Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  “Has to look and sound good for the minions; you know.”

  The other demon pulled on some sort of headset. “Portal we agreed, first choice,” it said. “Flight time as simmed.”

  “Sounds good to me,” the first demon said. “Last one through’s unfavoured.” The demon wearing the headset pulled at the controls. The beetle lurched upward, reared back as it rose, then tipped forward. It settled level but still felt as though it was pointing upwards as it accelerated away across the riven, smoke-streamered landscape beneath, rising almost to the greasy-looking brown overcast.

  The first demon looked over its shoulder at her again. “Could only get one of you out, yes?”

  She blinked at it. No pain. No pain. To be flying, trapped in this thing, but to be feeling no pain. It made her want to cry. The demon looking at her made a shape with its great, tooth-filled mouth that was probably meant to be a smile. “It’s all right to talk,” it told her. “You are allowed to reply. The cruelty has already stopped, the madness ceased to be. We’re going to get you out of here. We’re your rescuers.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she said. Her voice sounded strange to her, without teeth. Her tongue had been bitten and although not causing her any pain it was swollen, and that was making her voice different too. She didn’t know if she had bitten her own tongue or if one of the demons in the mill had.

  The senior demon shrugged. “Suit yourself.” It turned away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What?” It turned back to look at her again.

  “I’m sorry I don’t believe you.” She shook her head slowly. “But I don’t. Can’t. Sorry.”

  The demon looked at her for a moment. “They really have chewed you up bad, haven’t they?”

  She didn’t say anything for a while. The demon continued to look at her. “Who are you?” she asked eventually.

  “I’m called Klomestrum,” it told her. It nodded at the demon flying the beetle. “Ruriel.”

  The other demon waved one forelimb but did not look round.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “Place we can all get the fuck out of here. Another portal.”

  “A portal to where?”

  “The Real. You know; the place where there isn’t all this pain and suffering and torture and shit?”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “And where will we be then? Where in this ‘Real’?”

  “Does it really matter? Not here, that’s the point.”

  The two demons glanced at each other and laughed.

  “Yes,” she insisted, “but where?”

  “Wait and see. We’re not there yet. Best not to give anything away, eh?”

  She blinked at him.

  He sighed. “Look, if I tell you where we’re going to come out and they’ve somehow managed to listen in on this then they might be able to stop us, see?”

  The first demon half-turned his head to her. “Where did you think you were going back to just there, back at the mill?” he asked her.

  She shook her head. “Another part of here,” she said. “There is no ‘Real’. It’s just a myth to make things seem even worse here.”

  “You really think that?” the demon said, looking aghast at her.

  “It’s all that makes sense,” she said. “It’s all there is. This is all there is. How could there be a Real where people would allow something so terrible as this to exist? This place must be all that there is. What people call the Real is a myth, an unreachable heaven only there to make existence all the worse by comparison.”

  “There could still be a Real,” the demon protested, “but one where the people—”

  “Leave it,” the other demon said.

  Somehow, without her noticing it happening, the demon piloting the giant beetle had turned into one of the smaller demons, a dark little squirmy thing with a long glistening body. It looked like something that had just been born, or excreted.

  “Fuck,” the other demon said. It had turned into something much smaller too; a sort of featherless bird with pale, raw, tattered skin and a beak whose top part had been broken half off. “You really think your friend just went to another part of Hell?”

  “Where else is there to go?” she asked.

  “Fuck,” the demon said again. It seemed to stiffen. So did the other demon.

  “Oh, fuck, we’re not even getting to—”

  There was no transition. One instant she was numb and without pain in the pod inside the giant flying beetle, the next she was pinned, flayed, in agony, her flesh opened out and spread out all around her, on a slope in front of some sort of ultimate Demon. She was shrieking.

  “Shush,” something said, and the force of it tumbled across her like a gigantic wave, pressing her into the noisome earth beneath her where things crawled and squirmed and invaded her flesh. Now she could not scream. Her throat had been sealed, her mouth had been sewn shut. She breathed through a ragged hole in what was left of her neck, chest muscles working to expand and compress her lungs but leaving her unable to make any sound. She writhed, moved side to side, tried to jerk herself loose from whatever held her. The motions produced only more pain but she persisted.

  A noise like a sigh rolled across her, scarcely less batteringly heavy than the sound of “Shush” a moment earlier.

  The pain ebbed, retreated, left her quivering. It did not go away entirely but it left her room to think, to feel other things besides the agony.

  She could see properly now. The pain before had been so bad she had not been able to understand what she was looking at.

  Before her, across a dark valley full of smoke and half-hidden red and orange flames, on a dully glowing throne the size of a great building, sat a demon at least a hundred metres tall.

  The demon had four limbs but looked alien, bipedal; its upper limbs were arms rather than legs. Its skin was made from living pelts and hides and flesh, its body from an obscene amalgam of sweating metal, stretched gristle, pitted ceramic gears, reconstituted, pulverised bone and inflamed, smouldering sinew, tattered flesh and leaking, boiling blood. The vast throne glowed dully because it was red hot, producing a greasy slow upwelling of smoke from the fleshes and pelts that cloaked the demon, filling the air with a continual sizzling, spitting noise.

  The thing had a lantern head, like an enormous version of a four-paned, inward-sloping gas light from ancient history. There was a sort of face shown within the lantern itself, an alien face made of a dirty, smoking flame; it peered out through glass made dark and filthy by the soot and livid fumes within. At each of the four external corners of the lantern, a giant candle of tallow stood, each containing a hundred shrieking nervous systems intact and in burning agony within. She looked at it, knew it, knew all this, and could see herself through its eyes, or whatever infernal senses or organs it used to see.

  She was a skinned skeleton-plus-musculature figure, a tiny distant doll of a thing, her flesh pulled away from her and pegged, pinned to the ground around her.

  “I hoped to make you hope,” the vast voice said, the syllables rolling over her like thunder. Her ears hurt with the force of it and kept on ringing afterwards. “But you are beyond hope. That is vexing.”

  Suddenly she could talk again, the stitches that had sealed her mouth gone in a blink, the ragged tear in her neck sealed, her throat no longer crushed closed, her breath coming and going normally.

  “Hope?” she gasped. “There is no hope!”

  “There is always hope,” the vast voice declaimed. She could feel the force of it in her lungs, feel its words shaking the very ground beneath her. “And there must be hope. To abandon hope is to escape part of the punishment. One must hope in order for hope to be destroyed. One must trust in order to feel the anguish of betrayal. One must yearn, or one cannot feel the pain of rejection, and one must love in order to feel the agony of witnessing the loved one suffer excruciation.” The vast being sat back, producing wreathes o
f smoke like the currents of dark continental rivers, candles spearing flame like huge trees burning.

  “But above all one must hope,” the voice said, each word, each syllable smacking into her body, resounding inside her head. “There must be hope or otherwise how can it be satisfyingly dashed? The certainty of hopelessness might become a comfort; the uncertainty, the not-knowing, that is what helps to bring on true despair. The tormented cannot be allowed to abandon themselves to their fate. That is insufficient.”

  “I am abandoned, I am nothing but abandoned; abandonment is all there is,” she screamed back. “Make your myths but I’ll not believe in them.”

  The demon rose up, fire and fumes and smoke beating and wallowing in his wake. The ground beneath her shook to his foot-steps, jarring the few teeth left in her head. He stood over her, towering above like an insane statue of something unbalanced, unnatural, two-legged. He stooped, causing a great roaring as the flames around him tore brightening through the air. A finger longer than her whole body scooped something from the ground near her head. Dripping wax from one tower-sized fleshy candle splashed spattering onto her torn-open skin, stinking of rotten, burned flesh, causing her to howl with fresh pain until it cooled, part solidified.

  “You did not even notice this, did you?” the great voice bellowed, rolling over her. He held the tiny-looking necklace of barbed wire which she had worn for as long as she could remember. He rubbed it between his body-thick fingers, and for an instant took on the magnified but gritty, pixelated appearance of one of the great powerful demons Prin had impersonated and the two in the flying beetle machine had at first seemed to be. The image flickered off. He threw the lengths of wire away. “Disappointing.” The word cracked and rolled over her, seemed to press her into the earth with its vast, despondent force.

  He held his cock and sprayed her with fluid salts at the same time as the pain came flooding back. The gushing waters pummelled her and their fire-bright stinging made her shriek once more.

  The pain was turned right down again, just long enough for her to hear him say, “You should have had religion, child, that in it you might have found the hope that could then be crushed.”

  He raised one massive iron foot the size of a truck high above her then brought it down fast and hard from twenty metres up, killing her.

  Sixteen

  “What is that?”

  “That is a present,” the ship told her. She looked at the thing lying in Demeisen’s palm. Then she looked up at his eyes.

  The avatar’s face had filled out a little more over the last few days. His body had altered a fraction too, making him look more like a Sichultian. This was a process that was intended to continue until he looked as native as she did when they arrived in Enablement space fifteen days from now. His eyes looked crinklier, she thought; friendlier. She knew that technically he was an it, not a he, but she still thought of him as male. All she had to remember, of course – she told herself – was that whether a he, a she, an it or anything else, Demeisen was the ship. The avatar was not anything truly independent or genuinely human.

  She frowned. “It looks a bit like a—”

  “Neural lace,” Demeisen said, nodding. “Only it isn’t.”

  “What, then?”

  “It’s a tattoo.”

  “A tattoo?

  He shrugged. “Kind of.”

  They were in the twelve-person module the ship had brought aboard from the GSV especially for her. It was housed within one of the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints’ many cramped spaces that were something between magazines, munition-stores and hangars. The ship had no other dedicated human habitable space inside it at all; even this module was a concession. It had not impressed her when she’d first seen it and been told this was all there was.

  “This is it?” she’d said after she’d joined Demeisen on board and realised that, somehow, the little slap-drone had been left behind. She’d said a sincere thank you for that but then there had been a moment of awkwardness after the avatar had welcomed her aboard and she’d stood there waiting to be shown to her cabin from the rather minimal and utilitarian cabin space she’d materialised in.

  “This is it?” she’d repeated, turning, looking round. She was standing in a space about four metres by three. In one direction lay a blank grey wall; opposite it there was a raised platform a little narrower than – and one step up from – the space she stood in; the platform held three long, deep padded chairs facing a double sloped wall, the upper part of which appeared to be a screen, though it was also blank at the moment. To either side there were what might be double doors, though they too were a uniform grey.

  Demeisen had looked genuinely hurt. “I had to leave behind an Offensive Slaved Broad-Spectrum Munitions Platform, Self Powered to fit this in,” he’d told her.

  “You don’t have any space inside your … inside the ship at all?”

  “I’m a warship, not a taxi. I keep telling you.”

  “I thought even warships could carry a few people!”

  “Pa! Old tech. Not me.”

  “You’re one and a half kilometres long! There must be room somewhere!”

  “Please; one point six kilometres long, and that’s naked hull in full compression. In standard operational deployment mode I’m two point eight klicks; three point two with all fields on but pulled corset tight. In serious gloves-off, claws out, teeth bared, just-point-me-at-the-bad-guys engagement-ready mode I’m … well it varies; it’s what we call threat-mix dependent. But many kilo metres. Riled-up I’m really more like a sort of mini fleet.”

  Lededje, who had stopped listening at the first use of the word “point”, had wailed, “I can touch the ceiling!” She’d reached up to do just that, without even standing on tiptoe.

  Demeisen had sighed in exasperation. “I’m an Abominator-class picket ship. This is the best I can do. Sorry. Would you rather I slung you back aboard The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory?”

  “Picket? But it was a picket ship and it had lots of space!”

  “Ah. No it wasn’t. That’s the clever bit.”

  “What?”

  “People have spent the best part of one and a half millennia getting used to the idea of the Culture having all these ex-warships, most of them largely demilitarised, called Fast Pickets or Very Fast Pickets, and they are basically just express taxis, then along comes this new class called the Abominator, they call it a picket ship and nobody takes any notice. Even when Abominators almost never taxi anybody anywhere.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “‘Picket’ in my case means I hang around waiting for trouble, not that I hang around waiting for hitch-hikers. There are two thousand Abominator-class ships, we’re scattered evenly throughout the galaxy and all we do is sit and wait for stuff to happen. I’m part of the Culture’s quick reaction force; we used to keep all the serious up-fucking ships in a few mostly very-far-away ports but that didn’t always work out when things blew up suddenly. Remember I said ‘Don’t ask why’ earlier?”

  “Yes. You said not to ask you why you were heading in the direction of Sichult anyway.”

  “Well, Lededje – and appreciate that, to continue the dubious maritime analogy, I’m negotiating a tricky course between the minefield of personal honesty on one side and the rocky coast of operational security on the other – that’s as good a hint as I can afford to give you. Now, I’m serious; do you want to be put back aboard the The Usual But bla bla bla?”

  She’d scowled at him. “I suppose not.” She’d looked around. “This thing does have a toilet?”

  Nine seats blossomed from the floor and rear wall, then they collapsed back as though made from a membrane that had suddenly been punctured and collapsed, to be followed by a very generously sized bed, then by a sort of white glazed balloon which parted neatly to reveal what was probably a combined bath and walk-in shower. Then that too was swallowed back up into the floor and wall. “That do?” Demeisen
had asked.

  The fifteen days since had been spent in the same tiny space, though the entirety of the cabin’s interior surfaces could function as a single astoundingly convincing screen, so it could look like she was standing on a snowy mountain top, the middle of a table flat desert, a wave-washed beach or anywhere else she or the module could think of.

  She had been thinking ahead and had decided what she might require when she got to Sichult. She was intending to get to Veppers through his lust; she reckoned the degree of physical beauty she had been granted, thanks to Sensia and her human-growing vats, would be sufficiently beguiling to entice Veppers, if she got close enough to be seen by him in the right social situation. A second way to get to him might be through her own knowledge of how his household, the town house in Ubruater and the mansion at Espersium all worked.

  She’d had the ship make her clothes and jewellery and various other personal possessions, ready for when she arrived at Sichult. She’d tried to get it to make her some weapons, but it wouldn’t play. It had even hesitated over one of her necklaces, given that it was long enough to be used to strangle somebody. It had conceded on that one. It had had no detectable qualms whatsoever about providing her with a diamond-film currency card allegedly loaded with enough credit to ensure that if she changed her mind about murdering Veppers she could buy her own Ubruater town house, her own country estate and just live like a princess for the rest of her life. Maybe that was the idea.

  She exercised, she studied – mostly she studied all that the Culture knew of Veppers, Sichult and the Enablement, which was a lot more than even Veppers himself knew, she’d be prepared to bet – and she talked to the always-available Demeisen, who would materialise whenever she wanted to talk. Not that it was really materialising, literally, apparently, though she felt her eyes start to glaze over once the technical explanation kicked in.

  She’d undergone a guided virtual tour of the ship, albeit reluctantly. She’d only agreed because Demeisen had seemed so boyishly enthusiastic about it. The tour had taken a while, though probably not as long as it had felt at the time. All she remembered was that the ship could split into different bits, like a sort of one ship fleet or something, though it was most powerful as a single unit. Sixteen bits. Or maybe it was twenty-four. She’d made the appropriate Ooh, Ah, No, really? noises at the time, which was what actually mattered. She had lots of experience at that sort of thing.