“Let me show you to your cabin,” the ship’s drone said.
They set course for Sichult. The journey was due to take about ninety days.
Lededje’s cabin, taking up the space of four of the originals, was spacious and beautiful, if somewhat minimalist compared to what she was used to back home. Veppers didn’t believe in minimalism; he thought it smacked of a lack of imagination or money, or both. The bathroom was similar in size to the cabin and had a transparent spherical bath for which she suspected she was going to need instructions.
Kallier-Falpise followed her and the ship’s drone around, floating a metre or so to her side, just visible at the corner of her eye as she inspected the cabin. She turned and faced it once the ship’s own drone had left.
“I think I’ll get some more sleep,” she told the slap-drone.
“Allow me,” the cream-coloured machine said, and the bed — another of the scoop-plus-intelligent-snowflake-feathers design she was becoming used to — fluffed up, like a curiously localised snowstorm in one corner of the cabin. They were called billow beds, apparently.
“Thank you,” she said. “You don’t need to stay.”
“Are you sure?” the little machine asked. “I mean, obviously while we’re aboard ship, that’s fine, but once we arrive anywhere else I would be derelict in my duty if I didn’t remain where I might be of most immediate protective use, especially while you’re asleep. It might be best for us both to get used to that arrangement, don’t you think?”
“No,” she said. “I prefer my privacy.”
“I see.” The machine bobbed in the air, its aura field going grey-blue. “Well, as I say, while we’re aboard ship… Excuse me.”
The door shushed closed behind it.
“‘Ahem’, is the accepted interrupter, I believe. So: ah-fucking-hem.”
She opened her eyes to find herself looking sideways at a man sitting cross-legged on the floor about two metres away, near the centre of the cabin. He was dressed in the same dark clothes Demeisen had worn, and — as she blinked, trying to confirm to herself that she was really seeing what she appeared to be seeing — she realised that he looked like a healthier, filled-out version of the gaunt figure who’d bade her farewell only a few hours earlier.
She sat up, aware of the bed feathers swirling neatly about her, tidying themselves out of the way. She was glad she had worn pyjamas, less glad now that she had got rid of the slap-drone.
Demeisen raised one long finger. “Wait a mo; you might need this.”
The word SIMULATION glowed in red letters — in Marian, this time — at the lower limit of her field of vision.
“What the hell is going on?” she said. She pulled her knees up to her chin. For a dizzying instant she was back in her bedroom in the town house in Ubruater, a decade earlier.
“I’m not really here,” Demeisen said, winking at her. “You haven’t seen me, right?” He laughed, spread his arms, looked about the cabin. “Do you have any idea how highly fucking irregular this is?” He put his elbows on his knees, rested his chin on his tented fingers. Too long, too multiply jointed, they looked like a cage. “This poor old stager thinks it’s still some sort of hot-shot fucking warship with a few of its systems removed and most of the others improved. No more chance of somebody having a private chat with a passenger than… I don’t know; it hitting a space reef or something.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. She looked around the cabin. The word SIMULATION followed her gaze like a subtitle.
Demeisen’s face sort of scrunched up. “Not that there’s any such thing. Running aground on an asteroid maybe; whatever. Anyway,” he said, “Hello again. Bet you didn’t expect to see me again so soon.”
“Or ever.”
“Well quite. Also bet you’re wondering why I’m here.”
She waggled a finger towards her lower face as she looked at him. “Can you get rid of…”
He snapped his fingers. It was an unsettlingly sharp, loud sound. She almost jumped.
“There,” he said. The word SIMULATION vanished.
“Thank you. Why are you here, if only apparently?”
“To make you an offer.”
“What? To be your next abused avatar?”
He grimaced again. “Oh, that was all just to upset Jolicci. You saw the guy I was… inhabiting; I released him in front of you. He was fine. I’d even fixed his fingers and everything. Didn’t you notice, this morning?”
She hadn’t.
“And anyway he did agree to everything. Not that I really abused him in the first place. Did he say anything? When I released him; did he? I didn’t bother to send any surveillance back-up and I haven’t asked the SAMWAF, so I honestly don’t know what happened after I pulled out. Did he? Make any allegations?”
“He couldn’t remember anything at all. He wasn’t even sure he’d been an avatar; he thought maybe it was about to happen.”
Demeisen waved his arms. “Well, there you are!”
“There you are what? That proves nothing.”
“Yes it does; if I’d really been sneaky I’d have left the dumb fuck with a batch of implanted false memories full of whatever Contact-wank fantasies he’d been imagining before he took the gig in the first place.” He waved one hand in a blur of too-long fingers. “Anyway, we’re getting off the point here. You need to hear my offer.”
She raised one brow. “Do I?”
He smiled. It was the first time he’d smiled, she thought, when it actually looked like he meant it. “Fine attempt at dismissive insouciance,” he told her. “But yes, you do.”
“All right. What is it?”
“Come with me. Not right now necessarily, but come with me.”
“Where?”
“To Sichult. Back to your home.”
“I’m already going there.”
“Yes, but very slowly, and with a slap-drone in tow. Plus, they’re going to try to distract you.”
“How are they going to distract me?”
“By telling you they’ve found the ship with your full body image, the Me, I’m Counting. Which they sort of have, so it’s not a lie, but they’re hoping you’ll want to detour to get your old body back or have the tattoo stuff copied onto your present body or some such nonsense. Which will mean a serious delay, especially travelling in this antique.”
“Perhaps I’ll want to do that anyway,” she said. She felt a pang of something like loss and hope together. Wouldn’t it be good to see her old, true self? Even if she wouldn’t want to regain her Mark — maybe ever, but certainly not until she’d returned and got as close to Veppers as she could and done her damnedest to kill him.
“Makes no difference,” Demeisen said, scything one hand through the air. “I’ll fucking take you there if you insist on going; still be quicker. Point is: stay on this thing and you’ll get home in not less than ninety days, and with a slap-drone dogging your every step.”
“Whereas?”
He rocked forward on his crossed legs, looked suddenly serious and said, “Whereas come with me and I’ll get you there in twenty-nine days with no fun-spoiling chaperone to hobble you.”
“No slap-drone?”
“None.”
“And no mistreatment? Of me, I mean, the way you mistreated that poor man? Including mistreatment I forget about?”
He frowned. “You still on about that? Of course no mistreatment. I swear.”
She thought. After a moment she said, “Would you help me kill Veppers?”
He put his head back and laughed, loudly. The simulation did a convincing job of making his laughter echo round the generously proportioned cabin. “Ah, if only,” he said, shaking his head. “You can cause your own major assassinatory incident, sweetheart, without making it a diplomatic one involving the Culture.”