Iain Banks - The Algebraist

“Fuck! So we did. Total retraction. Show me what you got to show me.”

“Walk this way.”

“Ah now, just fuck off.”

Fassin followed Sal through to the inner recess of his study. It was kind of what he might have expected if he’d given the matter any thought: lots of wood and softly glowing pools of light, framed stuff and a desk the size of a sunken room. Funny-looking twisted bits of large and gleaming metal or some other shiny substance sitting in one corner. Fassin guessed these were starship bits.

“There.”

“Where? What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“This.” Sal held up a very small twisted-looking bit of metal mounted on a wooden plinth.

Fassin tried very hard not to let his shiver show. He was nothing like as drunk as he was trying to appear to be.

“Yeah? An whassat?” (Overdoing it, but Sal didn’t seem to notice.)

Saluus held the piece of odd-looking metal up before Fassin’s eyes. “This is that thing I got out of that fucking downed ship, my man.” Sal looked at it, swallowed and took a deep breath. Fassin saw Sal’s lip tremble. “This is what—”

The fucker’s going to break down, Fassin thought. He slapped one hand on Sal’s shoulder. “This is no good,” he told him. “We need different, we need, I don’t know; something. We need not this, not what is before us here. We need something different. Elsewhen or elsestuff or elsewhere. This might be my last night of freedom, Sal.” He gripped the other man hard by the shoulder of his perfectly tailored jacket. “I’m serious! You don’t know how bad things might get for me! Oh fuck, Sal, you don’t know how bad things might get for all of us, and I can’t fucking tell you, and this could be my last night of fun anywhere, and… and… and you’re showing me some fucking coat hook or something, and I don’t know…’ He swiped weakly at the twisted piece of metal, patting it away and still missing. Then he sniffed and drew himself up. “Sorry,” he said, soberly. “Sorry, Sal.” He patted the other man’s shoulder. “But this is maybe my last, ah, night of fun, and… look, I feel totally charged for anything — wish Boogeytown was right outside, really do, but on the other hand it’s been a long few days and maybe — no, not maybe. Maybe definitely. In fact, not that, just plain definitely the sensible thing to do is just go to bed and—”

“You serious?” Sal said, dropping the metal piece on its wooden plinth onto the desk behind him.

“About sleep?” Fassin said, gesturing wildly. “Well, it — -”

“No, you moron! About Boogeytown!”

“What? Eh? I didn’t mention Boogeytown!”

“Yes, you did!” Sal said, laughing.

“I did? Well, fuck!”

Sal had a flier. Automatic to the point of being nearly banned under the AI laws. Loaded with repair mechanisms that were not quite nanotech but only by such a tiny - tiny -tiny little bit. Deeply civilian but with total military clearance. If a Grand Fleet Admiral of the Summed Fucking Fleet stepped into this baby and toggled his authority it would only decrease the fucker’s all-areas, multi-volumes access profile. Down in the hangar deck. Walk this way, har har.

They left the top down part of the way, to clear their heads. It was very, very cold.

They set down somewhere where litter blew about under the fans of the flier. Fassin hadn’t thought there was still such a thing as litter.

Boogeytown was much as he remembered it. They hit the lows, looking for highs. They trawled the bowl-bars and narctail parlours, coming up with a brimming catch of buzz and girls, Fassin meanwhile trying to edge Sal in a certain bar’s direction, while Sal — vaguely recalling this wasn’t supposed to be just fun but also a way of getting his old pal Fass to open up with more potentially useful and lucrative details about whatever the fuck was going on — tried to get his old-new best buddy to move in a certain informational direction but without much success and anyway with decreasing amounts of concern and an increasing feeling of oh-who-gives-a-fuck?

Fassin too was getting frustrated, still angling for one more move and one particular streetlet, one particular bar, but they were here now in this diamond-walled emporium called the Narcateria where the sleaze was so coolly glitz it almost hurt, surrounded by people who hadn’t seen Sal in so long and just had to keep him where he was, don’t you dare go away, you wicked man you! And is this your friend? Where you been keeping him? Can I sit here, hmm? Me too me too! So eventually he had to stumble away and make a call in a private public booth and then head for the toilet where he threw up in a thin burning stream all the alcohol he’d drunk since the last time he’d been to the loo (over the hole, so it looked and sounded authentic), then wash his face and rejoin the drunken stoned-out fray of breath-catching loveliness, waiting for the right girl, the one all this had been about, all of it: asking to go to Sal’s in the first place, then getting him drunk and seeming to get drunk himself (which he was, but not that drunk) and then dropping hints about Boogeytown, all so that he could get away and get here and see this one particular girl…

… Who finally appeared nearly an hour later when he was just starting to despair but there she was, perfect and calm and quietly beautiful as ever, though looking quite different, again, with white-gold hair swinging heavy as the real 24-carat article about her near-triangular face, chin just made for holding, strawberry-bruise lips for kissing, tiny little nose for nuzzling, cheeks for stroking, eyes for gazing into (depths, ah, depths!) brows for licking, forehead for licking too, licking dry of sex-sweat after — oo! oo! oo! just too strenuous a session!

Aun Liss.

The one real love of his life, his controlling passion.

Older again but not as old as she should be. Looking different, living different, being different, called different. Called Ko now (and that was all), not Aun Liss, but she would always be Aun Liss to him. No need to say her real name. A lot of what passed between them wasn’t said anyway. Dressed in salarygirl clothes. Nothing special, revealing or provocative.

Nevertheless.

She held out her hand.

Nearby, surrounded by — actually, nearly drowning in — utter human female and super-stimulus hyper-pulchritude loveli-nessence, even Sal looked impressed.

“Fass, you dog!”

Aun Liss was still holding out her hand.

Back in Sal’s flier. Sal was in the front, being grievously attended to by the infamous Segrette Twins, moaning.

Fassin and Aun in the back seat, utterly happy to appear so archetypical. They kissed for a long time, then — looking round, shrugging at the front-seat antics (the flier at this point not really going anywhere, circling in a holding pattern — a clinching pattern, Aun Liss suggested) — she rose up and straddled him, his hands up underneath the light dress she wore, fingers still kneading her back… as they continued to do once they were finally returned to the idiot Kehar house poised over the column of water just as, Aun pointed out, she was poised over his column. (This aloud, for the benefit of anybody listening. They both laughed, not too loudly, he hoped.) Meanwhile she kept the dress on still, even in the heat of it, with his fingers pressing, kneading, moving above her arched spine producing little half-pained gasps until later when they were finally just lying together under a thin sheet she shucked off the dress and he just held her.

And this is what, over the course of those several hours, their fingers said, drawing and tapping out the private, effectively unbuggable code they had used for hundreds of years, since she first became his control, his link: