“My name is Vyr Cossont. I’m—”
“Wait, wait, girl; how did you get through to — nobody’s supposed to be—”
~Privacied, Berdle sent to her, voice quick and clipped. ~Continues: “—able to get through on this without…” Cossont heard Ximenyr’s voice continue, even though the connection was quiet. “You any…?” the human voice said. “Yeah, check the bases, pull it off replay. Veer Kossin or something.”
“Yeah,” the man said via the earbud again. “How’d you get through to me here? Not supposed to accept…” His voice trailed off. It sounded like he’d been distracted.
~An acolyte is performing a sexual act on Mr Ximenyr, Berdle reported.
Cossont listened to some heavy breathing for a moment or two, then said, quite loudly, “I’m an old friend of Mr QiRia; he visited you five years ago, at the start of the party. Do you remember him?”
The heavy breathing stopped.
~Mr Ximenyr has pushed the acolyte away, Berdle reported. ~The sexual act has ceased.
“Well, if I don’t, something or somebody will remember for me, I’m sure,” Ximenyr said. “Assuming this actually happened. Who did you say again?”
“My name is Vyr Cossont. Friend of Ngaroe QiRia. I’d like to meet with you.”
“Yeah… How did you get through?”
~Mr Ximenyr is gesturing to call up a video feed from here, the avatar sent. Berdle sucked on the drug stick, bent close to Cossont’s ear and said, “With great difficulty!” Cossont coughed, waved the resulting smoke away. The avatar smiled up at the corner of the hangar-balcony. Cossont looked too but couldn’t see anything. “Hi,” the avatar said, and waved. The rest of the smoke came out of his ears again.
“Uh-huh,” the deep voice said. “And you would be?”
“Dying to meet you, Master of the Revels, sir,” Berdle said cheerily. “My name’s Berdle.”
Cossont heard silence on the connection for a moment.
~He’s saying: “‘Berdle’?… Nothing? Vyr Cossont? Mil reserve? Just civilian?… Muso, yeah? Wearing an Excrements top; that’s cool enough. And look at her; I’d — Wait a fucking minute. I remember that name. No, QiRia. Fucking QiRia fella. Fuck, him. Fuck. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Fucking… welcome aboard, classical girl. Yeah. Right.”
“Hello?”
“Mr Ximenyr.”
“Come on in. Welcome. Hope you’re broad-minded.”
PLEASE COME IN
The wide door behind the soup-faced person was swung open by a one-legged combat arbite which made a slight creaking noise as it gestured for them to enter. Berdle handed the machine the stub of his blunt and it stood there looking at the drug stick as they followed the soup-faced person into the body of the airship.
The Last Party had grown to become several parties. There were at least four party cycles happening at any one point, roughly aligned with the times of the day/night cycle, so that no matter when you felt like partying — even if it was immediately after your own randomly houred breakfast — there would be a party just started or just about to start.
Led by the soup-faced person, they walked through broad open spaces, red-lit, where it looked like the party had been over for some time; small floating machines were picking up litter, the air was full of strange scents and the space part-full of ceiling-suspended pods and shallow platforms and things like giant hammocks, many of them transparent or translucent. There was quite a lot of sex happening, Cossont noticed, in and on the hammocks, and the air was also full of soft cries, the occasional piercing scream and all the other sounds associated with physical passion, unreservedly expressed. Cossont felt herself becoming surprisingly hot and bothered by it all; usually she had pretty good control of herself.
~The atmosphere is saturated with compounds sexually stimulating to your species, Berdle sent as they ducked underneath an especially large hammock where several frolicking bed-fellows were contorting themselves in particularly inventive combinations.
“Sex-scent city!” Pyan agreed, through the earbud.
A male face and torso swung down from a nearby platform. Sweating, breathing hard, the man smiled at Vyr. “Like the arms,” he said, breathlessly. “You’d be so very welcome.” Then, with a look of slight surprise, he was pulled back up onto the platform by a couple of grinning naked women, who blew kisses at an uncomprehending Berdle.
A short dark corridor led to another wide room where extravagantly costumed, masked people danced; some to a space-filling song of powerful beats and trembling ululations, some to rhythms they were hearing through earbuds, their wildly eccentric motions at odds with everybody else around them.
DARK SOUND… SPACE AHEAD the soup-faced person told them, walking backwards down another intervening corridor, face turned towards them.
“About to get really loud,” Cossont told Berdle.
“I can feel it through my feet,” he told her.
Cossont closed her ears.
Double doors led to the dark-sound dance floor, where the whole point was to hear with every part of your body except your ears. It was night-dark, strobe-lit; with each staccato pulse of light the near-naked dancers looked like marionettes frozen in poses of either ecstasy or torment. Cossont heard the wild, thudding music through the jelly in her eyes, via her lungs, resonating in the long bones of her arms and legs.
“Fuck me, that’s loud,” Pyan said in her ear, voice made high and tinny to get through.
Cossont opened her mouth a little to say “Shh,” to the creature. As she did so it was as though her mouth filled with noise; she felt her teeth vibrate.
Berdle looked unaffected.
Away from the dark-sound room, they passed a large circular oil swimming pool with a screen ceiling where people seemed to be practising synchronised floating in giant flower-like patterns. They climbed through a couple of levels where tired-but-happy-looking people were eating at tables — though one section seemed to be set aside for food-fights, with one just starting — then ascended via an adventurously steep and long escalator to a tall, broad corridor with what appeared to be a transparent ceiling showing the fretwork of tunnel moving slowly past above.
Ximenyr’s quarters lay through a sequence of intestinally curved, squishily floored round-section corridors hung with what looked like folds and strands of gaudy, hallucinatory vivid seaweeds, all moving and waving on invisible currents.
~That’s interesting, Berdle sent. ~Just lost feed from my scout missile. That is a little worrying.
Finally, at a doorway bearing an unmistakable resemblance to a vulva, the soup-faced person bowed and left them. The vulva irised, opening.
“This is a bit gross, isn’t it?” Pyan whispered. “It’s not just me thinking this, no?”
Cossont followed Berdle down a short, narrow corridor. Cossont’s earbud beeped to signal it was losing all external reception — something it had never done anywhere else in or on the Girdlecity, in all the years she’d lived within it.
They arrived into a chamber where a large, barrel-chested, handsome-looking man with vivid red skin and an unfeasible number of phalluses reclined on a giant, tipped bed. He was smiling at them. He wore a roomy-looking pair of shorts, so the penis he’d likely been born with was perhaps the only one not visible, but he had plenty of others, sprouting — short, stubby, flaccid — from at least forty points on his body, including four on his calves, six on each thigh, similar numbers on his upper and lower arms and one each where the nipples would have been on a mammal. His head, feet and hands looked normal. Around his thick neck lay something like a giant charm bracelet, weighed down with chunky trinkets, mostly jewel encrusted. He was attended by naked people — mostly females — all of whom had the heads of animals and mythical creatures.