Matter

offensive, depending. The defensive model implies a more even spread of forces than the offensive one, which favours greater concentration. These represent options one and two respectively in the modelled plausibility grading. There is, however, a third option, shown here.

The other layers fell away but Batra had already spotted the pattern and the place within it that was its focus.

They could be gathering round Sursamen, he sent.

The General Contact Unit It’s My Party And I’ll Sing If I Want To still sounded puzzled: Well, quite.

The Integrity of Objects

20. Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown

The interior of the Morthanveld Great Ship Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown was generally experienced virtually even by those for whom it was designed and who had built it. Externally the ship was a flattened sphere fifty kilometres in diameter. It resembled a vast droplet of blue ice whose surface had been blasted with several million jewels, about half of which had subsequently fallen out, leaving behind small craters.

Its main internal space was enormous; bigger than anything on a Culture GSV. The best way to think of it, Anaplian had been told by Skalpapta, her Morthanveld liaison officer, was as if you’d got nineteen balloons full of water each nearly ten kilometres in diameter, arranged them into a rough hexagon so that they formed as near a circle as possible, then squished them all together so that the walls between them flattened out. Then you added another two layers of seven spheres, one above and one below, under the same principle. Finally you removed all those flat, separating walls.

The whole space was criss-crossed by strands and cables supporting hundreds of millions of polyp-like living quarters and multitudinous travel tubes, many with a vacuum inside to speed up transit times.

As on most Morthanveld ships, the water was generally kept as clean as desirable by fixed and static scrubbing units; nevertheless, the fact was that the bait species and accrescent flora the Morthanveld liked to feed on needed water with nutrients in it, and the Morthanveld themselves regarded having to visit some special place to relieve oneself of waste as the mark of a species insufficiently at home with itself. Or gas-breathing, which was almost as embarrassing.

The water they lived, swam, worked and played within, then, was not perfectly unclouded. However, it was always pleasant to have a clear view, especially in such a vast space.

The Morthanveld very much approved of themselves, and the larger the numbers of their kind there were present, the more self-approval they felt. Being able to see the hundreds of millions of their fellows a Great Ship normally carried was generally regarded as an extremely good thing, so rather than rely on their naked eyes to see their way round a space as vast as that of a Great Ship’s interior, they used thin-film screens covering their eyes to present them with the view they’d be able to see had the water been perfectly clear.

Djan Seriy had decided to adopt the same strategy and so swam with a modified thin-film screen over her own eyes. She moved through the water in a dark suit like a second skin. Around her neck was what looked like a necklace made of fluttering green fronds; a gill arrangement that provided oxygen to her nose through two small transparent tubes. This was somewhat ignominious to her, as with her old upgrades her skin would have ridged and puckered over whatever area was required to absorb the gases she needed straight out of the water.

The thin-film screen was stuck across her eyes like a flimsy transparent bandage. She had switched off her blink reflex; the alternative was to let the screen bulge out far enough for her to blink normally, but the air-gap introduced unwanted distortions. The screen provided her with the virtual view of the real space, showing the cavernous semi-spherical spaces of the Great Ship like some staggeringly vast cave system.

She could have patched directly into the ship’s internal sensory view to achieve the same effect, or just swum with her own senses and not bothered with the greater, seemingly clear view, but she was being polite; using the thin-film screen meant that the ship could keep an eye on her, seeing, no doubt, what she could see, and so knowing that she wasn’t getting into any Special Circumstances-style mischief.

She could also have used any one of several different kinds of public transport to get to where she was going, but had opted instead for a small personal propulsion unit which she held on to with one hand as it thrummed its way through the water. The sex toy that was really a knife missile that was really a drone had wanted to impersonate such a propulsion unit, so staying close to her, but she reckoned this was just the machine fussing and had instructed it to remain in her quarters.

Djan Seriy powered up and to the left to avoid a fore-current, found a helpful aft-current, curved round a set of long, bulbous habitats like enormous dangling fruits and then struck out towards a tall bunch of green-black spheres each between ten and thirty metres across, hanging in the water like a colossal strand of seaweed. She switched off the prop unit and swam into one of the larger spheres through a silvery circle a couple of metres across and let the draining water lower her to the soft, wet floor. Gravity again. She was spending more time aquatic than not, even including sleeping, as she explored the huge space vessel. This was her fifth day aboard and she only had another four to go. There was still much to see.

Her suit, until now coating her body as closely as paint, promptly frizzed up, forcing the water to slide off and letting it assume the look of something a fashionable young lady would choose to wear in an air-breathing environment. She stuffed her necklace gill into a pocket and — as the suit’s head-part flowed downward to form an attractive frilled collar — flicked one earring to activate a temporary static field. This sorted her hair, which was, today, blonde. She kept the thin-film screen on. She thought it looked rather good on her; vaguely piratical.

Djan Seriy stepped through the cling-field into the 303rd Aliens’ Lounge, where thumping music played loudly and the air was full of drug smoke and incense.

She was quickly greeted by a small cloud of tiny brightly coloured creatures like small birds, each thrown by one of the bar’s patrons. Some sang welcomes, others fluttered strobed messages across their hazy wings and a few squirted scent messages at her. This was, currently, the latest greeting-fad for new arrivals at the 303rd Aliens’ Lounge. Sometimes the lobbed creatures would carry notes or small parcels of narcotics or declarations of love, or they would start spouting insults, witticisms, philosophical epigrams or other messages. As Djan Seriy understood it, this was meant to be amusing.

She waited for the cloud of flittering creatures to start dissipating, thinking all the time how easy it would have been to bat, grasp and crush every one of the twenty-eight little twittering shapes around her, had she been fully enabled. She plucked the most lately arrived of the creatures out of the air and looked severely at the old- looking, purple-skinned humanoid who had thrown it. “Yours, sir,” she said, as she passed his table, handing it to him. He mumbled a reply. Others nearby were calling out to her. The denizens of the 303rd were gregarious and got to know people quickly; she was already regarded as a regular after only three visits. She refused various offers of company and waved away some especially thick and pungent drug smoke; the 303rd was something of a wide- spectrum humanoid stoners’ hang-out.

She acknowledged a few people as she walked to the circular bar in the middle of the Lounge, sitting glowing in the darkened space like a giant halo.

“Shjan! You’re here!” shouted Tulya Puonvangi, who was what passed as the Culture’s ambassador on the Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown. Djan Seriy regarded the man rather as she did the fluttering creature fad; immature and vaguely annoying. He had introduced himself shortly after she’d arrived and done his best to make himself a nuisance more or less ever since. Puonvangi was obese, pinkish, bald, and fairly human-basic on the surface save for two long, fang-like incisors which distorted his speech (he couldn’t manage the hard “D” sound at the start of her first name, for example). Plus he had an eye in the back of his head which he claimed was fully functional but was apparently really no more than an affectation. He often, as now, kept it covered with an eye patch, though the eye patch — again, as now — was frequently clear. He also — he’d told her