Surface Detail

Twelve

“Lededje Y’breq,” the avatar Sensia said, “may I introduce Chanchen Kallier-Falpise Barchen-dra dren-Skoyne.”

“Kallier-Falpise for short,” the drone itself said, dipping in the air in what she guessed was the equivalent of a bow or nod. “Though I’ll happily answer to Kall, or even just KP.”

The machine floated in the air in front of her. It was about big enough to sit comfortably on two outspread hands; a cream-casinged, mostly smooth device that looked like something you’d find on the work surface of an intimidatingly well-equipped kitchen and wonder what its function was. It was surrounded by a vague, misty halo that appeared to be various mixtures of yellow, green and blue according to the angle. This would be its aura field — the drone equivalent of facial expression and body language, there to convey emotions.

She nodded. “Pleased to meet you,” she told it. “So you’re my slap-drone.”

Kallier-Falpise rocked back in the air as though hit. “Please. That’s a little pejorative, if I may say so, Ms. Y’breq. I’ll be accompanying you principally for your own convenience and protection.”

“I’m—” she began, then was interrupted by the young man standing at her side.

“My lovely Led,” he said, “I’m sorry I can’t wave you farewell properly, but I must go. Let me…” He took her hand, kissed it, then, after a shake of his head and a wide smile, he held her head in both hands and kissed her face in a variety of places.

He was called Shokas, and while he had proved an attentive and sensitive lover, he had been impossible to shake off come the morning. He’d said he had other things he had to do that day but had insisted on accompanying her here, despite protests.

“Mmm,” she said, noncommittally, as he kissed her. She prised his hands from her face. “A pleasure, Shokas,” she told him. “I don’t suppose we shall ever meet again.”

“Shh!” he said, placing a finger to her lips and his other hand on his chest as he half closed his eyes and shook his head. “However, I must go,” he said, backing off but keeping hold of her hand until the last moment. “You wonderful girl.” He looked round the others, winked. “Wonderful girl,” he told them, then sighed deeply, turned and walked quickly for the traveltube doors.

Well, that was one less. She hadn’t expected so many people. Jolicci was there too, standing smiling at her.

She was in a Mediumbay of the GSV, on a wide gantry fifty metres up a side wall from the deck, the view in front of her filled by the pink-hulled bulk of the Fast Picket The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory; near three hundred relatively slim metres of ancient warship now turned to more peaceful duties, such as ferrying people about the galaxy when they were heading for points not covered by the Culture’s more routine transportation arrangements.

The ship was supposed to be fifteen hundred years old but appeared brand spanking new and — to her — still looked like a round, windowless skyscraper laid on its side. Its rear three-fifths was a single great cylinder, its pale pinkness chevroned with brown. This was its engine, seemingly. Another substantial section held various mostly sensory systems and the roughly conical section at the front would have held weapons when it had been a Psychopath-class Rapid Offensive Unit. The crew section, a thick band on the central spindle squeezed in between the engine and the systems section, looked small for the thirty or so people who would once have formed its crew, but generous for one. It had produced a single solid-looking plug of doorway twenty metres long, which had moved smoothly out towards them then dropped gently down to the gantry’s floor level to provide a sort of gang-plank affording access to the vessel. The ship’s own avatar was another drone, a little bigger, boxy and more thrown-together-looking than Kallier-Falpise.

“Shall we?” she said to it.

“Certainly.” The drone floated to one side and picked up the two small cases of clothes, assorted toiletries and so on which Sensia had given her.

“Farewell, Lededje,” Sensia said.

Lededje smiled at her, thanked her, accepted a hug, then bade a slightly more formal goodbye to Jolicci. She turned towards the ship.

“Just in time. Let me be the last to wish you bon voyage,” a voice said behind her.

She turned to find Demeisen strolling from the traveltube entrance, smiling thinly. He looked a little less haggard and dishevelled than when Lededje had seen him the evening before. The red jewel at his neck glittered under the lights.

Sensia glared at him. “I thought you left earlier.”

“I did leave earlier, my gracious hostess. I am currently some eighty years or so distant on an acutely divergent course, and travelling only slightly more rapidly than your good self, though still just about within real-time control range, at least for something as intrinsically slow-reacting as a human host. All of which I would hope you’re well aware of.”

“You’re abandoning your puppet here then?” Jolicci said.

“I am,” Demeisen agreed. “I thought now would be as appropriate an occasion as any other to return the fucker to the wild.”

“I have heard some disturbing reports regarding your treatment of this human you’re using, ship,” Sensia said. Lededje looked at the GSV’s avatar. For a small, frail-looking lady with frizzy blonde hair she seemed suddenly invested with a steeliness Lededje found herself glad was not directed at her.

Demeisen turned to Sensia. “All above board, dear thing. I have the relevant releases signed by his own fair hand. In blood, admittedly, but signed. What was I to use — engine oil?” He looked puzzled and turned to Jolicci. “Do we even have engine oil? I don’t think we do, do we?”

“Enough,” Jolicci said.

“Say goodbye and release your hold now before I do it for you,” Sensia said levelly.

“That would be impolite,” Demeisen said, pretending shock.

“I’ll suffer the injury to my reputation,” the GSV’s avatar said coolly.

The cadaverous humanoid rolled his eyes before turning to Lededje and smiling broadly. “My every best wish for your journey, Ms. Y’breq,” he said. “I hope I did not alarm you unduly with my little display last night. I get into character sometimes, find it hard to know when I’m causing distress. My apologies, if any are required. If not, then please accept them in any event, on account, to be banked against any future transgressions. So. Perhaps we shall meet again. Until then, farewell.”

He bowed deeply. When he came upright he looked quite changed; his face was set differently and his body language had altered subtly too. He blinked, looked around, then stared blankly at Lededje and then at the others. “Is that it?” he said. He stared at the ship in front of him. “Where is this? Is that the ship there?”

“Demeisen?” Jolicci said, moving closer to the man, who was looking down at himself and feeling his neck under his chin.

“I’ve lost weight…” he muttered. Then he looked at Jolicci. “What?” He looked at Sensia and Lededje. “Has it happened yet? Have I been the avatar?”

Sensia smiled reassuringly and took him by the arm. “Yes, sir, I believe you have.” She began to lead him towards the traveltube and made a begging-your-leave gesture to Jolicci and Lededje before turning away.

“But I can’t remember anything…”

“Really? Oh dear. However, that may be a blessing.”

“But I wanted memories! Something to remember!”

“Well…” Lededje heard Sensia say, before the doors of the traveltube capsule closed.

Lededje nodded to an unsmiling Jolicci and walked along the level, granite-solid gangplank towards the ship, followed by the ship’s drone and the creamy presence of her slap-drone.

The Fast Picket The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory slipped away from the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, slung out in a great elongated nest of fields that decelerated it to speeds the Fast Picket’s engines could cope with. To Lededje, who was used to fighter planes being faster than passenger jets and powerboats overtaking liners, this seemed wrong somehow.

“Scale,” the boxy-looking ship-drone told her as she stood — and it and Kallier-Falpise floated — in the main lounge, watching a wall screen showing the silvery dot that was the GSV disappearing into the distance. The dot, and the swirl of stars shown beyond it, started to track across the screen as the The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory began its long turn to head for Arm One-one Near-tip and the Ruprine Cluster. “With ship engines, there are advantages that come with scale.”

“Bigger is better,” confirmed Kallier-Falpise. The silvery dot and the whole great sweep of stars moved faster and faster across the screen, apparent motion accelerating as the Fast Picket wheeled about, heading three-quarters of the way back in the direction the GSV had come from.

“Let me show you to your cabin,” the ship’s drone said.

They set course for Sichult. The journey was due to take about ninety days.

Lededje’s cabin, taking up the space of four of the originals, was spacious and beautiful, if somewhat minimalist compared to what she was used to back home. Veppers didn’t believe in minimalism; he thought it smacked of a lack of imagination or money, or both. The bathroom was similar in size to the cabin and had a transparent spherical bath for which she suspected she was going to need instructions.

Kallier-Falpise followed her and the ship’s drone around, floating a metre or so to her side, just visible at the corner of her eye as she inspected the cabin. She turned and faced it once the ship’s own drone had left.

“I think I’ll get some more sleep,” she told the slap-drone.

“Allow me,” the cream-coloured machine said, and the bed — another of the scoop-plus-intelligent-snowflake-feathers design she was becoming used to — fluffed up, like a curiously localised snowstorm in one corner of the cabin. They were called billow beds, apparently.

“Thank you,” she said. “You don’t need to stay.”

“Are you sure?” the little machine asked. “I mean, obviously while we’re aboard ship, that’s fine, but once we arrive anywhere else I would be derelict in my duty if I didn’t remain where I might be of most immediate protective use, especially while you’re asleep. It might be best for us both to get used to that arrangement, don’t you think?”

“No,” she said. “I prefer my privacy.”

“I see.” The machine bobbed in the air, its aura field going grey-blue. “Well, as I say, while we’re aboard ship… Excuse me.”

The door shushed closed behind it.

“‘Ahem’, is the accepted interrupter, I believe. So: ah-fucking-hem.”

She opened her eyes to find herself looking sideways at a man sitting cross-legged on the floor about two metres away, near the centre of the cabin. He was dressed in the same dark clothes Demeisen had worn, and — as she blinked, trying to confirm to herself that she was really seeing what she appeared to be seeing — she realised that he looked like a healthier, filled-out version of the gaunt figure who’d bade her farewell only a few hours earlier.

She sat up, aware of the bed feathers swirling neatly about her, tidying themselves out of the way. She was glad she had worn pyjamas, less glad now that she had got rid of the slap-drone.

Demeisen raised one long finger. “Wait a mo; you might need this.”

The word SIMULATION glowed in red letters — in Marian, this time — at the lower limit of her field of vision.

“What the hell is going on?” she said. She pulled her knees up to her chin. For a dizzying instant she was back in her bedroom in the town house in Ubruater, a decade earlier.

“I’m not really here,” Demeisen said, winking at her. “You haven’t seen me, right?” He laughed, spread his arms, looked about the cabin. “Do you have any idea how highly fucking irregular this is?” He put his elbows on his knees, rested his chin on his tented fingers. Too long, too multiply jointed, they looked like a cage. “This poor old stager thinks it’s still some sort of hot-shot fucking warship with a few of its systems removed and most of the others improved. No more chance of somebody having a private chat with a passenger than… I don’t know; it hitting a space reef or something.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked. She looked around the cabin. The word SIMULATION followed her gaze like a subtitle.

Demeisen’s face sort of scrunched up. “Not that there’s any such thing. Running aground on an asteroid maybe; whatever. Anyway,” he said, “Hello again. Bet you didn’t expect to see me again so soon.”

“Or ever.”

“Well quite. Also bet you’re wondering why I’m here.”

She waggled a finger towards her lower face as she looked at him. “Can you get rid of…”

He snapped his fingers. It was an unsettlingly sharp, loud sound. She almost jumped.

“There,” he said. The word SIMULATION vanished.

“Thank you. Why are you here, if only apparently?”

“To make you an offer.”

“What? To be your next abused avatar?”

He grimaced again. “Oh, that was all just to upset Jolicci. You saw the guy I was… inhabiting; I released him in front of you. He was fine. I’d even fixed his fingers and everything. Didn’t you notice, this morning?”

She hadn’t.

“And anyway he did agree to everything. Not that I really abused him in the first place. Did he say anything? When I released him; did he? I didn’t bother to send any surveillance back-up and I haven’t asked the SAMWAF, so I honestly don’t know what happened after I pulled out. Did he? Make any allegations?”

“He couldn’t remember anything at all. He wasn’t even sure he’d been an avatar; he thought maybe it was about to happen.”

Demeisen waved his arms. “Well, there you are!”

“There you are what? That proves nothing.”

“Yes it does; if I’d really been sneaky I’d have left the dumb fuck with a batch of implanted false memories full of whatever Contact-wank fantasies he’d been imagining before he took the gig in the first place.” He waved one hand in a blur of too-long fingers. “Anyway, we’re getting off the point here. You need to hear my offer.”

She raised one brow. “Do I?”

He smiled. It was the first time he’d smiled, she thought, when it actually looked like he meant it. “Fine attempt at dismissive insouciance,” he told her. “But yes, you do.”

“All right. What is it?”

“Come with me. Not right now necessarily, but come with me.”

“Where?”

“To Sichult. Back to your home.”

“I’m already going there.”

“Yes, but very slowly, and with a slap-drone in tow. Plus, they’re going to try to distract you.”

“How are they going to distract me?”

“By telling you they’ve found the ship with your full body image, the Me, I’m Counting. Which they sort of have, so it’s not a lie, but they’re hoping you’ll want to detour to get your old body back or have the tattoo stuff copied onto your present body or some such nonsense. Which will mean a serious delay, especially travelling in this antique.”

“Perhaps I’ll want to do that anyway,” she said. She felt a pang of something like loss and hope together. Wouldn’t it be good to see her old, true self? Even if she wouldn’t want to regain her Mark — maybe ever, but certainly not until she’d returned and got as close to Veppers as she could and done her damnedest to kill him.

“Makes no difference,” Demeisen said, scything one hand through the air. “I’ll fucking take you there if you insist on going; still be quicker. Point is: stay on this thing and you’ll get home in not less than ninety days, and with a slap-drone dogging your every step.”

“Whereas?”

He rocked forward on his crossed legs, looked suddenly serious and said, “Whereas come with me and I’ll get you there in twenty-nine days with no fun-spoiling chaperone to hobble you.”

“No slap-drone?”

“None.”

“And no mistreatment? Of me, I mean, the way you mistreated that poor man? Including mistreatment I forget about?”

He frowned. “You still on about that? Of course no mistreatment. I swear.”

She thought. After a moment she said, “Would you help me kill Veppers?”

He put his head back and laughed, loudly. The simulation did a convincing job of making his laughter echo round the generously proportioned cabin. “Ah, if only,” he said, shaking his head. “You can cause your own major assassinatory incident, sweetheart, without making it a diplomatic one involving the Culture.”

“You can’t offer me any help at all?”

“I’m offering to get you there, quicker, and without the fucking slap-drone.”

“But no help in doing what I want to do when I get there.”

He slapped himself on the forehead. “Fuck me! What more do you want?”

She shrugged. “Help with killing him.”

He put one long-fingered hand over his eyes for a moment. “Well,” he said on an inward breath, taking his hand away and looking at her, “that is the only catch. Much as I’d like to offer you one of my own drones, or a knife missile or some magic force-field buttons for your cardigan or an enchanted gusset or what-ever the fuck, for protection if nothing else… I can’t, because in the unlikely event you do waste this fucker, or try to but fail — a much more plausible scenario, if we’re being honest here — and they find any Culture tech on you, suddenly we look like the bad guys, and — hilarious though that would be in so many ways, obviously — even I draw the line at that sort of shit. Unless I’m requested to by a properly constituted committee of my strategically informed intellectual superiors, naturally. That would be entirely different.”

“So why offer to help me at all?”

He grinned. “For my own amusement. To see what you get up to, to annoy the SAMWAF and Jolicci and all the other constipated smug-meisters of Contact and also because I’m heading in that direction anyway.” He lifted both eyebrow creases. “Don’t ask why.”

“And how do you know all this?”

“You told me quite a lot of it last night, babe. The rest…” He spread his arms again. “I’m just well connected. I know Minds that know stuff. Specifically, exactly this sort of stuff.”

“You’re part of Special Circumstances.”

He waggled one hand. “Technically no ships or Minds really are, not in an organised, hierarchic, signed-up-for-the-duration kind of way; all that any of us can ever do is just help out as best we can, making whatever small contribution we are able to as specific, time-limited opportunities present themselves. But yes.” He sighed, somewhere between patiently and in exasperation. “Look, I don’t have for ever; even this bumpkin of a taxi will twig to me being here eventually, so I’m going to go. You have a think. The offer stands for the next eight hours; local midnight. After that I really need to dash on ahead. But just you wait; they’ll spring this meet-up with the Me, I’m Counting or something representing it.” He sat back, nodding. “Semsarine Wisp. That’s the name to look out for: the Semsarine Wisp.” He flapped one long hand at her. “You can go back to sleep now.”

She woke with a start, sat up. The cabin lights reacted to her movement, turning slowly up from near total darkness to a pervasive gentle glow. The noise of the ship made a distant shushing noise all about her.

She lay back down in her little organised storm of well-behaved snowflakes.

After a few moments the lights faded away too.

“Whereabouts?”

“Hmm?”

“Where would this rendezvous take place?” she asked Kallier-Falpise. They were in a part of the ship’s lounge shaped like a giant bay window. She sat at a table, eating a meal that was part breakfast, part early supper. A breeze blew about her, bringing smells of the ocean. She had rolled the cuffs of her pyjamas up to feel the soft warm wind on her calves and forearms. The concave wall around her impersonated the view of a blue-green cloudless sky, a ruffled green ocean and snow-white breakers crashing onto the pale blue sand of a wide, deserted beach framed by gently swaying trees. Even the floor beneath her bare feet was taking part in the illusion, ridging and roughening to become a convincing impression of polished but uneven wooden boards, just like you’d find at a beach-side villa or resort somewhere nice and hot and far away. She’d almost finished the plate of completely unidentifiable but perfectly delicious fresh fruits. She’d been ravenous.

“There’s a place in a part of the sky called the Semsarine Wisp,” the little drone told her, as though she really didn’t need to bother her pretty little head about such boring details. “That’s where the rendezvous is expected to take place.”

“Mm-hmm.” She drank some water, sloshed it round her teeth.

The drone, floating over the table near her right hand, was silent for a moment, as though thinking. “You’ve… you’ve heard of it?”

She swallowed the water, dabbed at her mouth with a fluid-soft napkin. She gazed out at the fake view of the beach and sea, then looked at the little cream-coloured drone and smiled. “Would you ask the ship to contact the General Offensive Unit Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, please?”

“What? Why?”

“Go on; say it’s irregular.”

“Irregular is the very least of what it is. It’s rude, it is suspicious.” The boxy ship’s drone swivelled in mid-air, turning away from the grinning figure of Demeisen to point itself at Lededje. “Ms. Y’breq,” it said frostily. “I cannot emphasise strongly enough that I think this would be a profoundly unwise move; frankly, even a stupid and dangerous one. I’m sorry to be so blunt.” It glanced at Demeisen. “I thought you had seen something of how this person, this ship is liable to treat innocent human beings. I cannot believe that you are even contemplating such a hazardous and foolhardy choice.”

“Hmm,” Lededje said, nodding at this. “You know, I think I’ll leave these bags behind.” She frowned down at the two small cases Sensia had given her. They sat at her feet in the ship’s main lounge. Demeisen stood at her side; the two drones floated in front of them. She turned at Demeisen. “You can provide me—?”

“Of course.”

“Ms. Y’breq,” Kallier-Falpise said, sounding like it was trying to remain calm. “Obviously, I shall be coming with you…”

“Obviously,” the ship’s drone agreed, traversing to point at Demeisen.

There was only the faintest of pauses. “Eh? Oh. Yes, obviously,” Demeisen said, nodding strenuously.

“Ah. You agree then?” Kallier-Falpise said, flicking to look straight at Demeisen. “I accompany Ms. Y’breq?”

“I would have it no other way,” Demeisen said solemnly.

“Just so.” The little drone’s aura field glowed an agreeable pink. It turned smoothly back to Lededje. “As we all agree, then, I shall be coming with you, still charged, of course, with protecting you—”

“Mostly from yourself,” Demeisen said with a quick grin. He bowed his head and held up one hand as the little cream-coloured drone’s field flashed a bright grey. “Sorry,” he said.

“However,” Kallier-Falpise continued, “I too am very much of the opinion that this is, nevertheless, a foolish, dangerous and unnecessary move. Please, I beg you; reconsider.”

Lededje smiled at it. She looked at the ship’s drone. “Thank you for all your help,” she told it. She turned to Demeisen again. “Ready when you are.”

“I’ll prepare a shuttle,” the ship-drone said.

Demeisen flapped one hand. “We’ll Displace.”

“Has Ms. Y’breq been informed—?”

“There is a chance Displacements can be bad for you,” Demeisen said with a sigh. “Yes. I’ve read her her last rights.”

Kallier-Falpise’s fields went frosty grey again. “You did not think to ask me if I consent to being Displaced when a far more intrinsically safe method of transferring us between ships exists to hand.”

Demeisen rolled his eyes. “Fine, you take the shuttle, you rough, tough little protection-and-intervention drone; I’ll Displace the squidgy bag of guts, gas and fluids that is the painfully vulnerable but patently unafraid human being.”

“Frankly I wouldn’t trust you to wait for me,” the little drone said. “I shall Displace along with Ms. Y’breq. Within the same containment field, if you please.”

“Fuck me,” Demeisen breathed. “Hoity and toity. Fine! We’ll do it your way.” He pointed at the ship’s drone. “Tell you what, grandpa; why don’t you do the fucking Displace? You move them both over to me.”

“I was going to suggest that anyway,” the ship-drone said coldly.

“Right,” Demeisen said, sounding exasperated. “Can we get going? Now? Your venerableness here might be going flat out but I’m barely strolling. Getting antsy here.”

“Excuse me,” the little cream-coloured drone said as it floated closer to Lededje and up-ended itself to press gently in against her stomach. She wore another set of the trews and top she had grown fond of since waking in this body. “You are sure you don’t want to take your luggage?”

“Quite sure,” she said.

“Both ready?” the ship-drone asked.

“Entirely so.”

“Yes.”

“After you,” the ship-drone said to Demeisen.

“See you over there,” he said to Lededje, then a silver ovoid enclosed him. It winked to nothing.

An instant later Lededje briefly found herself staring at a distorted version of her own face.

The ship’s drone tipped back to look up at the ceiling, which was where the protection-and-intervention drone Kallier-Falpise had floated the instant the Displacement containment field around it and Lededje Y’breq had flicked out of existence. Kallier-Falpise, listing badly, bumped randomly along the ceiling a few times, for all the world like an escaped party balloon, partly deflated. Its aura field displayed the colours of oil floating on water.

“Shao, shum-shan-shinaw, sholowalowa, shuw, shuwha…” it mumbled.

The boxy-looking ship-drone used its own light effector unit to administer the equivalent of a slap. Kallier-Falpise trembled against the ceiling fixtures, then dropped, side-slipping. It flashed a strident yellow-orange for an instant, then it seemed to shake itself. It straightened, floating down to the same level as the shipdrone, its aura field glowing white with anger.

~Meatfucker.

~If it’s any comfort, the ship-drone sent — I don’t even know how it did that. It’s not as though it let you land and then spat you straight back. Fucking thing jumped my Displace mid-throw. I wasn’t even aware we could do that. That’s downright worrying.

~Did you put anything on the girl?

~On and in. Best bits and pieces I was given. I’m just waiting to—

There was a flicker of silver directly over the ship-drone, followed by a tiny clapping noise as the incoming Displacement field collapsed. A bitty rain of tiny components, seemingly little more than dust, some hair-thin threads and a few grains of sand, floated down through the air to be caught and held by a maniple field the drone extended above itself.

~Ah, it sent — here they are now. It made a show of bouncing the maniple field up and down, weighing. — Yup, they’re all there, to the last picogram.

~Meatfucker, the other drone repeated.

~Trying comms; zero avail. The ship’s drone rose a quarter-metre in the air then sank slowly down. — Guess that’s that then.

The two machines watched through the ship’s main sensor array as it showed the sixteen-hundred-metre length of the other warship sweeping its multiple deep-space high-speed engine fields about it with a completely unnecessary flourish. For the merest instant the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints presented in real space as a black, perfectly reflecting ovoid, then with a flicker it was gone, so quickly even the Fast Picket’s finely tuned sensors struggled to track it.