Djan Seriy stepped through the cling-field into the 303rd Aliens’ Lounge, where thumping music played loudly and the air was full of drug smoke and incense.
She was quickly greeted by a small cloud of tiny brightly coloured creatures like small birds, each thrown by one of the bar’s patrons. Some sang welcomes, others fluttered strobed messages across their hazy wings and a few squirted scent messages at her. This was, currently, the latest greeting-fad for new arrivals at the 303rd Aliens’ Lounge. Sometimes the lobbed creatures would carry notes or small parcels of narcotics or declarations of love, or they would start spouting insults, witticisms, philosophical epigrams or other messages. As Djan Seriy understood it, this was meant to be amusing.
She waited for the cloud of flittering creatures to start dissipating, thinking all the time how easy it would have been to bat, grasp and crush every one of the twenty-eight little twittering shapes around her, had she been fully enabled. She plucked the most lately arrived of the creatures out of the air and looked severely at the old-looking, purple-skinned humanoid who had thrown it. “Yours, sir,” she said, as she passed his table, handing it to him. He mumbled a reply. Others nearby were calling out to her. The denizens of the 303rd were gregarious and got to know people quickly; she was already regarded as a regular after only three visits. She refused various offers of company and waved away some especially thick and pungent drug smoke; the 303rd was something of a wide-spectrum humanoid stoners’ hang-out.
She acknowledged a few people as she walked to the circular bar in the middle of the Lounge, sitting glowing in the darkened space like a giant halo.
“Shjan! You’re here!” shouted Tulya Puonvangi, who was what passed as the Culture’s ambassador on the Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown. Djan Seriy regarded the man rather as she did the fluttering creature fad; immature and vaguely annoying. He had introduced himself shortly after she’d arrived and done his best to make himself a nuisance more or less ever since. Puonvangi was obese, pinkish, bald, and fairly human-basic on the surface save for two long, fang-like incisors which distorted his speech (he couldn’t manage the hard “D” sound at the start of her first name, for example). Plus he had an eye in the back of his head which he claimed was fully functional but was apparently really no more than an affectation. He often, as now, kept it covered with an eye patch, though the eye patch — again, as now — was frequently clear. He also — he’d told her after a remarkably short time during their first meeting — had exquisitely altered genitalia, which he’d offered to show her. She had demurred.
“Hello, jear!” Puonvangi said, clutching at her elbows and bringing her close to kiss her cheeks. She allowed this to happen while remaining stiff and unresponsive. He smelled of brine, tangfruit and some sweet, unashamedly psychotropic scent. His clothes were loose, voluminous, ever gently billowing and showed slow-motion scenes of humanoid pornography. His sleeves were rolled up and she could see from the thin, fiercely glowing lines incised on his forearms that he had been grazing tattoo drugs. He released her. “How are you? Looking ra’iant as ezher! Here’sh the young fellow I wanted you to meet!” He pointed at the young, long-limbed man sitting by his side. “Shjan Sheree Araprian, this is Kra’sri Kruike. Kra’sri; say hi!”
The young man looked embarrassed. “How do you do,” he said in a quiet, deep, deliciously accented voice. He had gently glowing skin of something between deep bronze and very dark green and a mass of shining, ringleted black hair. He wore perfectly cut, utterly black close-fitting trous and a short jacket. His face was quite long, his nose fairly flat, his teeth were normal but very white and his expression, beneath hooded eyes, was diffident, amused, perhaps a little wary, though modulated by what looked like a permanent smile. He had laughter lines, which made someone so otherwise young-looking appear oddly vulnerable. Chevron-cut brows and moustache looked like something new he was trying and was unsure he was getting away with. Those eyes were dark, flecked with gold.
He was almost unbearably attractive. Djan Seriy had therefore naturally gone instantly to what she regarded as her highest alert state of suspicion.
“I am Djan Seriy Anaplian,” she told him. “How is your name properly pronounced?”
He grinned, glanced apologetically at a beaming, eyebrow-waggling Puonvangi. “Klatsli Quike,” he told her.
She nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Klatsli Quike,” she said. She took the bar stool on the far side of him, putting the young man between her and Puonvangi, who looked disappointed, though only briefly. He slammed the bar with the flat of one hand, bringing a serving unit zinging over on shining rails strung along the far side of the bar.
“Jhrinks! Shmokes! Shnorts! Inshisions!”
She agreed to drink a little to keep Puonvangi company. Quike lit up a small pipe of some fabulously fragrant herb, purely for the scent as it had no known narcotic effect, though even the aroma was almost drug-like in its headiness. Puonvangi ordered a couple of styli of tattoo drugs and — when both Djan Seriy and Quike refused to join him — grazed one into each of his arms, from wrist to elbow. The drug lines glowed so brightly at first they coloured his pink face green. He sighed and sat back in his high seat, exhaling and closing his eyes, going slack. While their host was enjoying his first rush, Quike said, “You’re from Sursamen?” He sounded apologetic, as though he wasn’t supposed to know.
“I am,” she said. “You know it?”
“Of,” he said. “Shellworlds are a subject of mine. I study them. I find them fascinating.”
“You’re not alone in that.”
“I know. Actually, I find it perplexing that everyone doesn’t find them utterly fascinating.”
Djan Seriy shrugged. “There are many fascinating places.”
“Yes, but Shellworlds are something special.” He put his hand to his mouth. Long fingers. He might have been blushing. “I’m sorry. You lived there. I don’t need to tell you how fabulous they are.”
“Well, for me it is — was — just home. When one grows up in a place, no matter how exotic it may seem to others, it is still where all the usual banalities and indignities of childhood occur. Home is always the norm. It is everywhere else that is marvellous.”
She drank. He puffed on his pipe for a bit. Puonvangi sighed deeply, eyes still closed.
“And you,” she said, remembering to be polite. “Where are you from? May I ask your Full Name?”
“Astle-Chulinisa Klatsli LP Quike dam Uast.”
“LP?” she said. “The letters L and P?”
“The letters L and P,” he confirmed, with a small nod and a mischievous smile.
“Do they stand for something?”
“They do. But it’s a secret.”
She looked at him doubtfully.
He laughed, spread his arms. “I’m well travelled, Ms Seriy; a Wanderer. I am older than I look, I have met many people and given and shared and received many things. I have been most places, at a certain scale. I have spent time with all the major Involveds, I have talked to Gods, shared thought with the Sublimed and tasted, as far as a human can, something of the joy of what the Minds call Infinite Fun Space. I am not the person I was when I took my Full Name, and I am not definable just by that any more. A nested mystery in the centre of my name is no more than I deserve. Trust me.”
Djan Seriy thought about this. He had called himself a Wanderer (they were talking Marain, the Culture’s language; it had a phoneme to denote upper case). There had always been a proportion of people in the Culture, or at least people who were from the Culture originally, who termed themselves so. She found it difficult not to think of them as a class. They did indeed just wander; most doing so within the Culture, going from Orbital to Orbital, place to place, travelling on cruise ships and trampers as a rule and on Contact vessels when they could.