Ulver Seich scanned the screen-set her neural lace threw across her left eye’s field of vision as she walked, one half of her brain paying attention to the business of walking and the other half watching the virtual screen. Not a thing about her. She wasn’t sure whether to feel relieved or insulted. Let’s try:
(Tier gets sniffy… No, that was nothing but general stuff about the habitat throwing all Culture people and Affronters off. No names mentioned.
Index. P… Ph… Phage Rock.
(That war again; was PR a kind of minor ship store?
(Tier over-rated anyway; PR turns tail. New heading, but where exactly?
(Koodre wins IceBlast cup.
(New Ledeyueng exhibition opens in T41.
DiaGlyph subDirectory.
subIndex.
subIndex. S… Seich, Ulver.
(Oh Ulver, Where Are You? — new Poeglyph by Zerstin Hoei.
She stared at the entry. Grief, was that it? One lousy picture-poem by an irredeemable feeb she’d barely heard of (and even then only to discover he regularly changed his appearance to resemble her current boyfriend)? Ugh! She joggled the subIndex again, in the remote and forlorn chance there was some sort of ware glitch. There wasn’t. That was it. If she wanted more she’d have to hit Records.
Ulver Seich stopped in her tracks and stared at the nearest bulkhead, open mouthed.
She was no longer News on Phage.
VIII
It should not have made the difference that it did, and yet it did. Their three visitors stayed for two nights, going swimming with the ‘Ktik during the second day. Byr met Aist again that night. The following day the visitors left, climbing into the module which the Unacceptable Behaviour sent down for them. The ship was heading off to loop round a proto-nova a few thousand years distant. It would be back in two weeks to drop off any further supplies they might need. Dajeil’s baby would be born a couple of weeks after that. The next ship due to visit would be another year away, when they might have doubled the human population of the planet. They stood together on the beach. Dajeil held Byr’s hand as the module climbed into the slate-coloured clouds.
Later that evening Byr found Dajeil watching the recording in the tower’s top room, where the screens were. Tears ran down her face.
There were no monitor systems on the tower itself. It must have been one of the independent camera drones. This one must have landed on the tower that night, found two large mammals there, and started recording.
Dajeil turned to look at Byr, her face streaked with the tears. Byr felt a sudden welling of anger. On the screen, she watched the two people embracing, caressing on the tower’s moonlit roof, and heard the soft gasps and whisperings.
“Yes,” Byr said, smiling ironically as she pulled off the wet suit. “Old Aist, eh? Quite a lass. You shouldn’t cry, you know. Upsets the body’s fluid balance for baby.”
Dajeil threw a glass at her. It smashed behind Byr on the winding stair. A little servitor drone scurried past Byr’s feet and windmilled down the carpeted steps on its little limbs, to start cleaning up the mess. Byr looked into her lover’s face. Dajeil’s swollen breasts rose and fell within her shirt and her face was flushed. Byr continued to peel off bits of the wet suit.
“It was a bit of light relief, for grief’s sake,” she said, keeping her voice even. “Just a friendly fuck. A loose end sort of thing. It—”
“How could you do this to us?” Dajeil screamed.
“Do what?” Byr protested, still trying to keep her voice from rising. “What have I done?”
“Screwing my best friend, here! Now! After everything!”
Byr kept calm. “Does it count as screwing, technically, when neither of you has a penis?” She assumed a pained, puzzled expression.
“You shit! Don’t laugh about it!” Dajeil screamed. Her voice was hoarse, unlike anything Byr had heard from her before. “Don’t you fucking laugh about it!” Dajeil was suddenly up out of her seat and dashing towards her, arms raised.
Byr caught her wrists.
“Dajeil!” she said, as the other woman struggled and sobbed and tried to shake her hands free. “You’re being ridiculous! I always fucked other people; you were fucking other people when you were giving me all this shit about being my ‘still point’; we both knew, it wasn’t like we were juveniles or in some dumb monogamy cult or something. Shit; so I stuck my fingers in your pal’s cunt; so fucking what? She’s gone. I’m still here; you’re still here, the fucking kid’s still in your belly; yours is in mine. Isn’t that what you said is all that matters?”
“You bastard, you bastard!” Dajeil cried, and collapsed. Byr had to support her as she crumpled to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably.
“Oh, Dajeil, come on; this isn’t anything that matters. We never swore to be faithful, did we? It was just a friendly… it was politeness, for fuck’s sake. I didn’t even think it was worth mentioning… Come on, I know this is a tough time for you and there’s all these hormones and shit in your body, but this is crazy; you’re reacting… crazily…”
“Fuck off! Fuck off and leave me alone!” Dajeil spat, her voice reduced to a croak. “Leave me alone!”
“Dajeil,” Byr said, kneeling down beside her. “Please… Look, I’m sorry. I really am. I’ve never apologised for fucking anybody in my life before; I swore I never would, but I’m doing it now. I can’t undo it, but I didn’t realise it would affect you like this. If I had I wouldn’t have done it. I swear. I’d never have done it; it was she who kissed me first. I didn’t set out to seduce her or anything, but I’d have said No, I’d have said No, really I would. It wasn’t my idea, it wasn’t my fault. I’m sorry. What more can I say? What can I do…?”
It did no good. Dajeil wouldn’t talk after that. She wouldn’t be carried to her bed. She didn’t want to be touched or be brought anything to eat or drink. Byr sat at the screen controls while Dajeil whimpered on the floor.
Byr found the recording the camera drone had taken and wiped it.
IX
The Grey Area did something to his eyes. It happened in his sleep, the first night he was aboard. He woke up in the morning to the sound of song birds trilling over distant waterfalls and the faint smell of tree resin; one wall of his cabin impersonated a window high up in a forest-swathed mountain range. There was a memory of some strangeness, a buried recollection of some sort; half real, half not, but it slipped slowly away as he came fully to. The view was blurry for a moment, then slowly came clear as he recalled the ship asking him last night if it could implant the nanotechs while he slept. His eyes tingled a little and he wiped away some tears, but then everything seemed to settle back to normal.
“Ship?” he said.
“Yes?” replied the cabin.
“Is that it?” he asked. “With the implants?”
“Yes. There’s a modified neural lace in place in your skull; it’ll take a day or so to bed in properly. I hurried up a little repair-work your own systems were taking their time with near your visual cortex. You have hit your head recently?”
“Yeah. Fell out of a carriage.”
“How are your eyes?”
“Bit blurred and smarted a little. Okay now.”
“Later today we’ll go through a simulation of what happens when you’ve interfaced with the Sleeper Service’s Storage vault system. All right?”
“Fine. How’s our rendezvous with the Sleeper looking?”