Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  The room where Lededje had woken, to see Sensia sitting outside on the balcony, was hers for as long as she stayed on the ship. After their tour in a small, very quiet aircraft – the GSV was appropriately mind-boggling from every external angle and internal corridor – Sensia had dropped Lededje off nearby, where one of the kilometres-long internal corridors abutted one of the little stepped valleys of accommodation units, given her a long, silvery and elaborate ring – a thing called a terminal that let her talk to the ship – then left her to find her own way back to the room and otherwise sort herself out. Sensia said she’d be a call away, happy to be a guide, companion or whatever. In the meantime, she imagined Lededje might want to rest, or just have some time to herself.

  The ring fitted itself to Lededje’s longest finger and gave spoken directions back to her room. One wall of the room acted as a screen and allowed apparently unrestricted access to the ship’s equivalent of the Sichultian datasphere. She sat, started asking questions.

  “Welcome aboard,” said the avatar drone of the Bodhisattva. “May I take your bag?”

  Yime nodded. Instead of the avatar taking it from her, the bag simply disappeared from her hand, leaving the skin on her fingers with a tingling feeling. She wobbled on her feet and almost staggered as the bag’s weight was suddenly removed from that side of her body, leaving her unbalanced. “You’ll find it in your cabin,” the avatar said.

  “Thank you.” Yime looked down. She was standing on nothing. It felt like a very hard nothing, but – just looking – there didn’t seem to be anything beneath her feet except stars arranged in familiar-looking wispy sprays and whorls. Stars to the sides, too. Above her, a vast dark presence; a ceiling of polished black reflecting the stars shining beneath her feet. Looking straight up, she saw a ghost-pale version of herself, looking straight back down.

  Beneath, she recognised the patterns of the stars as those visible from her home Orbital of Dinyol-hei. Though given that she had just left her apartment in the later afternoon, these were not the stars she’d have expected to see if they’d simply moved straight down from her apartment to the part of the Orbital beneath where she lived. The ship was obviously some distance further away. She felt pleased with herself to have worked this out so quickly.

  “Do you need time to freshen up, adjust, orientate yourself or otherwise—?” the drone began.

  “No,” Yime said. She stood as she had before, though with feet spread a little. “May we begin?”

  “Yes. Your full attention, please,” the Bodhisattva said.

  Your full attention. Yime felt mildly insulted. Still, this was Quietus. It was known for its air of formal austerity and a degree of implicit asceticism. If you didn’t like the discipline involved in most things Quietudinal you shouldn’t have signed up in the first place.

  There was a spiteful rumour, seemingly incapable of being entirely laid to rest, that the more recently manifested specialist divisions of the Culture’s Contact section were only there to provide substitute employment niches for those desperate but unable to make the cut and get into Special Circumstances itself.

  Contact was the part of the Culture that handled more or less every aspect of the Culture’s interactions with everything and everybody that wasn’t the Culture, from the investigation of unexplored star systems to relations with the entire panoply of other civilisations at every developmental level, from those still unable to scrape together the plan for a world government or a functioning space elevator to the elegantly otiose but nevertheless potentially deeply powerful Elders and the still more detached-from-reality Sublimed, where any vestige or trace of such exotic entities remained.

  Special Circumstances was, in effect, the Contact section’s espionage wing.

  There had always been specialist sub-divisions within the organisational behemoth that was Contact. Special Circumstances was only the most obvious and, uniquely, it had been formally separate almost since its inception; largely because it sometimes did the sort of things the people who were proud to be part of Contact would have been horrified to have been remotely associated with.

  As time had passed though, especially over the last half-thousand years or so, Contact itself had seen fit to introduce various re -organisations and rationalisations which had resulted in the creation of three other specialist divisions, of which the Quietudinal Service was one.

  The Quietudinal Service – Quietus, as it was usually called – dealt with the dead. The dead outnumbered the living in the greater galaxy by some distance, if you added up all those individuals existing in the various Afterlives the many different civilisations had created over the millennia. Happily – mercifully – the dead generally tended to keep themselves to themselves and caused relatively little trouble compared to those for whom the Real was still the place to exist within and try to exploit. However, the sheer scale of their numbers ensured that important issues involving the deceased still arose now and again; the dead Quietus dealt with might be technically departed, but they were, sometimes, far from quiet.

  A lot of the time such matters were effectively about legality, even about definitions; in a lot of societies the principal difference between a live virtual person – possibly just passing through, as it were, between bodies, back in the Real – and a dead virtual person was that the latter had no right to property or any other kind of ownership outside of their own simulated realm. Perhaps not unnaturally, there were those amongst the dead who found such a distinction unfair. This sort of thing could lead to trouble, but Quietus was skilled in dealing with the results.

  Relatively small in terms of ships and personnel, Quietus could nevertheless call on whole catalogued suites of dead but preserved experts and expert systems – not all of which were even pan-human in origin – to help them deal with such matters, bringing them back from their fun-filled retirement or out of suspended animation, where they had left instructions that they were ready to be revived if they could be of use when circumstances required.

  Slanged as “Probate” by some of those in SC, Quietus had links with Special Circumstances, but regarded itself as a more specialised service than its much older and larger sibling utility. Most of the humans within Quietus regarded any links with SC as deplorable in essence and only very occasionally necessary, if ever. Some just plain looked down on Special Circumstances. Theirs, they felt, was a higher, more refined calling and their demeanour, behaviour, appearance and even dress reflected this.

  Quietus ships added the letters OAQS – for On Active Quietudinal Service – to their names while they were so employed, and usually took on a monochrome outer guise, either pure shining white in appearance or glossily black. They even moved quietly, adjusting the configuration of their engine fields to produce the minimum amount of disturbance both on the sub-universal energy grid and the 3D skein of real space. Normal Culture ships either went for maximum efficiency or the always popular let’s-see-whatwe-can-squeeze-out-of-these-babies approach.

  Similarly, the human and other biological operatives of Quietus were expected to be sober, serious people while they were on duty, and to dress appropriately.

  It was to this division of Contact that Yime belonged.

  Your full attention, indeed. Oh well. Rather than reply, Yime just nodded.

  Suddenly she was surrounded waist deep in stars. The drone, the far-distant stars beneath her feet and their reflections had all disappeared. “This is the Ruprine Cluster, in Arm One-one Near-tip,” the ship’s voice said all around her.

  Arm One-one Near-tip was a little under three hundred light years distant from the region of space where the Orbital Dinyolhei lay circling around the sun Etchilbieth. In galactic terms, this was practically next door.

  “These stars,” the ship said as a few dozen of the suns shown turned from their natural colours to green, “represent the extent of a small civilisation called the Sichultian Enablement, a Level Four/Five society originating here.” One of the green stars blazed brightly, then r
educed in brilliance. “The Quyn system; home of the planet Sichult where the pan-human Sichultians evolved.” A pair of pan-humans were shown, standing just outside the ball of stars surrounding Yime. Curious physical proportions, Yime thought. Two sexes; each a little odd-looking to her eyes, just as she would have been to theirs, she supposed. Their skin colours changed as she looked at them, from dark to pale then back to dark, with yellow, red and olive tones exhibited en route. The two naked beings were replaced by one clothed one. He appeared tall, powerfully built and had long white hair.

  “This is a man called Joiler Veppers,” the ship told her. “He is the richest individual in the entire civilisation, and by some margin. He is also the most powerful individual in the entire civilisation – though unofficially, through his wealth and connections rather than due to formal political position.”

  The image of the stellar cluster with its artificially green stars and the tall, white-haired man both vanished to be replaced by the earlier image of the stars constituting the Sichultian Enablement, with the Quyn system’s sun still shown as the brightest.

  “Ms. Nsokyi,” the ship said, “are you aware of the current, long-running confliction over the future of the Afterlives known as Hells?”

  “Yes,” Yime said.

  Confliction was the technically correct term for a formal conflict within a virtual reality – i.e. one where the outcome mattered beyond the confines of the virtual battle environment itself – but mostly people just called this one the War in Heaven. It had been running now for nearly three decades and had yet to produce a result. She’d heard reports recently that it was finally coming close to a conclusion, but then there had been similar reports almost every hundred days since it had started so she had taken no more notice than anybody else. Most people had long since lost interest.

  “Good,” the ship said. “Mr. Veppers controls the largest part of the Enablement’s productive capacity and – through one of his interests in particular – has access to this.” A star near the outer limit of the Enablement’s volume blazed too, attracting attention. The view zoomed in vertiginously until it showed a single-ringed gas giant planet. Between its broad, dun-coloured polar regions, the planet displayed seven horizontal bands coloured various shades of yellow, red and brown.

  “This,” the ship said, as the entirety of the single equatorial ring surrounding the planet flashed green once, “is the artificial planetary nebula of the Tsungarial Disk, around the planet Razhir, in the Tsung system. The Disk comprises over three hundred million separate habitats and – mostly – manufacturies, usually called fabricaria. The Disk was abandoned two million years ago by the then Subliming Meyeurne and has been a Galactic Protectorate since shortly after their disappearance. The Protectorate status was agreed to be necessary due to a chaotic, dangerously uncontrolled war both over and enabled by the very considerable ship-and-weapon-system-manufacturing capacity left behind, at least irresponsibly, possibly mischievously and arguably maliciously by the Meyeurne. The civilisations involved were the Hreptazyle and the Yelve.”

  The ship didn’t bother to display any images of the Meyeurne, Hreptazyle or Yelve. Certainly Yime had never heard of any of them, which meant they were either long gone or just irrelevant.

  “Shortly following the Idiran War,” the Bodhisattva said, “the Culture became the latest in a long line of trusted Level Eights to be given Protectorate custody of the Disk. However, as part of what were in effect war reparations after the Chel debacle, six hundred years ago, we ceded overarching control of the Disk to the Nauptre Reliquaria and their junior partners the GFCF.”

  Yime most certainly had heard of the Nauptre Reliquaria and the GFCF. Like the Culture, the Reliquaria was a Level Eight civilisation; technologically the societies were equals. Originally a species of giant, furred, gliding marsupials, for the last couple of millennia they had expressed themselves almost exclusively as their machines: GSV-sized constructor ships, smaller though still substantial space vessels, lesser independent space-faring units and a multifarious variety of metre-scale individuals roughly equivalent to drones, though with no standard model; each design was unique or close to it. Their presence then extended down through the centimetre and millimetre scales to collectivised nanobots.

  The furry marsupials still existed, but they’d retreated to their home planets and habitats to lives of cheerfully selfish indolence, leaving their machines to represent them in the galactic community. Generally reckoned to be well on the slippery (if confusingly, by convention, upward) slope to Subliming, the Reliquaria’s relations with the Culture were formal – perhaps even frosty – rather than friendly, largely due to the Nauptrians’ robust attitude to punishment in their artificial Afterlife.

  Basically, they were very much for it.

  Unlike the Culture, which – despite being firmly of a mind with the anti-Hell side of the confliction – had thought it politic to take no active part in the virtual war, the Nauptrians had made themselves an enthusiastic part of the pro-Hell war effort.

  The Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy was a Level Seven civilisation. Pan-human, smaller and more delicate than the average but generally reckoned to be quite beautiful, with large heads and large eyes, they had a strange relationship with the Culture, professing to love it – they had even chosen their name partly in honour of the Culture – but often seeming to want to criticise it and even work against it, as though they so much wanted to be of help they needed the Culture reduced to a level of neediness that would make such aid something it would genuinely be grateful for.

  The mention of Chel was randomly appropriate, Yime thought. Before that particular stain on the Culture’s reputation people had seemed reticent to talk about the whole issue of Afterlives. After it, for a while at least, they’d appeared to talk of little else.

  “The components of the Tsungarial Disk have mostly been mothballed for all this time,” the ship continued, “left as a kind of monument or mausoleum. Over the last few decades, however, as the Sichultia have expanded their sphere of influence out to and around it, they have been granted limited, low-level control over the Disk and allowed, in the shape of Veppers’ Veprine Corporation, to use a handful of the orbital manufacturies to construct trading and exploratory ships, all of this supervised by the Nauptre Reliquaria and the GFCF.

  “Veppers and the Sichultia have long sought greater operational control over the Disk and its manufacturing capacity to aid their commercial, military and civilisational expansion. They are now on the verge of achieving their goal due to the changing attitudes, not to say connivance, of the GFCF and the Reliquaria. This is because the GFCF covets at least some of that capacity as well – their medium-term aim is to step up a civilisational level, and control of the reactivated Disk’s productive capacity would go some way to securing it – while the Nauptre Reliquaria are pro-Hell, in the short term wanting the pro/anti-Hell confliction ended – and with what they see as the right result – as well as, in the long term, and assuming they do not Sublime in the meantime, by their own admission planning to combine all Afterlives with their own and others Sublimed. That nobody else thinks this is even possible does not seem to trouble them and is anyway beside the point.”

  “Why does the Reliquaria being pro-Hell have anything to do with control of the Disk?” Yime asked.

  “Because the Disk’s productive or possibly computational capacity may come into play in an outbreak from the confliction into the Real.”

  “An outbreak?” Yime felt genuinely shocked. Conflictions – virtual wars – were there specifically to stop people warring in the Real.

  “The pro/anti-Hell confliction may be about to end,” the ship said, “in victory for the pro-Hell side.”

  That was a blow for the Culture, Yime thought. Even though it had seemingly stood aside from the war, there had never been any doubt which side it believed in.

  It was all just bad timing, in a way. At the point when the war began, the Culture had been i
n one of its cyclic eras of trying not to be seen to be throwing its weight around. Too many others of the In-Play Level Eights had objected to the Culture being involved with the War in Heaven for it to be able to do so without looking arrogant, even belligerent.

  The assumption had somehow always been that the pro-Hell forces were going to be fighting a losing battle anyway and their defeat was probably inevitable no matter who did or didn’t join in. Seemingly, the more the In-Play and the Elders thought about it, the more obvious it became that the whole idea of Afterlives dedicated to extended torture was indeed barbaric, unnecessary and outdated, and the course of the confliction over the continued existence of the Hells was expected to follow this slow but decisive shift in opinion. At the time, the prospect of the Culture getting involved seemed likely to most people to make the conflict less fair, its outcome effectively fixed before it even began.

  For a virtual war to work, people had to accept the outcome; the losing side in particular had to abide by the result rather than cry foul, revoke the solemn pledges they had made in the War Conduct Agreement drawn up before the conflict began, and continue as things had been before. The consensus had been that the Culture taking part would give the pro-Hell side the excuse to do just that, if and when they lost.

  “The anti-Hell side,” the ship continued, “was the first to attempt to hack the other’s conflict-direction processing substrates. The opposing side retaliated. The anti-Hell side has additionally attempted direct hacking attacks on some of the Hells themselves, seeking either to release the inmates or to destroy the virtual environments completely.

  “The various hacking attacks by both sides have almost all failed, those that succeeded did little damage and the vast majority of those by both sides were detected by those targeted, leading to multiple judging and arbitration disputes, all of which are currently being kept sub judice; successfully so far though probably not for much longer. Extensive legal and diplomatic disputes are anticipated and almost certainly being prepared for.