Colonel Hatherence leaned over towards Fassin. — This kudos thing, then, she sent. — It is really how they calculate their worth?
· I’m afraid so.
· So it’s the truth! I thought it was a joke.
· Distinguishing between the two is not a Dweller strong point.
Y’sul wandered back, failing to shut the window. His vanes made a quiet burring noise as he roted through the gas towards them. “Give me the message,” he said. “I’ll forward it.”
“Via an out-of-the-way transceiver?” Fassin asked.
“Of course!”
“Well, just send to Sept Bantrabal, letting them know I’m all right and asking whether they’re okay at their end. I imagine they already know what happened to the Third Fury moon. You might ask them whether anything has been heard of Master Technician Apsile and the drop ship which escaped the moon’s assault, and what happened to the ships supposed to be protecting Third Fury.”
“Ahem,” the colonel said.
They both looked at her. “Is this wise?” she asked.
“You mean should I pretend to be dead?” Fassin said.
“Yes.”
“That did occur to me. But there are people I’d like to know I’m alive.” He thought of that glimpse of a flash which might have been something hitting ’glantine while Third Fury was being bombarded. “And I’d like to know my friends and family are all right.”
“Of course,” the colonel said. “However, I wonder if it might be more sensible for me to communicate with my superiors first. We might ask Dweller Y’sul here to let me use this remote relay. Once a more secure link had been established, perhaps via one of the warships, which I assume are still somewhere around the planet, a message might be sent to your Sept to let them know you are well. None of which need take long.”
While Hatherence had been speaking, Y’sul had floated right up to her, seemingly intent on peering through the front plate of her esuit, which was in fact completely opaque, and indeed armoured. Eventually he was within a centimetre of her, towering above the oerileithe. The colonel did not retreat. One of Y’sul’s rim limbs tapped — more delicately this time — on the colonel’s esuit casing.
“Would you mind not doing that, sir?” she said frostily.
“Why are you still inside that thing, little dweller?” Y’sul asked.
“Because I am evolved for higher, colder levels with a different gas-mix and pressure gradient, Dweller Y’sul.”
“I see.” Y’sul drew back. “And you have a very strange accent and way with grammar. I swear this human speaks better than you do. What were you saying again?”
“I was asking you kindly to refrain from making physical contact with my esuit.”
“No, before that.” .
“I was suggesting I make contact with my superiors.”
“Military superiors?”
“Yes.”
Y’sul turned to Fassin. “That sounds more interesting than your plan, Fassin.”
“Y’sul, two hundred of my people died yesterday. If not more. I’d like—”
“Yes yes yes, but—”
“I might have to signal ’glantine direct, if no satellites are left,” Hatherence was saying, as a tall door swung up in one wall and a Dweller in ceremonial clothes poked its rim out.
“I’ll see you now,” said the City Administrator.
The Administrator’s office was huge, the size of a small stadium. It was ringed with holo-screen carrels. Fassin counted a hundred or so of the study stations, though only a few were occupied by Dwellers, mostly fairly young. There were no windows but the ceiling was diamond leaf, with most of the sections slid round to leave the place open to the rapidly darkening sky. Floatlamps bobbed, casting a soft yellow light over them as they followed the Administrator to her sunken audience area in the centre of the giant room.
“You are pregnant!” Y’sul exclaimed. “How delightful!”
“So people keep telling me,” the Administrator said sourly. Dwellers were, for want of a better term, male for over ninety-nine per cent of their lives, only changing to the female form to become pregnant and give birth. Becoming female and giving birth was regarded as a social duty; the fact that the obligation was more honoured than not made it unique in Dweller mores. It contributed mightily to one’s kudos tally and anyway had a sort of sentimental attraction for all but the most determinedly misanthropic members of the species (statistically, about forty-three per cent). Still, it was undeniably a burden, and very few Dwellers went through the experience without complaining mightily about it.
“I myself have thought of becoming female, oh, several times!” Y’sul said.
“Well, it’s overrated,” the City Administrator told him. “And particularly burdensome when one had an invitation to the forthcoming war that one is now apparently morally obliged to turn down. Please; take a dent.”
They floated to a series of hollows in the audience area and rested gently within them.
“Why, I too hope to be going to the war!” Y’sul said brightly. “Well, somewhere very near it, at least. I have only just now returned from my tailor’s after being measured for the most lately fashionable conflict attire.”
“Oh, really?” the Administrator said. “Who’s your tailor? Mine just left for the war.”
“Not Fuerliote?” Y’sul exclaimed.
“The same!”
“He was mine also!”
“Just the best.”
“Absolutely.”
“No, I had to go to Deystelmin.”
“Is he any good?”
“Weeeelll.” Y’sul waggled his whole double-discus. “One lives in hope. Good mirror-side manner, as it were, but will it translate into a flattering cut? That’s the question one has to ask oneself.”
“I know,” agreed the Administrator. “And off to become a junior officer on a Dreadnought!”
“Not even that! A rating!”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“Very lowly, for someone so distinguished!”
“I know, but a smart move. Getting in as a rating before the recruitment window even properly opens makes sense. The smoking-uniform effect.”
“Ah! Of course!”
Fassin tried making a throat-clearing noise in the midst of all this, but to no effect.
· The smoking-uniform effect? The colonel light-whispered to him.
· Dead men’s shoes, Fassin explained. — They only promote from within once hostilities have begun. If he’s lucky this tailor’s Dreadnought will suffer heavy damage and lose a few officers and he’ll end up an officer after all. If he’s really lucky he could rise to admiral.
Hatherence thought about this. — Would a tailor, however distinguished, necessarily make a good admiral?
— Probably no worse than the one he’d be replacing.
The problem was that to the Dwellers all professions were in effect hobbies, all posts and positions sinecures. This tailor that Y’sul and the City Administrator were babbling on about would have had no real need to be a tailor, he was just somebody who’d found he possessed an aptitude for the pastime (or, more likely, for the gossiping and fussing generally associated with it). He would take on clients to increase his kudos, the level of which would increase proportionally the more powerful were the people he tailored for, so that somebody in a position of civil power would constitute a favoured client, even if that position of power had come about through a lottery, some arcanely complicated rota system or plain old coercive voting — jobs like that of City Administrator were subject to all those regimes and more, depending on the band or zone concerned, or just which city was involved. The City Administrator, in return, would be able to drop casually into just the right conversations the fact she had such a well-known, high-kudos tailor. Obviously Y’sul had had sufficient kudos of his own to be able to engage the services of this alpha-outfitter too. People further down the pecking order would have employed less well-connected tailors, or just got their clothes from Common, which was Dweller for, in this particular case, off-the-peg, and in general just meant mass-produced, kudos-free, available-as-a-matter-of-right-just-because-you’re-a-Dweller… well, pretty much anything, up to and including spaceships.