popping lights of a small firework display. The air was filled, too, with the chanting of massed voices;
a choir of scalecones stood banked on
the far side of the auditorium. The humanoids forming the choir appeared identical in
all but stature and in the tones they produced from their
puffed-out chests and long necks. They seemed to be making the ambient
racket, but as he looked around the arena Horza could make out the
faint purple edges in the air where other, more localized
sound fields held command, over smaller stages where dancers danced, singers sang,
strippers stripped, boxers boxed, or people
just stood around talking.
Banked all around, the paraphernalia of the game seethed like a vast storm. Maybe ten or even twenty thousand people, mostly
humanoid
but some utterly different, including not a few machines and drones, they sat or lay or walked or stood, watching
magicians, jugglers, fighters,
immolators, hypnotics, couplers, actors, orators and a hundred other types of entertainers
all doing their turns. Tents had been pitched on some
of the larger terraces; rows of seats and couches remained on others.
Many small stages frazzled with lights, smoke and glittering holograms
and soligrams. Horza saw a 3-D maze spread out over
several terraces, full of tubes and angles, some clear, some opaque, some moving,
some staying still. Shadows and forms moved
inside.
A slow-motion animal trapeze act arced gradually overhead. Horza recognized the beasts performing it; it would become a combat
act later
on.
Some people walked by Horza: tall humanoids in fabulous clothes, glittering like a gaudy night city seen from the air. They
chattered in
almost inaudibly high voices, and from a network of fine, golden-colored tubes branching all around their bright
red and dark purple faces, tiny
puffs of incandescent gas pulsed out, wreathing their semi-scaled necks and naked shoulders,
and trailing and dimming behind them in a fiery
orange glow. Horza watched them pass. Their cloaks, flowing out behind as
though hardly heavier than the air through which they moved,
flickered with the image of an alien face, each cloak showing
part of one huge moving image, as though a projector overhead was focused on
the capes of the moving group. The orange gas
touched Horza’s nostrils and his head swam for a second. He let his immune glands deal with
the narcotic, and continued to
look around the arena.
The eye of the storm, the still, quiet spot, was so small it could easily have been missed in even a slow and attentive scan
of the auditorium.
It was not in the center, but set at one end of the ellipsoid of level ground forming the lowest visible
level of the arena. There, under a canopy of
still dark lighting units, a round table stood, just about large enough to accommodate
at its rim the sixteen large, differently styled chairs which
each faced a wedge of color fixed to the top of the table. A
console set into the table itself faced each chair, on which straps and other
restraining devices lay opened. Behind each
of the seats lay an area of clear space on which small seats, twelve in all, were placed. A small
fence separated them from
the larger seats in front, and another fence cordoned off the set of twelve seats from a larger area behind where
people,
most of them moties, were already quietly waiting.
The game seemed to have been delayed. Horza sat down on what was either an over-designed seat or a rather unimaginative piece
of
sculpture. He was almost on the highest level of the terraces of the arena, with a good view over most of the rest. There
was nobody nearby. He
reached deep inside his heavy blouse and peeled off some artificial skin from his abdomen. He rolled
the skin into a ball and threw it into a
large pot that held a small tree, just behind where he sat; then he checked the Aoish
credit Tenths, the negotiable memory card, the pocket
terminal and the light CRE pistol which had been hidden by the paunch
of fake skin. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a small, darkly dressed
man approach. The man looked at Horza with his head
tilted, from about five meters off, then came closer.
“Hey, you want to be a Life."
“No. Goodbye," Horza said. The small man sniffed and walked off, stopping further along the walkway to prod a shape lying
near the edge
of a narrow terrace. Horza looked over and saw a woman there raise her head groggily, then shake it slowly,
moving sinuous lengths of
bedraggled white hair. Her faced showed briefly in the light of an overhead spot; she was beautiful
but looked very tired. The small man spoke
to her again, but she shook her head and made a motion with one hand. The small
man walked off.
The flight in the ex-Culture shuttle had been relatively uneventful; after some confusion, Horza had succeeded in patching
through to the Orbital’s
navigation system, discovered where he was in relation to the
Olmedreca
’s last known position, and set off to find whatever was left of the
Megaship. He’d accessed a news service while gorging
himself on Culture emergency rations, and found a report on the
Olmedreca
in the
index. The pictures showed the ship, listing a little and fractionally bow-down, floating in a calm sea surrounded
by ice, the first kilometer of its
hull seemingly buried inside the huge tabular berg. Small aircraft and a few shuttles hovered
and flew about the gigantic wreck, like flies above
the carcass of a dinosaur. The commentary accompanying the visuals spoke
of a mysterious second nuclear explosion aboard the craft. It also
reported that when police craft had arrived, the Megaship
had proved to be deserted.
Hearing that, Horza had immediately altered the shuttle’s destination, swinging the craft round, to head for Evanauth.
Horza had had three Tenths of an Aoish credit. He had sold the shuttle for five Tenths. It was absurdly cheap, especially
given the imminent
destruction of the Orbital, but he had been in a hurry, and the dealer who accepted the craft was certainly
taking a risk handling the machine; it
was very obviously a Culture design, the brain had equally obviously been shot out
of it, so there could be little doubt it had been stolen. The
Culture would treat the destruction of the craft’s consciousness
as murder.
In three hours Horza had sold the shuttle, bought clothes, cards, a gun, a couple of terminals and some information. All except
the
information had been cheap.
Horza now knew that there was a craft answering the description of the
Clear Air Turbulence
on the Orbital, or rather underneath it, inside
the ex-Culture General Systems Vehicle called
The Ends of Invention.
He found that hard to believe, but there was no other craft it could be.
According to the information agency, a ship fitting
the
CAT
’s description had been brought on board by one of the Evanauth Port shipbuilders
to have repairs made to its warping units;
it had arrived under tow two days previously, with only its fusion motors working. He could not,
however, find out its name
or exact location.
It sounded to Horza like the
CAT
had been used to rescue the survivors of Kraiklyn’s band; it must have come over the O wall on remote
control, using its
warp units. It had picked the Free Company up, then hopped back over again, damaging its warp motors in the process.
He had also been unable to find out who the survivors might be, but assumed Kraiklyn must be one of them; nobody else could
have
brought the
CAT
over the Edgewall. He hoped he’d find Kraiklyn at the Damage game. Either way, Horza had decided to make for the
CAT
afterward. He still intended to head for Schar’s World, and the
Clear Air Turbulence
was the most likely way of getting there. He hoped Yalson
was alive. He also hoped it was true about
The Ends of Invention
being totally demilitarized, and the volume around Vavatch being free of
Culture ships. After all this time he wouldn’t have
put it past the Culture’s Minds to have found out about the
CAT
being in the same volume of
space as
The Hand of God 137
when it came under attack, and to have made a connection or two.
He sat back in the seat—or sculpture—and relaxed, letting the internal pattern of the motie drop from his mind and body. He
had to start
thinking like Kraiklyn again; he closed his eyes.
After a few minutes he could hear things starting to happen down in the lower reaches of the arena. He brought himself to
and looked
around. The white-haired woman who had been lying on the nearby terrace had got up; she was walking, a little unsteadily,
down into the arena,
her long, heavy dress sweeping over the steps. Horza got up, too, following quickly down the stairs in
the wake of her perfume. She didn’t look
at him when he skipped past her. She was fiddling with an askew tiara.
The lights were on over the colored table where the game would be played. Some of the stages in the auditorium were starting
to close up