Byr laughed, peeling off the suit’s feet to reveal wrinkled pink-brown toes. ‘Sk’ilip’k’ has decided he likes the idea of walking on land; says he’s ashamed his ancestors went out of the ocean and then went back in again as if the air was too cold. He wants us to make him a walking machine. The others think he’s crazy, though there is some support for the idea of them all somehow going flying together. I left them a couple more screens and increased some of their access to the flight archives. They gave me this; for you.’

Byr handed her something from the suit’s side pouch.

‘Oh; thank you.’ She put the small figurine in one palm and turned it over carefully with her fingers, inspecting it by the fading red light of the day’s end. It was beautiful, worked out of some soft stone to perfectly resemble their idea of what they thought a human ought to look like; naturally flippered feet, legs joined to the knees, body fatter, shoulders slender, neck thicker, head narrower, hairless. It did look like her; the face, for all that it was distorted, bore a distinct resemblance. Probably G’Istig’tk’t’s work; there was a delicacy of line and a certain humour about the figurine’s facial expression that spoke to her of the old female’s personality. She held the little figure up in front of Byr. ‘Think it looks like me?’

‘Well, you’re certainly getting that fat.’

‘Oh!’ she said, slapping Byr lightly on the shoulder. She glanced down at her lap, reaching to pat her belly. ‘I think you’re starting to show yourself, at last,’ she said.

Byr smiled, her face still freckled with droplets of water, catching the dying light. She looked down, holding Dajeil’s hand, patting her belly. ‘Na,’ she said, rising to her feet. She held out a hand to Dajeil and glanced round to the tower. ‘You coming in or are you going to sit around communing with the ocean swell all evening? We’ve got guests, remember?’

She took a breath to say something, then held up her hand. Byr helped pull her up; she felt suddenly heavy, clumsy and . . . unwieldy. Her back hurt dully. ‘Yes, let’s go in, eh?’

They turned towards the lonely tower.

9 - Unacceptable Behaviour

9

Unacceptable Behaviour

I

I

The Excession’s links with the two regions of the energy grid just fell away, twin collapsing pinnacles of fluted skein fabric sinking back into the grid like idealised renderings of some spent explosion at sea. Both layers of the grid oscillated for a few moments, again like some abstractly perfect liquid, then lay still. The waves produced on the grid surfaces damped quickly to nothing, absorbed. The Excession floated free on the skein of real space, otherwise as enigmatic as ever.

There was, for a while, silence between the three watching ships.