Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  “Well, hello to you both,” Veppers said to the Flekkian and the Reliquarian. “Thank you for coming, and for agreeing to conduct our meeting in Sichultian.”

  “It is easier for us to talk down to you than it is for you to aspire to our far more sophisticated language,” the Reliquarian said.

  Veppers smiled. “Well, I have to hope that lost something in the translation. Now, however, I understand we have to do this ridiculous thing with the masks.”

  The ridiculous thing with the masks meant them wearing a sort of helmet – or similar – each, from which a hose led to a central junction chamber. This way they could all talk and listen to each other without anybody else hearing. It all seemed madly contrived to Veppers but apparently in this age of summed-state super quantum phase-parsed encryptography it was the last thing anybody would be looking for. The Nauptre Reliquaria especially thought it was just the greatest thing imaginable and had insisted on it.

  It took a while to get everything and everybody set up and adjusted. 200.59 Risytcin insisted on inspecting both the ingot of gold in Jasken’s pocket and his Oculenses, taking some time over the latter – turning them over and over in a maniple field and at one point seemingly trying to twist them apart – but eventually pronounced them safe and handing them back. Jasken looked unhappy, and carefully cleaned and readjusted them before putting them back on.

  “To business,” Xingre said, once they were all technically happy and the pleasantries had been dealt with. Its voice sounded at once muffled and echoey, coming through the inter-linked set of tubes. All linked up together, barely lit, hunkered down in this crude approximation of a boat, they looked, Veppers thought, like some bizarrely motley set of desperate survivors from some strange and terrible shipwreck.

  The Reliquarian said, “Introductory statement and opening position of the NR, with superposition of same relevant to Flekke: We have good reason to believe that the anti-Hell faction in the relevant confliction – concerning proposed unwarranted intrusions in certain virtual realities – grows desperate. They may attempt to intrude within the Real. A possible source of intrusion might conceivably come via the Tsungarial Disk. We will seek to prevent this happening and expect our allies and friends to cooperate in this. The cooperation of the Veprine Corporation falls within this definition. To Mr. Veppers of the Veprine Corporation: kindly state your position and intentions.”

  Veppers nodded. “All very interesting,” he said. “So, we are to take it that the NR representative speaks for the Flekke as well?”

  “Indeed,” the ellipsoid shape within the Reliquarian said. “As stated.” Its voice sounded appropriately watery through the linking tubes.

  “And do you also talk on the behalf of the GFCF?” Veppers asked.

  “The Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy need not be present,” the Reliquarian informed them. “Their acquiescence is assured and assumed.”

  Veppers smiled broadly. “Splendid!”

  “To repeat: your position and intentions, Mr. Veppers, speaking on behalf of yourself, the Veprine Corporation and the Sichultian Enablement to the extent that you are able to answer for it,” the Reliquarian said.

  “Well then, subject to a satisfactory negotiationary outcome here,” Veppers said, “my position is that I fully support the stance and values of our good friends and allies the NR and the Flekke and will do whatever is within my modest means to facilitate their strategic goals.” He smiled, opened his arms wide. “I am on your side, of course.” He smiled again. “Providing the price is right, naturally.”

  “What is this price?” Chruw Slude Zsor, Functionary-General for the Flekke said.

  “I recently lost something very precious to me,” Veppers said. “And discovered that I had gained something at the same time, something I might not have wished on myself.”

  “Would this be linked to the remains of the Culture neural lace which is in one of your servant’s pockets?” 200.59 Risytcin asked.

  “How well spotted,” Veppers said. “Yes. I would like to investigate the possibility of replacing the thing that I lost with an identical item, and I would like to have the assistance, even protection, of both the NR and the Flekke, should somebody – anybody – wish to harm me due to any circumstances which might be linked with the neural lace being in my possession.”

  “This sounds a little vague,” Chruw Slude Zsor said.

  “I intend to be much less vague when we discuss financial remuneration and technology transfer,” Veppers said. “What I’m looking for right now is a declaration of goodwill more than anything else.”

  “The Flekke are happy to give this,” Chruw Slude Zsor said.

  There was another inscrutable pause before the Reliquarian said, “Similarly.”

  “Subject to contract,” the Flekkian added.

  “Also similarly,” 200.59 Risytcin confirmed.

  Veppers nodded slowly. “Good,” he said. “We can do details later, but for now I’d like to approach the monetary strand of these talks. Mr. Jasken here will record our deliberations using his Oculenses from this point on until further notice, each of us having a veto. Is that agreed?”

  “Agreed,” 200.59 Risytcin said.

  “The principle is allowed,” Chruw Slude Zsor said. “Though given that all we ask of you is to do nothing, and the price of in -action traditionally is significantly less than that of action, we might wish that you do not approach such negotiations with too unrealistic a set of hopes.”

  Veppers smiled. “I shall, as ever, be the very soul of reasonableness.”

  Veppers had extensive business interests on Vebezua and throughout the rest of that day he attended a series of more conventional meetings following the one held in the paper boat on Mercury Lake. The Iobe city authorities held a reception for him that evening in a great ballroom complex suspended on cables in the centre of the single greatest circular piercing above the main city caverns. The ceiling was opened to the night.

  Vebezua was uncomfortably close to its star and Iobe lay almost right on the equator; by day it would have been insufferably hot and bright in the ballroom with the ceiling irised back, but by night the full glory of the stars was displayed, a distant speckled wash of multi-coloured lights enhanced by a large waning moon and the layered, slow- and not-so-slow-moving sparkle of junk and hab light as the planet’s various halos of artificial satellites rotated overhead.

  Veppers had been coming to Vebezua on business for decades and possessed one of the finest mansions in the inner city; however, it was being remodelled, again, and so he had elected to stay in Iobe’s finest hotel, his suite of suites and his retinue taking up the two top floors. He owned the hotel, of course, so making the arrangements, even at relatively short notice, had been trivial.

  For security reasons he slept right at the back of the hotel where its largest, finest but windowless grand bedroom had been carved out of the rock of the cavern wall.

  Before retiring for the night he had Jasken meet him in one of the saunas. They sat facing each other, naked in the steam.

  “My, how pale that arm is becoming,” he told the other man. Jasken had taken his cast off and left it outside.

  Jasken flexed his arm, clenched his fist. “I’m due to take it off next week.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Veppers said. “The Reliquarian. Did it put something in the Oculenses?”

  “I think so. Probably a tracker. Too small to tell. Do I give it to Xingre’s techs to check?”

  “Tomorrow. Tonight you stay here.”

  Jasken frowned. “You sure?”

  “Quite sure. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Can’t I just leave the Oculenses?”

  “No. And do something memorable.”

  “What?”

  “Something memorable. Go back out, to a club, start a fight, or get two girls fighting over you, or throw a whore into a wine barrel; whatever it takes to be noticed. Nothing so heinous anyone would think to wake me, obviously, but something that‘ll
make it very clear you’re still here.” Veppers frowned; Jasken was frowning at him. Veppers looked down at his own lap. “Oh, yes, well; just the mention of whores will do that. Better deal with it.” He grinned at Jasken. “Meeting over. Tell Astil I’ll manage by myself tonight and send Pleur up on your way out.”

  The suite’s giant circular bed could be surrounded by multiple concentric layers of soft and floaty curtains. Once they were all fully drawn round and the hidden monofils within the fabrics had been activated and stiffened, it was impossible to tell from outside that the bed had descended into the deep floor and retreated into the rock wall behind and beneath.

  Veppers left Pleur sleeping; the tiny drug-delivery bulb attached to her neck would keep her under for days if necessary. The drug bulb looked just like an insect, which was a nice touch, he thought. He must get Sulbazghi to provide more of the things.

  The bed went back to where it had come from; Veppers walked across the gently lit tunnel and into a little underground car. Not too dissimilar to the Reliquarian’s bullet shape, he thought as he swung the door down, switched the thing on and flicked a button to tell it to go. He was pressed back in the couch as the car accelerated. The Reliquaria. Annoying species, or machine type – whatever the fuck they were. Again, though; useful on occasion. Even if it was to be little better than a decoy. He punched in the destination code.

  The private underground car system had various stops, most within Iobe city, almost all within buildings and other structures owned by Veppers. One, though, was inside an old mine, way out in the karst desert a quarter of an hour and over a hundred kilometres from the city outskirts.

  The stealthed GFCF shuttle was waiting for him: a dark shape like a ragged shallow dome of night squatting on the serrations of rock. Moments after he’d boarded, it rose silently, kept subsonic, accelerated harder once it achieved space, threaded its way through the layers of the orbiting habs, fabs and satellites, and docked with a much larger but similarly secretive ship keeping a little above geosynchronous orbit. The dark, slimly ellipsoid vessel swallowed the shuttle craft and slipped away into hyperspace with barely a ripple to disturb the skein of real space.

  He was met by a group of small, obviously alien but ethereally beautiful creatures with sliver-blue skin which turned to delicate scales – insect-wing thin and iridescent, like a tiny lacy rainbow

  – where most pan-humans had head hair. They wore white, wispy clothes and had large, round eyes. One came forward and addressed him.

  “Mr. Veppers,” it said, its sing-song voice soft, high and mellifluous, “how good to see you again. You are indeed most welcome back aboard the GFCF Succour-Class Contact Craft Messenger Of Truth.”

  Veppers smiled. “Evening all. Great to be aboard.”

  “And what are you supposed to be?”

  “I am the angel of life and death, Chay. It is time.”

  The thing had appeared in her sleeping chamber in the very middle of the night. There was a noviciate sleeping in a chair by Chay’s bedside, but Chay didn’t even bother trying to wake her. She knew in her heart this was something she would have to deal with, or endure, by herself.

  The creature was something between quadri- and bi-pedal in form; its front legs still looked like legs but they were much smaller than its rear legs. It had a single trunk, and two vast, slowly beating wings which flared from its back. They were impossibly wide; far too big to fit into the chamber, and yet – by whatever logic was supposed to be operating here – they appeared to fit inside quite comfortably nevertheless. The thing claiming to be the angel of life and death hovered over the foot of bed, which was where such things were generally expected to show up, if you believed in that sort of thing. And perhaps even if you didn’t, she supposed.

  She wondered again about reaching out and shaking the noviciate awake. But it would be such an effort, she thought. Everything was such an effort these days. Getting up, hunkering down, bending, standing, eating, defecating; everything. Even seeing, of course, though she noticed that she could see the self-proclaimed “angel of life and death” better than she ought to be able to.

  An apparition, then; a virtuality or whatever you wanted to call it. After all these years, she thought, finally some proof beyond her own dimming memories and the fading ink in her charred page diary that all she had lived through in the Real and the Hell had been in some sense true, not just figments of her imagination.

  “You mean time for me to die?”

  “Yes, Chay.”

  “Well, I must disappoint you, whatever you are or might claim to be. By one way of looking at things I am already dead. I was killed by the king of Hell himself.” She gave a bubbling, choking laugh. “Or at least by some big bugger of a thing. In another way of looking—”

  “Chay, you have lived here and now it is time to die.”

  “—at things, you cannot kill me,” said Chay, who, as Superior of the Refuge for many years, had become used to not being interrupted. “Because, in the place I came from originally, I am still alive, or at least I presume I am, and will continue to remain so, no matter what sort of tricks you—”

  “Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.”

  “I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents. They were still alive when I entered the Hell. Can you do anything useful and tell me how they are? Still alive? Passed on? Well? Well? Eh? No? Thought not. ‘Maker’ indeed. What superstitious bollocks are you trying to—?”

  “Chay!” the thing shouted at her. Quite loudly, Chay thought, and – what with her failing hearing – that must have meant extremely loudly. Still the young noviciate asleep in the chair by her bedside didn’t even stir. She was glad she hadn’t wasted the effort waking the girl up. “You are about to die,” the apparition told her. “Have you no wish to see God and be accepted into Her love?”

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. There is no God.” It was what she believed, what she had always believed, but still she looked nervously at the sleeping noviciate.

  “What?” the angel cried. “Will you have no thought for your immortal soul?”

  “Oh, fuck off,” Chay said. Then she stopped, and felt terrible. Swearing in front of the noviciate! She hadn’t sworn aloud for over two decades. She was the Superior; the Superior didn’t swear. But then she was annoyed at herself for being embarrassed and penitent in the first place. What did it matter? “Yes,” Chay said, while the so-called “angel of life and death” flapped its impossible wings and stared wide-eyed at her. “Fuck off. Entirely fuck off, you ersatz, cobbled-together, neither-one-thing-nor-the-other piece of poor-quality animation. Do whatever it is you have to do and let’s just get this charade over with.”

  The great dark angel seemed to pull briefly back, then came forward again, enfolding her vast black wings about the bed, then just around Chay, who said, “Oh, shit. And I bet this is going to hurt.”

  The ship towered within the shadowy space of its hangar, a little over three hundred and fifty metres in height, its trim, pale hull girdled about its waist with five dark weapon blisters, its sleekly pointed nose housing three even longer bubbles.

  “It looks fabulously retro,” Veppers said. “What exactly is it?”

  The alien who had addressed him earlier turned to him. “Technically, to allow for legal challenges based on laws which admittedly do not yet exist, it is a one-point-zero-one-two-five to one scale model of a Culture ‘Murderer’ General Offensive Unit,” it said.

  Veppers thought about this. “Doesn’t that mean it’s a model which is bigger than the original?”

  “Yes!” the GFCFian said, clapping its little hands. “Bigger is better, yes?”

  “Well, generally,” Veppers agreed, frowning.

  They were standing in a viewing gallery looking out into a cylindrical hangar a kilometre from top to bottom and half that wide. The hangar had been carved out of the compacted ice and rock making up one of the Tsung system’s half-trillion or so Oort cloud obj
ects. The lumpy conglomerate of ice housing the GFCF base

  – and within it this hangar – was sufficiently massive to provide less than one per cent of standard gravity; point your mouth down when you sneezed and you could take off. The ship they were looking at – its hull a lustrous golden hue Veppers strongly suspected had been chosen to resemble as closely as possible his own usual skin colour – sat lightly on its flat, circular rear, its sharply pointed nose spiring toward the hangar’s ceiling.

  “Its working name is the Joiler Veppers,” the little alien told him, “though it may be re-named anything you wish, of course.”

  “Of course.” Veppers looked round the rest of the gallery. They were alone; the other GFCF people had remained on the ship when they’d shuttled across to the ancient lump of space debris, one of the near uncountable bits of debris left over after the stellar system had come into being billions of years earlier.

  “You approve of the ship?”

  Veppers shrugged. “Maybe. How fast is it?”

  “Mr. Veppers! This obsession with speed! Let us say, faster than the original. May we not deem that sufficient?”

  “What would that be in figures?”

  “I sigh! However: the craft is capable of velocities up to approximately one hundred and twenty-nine thousand times the speed of light.”

  Veppers genuinely had to stop for a moment and think. That did sound like a lot. He’d have to check, but he was fairly certain the Jhlupian ship which had taken him to Vebezua had travelled slower than that. The ships which the Veprine Corporation Heavy Industries Deep Space Division constructed measured their maximum velocities in hundreds of times lightspeed. This thing was a galaxy-crosser. Even so, he refused to look impressed.