Ximenyr laughed. “Why on Zyse, Xown or anywhere would he do that?”
“He…” Cossont began, about to say that QiRia had given her such a device, then remembering that she hadn’t told Berdle this was what she was looking for at the Ospin Dataversities. She’d nearly given that away. She wondered how much she already had.
Berdle had already cut in. “He might have wanted to back himself up.”
Ximenyr shook his head. “Doubt that. He was always kind of resistant regarding that sort of duplicated soul stuff.”
“Do you know where else he might have gone when he was in Gzilt?” Cossont asked.
“No,” Ximenyr said. “Secretive old boy. How about you, Vyr, did he come to visit you?”
“No,” she admitted.
“Oh, feeling jilted?” Ximenyr said softly, with a look of exaggerated sympathy.
“We were never friends like that.”
“You don’t have to be. You just have to care what people think of you.” He brought his blue irises rolling down for a moment, looked at her, then let them roll back up again to be replaced by the red ones. “If it’s any consolation, I know he visited Gzilt at least once without bothering to come see me. Didn’t even call.” He looked at Berdle. “We never did settle how official this visit is.”
Berdle nodded. “Officiality is a slippery concept, in the Culture.”
Ximenyr laughed. “Well,” he said, arching his back and stretching — all the penises gave a little jerk, as though they were separate tiny animals just waking — “this has all been very interesting; however, things have recharged and there is, frankly, pleasure to be secured. You may have to excuse me, shortly.” He looked at Cossont and Berdle, as all the animal- and beast-headed people joined him on the bed, kneeling by him and reaching out to stroke and caress him. All the phalluses dotted over Ximenyr’s body started, very slowly, to fatten and lever themselves upright. Wavy lines like veins that probably did not all carry blood were beginning to show all over his body, bulging and rippling beneath his ruby-red skin. “Unless you’d like to join in, of course?” he said brightly. “Both, either of you? You’d be very welcome. Plenty of time, plenty of places. We’ll turn the AG on shortly, I’ll start my last heart and we can get things going on my back…”
“I would,” Pyan said in Cossont’s earbud.
Cossont looked down at the creature. “Okay. I could just leave you here,” she told it.
“Never mind.”
“Thank you,” she said to Ximenyr. “But we’d best be on our way.”
“Mr Berdle,” Ximenyr said, taking one hand from between the legs of one of the girls stroking him. He detached the little scout missile from his neck-chain. “You may have this back. Excuse the, ah…”
Berdle had to kneel one-legged on the bed between Ximenyr’s legs and two naked bodies to retrieve the scout missile. “Thank you,” he said.
“Always keep on the right side of the Culture,” Ximenyr murmured dreamily, his face just becoming obscured by a young man straddling him. Very little of his body was visible now, though what was was clearly quite excited.
“You really are no fun,” Pyan said, petulant, as they descended the alarmingly long and steep escalator with the soup-faced person leading the way. In the cavernous space above and in front of them, an energetic game of sorball had begun, with people in transparent spherical suit-spheres leaping about in a zero-G volume, pinging off the inside walls of a giant diamond glass sphere forty metres across.
“Tough,” Cossont said, then turned to Berdle, but could only get to the point where she opened her mouth to speak before he turned to her and said,
“Later.”
“So?” she said. They were back aboard the module. It had met them on a landing platform which cantilevered out from the mass of the Girdlecity like a round tray on an outstretched arm. The craft started to pull away, going astern to avoid some overhanging architecture a few kilometres above.
“Mr Ximenyr has access to some surprisingly sophisticated tech,” Berdle said, lowering himself onto a lounge couch and examining the scout missile. “And some 4D shielding, of course, which is why we had to get in there.”
“Not just prurience, then,” Pyan said, aloud, but was ignored.
“They found and disabled this with embarrassing ease,” Berdle said, rolling the scout missile around on his palm. “Ah!” The little machine suddenly came alive and leapt into the air above his hand. It twisted quickly this way and that, as though confused at having just woken up.
Most of the walls of the module’s living area had seemingly turned transparent, allowing a vertiginous view of the Hzu coast beneath as the module tipped, twisted and then reared suddenly upwards. Ribbons of ochre and jade stitched by slow-spreading breakers of alabaster white, the land and the shallow margins of the sea seemed to sink away beneath them like something dropped; the Girdlecity was a dark wall they climbed magically without touching, hurtling silently back to the stars. Cossont tore her gaze from the view and said, “But did you find anything?”
Berdle frowned. “No. I was rather hoping for some sort of data store with information on Mr Q, something that would be kept close to Ximenyr, but there was nothing relevant anywhere on the airship. I’ve copied everything I found to the ship Mind to see if there’s some really clever cryptography in the storage, but it doesn’t look promising.”
“Nothing in all that stuff round his neck?”
“There was a minimal amount of processing left in the android digit, which was anyway unpowered, there was a dedicated, digital time-to device, functioning and correctly synchronised to the millisecond, but with zero spare capacity, a defunct model of an ancient Waverian Zoehn Dynasty spaceship, itself based on a primitively early form of processor technology called a vacuum tube, again with minimal and extremely crude processing, long burned out, a crystal container holding some animal or vegetable matter– two or three berries or small fruits, I believe — the baculum from a Vimownian Woller with an embedded particle-chip, probably from a hunter’s homing round, and a LastDitch Corp minicollar subsaver, hair-triggered to intervene should any of the gentleman’s hearts give out—”
“Yeah. He said something about starting his last heart.”
“He has four.” The avatar looked thoughtful. “That is a lot of vaso-congestive tissue to support.”
“I suppose.”
“Again, minimal processing involved; just enough to do its job and no more. Everything else was just dumb matter; process-free.”
“So, nothing.”
“Nothing relevant, as far as I can tell.” The avatar smiled at Cossont. “So, onwards and outwards to Ospin and the Dataversities.”
She found herself smiling back. “One request?” she said.
“What?”
“Could you keep that look?”
“If you like.” Berdle looked puzzled. “Why?”
“It suits — well, it just looks good.”
The avatar shrugged. “Okay.”
“Are you still being affected by those sexually stimulating compounds?” Pyan asked through her earbud.
Cossont used a finger to flick one corner of the creature. It yelped and unwound itself from round her neck, flapping away from her in a flurry of melodramatic movement.
“The Culture craft continues to adhere to local legal velocity limitations but is about to leave the atmosphere,” the combat arbite Uhtryn said. “If it is to be engaged, this would be the last chance.”
Colonel Agansu felt like he was suspended in space just above the planet of Xown, staring down at its brown/green land, the white-lined coast of Hzu and the green/blue waters of the sea. The Girdlecity was a thick dark rim round the world, hazing and disappearing to the horizon in each direction. He watched the dot that was the Culture module rising quickly upwards through the atmosphere.