Surface Detail

She looked down at her feet to watch them moving and noticed that she could see through the floor. To her surprise, the strings went on down through her feet towards another person in the level beneath. She was looking straight down at that person’s head.

She stopped. The person below her stopped. She felt the strings do something, but somehow through her, without moving her. The person below her was looking up at her. She waved down. The person below waved back. She looked a bit like her, but not entirely. Below the person below, there were more people. Human – maybe just pan-human further down, it was hard to tell – vaguely female, all looking a bit like her.

Again, they sort of faded into the haze beneath eventually, which was, quite rightly, exactly the same as the haze above.

She took off her night-dress and got dressed. The clothes just flowed like liquid around the strings that controlled her, parting and re-forming as required. Soon she was outside, walking along the true, broad floor of the corridor outside, with the arches rising to a series of points above, the way it was supposed to be.

A cascade of riffling images and a faint breath on her cheek indicated moving very quickly and then she was at the entrance to the chamber housing the singularity. The gravity felt stronger here; maybe about half normal. A sequence of great thick shiny metal doors rolled away, irised open or ascended to let her enter, and in she went. Whatever structure was above her – and beneath her – didn’t interfere with the strings in the least.

Inside was a huge dark spherical space with only one thing right in the middle of it.

She laughed when she saw how the singularity was choosing to project itself to her. It was a cock; an erect phallus that any panhuman adult would have recognised, but with a vagina splitting it not quite from top to bottom, frilled with vertical double lips. Looking at it, it did quite a good job of looking exactly like both sets of genitals at once, with neither really predominating. She wondered if her subconscious had designed this for her. She patted herself between the legs as though telling her own little nub not to mind, not to get jealous.

“Oh,” she heard herself say, “you’re not going to kill me too are you? Like Norpi.”

“Nopri,” the vagina corrected her. Of course it could speak. She always got names wrong in dreams.

“You’re not, are you?” She’d remembered the bald young man telling her that each time he tried to talk to the Bulbitian it killed him and he had to be revented. She assumed that was what was going on here. Strange; she’d have thought she would feel frightened right now, but she didn’t. She wondered why that was. “I would ask you not to.” She glanced up, saw that the ship’s drone was still there, a few metres above her. That was reassuring.

“He is trying to do something different,” the voice said. It was a thick, luscious voice, each rolled syllable perfectly enunciated.

“This is not that.”

She thought about this. “Well, what is, apart from this itself?”

“Just so.”

“Who are you, exactly?”

“I am what people call the Bulbitian.”

She bowed to it. Looking down as she did so, she saw the person below her still standing straight. She wondered if this was rude. She hoped not. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

“Why are you here, Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh?”

Wow! Her Full Name. That wasn’t something you heard every day. “I am to wait for the ship coming here from the Culture GSV Total Internal Reflection,” she told it.

“Why?”

“To see if a girl called Ludedge Ibrek… hmm; something like that… anyway, to see if she turns up too and goes back with the ship from the Total Internal Reflection.” It was all right to say all this, wasn’t it? Everybody knew this.

“To what end?”

Apparently there was a string that made her cheeks blow out and let her expel a long breath. “Well, it’s complicated.”

“Please explain.”

“Well,” she began. And she explained.

“Your turn.”

“What?”

“Your turn to tell me what I want to know.”

“You may not remember anything I tell you.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“All right. What do you want to know?”

“Where is the Total Internal Reflection?”

“I don’t know.”

“How far away is its incoming ship?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is the name of that ship?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who exactly are you?”

“I told you; I am the structure around you. What people call a Bulbitian.”

“What is your name?”

“I am called the Unfallen Bulbitian, Semsarine Wisp.”

“But what would you call yourself?”

“Just that.”

“All right. What did you used to be called, before the war?”

“Jariviour 400.54, Mochurlian.”

“Explain, please.”

“The first part is my given name, the figurative part is a size and type designation, the last is the old name of the stellar system which I inhabit.”

“Who put the singularity in your core?”

“The Apsejunde.”

“Hmm. I’ve never heard of them.”

“Next question.”

“Why did they put it there?”