Excession

blowing him a kiss as the apparent gravity cut by ninety per cent. The padding beneath their bodies suddenly had a lot less weight to support; the effect was to produce a very gentle, padded pat on the bottom which was enough to send them both floating fractionally upwards. He looked surprised; it was such a sweet, boyish, innocent expression she almost stayed.

But she didn't; she jumped out of the bed, kicking up through the air and raising her arms above her head to dive through the loose gatherings of the chamber's tented ceiling and out into the bedroom beyond, arcing out over the padded platform around the bed chamber and falling gently back into the clutches of its standard gravity. She ran down the curved steps to the bedroom floor and almost bumped into the drone Churt Lyne.

'I know!' she yelled, flapping one hand at it.

It lifted out of her way, then turned smoothly and followed her across the floor of the bedroom towards the bathroom, its fields formal blue but tinged with a rosy humour.

Ulver broke into a run. She'd always liked big rooms; the bedroom one was twenty metres square and five high. One wall was window. It looked out onto a tightly curved landscape of fields and wooded hills dotted with towers and ziggurats. This was Interior Space One, the central and longest cylinder of a cluster of independently revolving five-kilometre diameter tubes which formed the main living areas in the Rock.

'Anything I can do?' the drone asked as Ulver ran into the bathroom. Behind it, there was a shout and then a series of curses as the young man tried to exit the bed chamber in the same way Ulver had and got the gravity- transition wrong. The drone turned briefly towards the disturbance, then swivelled back as Ulver's voice floated out through the noise of rushing fluids. 'Well, you could throw him out… Nicely, mind.'

'What?' Ulver screamed. 'You get me to ditch a luscious new guy after one night, you make me scrap all my engagements for a month and then you won't even let me take a few pets? Or a couple of pals?'

'Ulver, can I talk to you alone?' Churt Lyne said calmly, rotating to point at a room off the main gallery.

'No you can't!' she yelled, throwing down the cloak she'd been carrying. 'Anything you have to say to me you can damn well say in front of my friends.'

They were in the outer gallery of Iphetra, a long reception area lined with windows and old paintings; it looked out to the formal gardens and Interior Space One beyond. A couple of traveltubes waited beyond doors set into the wall full of portraits. She'd told everybody to rendezvous here. She'd missed the noon deadline by over an hour, but there were certain things about one's toilet that simply couldn't be rushed, and — as she'd told a briefly but fetchingly incandescently furious Churt Lyne from her milk-bath — if she was really that important to all these top-secret plans, SC had no choice but to wait. As a concession to the urgency of the situation she had left her face unadorned, tied her hair back into a simple bun and slipped into a conservatively patterned loose pants and jacket combination; even choosing her jewellery for the day had taken no more than five minutes.

The gallery had got quite busy; her mother was here, tall and tousled in a jellaba, three cousins, seven aunts and uncles, about a dozen friends — all house-guests and a little bleary-eyed after the Graduation party — and a couple of house-slaved drones attempting to control the animals; a brace of tawny speytlid hunters looking about at everybody and snuffling and slavering with excitement and her three hooded but still restless alseyns which kept stretching their wings and giving their piercing, plangent cry. Another drone waited outside the nearest window with Brave, her favourite mount, saddled up and pawing the ground, while the three drones she'd decided were the minimum she could manage with were taking care of her luggage trunks, which were still appearing from the house lift. A tray floated at her side with breakfast; she'd just started munching on a chislen segment when the drone had told her she had to make this journey alone.

Churt Lyne didn't reply in speech. Instead — astonishingly — it spoke through her neural lace:

— Ulver, for pity's sake, this is a secret mission for Special Circumstances, not a social outing with your girlfriends.

'And don't secret-talk me!' Ulver hissed through clenched teeth. 'Grief, that's so rude!'

'Quite right, dear,' muttered her mother, yawning.

A couple of her friends laughed lightly.

Churt Lyne came right up to her until it was almost touching her, and then the next thing she knew there was a sort of grey cylinder around her and the machine; it stretched from wooden floor to stone-carved ceiling and it was about a metre and a half in diameter, neatly enclosing her, Churt and the tray carrying breakfast. She stared at the drone, her mouth open, eyes wide. It had never done anything like this before! Its aura field had disappeared. It hadn't even had the decency to square the field and put the field on a mirror finish; at least she could have checked her appearance.

'Sorry about this, Ulver,' the machine said. Its voice sounded flat in the narrow cylinder. Ulver closed her mouth and prodded the field the drone had slung around them. It was like touching warm stone. 'Ulver,' the drone said again, taking one of her hands in a maniple field, 'I apologise; I ought to have made the point earlier. I just assumed… Well, never mind. I'm supposed to come with you to Tier, but not anybody else. Your friends have to stay here.'

'But Peis and I always go deep space together! And Klatsli is my new protege; I promised her she could stick around me; I can't just abandon her! Do you have any idea what that could do to her development? To her social life? People might think I've dumped her. Besides, she's got an utterly exquisite older brother. If I-'

'You can't take them,' the drone said loudly. 'They're not included in the invitation.'

'I heard what you said yesterday, you know,' Ulver said, shaking her head and leaning forward at the drone. ''Keep it secret'; I haven't told them where we're going.'

'That's not the point. When I said don't tell a soul I meant don't tell a soul you're going, not don't tell a soul exactly where you're going.'

She laughed, throwing her head back. 'Churt; real space here! My diary is a public document, hadn't you noticed? There are at least three channels devoted to me — all run by rather desperate young men, admittedly, but nevertheless. I can't change my eye colour without anybody on the Rock who follows fashion knowing about it within the hour. I can't just disappear! Are you mad?'

'And I don't think the animals can come either,' Churt Lyne said smoothly, ignoring her question. 'The protira certainly can't. There isn't room on the ship.'

'Isn't room?' she roared. 'What size is this thing? Are you sure it's safe?'

'Warships don't have stables, Ulver.'

'It's an ex- war ship!' she exclaimed, waving her arms around. 'Ow!' She sucked at the knuckle she'd hit against the field cylinder.

'Sorry. But still.'

'What about my clothes?'

'A cabin full of clothes is perfectly all right, though I don't know for whose benefit you're going to be wearing them.'

'What about when I get to Tier?' she cried. 'What about this guy I'm not supposed to fuck? Am I supposed to just wander past him naked?'

'Take two roomsful; three. Clothes are not a problem, and you can pick up more when you get there — no, wait a minute, I know how long it takes you to choose new clothes; just take what you want. Four cabins; there.'

'But my friends!'

'Tell you what; I'll show you the space you've got to work with. Okay?'

'Oh, okay,' she said, shaking her head and sighing heavily.

The drone fed convincing-looking pictures of the ex-warship's interior into Ulver's brain through the neural lace.

She caught her breath. Her eyes were wide when the display stopped. She stared at the drone. 'The rooms!' she exclaimed. 'The cabins; they're so small!'

'Quite. Still think you want to take your friends?'

She thought for a second. 'Yes!' she yelled, thumping a fist on the little tray floating at her side. It wobbled,