“What is that, anyway?”
“Who, not what; Homomdan guy. Called Kabe.”
“Oh.”
They were lava-rafting. Kabe sat in the centre of the flat-decked craft, staring at the mottled yellow-bright flowing river of molten rock ahead and the darkly desolate landscape through which it ran. He could hear the humans talking but he wasn’t paying much attention to who said what.
“He’s already out of it.”
“Just
“I agree. Get him zapped.”
“It’s on fire!”
“Pole on the dark bits, you idiot, not the bright bits!”
“Bring it in and put it out!”
“Fuck, it’s hot.”
“Yeah, it is, isn’t it? I never felt a sim this hot!”
“This is not a simulation, and you’re getting zapped.”
“Can anybody-?”
“Help!”
“Oh, throw it away! Grab another oar.”
They were on one of Masaq’s last eight uninhabited Plates. Here—and for three Plates to spinward and four anti-spinward—Masaq’ Great River flowed dead straight through a seventy-five-thousand-kilometre-long base- material tunnel across a landscape still in the process of being formed.
“Wow! Hot hot hot! Some sim!”
“Get this guy out of here. He shouldn’t have been invited in the first place. There are one-timers here with no savers. If this clown thinks we’re in a sim he could do anything.”
“Jump overboard, hopefully.”
“Need more bods on the starboard side!”
“The what?”
“Right. The right. This side. This side here. Fuck.”
“Don’t even fucking joke about that. He’s so twisted I wouldn’t trust him to punch out if he did fall in.”
“Tunnel ahead! Going to get hotter!”
“Oh, shit.”
“It can’t get hotter! They don’t let it.”
“Will you fucking
As was by now long-standing established practice for the Culture, asteroids from Masaq’s own system—most of them collected and parked in planetary holding orbits several thousand years earlier when the Orbital had first been constructed—were tugged in by Lifter craft and lowered to the Plate’s surface where any one of several energy delivery systems (planetary crust-busting weapons, if you insisted on looking on them that way) heated the bodies to liquid heat so that even more mind-boggling matter- and energy-manipulating processes either let the resulting slag flow and cool in certain designated directions or sculpted it to cloak the already existing morphology of the strategic base matter.
“On.”
“What?”
“On. You fall on, not in. Don’t look at me like that; it’s the density.”
“I bet you know all about fucking density. Got a terminal?”
“No.”
“Implanted?”
“No.”
“Me neither. Try and find somebody who does or is and get that cretin off here.”
“It won’t come out!”
“The pin! You have to knock the pin out first!”
“Oh, yeah.”
People—especially Culture people, whether human, once human, alien or machine—had been building Orbitals like this for thousands of years, and not very long after the process had become a mature technology, still thousands of years earlier, some fun- (or at any rate risk-) loving individual had thought of using a few of the lava streams naturally generated by such processes as the medium for a new sport.
“Excuse me, I have a terminal.”
“Oh. Yeah, Kabe, of course.”
“What?”
“I have a terminal. Here.”
“Ship oars! Mind your heads!”
“It’s fucking glowing in there, man!”
“Sep; hit the cover!”
“Covering now!”
“Oh, wow!”
“Ship them or lose them!”
“Hub! See this guy? Sim-shitter! Zap him out now!”
“Done!”
And so lava-rafting became a pastime. On Masaq’ the tradition was that you did it without the aid of field technology or anything clever in the way of material science. The experience would be more exciting and you would come closer to its reality if you used materials that were only just up to the demands being made in it. It was what people called a minimal-safety-factor sport.
“Watch that oar!”
“It’s caught!”
“Well, push it!”
“Oh, shit!”
“What the-?”
“Aaah!”
“It’s okay, it’s okay!”
“Fuck!”
“…You are all quite mad, by the way. Happy rafting.” The raft itself—a flat-decked platform four metres by twelve with metre-high gunwales—was ceramic, the cover protecting the rafters from the heat of the lava tunnel they were now shooting down was aluminised plastic, and the steering oars were wood, to introduce a note of the corporeal.
“My hair!”
“Oh! I want to go home!”
“Water bucket!”
“Where’d that guy-?”
“Stop whining.”
“Good
Lava-rafting had always been exciting and dangerous. Once the eight Plates had been filled with air, it had become more of a hardship; radiated heat was joined by convected, and while people felt it was somehow more authentic to raft without breathing gear, having your lungs scorched was generally no more fun than it sounded.
“Ah! My nose! My nose!”
“Thanks.”
“Sprays!”
“You’re welcome.”
“I’m with the other guy. I don’t believe this.”
