The gallery had got quite busy; her mother was here, tall and tousled in a jellaba, three cousins, seven aunts and uncles, about a dozen friends — all house-guests and a little bleary-eyed after the Graduation party — and a couple of house-slaved drones attempting to control the animals; a brace of tawny speytlid hunters looking about at everybody and snuffling and slavering with excitement and her three hooded but still restless alseyns which kept stretching their wings and giving their piercing, plangent cry. Another drone waited outside the nearest window with Brave, her favourite mount, saddled up and pawing the ground, while the three drones she'd decided were the minimum she could manage with were taking care of her luggage trunks, which were still appearing from the house lift. A tray floated at her side with breakfast; she'd just started munching on a chislen segment when the drone had told her she had to make this journey alone.

Churt Lyne didn't reply in speech. Instead — astonishingly — it spoke through her neural lace:

— Ulver, for pity's sake, this is a secret mission for Special Circumstances, not a social outing with your girlfriends.

"And don't secret-talk me!" Ulver hissed through clenched teeth. "Grief, that's so rude!"

"Quite right, dear," muttered her mother, yawning.

A couple of her friends laughed lightly.

Churt Lyne came right up to her until it was almost touching her, and then the next thing she knew there was a sort of grey cylinder around her and the machine; it stretched from wooden floor to stone-carved ceiling and it was about a metre and a half in diameter, neatly enclosing her, Churt and the tray carrying breakfast. She stared at the drone, her mouth open, eyes wide. It had never done anything like this before! Its aura field had disappeared. It hadn't even had the decency to square the field and put the field on a mirror finish; at least she could have checked her appearance.

"Sorry about this, Ulver," the machine said. Its voice sounded flat in the narrow cylinder. Ulver closed her mouth and prodded the field the drone had slung around them. It was like touching warm stone. "Ulver," the drone said again, taking one of her hands in a maniple field, "I apologise; I ought to have made the point earlier. I just assumed… Well, never mind. I'm supposed to come with you to Tier, but not anybody else. Your friends have to stay here."

"But Peis and I always go deep space together! And Klatsli is my new protege; I promised her she could stick around me; I can't just abandon her! Do you have any idea what that could do to her development? To her social life? People might think I've dumped her. Besides, she's got an utterly exquisite older brother. If I-"

"You can't take them," the drone said loudly. "They're not included in the invitation."

"I heard what you said yesterday, you know," Ulver said, shaking her head and leaning forward at the drone. ""Keep it secret"; I haven't told them where we're going."

"That's not the point. When I said don't tell a soul I meant don't tell a soul you're going, not don't tell a soul exactly where you're going."

She laughed, throwing her head back. "Churt; real space here! My diary is a public document, hadn't you noticed? There are at least three channels devoted to me — all run by rather desperate young men, admittedly, but nevertheless. I can't change my eye colour without anybody on the Rock who follows fashion knowing about it within the hour. I can't just disappear! Are you mad?"

"And I don't think the animals can come either," Churt Lyne said smoothly, ignoring her question. "The protira certainly can't. There isn't room on the ship."

"Isn't room?" she roared. "What size is this thing? Are you sure it's safe?"

"Warships don't have stables, Ulver."

"It's an ex- war ship!" she exclaimed, waving her arms around. "Ow!" She sucked at the knuckle she'd hit against the field cylinder.

"Sorry. But still."

"What about my clothes?"

"A cabin full of clothes is perfectly all right, though I don't know for whose benefit you're going to be wearing them."

"What about when I get to Tier?" she cried. "What about this guy I'm not supposed to fuck? Am I supposed to just wander past him naked?"

"Take two roomsful; three. Clothes are not a problem, and you can pick up more when you get there — no, wait a minute, I know how long it takes you to choose new clothes; just take what you want. Four cabins; there."

"But my friends!"

"Tell you what; I'll show you the space you've got to work with. Okay?"

"Oh, okay," she said, shaking her head and sighing heavily.

The drone fed convincing-looking pictures of the ex-warship's interior into Ulver's brain through the neural lace.

She caught her breath. Her eyes were wide when the display stopped. She stared at the drone. "The rooms!" she exclaimed. "The cabins; they're so small!"

"Quite. Still think you want to take your friends?"

She thought for a second. "Yes!" she yelled, thumping a fist on the little tray floating at her side. It wobbled, trying not to spill the fruit juice. "It'd be cozy!"

"What if you fall out?"

That stopped her for a moment. She tapped her lips with one finger, frowning into space. She shrugged. "I can cut people dead in a traveltube, Churt. I can ostracise people in the same bed. She leant towards the machine again then glanced round at the grey walls of the field cylinder. "I can ostracise people in something this big," she said pointedly, her hands on her hips. She put her head back, narrowed her eyes and lowered her voice. "I could just refuse to go, you know."

"You could," the machine said with a pronounced sigh. "But you'd never get into Contact, and SC would be forced to try and get a double — a synthetic entity — to impersonate this woman on Tier. The authorities there wouldn't be amused if they found out."

She gazed levelly at the machine for a moment. She sighed and shook her head. "Bugger," she breathed, snatching the glass of fruit juice from the floating tray and looking in distaste at where the juice had run down the outside of the glass. "I hate this acting adult shit." She knocked the juice back, set the glass back down and licked her lips. "Okay; let's go, let's go!"

The goodbyes took a while. Churt Lyne glowed greyer and greyer with frustration until it turned into a sort of off-black sphere; then it dropped its aura field altogether and sped out of the nearest opened window. It raced around in the air outside for a while; a couple of sonic booms nearly had the mounts bolting.

Eventually, though, Ulver had said her farewells, decided to leave all her animals and two trunks of clothes behind and then — having remained serene in the midst of much hullabaloo and some tears from Klatsli — entered a traveltube with a frostily blue Churt Lyne and was taken to the Forward Docks and a big, brightly lit hangar, where the Psychopath Class ex-Rapid Offensive Unit Frank Exchange of Views was waiting for her.

Ulver laughed. "It looks," she snorted, "like a dildo!"

"That's appropriate," Churt Lyne said. "Armed, it can fuck solar systems."

She remembered when she was a little girl and had stood on a bridge over a gorge in one of the other Interior Spaces; she had a stone in her hand and her mother had held her up to the bridge parapet so that she could look over the edge and drop the stone into the water below. She'd held the stone — it was about the same size as her little fist — right up to one eye and closed her other eye so that the dark stone had blotted out everything else she could see. Then she'd let it go.

She and Churt Lyne stood in the ship's tiny hangar area, surrounded by her cases, bags and trunks as well as a deal of plain but somehow menacing-looking bits and pieces of military equipment. The way that stone had fallen towards the dark water then, shrinking and shrinking, was very like the way Phage Rock fell silently away from the old warship now.