Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  Veppers had what he honestly believed was the best-looking ten-girl Harem Troupe in the Enablement. This girl, Pleur, was special even within that august selection: one of his two Impressionist girls, able to take on the appearance and mannerisms of whatever female public figure he had taken a shine to recently. Of course, he’d had his share – much more than his fair share, as he was the first to acknowledge – of super-famous screen stars, singers, dancers, screen presenters, athletes and the very occasional hot politician and so on, but such pursuits could be terribly time-consuming; the truly famous, even when they were available, not committed, expected to be wooed over time, even by the richest man in the Enablement, and it was usually a lot simpler just to have one of the Impressionist girls alter herself – and have herself altered surgically, where the change would take too long otherwise – to look like the relevant beauty. It wasn’t as though he really wanted them for their minds after all, and this way also had the advantage of letting you compensate for any bodily deficiencies in the original.

  As he swam, Veppers looked over at Jasken, and nodded towards the sleeping girl, who currently looked identical to – unusually for Veppers – an academic. Pleur had recently taken on the appearance of a severely beautiful doctor of eugenics from Lombe whom Veppers had first glimpsed at a ball in Ubruater City earlier in the year but who had proved annoyingly determined to remain faithful to her husband, even in the face of the sort of blandishments and gifts that were guaranteed to turn almost anybody’s head (husbands included, where it merely meant turning a blind eye). Jasken walked over towards Pleur’s sleeping form as Veppers arrived at the side of the pool, then trod water and mimed what Jasken was to do.

  Jasken nodded, went to the back of the sun-bed, gripped its lower frame and, only slightly hindered by the fake cast on his arm, swiftly hoisted the rear of the sun-bed up to head height, tipping the girl into the pool with a splash and a spluttering scream. Veppers was still laughing and fending off Pleur’s flapping blows, while pulling her robe off, when Jasken frowned, put one finger to his ear, then got down on both knees at the pool side and started waving urgently.

  “What?” Veppers shouted at Jasken, exasperated. A near miss from one of Pleur’s hands skiffed one cheek and splashed water into his eyes. “Not on the nose, you dumb bitch!”

  “It’s Sulbazghi,” Jasken told him. “Highest urgency.”

  Veppers was much bigger and stronger than Pleur. He gripped her, turned her round and held her tightly while she cursed at both him and Jasken, coughing and spitting water all the while. “What? Something happening in Ubruater?” Veppers asked.

  “No, he’s in a flier, on his way here. Four minutes out. Won’t say what, but insists it’s highest urgency. Shall I tell Bousser to summit the landing platform?”

  Veppers sighed. “I suppose.” He got Pleur’s robe off at last. She had mostly stopped struggling and coughing. “Go and meet them,” he told Jasken, who nodded once and walked off.

  Veppers pushed the naked girl towards the side of the pool. “As for you, young lady,” he said, biting her neck hard enough to produce a yelp, “you’ve been terribly ill-mannered.”

  “I have, haven’t I?” Pleur agreed. She knew just what Veppers liked to hear. “I need to be taught a lesson, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes I would. Assume the position.” He shoved the floating weight of the robe out of the way as Pleur braced herself against the edge of the pool with both hands. “Won’t be long!” he called after Jasken’s retreating back.

  Still a little breathless, still with the pleasant glow of satiation about him and still dripping from inside his fluffy robe, Veppers sat forward and looked at the thing lying in Dr. Sulbazghi’s broad, pale yellow palm. He, Sulbazghi – still wearing his lab coat, which was an unusual sight – Jasken and Astil, Veppers’ butler, were the only people in the lavishly furnished lounge. Outside, beyond plump brocade bolsters, waggling tassels, gently clinking chandeliers and trembling gold-thread window fringes, the view was of the slowly clearing mists before and behind the Wheel as it continued on its journey through the spreading pastel light of dawn.

  “Thank you, Astil,” Veppers said, accepting a cup of chilled infusion from his butler. “That’s all.”

  “Sir,” Astil said, bowing and exiting.

  Veppers waited until he

  Whatever it was, it looked like a small bunch of very fine wires, their colour a sort of dull matt silver with a hint of blue. Scrunch it up, he thought, and you’d have something like a pebble; something so small you could probably swallow it.

  Sulbazghi looked tired, frazzled, almost ill. “It was found in the furnace,” he told Veppers, and ran a hand through his thin, unkempt hair.

  “What furnace?” he asked. He’d come into this thinking it was going to prove to be one of those matters that seemed terribly important and momentous to those around him but which he could, having cast his eye over it, happily leave for them to worry about and sort out if possible. That was, after all, what he paid them for. Now, just from the feel in the room, he was starting to think there might be a real problem here.

  “There shouldn’t have been anything left,” Jasken said. “What temperature—?”

  “The furnace in the Veppers Memorial Hospital,” Sulbazghi said, rubbing his face with his hands, not looking Veppers in the eye. “Our little friend, from the other night.”

  Great God, the girl, Veppers realised, with a disturbing feeling in his belly. Now what? Was the fractious bitch to pursue him from beyond the grave? “Okay,” he said slowly. “And all very unfortunate, I’m sure we can agree. But what has …?” He waved at the silvery-blue wires still displayed in Sulbazghi’s hand. “What has whatever this is got to do with that?”

  “It’s what was left of her body,” Sulbazghi said.

  “There shouldn’t have been anything left,” Jasken said. “Not if the furnace was—”

  “The fucking furnace was at the right fucking temperature!” Sulbazghi shouted shrilly.

  Jasken whipped off his Oculenses, his expression furious. He looked ready to start a fight.

  “Gentlemen, please,” Veppers said calmly, before Jasken could reply. He looked at the doctor. “As simply as you can, Sulbazghi, for the non-technically minded; what the hell is this thing?”

  “It’s a neural lace,” the doctor said, sounding exhausted.

  “A neural lace,” Veppers repeated.

  He’d heard of these things. They were the sort of device that highly advanced aliens who’d started out squidgy and biochemical – as squidgy and biochemical as Sichultians, for example – and who had not wanted to upload themselves into nirvana or oblivion or wherever, used when they wanted to interface with machine minds or record their thoughts, or even when they wanted to save their souls, their mind-states.

  Veppers looked at Sulbazghi. “Are you saying,” he said slowly, “that the girl had a neural lace in her head?”

  That shouldn’t be possible. Neural laces were illegal for Sichultians. Great God, fucking drug glands were illegal for Sichultians.

  “Kind of looks like it,” Sulbazghi said.

  “And it never showed up?” Veppers asked. He stared at the doctor. “Sulbazghi, You must have scanned that girl a hundred times.”

  “They don’t show up using the equipment we’ve got to look with,” Sulbazghi said. He stared down at the thing in his hand, gave a tiny, despairing laugh. “Minor miracle we can see it with the naked eye.”

  “Who put it in her?” Veppers asked. “The clinicians?”

  Sulbazghi shook his head. “Impossible.”

  “Then who?”

  “I’ve done a quick bit of investigating since the doctor told me about this,” Jasken said. “We need help here, sir: somebody who properly knows about this sort of thing—”

  “Xingre,” Sulbazghi said. “He’ll know, or know better how to find out.”

  “Xingre?” Veppers said, frowning. The Jhlupian trader and honorary consul was h
is principal contact with the alien civilisation the Enablement was closest to. Jasken had a sour look on his face that Veppers recognised; it meant he was having to agree with Sulbazghi. Both men knew this had to be kept as quiet as possible. Why were they suggesting bringing the alien into this?

  “He, she or it might know,” Jasken said. “The point is it’ll be able to find out if this thing really is what it looks like.”

  “And what the fuck does it look like?” Veppers asked.

  Jasken took a deep breath. “Well, like a … a neural lace device, the sort of thing the so-called ‘Culture’ uses.” He grimaced. Veppers saw the man grind his teeth for a moment. “It’s hard to tell; it could be a fake. With our technology—”

  “Why would anyone go to this trouble to fake it?” Sulbazghi said angrily. Veppers held up one hand to quiet him.

  Jasken glared at the doctor but went on, “It isn’t possible to be sure, which is why we might need Xingre and the sort of analysis and diagnostic equipment he has access to, but it looks like this thing is one of their devices. A Culture device.”

  Veppers looked at them both in turn.

  “It’s a Culture device?” he asked. He held out his hand and let Sulbazghi tip the thing into his palm. The closer he looked, the more tiny, still finer filaments he could see, branching and re-branching off the main, already very thin wires. It felt amazingly soft. It weighed next to nothing.

  “Looks very likely,” the doctor agreed.

  Veppers bounced the thing up and down in his hand a couple of times; a handful of hair would have weighed more. “Okay,” he said. “But what does this mean? I mean, she wasn’t a Culture citizen or anything, was she?”

  “No,” Sulbazghi said.

  “And … she didn’t seem to be able to interface with any equipment … ?” Veppers looked from the doctor to Jasken, who was now standing with his Oculenses dangling, the arm in the cast folded across his chest, his other arm resting on it, hand stroking the skin around his mouth repeatedly. He was still frowning.

  “No,” Sulbazghi said again. “She might not even have known the thing was in there.”

  “What?” Veppers said. “But how?”

  “These things grow inside you,” Jasken said. “If it really is one then it’ll have started as a seed and grown all around and into her brain. Fully developed these things link with just about every brain cell, every synapse.”

  “Why didn’t she have a head the size of a basket fruit?” Veppers asked. He grinned but neither man responded. That was very unusual. And not a good sign.

  “These things add less than half a per cent to the bulk of the brain,” Jasken said. He nodded at the thing lying in Veppers’ palm. “Even what you see there is mostly hollow; in the brain it’d be filled with fluid or bits of the brain itself. The tiniest filaments are so thin they’re invisible to the naked eye and they’ll probably have been burned off in the furnace anyway.”

  Veppers stared at the strange, insignificant-looking device. “But what was it in her brain to do?” he asked both men. “What was it for? Given that we’ve established it didn’t seem to give her any super powers or anything.”

  “These things are used to record a person’s mind-state,” Jasken said.

  “Their soul, for want of a better word,” Sulbazghi said.

  “It’s so Culture people can be reincarnated if they die unexpectedly,” Jasken said.

  “I know,” Veppers said patiently. “I’ve looked into the technology myself. Don’t think I’m not jealous.” He tried another smile. Still no response. This must be serious.

  “Well,” Jasken said, “it’s not impossible that such information – her mind-state – was transmitted somewhere else at the point of death. It’s what these things are for, after all.”

  “Transmitted?” Veppers said. “Where?”

  “Not far—” Jasken began.

  “I can’t see how.” Sulbazghi shook his head, glancing at Jasken. “I’ve done my own research. “It takes time, and a full clinical setup. It’s a person’s entire personality we’re talking about here, their every memory; you don’t squirt that out in a beat or two like a fucking text message.”

  “We are dealing with what the aliens call Level Eight technology,” Jasken said contemptuously. “You don’t know what it might be capable of. We’re like pre-wheel primitives looking at a screen and saying it can’t work because nobody can re-draw a cave-painting that quickly.”

  “There are still limits,” Sulbazghi insisted.

  “Doubtless,” Jasken said. “But we have no idea what they are.”

  Sulbazghi drew breath to speak but Veppers just talked over the start of whatever he had been about to say. “Well, in any event; bad news, perhaps, gentlemen.” He reached out, let Sulbazghi take the device back. The doctor bagged it, put it in a pocket of his lab coat, sealed it.

  “So …” Veppers said. “If this stored her mind-state, I suppose it would know …”

  “Everything up to the moment of her death,” Sulbazghi said.

  Veppers nodded. “Jasken,” he said, “ask Yarbethile what our relations are with the Culture, would you?”

  “Sir,” Jasken said, turning away for a moment while he contacted Veppers’ Private Secretary, doubtless already at his desk in the Halo 7’s executive office pod. Jasken listened, muttered something, turned back. “Mr. Yarbethile characterises our relations with the Culture as ‘Nebulous’,” Jasken said drily. He shrugged. “I’m not sure if he’s trying to be funny or not.”

  “Well,” Veppers said. “We don’t really have much to do with them, with the Culture, do we?” Veppers looked at the other two men. “Not really.”

  Jasken shook his head. Sulbazghi clenched his jaw and looked away to one side.

  All three experienced a momentarily disquieting lurch as the Halo 7, which had been quietly and suitably re-configuring itself for the last couple of minutes, left the land precisely as scheduled and crunched down a long, broad beach in two giant troughs of pebbles to meet the misty, torpid waters of the Oligyne Inland Sea, turning itself into a giant paddle wheel as it ploughed on through the banks of mist, its pace only slightly reduced.

  “We need to look into this, obviously,” Veppers said. “Jasken, use any resources required. Keep me informed, daily.” Jasken nodded. Veppers stood up, nodded to Sulbazghi. “Thank you, doctor. I trust you’ll stay for breakfast. If there’s nothing more for now, though, I think I’ll go and get dressed. Excuse me.”

  He walked towards the link leading to his bedroom, currently joined with the lounge gondola. As sometimes happened, Veppers found that the giant Wheel’s faint bobbing motion as it rolled through waters was giving him a feeling of nausea.

  He felt sure it would pass.

  Eight

  The planet outside was very big and blue and white and bright. It was revolving, like planets usually did, but you couldn’t really see that on normal-time sight. It only seemed to move because the place where he was was moving. The place where he was was separate from the planet and it was moving. It was above the planet and it was moving. The place where he was was called an Abandoned Space Factory and he was here to wait for the enemy to come and when they came he would fight them. That was what he did; he fought. He had been built to fight. What he was, the thing that he was inside; that had been built to fight.

  The thing he was in was a thing, an “it”, but he was not an “it”; he was a he. He was a man. Or he had been, at least. He was still who he was but he was also inside the thing, the machine that was designed and built to fight and perhaps get destroyed. But not him. He wouldn’t be destroyed. He was still who he was. He was somewhere else as well, and that was where he would wake up, if this thing he was in was destroyed. That was how it worked.

  “Vatueil? Captain Vatueil?”

  They were talking to him again.

  We’re losing, he thought, reviewing the latest schematics. You hardly needed the schematics; just step back far enough from the
whole thing, replay what had happened since the war had broken out and you could see it writing itself out in front of you.

  They’d had some early disasters, then successes, then they’d been beaten back consistently, then they’d consolidated and subsequently seemed to achieve the upper hand across almost every front, making steady progress everywhere … then found that the fronts were not true fronts, the fronts – or at least the places where his side was strongest and was prevailing – were like stubborn tatters of a balloon that it turned out had already burst some time ago; there just hadn’t been time to hear the Bang. They were making forward progress the way the torn strips of the exploded balloon made forward progress: flailing hopelessly, uselessly outwards like soft shrapnel.

  He sat – or floated or whatever you wanted to call it – in the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space as it was rather grandly called, surrounded by the other members of the Grand War Council. The council was mostly composed of people who were his comrades, friends, colleagues and respected rivals. There was only the barest minimum of contrarians, awkwardistas and outright defeatists, and even they argued their points well and arguably contributed to the working consensus. Human, alien, whatever, he knew all of them about as well as was possible by now, and yet still he felt quite alone.

  He looked round them.

  There was no perfect Real analogy for the situation he and the rest were currently in: it was as though they all hovered around some modest spherical space maybe a handful of metres across. From the outside the sphere’s surface appeared solid and opaque, but you could stick your head through it from the outside if you had the right clearance and a sufficient degree of military seniority.

  You stuck your head through and there you were; one bodiless head sticking through protruding into this dimly lit spherical space with lots of other bodiless heads – only a minority of them in any sense human.

  Usually a spherical display hovered in the centre of the space. Right now the display was showing some detail of the general battle space; an antique faux-Real volume in which small rocket ships armed with nuclear missiles, particle beam guns and CREWs went skating around a few billion asteroids spread in a ring round a sun, blasting and zapping each other. He had seen such battle environments many times before. Versions of him had invested the simmed humans fighting in these, or invested the machines.