She felt mildly insulted, as though the drone had enquired whether she’d just farted. “Yes,” she said sharply. “That was me. Comms off-line.”
“No need to get snappy.”
She looked at the machine through narrowed eyes. “I think you’ll find there is,” she informed it.
“My, it’s breezy out there!” Batra said, floating in through the force field from outside. “Djan Seriy; the module is here.”
“I’ll get my bag,” Anaplian said.
“Please,” Turminder Xuss said. “Allow me.”
Batra must have read the expression on her face as she watched the drone make its way to the nearest interior door.
“I think Turminder Xuss is going to miss you,” Batra said, extending loops of brittle-looking twigs and branches to take his/its weight and standing head-height in front of her like a framework for the sculpture of a human.
Anaplian shook her head. “The machine grows sentimental,” she said.
“Unlike yourself?” Batra asked neutrally.
She guessed he was talking about Toark, the child she had rescued from the burning city. The boy was still asleep; she had crept into his cabin to say a one-sided farewell earlier that morning, stroking his hair, whispering, not waking him. Batra had agreed, reluctantly, to look after the child while she was away.
“I have always been sentimental,” Anaplian claimed.
The little three-seat module dropped from the sky, lowered itself gently through the roof of force field bowing over the platform’s flight deck and backed up towards the group waiting for it, rear door hingeing open.
“Farewell, Djan Seriy,” Batra said, extending a less-than-skeletal assemblage at chest height, the extremity vaguely hand-shaped.
Anaplian put her palm briefly against this sculpted image, feeling faintly ridiculous. “You will look after the boy?” she said.
“Oh,” Batra said with a sighing noise, “as though he were your own.”
“I am serious,” she said. “If I don’t come back, I want you to take care of him, until you can find somewhere and someone more fitting.”
“You have my word,” Batra told her. “Just make sure you do come back.”
“I shall endeavour to,” she said.
“You have backed up?”
“Last night,” Anaplian confirmed. They were both being polite; Batra would know very well that she had backed herself up. The platform had taken a reading of her mind state the evening before. Should she fail to return — whether due to death or in theory any other reason — a clone of her could be grown and all her personality and memories implanted into it, creating a new her almost indistinguishable from the person she was now. It did not do to forget that, in a disquietingly real sense, to be an SC agent was to be owned by SC. The compensation was that even death was just a temporary operational glitch, soon overcome. Again though, only in a sense.
Turminder Xuss reappeared and deposited her bags in the module. “Well, goodbye, dear girl,” it said. “Try to avoid getting into any scrapes; I shan’t be there to save you.”
“I have already adjusted my expectations,” Anaplian told it. The drone was silent, as though not sure what to make of this. Anaplian bowed formally. “Goodbye,” she said to both of them, then turned and walked into the module.
Three minutes later she was stepping out of it again, aboard the Eight Rounds Rapid, a Delinquent-class Fast Picket and ex-General Offensive Unit which would take her to rendezvous with the Steppe-class Medium Systems Vehicle Don’t Try This At Home. This represented just the first leg of her complicated and languidly paced journey back to her old home.
Djan Seriy was shown to a small cabin aboard the old ex-warship by a ship-slaved drone. She would be aboard for less than a full day; however, she had wanted somewhere to lie down and think.
She opened her bag. She looked at what was lying on top of her few clothes and possessions. “I don’t recall packing you,” she muttered, and was immediately uncertain whether she was talking to herself or not (she instinctively tried to read the device with her active EM sense, but of course that didn’t work any more).
She was not talking to herself.
“Well remembered,” the thing she was looking at said. It appeared to be a dildo.
“Are you what I think you are?”
“I don’t know. What do you think I am?”
“I think you are a knife missile. Or something very similar.”
“Well, yes,” the small device said. “But then again no.”
Anaplian frowned. “Certainly you would appear to possess some of the more annoying linguistic characteristics of, say, a drone.”
“Well done, Djan Seriy!” the machine said brightly. “I am indeed one and both at the same time. The mind and personality of myself, Turminder Xuss, copied into the seasoned though still hale and hearty body of my most capable knife missile, lightly disguised.”
“I suppose I ought to be gratified you chose to make your ruse known at this point rather than later.”
“Ha ha. I would never have been so ungallant. Or intrusive.”
“You hope to protect me from scrapes, I take it.”
“Absolutely. Or at least share them with you.”
“Do you think you’ll get away with this?”
“Who can say? Worth a try.”
“You might have thought to ask me.”
“I did.”
“You did? I appear to have lost more than I thought.”
“I thought to ask you, but I didn’t. So as to protect you from potential blame.”
“How kind.”
“This way I may take full responsibility. In the I hope unlikely event you wish me to return whence I came, I shall leave you when you board the Don’t Try This At Home.”
“Does Batra know?”
“I most sincerely hope not. I could spend the rest of my Contact career toting bags, or worse.”
“Is this even semi-official?” Anaplian asked. She had never entirely lost her well-developed sense of suspicion.
“Hell’s teeth, no! All my own work.” The drone paused. “I was charged with protecting you, Djan Seriy,” it said, sounding more serious now. “And I am not some blindly obedient machine. I would like to continue to help protect you, especially as you are travelling so far outside the general protection of the Culture, to a place of violence, with your abilities reduced. For these reasons, I duly offer my services.”
Anaplian frowned. “Save that for which your appearance would imply you are most suited,” she said, “I accept.”
11. Bare, Night
Oramen lay on the bed with the girl who’d called herself Jish. He was playing with her hair, tangling long brown locks of it around one finger then releasing it again. He was amused by the similarity in shape of the girl’s spiralled curls and the rolls of smoke she was producing from the unge pipe she was smoking. The smoke rolled lazily upwards towards the high, ornate ceiling of the room, which was part of a house in an elegant and respectable area of the city which had been favoured by many of the court over the years, not least by his brother Ferbin.
Jish passed him the pipe, but he waved it away. “No.”
“Oh, come!” she said, giggling. She turned towards him to try and force the pipe on him, her breasts jiggling as she moved across the broad, much-tousled bed. “Don’t be a spoil!” She tried to jam the stem of the pipe into his mouth.
He turned his head, moved the pipe away again with the flat of one hand. “No, thank you,” he said.
She sat cross-legged in front of him, perfectly naked, and tapped him on the nose with the stem. “Why won’t the Ora play? Won’t the Ora play?” she said in a funny, croaky little voice. Behind her, the broad, fan-shaped headboard of the bed was covered with a painting of mythical half-people — the satyrs and nymphs of this world — engaged in a pink-toned orgy upon fluffy white clouds, peeling faintly at the edges. “Why won’t the Ora play?”