House of Suns by Alastair Reynolds

purple-black cylinder clutched in my right hand, with a gold interface collar around its midsection, where it normally plugged into the ship. It felt as if I was dragging a small neutron star around with me. The trove was brimming with data, knowledge and wisdom.
    ‘Will that suit keep you alive for a long while, shatterling?’
    ‘Long enough, I hope.’
    ‘Then tell your ship to await your return. It can take care of itself while you are absent?’
    ‘It’s already done.’
    ‘Then hold still. I will take care of you.’
    The curator’s hand moved towards me, the fingers splaying wide and then closing slowly, tenderly, around my tiny, squashable form. The suit creaked as the fingers took hold and began to drag me and the trove in the direction of the face. I had not noticed it until then, but there was a nozzle-like aperture in the ring connecting the curator’s helmet to the rest of his body. A door opened in the nozzle and I was popped inside, into a weightless chamber the size of a small cargo hold. The door sealed and briny pink fluid erupted in, boiling at first before it had squeezed the vacuum out of the room. My suit pondered the ambient chemistry. The liquid was a soup, thick with long-chain molecules.
    A second door opened and I drifted out with the tidal flow of the liquid. I paddled to recover my orientation. I was in the helmet, floating in the liquid space between the curator’s chin and the glass. The curator breathed so slowly that it was like the ebb and flow of water at a lazy shoreline. I continued my drift until I was level with the awesome gash of the mouth, stretching away to either side of me, the lips curved like sandstone carved by underground rivers.
    ‘Is this distressing for you, shatterling? You must tell me if it is distressing.’
    ‘I’m fine.’
    ‘Not everyone has been as comfortable as you, in this situation.’
    ‘I don’t think you mean to hurt me. You could have done that already.’
    ‘I could mean to eat you. Have you considered that possibility?’
    ‘Now that you mention it ...’
    ‘I don’t mean to eat you - not in the sense we are both imagining. But it is necessary for me to swallow you. You’ll see why in a few moments. Be reassured that no harm shall come to you, and that your stay inside me will be temporary.’
    ‘Then I shall take your reassurance.’ The mouth widened by degrees, until there was room for me to pass between the lips. ‘Curator,’ I said, as I fell into that bottomless trench, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what guarantees do you have that I’m not going to do you harm, once I’m inside you?’
    ‘Even if you destroyed this entire node, you would barely scratch the sum total of the data in our possession, and nothing valuable would be lost.’
    ‘I might have tried.’
    ‘You have been examined more thoroughly than you probably realise. We have a good understanding of the capabilities of your ship. It has weapons, but it is not warlike. And your suit contains nothing harmful at all.’
    ‘And me?’
    ‘We have looked inside you. We found only meat and bones, and a salting of harmless machines. The trove might be a bomb, of course, but that is a chance we shall take. No act of knowledge acquisition is entirely without risk.’
    I was being carried down the curator’s throat by the flow of swallowed fluid. Ahead of me, picked out in lurid pinks and mauves by the suit’s lamps, the spongy door of an epiglottis hinged shut just as I was about go through it. I was going into the stomach, not the lungs.
    I rode peristalsis all the way down, the walls of the curator’s gullet squeezing and opening to propel the sac of fluid in which I floated. Eventually the narrowing shaft deposited me in a warm, liquid-filled compartment. I guessed that I was somewhere deep in his torso, probably in the lower abdominal region, but I had no idea in which organ, or compartment of an organ, I had arrived. The curator’s internal anatomy