Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  Usually, as she was lowered carefully towards the desert floor, she reflected on how much she had changed. Her old self – the person she had been back in the Real, before the brief but traumatising excursion in the Hell – would have wanted to break with that tradition, would have wanted to change things, would have wanted to insist that there was nothing beyond idiotic, absurdly unquestioned tradition stopping males from being brought up into the Refuge itself.

  The person she had become, the person she was now, could see the force in all such arguments and yet still thought it was right to continue with the tradition. Perhaps it was wrong in some theoretical way, but perhaps not, and if it was, well, it did no great harm. Maybe it was even charming, just eccentric. Anyway, she would not like to have to be the Superior on whose shift the tradition was changed.

  She had always wondered how faithful to a real, changing society and world this simulation was. Did the cities that the noviciates, travellers and charity representatives spoke of and claimed to have come from really exist? Did people within those cities work and struggle and study and improvise as they would in the Real? If you left this sim running, would somebody somewhere invent moveable type and printing, and so make what they did here in the Refuge irrelevant and all its occupants redundant?

  She kept waiting for one of the charity representatives to turn up for their latest meeting with a regretful look and a copy of something hot off this brand new thing called a press.

  However, as she approached what must be the end of her life in this virtuality, the freshly illuminated manuscripts kept on being taken away and the supplies of writing materials and of food and other necessities kept on being delivered. She realised that she would die – as far as that idea had any meaning here – in the same society she had been born into. Then she would have to remind herself that she had not been born here, she had simply woken up, already an adult.

  One year, a noviciate was brought before her for denying the existence of God. She found herself saying pretty much what had been said to her by the old Superior. Showing the girl the deep buried cell and the whips and flails gave Chay no pleasure, though the dank, lamp-lit dungeon didn’t smell as bad as it had when she’d been shown it, she thought. She’d never had cause to use it; that was probably why. Or maybe her sense of smell was going with everything else. Thankfully, the noviciate relented – albeit with ill-disguised contempt – and no further action needed to be taken. She wondered if she could have ordered the punishment carried out if things hadn’t gone so agreeably.

  Her eyesight gradually grew too poor for her to continue to write her life story in her part-charred book. The letters had become larger and larger as her sight had failed. One day, she thought, she would be writing only a single letter per page. Just as well in way, as she had only filled two-thirds of the blank and would die soon with lots of pages unfilled. But writing the bigger and bigger letters made the whole undertaking start to appear ridiculous and self-important, and eventually she gave in and stopped writing altogether. She had long since caught up with herself anyway and was effectively just keeping a rather boring diary.

  So she bored the noviciates with her stories instead. She was the Superior, so they had to listen. Or maybe young people these days were just very polite. Her voice had almost gone but still she would be carried to the chapel each day to listen, enraptured, eyes closed, to the beautiful, transcendent singing.

  Eventually she lay on her death bed and an angel came for her.

  Nineteen

  The Jhlupian heavy cruiser Ucalegon – forty times as fast as any ship possessed by the Sichultian Enablement – delivered Veppers to Iobe Cavern City on Vebezua in less than two days. Vebezua was the furthest flung of the Enablement’s planets, lying in a small spiral of stars called the Chunzunzan Whirl, a sparse twist of old stars that also held the Tsung system.

  “Of course I’m serious. Why can’t I just buy one?”

  “They are not for sale.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is not policy.”

  “So change the policy.”

  “The policy is not to be changed.”

  “Why is the policy not to be changed?”

  “Because changing policies is not policy.”

  “Now you’re just going round in circles.”

  “I am merely following you.”

  “No you’re not. I am being direct. You are being evasive.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  “… Is that it? ‘Nevertheless’ and we just leave things there?”

  “Yes.”

  Veppers, Jasken, Xingre, half a dozen others of Veppers’ retinue plus the Jhlupian’s principal aide and a medium-ranking officer from the Ucalegon were sharing a tethered flier making its way through one of the great karst caves that made up Iobe Cavern City. The cave averaged a kilometre or so across; a huge pipe whose floor held a small, winding river. The city’s buildings, terraces, promenades and boulevards rose up from the riverside, increasingly precipitously as they approached the mid-way point of the cave, where the buildings became sheer cliffs; a few went even beyond that, clinging to the overhanging curve of the cavern’s upper wall. The flier tether-rails were stationed further up still, cantilevered out from the cave’s roof on gantries like a sequence of giant cranes. A series of enormous oval holes punctured the roof’s summit, letting in great slanting slabs of withering Vebezuan sunlight.

  Lying close to its slowly ever-brightening star, the planet was cursed with too much sunlight but blessed with entire continents made mostly of deeply eroded limestone, providing vast cave systems in which its inhabitants – native animals and Sichultian incomers – could hide. You had to travel to the very high and very low latitudes to find pleasantly balmy climates. The poles were havens of temperate freshness. Very occasionally the hills there even got snow.

  “Xingre,” Veppers said with a sorrowful shake of his head, “you are my trusted business associate and even a friend in your own strange alien way, but I may have to go over your head here. Or carapace.”

  “Carapace. Though in our language the expression is I may have to go beyond your reach.”

  “So who would I have to ask?”

  “About what?”

  “About buying a ship.”

  “No one. There is no one to ask because such things are not covered.”

  “Not covered? Is that the same as being not policy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lieutenant,” Veppers said, turning to the ship’s officer, who also floated, twelve limbs neatly folded on one of the shiny cushions that doubled as chairs and translators, “is this really true?”

  “Is what true, sir?”

  “That it’s not possible to buy one of your ships.”

  “It is not possible to buy navy ships of our navy.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is not policy.”

  Veppers sighed. “Yes, so I’ve been told,” he said, looking at Xingre.

  “Navies rarely sell their vessels, not if they are of the best,” Xingre said.

  “You’re already hiring it to me,” Veppers said.

  “Not the same,” the officer told him. “We remain in control. Sold to you, you assume control.”

  “It’d only be one ship,” Veppers insisted. “I don’t want your whole navy. Really, such a fuss. You people are positively purists.” Veppers had once asked ambassador Huen if it was possible to buy a Culture ship. She’d stared at him for a second, then burst out laughing.

  The flier zoomed, rising to avoid a high bridge barring their way. The craft stayed flat rather than pointing its nose up, the winch bogey travelling the network of flier tether rails above reeling in the craft’s four invisibly fine mono-filament lines equally.

  Iobe city had banned flying machines entirely for centuries, then allowed fliers to be used but suffered one or two accidents which had resulted in the destruction of several notable buildings and prized historic cross-cavern bridges, so had comprom
ised by allowing fliers but only if they were tethered to tracks in the cavern roofs and controlled automatically.

  “The best Jhlupian ships are of the Jhlupian navy,” the lieutenant said. “We prefer to keep it that way. For the benefit of not being outrun by civilian vessels. Embarrassment might ensue otherwise. Most governmental entities share this policy.”

  “Do the Sichultians sell their best ships to their lessers?” Xingre asked.

  “I’d give you a very good price,” Veppers said. He turned from Xingre to the lieutenant. “Very good. You could even take the weapons off. It’s the speed I’m after.”

  “Culture ships are even faster, sir,” Jasken said.

  Veppers looked coldly at him. “Are they now?”

  “Some are,” the lieutenant said.

  “How much would a ship like the Ucalegon cost?” Jasken asked the lieutenant. “If it was for sale?”

  “Impossible to say,” the officer said.

  “You must know how much they cost,” Veppers said. “You have to price them, you must have a budget for how many you can build and operate.”

  “Realistic price might be more than entire gross economic product of Sichultian Enablement,” Xingre said.

  Veppers smiled. “I doubt that.”

  Xingre made a chuckling sound. “Nevertheless.”

  “Additionally,” the lieutenant said, “there are treaties to be considered.”

  Veppers exchanged looks with Jasken. “Oh, I bet there are.”

  “As responsible members of galactic community and Galactic Council,” the officer said, “we are signatories to treaties forbidding us from over-runging certain technologies.”

  “Over-runging?” Veppers asked in his best what-the-fuck-does-that-mean tone. He looked from the lieutenant to Jasken, who shrugged.

  “Technical term,” Xingre said. “One may gift or sell technology one rung down the ladder of civilisational attainment, but no further.”

  “Ah, that,” Veppers said sourly. “That keeps us all in our place, doesn’t it?”

  Xingre rocked backwards on his shiny pillow, looking outward from the flier. “My, is beautiful city!” he said.

  “And,” the ship’s officer said, “one is behoved to retain control over said technology to prevent it being re-sold further down relevant tech ladder by rascalish peoples acting purely as middle-men, fraudulently.”

  “End-user certificates,” Xingre said, agreeing.

  “So we have to wait until we’re about to invent something our selves before we can buy it from somebody else?” Veppers asked.

  “Much like that,” Xingre said. It waved a thin green limb at a particularly slim, highly ornate bridge they were passing over. “See, great elegance of form!” It waved at the road and pedestrian traffic crossing the bridge, not that anybody was looking at them, and anyway the flier’s bubble canopy was mirrored on the outside.

  “Such treaties and agreements prevent free-for-all,” the lieutenant said helpfully.

  Veppers looked unimpressed.

  “Hmm. Free-for-alls,” Xingre agreed. “Tsk.”

  The flier swung round, banking as it turned to enter a side cavern. This new tunnel was about half the diameter of the one they had been heading down until now. The craft levelled out but dropped, still level, and flew on into darkness; this cavern had no roof piercings to let in the sunlight, or buildings within. A display on the flier’s forward screen lit up to show what the cavern looked like ahead. Rocky, uneven walls stretched curving away into the distance.

  “I like free-for-alls,” Veppers said quietly.

  They sat in a paper boat floating on a lake of mercury, lit by a single distant ceiling hole producing a searchlight shaft of luminescence. Veppers had brought an ingot of pure gold specially. He took his mask off for a moment. “Plop it in,” he told Jasken.

  Jasken didn’t take his mask off. “You can talk through the mask, sir,” he told Veppers, who just frowned, then nodded impatiently.

  Jasken slid the soap-bar-size lump of gold out of his tunic, held it by one end, reached over the side of the boat and dropped the thick glossy sliver overboard. It vanished into the silver surface.

  Veppers took part of the boat’s gunwale between his fingers, wobbled it. “Paper, really?” he asked Xingre, pulling his mask away again.

  The Jhlupian didn’t need a mask; mercury vapour wasn’t poisonous to Jhlupians. “Paper,” the alien confirmed. “Compressed.” It made an expanding then contracting gesture with its limbs. “Easier disposing of.”

  The flier had reached the limit of the cave system’s tether rails, had landed, been released from its cables and flown on through another two junctions’ worth of smaller and smaller side tunnels until it had reached the cavern holding Mercury Lake, one of Vebezua’s modest number of tourist attractions.

  The flier had hovered centimetres off the surface of the lake and let them step straight into the paper boat. They could have walked across the surface of the mercury, of course, and Veppers had wanted to, but apparently that was forbidden, or at least frowned on, or gave you seasickness or something. The mercury could have been cleaner, Veppers reckoned. Its surface held dust and grit and swirls of little rock particles like dark sand.

  The boat was slightly absurd; it looked like a scaled-up version of the sort of paper boat a child might make. Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn’t. It was one number down the Periodic Table and so ought to float. Veppers looked over the side of the vessel at where his ingot of gold had entered the liquid metal, but it showed no sign of surfacing yet.

  After dropping them at the boat, the flier had taken off again, carrying the other two Jhlupians with it. Apart from showing his importance to the Jhlupian navy, Xingre hadn’t needed his aide along with him in the first place, and the Navy itself, while being contractually obliged to bring Veppers here safely, had wanted no part of whatever might transpire or be agreed here.

  Another, smaller flier approached. Jasken watched it on his Oculenses. The paper boat lay about two hundred metres off the nearest section of cavern wall. Mercury Lake was not natural, though nobody knew who had chosen to place such a huge amount of the metal in an out-of-the-way spot within a natural labyrinth in a planet that was itself quite isolated. The approaching flier was only about three metres by four. Small, for two people of different species, Jasken thought. He had several weapons with him, including one concealed by the cast over his arm. He felt a need to check them again, but didn’t. He already knew they were primed and ready.

  The Oculenses were a little confused by the mercury vapour swirling within the chamber. The cavern was roughly spherical, about half a kilometre across. It was a little under half full of mercury, and volcanic activity kept the very bottom of the chamber heated, producing – every now and again – gigantic belching bubbles within the liquid metal. Those bubbles produced the gasses that made the air in the chamber poisonous to pan-humans and many other biological beings, as well as making it next to impossible to monitor any vibrations through the air by laser or any other form of surveillance.

  The paper boat kept near but not too close to the centre of the lake, sufficiently distant to ride any waves produced by the sporadic bubbles. The volcanic activity wasn’t natural either; several hundred thousand years earlier – long before the Sichultians arrived on the scene to find a happily habitable but sentiently uninhabited planet – a hole had been drilled down through many tens of kilometres of rock to create the tiny magma chamber that heated the base of the cavern and so kept the mercury simmering. Nobody knew who had done this, or why. The best guesses were that it was either a religious thing or an artwork.

  While Jasken was watching the flier approach, Veppers looked over the side of the boat and saw the shining lozenge of the gold ingot, surfaced again at last. He prodded Jasken on the shoulder and he retrieved it.

  Th
e flier set down by the side of the paper boat. It looked like a fat bullet made of chrome and coloured glass. It split, opened and revealed a glistening mass within. Just about discernible inside was a dark elliptical shape, fringed or tentacled at either end.

  “Welcome, friend from Flekke,” Xingre said.

  “Good day,” said an obviously synthesised voice from the opened bullet of the flier. “Chruw Slude Zsor, Functionary-General.”

  “An honour,” Xingre said, dipping on its floating cushion.

  “We were expecting you to arrive with the Nauptrian negotiator,” Veppers said, talking through the mask.

  “That is me, I am here,” said the flier containing the Flekke in what was – somewhat counter-intuitively, Veppers thought – a more organic-sounding voice. “Though I am not Nauptrian. I am of the Nauptre Reliquaria. Were you expecting a sample of our feeder species, or making a mistake?”

  “Humble apologies,” Xingre said, extending the limb nearest Veppers towards the man by just enough for the movement to be interpreted as a gesture at all. Veppers had seen, and – reluctantly

  – kept quiet. “We biological species,” Xingre said, putting a laugh into its voice, “in such niceties’ matterings err, with sporadic effect.”

  Veppers had to suppress a smile. He had noticed before that Xingre’s grasp of language ebbed and flowed quite usefully on such occasions, allowing the Jhlupian to present itself as any where between razor smart and hopelessly bumbling, as desired.

  The Reliquarian might have been nonplussed by this. It said nothing for a moment, then, “To introduce: I am 200.59 Risytcin, Nauptre Reliquaria Extra-Jurisdictional Service, rank Full Mediary.”

  “Please,” Xingre said, gesturing. “On-boarding.”

  The opened bullet shape slid forward, up and over the shallow gunwale of the boat, coming to rest just above the flat interior surface of the vessel’s hull. “Most splendid,” Xingre said, and, reaching up with half of its dozen limbs, drew a compressed paper cover right over the whole of the boat’s open surface, enclosing them. Gentle glows from the Jhlupian’s floating pillow and the interior of the Reliquarian’s bullet-shaped casing kept them all visible to each other. It was almost romantic, Veppers thought, if your taste ran to weird, inhuman aliens and fanatical machines with a taste for torment.