With a last crash of drumming rain straining the bowing material of the umbrellas, they walked into the wide entrance to be met by a tall young man dressed quite similarly to Yime, though much less smartly. He was struggling and failing to open another umbrella. He was swearing quietly, then looked up, saw them, stopped swearing, smiled instead and threw the umbrella aside.
“Ms. Dvelner, thank you,” he said, nodding to the older woman, who was frowning suspiciously at him. “Ms. Nsokyi,” he said, taking her hand in his; “welcome.”
“Mr. Nopri?” Yime said.
He sucked air through his teeth. “Well, yes and no.” He looked pained.
Yime looked at Dvelner, who had closed her eyes and might have been shaking her head. Yime looked back at Nopri. “What would constitute the grounds for the ‘no’ part?”
“Technically the person you were expecting — the me you were expecting — is dead.”
The television was old, its casing made of wood, its thick glass screen bulbous and the image displayed on it monochrome. It showed a half-dozen dark shapes like long, jagged spear points hurtling down from a black sky riven with lightning. He reached over and turned it off.
The doctor tapped her pen on the side of her clipboard. She was pale, had short brown hair, wore glasses; she looked half his age. She wore a dull grey suit and a white coat, like doctors were meant to. He wore standard army fatigues.
“You should really watch it to the end,” she said.
He looked at her, sighed, then reached over and turned the set back on again. The dark spearhead shapes fell, formation splitting up as they twisted and wove their way through what might have been air or not. The camera stayed with one of the spearheads in particular, remaining on it after the others had disappeared. It fell past wherever the camera was watching all this from and as the view tipped, following it. The screen filled with light.
It was a poor representation; the image was too small, too grainy and smeary to do justice to the sight, even if it had been in colour. In vaguely green-tinged black-and-white it was just a mess. You could hardly see the spearhead shape now; its presence was only revealed by its quickly shrinking shadow occluding some parts of the flares and pools and rivers of light beneath.
Then a point of light seemed to detach from the lights below and rise to meet the spearhead shape, which rolled and flicked and twisted ever more desperately until the rising point of light flashed past both the spearhead and the camera. A dozen more points of light rose from the lightscape, followed by another, bigger barrage, and another. Just visible at the distorted edge of the screen, more sets of sparks rose fanning out towards the other spearheads. The spearhead the camera was following dodged three of the incoming lights, then one of them winked out just behind it; a moment later the spearhead shape was silhouetted, caught three-quarters to side on in a flare of light bursting all around it, drowning out the view below.
The screen washed out with light. Even on the old, muddy looking screen the flash of brilliance somehow startled the eye.
The screen went dark.
“Satisfied?” Vatueil asked.
The young doctor said nothing, made a note.
They were in an anonymous office filled with anonymous furniture. They sat in two cheap chairs in front of a desk. The crude looking television was perched on the surface of the desk, between them; a power cable made S shapes across the desk and floor to a wall socket. A window with half-open vertical blinds looked out onto a white-tiled lightwell. The white tiles looked grimy; the lightwell let in little light. A buzzing fluorescent lamp was set diagonally across the ceiling, shedding a flat glare that gave the young doctor’s pale face an unhealthy pallor. Probably his too, though he had darker skin.
A faint rising and falling feeling, and a sensation that the whole room and lightwell were moving a little from side to side, clashed with the obvious impression that they were in a conventional building on land. There was a degree of regularity, a periodicity to the various oscillations, and Vatueil was trying to work out the intervals involved. There seemed to be at least two: a long one lasting about fifteen or sixteen heartbeats and a shorter one of about a third of that. He was using heartbeats because he had no watch or phone or terminal and there wasn’t a clock visible anywhere in the room either. The doctor wore a watch but it was too small for him to make out.
They must be on a ship or barge. Maybe some sort of floating city. He had no idea; he’d just woken up here, sitting in this cheap looking chair in this bland office room, being made to watch lo-fi video on an ancient screen device called a television. He’d already had a prowl round the space; the door was locked, the lightwell went down another four storeys to a small, leaf-litter-filled courtyard. The young doctor had just sat there, asking him to sit down and making notes on her clipboard while he’d looked round. The drawers in the room’s single desk — wood, battered-looking — were locked too, as was the single dented grey mild steel filing cabinet. No telephone, comms screen, terminal or sign that there was anything intelligent and helpful listening or present. There was even a switch for the ceiling light, for fate’s sake.
He’d looked over the doctor’s shoulder at the notes she was taking, but they were in a language he didn’t recognise. He wondered how long he was expected to give it before he tried threatening the doctor or shoulder- charging the flimsy-looking door.
He looked up at what was obviously a suspended ceiling. Maybe he could crawl his way out.
“Just tell me what you want to know,” he said.
The doctor made another note, crossed her legs, said, “What do think we might want to know?”
He put his hands to his face, wiped back from his nose to his cheeks and then ears. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know, do I?”
“Why did you think we might want to know anything?”
“I attacked you,” he told her, pointing at the wooden box that held the screen. “That was me, in that — I
She made another note. “Maybe we should watch the screen again,” she suggested. He sighed. She turned the television back on. The black spearhead shape fell from the lightning-cracked sky.
“It’s nothing — just a death.”
Yime smiled thinly. “I think you make light of our calling, Mr. Nopri, if you treat the cessation of life in quite so off-hand a fashion.”
“I know, I know, I know,” he said, agreeing heartily and nodding vigorously. “You’re absolutely right, of course. But it is in a good cause. It is necessary. I do take the whole Quietus ethic seriously; very seriously. These are — ha-ha! — well, special circumstances.”
Yime looked at him levelly. Nopri was a skinny, dishevelled looking young man with bright blue eyes, pale skin and a gleamingly bald head. They were in what was apparently entitled the Officers’ Club, the main social space for the forty or so Culture citizens who made up about a half per cent of the Bulbitian’s highly diverse — and dispersed — population. The Club was part of what had once been some sort of games hall for the Bulbitian species, what had been its ceiling — and was now its floor — studded with enormous multi-coloured cones like gaudy versions of fat stalagmites.
Food, drink and — for Nopri — a drug bowl were brought by small wheeled drones which roamed the wide space; apparently the Bulbitian could display unpredictable reactions when it came to other entities using fields inside it, so the drones used wheels and multi-jointed arms instead of just levitating by AG and using maniple fields. Still, Yime noticed, the ship’s drone seemed to be doing all right, floating level with their table.
She and Nopri sat alone with the drone, Dvelner having returned to her own duties. There were two other tables occupied in the warm but pleasantly dehumidified space. Both supported little groups of four or five people huddled round them, all of whom looked rather drab by the normal standards of Culture sartorial acceptability and all of whom seemed to be keeping themselves to themselves. Yime had guessed, before Nopri had told her
