assumed an expression of cautious optimism.
“Mission Director,” Tyun said. “We have come to a decision.” The Liseiden sounded curt, severe. Jelwilin felt relief. Tyun would be compensating for a decision to keep talking rather than to get threatening. A conciliatory, regretful or solemn tone would have augured very badly. “You may authorise Ambassador Mierbeunes to continue negotiations and continue our earlier course regarding the septame.”
Jelwilin bowed. “Thank you, Team Principal.”
“Furthermore, to reinforce the perception of our commitment to a successful outcome regarding the totality of this matter, we shall re-disposition the main portion of our fleet to Zyse.”
Jelwilin assumed his pained expression again.
“Team Principal, if I might make a suggestion—”
“No, thank you, Mission Director,” the Liseiden said, politely but firmly. “You may not. Kindly don’t make the mistake of imagining you’re entering this discussion anywhere else than following its conclusion. The actions I’ve outlined are settled. They will not be subject to further negotiation. We thank you for your assistance and valued advice.”
Jelwilin knew when to give way with grace. “I understand, Team Principal,” he said. “I wish us both the best fortune in these endeavours.”
“Thank you,” Tyun said, his body making slow S shapes in some unseen current. “You may return to your… Element.”
As far as anybody could tell, the Girdlecity of Xown had been built by the long-Sublimed Werpesh simply because they could. Nearly thirty thousand kilometres long, the structure formed a single vast bracelet round the equator of the world. A-shaped in cross-section, over a hundred kilometres across at the base, dozens at the top and just under two hundred klicks high — so tall that it protruded above almost all the atmosphere, providing Xown with a spaceport sufficiently prodigious to have served a thousand such worlds — the Girdlecity was a single colossal barricade, an everywhere-pierced wall, halving the planet.
Even building on this extraordinary scale, there were touches of elegance to its design; because Xown was a planet with little wobble and the Girdlecity straddled the equator, it effectively sat between the narrow tropic lines, only ever casting a shadow on lower parts of itself, never on the planet’s surface.
And it could easily have been bigger. As a Non-Gravitationally Constrained Self-Supporting Artefact, or, colloquially, just an NG — which sort of stood for Neutral-Gravity structure — it was formed from a mix of ordinary and exotic materials that meant only a tiny fraction of its mass actually imposed itself as weight upon either its own lower reaches or on the crust of the planet beneath. Had they wanted, the Werpesh could have arranged it so that where the mighty structure’s foundations met Xown’s bedrock, they exerted a gentle upward pull, rather than a modest load. Artefacts constructed using this sort of technology could be extended indefinitely, with no annoying tendency to collapse in on themselves. Most such structures were in space, and some were much bigger.
The Girdlecity had the additional problem of needing to keep its structural elements tuned for their precise place within the slope of the planet’s gravity well, but this had proved trivial. Even so, while nearly weightless, the artefact still had colossal mass, and its effect on Xown’s total angular momentum had been to slow down the planet’s rotation by nearly a second a year.
As was the case with each of their impressive if arguably rather pointless Sculpt worlds, the main point of the Girdlecity, as far as its builders had been concerned, appeared to have been the building of it, rather than any subsequent use it might have been put to. The Werpesh — famously secretive and opaquely motivated — had never chosen to elaborate on their reasons for constructing it. Some of them had lived in portions of it and it did function as a kind of grossly over-engineered spaceport, but the main use it might have had — attracting alien tourists — wasn’t one the Werpesh had ever chosen to promote. Most of the time, before the Werpesh finally did the decent thing and Sublimed, the sparsely populated, barely used Girdlecity had just sort of sat there.
The Gzilt had made better use of it, but even then, in nearly eleven thousand years of custodianship, they had never even come close to filling it entirely, and rarely ventured into the sections above the level where there was natural atmosphere to breathe, leaving over ninety per cent of it empty of life. Space habitats, for all their even greater intrinsic artificiality, were capable of providing far more agreeable, pleasantly rural, less brutally industrial- feeling places in which to live.
Still, the Girdlecity had contained many billions, and even now contained hundreds of millions of Gzilt. And in a sense, of course, it still contained those billions, except the vast majority of them were Stored, existing in a state of suspended animation, awaiting the pre-waking just before the Instigation that would itself lead to their new life in the Sublime.
There had always been open tunnels within the Girdlecity; routes — some never less than half a kilometre in diameter — within the length of it that stretched throughout its fretwork of vast tubes, girders, walls and components both structural and habitative to provide a kind of large-scale transport network for airships. The great dirigibles had plied the vast tunnels for millennia, carrying people and occasionally goods, even though there were many faster, more efficient systems built into the Girdlecity. Airship travel was seen as romantic.
Now, as far as was known, there was only one airship still making its way through the structure, and it was home to the Last Party.
The Last Party was a five-year-long Debaucheriad aboard the airship
The
Nominally owned by one of the many collectives which had been set up within the Girdlecity, it had been due to cease flying with all the other ships as the waking population of the structure dwindled to less than five per cent of what it had once been. Then a small group within the collective — one based on the pursuit of art and experimental living, so it had been pretty eccentric even at the best of times — had suggested keeping the thing flying, right to the end, and making a proper going-away party of its last flight.
The original idea had been to have a year-long party, one that would have started over four years after the suggestion was first put forward, but such was the excitement the idea produced, nobody could stand to wait that long so the plan was altered: it would be a five-year-long party, and fate help all who dared to sail on it.
The small group within the collective had been led, or at least fronted, by a man called Ximenyr, who’d been into a variety of radical body arts and amendment. He was one of the founding members of the Last Party, and one of a few dozen out of the original few hundred who had started out who was still determinedly partying; most of the rest had given up, burned out, been hospitalised or died. A few had even got religion. The party hadn’t fizzled out, though; quite the opposite. It had grown in size over the years as more and more people heard about it and arrived to sample its delights until it entirely filled the two thousand accommodation and social units aboard the ship and there was supposedly a waiting list if you wanted to stay overnight. Though, given that one of the (few) guiding principles of the Last Party was that all things ought to be as shambolic as possible at all times — and it had entirely lived up to this rule — nobody really took this restriction especially seriously. Unless, of course, the sheer weight of bodies aboard led to the airship starting to bump along the bottom of its open-work tunnel, in which case it was time to restore buoyancy by disposing of any blatantly unnecessary items, such as articles of furniture.
“Are we clear?”
“Consider me briefed. How close do you have to get?”
“Just inside might make all the difference, though the closer to the man himself the better. ROAT, preferably.”
“Roat?”
“Reach Out And Touch. This sort of distance.”
“Okay.”
~Hear me via the earbud?
“Yes,” she said. She’d never been great at sub-vocalising.
“Do you want me to wake the android Eglyle Parinherm?”
