and bracing one leg while he struck out with the other in the direction the punch had come from; he felt his foot hit something yielding.
He got to his feet, ducking as he thought of whirling impeller blades just overhead. The eddies and vortices of hot oil-filled air rocked him like a small boat bobbing in a chopping sea. He felt like a puppet controlled by a drunk. He staggered forward, his arms out, and hit Kraiklyn. They started to fall again, and Horza let go, punching with all his might at the place he guessed the man's head was. His fist crashed into bone, but he didn't know where. He skipped back, in case there was a retaliatory kick or punch on its way. His ears were popping; his head felt tight. He could feel his eyes vibrating in their sockets; he thought he was deaf but he could feel a thudding in his chest and throat, making him breathless, making him choke and gasp. He could make out just a hint of a border of light all around them, as though they were under the middle of the hovercraft. He saw something, just an area of darkness, on that border, and lunged at it, swinging his foot from low down. Again he connected, and the dark part of the border disappeared.
He was blown off his feet by a crushing down-draught of air and tumbled bodily along the concrete, thumping into Kraiklyn where he lay on the ground after Horza's last kick. Another punch hit Horza on the head, but it was weak and hardly hurt. Horza felt for and found. Kraiklyn's head. He lifted it and banged it off the concrete, then did it again. Kraiklyn struggled, but his hands beat uselessly off Horza's shoulders and chest. The area of lightness beyond the dim shape on the ground was enlarging, coming closer. Horza banged Kraiklyn's head against the concrete one more time, then threw himself flat. The rear edge of the skin scrubbed over him; his ribs ached and his skull felt as though somebody was standing on it. Then it was over, and they were in the open air.
The big craft thundered on, trailing remnants of spray. There was another one fifty metres down the dock and heading towards him.
Kraiklyn was lying still, a couple of metres away.
Horza got up onto all fours and crawled over to the other man. He looked down into his eyes, which moved a little.
'I'm Horza!
He shook his head, and with a grimace of frustration on the face that was not really his own and which was the last thing the real Kraiklyn ever saw, he gripped the head of the man lying on the concrete and twisted it sharply, breaking the neck, just as he had broken Zallin's. He managed to drag the body to the side of the dock just in time to get out of the way of the third and last hovercraft. Its towering skirt bulged past two metres away from where he half lay, half sat, panting and sweating, his back against the cold wet concrete of the dock, his mouth open and his heart thudding.
He undressed Kraiklyn, took off the cloak and the light-coloured one-piece day suit he wore, then climbed out of his own torn blouse and bloody pantaloons and put on what Kraiklyn had been wearing. He took the ring Kraiklyn wore on the small finger of his right hand. He picked at his own hands, at the skin where palm became wrist. It came away cleanly, a layer of skin sloughing off his right hand from wrist to fingertips. He wiped Kraiklyn's limp, pale right palm on a damp bit of clothing, then put the skin over it, pressing it down hard. He lifted the skin off carefully and positioned it back on his own hand. Then he repeated the operation using his left hand.
It was cold and it seemed to take a very long time and a lot of effort. Eventually, while the three big air- cushion vehicles were stopping and letting passengers off half a kilometre down the dock, Horza finally staggered to a ladder of metal rungs set into the concrete wall of the dock, and with shaking hands and quivering feet hauled himself to the top.
He lay for a while, then got up, climbed the spiral stairs to the small footbridge, staggered across it and down the other side, and entered the circular access building. Brightly dressed and excited people, just off the big hovers and still in a party mood, quietened when they saw him wait near the elevator doors for the capsule which would take them down to the spaceport area half a kilometre under their feet. Horza couldn't hear very much, but he could see their anxious looks, sense the awkwardness he was causing with his battered, bloody face and his ripped, soaking clothes.
At last the elevator appeared. The party goers piled in, and Horza, supporting himself on the wall, stumbled in too. Somebody held his arm, helping him, and he nodded thanks. They said something which he heard as a distant rumble; he tried to smile and nod again. The elevator dropped.
The underside greeted them with an expanse of what looked like stars. Gradually, Horza realised it was the light-speckled top of a spacecraft larger than anything he'd ever seen or even heard about before; it had to be the demilitarised Culture ship,
The elevator had come to a halt in a transparent tube above a spherical reception area hanging in hard vacuum a hundred metres under the base of the Orbital. From the sphere, walkways and tube tunnels spread out in all directions, heading for the access gantries and open and closed docks of the port area itself. The doors to the closed docks, where ships could be worked on in pressurised conditions, were all open. The open docks themselves, where ships simply moored and airlocks were required, were empty. Replacing them all, directly underneath the spherical reception area, just as it was directly underneath almost the entire port area, was the ex-Culture General Systems Vehicle
He felt dizzy again, registering the sheer scale of the vast craft. He hadn't seen a GSV before, far less been inside one. He knew of them and what they were for, but only now did he appreciate what an achievement they represented. This one was theoretically no longer part of the Culture; he knew it was demilitarised, stripped bare of most equipment, and without the Mind or Minds which would normally run it; but just the structure alone was enough to impress.
General Systems Vehicles were like encapsulated worlds. They were more than just very big spaceships; they were habitats, universities, factories, museums, dockyards, libraries, even mobile exhibition centres. They represented the Culture — they were the Culture. Almost anything that could be done anywhere in the Culture could be done on a GSV. They could make anything the Culture was capable of making, contained all the knowledge the Culture had ever accumulated, carried or could construct specialised equipment of every imaginable type for every conceivable eventuality, and continually manufactured smaller ships: General Contact Units usually, warcraft now. Their complements were measured in millions at least. They crewed their offspring ships out of the gradual increase in their own population. Self-contained, self-sufficient, productive and, in peacetime at least, continually exchanging information, they were the Culture's ambassadors, its most visible citizens and its technological and intellectual big guns. There was no need to travel from the galactic backwoods to some distant Culture home-planet to be amazed and impressed by the stunning scale and awesome power of the Culture; a GSV could bring the whole lot right up to your front door…
Horza followed the brightly dressed crowds through the bustling reception area. There were a few people in uniform, but they weren't stopping anybody. Horza felt in a daze, as though he was only a passenger in his own body, and the drunken puppeteer he had felt in the control of earlier was now sobered up a little and guiding him through the crowds of people towards the doors of another elevator. He tried to clear his head by shaking it, but it hurt when he did that. His hearing was coming back very slowly.
He looked at his hands, then sloughed the imprinter-skin from his palms, rubbing it on each of the lapels of the daysuit until it rolled off and fell to the floor of the corridor.
When they got off the second elevator they were in the starship. The people dispersed through broad, pastel-shaded corridors with high ceilings. Horza looked one way then another, as the elevator capsule swished back up towards the reception sphere. A small drone floated towards him. It was the size and shape of a standard suit backpack, and Horza eyed it warily, uncertain whether it was a Culture device or not.
'Excuse me, are you all right?' the machine said. Its voice was robust but not unfriendly. Horza could just hear it.
'I'm lost,' Horza said, too loudly. 'Lost,' he repeated, more quietly, so that he could hardly hear himself. He was aware that he was swaying a little as he stood there, and he could feel water trickling into his boots and dripping off the sodden cloak onto the soft, absorbent surface under his feet.
'Where do you want to go?' the drone asked.
