“Just tell me what you want to know,” he said.
The doctor made another note, crossed her legs, said, “What do think we might want to know?”
He put his hands to his face, wiped back from his nose to his cheeks and then ears. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know, do I?”
“Why did you think we might want to know anything?”
“I attacked you,” he told her, pointing at the wooden box that held the screen. “That was me, in that — I was that thing attacking you.” He waved his hands, looked around. “But I got shot down. I’m guessing we all got intercepted. And now I’m here. Whatever you saved of me, you must have been able to learn all you needed to directly, just looking at the code, running bits of it. You don’t need me so I’m just puzzled why I’m here. All I can think of is you still want to know something else. Or is this just the first circle of Hell? Do I stay here for ever being bored to death?”
She made another note. “Maybe we should watch the screen again,” she suggested. He sighed. She turned the television back on. The black spearhead shape fell from the lightning-cracked sky.
“It’s nothing — just a death.”
Yime smiled thinly. “I think you make light of our calling, Mr. Nopri, if you treat the cessation of life in quite so off-hand a fashion.”
“I know, I know, I know,” he said, agreeing heartily and nodding vigorously. “You’re absolutely right, of course. But it is in a good cause. It is necessary. I do take the whole Quietus ethic seriously; very seriously. These are — ha-ha! — well, special circumstances.”
Yime looked at him levelly. Nopri was a skinny, dishevelled looking young man with bright blue eyes, pale skin and a gleamingly bald head. They were in what was apparently entitled the Officers’ Club, the main social space for the forty or so Culture citizens who made up about a half per cent of the Bulbitian’s highly diverse — and dispersed — population. The Club was part of what had once been some sort of games hall for the Bulbitian species, what had been its ceiling — and was now its floor — studded with enormous multi-coloured cones like gaudy versions of fat stalagmites.
Food, drink and — for Nopri — a drug bowl were brought by small wheeled drones which roamed the wide space; apparently the Bulbitian could display unpredictable reactions when it came to other entities using fields inside it, so the drones used wheels and multi-jointed arms instead of just levitating by AG and using maniple fields. Still, Yime noticed, the ship’s drone seemed to be doing all right, floating level with their table.
She and Nopri sat alone with the drone, Dvelner having returned to her own duties. There were two other tables occupied in the warm but pleasantly dehumidified space. Both supported little groups of four or five people huddled round them, all of whom looked rather drab by the normal standards of Culture sartorial acceptability and all of whom seemed to be keeping themselves to themselves. Yime had guessed, before Nopri had told her anyway, that these were people who were here to rendezvous with the ship which would arrive, sometime in the next two or three days, from the Total Internal Reflection, the GSV which was one of the Culture’s Oubliettionaries, its Forgotten fleet of supposedly ultra-hidden post-posited-catastrophe seed-craft.
“What ‘special circumstances’, Mr. Nopri?” she asked.
“I’ve been trying to talk to the Bulbitian,” Nopri told her.
“Talking to it involves dying?”
“Yes, all too often.”
“How often?”
“Twenty-three times so far.”
Yime was appalled. She took a drink before saying, “You’ve been killed by this thing twenty-three times?” she said, her voice dropping to a shocked whisper without her meaning it to. “You mean in a virtual environment?”
“No, really.”
“Killed really?”
“Yes.”
“Killed in the Real?”
“Yes.”
“And, what; revented each time?”
“Yes.”
“Did you come with a stack of blank bodies then? How can you—?”
“Of course not. It makes me new bodies.”
“It? The Bulbitian? It makes you new bodies?”
“Yes. I back up before every attempt to talk to it.”
“And it kills you every time?”
“Yes. But only so far.”
Yime looked at him for a moment. “In that case silence might constitute a more prudent course.”
“You don’t understand.”
Yime sighed, put her drink down and sat back, fingers interlocked over her midriff. “And I’m sure I shall continue not to until you enlighten me. Or I can talk to somebody else on your team who is more…” She paused. “Plausible,” she said. The drone’s blueish aura field coloured a subtle shade of pink.
Nopri appeared oblivious to the insult. He sat forward eagerly. “I am convinced that the Bulbitians are in touch with the Sublimed,” he told her.
“You are,” Yime said. “Isn’t that a matter for our colleagues in Numina? Like Ms. Dvelner?”
“Yes, and I’ve talked to them about it, but this Bulbitian only wants to talk to me, not to them.”
Yime thought about this. “And the fact that it keeps killing you, every time you attempt to do so, hasn’t shaken your faith in this conviction?”
“Please,” Nopri said. “It’s not faith. I can prove this. Or I will be able to. Soon.” He buried his face in the fumes rising from the drug bowl, sucked in deeply.
Yime looked at the drone. “Ship, are you still listening here?”
“I am, Ms. Nsokyi. Hanging fascinated on every word.”
“Mr. Nopri. There are how many on your team here — eighteen?” Nopri nodded, holding his breath. “Do you have a ship here?” Nopri shook his head emphatically. “A Mind, then?”
Nopri let his clouded breath out and started coughing.
Yime turned to the drone again. “Does the team that Mr. Nopri belongs to have the benefit of a resident Mind or AI?”
“No,” the drone replied. “And neither does the Numina team. The nearest Mind at the moment, aside from my own of course, is probably that belonging to the inbound ship journeying here from the Total Internal Reflection. There are no Minds or true AIs stationed here. No Minds or true AIs of anybody’s, in fact; not just the Culture’s.”
“It isn’t keen on Minds or AIs,” Nopri agreed, wiping his eyes. He sucked from the drug bowl again. “Not that wild about drones, either, to be frank.” He looked at the ship’s drone, smiled.
“Is there any news of the ship on its way from the Total Internal Reflection?” Yime asked.
Nopri shook his head. “No. There’s never any news. They don’t tend to publish course schedules.” He breathed deep from the bowl again, but let it out quickly this time. “They just turn up without warning, or don’t show at all.”
“You think it might not show?”
“No, it probably will. There’s just no guarantee.”
Nopri showed her to her quarters, a bewilderingly large, multi level space set off a vast curving corridor. To have reached this by walking would have taken about half an hour from the Officers’ Club; instead, one of the wheeled drones just picked up their seats with them still sitting in them and rolled away through the dark, tall corridors towards her cabin. Yime gazed up at the tall inverted arch of the ceiling as they progressed through the bizarre upside-down architecture of the Bulbitian. It was like being at the bottom of a small valley. The smooth floor the drone ran along was narrow; only a metre or so across. The walls took on a ribbed appearance; now it was like travelling through the gutted carcass of some vast animal. The ribs above rose outwards to a broad flat ceiling ten metres wide and easily twenty metres above.