Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  “Yes. What the fuck is that, now?”

  “Oh, come on; this is just the stuff I have to deal with, an emergence from the weird-shit space I happen to pass my days in.” If Lededje hadn’t known better she might have thought the avatar was hurt. “An ablationary plume,” he said, sighing. “It’s what happens when a ship tries to hit the ground running and fails, in e-Grid terms; its field engines are unable to connect efficiently with the Grid and – rather than blowing up or being flung out, wrecked, to coast for ever – its engines ablate a part of themselves to cushion the energy blow. Slows the ship, though at great cost. Immediate total engine refit required. The point is that the resulting plume’s visible from way far away in e-Grid terms, so it can work as a sort of emergency distress signal. Embarrassing enough during peacetime and likely fatal in a war.” The avatar fell silent, seemingly contemplating this odd turn of events.

  “… E-Grid?” Lededje asked tentatively.

  “Oh come on!” Demeisen said, sounding exasperated. “Do they teach you nothing at school?”

  Somebody was calling her name. Everything was a bit fuzzy, even including her sense of who she was. Her name, for example. There it was again. Somebody saying it.

  Well, they were saying something. Her first thought was that they were saying her name but now she thought about it she wasn’t so sure.

  It was as though the sounds meant something but she wasn’t sure what, or maybe she knew what they meant but couldn’t be sure what the sounds actually were. No, that wasn’t what she meant. Fuzzy.

  Yime. That was her name, wasn’t it?

  She wasn’t entirely sure. It sounded like it was supposed to mean something pretty important and it wasn’t an ordinary word that she knew which meant something. It sounded like a name. She was pretty sure it was a name. Chances were it was her name.

  Yime?

  She needed to get her eyes open. She wanted to get her eyes open. She wasn’t used to having to think about opening her eyes; usually it was something that just happened.

  Still, if she was going to have to think about—

  Yime? Can you hear me?

  —it, she’d just have to think about it. There it was again, just there, while she’d been thinking about getting her eyes open; that … feeling that somebody or something had said her name.

  “Yime?” said a tiny, high-pitched voice. It was a silly voice. A pretend, made-up voice, or one belonging to a child who’d just sucked on a helium balloon.

  “Yime? Hello, Yime?” the squeaky voice said. It was hard to hear at all; it was almost drowned out by the roaring sound of a big waterfall, or something like a big waterfall; a high wind in tall trees, maybe.

  “Yime? Can you hear me?”

  It really did sound like a doll.

  She got one eye open and saw a doll.

  Well, that fitted, she supposed. The doll was standing looking at her, quite close to her. It was standing on the floor. She realised that she must be lying on the floor.

  The doll was standing at a funny angle. Being at that angle, it should be falling over. Maybe it had special feet with suckers on them, or magnets. She’d had a toy that could climb walls, once. She guessed the doll was the usual doll-size; about right for a human toddler to carry and cuddle like an adult would a baby. It had glowing yellow-brown skin, black, intensely curled hair and the usual too-big head and eyes and over-chubby limbs. It wore a little vest-and-pants set; some dark colour.

  “Yime? Can you see me? Can you hear me?”

  The voice was coming from the doll. Its mouth had moved as it had spoken, though it was a little hard to be sure because there was some stuff in her eye. She tried to bring her hand up to her face to wipe away whatever it was in her eye, but her hand wasn’t cooperating. Her whole arm wasn’t cooperating. She tried the other arm/hand combination, but it wasn’t being any more helpful. Signals seemed to be piling up inside her head from both arms, both hands, trying to tell her something, but she couldn’t make sense of whatever it was. There were a lot of signals like that, from all over her body. Another mystery. She was getting tired of them. She tried to yawn but got a strange grating feeling from her jaw and head.

  She opened her other eye and saw two dolls. They were identical, and both were at the same strange angle.

  “Yime! You’re back with me! Good!”

  “Ack?” she said. She had meant to say “Back?” but it had come out wrong. She didn’t seem to be able to get her mouth to work properly. She tried to take a deep breath but that didn’t go too well either. It felt like she was sort of jammed, as though she’d tried to squeeze through a really tight gap and it hadn’t worked and she’d got trapped.

  “Stay with me, Yime,” the doll squeaked.

  She tried to nod, but … no.

  “Okay,” she said.

  There was only one doll, she’d worked out. Not two; it was a focusing problem. The doll was too close, there was stuff – black stuff – in her eyes and everything was at an odd angle. The ceiling, if you were going to call it that, seemed awfully close to the doll’s bubble-haired head. And the doll’s glowing skin seemed to be the only light within this cramped, shadowy space.

  Where the hell was she?

  She tried to think where she had been last.

  She had been standing under the ship, being briefed, looking at images of stars and clusters and systems, the vast dark bulk of the ship directly above. No; she’d been walking out from underneath the ship, into rain, with the blunt snout of the ship like a black glass cliff poised above; a giant flat knife for cutting through to the underneathness of the universe …

  “Yime!” something squeaked. She got one of her eyes to open. Oh yes, this weird little doll thing standing in front of her. Funny angle.

  “Ot?” (“What?”)

  “Don’t do that. Stay with me. Don’t drift off like that.”

  She wanted to laugh, but couldn’t. Drift off? How? To where? She was trapped here, caught.

  The doll wobbled towards her, its gait made awkward by its short, thick legs. It had something in its hand, something like a needle with a single slick-looking thread trailing behind it. The thread disappeared into the slanted narrow darkness behind the doll. She thought there was something familiar but wrong about the two very close-together surfaces behind the doll.

  The doll had something in its other hand too. The toy waddled so close to her head she couldn’t see it properly any more. She could feel it, though; feel its little clothed body squeezing against the side of her head.

  “Ot you doing?” she asked it. Something cold was pressed against her neck. She tried to move. Anything. Eyelids; they worked. Mouth; a bit. Her lips didn’t seem to be too keen on pressing together. Facial muscles; mostly. Tongue and throat and breathing; a bit. Fingers? No fingers. Toes? Toes not responding. Bladder muscles; something there. Great; she could pee herself if she wanted.

  She could not move her head or body or limbs at all.

  Suddenly the slanted narrow space made a sort of sense and she realised she was still in the ship, still in the lounge she’d been in earlier, when it had been accelerating. Accelerating? Did ships accelerate? This was the floor folded over and pressed up against the wall. She was lying on the wall and the floor had come up to meet the wall and she was lying crushed between the two. This would account for her not being able to move.

  “What?” the doll squeaked, clambering lightly over her face as it moved to the other side of her neck.

  “Ot you doing?” she repeated.

  “I’m putting a micro med-pack on you and hooking you up to a distant-delivery med-pack that’s as close as I can get it, a couple of metres away.”

  “Ang I trat?”

  “Are you trapped?” the doll repeated, fiddling with something just outside of sight. “Yes, Yime, I’m afraid you are.” She felt and half-saw it flick the long silver line, then felt something cold on the other side of her neck. She sensed a needle sliding into her flesh but there was
no pain at all; not even the slightest, which was surprising. She was sure you were supposed to experience a tiny bit of pain with anything the body experienced as an injury, before the pain-relief system kicked in. Unless your whole body was basically in screaming agony and therefore your brain was so flooded with pain-relief secretions coming from the appropriate glands and just-ignore-it signals coming from the relevant brain-bits that something as trivial as a needle sliding into your flesh just didn’t register at all.

  That must be it. She was crushed, immobile, inside the crippled ship, barely able to breathe, and her body was probably really badly smashed up. Made sense.

  She was taking all this very calmly, she thought.

  Well, there wasn’t much point in panicking.

  She swallowed, then said, “Ot the suck ha’ind?”

  “What the fuck happened?” the doll said, finishing what it was doing and climbing back out from beside her neck and standing in front of her again. It stood a little further back now so she could see it better. “I – we – got clobbered by something very powerful: either the Bulbitian itself displaying hitherto unknown martial prowess, or an equiv-tech ship that was nearby. We only just got out of the Bulbitian’s environment sphere. I had to total

  – go into hyperspace – before I cleared the sphere, or we’d have been smeared. It was a rough old transit and we were still getting attacked. Got off some retaliation but no idea if I hit anything. More frazzling ensued before I could get us away. Took myself to bits; firing off burst units like missiles and p-chambers like mines. Lost 4D directional and had to traction-plough the grid to stop us subrupturing. Now we’re drifting, decoupled.”

  “Oor juss a-oyding saying yeer sucked.”

  “No I’m not,” the doll squeaked. “We are fucked, in the sense we’re both in a very bad way, but on the other hand we are alive at the moment, and we have a substantial chance of getting out of this alive.”

  “Ee do?”

  “We do. Thanks to my efforts and your body’s own emergency systems we can keep you stabilised and even start some repairs, meanwhile I seem to have shaken off our attackers, my own repair systems are running at maximum and the distress calls I got out before losing my signal fields, plus the ablation plume itself, should have been sufficient to summon help. I expect it is on its way even as we speak.”

  She tried to frown. It was just about possible. “I a doll?”

  “All my other remotes are compromised, too big or otherwise engaged. The doll dates from when I once had some children aboard. Rather than recycle it I retained it in this form for sentimental reasons. I’ll leave it here to keep you company if you want to stay awake, though it might be better to let you sleep now we’ve got you hooked up; going to be a while before I can get you unstuck.”

  She thought about this. “Slee,” she said.

  Just before she slipped under, she thought, Wait! There had been something important she’d really meant to remember.

  But then it all went away from her.

  “That thing’s coming up on me,” Demeisen said, frowning. “What the fuck does it think it’s trying to do; overtake?”

  “You’re sure it’s not a missile?” Lededje asked. She’d got the ship to put the image back on the module screen again so she could at least see something of what was going on immediately behind them. The granular two-tone greyness in the screen’s centre looked just as it had.

  “Whatever this thing is, I doubt it considers itself single-use expendable, so not a missile by the standard definition,” the avatar said. “But it is coming straight up behind us, which is a semi-hostile manoeuvre.”

  “When does it become a totally hostile manoeuvre?”

  Demeisen shrugged. “When it reaches a point where a Torturer-class ROU would normally catch sight of something immediately behind it. At the moment it thinks I can’t see it, so in a sense I’ve no business assuming it’s hostile. As soon as or slightly before it reaches the point where a real Torturer class would spot it, it should hail us.”

  “When does that happen?”

  “As things stand, if nobody alters power, about two hours.” The avatar frowned. “Which is shortly before we’ll get to the Tsung system, where the Disk is. Now isn’t that a coincidence?” The avatar plainly didn’t expect an answer, so Lededje didn’t attempt to provide one. Demeisen tapped one fingernail on a front tooth. “One slightly worrying nuance here is that it expects me to see it about halfway into my approach. It’s assuming that I’m stopping at Tsung, which is not unreasonable.” The avatar was more muttering than talking now. Lededje remained patient. “But I’ll be slowing down, halfway to dead stop, when it expects to pop up on my sensors,” Demeisen said quietly, staring sideways at the screen. “And, if you were being paranoid about it, that’s almost a hostile act in itself, because that sets our chum up for an attacking pass, unless he slows too or peels away.” The avatar laughed, raised his eyebrows at her. “Golly. What shall we do, Lededje?”

  She thought. “The smartest thing?” she suggested.

  Demeisen clicked his fingers. “What a splendid suggestion,” he said, swivelling round in the seat to look at the screen. “Naturally we have to ignore the awkward fact that the smartest thing is all too often only obvious in hindsight, but never mind.” He turned to look at her. “There is just a very small chance that this could get awkward, Lededje. I might actually get in a proper fire-fight here.” The avatar grinned at her, eyes bright.

  “A prospect that patently fills you with horror.”

  Demeisen laughed, might almost have looked embarrassed. “Thing is,” he said, “big space fights between grown-up ships ain’t no place for a young slip of a girl such as yourself, so if that’s what looks like happening I’ll try and get you away. Right now you’re safest here, inside me, but that could change in an instant. You might find yourself inside the shuttle inside one of my subsections, or just inside the shuttle alone, or even just in a suit or even a gel suit with scary empty space only millimetres away. All with no warning. Actually, be better even if you still had a lace; we could back you up and make you nearly as shock-proof as me, but never mind. You ever worn a gel suit?”

  “No.”

  “Really? I suppose not. Never mind. Nothing to it. Here you go.”

  Just to the side of Lededje’s seat, a silvery ovoid swelled, popped and disappeared, depositing what looked like a cross between a large jellyfish and a thick condom the size and shape of a human onto the floor. She stared down at it. It looked like somebody had had their skin turned transparent and then been flayed. “That’s a space suit?” she asked, aghast. In her experience, space suits looked a little more reassuringly complicated. Not to mention bulky.

  “You’ll probably want to empty your bladder and bowels before putting it on,” Demeisen told her, nodding back to where the shuttle’s living area was already reconfiguring to its shiny hi-tech bath/shower/toilet aspect. “Then just strip off and step in; it’ll do the rest.”

  She picked the gel suit up. It was heavier than she’d expected. Peering at it, she could see what looked like dozens of thinner-than-tissue-thin layers within it, boundaries marked out with a hint of iridescence. There were some parts of it that looked a little thicker than others and which were sort of mistily opaque. They made the thing appear a little more substantial than it had at first glance, but not by much. “I suppose I’d only be exposing my hopeless naivety if I asked if there was some alternative to this.”

  “It’d be more of a hopeless inability to come to terms with reality,” the avatar told her. “But if it appears a bit flimsy don’t worry; there’s an armoured outer-suit that goes over the top. I’m getting one of those ready too.” He nodded at the now fully formed bathroom. “Now do your business like a good little biological and don’t tarry.”

  She glared at the avatar but he was staring at the screen. She wheeled out of the seat and stamped to the bathroom.

  “Do you need to pee and poo?” she called fro
m inside the bathroom. “In your human form there?”

  “No,” the avatar called. “Not biological. Can do, though, if I’ve been eating or drinking for what you might call social effect. Comes out just like it went in. Though chewed, obviously, in the case of solids. Edible and drinkable. Well, unless I‘ve kept it inside long enough for any airborne or already-present organisms to start to break it down. So I can do convincing, if very delicate, belches and farts. Some human people actually like to eat what comes out of avatars. Very odd. Still, that’s people.”

  “Sorry I asked,” Lededje muttered, starting to strip off.

  “Ha! Thought you might be,” the avatar called back cheerily. Sometimes she forgot how good its hearing was.

  She had a token pee and then laid the gel suit out on the floor. The mistily opaque bits were mostly on its back. Or front – it was impossible to tell. They tapered smoothly, looking like long, nearly transparent muscles.

  She looked at herself in the reverser. The tattoo was a frozen storm of swirling black lines scrolled across her body. She had spent a lot of the time over the days since they’d left the GSV learning how to use the tat’s own controls to influence its display. She could thicken and thin the lines, alter their number, their colours and reflectivity, make them straight, wiggly, curled or spiralled, turn them into circles or squares or any other simple geometric form, or choose from any one of thousands of tweakable patterns.

  She frowned at the silvery ring on her left hand. “What about the terminal ring?” she called.

  “Don’t worry; the suit will adjust.”

  She shrugged. Oh well, she thought. She stepped onto the foot parts of the suit. There didn’t seem to be any holes to put her feet into.

  Just when she thought nothing was going to happen and that maybe she ought to reach down and see if she could pull it up somehow, the thing suddenly rippled and rose, clumping round her feet then flowing upwards, climbing up her shins and thighs, enveloping her torso and flowing down her arms as it gathered in a sort of ruff round her neck. It moved faster than the tattoo had performing its roughly similar trick. It felt like it was at blood heat; like the tat, she could hardly tell it was there.