Surface Detail

Sixteen

“What is that?”

“That is a present,” the ship told her. She looked at the thing lying in Demeisen’s palm. Then she looked up at his eyes.

The avatar’s face had filled out a little more over the last few days. His body had altered a fraction too, making him look more like a Sichultian. This was a process that was intended to continue until he looked as native as she did when they arrived in Enablement space fifteen days from now. His eyes looked crinklier, she thought; friendlier. She knew that technically he was an it, not a he, but she still thought of him as male. All she had to remember, of course — she told herself — was that whether a he, a she, an it or anything else, Demeisen was the ship. The avatar was not anything truly independent or genuinely human.

She frowned. “It looks a bit like a—”

“Neural lace,” Demeisen said, nodding. “Only it isn’t.”

“What, then?”

“It’s a tattoo.”

“A tattoo?”

He shrugged. “Kind of.”

They were in the twelve-person module the ship had brought aboard from the GSV especially for her. It was housed within one of the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints’ many cramped spaces that were something between magazines, munition-stores and hangars. The ship had no other dedicated human habitable space inside it at all; even this module was a concession. It had not impressed her when she’d first seen it and been told this was all there was.

“This is it?” she’d said after she’d joined Demeisen on board and realised that, somehow, the little slap-drone had been left behind. She’d said a sincere thank you for that but then there had been a moment of awkwardness after the avatar had welcomed her aboard and she’d stood there waiting to be shown to her cabin from the rather minimal and utilitarian cabin space she’d materialised in.

“This is it?” she’d repeated, turning, looking round. She was standing in a space about four metres by three. In one direction lay a blank grey wall; opposite it there was a raised platform a little narrower than — and one step up from — the space she stood in; the platform held three long, deep padded chairs facing a double sloped wall, the upper part of which appeared to be a screen, though it was also blank at the moment. To either side there were what might be double doors, though they too were a uniform grey.

Demeisen had looked genuinely hurt. “I had to leave behind an Offensive Slaved Broad-Spectrum Munitions Platform, Self Powered to fit this in,” he’d told her.

“You don’t have any space inside your… inside the ship at all?”

“I’m a warship, not a taxi. I keep telling you.”

“I thought even warships could carry a few people!”

“Pa! Old tech. Not me.”

“You’re one and a half kilometres long! There must be room somewhere!”

“Please; one point six kilometres long, and that’s naked hull in full compression. In standard operational deployment mode I’m two point eight klicks; three point two with all fields on but pulled corset tight. In serious gloves-off, claws out, teeth bared, just-point-me-at-the-bad-guys engagement-ready mode I’m… well it varies; it’s what we call threat-mix dependent. But many kilo metres. Riled-up I’m really more like a sort of mini fleet.”

Lededje, who had stopped listening at the first use of the word “point”, had wailed, “I can touch the ceiling!” She’d reached up to do just that, without even standing on tiptoe.

Demeisen had sighed in exasperation. “I’m an Abominator-class picket ship. This is the best I can do. Sorry. Would you rather I slung you back aboard The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory?”

“Picket? But it was a picket ship and it had lots of space!”

“Ah. No it wasn’t. That’s the clever bit.”

“What?”

“People have spent the best part of one and a half millennia getting used to the idea of the Culture having all these ex-warships, most of them largely demilitarised, called Fast Pickets or Very Fast Pickets, and they are basically just express taxis, then along comes this new class called the Abominator, they call it a picket ship and nobody takes any notice. Even when Abominators almost never taxi anybody anywhere.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“‘Picket’ in my case means I hang around waiting for trouble, not that I hang around waiting for hitch-hikers. There are two thousand Abominator-class ships, we’re scattered evenly throughout the galaxy and all we do is sit and wait for stuff to happen. I’m part of the Culture’s quick reaction force; we used to keep all the serious up-fucking ships in a few mostly very-far-away ports but that didn’t always work out when things blew up suddenly. Remember I said ‘Don’t ask why’ earlier?”

“Yes. You said not to ask you why you were heading in the direction of Sichult anyway.”

“Well, Lededje — and appreciate that, to continue the dubious maritime analogy, I’m negotiating a tricky course between the minefield of personal honesty on one side and the rocky coast of operational security on the other — that’s as good a hint as I can afford to give you. Now, I’m serious; do you want to be put back aboard the The Usual But bla bla bla?”

She’d scowled at him. “I suppose not.” She’d looked around. “This thing does have a toilet?”

Nine seats blossomed from the floor and rear wall, then they collapsed back as though made from a membrane that had suddenly been punctured and collapsed, to be followed by a very generously sized bed, then by a sort of white glazed balloon which parted neatly to reveal what was probably a combined bath and walk-in shower. Then that too was swallowed back up into the floor and wall. “That do?” Demeisen had asked.

The fifteen days since had been spent in the same tiny space, though the entirety of the cabin’s interior surfaces could function as a single astoundingly convincing screen, so it could look like she was standing on a snowy mountain top, the middle of a table flat desert, a wave-washed beach or anywhere else she or the module could think of.

She had been thinking ahead and had decided what she might require when she got to Sichult. She was intending to get to Veppers through his lust; she reckoned the degree of physical beauty she had been granted, thanks to Sensia and her human-growing vats, would be sufficiently beguiling to entice Veppers, if she got close enough to be seen by him in the right social situation. A second way to get to him might be through her own knowledge of how his household, the town house in Ubruater and the mansion at Espersium all worked.

She’d had the ship make her clothes and jewellery and various other personal possessions, ready for when she arrived at Sichult. She’d tried to get it to make her some weapons, but it wouldn’t play. It had even hesitated over one of her necklaces, given that it was long enough to be used to strangle somebody. It had conceded on that one. It had had no detectable qualms whatsoever about providing her with a diamond-film currency card allegedly loaded with enough credit to ensure that if she changed her mind about murdering Veppers she could buy her own Ubruater town house, her own country estate and just live like a princess for the rest of her life. Maybe that was the idea.

She exercised, she studied — mostly she studied all that the Culture knew of Veppers, Sichult and the Enablement, which was a lot more than even Veppers himself knew, she’d be prepared to bet — and she talked to the always-available Demeisen, who would materialise whenever she wanted to talk. Not that it was really materialising, literally, apparently, though she felt her eyes start to glaze over once the technical explanation kicked in.

She’d undergone a guided virtual tour of the ship, albeit reluctantly. She’d only agreed because Demeisen had seemed so boyishly enthusiastic about it. The tour had taken a while, though probably not as long as it had felt at the time. All she remembered was that the ship could split into different bits, like a sort of one ship fleet or something, though it was most powerful as a single unit. Sixteen bits. Or maybe it was twenty-four. She’d made the appropriate Ooh, Ah, No, really? noises at the time, which was what actually mattered. She had lots of experience at that sort of thing.

She had, tentatively, entertained the idea of taking Demeisen as a lover. The more Sichultian he got, and the longer she was cooped up in here, fabulous fake scenery or not, the more attractive he looked and the itchier that subject got. She guessed, first, it would be pretty meaningless to the ship, second that she’d be indulged (it would say yes), third that it would be done with some style and sensitivity and — it occurred to her one day — fourth, it might just… just… make her safer, and her plan to kill Veppers more likely to succeed.

The Minds, the hyper AIs that commanded, that basically were the Culture’s capital ships, were unarguably sentient, and they had emotions, even if their feelings were always under the control of their intellects, never the other way round. The ship had already hinted that there might be trouble where it was taking her — the sort of trouble where its fearsome martial abilities might come into play — so was there not just a chance that having sex with its avatar might make it feel even the tiniest bit of extra commitment towards her?

How much would it mean to the ship if she and its avatar did fuck? Nothing whatsoever? Or would it be like a human stroking a domestic pet; indulgent, companionable, mildly pleasant… though with no possible component that might lead to feelings of ownership, commitment or jealousy?

It was calculation rather than emotion; she’d be whoring herself. But then Veppers had long ago removed any choice she might have had regarding who she fucked. She’d had to whore herself for him (and against him — not that that had worked). The only time she’d ever had sex simply because she’d wanted to had been on that single night aboard the GSV, with Shokas.

Anyway, she had not broached the subject. And besides, for all she knew, the ship would revert to type, the way it had been while it had been aboard the GSV, before it had had its sudden and still slightly suspicious change of mind. Then it had seemed to enjoy hurting people; so it might do so again, and take pleasure in having its avatar reject her.

Now he — it — was offering her a present: a tattoo, allegedly. She was sat in one of the three flight-deck seats; she’d been watching news reports out of Sichult on the module’s screen when Demeisen had popped into existence behind her. She leant forward. The thing lay in his palm; a looped, tangled assortment of thin grey-blue filaments looking a lot how she knew a fully grown neural lace looked.

“What makes you think I might want a tattoo?”

“You said you missed having one.”

“I did?”

“Eleven days ago. Then again yesterday. The first time, you said that sometimes you felt too naked when you woke up. You also mentioned that since you were revented you’d had dreams of walking down a city street thinking you were fully clothed but everybody looking at you weirdly and then you looking down at yourself and realising you were naked.”

“Apparently normal people have that dream.”

“I know.”

“Did I also say I was glad to be rid of the tattoo?”

“No. Maybe you just think you say that to people.”

She frowned, looked at the thing in his palm again. Now it looked like thin strands of oily mercury. “Anyway, that does not look like a tattoo,” she told him.

“Not like this. Watch.”

The assemblage of loops and lines started to move slowly, stirring itself. It began to flow out across Demeisen’s palm as though forming a sort of chain-mail glove. He turned his hand over for a moment to show it wrapping itself round his fingers, then turned it back as the lines moved like tiny waves up his wrist and arm, disappearing under his shirt. He rolled the sleeve back to show the filaments coursing along his upper arm, thinning fractionally and spreading out.

He undid his shirt a little to show the silver-blue lines tracking smoothly across his upper chest — it was smooth, hairless, like a child’s — then put his head back as the tattoo rose up his neck and over his face and then right round his head, a few tiny thin lines decorating his ears while others swept fabulously, precisely over his face, moving to within millimetres of his nostrils, mouth and eyes but stopping there. He raised his other hand to show the lines flowing down there too, then held both hands and forearms up to show that they were identically, symmetrically decorated in millimetrically spaced curls and swirls, curves and parabolas.

“I’m getting it to display just the upper-body section,” he explained. “It does the torso, legs and feet too; same spacing.” He admired his hands. “Or you can go for a more angular look…”

The mobile tattoo shifted everywhere, the curves becoming straight lines, the tight curls becoming right angles, zigzags. “Colour’s commandable too,” Demeisen muttered. The tattoo changed to soot black. Then to perfectly reflective silver, as though the whole tattoo was made of mercury teased impossibly fine. “Or sort of random.” Within seconds the tattoo had become a dark, random scribble across what she could see of his body. “Motifs, obviously,” Demeisen added. The tattoo became a series of nested, concentric silver circles on his skin, the largest a hand’s-breadth in diameter across his upper chest.

She reached out and took one of his hands, peering at the circles on the back of his hand. Looking extremely closely — she still thought her eyesight was significantly better than any normal Sichultian’s had ever been; more zoomable, for a start — she could just make out tiny silver lines running from one circle to another. Hair fine, she thought. No; down fine.

She gazed at all the silvery circles, spread across his skin like too-symmetrical ripples in a pond someone had thrown a few dozen pebbles into. The circles spread, merged, became a criss-cross pattern of thick lines that looked braided, and much finer lines which wove in between the braids. Changing from silver to gold, they made it look as though he was wrapped in a glittering wire cage.

“Of course, I’m able to alter it by just thinking,” he told her. “You’d need to control it through an interface; maybe have some sort of control section always manifest in the pattern, if you wanted to make it change appearance. One wrist with a sort of stylised key- or glyph-board on it would work, or even just coded fingertip sequences anywhere. Though a terminal would work too. Something to decide later.”

She was barely listening, still staring. “It’s astonishing,” she breathed.

“Like it? It’s yours,” he told her.

She kept hold of his hand. She looked up at him. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

He laughed. “Of course not.”

“Are there any catches?”

“Catches?” He looked confused for a moment. “Oh,” he said, “you mean any downside?”

“Anything I might wish I’d known, looking back on this moment from some point in the future?”

She worried that she might have insulted him, insulted the ship somehow, by being so cautious, even suspicious. But Demeisen just pursed his lips and looked thoughtful. “None I can think of.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it’s yours if you want it.” The tattoo was already moving, all over him, changing from silver circles to wavy dark grey lines and sliding back the way it had come, up from one hand, down from his head, face and neck, away from his chest and back down the other arm until it rested coiled, grey-blue and immobile back in his palm again.

She still held that hand. “All right,” she said softly. “I’ll take it.”

“Keep your hand there,” he told her.

The tattoo moved up his palm, along two of his fingers and then onto her fingers, hand, wrist and forearm. She could only just feel it as it slid slowly along her tawny skin, faintly disturbing the fine, downy hairs on her arms. For some reason she had assumed it would be cool, but it was skin temperature.

“Any particular pattern you’d like it to assume?” Demeisen asked.

“That first one you had,” she said, watching it settle over her fingers on the hand it started on. She flexed her fingers. There was no resistance, no feeling of tightness, even where the lines seemed printed over her knuckles. The pattern he’d had first, the one with the whorls and swirls, expressed itself over her arms. She pulled her sleeve up to see. “I can change it later?” she asked, glancing at him.

“Yes,” he said. He made a hand-shaking gesture. “You can let go now,” he said. She smiled at him, let go of his hand.

The tattoo went smoothly onto her upper chest; she could feel it go quite quickly across her back between her shoulder blades, heading for her other arm. It wrapped round her chest and torso and spread up over her neck and face and head. She stood up as it covered her belly and flowed down over her behind. She stepped down to where Demeisen stood. “Can I—?” she asked, and immediately Demeisen was holding a mirror, showing her her own face. She raised her other hand to watch it move down from her wrist to her fingers. It slid easily under the silvery ring which was her terminal. She looked back at her reflection.

“Mirror,” Demeisen said. He twirled the mirror’s handle, presenting her with the other side. “Or invertor; a screen, in other words.”

She gave a small laugh, shook her head as she watched the dark patterns settle over her face like tiny trajectories, like tracks in a bubble chamber, like the slightest, finest spiral-vines in a miniature forest. She touched her fingers to her cheek. It was as though it wasn’t there. Her fingertips felt as sensitive as they ever had and her cheek felt just as it always did. “Make it go silver,” she whispered.

“Your wish, ma’am,” he said.

It went silver. She regarded her face. Silver would never look as good as when her skin had been black. “Black, please,” she said.

It went perfectly black. She felt it complete its spread over her torso and back. It settled and joined between her legs, close by vagina and anus but not covering. It moved down her legs, spiralling towards her ankles and feet.

She pulled the material of her blouse out, looked down. “Is there any strength to it?” she asked. “Could it act as support, as a brassiere?”

“There is a little tensile strength to it, naturally,” Demeisen said quietly. She felt and — blouse neck still pulled open — watched as the tattoo pushed her breasts gently upwards. Now there was a slight tightness around her rib cage, just under her breasts. She let the material go, grinned at him. “Not that I’m vain,” she told him with a suddenly shy smile. “Or really need one. You can let it go back the way it was.”

She felt the tightness around her chest relax and disappear. For a moment she was aware of the weight of her breasts, then they just went back to feeling normal again.

Demeisen smiled. “Also, it can go skin coloured.”

She felt it squeeze between the soles of her feet and the thin slippers she wore. At the same time, the tattoo disappeared. She peered at her image in the invertor again. There was no sign of it whatsoever. She put her fingers to her face once more. Still nothing to be felt. “Bring it back?” she asked, missing it already.

It faded slowly up, from her precise skin tone to soot black again, like an ancient photograph.

“What’s it made of?” she asked.

“Mased-state transfixor atoms, woven long-chain molecular exotics, multi-phased condensates, nanoscale efines, advanced picogels… other stuff.” He shrugged. “You weren’t expecting anything simple like ‘plastic’ or ‘memory mercury’, were you?”

She smiled. “Did you make it yourself?”

“Certainly did. From pre-existing patterns, but tweaked.” The tattoo had settled everywhere upon her skin. It had stopped moving. She closed her eyes for a moment, flexed her fingers, rotated both arms in an exaggerated windmilling motion. She could feel nothing. As far as her skin was concerned, the tat might as well not be there.

“Thank you,” she said when she opened her eyes. “Can it come off as quickly?”

“Slightly quicker.”

She put one hand to the skin just under her eye. “But could it, say, stop somebody trying to poke me in the eye with a sharp stick?”

A tiny grid of dark lines leapt up in front of her right eye, near where her fingers were. She felt that all right; not exactly sore, but there had been real pressure on the skin all around her eye.

She grinned. “Any other orifices or bodily parts it protects?” she asked.

“It can probably dice your poo as it emerges,” Demeisen said, matter-of-factly. “And act as a chastity belt if you want. You’ll need to practise controlling it with your terminal; there’ll be something of a learning process for the more complicated stuff.”

“Anything else it can do?”

A pained expression crossed his face. “That’s about it. I wouldn’t go jumping off any tall buildings expecting it to save you, because it won’t. You’ll still end up squished.”

She stepped back, looked at her arms and hands, then came forward and hugged him.

“Thank you, Demeisen,” she said into his ear. “Thank you, ship.”

“My pleasure entirely,” the avatar said. He — it — returned the hug with — she’d have been prepared to bet — exactly the same amount of pressure she was putting into it. “I am very glad you like it.”

She loved it. She hugged the avatar a little longer, and was patted on the back. She gave it just one extra beat to see if there would be any more to it than that, but there wasn’t.

Any normal man, she thought… But that, of course, was precisely what he was not. She patted his upper arms and let go.