up to them, announced itself as being Nuthe 3887b, an accredited Morthanveld greeting device belonging to the First Original Indigent Alien Deep Spacefarers’ Benevolent Fund, and told them it would be their guide. It sounded helpful and was jollily coloured, but Ferbin had never felt further from home, or more small and insignificant.
We are lost here, he thought as Holse chatted with the machine and passed on to it their pathetically few possessions. We might disappear into this wilderness of civility and progress and never be seen again. We might be dissolved within it for ever, compressed, reduced to nothing by its sheer ungraspable scale. What is one man’s life if such casual immensity can even exist?
The Optimae counted in magnitudes, measured in light years and censused their own people by the trillion, while beyond them the Sublimed and the Elder peoples whom they might well one day join thought not in years or decades, not even in centuries and millennia, but in centieons and decieons at the very least, and centiaeons and deciaeons generally. The galaxy, meanwhile, the universe itself, was aged in aeons; units of time as far from the human grasp as a light year was beyond a step.
They were truly lost, Ferbin thought with a kind of core-enfeebling terror that sent a tremor pulsing through him; forgotten, minimised to nothing, placed and categorised as beings far beneath the lowest level of irrelevance simply by their entry into this thunderously, stunningly phenomenal place, perhaps even just by the full realisation of its immensity.
It came as something of a surprise, then, for Ferbin and Holse to be greeted, before Holse had finished chatting to the Morthanveld machine, by a short, portly, smiling gent with long, blond, ringletty hair who called them by name in excellently articulated Sarl and entirely as though they were old friends.
“No, to a Morthanveld a Nestworld is a symbol of homeliness, intimacy,” their new friend informed them as they rode a little tube-car along a gauzily transparent tunnel threaded through one of the klick-thick hab tubes. “Bizarrely!” he added. The man had given his name as Pone Hippinse; he too was an Accredited Greeter, he said, albeit only gaining this distinction recently. For a machine, Nuthe 3887b did a very good impression of being annoyed by Hippinse’s arrival. “The nest a male Morthanveld weaves when he’s trying to attract a mate is a sort of torus of seaweed twigs,” Hippinse continued. “Kind of a big circle.” He showed them what a circle looked like, using both hands.
They were on their way to another port area for what Hippinse described as a “short hop” in a spaceship round a small part of the vast ring to a suitable Humanoid Guest Facility. The Facility — the 512th Degree FifthStrand; 512/5 to most people — was most highly recommended by Hippinse.
“Strictly speaking—” Nuthe 3887b began.
“So, to a Morthanvelder, one of these things,” Hippinse said, ignoring the little machine and waving his arms about to indicate the whole Nestworld, “is a sort of symbol of their being wedded to the cosmos, see? They’re making their conjugal bower in space itself, expressing their connectedness to the galaxy or whatever. It’s quite romantic, really.
Holse was looking at Pone Hippinse, trying to figure the fellow out.
“I mean, to remove you guys from the attentions of the media, the news junkies and aboriginistas; people like that.” Hippinse belched and fell silent.
Ferbin used the opportunity to ask, “Where exactly are we going?”
“To the Facility,” Hippinse said, with a glance at Nuthe 3887b. “Someone wants to meet you.” He winked.
“Someone?” Ferbin asked.
“Can’t tell you; spoil the surprise.”
Ferbin and Holse exchanged looks.
Holse frowned and turned deliberately to the Morthanveld machine, hovering in the air to one side of the three seated humans. “This Facility we’re heading for…” he began.
“It’s a perfect place for—” Hippinse started to say, but Holse, now sitting side-on to him, held up one hand to him — held it almost into his face — and said, “If you don’t mind, sir. I’m talking to this machine.”
“Well, I was just going to say—” Hippinse said.
“Tell us about it,” Holse said loudly to the machine. “Tell us about this Facility we’re supposed to go to.”
“…you can hole up there, unmolested…” Hippinse continued.
“The 512th Degree FifthStrand, or 512/5, is a Humanoid Transfer and Processing Facility,” the machine told them as Hippinse finally fell silent.
Holse frowned. “What sort of processing?”
“Identity establishment, in-world alien behaviour legal agreement-making, knowledge-sharing—”
“What does that mean? Knowledge-sharing?” Holse had once helped a town constable with his enquiries regarding the theft of some tableware from the local County House; it had been a considerably rougher and more painful experience than the phrase Helping With Enquiries implied. He was worried that ‘knowledge-sharing’ might be a similar lie dressed up pretty.
“Any data held is requested to be shared with the knowledge reservoirs of the Nestworld,” Nuthe 3887b said, “on a philanthropic or charitable basis, as a rule.”
Holse still wasn’t happy. “Does this process hurt?” he asked.
“Of course not!” the machine said, sounding shocked.
Holse nodded. “Carry on.”
“The 512th Degree FifthStrand Facility is a Culture-sponsored Facility,” the machine told them. Ferbin and Holse both sat back and exchanged looks.
“I was
They transferred to the Facility in a fat little ship which swallowed the car they were riding in whole. The ship lurched and they were away.
A screen showed them the view ahead for the duration of the twenty-minute journey; Hippinse chattered continually, pointing out sights, especially famous or well-executed patterns of cables or designs engraved on the cables, noteworthy spacecraft arriving and departing, stellar-atmospheric effects and a few of the favela structures which were not officially part of the world at all but which had been constructed within Syaung-un’s surrounding network of cylinders and inside the partial protection, both physical and symbolic, afforded by the lattice of mighty cylinders and their accompanying wrap of gases.
The 512th Degree FifthStrand was a kind of fully enclosed mini-Orbital, fashioned to look as much like the Nestworld itself as possible. It was only eight hundred kilometres across and — until you were right up at it — it looked quite insignificant within the loops and swirls of the giant world’s main cylinders; just a tiny finger-ring lost amongst the openwork vastness of the braided super-cables submerged in their accidental haze of found atmosphere.
Close up, the Facility looked a little like a pushbike wheel. They docked at the hub. Nuthe 3887b stayed aboard; it wished them well. Hippinse’s long blond hair floated about his head like a curly nebula and he pulled it back and bunned it with a little hair-net. Their car was released from the stubby ship and floated into and down a curved, hollow spoke like a thin, twisted Tower.
“Keen on being able to see through things, aren’t they?” Holse said, staring down through the clear floor of the car, the transparent side of the hollow spoke and the seemingly nonexistent roof of the miniature habitat
