along with who-knew-how-many people across Xown and the Gzilt domain; there was no shortage of fascinating screen to watch from all over the Gzilt hegemony in these end-days, for those with time to spare from their own preparations for the Subliming, but the Last Party had achieved a modest level of fame over the years, and allegedly many millions of people were watching.
“Lovely warm perfumed water,” Ximenyr was saying, “dosed with cutaneous-contact-hallucinogens, so it’ll be quite a crazy ride just getting to the top, and you can’t just float straight up either; there are baffles. So it’s more of a 3D maze, really.”
“So, is this symbolic of our struggle towards enlightenment, or a comment on our tortuous route to Subliming?”
Ximenyr shrugged. “Yeah, if you like. I just thought it’d be neat.”
“What about pressure?”
Ximenyr snapped his fingers. “Good question. You know,
“So, Ximenyr, anyone may join you in this?”
“Anyone but not everyone. We’ll have to be selective, let just a few people aboard at a time. We need to balance the extra weight of people coming in with our positive buoyancy… factor, or something. Anyway, there’s refuse we’ve got stored up and long-term supplies we’re not going to be using, all of which we’ll be dumping gradually as we take people on, so we’re going to have room for lots more people.” He looked up, nodding at the circular patch of bright lights directly overhead. “A few brave guys and gals are already up there, after doing the testing. Couple of panickers when it all took too long and they couldn’t work out the maze, but they’re fine by now and we’ve made it all a lot easier, with cheats and guidance available.” He smiled dazzlingly at the arbite’s camera eyes. “Should be a cool last ride.”
“That’s annoying,” Berdle said.
“Why?” Cossont asked. “Compared to the last tank of warm liquid we were in…”
“Yes, but if we have to get through that one, I’m going to show up. I’m too dense. If I support myself with AG or even field, they’ll spot me.”
Cossont was squatting beside him in her double-layer suit. She had watched the feed from the arbite on a wrist screen after deciding to risk rolling down the helmet parts of both suits. The air, she had been pleased to discover, smelled perfectly nice, though somehow you could sort of tell there had been construction work going on recently.
“Too dense? Like, too heavy?” she asked.
“Yes.” Berdle looked at Cossont, nodding at her suit. “And you’ll be, too. Those suits mass a lot more than they feel. Outer one especially. Inner might expand enough, though you might look a bit fat.”
Cossont shrugged. “I’m not my mother; I don’t care. More to the point, though, did you spot that our man doesn’t seem to have his necklace on any more?”
“Yes.” The avatar nodded. “That could be a problem.”
“We don’t even know how personal that stuff is for him,” Cossont said. “Might have just abandoned it; left it in a bedside cabinet or something. God, he might have thrown it out!”
“Maybe we should look back in the sewage tank,” Berdle suggested. Cossont looked at him. The avatar shrugged. “Just kidding; I checked it out as a matter of course when we were in there. Nothing.”
“Maybe it’s up at his… bedroom suite. Where we were when we saw him before,” Cossont suggested.
“That’s not there any more,” Berdle said. “I’ve found the remodelling plans in one of the airship’s data banks, such as they are. Whole volume was ripped out.” The avatar shook his head. “Their internal video monitoring is so patchy. There might be some record in here of what happened to all that stuff, but… found it. Ah.”
“Is that a good ‘Ah’?” Cossont asked.
“Partially,” Berdle told her. “All his personal effects are more or less where they were; in some sort of chest or locker… yes, a big sort of upright wheeled chest thing, in this ‘heaven’ space, at the top of the giant liquid tank.”
“Think Mr Q’s missing bits are there?”
“Maybe. Ximenyr’s… had a temporary cabin near the main medical suite for the last eight days,” Berdle reported, still quizzing the airship’s systems.
“Probably having all his extra cocks removed,” Cossont muttered.
Berdle shook his head. “
Cossont started to stand up but he pulled her back down again. “I’ve an insectile on that particular job.”
“If they’re not there, think we’ll have to swim through the big tank?”
“Perhaps.”
“Can’t we just come in from the top?”
“No. It’s all shielded. It looks transparent up there, like a big glass dome, but it isn’t; it’s a two-way screen, metres thick. Once the ship’s back, in about twelve minutes, we have the option of blasting the shielding out of the way and Displacing in, but that’s a last resort; wasting 4D without causing horrendous collateral in the associate flat-space is almost impossible. In 4D you think all you’ve done is kick down a door, and imagine you’ve done it really neatly, minimum force, but then you look back into 3D and realise you’ve blown down the whole building. Sometimes the whole block.”
“Twelve minutes till the ship’s back?”
“Just under. Though how easy the Gzilt battleship will make it for me to do anything as delicate as targeting bits of 4D shielding in the first place is very much open to question.”
“Is there going to be a fight?”
“Yeah, could be,” Berdle said. “There goes our boy,” he added.
Cossont switched her wrist screen on again to see Ximenyr placing his white shift on a shelf and then walking into a vaginal-looking vertical aperture in one of the translucent spheres, a breather tube gripped in his mouth. He was quite naked. Only one penis, as far as Cossont could see. And he didn’t seem to have anything else with him that might have contained the pair of eyes.
Some sort of double liquid-lock had allowed Ximenyr to enter the sphere without any fluid spilling. There was a pause while he stood and fluid swirled up around him, then a sphincter valve at the top of the sphere opened and he rose quickly and easily up, out of the sphere and into the liquid-filled tank above.
“…And so,” the reporter arbite began to intone, gravely.
Cossont switched the sound off and just watched Ximenyr’s pale-looking body as he swam out at an angle into the darkness. The extra lights he’d asked for earlier, or the enhancement, had been switched off, so his shape disappeared into the watery shadows after barely half a minute; the vast tank was now an almost entirely dark megatonne presence hanging over the scene below. The view switched to the other party-goers taking off their own shifts and preparing to step naked into the translucent spheres to follow Ximenyr.
“The locker in the medical suite’s got nothing,” Berdle said quietly, shaking his head.
“Can I see?” she asked.
“Need a helmet to see properly,” the avatar told her. “Use the inner suit.” She brought the hood-helmet up. The view darkened, stabilised. A space like a small dark room, one wall edged all round with dim light; quilts on the floor, a small rug, rolled, and a couple of ancient-looking flat screens. “A pair of pants,” Berdle announced. “A single sock. The end of a roll of antiseptic splint-bandage patches. A tooth plectrum. A pair of time-to devices. That’s all.”
“Sure this isn’t art too?”
“Fairly certain.”
“We’re going to have to go up through that fucking tank, aren’t we?”
“Looking like it.”
Cossont redirected her attention to local reality in time to watch Berdle stand, and then saw what looked like
