The Administrator groaned. “Oh no,” she said. “That is the press.”
“Sholish! My good cuirass, you witless rind-nibbling waste of gas!”
Y’sul threw a piece of armour across the room at his servant.
The camo-painted carbon plate spun through the gas, changing colours rapidly as it tried to adapt, narrowly missed several other Dwellers — the large room was crowded and people had to duck, bob or dodge — just avoided Sholish and embedded itself in a FloatTree panel, producing a distinct thunk. Before it had much of a chance to blend in, Sholish tugged it out of the wall and disappeared into a side chamber, muttering.
“Excuse me,” Colonel Hatherence said sharply to a Dweller who’d just bumped into her in the general shuffling that had spread through the room to give the thrown piece of armour a clear trajectory.
“Excused!” the Dweller said, then continued his conversation with another of Y’sul’s relations.
Y’sul was getting ready to quit Hauskip and leave for the war along with his charges, Fassin and the oerileithe. His new combat clothing had arrived just that morning (kudos-enhancingly quickly!) along with various gifts from friends and family, most of whom, it seemed, had thought it best to show up in person to present their mostly useless or positively dangerous gifts and offer vast amounts of generally contradictory but extremely loudly proffered advice.
Y’sul, flattered and excited to be the centre of so much attention, had invited them all into his dressing room for snacks and whatever while he tried on all his new clothing, checked that his antique, inherited familial armour still more or less fitted and played with all the new bits and pieces he’d been given. Fassin counted over thirty Dwellers in the chamber, which was one of the larger spaces in the wheel-shaped house. There was a saying to the effect that one Dweller constituted an argument-in-waiting, two a conspiracy and three a riot. Quite what a gathering of thirty-plus was supposed to represent he wasn’t sure, but it would assuredly have nothing to do with silence or subtlety. The noise rang off the curved walls. The clothing competed for loudness. Expressive patterns spread across exposed carapace skin like flip-books of geometric artwork. Magnetic chatter swirled, infrasound bounced confusion from one wall to another and a heady mix of pheromones bathed the place in frantic currents of Dweller hilarity.
— Are there other guides-cum-guards we might employ beside this one? Hatherence asked, pressing up to the wall beneath where Fassin floated as another Dweller bearing gifts arrived and pushed his way through the throng towards Y’sul.
— Not really, Fassin told her. — Y’sul suffered a significant kudos-loss within the Guard-mentors Guild taking on an alien outworlder, back when he agreed to be Uncle Slovius’s mentor. He got that back eventually but it was a brave thing to do. Few of them will accept that kind of loss. Starting from scratch to find somebody new would take years, even if Y’sul did agree.
Something small, round, pink and gooey bumped into the top of the colonel’s esuit, and stuck. She batted it away. — What are all these things? she said, exasperated.
— Just hospitality, Fassin sent, with a resigned expression.
Floating, drifting round the room were bobfruits, flossballs, chandelier-gumbushes and wobbling breezetrays loaded with sweetmeats, mood-balloons, narcopastes and party-suppositories. The guests helped themselves, eating, ingesting, snorting, rubbing and inserting away as appropriate. The noise seemed to be swelling by the minute, as was the collision rate — always a sure indicator that Dwellers were getting out of it (lots of loud bumps, hasty cries of “Excuse me!’, sudden, alarming tiltings, and bursts of the sort of especially raucous laughter which invariably accompanied the realisation by a Dweller that one of its companions had lost control of their buoyancy).
· Oh dear, Fassin said. — I do believe this is turning into a party.
· Are these people intoxicated? Hatherence asked, sounding genuinely shocked.
Fassin looked at her, letting his incredulity show. — Colonel, he told her, — they are rarely anything else.
There was a bang and a yelp from somewhere near where Y’sul floated. A bobfruit exploded in mid-gas and fell limply to the floor. People nearby wiped foamy pieces of fruit off their clothes.
“Oops!” Y’sul said, amidst widespread laughter.
· He can’t be the only guide! the colonel protested. — What about other Seers? They must have guides too.
· They do, but it’s a one-to-one thing, an exclusive relationship. Abandoning your Guard-mentor would be a terrible insult. They’d lose all kudos.
· Major Taak, we cannot afford to be sentimental here! If there is even a possibility that we might find a better, less idiotic guide, we ought at least to start looking.
— The Guard-mentors are a Guild, colonel. They run a closed shop. If you dumped one of them, none of the rest would touch you. You’d certainly then find some clown who’d offer to act as a guide, mentor, guard, whatever — in fact they’d probably have to form a queue — but they’d be very young and stupid, or very old and, ah, eccentric, and they’d assuredly get you into far more trouble than they were ever likely to get you out of. The Guard-mentors Guild would harass them from the start, for one thing, and the vast majority of other Dwellers wouldn’t talk to you at all. Librarians, archive-keepers, antiquarians, exo-specialists — all the people we most need to talk to, in other words — in particular would not even give you the time of day.
They made room for Y’sul’s servant, Sholish, returning from the side chamber with a two-piece, highly polished, mirror-finished cuirass. Sholish was an adolescent, only a few hundred years old, barely three-quarters grown and skinny. Personal servants, always at least two generational stages younger than their masters, were fairly common in Dweller society, especially where the senior Dweller was bothering to pursue a hobby-cum-profession which actually involved a degree of study and\or training, when the servant had a fighting chance of picking up the basics of the given trade. The better masters regarded their servants more as apprentices than servants and the occasional especially aberrant ones treated their underlings almost as equals.
Y’sul had yet to fall prey to such sentimentality.
“And about time, you custard-brained phlegm-wart!” Y’sul yelled, snatching the cuirass from Sholish’s grasp. “Did you have to forge and weave the armour yourself? Or did you start gazing at your own reflection and lose all track?”
Sholish mumbled, retreated.
— I refuse to accept that we are as powerless as you imply, major, the colonel told Fassin.
He turned to look at the oerileithe. — We are here very much on sufferance, colonel. The Dwellers can go off entire species of Seers, for no accountable reason. Nobody’s ever worked out a pattern to this. You just suddenly find that you and your kind aren’t welcome any more. It doesn’t usually happen while they’re still getting to know a new-to-civilisation species, but even that’s no guarantee. They certainly get fed up with individuals — I’ve seen it happen — and that’s equally random. Every time I come down here I have to accept that no matter how friendly and helpful everybody might have been during my last visit — (the colonel gave a sceptical laugh) — they might have nothing more to do with me this time or ever again. In fact, they might tell me I’ve got a day to get out or become the object of a hunt. And a Seer faces that prospect every single time they delve, either remotely or directly. We just have to get used to it. They don’t even need to have met you; there are records of Seers-to-be who’ve spent decades getting trained up, who’ve been part of respected Seer Septs going back millennia who’ve been about to go on their very first delve and been told not to bother and to stay away for ever. It’s a minor miracle they’ve accepted you the way they have. And don’t forget the only reason you’re not constantly being challenged as an interloper is because Y’sul is on record as vouching for you.