Surface Detail

“The Restoria mission at the Tsungarial Disk has been kept informed regarding the potential for the fabricaria to come into play should the confliction spill over into the Real and has requested any help that might be available so long as it draws no extra external attention to the mission or the Disk. We are happy to provide and are lucky to have had assets, including but not limited to myself, and you, close by, given that the situation may become one of extreme urgency very quickly. Whether Restoria has also made such a request to Special Circumstances is not known to us.

“It is worth noting that the smatter infestation within the Disk has been in abatement for the last few decades and will, it is hoped, not enter into the equation.”

Smatter was the name given to the bitty remains of a hegswarm after it had been stamped out as any coherent threat. Usually it didn’t last significantly longer than the outbreak itself and just got mopped up. If some bits did persist then, while you could never afford to ignore the stuff, you didn’t really need to fear it. On the other hand, some of it getting into a mothballed system of a few hundred million ancient mothballed manufacturies did sound like awfully bad luck, Yime thought. Actually, it sounded like the kind of thing that woke Restoria people up at night, sweating and screaming.

The image of the gas giant planet and its glittering, artificial disk rotated slowly and silently in front of Yime.

“What was the possible link between the ‘components’ you mentioned earlier?” she asked.

“It is a potential link between the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly and the Sichultian Enablement in the shape of this vessel.’

The ringed gas giant disappeared to be replaced by the slim but chunky image of a Hooligan-class Limited Offensive Unit. It looked like a long, quite substantial bolt with various smoothed-off washers, nuts and longer collars screwed onto it.

“This is the Me, I’m Counting, an ex-LOU now of the Culture Ulterior,” the ship told her. “It was constructed by the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly shortly before the Idiran war and is thought to remain in sporadic contact with it. It is a self-declared Peripatetic Eccentric: a wanderer, a tramp vessel. It was last heard of with any formal degree of certitude some eight years ago when it declared it might go into a retreat. It is thought to have been present in the Sichultian Enablement two years earlier and so may constitute the mentioned link between it and the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly. There are indications that it accumulates images of strange and exotic creatures or devices and it may have chosen to collect such an image of Lededje Y’breq.”

“That would be a very comprehensive image.”

“It would.”

“And one which would be ten years younger than the female when she died. She wouldn’t know she’d been murdered, if she was.”

“She might simply have been told.”

Yime nodded. “I suppose she might.”

“We think we know, to a degree,” the ship said, a note of caution in its voice, “where the Me, I’m Counting is.”

“Do we?”

“It may well be with the GSV Total Internal Reflection.”

“And where is it?”

“That is not known. It is one of the Forgotten.”

“The what?”

“Ah.”

Ten

A what?”

“A hymen.”

There were things to do, Lededje had decided, and she might only have one night on the GSV to get them done. Getting laid was not the most important item on her list, but it didn’t feel like the least important either.

The attractive young man looked puzzled. “How would I know?”

At least she thought that was what he’d just said. The music was very loud. There were these zones scattered throughout the space that were called sound fields where the music magically dropped away to nothing. She saw the vague blue glow in the air that betrayed the presence of one a couple of metres away and – rather daringly, she felt – putting her hand on the attractive young man’s puffy sleeve, part encouraged and part dragged him in that direction.

Maybe it was her, she thought; she was talking Marain, the Culture’s own language, and while it felt bizarrely natural to just launch out and express herself in it, every time she stopped to think about what she was doing she sort of tripped over herself and stuttered to a stop. Sometimes specific word-choice had her stumbling too; there seemed to be an awful lot of not-quite synonyms in Marain.

The very loud, insistently beaty music – it was called Chug, apparently, though she had yet to establish whether this was the title of the composition, the name of the performer/s or the musical form itself – faded almost to nothing. The attractive young man still looked puzzled.

“You look puzzled,” she told him. “Can’t you just look the word up in your neural lace?”