like a ceiling of something elastic and giving, but strong. “The suit will tell you the direction to head in, using this voice. For now, turn ninety degrees to your left, follow the ceiling until you feel a downward current and then swim to your right.”
She did as she was told. She could see a couple of other people exiting from other spheres and striking out into the darkness: shadowy forms moving slowly in the darkness like smooth and liquid flames of flesh. She kept her lower set of arms tight against her body as she swam with the upper set until the other people had faded into the darkness, taking different routes. Then she pulled hard with all four arms, and kicked.
She felt a current heading down, and so turned right. “Straight up now,” the voice said, and she zoomed, passing into a strange gel-like region in the water where it seemed to grow thicker and press in against her from all sides. Through it, she felt the water pressure change a little, decreasing. The temperature was a little cooler, too. “Just entering the tank now,” Berdle told her. “Keep going. I’ll stay behind you.”
Prevented from speaking by the breather in her mouth, and unable to just think-send speech the way the avatar could, she found herself nodding, and wondered if the suit would transmit the action to Berdle.
She swam on up through the darkness, alone save for the sound of her own breathing and a few dim, wavering lights.
“Firearms are not permitted on board, sir,” the crew-person told Agansu. “We’re showing that you have a side-arm secreted by your lower back. That will have to be left here, with us.”
He had been stopped at the far end of the boarding gantry, on a sort of gallery set into the side of the airship. Two people, both large and dressed in standard-looking private security garb, barred his way. The woman who was talking was in front, her male colleague behind, standing in the open doorway in the hull of the
“I am a colonel in the Home System Regiment on a special assignment,” Agansu said quietly to the woman, aware of people starting to queue up behind him on the narrow gantry. “I appreciate and commend your alertness, however I do require entry to the vessel and I may well have need of my side-arm.”
~Marine operations officer, Agansu sent, ~are you reading all this?
~Yes, sir.
~Kindly bring one of your units to bear here, would you? Prepare to stun to temporary unconsciousness the two people blocking my way. Ten minutes should be sufficient. And have… four units ready to accompany me inside the vessel.
~Sir. Using AG inside the vessel is likely to make the units obvious to the airship’s systems.
~Have them switch to limbed locomotion on entry.
~Sir. Five units switched to your immediate control, now.
~I have them, Agansu confirmed, aware, in a virtual space behind his eyes, of exactly where the five marine arbites were in relation to him and his immediate surroundings.
“I’m afraid our orders make no allowance for that, sir, the security officer was telling him.
~Sir? the marine operations officer sent. ~Getting some data on a person of interest — the Cossont, Vyr, woman — entering the water tank in the airship, sir. Not a definite ID though; small bug, a distance off, and comms link unsteady.
“Hey!” somebody shouted in the queue behind Agansu. “Get moving!”
The security officer glanced behind him, then frowned at him. “Also, sir,” she said, “I’m just hearing from our colleagues on board that you are showing as very non-standard physiologically. There is a new policy in force aboard which means that if you’re an android or avatar you will need special permission to board.”
The man behind her had stepped back a pace and one hand had fallen to a holstered side-arm.
~Stun both, now.
~Sir.
The woman’s eyes closed. She collapsed, her knees giving way first so that she just seemed to sit heavily. Then she fell over backwards. The man behind performed the same actions a half-second later, as though in impersonation.
Agansu stepped over the two inert bodies and into the doorway; two marine arbites, visible more as disturbances in the air than as anything physical, darted in before him. They landed on the threshold with audible thumps, the air shimmering as they entered.
“Whoa!”
“Hey, what—?” voices said, inside.
~Stun, Agansu sent, as he looked within.
Two more bodies were folding into unconsciousness, a couple of metres inside the door. Agansu turned and looked back at the faces of the people crowding the boarding gantry. They were all looking either at the two fallen security guards outside, or at him. He smiled. The other two arbites made shimmering shapes in the air and landed in the doorway, slipping inside like shadows, only half seen.
~Close and lock the door, he said, over the channel to the arbite marines. The door swung to, then made clunking, locking noises. The space he was in now was perhaps twenty metres long but only five deep. Various fixtures and fittings, none of them relevant, save that there seemed to be a large number of white tabards or shifts, neatly wrapped and stacked. Another open doorway led into the rest of the ship.
~Show yourselves, please, Agansu said over the marines’ channel.
The four marine arbites dropped their camouflage, revealing them as stocky, metallic, vaguely humanoid shapes, crouched on pairs of zigzag legs. Each looked like something crayoned by a child then rendered in gun- metal. Their heads were long, flat, featureless.
~You will be arbites one through four, from lowest to highest serial number, Agansu told them. ~Understood?
~Understood, the arbites said in unison. They even sounded metallic.
She swam up through the layers and corridors of dark, warm water. The suit spoke to her in Berdle’s voice now and again, directing her — or Berdle spoke to her, it was hard to tell.
She looked about as she swam, and noticed that some of the tiny, dim lights visible through the fluid had been arranged so as to look like the most familiar constellations visible from Xown. This made the experience like swimming through space. She wondered if the avatar would feel this. She saw only one other person, briefly, some distance off, and below.
She and Berdle had joined the unhurried groups of people heading towards the access spheres from the rest of the airship near the start of the whole process; fewer than fifty people had preceded them into the giant tank. Most of the Last Party-goers would ascend before anybody from outside, though a few would hold back to help guide any stragglers, and there were some who just wanted to be last, or amongst the last, to make the journey.
The other person swam off, away from her, and disappeared. She felt oddly abandoned, almost sad. She hoped the other swimmer would make it to the top of the tank without incident. There were, Berdle had assured her, various viable routes to the top of the tank; she and the avatar were taking the shortest and quickest.
The skin-contact hallucinogens in the water were diluted to deliver a modest dose to somebody swimming completely naked, so they were having no discernible effect on her at all. Still, there was a dreaminess and unreality to the dark swim that — along with the relative simplicity of only having to think to the extent of following an instruction every half minute or so, and the pleasant glow of continuous but unstressed physical effort — allowed her mind to wander, allowed her to think.
What a strange way to be approaching the end of one’s life, she thought. Swimming through a vast tank of water and Scribe-knew-what towards a little artificial heaven with no escape, or only one. In search of a man’s discarded eyes. With the avatar of a Culture ship following, swimming. And one of her own people’s ships seemingly intent on stopping them. She had done a few strange things in her life, she supposed; why not leave one of the weirdest of all till last? To be topped only by the Subliming itself, she guessed.
Her breathing went on, like something apart from her, the whole sound-scape to her steady, paced exertion. Save that, the silence was entire, and she had started to understand something of QiRia’s slow-building obsession with immersion, both literal and in sound. Especially in sound; in the waves of compression that took and flowed through the body rather than — like light, like sight — stopping at the surface. She had done something similar in a
