Surface Detail

“I don’t have a lace,” he said, running his hand over one side of his face and through some of his long, dark, curly hair. “Right now I don’t even have a terminal on me; I’m out to play.” He looked up to where the cone of the noise-reducing sound field seemed to be emanating, from the ceiling of the space, unseen in the darkness above. “Ship, what’s a hayman?”

“A hymen,” she corrected.

“A hymen is a thin membrane partially obstructing the vagina of a mammal, especially a human,” the ship said from the long silver ring on her finger. “It is found in approximately twenty-eight per cent of the pan-human meta-species and its presence is often taken as signifying the individual concerned has yet to be subject to penetrative sex. However-”

“Thanks,” the attractive young man curled his fingers round the ring on her finger, muffling the ship’s voice and causing it to stop.

Lededje smiled as he took his fingers away. It had been quite an intimate act, she felt. Promising. She lowered her head to her hand a little. “Do I have a hymen?” she asked quietly.

“No,” the ring said. “Please hold me up to one of your ears.”

“Excuse me,” Lededje said to the attractive young man. He shrugged, drank his drink, looked away.

“Lededje, Sensia here,” the ring said. “The body blank I used didn’t come with defined genitalia at all; it was told to become female at the same time as the basic Sichultian characteristics were programmed in. The default setting is no hymen. Why? Do you want one?”

She brought the ring round to her mouth. “No!” she whispered. She frowned, watching the attractive young man smile and nod to somebody nearby.

He didn’t look Sichultian, of course, but he looked… different; a bit the way she looked different. When she had come up with her general plan of action, hours earlier, sitting in front of the wall screen in her room after Sensia had left her, she had asked about and quickly found various scheduled social gatherings of those amongst the ship’s not-quite quarter of a billion population who did not look like the average Culture human. In a ship with that many people aboard there were always going to be plenty of individuals who didn’t conform to the Culture norm.

The way to think of the ship’s living space, she’d decided, was as a single giant city, fifty kilometres long by twenty across and a uniform kilometre in height. With a perfect, free and rapid public transport system composed of what she thought of as small, luxurious, one-carriage ultra-fast underground trains crossed with elevator cars. She was used to the idea of cities attracting the eccentric and the strange, the people who would be ostracised or even attacked in the countryside or smaller towns and villages if they behaved as they really wanted to behave but who could become themselves, amongst others of whatever kind they were, when they came to the city. She’d known she would find some people somewhere who would find her attractive.

There was still the matter of finding what she was coming to think of as The Alternative Ship, though, and that did take priority. This place – Divinity In Extremis – was some sort of combination of semi-regular social event, performance space and drug bar.

It had a reputation. When she’d started asking the screen about it Sensia had butted in, the avatar’s voice suddenly coming out of the screen in place of the more neutral ship voice she’d just been getting used to, advising her that Divinity In Extremis wasn’t the sort of place somebody new to the Culture necessarily wanted to get involved with. Lededje had bit back her annoyance, thanked Sensia for her advice and politely asked her not to interrupt again.

So: Divinity In Extremis. Ship avatars were known to come here.

“You’re interrupting again,” she whispered into the ring. She smiled at the attractive young man as he frowned into his now empty glass.

“I could have pretended I was just the ship,” Sensia’s voice replied reasonably, sounding annoyingly unannoyed. “I assumed you wanted more detail on the physical process that led to your current incarnation. Sorry, dear girl. If you’re worried about whether your body was somehow sexually interfered with while in the grow tank, I can assure you it wasn’t.”

The attractive young man reached out to a passing tray as it floated past, depositing his empty glass and scooping up a fuming drug bowl. He brought it up to his face and inhaled deeply.

“Never mind,” Lededje said. “Sensia?”

“What?”

“Please go away now.”

“Duly gone. One tip though: don’t you think it’s time you asked him his name?”

“Goodbye.”

“Talk to you later.”

Lededje looked up, still smiling. The attractive young man went to hand her the drug bowl. She was about to take it with her right hand but he pulled it away again, gesturing to her left hand. She took the bowl with her left hand instead and raised it tentatively towards her face.