“Thank you,” Yime said. “It is always salutary to be reminded of one’s true place in the proper arrangement of matters.”
Himerance nodded. “Yes, I know.”
In the distance, up a short ramp, a large door to what appeared to be the outside was rising open. “Many of these are automatic too,” Himerance muttered to himself. “That’s useful.”
Most of the other vehicles in the car park were turning their lights on; some were already moving, all heading for the ramp and the doorway.
“We’ll leave in the middle, I think,” he said, as their vehicle made a low, distant humming noise and moved smoothly off, joining the line of quickly moving cars. Judging by the ones she could see into, none of the others had any occupants.
“Are you doing this, or the ship?” Yime asked as they left the underground garage.
“Me,” the avatar said. “The ship left some ninety seconds ago.”
Outside, the enormous tunnel of the city was bright with artificial lights, the cupped spread of the place disappearing upwards and down into a faint haze. The far side of the city — a perpendicular jumble of mostly tall, variegated buildings — was only a kilometre or so distant but looked further away in the murk. Around them, the driverless vehicles the avatar had set in motion were all heading off in as many different directions as they could find amongst the city’s jumbled network of streets. Above, little tethered aircraft flitted back and forth along the great cavern.
As Yime watched, one of the larger empty vehicles a short way in front of them in a side-lane slowed, met with some hanging cables and was hoisted rapidly into the air.
“We’re going to do the same thing,” Himerance said, shortly before their vehicle followed the other one, though it then promptly headed off in the opposite direction.
Their vehicle rose quickly amongst the hundreds of cable-held craft.
They had reached a steady height and held it for about twenty seconds when the avatar sucked in a breath, the black glass around parted directly overhead then started to sink back into the sides of the vehicle. Before the retracting glass had reached shoulder level, Himerance’s arm flicked almost too fast to see as he threw the stubby tube of the neural blaster out of the vehicle. Immediately, the glass moved back up around them.
Moments later there was a flash from behind, quickly followed by a great thudding bang which left the vehicle swinging back and forth, causing it to slow automatically, briefly, to correct the oscillation. Himerance and Yime looked back to see a blossoming cloud of smoke and debris rising from near the centre-line of the cavern city; pieces of a great bridge, sundered in the middle, were starting to fall slowly towards the river on the tunnel’s floor. Directly above, more glowing pieces of wreckage and cinders were falling from a tiny, yellow-rimmed hole in the cavern ceiling. Echoes of the detonation slammed back and forth amongst the buildings, disappearing slowly down the tunnel city.
Himerance shook his head. “I beg your pardon. I should have thought they might trace that somehow. My mistake,” he said, as they drew level with a tall stone tower. The glass around them flowed fully down into the sides of the vehicle. The vehicle was beeping irately, though it was almost drowned out by multitudinous echoing sirens starting to sound around the city. They bumped gently against the summit of the tower.
“We need to get out,” the avatar said, rising, taking Yime’s hand and together making the small jump onto the grass beyond the tower’s parapet. The impact hurt her knees. The vehicle stopped beeping and swung away again, glass panels rising back into place as the cables above whisked it back to the heights.
Himerance hauled an old but stout-looking trap-door open in a flurry of earth and popping rivets. They hurried down an unlit spiral staircase and had descended about two complete turns — Yime following Himerance and trusting him to see in a darkness so profound even her moderately augmented eyes could register next to nothing — when there was a distant-sounding thud from outside. The tower shook, just a little.
“That was the vehicle we were just in, wasn’t it?” she said.
“It was,” the avatar agreed. “Whoever’s coordinating this is thinking commendably quickly. NR, almost certainly.” They thudded down more steps, spiralling downwards all the time, so fast Yime felt she was starting to get dizzy. It was hurting her knees and ankles and back, too. “Best not to tarry, then,” the avatar said, putting on a burst of speed. She heard and vaguely sensed him disappearing round the curve of the winding stair.
“I can’t go that fast!” she shouted.
“Of course not,” he said, stopping; she thudded into him. “My apologies. Jump on my back; we’ll go faster. Just keep your head down.”
She was too breathless to argue. She climbed onto his back, legs round his waist, arms about his neck.
“Hold tight,” the avatar said. She did. They set off, whirling down the steps so fast it was almost falling.
Those who had seen the first two incursions reported seeing a cerise beam destroy first the high bridge and then the wheeled, airborne cable-craft. In both cases the beam simply came angling down from the ceiling of the cavern having bored through many tens of metres of rock before transfixing its target.
The third and the last time the beam assaulted Iobe Cavern City, it hit an ancient ornamental stone tower, part of the original Central University buildings. The beam struck the old tower near its base, bringing the whole edifice tumbling down.
At first it was thought there had been no casualties, until, half a day later, the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered, still locked together, her legs round his waist, her arms round his neck, under the hundreds of tonnes of rubble.
There was a house which was the shape of the galaxy. It was a virtual house, of course, but it was very highly detailed and well imagined, and although the scale on which it modelled the galaxy could vary quite a lot from time to time and from place to place within it, the general effect was convincing for the beings who had brought the house into existence, and, at least as far as they were concerned, the surroundings felt agreeably familiar.
The beings concerned were Culture Minds: the very high-level AIs which were, by some distance, the most complicated and intelligent entities in the whole civilisation, and — arguably — amongst the most complicated and intelligent entities in the whole galaxy-wide meta-civilisation.
The house was used to indicate where the individual Minds were in the real galaxy, so that a Mind which existed within an Orbital Hub close to the galactic centre would be located in the great bulbous, multi-storeyed centre of the house, while a ship Mind in a vessel currently somewhere towards the wispy tip of one of the galaxy’s arms would appear in one of the single-room tall outer wings. There were special arrangements for those Minds who didn’t want their location known by all and sundry: they tended to inhabit pleasingly dilapidated outbuildings within what were effectively the grounds of the main construction, communicating at a remove.
The house itself manifested as an echoingly vast baroque edifice of extraordinary, ornamental richness, every room the size of a cathedral and full of intricately carved wooden walls and pierced screens, gleaming floors of inlaid wood and semi-precious stone, ceilings dripping with precious metals and minerals, and populated, usually quite sparsely, by the avatars of the Minds, which took on pretty much every form of being and object known.