The person in front of them appeared to have a round flat face exactly like a large plate of alphabet soup: a yellow-brown liquid holding lots of little white letters, somehow held at ninety degrees to vertical when it looked convincingly as though the whole lot should be spilling to the floor of the balcony hangar. It could, Cossont supposed, be a screen or more likely a holo, but when she’d first bent forward to look at it she’d have sworn it was real; there was vapour coming off it and she could smell the soup. Otherwise the person looked physically relatively normal; either a thin female or a rather hippy male of average height dressed in a motley of violently spray-painted military gear. The top, sides and chin of his/her head flowed seemingly naturally into the bowl making up their face.
The letters in the soup bowl rearranged themselves: COURSE HEAR!
Berdle, standing alongside Cossont, crossed one leg over the other, put his arm over her shoulders and drew deeply on a fat drug stick. He held the breath, grinned at the person with the soup-bowl face. Berdle was dressed like a badly lagged pipe; a thick, red, pillowy material wrapping his limbs and torso was held in place by loose-looking black straps.
“We’d like to talk to The Master of the Revels,” Cossont said, a little more quietly. This was the title Ximenyr had taken nearly a year earlier, for the last circuit of the Girdlecity and the planet before the Big Enfold.
WHO?
Cossont sighed. “Ximenyr.”
Berdle brushed some ash off Cossont’s jacket. She hadn’t even seen Berdle change; in some moment between the module touching down on a deserted piazza about a kilometre above the waves and them walking off the deck into the structure he’d gone from whatever he’d been wearing earlier (she couldn’t remember) to what he was wearing now.
She’d looked back, frowned, and started wondering if this was some projection. She’d stepped towards him as they’d walked, rubbed his sleeve fabric between thumb and finger. Nope; real.
“Sorry,” she’d said.
“None taken,” he’d replied. She’d looked askance.
Maybe, she’d thought, it was some ultra-clever and adaptable piece or pieces of clothing, or — along with his whole face-and-body-altering thing earlier — maybe it meant the entire avatar was some sort of swarm-being, made up of tiny machines. She’d looked him hard in the eye, from very close up, but he’d still contrived to look like flesh and blood.
She’d pulled away. “Sorry, again.”
“Still none taken.”
She was dressed as she had been, freshly repaired Lords of Excrement jacket included, with Pyan rolled into a scarf shape and draped over her shoulders.
They’d walked through the empty tubularity of the local architecture, their way lit by a few small and distant lights. They’d come to a long gallery where the nose of the airship was just starting to slide past like a colossal walking-speed tube train. It was moving so slowly she’d thought it had stopped, but it was still going, if only at a slow stroll. Thirty thousand klicks in a year; she supposed that did equate to strolling speed. The tunnel the ship moved in looked like a gigantic woven basket of dark filaments, stretching to a hazed curve within the greater structural and architectural elements of the Girdlecity. A few random lights shone; so few the average unaided eye would have interpreted the gloom as something close to utter darkness. Good to have augmentation, she’d thought. She’d glanced at the avatar. Berdle probably had eyes that could see through planets.
A thin metal net strung on stanchions protected them from the drop into the curve of tunnel.
The molecule-thin hull of the ship was probably red underneath, though it was hard to tell in the paltry light because the surface was so thoroughly splattered with a berserk variety of patterns, diagrams, logos and drawings, some illuminated, some moving — some looping, some not — and covered with flowing, bedraggled banners, gently waving pennants and ragged flags.
The nose pushed slowly out past them, right to left, the ship seeming to broaden out to meet them, metre by metre, until it looked like the airship was going to collide with the gallery she and Berdle stood on. There was what looked like a trench gouged in the side of the ship, level with the gallery they stood on.
~Lateral hangar-balcony, the avatar had sent. Then he looked down, and she had the very strong impression Berdle was looking somehow through the airship. ~Hmm. Taking on a lot of water. Interesting.
The hangar-balcony was closed off with what were probably lengths of diamond film. One of these had slid aside just as that part of the trench had started to pass them. Berdle had reached down, lifted the metal net away. The floor of the hangar-balcony was so close they could just step onto it across a half-metre gap. That had been when the soup-faced person had come, almost tumbling, out of a nearby door and asked them WHAT WANT?
~Combat arbite just behind the door, Berdle had told Cossont. ~One-legged combat arbite with no ammunition and the mechanical equivalent of arthritis, but just so’s you know.
The letters forming the word WHO! had taken their time drifting apart. Now they slipped beneath the yellow-brown surface while others surfaced and rearranged themselves.
ASLEEP said the word now seemingly floating on the soup-face.
The avatar was exhaling, blowing the smoke out his ears.
~No, he’s not, he said quietly via Cossont’s earbud. Berdle claimed to have something called a scout missile within metres of Ximenyr, inserted into his cabin without him noticing while the module had still been approaching the Girdlecity. ~Shall I call him now?
“We could just call him,” Cossont said to the soup-face, glancing at Berdle. “Or we could wait. That would only be polite. Tell him an old friend of Mr QiRia is here to see him.”
~We ought to call him. Time’s a-wasting.
APPOINTMENT?
“That’s very kind,” Cossont said. “But we won’t need one. I’m sure he’ll see us as soon as he can.”
The soup-face jerked back a little as though surprised. New letters arranged themselves quickly, struggling to find enough room in the space available.
NODOYO UHAV EAPP Some letters disappeared; the rest rearranged themselves again. NO. YOU HAVE APP?
“No, we don’t,” Cossont said patiently. “This is, in its own small way, urgent. You don’t have appointments for urgent things, as a rule, do you?”
NO APPOINT?
“We’d be terribly obliged if you’d just let him know we’re here, right now. Don’t forget to mention Mr QiRia’s name.”
SORRY.
“Sorry?” Cossont said. She tapped one booted foot while the letters swam about.
STILL ASLEEP
~Call? Berdle sent.
“We’ll call him ourselves,” Cossont said.
~Thank you. Calling.
YBL
“Cheers, I’m sure we will be lucky,” Cossont said.
~Ringing.
Somewhere beyond the open-work wall behind them, the grey light of dawn was introducing a wash of colour into the detail of the giant multiply pierced tunnel.
~About to get bright, Berdle sent via the earbud. ~Little danger. Still ringing.
An instant later, light burst and flooded all around them and a cacophony assailed Cossont’s ears. She looked round and saw the basket-work of the great open tunnel and the parts of the structure immediately beyond all lit up with stuttering pulses of multi-coloured light. Deep thuds were followed by the crackling boom and partial echo of air explosions.
DAWN FIREWKS
“How quaint,” Cossont said.
~He’s picked up. Over to you.
“Mr Ximenyr?” Cossont said, turning slightly away from the soup-face.
“Who is this?” a deep male voice drawled. He sounded sleepy or just stoned.