said, nodding to a waiter, who scurried forward, drinks tray proffered. ‘It isn’t my body.’
Aircraft and ground vehicles floated and wound away from the old power station. The important people had departed. There were a few stragglers left in the hall, but they didn’t need her. She felt weary, and glanded a little snap to lift the mood.
From the south balcony of the apartments fashioned from the station’s admin block, she looked down to the deep valley and the line of tail lights strung out along Riverside Drive. An aircraft whistled overhead, banking and disappearing over the tall curved lip of the old dam. She watched the plane go, then turned towards the penthouse doors, taking off the small formal jacket and slinging it over her shoulder.
Music was playing, deep inside the sumptuous suite beneath the roof garden. She headed instead for the study, where Skaffen-Amtiskaw was waiting.
The scan to update the stand-in took only a couple of minutes. She came round with the usual feeling of dislocation, but it passed quickly enough. She kicked off her shoes and padded through the soft dark corridors towards the music.
Relstoch Sussepin drew himself out of the seat he’d been occupying, still holding a softly glowing glass of nightflor. Sma stopped in the doorway.
‘Thank you for staying,’ she said, dropping the little jacket onto a couch.
‘That’s all right.’ He brought the glass of glowing drink towards his lips, then seemed to think the better of it, and cradled it in both hands instead. ‘What, ah… was there anything, in particular you…?’
Sma smiled, somehow sadly, and put both hands on the wings of a big revolving chair, which she stood behind. She looked down at the hide cushion. ‘Perhaps, now, I’m flattering myself,’ she said. ‘But, not to put too fine a point on it…’ She looked up at him. ‘Would you like to fuck?’
Relstoch Sussepin stood stock still. After a while he raised the glass to his lips and took a long slow drink, then brought the glass slowly back down again. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I wanted to… instantly.’
‘There’s only tonight,’ she said, holding up one hand. ‘Just tonight. It’s difficult to explain, but from tomorrow onwards… for maybe half a year or more, I’m going to be incredibly busy; two-places-at-once sort of busy, you know?’
He shrugged. ‘Sure. Anything you say.’
Sma relaxed then, and a smile grew gradually on her face. She pushed the big chair round and slid the bracelet from her wrist to let it fall into the seat. Then she gently unbuttoned the top of her gown, and stood there.
Sussepin drained his glass, placed it on a shelf, and walked towards her.
‘Lights,’ she whispered.
The lights slowly dimmed, right down, until eventually the softly glowing dregs of the finished drink made the glass on the shelf the brightest thing in the room.
* * *
XIII
‘Wake up.’
He woke up.
Dark. He straightened, beneath the covers, wondering who had talked to him like that. Nobody talked to him in that tone, not any more; even half asleep, coming unexpectedly awake in what must be the middle of the night, he heard something in that tone he hadn’t heard for two, maybe three decades. Impertinence. Lack of respect.
He brought his head out of the sheltering cover, into the warm air of the room, and looked round in the one-light gloom, to see who had dared address him like that. An instant of fear – had somebody got past the guards and security screens? – was replaced by a furious hunger to see who had the effrontery to speak like that to him.
The intruder sat in a chair just beyond the end of the bed. He looked odd in a way which was itself odd; a very new sort of unusualness, unplaceable, even alien. He gave the impression of being a slightly skewed projection. The clothes looked strange too; baggy, brightly coloured, even in the dim light of the bedside lamp. The man was dressed like a clown or a jester, but his somehow too symmetrical face looked… grim? Contemptuous? That… foreignness made it difficult to tell.
He started to grope for his glasses, but it was just sleep in his eyes. The surgeons had given him new eyes five years ago, but sixty years of short-sightedness had left him with an ingrained reaction to reach for glasses which were not there, whenever he first woke up. A small price to pay, he had always thought, and now, with the new retro-ageing treatment… The sleep cleared from his eyes. He sat up, looking at the man in the chair, and began to think he was having a dream, or seeing a ghost.
The man looked young; he had a broad, tanned face and black hair tied back behind his head, but thoughts of spirits and the dead came into his head not because of that. It was something about the dark, pit-like eyes, and the alien set of that face.
‘Good evening, Ethnarch.’ The young man’s voice was slow and measured. It sounded, somehow, like the voice of someone much older; old enough to make the Ethnarch feel suddenly young in comparison. It chilled him. He looked around the room. Who was this man? How had he got in here? The palace was meant to be impregnable. There were guards everywhere. What was going on? The fear came back.