Surface Detail

“Yime Nsokyi, I presume,” the elderly lady said. “Welcome to the Unfallen Bulbitian, Semsarine Wisp.”

“Thank you. And you…?”

“Fal Dvelner,” the woman said. “Here, have an umbrella.”

“Allow me,” said the ship’s drone, taking the offered device before Yime could accept it. They were still under the ship itself, so sheltered from the rain for the moment. It was so dark the main light came from the big drone’s aura field, which was formal blue mixed with green good humour.

The Bodhisattva had backed carefully up to the structure’s only in-use landing entrance, hovering a few metres above the puddled surface of the landing pier itself, which was made of ancient, pitted metals the colour of mud. From the part of the ship nearest to the wide, bowed entryway into the Bulbitian to the entrance itself was only twenty metres, but the deluge was so heavy it would soak anybody crossing the rain-hazed surface of the pier.

“I was expecting somebody else,” Yime said as they walked splashing along under the jet-black under-surface of the ship. In the low gravity, she found herself imitating the floaty, bouncing gait of the older woman. The rain-drops were huge, slow-falling, slightly oblate spheres. Splashes from below, she noted, could soak you quite thoroughly in low gravity. Her ankle boots and trousers were already quite wet. Ms. Dvelner wore glossy thigh boots and a slick-looking shift, both of which were doubtless much more practical in the conditions. Yime carried her own bag. The air felt warm, and as humid as having a soaking, blood-temperature cloth applied to the face. The atmosphere seemed to press in and down, as though the floating bulk of the million-tonne ship directly above was somehow truly bearing down on her, for all that in reality it was supported within a dimension not even visible, and weighed, right now, within the frame of reference accessible to her, precisely nothing.

“Ah, yes; Mr. Nopri,” Fal Dvelner said, nodding. “He’ll be being unavoidably detained, I dare say.” Dvelner looked to be in about the last quarter of her life; spry, but delicately thin and white haired with a face that contained distinct lines. “He’s your Quietus rep here. I’m with the Numina mission.”

Numina was the part of the Culture’s Contact section that concerned itself with the Sublimed, or at least tried to. It was sometimes known as the Department Of What The Fuck?

“Why might Mr. Nopri be unavoidably detained?” Yime asked, raising her voice over the noise of the downpour. They were coming close to where the great snub nose of the ship rose like an obsidian cliff through the rain-filled air above. The ship had extended a field to shelter them from the rain; a dry corridor three metres wide extended all the way across the pier to the brightly lit entrance.

“Funny old places, Bulbitians,” Dvelner said quietly, arching one brow. She shook her umbrella out and opened it, nodded to the ship-drone, which was a soap-bar smooth, old-fashioned design nearly a metre long. The drone made a noise that might been “Hmm,” and flicked the umbrella open over Yime as they walked out from beneath the nose of the Bodhisattva.

The ship rocked; the whole three-hundred-metre length of it wobbled visibly in the air as the corridor it had made for them through the rain just disappeared, letting the rain thunder down around them. The downpour was so heavy Yime saw Dvelner’s arm sink appreciably as the weight of water hit the umbrella she was carrying. Given that they were bouncing along in only a third of standard G, this implied a lot of water, or a very weak old lady, Yime supposed.

“Here,” Yime said, taking the umbrella protecting her from the drone’s maniple field. She inclined her head towards Dvelner and the drone moved smoothly through the torrent, gently taking the handle of the umbrella from the older woman.

“Thank you,” Dvelner said.

“Did I just see you move?” Yime asked the ship’s drone.

“You did.”

“So what was all that about?”

“Anywhere else, I’d treat that as an attack,” the ship said through the drone, casually. “You don’t interfere with a GCU’s fields, even if all they’re doing is keeping the rain off somebody.”

Beside her, Ms. Dvelner snorted. Yime glanced at her, then said to the drone, “It can do that?”

“It can try to,” the drone said, its voice pitched to affable reasonableness, “with the implicit threat that if I didn’t let it it would get upset and try harder, which, as I say, anywhere else I’d take as tantamount to a challenge. However. My own field enclosures were never put under threat, I am a Quietus ship after all, and this is a particularly sensitive and special Bulbitian, so I chose to let it have its way. This is its turf, after all, and I am the guest-cum-intruder.”