Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  There had been over sixty humans in the Restoria mission to the Tsungarial Disk when the outbreak began. They’d all volunteered to get involved. They’d drawn lots for who got to pilot the twenty-four microships they could field. So far, two of the drone ships had been damaged but had managed to get back to base for repair. None of the humans had ended up dead/missing/ injured.

  The humans had all run their own sims and looked at old scenarios and reckoned that they had about a four-to-one chance of getting through this unscathed, if the outbreak ran the way it had been expected to.

  Only it hadn’t; they didn’t even think to report it immediately because the original little smatter burstlet had been interesting, something worth studying. Then, a day later, when they’d realised it was the real thing, they’d still confidently assured superiors and distant offers of help that they could handle it; it’d be over before anybody more than a day away got there, and there was nobody anywhere near a day away.

  It went over that first one-day prediction, but by then they were even more confident they had worked it out and knew how to deal with it; it’d be over in a couple of days. Well, four. Okay; definitely six. Now they were on day eight or nine, the fucking outbreak wasn’t letting up, in fact it was showing signs of developing – those weapons, crude or not – and they were all starting to get, as Lan had put it, frazzled.

  Plus their pooled, averaged, constantly updated should-be-fairly-reliable sims had, over the last few days, gone from giving them a four out of five chance of surviving without casualties to odds of three out of four, then to a two out of three chance and then – inevitably, it felt like – to a one-to-one likelihood. That had been sobering. It was only a sim, only a prediction, but it was still worrying. That last estimate had been good up to about five hours ago. By now they must be well into negative odds. Unless the outbreak just stopped or even just tailed away unfeasibly rapidly, or they were ridiculously lucky, they were going to lose somebody.

  Well, maybe they were. But she wasn’t going to be the one. They might lose more than one. She wasn’t going to be the first. Fuck it, maybe they’d all die. She wanted to be the one survivor, or the last to go down. A ferocity Auppi would never have guessed resided in her rose and burned in her chest and behind her eyes when she thought about this sort of stuff. Yeah, natural warrior, that was her. She could hear Lanyares laughing at her already. Glanded too much edge, sperk, quicken, focal, drill and gung, young lady.

  Still, though. That lust for destruction, glory – even glorious death – was a sort of extra, emergent drug in itself; a meta-hit that spoke to something deep-buried, long veneered over but never entirely expunged in the pan-human bio-heritage.

  She was armour-suited, plugged into a gel-foamed brace couch with at least four metres of high-density gunned-up much-beweaponed Fast Fleet Liaison Module between her and the vacuum

  – twelve metres of pointy, armoured ditto measuring from the front – and she had an arsenal of weaponry: one main laser, four secondaries, eight tertiaries, six point-defence high-repeat shrapnel laser cells, a couple of nanogun pods – currently seven-eighths depleted, so it would soon be time to get back to base to re-arm – and a heavy, slowing, bulky but useful hullslung missile container with an assortment of sleekly deadly lovelies inside. That was only half depleted, which the ship still maintained meant she was being too miserly with the missiles. She saw it as just being careful. Be tight with the stuff that could get depleted and extravagant with what seemed never-ending: her own desire to fight and destroy.

  She was almost ashamed to be backed up. A real warrior shouldn’t be. A real warrior should face the certainty of death and oblivion and still be fearless, still treat their life as just something to be gambled with against the odds of fate, as effectively as possible.

  Fuck it, though; the warriors of old had thought they were effectively backed up too, sure in themselves that they were bound for some glorious martial heaven. That it was nonsense wasn’t the point. Some of them must have had their doubts but they had still behaved as though they didn’t. That was fucking bravery. (Or stupidity. Or gullibility. Or a kind of narcissism – what you thought it was depended on what sort of person you were, what you might have felt and done in the same situation.) Would theyhave taken the offer of being truly backed up, had they been able? Leapt at it, she’d have bet. And never forget they would be killing other people, not dumb matter smartened up a couple of notches to the point it became annoying. That was where the analogy with game-playing became something even closer; you could waste smatter with exactly the same moral abandon as something whacked in a shoot-up game.

  Anyway, she was backed up, and popped out of the fray every four hours or so like the others to draw breath, find out what was happening and transmit the latest version of her all-too-mortal soul to the Restoria mission control hab on the inner fringe of the Disk, only a thousand klicks above the cloud tops of the gas giant Razhir – where she’d be heading shortly, to re-arm. Doubtless extra copies of her mind-state would then be passed on to whatever the nearest Restoria ship was, and beyond that, probably, to other substrates overseen by different Minds quite possibly on the other side of the big G, or even further afield.

  Backed up, tooled up, riled up. Time to waste something.

  She used the stare-focus function to zoom in on the cloud of boulders coming out of the mid-Disk Level-Seven fabricary. The front of the cloud was less than a minute old; most of it was still bursting out of the ancient space factory through round ports in the fabricary’s dark surface. It looked a lot like a giant seed pod releasing spores, which was fairly appropriate, she supposed.

  “Two point eight minutes away,” she said. She took a sweep about, scanning right around right to left and back to forward and then looking everywhere at once just to get the local feel. (She could just about remember how that had felt the first time it had been demonstrated to her. She’d almost thrown up. Looking in two contra-rotating directions at once, and then in all directions at the same time, just wasn’t stuff the ancient human brain systems were able to cope with; processing the results kind of confused the frontal cortex, too. She’d thought she’d never get the hang of it, but she had. It was routine, now.) “Anything closer smaller nastier? Or further but worse? If there is, I’m not seeing it.”

  “Agree,” the ship said. It had already started powering up its engines and pointed them at the offending fabricary and the cloud of smart boulders pouring out of it.

  “Numbers?”

  “Twenty-six K and counting; better than 400 per second from about as many ports. Stable issue rate. Just over a hundred thousand by the time we get there and estimating as many to come.”

  “Where are the fucking GFCF and their in-fab intervention teams?”

  “Not in that one, at a guess,” the ship said. “I’m sending its ident to the Initial Contact Facility so they can come sanitise it later.”

  “Never mind. Let’s go get the fuckers.”

  The ship hummed around her, she felt it accelerate and felt, too, her body adjust to the force. Most of the Gs they were pulling were being cancelled but they could go faster if they let some leak through. The ship went tearing through the field of Disk components, heading inward for the middle of the torus, flashing past the dark shapes of the fabricaria. She wondered how many more held infestations of the smatter, how much longer they could keep whacking everything that appeared.

  There was another way, of course, for her, Lan and the others not to get killed: they could just stop fighting and leave it all to the machines. There were another twenty drone-or self-controlled microships similar to the one she was in, all desperately trying to contain the outbreak. If the humans just stopped taking part in the fight the ships they were in would keep on operating regardless, once they’d off-loaded their single crew person.

  They’d be able to accelerate and turn faster without their biological component aboard and they would hardly suffer in the heat of battle; the ships to
ok advantage of useful aspects of the human brain’s behaviour – like its intrinsic pattern recognition, on-target concentration and flinch responses – so their wired-in human charges genuinely did some useful work alongside the AIs, but in the end everybody knew this was really just one set of machines against another and the humans were only along for the ride. Participant observers; taking part because not to do so would be dishonourable, ignominious. In the big, long picture, this was just another tiny instance that told anybody who was interested that the Culture was not just its machines.

  Auppi didn’t care. Useful, useless, big help or hindrance, she was having the time of her life. She hoped she’d have great-great-grandchildren to dandle on her knee one day so she could tell them about the time she’d fought the nasty cancerous breeding machines of the Tsungarial Disk armed only with a highly sophisticated little weaponified microship, an on-board brain-linked AI and more exotic weaponry than you could shake a space-stick at, but that was for another time, what would feel, no doubt, like another life altogether.

  For now she was a warrior and she had stuff to blit.

  She wondered what the incoming Torturer-class ship would bring to the fray, and almost wished it hadn’t come at all.

  They came for him, as he’d known they would. He’d expected they’d find a way, eventually. Representative Filhyn, her aide Kemracht and the others – many others; it had turned into quite a big operation – had done all they could to keep him safe, away from interference and temptation. They had spirited him away from the parliament building after the hearing where he had spoken out and they had kept him mobile, moving him from place to place almost every day over the ensuing weeks; he rarely slept in the same place twice.

  He had stayed in vast skyscraper apartments belonging to sympathisers, budget hotels off buzzing superhighways, house-boats on shallow lagoons near the sea, and, for the last two nights, in an old hill station in the mountains, a leafy summer retreat for the upper and upper-middle classes of centuries ago, before anybody had invented air conditioning. A little narrow-gauge railway had brought them up here, him and his two immediate companions and the small team of less obvious helpers and guards that nowadays always travelled with him.

  The lodge sat on a shallow ridge, looking out over unbroken slopes of trees stretching to the gently undulating horizon. On a clear day, they said, you could see the plains and some of the great ziggurats of the nearest big city. Not this weather, though; it was cloudy, misty, humid, and great snagging strands of clouds drifted above and around the lodge, sometimes wrapping themselves about the ridge like insubstantial, too-easily torn veils.

  They had been due to move to a different travellers’ lodge that morning, but there had been a mud slide overnight and the road was blocked. They’d move tomorrow.

  However reluctantly, Prin had become a star. It was not something he was comfortable with. People wanted him; they wanted to interview him, they wanted to change his mind or show him the error of his ways, they wanted to support him, they wanted to condemn him, they wanted to save him, they wanted to destroy him, they wanted to help him and they wanted to obstruct and hinder him. Mostly they wanted access to him to accomplish all these things.

  Prin was an academic, a law professor who had devoted his life to the theory and the practice of justice. The theoretical side was his professional life, the practical part had drawn him into worthy causes, campus protests, underground semi-legal net-publishing and, finally, into the scheme to infiltrate the Hell that everybody either denied existed outright or sort of knew was there but liked to pretend wasn’t because they sort of half agreed with the idea behind it, to punish those who deserved punishment. Hell was always for other people.

  He’d known something of the grisly reality of it from officially published and illegally disseminated accounts, and he and one of his junior colleagues had taken the decision to be the ones who went into Hell to experience it first hand and bring back the truth. The very fact he and Chay wouldn’t have been anybody’s first choice for such a bizarre and frightening mission they hoped would make them more credible witnesses if and when they returned. They were not fame-obsessed attention-seekers, not journalists trying to make a reputation, not people who had ever had much obvious interest in doing anything which would bring them the amount of attention such an undertaking might result in.

  Then, when they were doing what training they could for their undercover mission – training that to them just meant doing lots of reading about the subject, though others in their little cell of subversives had insisted include psychological “hardening” that had involved experiences a lot like the sort of stuff they were going in there to denounce – they had become lovers. That had complicated things a little, but they had discussed it and decided that if anything it would be an advantage; they would be more committed to each other as a team when they were in the Hell, now that they were something more than colleagues and friends.

  He looked back on their pathetic preparations and their terribly earnest discussions with a mixture of embarrassment, fondness and bitterness. What could prepare you for such horror? Not all their days of “hardening” – enduring small electric shocks, the start of suffocation and a lot of being shouted at and verbally abused by the ex-army guys who’d agreed to help – had amounted to a minute’s worth of what they had experienced in Hell right from the start, from day one.

  Nevertheless, despite being caught up in the horrifying vortex of violence and sheer hatred that had enveloped them instantly on their arrival, they had stayed together and they had, in some sense, accomplished their mission. He had got out, even if Chay had lost her mind. He had been able to be the sober, sensible, unrufflable witness that he had meant to be right from the start, when they had first started talking about the mission with the relevant programmers, hackers and ex-government agency whistle-blowers who’d originally been put in touch with their little underground organisation.

  But he had had to leave Chay behind. He’d done what he could to get her through as well, but he hadn’t made her his first priority. At the last moment, as they’d hurtled through the air towards the glowing gate that led back to reality and a relief from pain, he had twisted, led with his own back rather than with her, held in his limbs, literally putting himself first.

  He had hoped they would both make it through, but he had known that it was unlikely.

  And what he had to ask himself – what he had been asking himself, ever since – was this: if Chay had been of sound mind at the time, would he have acted any differently?

  He thought – he hoped – he would have.

  That being the case, he was sure she would have made just as good a witness as he had. Then he could have done the decent, chivalrous, masculine thing and saved the girl, got her to safety and taken whatever extra punishment the mephitic bureaucracy of Hell decreed. But he could only have done that if he’d thought that she would get back to the Real as anything other than a broken, weeping wreck.

  She had denied the Real while she’d been in Hell, to preserve what was left of her disintegrating sanity; how could he be sure she wouldn’t have denied the reality of Hell once she was back in the Real? Even that presupposed that she’d have made a considerable recovery from the pathetic state she’d been in towards the end.

  Well, the end for him, because he got out. Probably just the start of fresh torment and horror for her.

  Of course he had nightmares and of course he tried not to think of what might be happening to her back in the Hell. The pro-Hell parts of Pavulean society, headed by people like Representative Errun, had been doing everything they could to destroy his reputation and make his testimony look like a lie, or grossly exaggerated. Everything from a schooldays girlfriend who felt she’d been dumped too harshly to a fine for being disruptive in a university bar when he was a first-year student had been dragged out to make him look unreliable. That such trivial misdemeanours were the best the other side could do had been treated as a great
and unexpected victory by Rep. Filhyn, who had become a trusted friend over the months since he’d first testified at her side.

  They saw each other only rarely now; it would have made him too easy to trace. Instead they talked on the phone, left messages. He could watch her on the screen most evenings too, on news coverage, magazine programmes, documentaries or specialist feeds; denouncing the Hells and defending him, mostly. He liked her and could even imagine something happening between them – if that idea wasn’t in itself a wild fantasy – if things had been different, if he wasn’t for ever thinking of Chay.

  It was assumed that the Pavulean Hell was running on a substrate far away from Pavul itself; for decades people had been searching for any sign of it being in any sense physically on the planet itself, or even anywhere near – the relatively anarchic habitats of the planet’s inner system were particularly favoured as locations – but without having found any evidence at all. Most likely, Chay’s being resided tens, hundreds, maybe thousands of light years away, deep-buried inside the substrate of some unknowably alien society.

  He looked up at the stars some nights, wondering where she was.

  Don’t you feel guilty about leaving her? Do you feel guilty that you left her? How guilty do you feel, abandoning her there? Do you sleep well, with all that guilt? Do you dream about her? You must feel so guilty – would you do the same thing again? Would she have abandoned you there? He had been asked the same question in many slightly different guises many times and answered it as honestly as he could, each time.

  They had tried to get at him through her, tried to get her – the Chay who had been woken up on the houseboat, the Chay who would never have the memories of their time together in Hell – to denounce him for abandoning her. But she hadn’t let them use her. She said she’d felt hurt initially but thought he’d done the right thing. She still completely believed in what they’d done. She supported him fully.