— May I speak now? said the module.
— Yes, Genar-Hofoen thought. ~ Now, what is it?
— As I said, an urgent message.
— From?
— The GSV Death And Gravity.
— Oh? Genar-Hofoen was mildly impressed. ~ I thought the old scoundrel wasn’t talking to me.
— As did we all. Apparently it is. Look, do you want this message or not?
— All right, but why do I have to gland quicken?
— Because it’s a long message, of course… in fact it’s an interactive message; an entire semantic-context signal-set with attached mind-state abstract capable of replying to your questions, and if you listened to the whole thing in real time you’d still be sitting there with a vacant expression on your face by the time your jovial hosts got to the hunt-the-waiter course. And I did say it was urgent. Genar-Hofoen, are you paying attention here?
— I’m paying fucking attention. But come on; can’t you just tell me what the message is? Précis it.
— The message is for you, not me, Genar-Hofoen. I haven’t looked at it; it’ll be stream-deciphered as I transmit it.
— Okay, okay, I’m glanded up; shoot.
— I still say it’s a bad idea… muttered the gelfield suit.
— Shut UP! the module said. ~ Sorry, Genar-Hofoen. Here is the text of the message:
— from GSV Death And Gravity to Seddun-Braijsa Byr Fruel Genar-Hofoen dam Ois, message begins, the module said in its Official voice. Then another voice took over:
— Genar-Hofoen, I won’t pretend I’m happy to be communicating with you again; however, I have been asked to do so by certain of those whose opinions and judgement I respect and admire and hence deem the situation to be such that I would be derelict in my duties if I did not oblige to the utmost of my abilities.
Genar-Hofoen performed the mental equivalent of sighing and putting his chin in his hands while — thanks to the quicken now coursing through his central nervous system — everything around him seemed to happen in slow motion. The General Systems Vehicle Death and Gravity had been a long-winded old bore when he’d known it and it sounded like nothing had happened in the interim to alter its conversational style. Even its voice still sounded the same; pompous and monotonous at the same time.
— Accordingly, and with due recognition of your habitually contrary, argumentative and wilfully perverse nature I am communicating with you by sending this message in the form of an interactive signal. I see you are currently one of our ambassadors to that childishly cruel band of upstart ruffians known as the Affront; I have the unhappy feeling that while this may have been envisaged as a kind of subtle punishment for you, you will in fact have adapted with some relish to the environment if not the task, which I assume you will dispatch with your usual mixture of off-handed carelessness and casual self-interest—
— If this signal is interactive, interrupted Genar-Hofoen, ~ can I ask you to get to the fucking point?
He watched the two scratchounds tense together in slo-mo on either side of the pit.
— The point is that your hosts will have to be asked to deprive themselves of your company for a while.
— What? Why? Genar-Hofoen thought, immediately suspicious.
— The decision has been made — and I hasten to establish that I had no part in this — that your services are required elsewhere.
— Where? For how long?
— I can’t tell you where exactly, or for how long.
— Make a stab at it.
— I cannot and will not.
— Module, end this message.
— Are you sure? asked Scopell-Afranqui.
— Wait!, said the voice of the GSV. ~ Will it satisfy you if I say that we may need about eighty days of your time?
— No it won’t. I’m quite happy here. I’ve been bounced into all sorts of Special Circumstances shit in the past on the strength of a Hey-come-and-do-one-little-job-for-us come-on line. (This was not in fact perfectly true; Genar-Hofoen had only ever acted for SC once before, but he’d known — or at least heard of — plenty of people who’d got more than they’d expected when they’d worked for what was in effect the Contact section’s espionage and dirty tricks department.)
— I did not —
— Plus I’ve got a job to do here, Genar-Hofoen interrupted. ~ I’ve got another audience with the Grand Council in a month to tell them to be nicer to their neighbours or we’re going to think about slapping their paddles. I want details of this exciting new opportunity or you can shove it.
— I did not say that I am speaking on behalf of Special Circumstances.
— Are you denying that you are?
— Not as such, but —
— So stop fucking around. Who the hell else is going to start hauling a gifted and highly effective ambassador off—?
— Genar-Hofoen, we are wasting time here.
— We?, Genar-Hofoen thought, watching the two scratchounds launch themselves at each other slowly. ~ Never mind. Go on.
— The task required of you is, apparently, a delicate one, which is why I personally regard you as being utterly unsuited to it, and as such it would be foolish to entrust the full details either to myself, to your module, your suit or indeed to you until all these details are required.
— There you are; that’s exactly what you can shove; all that SC need-to-know crap. I don’t care how fucking delicate the task is, I’m not even going to consider it until I know what’s involved.
The scratchounds were in mid-pounce now, both of them twisting as they leapt. Shit, thought Genar-Hofoen; this might be one of those scratchound bouts where the whole thing was decided on the initial lunge, depending entirely on which beast got its teeth into the neck of the other first.
— What is required, said the message, with a fair approximation of the way the Death And Gravity had always sounded when it was exasperated, is eighty days of your time, ninety-nine to ninety-nine point nine-plus percent of which you will spend doing nothing more onerous or demanding than being carried from point A to point B; the first part of your journey will be spent travelling, in considerable comfort, I imagine, aboard the Affronter ship which we will ask (or rather pay, probably) them to put at your disposal, the second part will be spent in guaranteed comfort aboard a Culture GCU and will be followed by a short visit aboard another Culture vessel whereupon the task we would ask of you will actually be accomplished — and when I say a short visit, I mean that it may be possible for you to carry out what is required of you within an hour, and that certainly the assignment should take no longer than a day. Then you will make the return journey to take up wherever you left off with our dear friends and allies the Affront. I take it all that doesn’t sound too much like hard work, does it?
The scratchounds were meeting in the air a metre above the centre of the bait-pit, their jaws aimed as best they could at each other’s throats. It was still a little hard to tell, but Genar-Hofoen didn’t think it was looking too good for Fivetide’s animal.