Surface Detail

by Iain M. Banks

  It made a pleasant change for his last deployment not to have involved nuts-and-bolts, blood-and-guts soldiering – a meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well. On the other hand, he felt he had just been … read somehow. All those deployments, mostly indicating gradually increasing seniority of rank and importance and responsibility, all flickering past in his memory – all tumbling past, like a pack of nearly a hundred cards – that had felt like something triggered, something called up.

  Meeting. The meeting. The meeting in the ship. Lots of little aliens; one other pan-human. Big guy. Or at least important guy. He should know the name of that species too, but he couldn’t remember it.

  He’d been far away for that meeting. In some rarely travelled bit of the sim … no, he’d been in the Real. In the Real again; how about that? He’d been given a re-useable, download-ready body and he’d been physically present at that meeting with the cute little aliens with the big eyes and the single larger pan-human with the hunched look and the attitude.

  Still couldn’t remember the species the guy belonged to. Maybe he’d have better luck with his name. Vister? Peppra? It had been something like that. Important. Top brass in his civilian field. A big wheel. Paprus? Shepris?

  He remembered not being bored at the meeting. It really had been important. In fact, he remembered feeling nervous, excited, energised, feeling that something genuinely momentous was being agreed here, and he was a part of it.

  He’d been beamed into that body, transcripted into it. He might have been transcripted back out again, sent back to where he’d come from, his meeting-attending duties over. He probably had.

  He looked at the big creature hanging beside him, gazing into its staring yellow eyes. “How did I come to be here?” he asked.

  “How did you … get me?”

  “Guff-Fuff-Kuff-Fuff not so smart.”

  He stared at the creature. He closed his eyes, shook his head.

  “No, sorry; didn’t get the first part of that at all.”

  “GFCF not so smart,” the creature said.

  Shaking his head seemed to have helped. Now he could see that the creature had straps and pouches distributed across his golden-grey furred body. Some sort of head-set – thin, metallic, glittering like jewellery – wound round the back of its skull, little armatures seeming to clasp near but not in its ears and eyes and nose and mouth.

  “The GFCF?” Vatueil said. A feeling that was equal parts dread and sadness seemed to settle over him. He struggled not to show it.

  “Protocols in messagery,” Lagoarn-na told him. “Gifts of knowledge, from high to low, not always maximally one-way. That which is given may give back, in time, where time is potentially quite long time. Still less so in cases of knowledge gained by chicanery, thefting. And so, resultingly, to this, and here. Plainly? Plainly: ancient code, buried; consequencing trapdoors therefore. Their ignorance thereof.”

  The GFCF. And the NR. The Nauptre Reliquaria. That was the name of the species Lagoarn-na belonged to. The Nauptre, anyway. The Reliquaria bit usually referred to the machines that had taken over from them while the Nauptre themselves, the biological part of the super-species, prepared – everyone assumed – for Sublimation. That’s what had thrown him: the NR always presented as machines. You never saw the original bio species except in historical, contextual stuff.

  They must have intercepted him. He’d been taken in some handover the GFCF had made of his personality construct, his mind-state, while attempting to transmit his updated, downloaded soul back to the war sim.

  He wondered how bad this was, because it could be very bad. If he hadn’t made it back at all, at least people would know there had been a problem. He might only have been copied, though; maybe an identical copy had got back, and nobody had any suspicions.

  He tried to recall what the latest tech implied; could comms be made completely proof against interception? It kept changing. One time they told you it was impossible to read a signal without it being obvious to whoever it had been sent to, another time they seemed to have changed their minds, and it was possible again; even easy. Trivial, frankly.

  Then it would go back to being impossible, for a while.

  Whatever; he was here when he shouldn’t be, and the NR – or just the N, just the bio Nauptre, though he doubted that – could intercept GFCF comms, because some of the code the GFCF used in their comms protocols had been given by the Nauptre – or stolen from them by the GFCF – and it had come with holes in it, ways the NR or the Nauptre could listen in when they wanted to.

  Not as smart as they thought they were.

  Guff-Fuff-fucking-Kuff-Fuff.

  Shit.

  He wondered why they were bothering to embody him, either in the Real or in a decent sim. But then even when you had all the information, sometimes it could be difficult to find the bit you really wanted. Embodying helped. Especially when you looked upon what you had downloaded as some sort of strange alien.

  That was what he was to them. An alien. An alien they had refashioned from comms-code-information into something at least resembling what resulted from genetic information; a creature of flesh and blood. Him. And now they would want the truth.

  “Meeting,” Lagoarn-na said, with what might have been a smile.

  “GFCF. Pan-hu-man Vipperz. Scheme. War in afterlife. Tsung Disk? Tsung Disk.” The creature nodded.

  Shit; it already knew too much of it. Had he told them that already, inadvertently? What more would they ask? He couldn’t see any obvious torture instruments about the creature’s webbing and pouches, but who knew?

  Please not torture. Why did so much of everything have to come down to pain? We are creatures of pain, creatures of suffering. He had been through this, done this. Not more, please not more.

  “You not to worry,” the creature told him. It gestured encompassingly. “Is one of trillions scarnations,” it told him. “Quantum stuff. In one you bound to tell trute. Maybes this one.”

  The creature tipped its head to one side and Vatueil felt a feeling of utter relief and almost boundless pleasure wash through him. He knew he was being manipulated, but he didn’t care.

  Lagoarn-na didn’t want to hurt him, had no intention of hurting him. The Nauptre had every right to the information he had. All they wanted was the truth.

  The truth. All so simple. Just stick to the truth and it made life so much simpler. Just the one set of facts or assertions to remember. The force of this simple truth – the truth about truth! – hit him like a cannon shell.

  He really was experiencing bliss. This was only just short of sexual.

  “What do you want to know?” he heard himself say, dreamily.

  “Relate meeting,” Lagoarn-na said, and crossed its long, furmembraned arms across its chest, its wide unblinking yellow eyes seeming to stare into his soul.

  “All right,” he heard himself say. He marvelled at how relaxed and unconcerned he sounded. “First let me introduce myself. My name is Vatueil; Gyorni Vatueil, my most recent rank – that I recall – being that of Space Marshal …”

  He had never enjoyed relating anything more. Lagoarn-na proved to be a very good listener.

  Twenty-four

  Atdministrator-Captain Quar-Quoachali, commander of the GFCF Minor Destructor Vessel Fractious Person, took the priority call from Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III in his cabin, as ordered. The Legislator-Admiral was shown sitting at his private desk, a roller keyboard displayed on the surface in front of him. As Quar watched, Bettlescroy snicked a couple of keys into place, then folded his elegant hands under his chin, elbows on desk, leaving the keyboard’s Commit key winking.

  He looked up at Quar, smiled.

  “Sir!” Quar sat as upright in his seat as he could.

  “Quar, good day.”

  “Thank you, sir! To what do I owe the honour?”

  “Quar, we have never real
ly got on, have we?”

  “No, sir! My apologies for that, sir. I have always hoped—”

  “Accepted. Anyway, I thought that we might enter into a new phase in our professional relationship, and to that end I believe I need to divulge to you something of our plans regarding the Culture ship Hylozoist.”

  “Sir, this is an honour, sir!”

  “I’m sure. The thing is, the Hylozoist has just been informed that there are unauthorised ships being constructed in the fabri-caria of the Disk.”

  “I had no idea, sir!”

  “I know you didn’t, Quar. That was deliberate.”

  “Sir?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be blunt, Quar. We need to take action against the Culture ship; disable it at the very least, if not actually destroy it.”

  “Sir? You mean, attack it?”

  “As ever, your perspicacity and tactical awareness astonishes me, Quar. Yes, I mean attack it.”

  “A … Culture ship, sir? Are we sure?”

  “We are perfectly sure, Quar.”

  Quar swallowed, gulped. “Sir,” he said, sitting even more upright in his seat, “I and the other officers aboard the Fractious Person are at your disposal, sir; however I understood the Culture ship was most lately returned to the vicinity of the Disk Initial Contact Facility.”

  “It still is, Quar; we have succeeded in detaining it there with administrational drivel until now, but it is about to depart again, and it is as it departs that we intend to attack it.”

  “Sir! As I say, sir, I and the other officers aboard the Fractious Person are at your disposal. However, we are – as I’m sure sir is aware – stationed with our sister ship the Rubric Of Ruin, on the far side of the Disk from the Facility. It will take—”

  “Of course I’m aware of that, Quar. Unlike you I am not a complete idiot. And I might inform you there is another of our ships in your vicinity, standing some distance off, just beyond your scanner range.”

  “There is, sir?”

  “There is, Quar.”

  “But I thought I was aware of our full fleet disposition, sir.”

  “I know. But there are two GFCF fleets here, Quar, and the ship near you that you didn’t know about is part of the hidden one, our war fleet.”

  “Our war fleet,” Quar repeated.

  “Our war fleet. And when we attack the Culture ship we need to make it look as though somebody else attacked it, not us, and one of the best ways of making that appear plausible is to have one of our own ships attacked – indeed, preferably completely destroyed – at the same time. You see, war means sacrifice, some-times, Quar; that’s just the way it is, I’m afraid. We need to destroy one of our own ships.”

  “We do, sir?”

  “We do, Quar.”

  “The … the Rubric Of Ruin, sir?”

  “No, not the Rubric Of Ruin, Quar. But close.”

  “Sir?”

  “Goodbye, Quar; this pleases me much more than it will hurt you.” Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III unclasped his hands and brought one dainty, exquisitely manicured finger down onto the winking Commit key.

  Administrator-Captain Quar-Quoachali was very briefly aware of an extremely bright light shining from all around him, and a sensation of great warmth.

  The broad, sleek aircraft dived, side-slipped one way then the other before roaring over a broad, shallow river, making animals on the river bank and fish in the shallows between the gravel beds all scatter. The flier settled into a ground-hugging, low-altitude cruise, only metres above the tops of the trees on the trackway, which stretched all the ninety kilometres from here, the borders of the Espersium estate, to the great torus-shaped mansion house at its centre.

  The trackway cast a long, thick shadow over the rolling pasture land to one side and the treetops were lit by a ruddy sun rising through layers of misty cloud above the horizon.

  Veppers sat in one of the hunting seats in the back of the craft, looking out through the invisible barrier at the late autumn sunrise. Some high towers in Ubruater were reflecting the first direct light of the day, winking pinkly.

  He looked at the laser rifle, which was lying, switched on but still stowed in front of him. He was alone in the shooting gallery; he didn’t want anybody else around him right now. Even Jasken was inside with the rest of the entourage, in the main passenger compartment. Some large bird was startled out of the canopy beneath in a chaos of twigs and feathers and Veppers went to grasp the laser rifle on its stand, then just let his hand drop again as the bird flapped frantically away.

  It was a bad sign, he knew, when he lost his appetite for hunting. Well, shooting. You could hardly dignify it with the term hunting. It was an affectation, he felt now. Using a low-flying aircraft to throw up birds to shoot at. Still, it had been a useful affectation. He’d needed this excuse. He’d needed the trackways to be there. He felt heavy as the flier zoomed to follow the slope of a hill.

  All about to end, now. Still, he’d always known it might have to end, one day.

  He watched the landscape unwind behind the aircraft; and felt it, too, experiencing something close to weightlessness as the flier crested the hill and then followed the down-slope. Then he was heavy again, as they levelled out. The hill had hidden any sight of Ubruater, and the sunrise had been removed by a ridge to the east.

  Veppers felt tired, unsettled. Maybe he just needed a fuck. He remembered Sapultride’s girl, Crederre, straddling him, bucking enthusiastically up and down, in this very seat, only – what, ten or eleven days earlier? Pleur, maybe? Or one of the other girls? Or just get a couple of them to fuck each other, in front of him. That could be oddly calming.

  But he felt somehow impatient with the whole idea of sex right now. That was a bad sign too.

  Maybe just a massage; he could call Herrit through, get him to pummel and smooth his tensions and worries away. Except he knew that wouldn’t work either. He thought about consulting Scefron, his Substance Use Mediator. No, not drugs either. Holy fuck, he really was out of sorts today. Was there nothing?

  Nothing except all this being over, he guessed. This was nerves. He was the richest, most powerful man in the entire fucking civil-isation, way more monied and influential than anybody had ever been, ever, by orders of magnitude, but he was still suffering from nerves. Because what he was involved in now might make him much, much wealthier and more powerful than even he had ever been, or – just possibly – finish him, kill him, pauperise him, disgrace him.

  He had always been like this before a big deal, when things were reaching a point of culmination. Been a while, though.

  This was crazy. What was he doing, risking everything? You never risked everything; you risked as little as possible. You sold the idea of risking everything to the sort of idiot who thought that was how you got rich, but you kept your own risks to an absolute minimum. That way if you did make a mistake – and everybody made mistakes, or they weren’t really trying – it didn‘t finish you. Let others ruin themselves – there were always rich pickings in the wreckage – but don’t ever risk too much yourself.

  Except now he was.

  Well, he sort of had before, he supposed; the space mirror deal he’d gone into along with Grautze could have bankrupted him and the whole family if it had unravelled at the wrong time. That was why he’d had to set Grautze up, so that if it did go badly Grautze and his family would catch the blame and the shame, not he and his.

  Originally he hadn’t even meant for Grautze to suffer if it did go well, but then he’d realised that the same mechanisms he’d set up to protect himself if it went sour could equally easily double his payoff if all went according to plan, so that he would come out of it with all the money, all the shares, all the companies and instruments and power. It had just been too good a trick to resist. Grautze should have seen it, but he hadn’t. Too trusting. Too gullible. Too blinded by loyalties he thought were shared, or at least mutual. Mug.

  Poor fucker’s daughter had been m
ore properly ruthless than her father had been. Veppers stroked his nose; the tip was almost grown back now, though it was still a little thin and red-looking and tender to the touch. He could still feel the little bitch’s teeth closing round it, biting. It made him shiver. He hadn’t been back to the opera house since. He’d need to get back, appear fully in public again, before it became some sort of ridiculous phobia. As soon as his nose was fully healed.

  The deal would complete, all would go well and he’d end up with even more than he already had. Because he was who he was. A winner. The fucking winner. It had always worked out in the past; it would work out this time. Okay, so the war fleet had been discovered a few days early; that wasn’t such a disaster. And he’d been right still to stall. He hadn’t told Bettlescroy’s message boy where to attack yet. And he wouldn’t; not until the ships were genuinely ready to go. And they would be ready. They were too close to completion for anybody to stop them now. The Culture mission in the Disk was being dealt with and apparently even the incoming Culture warship could be taken on and neutralised. He just hoped the GFCF knew what the fuck they were doing. But then they probably felt the same way about him.

  So don’t worry, don’t panic and just keep your fucking head. Get everything ready at this end and have the courage to see it through to the end, no matter what the cost. Cost didn’t matter if you could afford it and the reward was going to be inestimably greater.