Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  The girl shrugged. “If you say so.” She smiled at him. Quite a pleasant, winning smile, he thought. He wondered again why she’d chosen – and been allowed – to stay behind with him. She was of an age, of course; technically independent, an adult, but all the same. It amused him when his friends, acquaintances and business partners tried to pair him off with their daughters – or even wives. Perhaps that was the idea here. He doubted anyone still thought they could marry their females off to him, but even just a liaison, an affair, might be useful to somebody with ambitions.

  Veppers looked round at Jasken, standing braced behind him, Oculenses on, holding on to a handle set into the bulkhead behind, his other arm still in its cast and supported by the sling. “Jasken, why don’t you come and show us how it’s done while I talk to Miss Crederre here.”

  “Sir.”

  “Lehktevi,” Veppers said, “why don’t you go and see how our pilot’s doing?”

  “Certainly, sir.” Lehktevi swung out of her seat, long legs flashing beneath a short skirt, massed dark hair tumbling as she pivoted to disappear though the doorway leading to the aircraft’s main cabin.

  Jasken sat in her seat. He pushed the Oculenses up his head, switched on the laser rifle in front of him and cradled it, one-armed. He got a shot off almost immediately, nailing a young blackbird in a detonation of indigo feathers. It fell back to the coppery foliage rushing past beneath.

  “Aren’t you worried your mistress will distract the pilot?” Crederre asked Veppers. “This thing does fly awfully low, and she is, well, distracting.”

  “Wouldn’t matter if she did,” Veppers said, nudging a button to bring his seat and Crederre’s closer together. Motors whined; the girl’s brows rose a little as she watched the gap between their seats shrink to nothing, padded armrests touching. “It’s all done automatically,” he explained. “Pilot’s redundant, almost irrelevant. Most critical operation they perform is punching in the destination coordinates. There are five separate terrain-following systems making sure we stay just above the scenery, without becoming part of it.”

  “Five? My,” she said quietly, sounding conspiratorial and dipping her head towards him, her long straight blonde hair nearly touching the soft material of his shirt. Was she trying to flirt with him, or being sarcastic? He found it hard to tell the difference with young women sometimes, despite all his experience. “Why so many?” she asked.

  “Why not?” he countered. “Always best to have lots of redundancy with something so critical. Doesn’t really cost, either; I own the company that makes them – makes the whole aircraft,” he said, glancing about them. Jasken blasted another blackbird, then another. “Actually, the pilots are there more for legal reasons than anything else.” He shrugged. “I blame the unions. Bane of my life. Though,” he said, tapping the girl on her bare forearm – she wore a knee-length, short-sleeved, soft-looking dress which appeared plain but expensive at the same time – “I should point out that Lehktevi isn’t a mistress.”

  “More of a whore?”

  Veppers smiled tolerantly. “She’s staff; a servant. It’s just that her duties are principally sexual in nature.” He looked thought-fully at the door she’d gone through. “Dare say there’s a union for her profession too.” He looked back at Crederre, who appeared not to be following all this. “I don’t really hold with unions, not amongst the staff,” he explained. “Divided loyalties. Does mean I have to pay more for her services though.”

  “How terrible for you,” she said.

  He heard her stepmother, Jeussere, in the remark. She’d been one of his lovers, once. Too long ago for Crederre to be his, though.

  “I know, isn’t it?” he said. He’d decided: it might be quite amusing to bed the girl. A sort of continuance. Jeussere might even have been intending it. She’d been a young woman of slightly odd and exotic sexual tastes in her time – who knew? “I have this frighteningly tiresome hearing this afternoon,” he said as Jasken fired again, downing something large and copper-coloured, “but I’m free this evening. Let me buy you dinner. Is there anywhere you’ve always wanted to go?”

  “That’s very kind. I’ll let you choose. Just you and me?”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling at her again. “Private room, I’d suggest. I’ll get my fill of crowds at the hearing this afternoon.”

  “A court hearing?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Why, have you done something terrible?”

  “Oh, I’ve done many terrible things,” he confided, leaning over close to her. “Though probably not what I’m being accused of today. Well, possibly not. It’s hard to say.”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He grinned. “Honestly, I don’t.” He tapped his temple. “I am the most frightfully old man really, you know.”

  “One hundred and seventy-eight, is that true?”

  “One hundred and seventy-eight-ish,” he agreed. He held out his arms, looked down at his fit, taut, muscular frame. “And yet I look, well; you tell me. What would you say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, looking down modestly. “Thirty?”

  So she was trying to flatter him. “Between that and forty, is the look I go for.” He smiled broadly. “Though I have the appetites of a man of twenty.” He shrugged as she looked down again, a smile on her lips. “So I’m told. As I say, it’s been so long since I was twenty I honestly can’t recall.” He sighed deeply. “Just as I can’t recall any of the details of the appallingly ancient case they’re going to bore me with this afternoon. I mean really can’t. I’m not lying when they ask me what I remember and I say I can’t remember anything. I’m just not able to; those memories all had to be excised decades ago to leave me room for new memories.”

  “Really?”

  “Had to be done; the medics insisted. Not my fault those memories are the ones the court would like to know about. I’d love to cooperate even more fully, tell them all they want to know, but I just can’t.”

  “That does seem terribly convenient,” she said.

  He nodded. “That is a word I have heard used in this context. Convenient.” He shook his head. “People can be so cynical.”

  “I know. Shocking, isn’t it?” Crederre said, and again Veppers heard her stepmother’s phraseology.

  “Shocking indeed. So, you’ll come for dinner?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure what my parents would say.”

  He smiled tolerantly. “It’s dinner, dear girl, not a sex club.”

  “Do you frequent those too?”

  “Never. You’ve seen my Harem, haven’t you?”

  “I have. You are so shameless, you know.”

  “Thank you. I do my best.”

  “I’m surprised you have any energy left even to think about other women, normal women.”

  “Ah, but there’s the challenge, you see,” he told her. “For simple sex, just fulfilling a need, the Harem girls are perfect, quite wonderful. Uncomplicated. But to make a chap feel … treasured, wanted for his own sake, he has to feel that he can still make somebody want to have sex with him … just because she wants to, not because it’s her job.”

  “Hmm. Yes.”

  “So, how about you?”

  “How about me what?”

  “Do you frequent sex clubs?”

  “Never either. Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  She shrugged. “Well, you never know, do you?”

  “No,” he agreed, sitting back, smiling thoughtfully. “You never do.”

  Jasken brought down a spevaline a little smaller than the one Veppers had killed earlier, but closer still to the rushing aircraft. Then the trees stopped abruptly and the view dropped away to a broad river, waters sparkling, wavy gravel banks unwinding beneath. Jasken clicked the laser rifle off and swung it to its stowed position. “Estate border, sir,” he said. He brought the Oculenses back down over his eyes. Veppers motioned towards the balcony door. “Excuse me,” Jasken said.
>
  The aircraft started to gain height and speed, heading for more conventional air corridors now that it had left the Espersium estate and was in the shared airspace leading to the vast conurbation of Greater Ubruater.

  Crederre watched Jasken close the door behind him. She turned back to Veppers. “You don’t have to buy me dinner first if you just want to fuck me.”

  He shook his head. “Good heavens, you youngsters are so forward.”

  She looked down at the seat Veppers was in, judging. She wriggled her skirt up. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. “But we’re only ten minutes from landing,” he said, watching her.

  She pushed both laser rifles out of the way then hoisted herself out of her seat and brought one long leg curving over so that she straddled him. “Better get to it, then.”

  He frowned as he watched her pulling at the laces securing his trousers’ crotch. “It wasn’t your mother put you up to this, was it?” he asked.

  “Nope,” she said.

  He laughed, put his hands under her skirt to her naked hips. “You young girls, I do declare!”

  Fifteen

  Here was a gulf of space, an infinite valley, stuffed full to choking with scenes of torment spread out to the furthest reach of sight, filled with the low moans and the chorused anguished of the torn and tormented and infested with a miasmic stench of shit and burned, corrupted flesh. Here was a pressure on the eyes of fractal detail – torment within torment within torment within torment, endlessly – just waiting, stacked, lined up, marking time until it could be dwelt upon, comprehended, made part of the self; guarantors of perpetual nightmare.

  Here was a seemingly infinite realm of torture presided over by slavering, wild-eyed devils, a never-ending world of unbearable pain, humiliation beyond imagining and utter, unending hatred.

  … She had decided there was a perverse beauty about it, an almost celebratory fecundity about the depths of creativity which must have been plumbed to produce such imaginative cruelty. The very bestiality, the absolute depravity of it raised it to the level of great art; there was a transcendent quality to its horror, its complete commitment to agony and degradation.

  And there was even a humour to it, too, she’d decided. It was the humour of children, of adolescence – determined to appal the adults or to take something to such an extreme you shocked even your peers – it was the humour of wringing every last conceivable shred of double-meaning or fanciful connection out of every even remotely misconstruable subject, every mention of anything that could be seen as having anything whatsoever to do with sexuality, bodily waste or any other function of simple, matter-of-fact creaturality or biochemicalness, but it was still humour, of a sort.

  When Prin went through and she did not, when the blue glowing doorway she had been only very peripherally aware of rejected her and bounced her back into the groaning confines of the mill, she had lain on the sweated boards of the ramp, watching the blue glowing mist evaporate and the surface of the doorway turn to what looked like grey metal. She could hear the predator-demons howling and cursing and arguing. They were further up, on the level where Prin – in the form of an even larger demon – had brushed them aside moments earlier, before launching himself – and her – at the glowing doorway. She got the impression that they hadn’t yet noticed her lying there.

  She lay still. They would find her, and probably very soon, she knew that, but for these precious few moments she was alone, undisturbed, yet to come to the attention of these most dedicated persecutors.

  Prin was gone.

  He had tried to take them both through to whatever was on the other side of the blue glowing doorway, but only he had got through. She had been left behind. Or he had left her behind. She wondered whether to feel sorry for him or not. Probably not. If he was right and there really was some other, pre-existing, non-tormenting life to be found beyond the doorway, then she hoped that he had found it. If he had gone into oblivion, then that was something to celebrate too, for oblivion, if it existed as a real, achievable possibility, meant an end to suffering.

  As likely, though, she thought, was that he had simply gone to another part of here, another and possibly worse, more terrible quarter of reality, of what he had chosen to call Hell. Perhaps she had been the lucky one, getting to stay behind. There would be more torment, more pain and abasement in store for her, she knew that, but perhaps what now awaited Prin was even worse. She didn’t like to think about what would happen to her, now, but thinking about what might be happening or about to happen to Prin was even worse. She did not let herself shy away from it; she made herself think about it. If you thought about it, if you embraced it, then the revelation you might in time be faced with – of what had happened to him, what had been done to him – would lose some of its power and its ability to shock.

  She wondered if she would ever see him again. She wondered if she would want to, given what they might do to him. He had disobeyed the rules of this place, the rules they lived by; he had gone against the very law of Hell, and his punishment would be extreme.

  So might hers, of course.

  She heard one of the demons say something. She didn’t understand exactly what had been said but it had sounded like an exclamation, like an expression of surprise. She knew then that she had been seen. She heard and felt crashing, iron-shod paws clattering down the ramp towards her. They stamped up to right beside her head.

  She was hauled upright by both her trunks. She tried to keep her hand-pads over her face but she was shaken, and her body’s own weight tore their grip free. She caught a glimpse of a demon’s wide, furred face, its two great eyes staring at her, then she shut her eyes tightly.

  The demon shouted in her face. “Didn’t get through? That’s bad!” His breath smelled of rotting meat. He marched up the slope, dragging her behind him. He was roaring to the others. Look what he’d found!

  They took turns raping her while they discussed what to do to really make her suffer. In Hell, the seed of demons burned like acid and generally brought with it parasites, worms, gangrene and tumours, as well as the possibility of the conception of something that would eat its way out when the time came to be born. That conception could equally well take place in a male; a womb was not required and the demons were not fussy.

  She found the pain astounding, the humiliation and degradation absolute.

  She started to sing to them. She sang without words, just making sounds in a language that she herself didn’t understand and had not known she possessed. The half-dozen demons reacted with fury, taking an iron bar to her mouth, smashing her teeth. She kept on singing, even through the froth of blood and broken teeth inside her mouth, the sounds bubbling up and out, sounding more and more like wheezing, unstoppable laughter. One of them tied something round her neck so that she started to suffocate. She felt the life going from her, and wondered what new torments would await her when she was brought back to life again, to continue suffering.

  The mad, ghastly thrusting that was tearing her apart suddenly stopped. The thing round her neck was torn away and she gulped air, then spat and retched as the blood coughed itself up, then was able to roll over onto her side and take a sequence of further deep, painful gasps, letting the blood and the bits of her teeth fall from her mouth onto the stained, uneven surface of the floor. There was more snarling and shouting and some thumping, like bodies being thrown about or being forced to the floor. She could see the boards better than before because the door to the outside was open and a giant beetle was visible.

  She looked up and, standing over her, saw a demon like the one Prin had become: massive and powerful, six limbed, fur striped yellow and purple, accoutred with jagged armour. Another one, striped yellow and black, not quite so fantastically armoured, stood behind, its powerful forelimbs holding a struggling minor demon, one of those who’d been raping her. The other minor demons had been scattered around the floor of the mill and lay moaning and slowly picking themselves up.

  The giant
predator demon lowered its face to hers as she wheezed and spat the last of the blood from her mouth. Between her legs, it felt as though she had been split apart. Inside, it was as though they had filled her with boiling water.

  “Unclever, little one,” the giant demon told her. “Now we go to a place where soon you will beg to come back here and let these scamps resume their play with you.” It straightened. “You bring her,” it said to the yellow and black demon, which threw the minor demon it held across the floor and into the rotating machinery of the mill. It howled as it was crushed; the machinery creaked to a stop. The demon lay like a limp rag leaking blood within the cogs and gears of bone.

  The yellow and black demon picked her up as easily as Prin had done and took her to the giant beetle waiting outside.

  Inside the flier, she was thrown into a giant open pod with a glistening red interior and brown-black lips like some enormous animal; the lips closed around her neck as her body was sucked further into the centre of the closing pod. She felt dozens of barbs connect with her skin, then penetrate her flesh. She waited for the next symphony of pain to consume her.

  Instead; everything went numb. A feeling of something like relief flooded her. Even her mouth stopped hurting. No pain. For the first time in months she was free of pain.

  She was facing forward, just behind the craft’s control deck, where the giant beetle’s hollow eyes looked out over the valley. She heard the ramp behind thud closed. The two giant demons squeezed themselves into seats, one looking out through each of the beetle’s segmented eyes.

  “Sorry about all that,” the yellow and purple one said to her, glancing over its shoulder as the other demon worked the craft’s controls and the whirring sound of giant beating wings filled the beetle’s interior. The demon’s voice was quieter now, conversational, though it still carried above the sounds of the wings.