Surface Detail

Eleven

“Auer. Lovely to see you. Radiant as ever. And Fuleow; this gorgeous creature still putting up with you?”

“So far, Veppers. Got your eye on her yourself, have you?”

“Never taken it off, you know that, Fuleow.” Veppers clapped the other man’s stout shoulder and winked at his slender wife.

“Oh, your poor nose!” Auer said, pushing back locks of soot-black hair to display glittering earrings.

“Poor? Nonsense; never richer.” Veppers flicked one finger against the new cover over his nose, which was still slowly growing back underneath. “This is pure gold!” He smiled, turned away. “Sapultride! Good to see you; glad you could make it.”

“What’s it look like, under there?” Sapultride asked, nodding at Veppers’ nose. He pulled down his sunglasses, revealing small green eyes above his own thin, expensively sculpted nose. “I was studying medicine before I was lassoed back into the family firm,” he said. “I could take a look. Wouldn’t be shocked.”

“My dear Sapultride, it looks great under this. Face facts; I look better mutilated than most men do at their very best, whole and hearty after a long day in the grooming salon.”

“Jasken,” Sapultride’s wife Jeussere said to the man standing behind Veppers, one arm in a cast and a sling, “did you really do this to our dear, lovely Veppers?”

“I regret to say so, ma’am,” Jasken said, bowing gently to the slim, exquisitely dressed and manicured woman. He pushed his slung arm out a little. “Mr. Veppers more than had his revenge though. What a blow he—!”

“His revenge?” Jeussere said, a tiny frown spoiling her otherwise quite perfect face. “The story I heard was that he struck first.”

“He did, ma’am,” Jasken said, aware that Veppers was watching him. “It was only his shock at having hit me so sharply, and his natural urge to stop, putting up his sword and inquiring to make sure that he had not injured me too severely, that allowed me the opportunity to deliver my own blow, the one that — more by luck than skill — so assaulted Mr. Veppers’ nose.”

Jeussere smiled conspiratorially. “You are too modest, Jasken.”

“Not so, ma’am.”

“What, you weren’t wearing masks?” Sapultride asked.

Veppers snorted. “Masks are for weaklings, aren’t they, Jasken?”

“Perhaps, sir. Or for those of us who have such a lack of looks that we can’t afford to lose even a little of them. Unlike your good self.”

Veppers smiled.

“My, Veppers,” Jeussere said slyly, “do you have all your servants flatter you so?”

“Absolutely not. I work to prevent it,” Veppers told her. “But the truth will out.”

Jeussere laughed delicately. “You’re lucky he didn’t run you through, Jasken,” she told him, her eyes wide. She slipped her arm through her husband’s. “Sappy here beat Joiler at some sport at school and he near throttled him, didn’t he, dear?”

“Ha! He tried,” Sapultride said, running a finger round his collar.

“Nonsense,” Veppers said, turning to somebody else. “Raunt! You ancient withered old rogue! That committee still hasn’t jailed you yet? Who’ve you had to bribe?”

“Nobody that you haven’t already got to, Veppers.”

“And Hilfe; still an accessory?”

“More of a bauble, Joiler.” The woman, much younger than her husband, though still in expensively well-preserved middle-age, coolly regarded his nose. “Well now, dear me. Think you’ll still be able to sniff out trouble?”

“Better than ever,” he told her.

“I’m sure. Anyway, good to see you back in the land of the sociable.” She held one hand out to be kissed. “Can’t have you hiding away; what shall we all do for fun?”

“You tell him. He spends too much time away on business trips,” Jeussere contributed, leaning in.

“My only aim is to keep your good selves entertained,” Veppers told the two women. “Ah, Peschl, we’ll have a word later, yes?”

“Certainly, Joiler.”

Jasken put one finger to an ear bud. “The boats are ready, sir.”

“They are? Good.” He looked round the other people in the slim barge. He clapped his hands, stopping most of the other conversations in the open vessel. “Let’s enjoy the fun, shall we?”

He raised his hands above his head, clapped them again, loudly. “Listen!” he hollered, attracting the attention of people in the other two barges behind. “Your attention please! Place your bets, choose your favourites! Our game begins!”

There was some cheering. He took his place in the seat — raised just a little higher than the rest — in the bows of the slim craft.

Astil, Veppers’ butler, saw to his master’s needs while other servants moved down the central aisles of the barges, dispensing drinks. Above the seated VIPs, sun canopies rippled in the breeze. In the distance, over tree-dotted pastureland, the serried neatness of the kitchen orchards and the formal gardens of the estate, the turrets and ornamental battlements of the mansion house of Espersium were visible.

Some birds flew up from the network of small lakes, ponds and channels beneath.

The great torus-shaped mansion of Espersium sat near the centre of the estate of the same name. Espersium was easily the largest private estate in the world. Had it been a country its land area would have ranked it as the fifty-fourth largest out of the sixty-five states that still had some administrative significance in the unified world that was Sichult.

It was the centre of, and central to, the Veppers family fortune in more than merely symbolic ways. The original source of the family’s vast wealth had been computer and screen games, followed by increasingly immersive and convincing Virtual Reality experiences, sims, games, proactive fictions and multiply-shared adventures, as well as further games of every sort and every level of intricacy, from those given away as free samples on smart-paper food wrappers, through those playable on devices as small as watches or jewellery, all the way to those which demanded either total bodily immersion in semi-liquid processor goo or the more simple — but even more radical — soft-to-hard-wiring of biological brain to computational substrate.

The house had long been ringed with comms domes, kept just out of sight of the house itself but linking it — and the buried masses of computer substrate it sat on — via satellites and system-edge relay-stations to further distant processor cores and servers all over the hundreds of planets that made up Enablement space and even beyond, to similar — if as a rule not quite so developed — civilisations that, with surprisingly little translation and alteration, found the games of the Veprine Corporation just as enjoyable and fascinating as Sichultians themselves had.

Still zealously guarding their original code, many of those games effectively reported back, eventually — via all those intervening arrays, servers, processors and substrates — to the still potent seat of power that was Espersium. From the estate house itself whole worlds and systems could be rewarded or punished according to how assiduously the local law-enforcement agencies applied anti-piracy legislation, billions of users could be granted access to the latest upgrades, tweaks and bonus levels, and lucrative personal on-line and in-game behaviour, preference and predilection data could be either used by the Veprine Corporation itself or sold on to other interested parties, either of a governmental or commercial nature.

Word had it that this sort of micro-managed operationality was no longer quite so centrally controlled, and the house had ceased to be the place that all versions of all games came to to get their latest updates — certainly there were fewer obvious satellite domes and programming geeks about the place than in the old days — but it was still much more than just a fancy country house.

The birds disturbed from the network of waterways beneath the barges wheeled in the sky, calling plaintively.

The little convoy of barges moved along a network of aqueducts poised above the watery landscape below. A couple of dozen skinny stone towers anchored the supporting stonework of delicate arches and flying buttresses which held the airborne canals aloft. At each of the towers the viaducts broadened out into circular basins collaring the slim spires and allowing the barges — individually, or joined as a tiny fleet — to change direction onto other channels. Half a dozen thicker towers held lifts within them and had quaysides where people could embark and disembark from the barges. The viaducts were only a couple of metres wide, with thin stone walls and no walkways alongside, so that one could look almost straight down.

Twenty metres beneath, in the channels, pools and lakes below, a dozen miniature battleships were just setting out from their individual start positions.

Each warship was the length of a large single-person canoe and had been designed to resemble a capital ship from the age when armour plate and large-calibre guns had ruled the seas of Sichult. Each ship contained a man, who powered his vessel by pedalling — turning a single propeller at the stern — steered it with a tiller attached to a bracket round his waist, and used his hands to aim and fire the three or four gun turrets his ship carried, each equipped with two or three guns.

Where the bridge would have been on the superstructure of the full-size vessels there was a series of slits, very like those in an ancient armoured helmet from the days of swords, lances and arrows. These provided the only way for the man inside the vessel to see out. Gun aiming was accomplished by nothing more sophisticated than dead reckoning and skill, the crewman of the miniature warship traversing the turrets and elevating their guns by way of a set of wheels and levers contained within his cramped compartment. Each ship also came equipped with a set of miniature torpedoes and a system of lights — the searchlights of the original ships — that let the vessels communicate with each other, to form temporary alliances and swap information.

Pennants flew from their masts, identifying who commanded them. The crewmen were far more highly trained than mere jockeys, Veppers contended. He had piloted the ships himself quite often, from when he had first come up with the idea, and still held the occasional amateurs-only battle for himself and similarly rich and competitive friends, but the truth was there was a great deal of skill involved; more than it was worth acquiring for a mere pastime.

These days the amateur versions of the ships were fitted with engines, which made life a little easier, but it was still taxing enough just manoeuvring the damned things without running aground or crashing into the banks of the channels, never mind the surprisingly difficult task of aiming the guns accurately. The amateur versions had better armour and less powerful weapons than the ships they were watching now.

Two ships caught a brief glimpse of each other from either end of a long channel connecting pools close to their start positions; disappearing from view again, they each elevated and fired their guns towards where they thought the other would shortly be, more in hope than with any expectation of a hit. Both sets of shells landed scattered amongst the low grassy hills of islands, in miniature reed beds and in the channels, raising skinny spouts of water. Neither part of either salvo landed closer than a ship length from its intended target.

“Something of a waste,” Veppers muttered, watching through a pair of field glasses.

“Are the bullets terribly expensive?” Jeussere asked.

Veppers smiled. “No, I mean, they only have so many.”

“Do they load the guns themselves?” Fuleow asked.

“No, automatic,” Veppers said.

The ships’ main weapons were almost more like grenade launchers than true guns; certainly they had nothing like the range they should have had, had that too been scaled proportionately. The little shells they fired fizzed and left a trail of smoke as they curved out across the waters, but they were explosive and could do real damage, piercing the armour of a ship and starting a fire within, or — hitting near the waterline — holing them so that they started to sink, or disabling turrets or the rudder or prop if they hit the right place.

A handful of pilots had been killed over the years, either struck by lucky shots that squeezed through the viewing slits, or drowning when their vessel turned over and the damage they had sustained had made it impossible to work the escape hatches, or choking or burned to death. Usually you could put out a fire by scuttling your ship — the channels, pools and most of the single large lake were generally little more than half a metre deep, so the command citadel, where the pilot’s head was, would still be just above water even when the ship was sitting on the bottom — but valves jammed, or men were knocked unconscious, and accidents happened. There were rescue teams of helpers and divers standing by, but they were not infallible. Twice, ships had blown up completely, the contents of their magazines detonating all at once. Most spectacular, though on one occasion fragments of wreckage had flown far enough to threaten the spectators, which had been worrying.

The pilots — all part of Veppers’ general staff, with other, part-time duties — were well paid, especially if they won their battles, and the risk of real injury and even death made the sport more interesting for the spectators.

Today’s match was a team game: two ships to a side, the winning team being whoever was first to sink four of their opponents. The first thing the six sets of ships had to do was find each other; each ship started individually from one of the dozen floating boat-houses scattered round the perimeter of the watery complex at any of several dozen randomly chosen locations.

The miniature naval battle itself — ship against ship or fleet against fleet, guns flashing and roaring, smoke drifting, shots landing, pieces getting blown off the ships, fountains of water bursting into the air when a torpedo hit — was only part of the delight of watching, Veppers found. Much of the enjoyment came from having this god-like overview of the whole battle arena and being able to see what the men in the ships couldn’t see.

Most of the islands and the channel banks were too high to see over when you were sitting in one of the miniature battleships; however, from the network of aqueducts above, pretty much every part of the watery maze could be seen. It could be almost unbearably exciting to see ships converging on the same pool from different directions, or to watch a damaged vessel, limping home and nearly there, being caught by another ship lying in wait for it.

“You should have smoke, you know, Veppers,” Fuleow told him as they all watched the ships cruise down the channels leading away from their starting points. They went at different speeds, some favouring high speed to get to some tactically important pool or junction before anybody else, some favouring a more stealthy approach; where the geography allowed, you could learn a lot by causing few waves yourself but watching for signs of the wakes of others as you passed side channels. “You know; from their funnels. That would make it look more realistic, don’t you think?”

“Smoke,” Veppers said, raising the pair of binoculars to his eyes. “Yes. Sometimes we have smoke, and they can put down smoke-screens.” He lowered the glasses, smiled at Fuleow, who had not been to one of these displays before. “Makes it hard to see from up here though, that’s the trouble.”

Fuleow nodded. “Ah, of course.”

“Don’t you think you ought to have pretty little bridges linking all the islands?” Auer asked.

Veppers looked at her. “Pretty little bridges?”

“Between the islands,” she said. “Little arched bridges; you know, bowed. It would look so much prettier.”

“Little too unrealistic,” Veppers informed her, smiling insincerely. “Also, they’d get in the way of the shells; too many ricochets. There are wading routes between the islands for when the staff need to access them; sort of submerged paths.”

“Ah, I see. Just a thought.”

Veppers went back to watching his own two ships. They had been started far enough apart for it all to look convincingly random, though a quiet word had been had to let the two pilots know where the other was starting out from, so they were beginning with a slight advantage over the other five teams. Their pennants were silver and blue, the Veppers’ family colours.

One of his ships chanced upon one of the Red team, powering down a channel forming the stem of a T-junction just as the other vessel was crossing ahead, allowing it to loose a salvo from its A and B turrets. Veppers always favoured ships with two forward-facing turrets and one rear-facing; it seemed more attacking, more adventurous. It also meant that a broadside consisted of nine shells rather than eight.

It was the first proper engagement of the afternoon. Cheers rang out as the targeted ship rocked to one side under the fusillade; bits of superstructure spun off the vessel as it lost its signalling lights. Two dark holes appeared near the waterline at mid-ships. Veppers ordered a round of celebratory cocktails for all. Arriving at the next tower, with its encircling girdle of water and choice of three different viaducts to take, the three barges split up and went their separate ways.

Veppers was in control of the first barge, steering it with pedals at his feet and ignoring the pleas of his passengers to watch the ships they’d placed bets on so that he could watch the progress of his own vessels.

There was a roar and some lady-like screams from some distance away as another two ships met side-on just beneath, but even closer than in the first engagement; one rammed the other, forcing it sideways onto a sandbank through the attacking vessel’s momentum and trapping it there, firing point-blank into its super-structure; shells whizzed away, ricocheting.

The grounded vessel brought all four twin-gun turrets to bear and let off a broadside that blasted into the other ship’s command citadel, where the torso, shoulders and head of the opposing pilot would be. Veppers, watching through his binoculars, made a whistling noise.

“That looks like it could well hurt!” Raunt said.

“The poor man’s just inside there!” Auer said.

“They sit in an armoured tub,” Veppers told her. “And they wear flak vests. Yes, Jasken?” he said as the other man leaned in towards him, Enhancing Oculenses glittering in the sunlight.

“The house, sir,” Jasken said quietly, nodding.

Veppers frowned, wondering what he was talking about. He looked towards the distant mansion and saw a small dark arrow-head shape lowering itself towards the central courtyard. He brought the binoculars up in time to see the familiar alien craft disappearing behind the stonework. He put the field glasses down.

“Fuck,” he said. “Chooses his moments.”

“Shall I ask him to wait?” Jasken said, his mouth very close to Veppers’ ear.

“No. I want the news, good or bad. Call Sulbazghi, get him to come too.” He looked behind. They were a lot closer to the tower to their rear than the one ahead. They’d disembark there. He put the barge into full astern. “Sorry ladies, gentlemen,” he shouted, over questions and protests. “Duty calls. I must go, but I shall return. To collect my winnings, I imagine. Sapultride, you’re captain.”

“Splendid! Do I get a special hat?”

“So, have we decided exactly what it is?” Veppers asked. He, Jasken, Dr. Sulbazghi and Xingre, the Jhlupian, were in the shielded, windowless drawing room in the sub-basement of the Espersium mansion which Veppers used for especially secret meetings or delicate negotiations.

Somewhat to Veppers’ surprise, it was Xingre, the usually reticent Jhlupian, who spoke, the translation filtering from the silvery cushion the alien sat upon, voice pitched to the scratchy, tinkly tones it favoured. “I believe it to be consistent with an inter-membranial full-spectrum cranial-event/state germinatory processor matrix with singular condensate-collapse indefinite-distance signalling ability, Level Eight (Player) in manufacture, bilateral carboniform pan-human sub-design.”

Veppers stared at the twelve-limbed creature. Its three stalk eyes stared back. One dipped down, let itself be cleaned and wetted by its mouth parts, then flipped jauntily upright again. The alien had returned with the thing that had been in the girl’s head, the thing that might or might not be a neural lace. Xingre had had its own techs analyse the device using Jhlupian technology.

If Veppers was being honest with himself he would have to admit that over the handful of days that the device had been with the Jhlupians he had quite happily let thoughts of the thing and its implications slip from his mind. Jasken had been unable to establish any more useful facts about it beyond what they already knew and on the couple of occasions they had talked about it they had largely convinced themselves that it must be a fake, or just something else, maybe alien, maybe not, that had somehow found its way into the furnace.

The alien extended one bright green limb towards Sulbazghi, giving him the device back inside a little transparent cylinder. The doctor looked at Veppers, who nodded. Sulbazghi poured the shimmering, blue-grey thing into his palm.

“My dear Xingre,” Veppers said after a moment, with a tolerant smile. “I think I understood every single word you said there, but, sadly, only as single words. Put together like that they made no sense at all. What are you talking about?” He looked at Jasken, who was frowning mightily.

“I told you,” the alien said. “Probably it is what remains of an inter-membranial full-spectrum cranial-event/state germinatory—”

“Yes, yes,” Veppers said. “As I say, I heard the words.”

“Let me translate,” said Sulbazghi. “It’s a Culture neural lace.”

“You’re sure, this time?” Jasken asked, looking from the doctor to the alien.

“Certainly Level Eight (Player) in manufacture,” Xingre said.

“But who put it in her?” Veppers asked. “Definitely not the clinicians?”

Sulbazghi shook his head. “Definitely not.”

“Agreed,” the Jhlupian said. “Not.”

“Then who? What? Who could have?”

“Nobody else that we know of,” Sulbazghi said.

“Level Eight (Player) manufacture is absolutely certain,” Xingre said. “Level Eight (Player) so-called ‘Culture’ manufacture likely to ratio of one hundred and forty-three out of one hundred and forty-four in total.”

“Almost certainly, in other words,” the doctor said. “I suspected it was from the start. It’s Culture.”

“Only to ratio of one hundred and forty-three out of one hundred and forty-four chances,” Xingre pointed out again. “Additionally, device implantation might have occurred at any time from immediately subsequent to birth event to within last two local years approximately but not closer to present. Probably. Also; only remains of. Very most fine cilia-like twiggings likely burned off in furnace.”

“But the kicker,” Sulbazghi said, “is in the one-time signalling capacity.”

Xingre bounced once on its silvery cushion, the Jhlupian equivalent of a nod. “Singular condensate-collapse bi-event indefinite-distance signalling ability,” it said. “Used.”

“Signalling?” Veppers said. He wasn’t sure if he was simply being slow here or if a deep part of him just didn’t want to know what might be the truth. He already had the feeling he usually got before people delivered particularly bad news. “It didn’t signal her…?” He heard his own voice trail off as he looked again at the tiny, nearly weightless thing that lay in his palm.

“Mind-state,” Jasken said. “It might have signalled her mindstate, her soul, to somewhere else. Somewhere in the Culture.”

“Malfunction rate of said process betrays ratio of equal to or higher than four out of one hundred and forty-four in total,” Xingre said.

“And that really is possible?” Veppers asked, looking at all three of them in turn. “I mean, total, full… transferring of a real person’s consciousness? This isn’t just a cosy myth or alien propaganda.”

Jasken and Sulbazghi looked at the alien, which sat floating silently for a short while, then — suddenly fixing them with the gaze from one eye each — seemed to realise it was the one they all expected to answer. “Yes,” it blurted. “Positively. A full affirmation.”

“And bringing them back to life; they can do that too?” Veppers asked.

Xingre was quicker this time. After a moment, when nobody else answered, it said, “Yes. Also most possible, availability of appropriate and compatible processing and physique substrate shell being assumed.”

Veppers sat for a moment. “I see,” he said. He put the neural lace down on the glass top of a nearby table, letting it drop from a half-metre up to see what noise it made.

It seemed to fall slightly too slowly, and landed silently.

“Bad luck, Veppers!” Sapultride told him when he got back to the naval battle. “Both your ships got sunk!”