after a remarkably short time during their first meeting — had exquisitely altered genitalia, which he’d offered to show her. She had demurred.
“Hello, jear!” Puonvangi said, clutching at her elbows and bringing her close to kiss her cheeks. She allowed this to happen while remaining stiff and unresponsive. He smelled of brine, tangfruit and some sweet, unashamedly psychotropic scent. His clothes were loose, voluminous, ever gently billowing and showed slow-motion scenes of humanoid pornography. His sleeves were rolled up and she could see from the thin, fiercely glowing lines incised on his forearms that he had been grazing tattoo drugs. He released her. “How are you? Looking ra’iant as ezher! Here’sh the young fellow I wanted you to meet!” He pointed at the young, long-limbed man sitting by his side. “Shjan Sheree Araprian, this is Kra’sri Kruike. Kra’sri; say hi!”
The young man looked embarrassed. “How do you do,” he said in a quiet, deep, deliciously accented voice. He had gently glowing skin of something between deep bronze and very dark green and a mass of shining, ringleted black hair. He wore perfectly cut, utterly black close-fitting trous and a short jacket. His face was quite long, his nose fairly flat, his teeth were normal but very white and his expression, beneath hooded eyes, was diffident, amused, perhaps a little wary, though modulated by what looked like a permanent smile. He had laughter lines, which made someone so otherwise young-looking appear oddly vulnerable. Chevron-cut brows and moustache looked like something new he was trying and was unsure he was getting away with. Those eyes were dark, flecked with gold.
He was almost unbearably attractive. Djan Seriy had therefore naturally gone instantly to what she regarded as her highest alert state of suspicion.
“I am Djan Seriy Anaplian,” she told him. “How is your name properly pronounced?”
He grinned, glanced apologetically at a beaming, eyebrow-waggling Puonvangi. “Klatsli Quike,” he told her.
She nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Klatsli Quike,” she said. She took the bar stool on the far side of him, putting the young man between her and Puonvangi, who looked disappointed, though only briefly. He slammed the bar with the flat of one hand, bringing a serving unit zinging over on shining rails strung along the far side of the bar.
“Jhrinks! Shmokes! Shnorts! Inshisions!”
She agreed to drink a little to keep Puonvangi company. Quike lit up a small pipe of some fabulously fragrant herb, purely for the scent as it had no known narcotic effect, though even the aroma was almost drug-like in its headiness. Puonvangi ordered a couple of styli of tattoo drugs and — when both Djan Seriy and Quike refused to join him — grazed one into each of his arms, from wrist to elbow. The drug lines glowed so brightly at first they coloured his pink face green. He sighed and sat back in his high seat, exhaling and closing his eyes, going slack. While their host was enjoying his first rush, Quike said, “You’re from Sursamen?” He sounded apologetic, as though he wasn’t supposed to know.
“I am,” she said. “You know it?”
“Of,” he said. “Shellworlds are a subject of mine. I study them. I find them fascinating.”
“You’re not alone in that.”
“I know. Actually, I find it perplexing that everyone doesn’t find them utterly fascinating.”
Djan Seriy shrugged. “There are many fascinating places.”
“Yes, but Shellworlds are something special.” He put his hand to his mouth. Long fingers. He might have been blushing. “I’m sorry. You lived there. I don’t need to tell you how fabulous they are.”
“Well, for me it is — was — just home. When one grows up in a place, no matter how exotic it may seem to others, it is still where all the usual banalities and indignities of childhood occur. Home is always the norm. It is everywhere else that is marvellous.”
She drank. He puffed on his pipe for a bit. Puonvangi sighed deeply, eyes still closed.
“And you,” she said, remembering to be polite. “Where are you from? May I ask your Full Name?”
“Astle-Chulinisa Klatsli LP Quike dam Uast.”
“LP?” she said. “The letters L and P?”
“The letters L and P,” he confirmed, with a small nod and a mischievous smile.
“Do they stand for something?”
“They do. But it’s a secret.”
She looked at him doubtfully.
He laughed, spread his arms. “I’m well travelled, Ms Seriy; a Wanderer. I am older than I look, I have met many people and given and shared and received many things. I have been most places, at a certain scale. I have spent time with all the major Involveds, I have talked to Gods, shared thought with the Sublimed and tasted, as far as a human can, something of the joy of what the Minds call Infinite Fun Space. I am not the person I was when I took my Full Name, and I am not definable just by that any more. A nested mystery in the centre of my name is no more than I deserve. Trust me.”
Djan Seriy thought about this. He had called himself a Wanderer (they were talking Marain, the Culture’s language; it had a phoneme to denote upper case). There had always been a proportion of people in the Culture, or at least people who were from the Culture originally, who termed themselves so. She found it difficult not to think of them as a class. They did indeed just wander; most doing so within the Culture, going from Orbital to Orbital, place to place, travelling on cruise ships and trampers as a rule and on Contact vessels when they could.
Others travelled amongst the rest of the Involved and Aspirant species, existing — when they encountered societies shockingly unenlightened enough not to have cast off the last shackles of monetary exchange — through inter-civilisational co-supportive understandings, or by using some vanishingly microscopic fraction of the allegedly infinite resources the Culture commanded to pay their way.
Some cast their adventures wider still, which was where problems sometimes occurred. The mere presence of such a person in a sufficiently undeveloped society could change it, sometimes profoundly, if that person was blind to what their being there might be doing to those they had come to live among, or at least look at. Not all such people agreed to be monitored by Contact during their travels, and even though Contact was perfectly unabashed when it came to spying on travellers who strayed into vulnerable societies whether they liked it or not, it did sometimes miss individuals. There was a whole section of the organisation devoted to watching developing civilisations for signs that some so-called Wanderer had — with prior intent, opportunistically or even accidentally — turned into a local Mad Professor, Despot, Prophet or God. There were other categories, but these four formed the most popular and predictable avenues people’s fantasies took them along when they lost their moral bearings down amongst the prims.
Most Wanderers caused no such problems, however, and such itinerants normally found somewhere to call home eventually, usually back in the Culture. Some, though, never settled anywhere, roaming all their lives, and of these a few — a surprisingly large proportion compared to the rest of the Culture’s population — lived, effectively, for ever. Or at least lived until they met some almost inevitably violent, irrecoverable end. There were rumours — usually in the form of personal boasts — of individuals who had been around since the formation of the Culture itself, nomads who’d drifted the galaxy and its near infinitude of peoples, societies, civilisations and places for thousands upon thousands of years.
“Really?” he asked, looking hurt. “I’m telling the truth,” he said quietly. He seemed half small boy and half untroubled ancient, darkly self-possessed.
“I’m sure it appears so to you,” she said, arching one eyebrow. She drank some more; she had ordered a Za’s Revenge, but said concoction was unknown to the bar machine, which had made its own speciality. It served. Quike took another pipe of incense herb.
“And you’re from the Eighth?” Quike said, coughing a little, though with a broad smile wreathed in violet smoke.
“I am,” she said. He smiled shyly and hid behind some smoke. “You’re well informed,” she told him.
“Thank you.” He suddenly mugged an expression of what might have been pretended fear. “And an SC agent too, yes?”
