Surface Detail

itself a part of a brown-dwarf binary system, leaving the giant double-cake of the Bulbitian bathed in the long- frequency radiations of the whole, still hazily dusty system and its artificially maintained skies punctuated by the blue-white glares of the Wisp’s younger stars, where their light was able to struggle through the great slow- swirling clouds and nebulas of dust still in the process of building new suns.

This particular Bulbitian had been colonised by several different species over the milleons, the current nominal occupiers being nobody in particular. Some long time ago the structure had had a stabilised singularity placed at its hollowed-out centre, a black hole which provided about a third of what pan-humans chose to deem one standard gravity. This was very close to the limit that an Unfallen Bulbitian could take without the whole structure collapsing in on itself. It didn’t help that the structure had originally been spun to provide the semblance of gravity, but no longer did so, meaning that — due to the absence of spin and the presence of the singularity — up had become down, and down up.

People had tried to do this sort of thing to Bulbitians before and paid, usually very messily, with their lives; the structures themselves seemed to object to being messed around with, and either activated defence systems nobody had known were there in the first place or had been somehow able to call on somebody else’s highly effective resources.

This one had allowed the contained singularity to be placed at its core but — given that in every other respect it was just as eccentric, wilful and occasionally murderously unpredictable as any other Bulbitian — nobody had ever dared to try and remove the black hole, even though it did arguably make the structure as unstable physically as it had always been behaviourally.

Nobody knew who had last been in charge of the place, or what had happened to them. This was, obviously, worrying, though no more worrying than any random phenomenon associated with any other Bulbitian.

Whoever it had been, they had obviously liked it hot, hazy and wet.

The Bodhisattva entered the six-thousand-kilometre-wide bubble of cloudy air surrounding the Bulbitian very slowly, like a thick needle somehow persuading the balloon it was penetrating not to pop, out of sheer politeness.

Yime watched the ship’s careful, gentle progress via a screen in her quarters as she packed a bag, in case she had to quit the Bodhisattva on little notice. Finally, the dripping rear end of the ship’s outermost horizon field parted company with the glisteningly adhesive internal surface of the Bulbitian’s atmospheric bubble. The view started to tilt as the ship rotated to position itself compatibly with the structure’s own gentle gravity field.

“Safely inside?” Yime asked, snapping her bag shut.

“… Inside,” the ship replied.

There were no confirmed reports of Culture ships suffering injury or destruction at the behest of a Bulbitian, but the space craft of other civilisations on the same technological level — and arguably of no less moral worth — had very occasionally been bizarrely crippled or had outright disappeared, at least allegedly, and so even Culture vessels — not normally known for their caution in such matters — tended to think twice before breezing up to your average Bulbitian with a cheery Hail fellow-entity!

The Bodhisattva moved on through a hothouse atmosphere of slow-swirling weather systems, giant grey-brown blister-clouds and long sweeping swathes of darkly torrential rain.

“Yime Nsokyi, I presume,” the elderly lady said. “Welcome to the Unfallen Bulbitian, Semsarine Wisp.”

“Thank you. And you…?”

“Fal Dvelner,” the woman said. “Here, have an umbrella.”

“Allow me,” said the ship’s drone, taking the offered device before Yime could accept it. They were still under the ship itself, so sheltered from the rain for the moment. It was so dark the main light came from the big drone’s aura field, which was formal blue mixed with green good humour.

The Bodhisattva had backed carefully up to the structure’s only in-use landing entrance, hovering a few metres above the puddled surface of the landing pier itself, which was made of ancient, pitted metals the colour of mud. From the part of the ship nearest to the wide, bowed entryway into the Bulbitian to the entrance itself was only twenty metres, but the deluge was so heavy it would soak anybody crossing the rain-hazed surface of the pier.

“I was expecting somebody else,” Yime said as they walked splashing along under the jet-black under- surface of the ship. In the low gravity, she found herself imitating the floaty, bouncing gait of the older woman. The rain-drops were huge, slow-falling, slightly oblate spheres. Splashes from below, she noted, could soak you quite thoroughly in low gravity. Her ankle boots and trousers were already quite wet. Ms. Dvelner wore glossy thigh boots and a slick-looking shift, both of which were doubtless much more practical in the conditions. Yime carried her own bag. The air felt warm, and as humid as having a soaking, blood-temperature cloth applied to the face. The atmosphere seemed to press in and down, as though the floating bulk of the million-tonne ship directly above was somehow truly bearing down on her, for all that in reality it was supported within a dimension not even visible, and weighed, right now, within the frame of reference accessible to her, precisely nothing.

“Ah, yes; Mr. Nopri,” Fal Dvelner said, nodding. “He’ll be being unavoidably detained, I dare say.” Dvelner looked to be in about the last quarter of her life; spry, but delicately thin and white haired with a face that contained distinct lines. “He’s your Quietus rep here. I’m with the Numina mission.”

Numina was the part of the Culture’s Contact section that concerned itself with the Sublimed, or at least tried to. It was sometimes known as the Department Of What The Fuck?

“Why might Mr. Nopri be unavoidably detained?” Yime asked, raising her voice over the noise of the downpour. They were coming close to where the great snub nose of the ship rose like an obsidian cliff through the rain-filled air above. The ship had extended a field to shelter them from the rain; a dry corridor three metres wide extended all the way across the pier to the brightly lit entrance.

“Funny old places, Bulbitians,” Dvelner said quietly, arching one brow. She shook her umbrella out and opened it, nodded to the ship-drone, which was a soap-bar smooth, old-fashioned design nearly a metre long. The drone made a noise that might been “Hmm,” and flicked the umbrella open over Yime as they walked out from beneath the nose of the Bodhisattva.

The ship rocked; the whole three-hundred-metre length of it wobbled visibly in the air as the corridor it had made for them through the rain just disappeared, letting the rain thunder down around them. The downpour was so heavy Yime saw Dvelner’s arm sink appreciably as the weight of water hit the umbrella she was carrying. Given that they were bouncing along in only a third of standard G, this implied a lot of water, or a very weak old lady, Yime supposed.

“Here,” Yime said, taking the umbrella protecting her from the drone’s maniple field. She inclined her head towards Dvelner and the drone moved smoothly through the torrent, gently taking the handle of the umbrella from the older woman.

“Thank you,” Dvelner said.

“Did I just see you move?” Yime asked the ship’s drone.

“You did.”

“So what was all that about?”

“Anywhere else, I’d treat that as an attack,” the ship said through the drone, casually. “You don’t interfere with a GCU’s fields, even if all they’re doing is keeping the rain off somebody.”

Beside her, Ms. Dvelner snorted. Yime glanced at her, then said to the drone, “It can do that?”

“It can try to,” the drone said, its voice pitched to affable reasonableness, “with the implicit threat that if I didn’t let it it would get upset and try harder, which, as I say, anywhere else I’d take as tantamount to a challenge. However. My own field enclosures were never put under threat, I am a Quietus ship after all, and this is a particularly sensitive and special Bulbitian, so I chose to let it have its way. This is its turf, after all, and I am the guest-cum-intruder.”

“Most ships stay outside the bubble,” Dvelner said, also raising her voice over the rain as they neared the entrance way and the sounds of the cataracts of water falling off the towering facade above increased in volume. The yellow lights inside shone through the thick, trembling bubbles of the rain as though through a rippled, transparent curtain.

“So I understand,” the ship said. “As I say, though; I am a Quietus ship. However, if the Bulbitian would rather I stayed beyond its atmospheric sphere, I will be happy to oblige.” The drone made a show of turning to Yime. “I’ll leave a shuttle.”