The coup de grâce was Veppers’ head twisting right round, an almost comical expression filling his already blood-flecked face as the tattoo lines flicked into a spiral, rose up and shrank inwards all at once, so that his head seemed to crumple and shrink into itself, becoming a far-too-thin tall cylinder that disappeared in a spray of blood.
Lededje had to look away. She heard what sounded like a whole big bowl full of rotten fruit being emptied onto the ground, then heard and felt the body thump into the grass beside her a moment later. She opened her eyes to see it twitch a couple of times, blood still pumping from the garrotted, twisted-open neck.
She felt she was going to faint. She put both arms out behind her. “Neat trick,” she said, watching arcs of flame and little sprays of fire burst from the miniature docks and the sheds where the model battleships were kept, as they burned and blew up, shells and rockets whizzing everywhere.
“It moved over from you to him when you tried to strangle the fucker in ambassador Huen’s office,” Demeisen told her, going over to kick the body once, as though testing it was real. “Left you with nothing but a glorified sun tan.”
She coughed again, looked around at the sheer lunatic devastation going on all around them.
“Other ships,” she said. “Soon. Need to—”
“No, we don’t,” Demeisen said, stretching and yawning. “No second wave. None left.” He stooped, plucking the knife out of the leg of the headless body, which had stopped twitching now. “Left the last handful for the planetary defence guys, to give them something to feel heroic about,” he told her as he inspected the knife, weighing it in his hand, twirling it a couple of times. A furious whizzing noise, barely following a flash of light, was a shell from one of the stricken, fire-consumed battleships; the avatar’s arm moved blurringly fast and he batted it away from his face without even looking, still admiring the knife. The fizzing shell slapped into the nearest reed bed and blew up in a tall fountain of water, orange-tinged white on grubby black. “I did think of letting just one through, or even stomping the relevant targets myself, just for the heck of it,” Demeisen said, “and pretending. But in the end I thought not; better to leave more of the evidence on the ground. Plus some of the Hells have only gone dormant, still storing personalities. Might be able to save some, if there’s anything sane left to save.”
The avatar held one arm straight out and the tattoo – glinting, pristine – uncurled itself from Veppers’ body, spiralling lazily up into the air like a twister-wind in a stubble field and wrapping itself round the avatar’s hand like spun mercury, disappearing as it flowed over his skin and up his arm.
“Was that thing alive all the time?” she asked.
“Yup. Not just alive; intelligent. So fucking smart it’s even got a name.”
She held up one hand while he was drawing his next breath. “I’m sure it has,” she said. “But … spare me.”
Demeisen grinned. “Slap-drone, personal protection, weapon; all of the above,” he said, stretching again, as though the tattoo had spread itself all over him and he was testing how it fitted his body.
He looked down at her.
“You ready to go back? If you’re coming back?”
She sat, arms out behind her, blood in one eye, aching everywhere, feeling like shit. She nodded. “I suppose.”
“Want this?” offering her the knife handle first.
“Better,” she said, taking it, then struggling to her feet, helped by his other hand. “Family heirloom.” She looked at the avatar, frowning. “There were two,” she said.
He shook his head, tsked, stooped and pulled the other knife from where it had stuck in the ground. He took the double sheath from Veppers’ jacket, presenting it and both blades to her with a bow.
A scale-model battleship, still tied-up to its quayside, on fire from stem to stern, lifted suddenly in the middle, breaking its back as it blew up, dispensing fire and flames, debris and shrapnel and angrily buzzing and whining shells and rockets all about. The first, keel-sundering gout of fire briefly lit up two silvery ovoids stood on their ends on a small low island nearby, before they vanished, almost as quickly as they had appeared.
Dramatis Personae
Ambassador Huen jumped before she was pushed, as was trad itional. Even the very limited amount of interfering she’d suggested and sanctioned was somewhat more than was strictly allowable in the circumstances. She resigned her post, went home, spent the next few years raising her son and the following couple of centuries not regretting what she’d done at all.
The Abominator-class picket ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints manifested at the Board Of Inquiry Into The Recent Events Around The Sichultian Enablement as a fabulously tattooed limping albino dwarf with a speech impediment and double incontinence. Quickly cleared of all but the most allow-able and – for an Abominator-class – expected malfeasance, it returned to its usual stand-by task of punctuated loneliness, sitting, generally in the middle of cold nowhere, waiting for stuff to happen and trying not to be too disappointed when nothing did.
It received from its fellow Abominator-class and other SC ships precisely the sort of congratulations and plaudits it might have expected for its actions around Tsung and Quyn; all deeply tinged with envy. It treasured them almost as much as the exquisitely rendered recordings of the engagements.
It spent quite a lot of time in or around the larger classes of GSVs, just for the company. Its avatar Demeisen continued to behave appallingly.
Joiler Veppers’ reputation survived more or less intact for a few weeks, but then as the weeks became months and the months years, it all fell apart as stories of his cruelty, greed and selfish-ness, and the extent of his callousness towards his own people and even his own planet, became clear. It was over a decade before the first revisionist right-wing historian attempted to restore his reputation, and even then to no lasting effect.
Yime Nsokyi really had been an SC plant, deep within Quietus, for all that time, even if, in a sense, she hadn’t known it herself after she’d both agreed to be so and then consented to have the memory of that agreement deleted. In any event, given that even in one of the most successful Specialist Agencies-led interventions in recent centuries she had been largely relegated to a supporting role, she resigned from the Quietudinal Service. More in frustration than disgust, but she resigned all the same.
She returned to her adopted home Orbital and began a successful political career, starting with the position of emergency drill supervisor on her home Plate and eventually becoming the representative for the entire Orbital. As with all hierarchic positions within the Culture it was almost entirely an honorary, figurehead role, but she found the achievement highly satisfying all the same.
Her personal life ended up consisting of a sort of cycle of being neuter, female and male in turn, each for a decade or so. She found that she was able to establish tender, meaningful relationships – with an agreeable physical component when she was not neuter – at every stage, but would have been the first to admit that real passion and true love, if there was such a thing, always eluded her.
The ex-Limited Offensive Unit Me, I’m Counting returned briefly to the Forgotten GSV Total Internal Reflection, then resumed a life of galactic tramping. It found new hobbies.
Hibin Jasken served some time in prison for his complicity in a few of his late master’s better-publicised crimes, though his efforts to pick up survivors from the firestorm around the Espersium mansion and his full cooperation with the authorities helped reduce his final sentence.
On his release he became a security consultant and successful businessman, living relatively modestly and contributing most of what he earned to charitable causes, especially those concerned with orphaned and disadvantaged children. He was instrumental in the Wheel Halo VII being turned into a mobile holiday home for the dependants of the bankrupt and destitute, and was an ardent supporter of the moves, eventually successful, to end the practice of Indented Intagl
iation.
The GCU Bodhisattva, its Mind re-housed in a new-build Escarpment class, remained attached to the Quietus section but subsequently spent a lot of time investigating – very carefully – Fallen and Unfallen Bulbitians, thinking to present a paper on the entities at some point in the future.
Auppi Unstril was reunited with a revented, slightly changed Lanyares Tersetier. It didn’t last long.
Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III came very close indeed to abject denunciation, demotion and utter ruin – both personal and familial – as the GFCF tried to decide whether all that had transpired regarding events within the Sichultian Enablement in general and the Tsungarial Disk in particular had been basically a thorough-going and unmitigated catastrophe or a sort of subtle triumph.
On the one hand the GFCF had lost influence and credibility, the Culture didn’t want to be their friend any more, they had been humiliated in an unexpectedly and appallingly one-sided naval encounter, they’d had to hand back the supervisory role in the Disk – to the Culture, of all people – and they had been informed in no uncertain terms by the NR that a close eye was going to be kept on them in future.
On the other hand it could have been worse. And arguably one way of making it worse would be to admit just how badly things had actually gone.
Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III was duly promoted to Prime Legislator-Grand-Admiral-of-the-Combined-Fleets and presented with several terribly impressive medals. He was put in charge of finding new ways to impress, reassure and – ultimately – imitate the Culture.
Chayeleze Hifornsdaughter, saved from Hell and torment after many subjective decades and the best part of two lifetimes, found herself rescued from the dormant remains of one of the Hells that had existed beneath the trackways of the Espersium estate on Sichult and placed into a Temporary Recuperative Afterlife in a substrate on her home planet of Pavul. She met Prin twice thereafter: the first time when he came to see her during her convalescence, and once much later.
She had discovered that she had no desire to come back to the Real. She had become whatever the Virtual equivalent of institutionalised was, and there could be no returning. Another Chay already lived in the Real who had never been through all that she had, and in many ways that person was the real Chay; she herself had become something entirely different. She still felt something for Prin, and wished him well, but she had no need to be part of his life. Prin eventually established a happy, lasting relationship with Representative Filhyn and Chay was glad that he was content.
By then she’d found her new role. She would remain a creature of ending and release in the Virtual; the angel of death who came for people who lived in happy, congenial Afterlives and who – tired even of their many lifetimes lived after biological death – were ready to dissolve themselves into the generality of consciousness that underlay Heaven, or who were ready simply to cease to be altogether.
That was when she met Prin for the second time, subjective centuries later.
They barely recognised one another.
Surprisingly quickly, given the bizarre and volatile variety of peoples, beings and endemic moralities involved, the culture of Hells – already irredeemably reduced following the events on Sichult and the testimony of people like Prin – became something of an anathema pretty much throughout the civilised galaxy, and indeed within a single average bio-generation their very absence became accepted almost without question as part of what constituted being civilised in the first place.
This made the Culture very happy.
Lededje Y’breq – Quyn-Sichultsa Lededje Samwaf Y’breq d’Espersium, to give her the Full Name she assumed on becoming a properly established Culture citizen – took up residence first on the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, on what was in effect an extended cruise to see the galaxy, then, twenty years later, settled on the Orbital called Hursklip where, in her middle-to-old age, she built, largely by hand, a full-size replica of the battleship grounds that she had known as the water maze, complete with working miniature battleships. They could be human-powered, but each incorporated a well-armoured survival pod which kept their occupant safe no matter what. The feature became an enduring tourist attraction.
She never did return to Sichult, or meet Jasken again, though he tried to get in touch.
She had five children by as many different fathers and ended up with over thirty great-great-great-grandchildren, which by Culture standards was almost disgraceful.
Epilogue
Vatueil, revented once more and back to using what he liked to think of as his original name – even though it wasn’t – sipped his aperitif on the restaurant terrace. He watched the sun set across the dark lake and listened to the crick and chirp of insects hidden in the bushes and vines nearby.
He checked the time. She was late, as usual. What was it about poets?
What a long, terrible war that had been, he thought, idly.
He really had been a traitor, of course. He’d been planted in the anti-Hell side long ago by those who wished to see the Hells continue for ever, a cause he’d supported at the time partly out of sheer contrarianism and partly out of that despair he felt some-times, periodically – during this long, long life – at the sheer self-hurtful idiocy and destructiveness of so many types of sentient life, especially the meta-type known as pan-human, to which he had always had the dubious honour of belonging. You want suffering, pain and horror? I’ll give you suffering, pain and horror …
But then, over time, fighting away, again and again, yet again, he’d changed his mind. Cruelty and the urge to dominate and oppress started to seem childish and pathetic once more, the way he’d accepted they were, long ago, but had somehow turned away from in the meantime.
So he’d spilled all the beans, implicated all those he knew about who deserved to be implicated, and had been quite pleased to see so much of what he had pledged to fight for crumble away into disgraced and piecemeal nothing. Hell mend them.
There would be people who would never forgive him for betraying them, but that was just too bad. They ought to have guessed, of course, but people never did.
That was the thing about traitors: they were people who’d already changed their minds at least once.
He made a mental note never again to insist on working his way up through the ranks He’d finally convinced himself he’d learned all the relevant lessons already, probably many times over, and the process was starting to smack too much of outright masochism.
The sun brightened slowly as it settled against the horizon, subsiding beneath a long sinuous line of intervening cloud to blaze through a channel of clear air with a languid, dying glory, hazy orange-red against a thin yellow arc of sky. He watched the star’s disk as it started to fall behind a line of dark, distant hills, far across the plains. Closer to him, fringed by its still hush of trees, the lake had gone dark as ink.
He drank in the sunlight’s slow dwindling.
From the first glint of dawn, and for the rest of the day, the sun was too bright to look at, he thought; you could only gaze steadily upon it, only truly see it, regard it, inspect and properly admire it, when it was at its most filtered – half hidden by the thickness of the atmosphere, with its cargo of the day’s dust – and just about to slip away altogether. He must have experienced this on a hundred planets, but was only really noticing it now.
He wondered if this counted as a poetic insight. Probably not. Or if it did it had already occurred to countless poets. Still, he’d mention it to her when she arrived. Likely, she’d snort, though it would depend or her mood; instead she might assume that wry, amused expression that told him he was impinging, clumsily if charmingly, upon her territory. Tiny crinkles of skin formed under her eyes when she had that look. It would be worth it for that alone.
He heard steps. The maître d’ crossed the terrace, arrived at his side, bowed fractionally and clicked his heels.
“Your table is ready, Mr. Zakalwe.”
Iain M. Banks, Surface Detail
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