Surface Detail

There was jeering. He bowed – sarcastically, Lededje thought, if such a thing was possible. He tossed the coin one last time, watched it flip in the air and then held open the breast pocket of his extravagantly decorated dressing gown. The coin dropped into the pocket. He extracted a kerchief from it and mopped his face as some of the people who’d been watching started to drift away.

“Led,” he said, nodding to her. “Pleased to meet you.” He looked at her, toe to top. She had dressed very conservatively at first, then changed her mind and opted for a short sleeveless dress, deciding to revel in the freedom to do so without displaying her legally approved, Veppers-designed tattoo. Jolicci shook his head. “You don’t look like anything I have stored up here,” he said, tapping his head. “Excuse me while I consult my better half. Oh, you’re Sichultian, is that right?”

“Yes,” she said.

“She wants to have sex with a ship’s avatar,” Admile told him.

Jolicci looked surprised. “Really?” he asked.

“No,” she told him. “I am looking for a disreputable ship.”

“Disreputable?” Jolicci looked even more surprised.

“I think so.”

“You think so?”

Perhaps, she thought – avatar or not – he was just one of those people who thought it the height of wit to constantly ask questions when they weren’t called for. “Would you know of one?” she asked.

“Many. Why do you want a disreputable ship?”

“Because I think the Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly means to send me away on one that will be too well behaved.”

Jolicci scrunched up one eye, as though this answer had hit him with the force of a spit.

She had been flicking through various documents and presentations she had discovered through her room’s screen, looking at what the Culture knew about and thought of the Enablement, when the ship had called back. “Lededje, I’ve found you a ship,” the vessel’s neutral voice had told her straight out of the screen.

“Oh, thank you.”

The image of what she supposed must be a Culture spaceship had appeared on the screen, pasted over what she’d been looking at. It resembled a rather featureless skyscraper lying on its side. “It’s called The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory.”

“Is it?”

“Don’t worry about the name. The point is, it’s heading in your direction and it’s agreed to take you. It’s setting off late tomorrow afternoon.”

“It will take me to Sichult?”

“Most of the way. It’ll drop you at a place called Bohme, a transfer station and dock complex just outside the Enablement itself. I’ll arrange local transport from there while you’re en route.”

“Won’t I need money to pay for that?”

“Leave that to me. Would you like to talk to the ship? Arrange when to board?”

“Okay.”

She’d talked to The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory. It had sounded cheery but boring. She’d thanked it, thanked the GSV again and then had sat frowning at the screen once control of it was returned to her.

She’d started looking for document sites about Culture spaceships. They appeared to be almost without number; there were millions of ships, each seemed to have what was in effect its own public log book and its own fan club – often more than one – and there were innumerable documents/presentations on particular types and classes of ships or those which had been constructed by specific manufacturies or other ships. It was bewildering. She could understand why Culture people just asked their local AI or Mind for whatever information they wanted; trying to work your way down through all the detail yourself was daunting.

Perhaps she should just ask. That seemed to be the way you did things in the Culture. On Sichult you had to think about what subjects and people it was safe to ask certain things about, but not here, apparently. On the other hand, doing it yourself felt more secure.

She was already fairly au fait with how you did all this; it wasn’t vastly different from the way the Enablement arranged access to the data it was prepared to share with the general public, plus she’d had practice while she’d still been in the ship’s Virtual Environment, before she’d be revented into this body.

Here in the Real, using the screen, she knew how to monitor the level of machine intelligence she was talking to. A side bar at the edge of the screen changed according to whether she was talking to, or just using, a completely dumb program, a smart but witless set of algorithms, one of three different levels of AI, an intelligent outside entity or was linked directly to the main personality of the GSV itself. The bar had ascended to its maximum when Sensia had broken in earlier with her warning about Divinity In Extremis.