Before she could do anything to stop him he gripped her hard by one elbow and pushed her out over the drop, only her feet still in contact with the car’s roof. “Still want me to let go?”
“No!” she shouted, grabbing his arm with her free hand. “Don’t be stupid! Of course not!”
He pulled her in towards him, though still not out of danger. “If you had a terminal it would hear you scream if you happened to fall,” he told her. He made a show of looking down. He shrugged. “Might be just enough time for the ship to realise what was happening and get a drone to you before you hit the bottom.”
“Stop doing this, please,” she said. “You’re frightening me.”
He pulled her close to him, his breath in her face now. “Everybody thinks SC is so glamorous, so … sexy!” He shook her, rubbed his groin against her leg. “Thrilling fun, all danger and excitement, but not too much danger. Is that what you think? Heard the rumours, absorbed the propaganda? Read the right assessments, listened to the relevant experts, self-proclaimed, have we?”
“I’m just trying to find out—”
“You feel frightened?” he asked her.
“I just said—”
He shook his head. “This isn’t dangerous.” he shook her again. “I’m not dangerous. I’m a nice roly-poly GCU avatar; I wouldn’t drop somebody down an antique lift shaft to let them splatter on the concrete. I’m one of the good guys. But you still feel frightened, don’t you? You do feel frightened, don’t you? I hope you feel frightened.”
“I already told you,” she said coldly, trying to keep any expression from her face or voice as she stared into his eyes.
He smiled, pulled her inwards as he stepped back. He let go of her and held on to the cables as the car started downwards again. “As I say, I’m one of the good guys, Ms. Y’breq.”
She gripped another of the cables, hard. “I never told you my full name.”
“Well spotted. Seriously though, I really am one of the good guys. I’m the sort of ship who’d always do everything to save somebody, not kill them, not let them die. SC – its ships, its people – might be on the side of the angels, but that doesn’t mean they always behave like the good guys. In fact, as you’re falling down the metaphorical lift shaft, I can virtually guarantee it will feel like they’re the bad guys, no matter how ethically sound the carefully worked out moral algebra was that led to them chucking you into it in the first place.”
“You have made your point, sir,” she told him frostily. “Perhaps we might abandon this pastime now.”
He looked at her for a few moments longer. Then he shook his head, looked away.
“Well, so you’re tough,” he said. “But you’re still a fool.” He let out a deep breath. The elevator car was pulling to a stop. “I’ll take you to an SC ship.” He smiled without any humour. “If and when it all goes horribly wrong, feel free to blame me, if you still can. It’ll make no difference.”
“The Forgotten,” the Bodhisattva told Yime Nsokyi. “Also known as Oubliettionaries.”
There were times, Yime might occasionally be forced to admit, when a neural lace would indeed be useful. If she had one she could be quizzing it now, asking it for mentions, references, definitions. What the hell was an Oubliettionary? Of course, the ship would know she was making such inquiries – she was on the ship now, not the Orbital, so any lace or terminal business would be conducted through the Bodhisattva’s Mind or its sub-systems – but at least with a lace you could have the relevant knowledge just dumped into your head rather than have to listen to it one word at a time.
“I see,” Yime said. She folded her arms. “I’m listening.”
“They’re ships of a certain … predisposition, shall we say, normally a GSV, usually with a few other ships and a small number of active drones aboard and often containing no humans at all,” the Bodhisattva told her. “They resign from the day-to-day informational commerce of the Culture, stop registering their position, take themselves off into the middle of nowhere and then they just sit there, doing nothing. Except listen, indefinitely.”
“Listen?”
“They listen to one or more – probably all, I’d imagine – of the handful of widely scattered broadcast stations which send out a continual update on the general state of matters in the greater galactic community in general and the Culture in particular.”
“News stations.”
“For want of a better word.”