Surface Detail

Nineteen

The Jhlupian heavy cruiser Ucalegon — forty times as fast as any ship possessed by the Sichultian Enablement — delivered Veppers to Iobe Cavern City on Vebezua in less than two days. Vebezua was the furthest flung of the Enablement’s planets, lying in a small spiral of stars called the Chunzunzan Whirl, a sparse twist of old stars that also held the Tsung system.

“Of course I’m serious. Why can’t I just buy one?”

“They are not for sale.”

“Why not?”

“It is not policy.”

“So change the policy.”

“The policy is not to be changed.”

“Why is the policy not to be changed?”

“Because changing policies is not policy.”

“Now you’re just going round in circles.”

“I am merely following you.”

“No you’re not. I am being direct. You are being evasive.”

“Nevertheless.”

“… Is that it? ‘Nevertheless’ and we just leave things there?”

“Yes.”

Veppers, Jasken, Xingre, half a dozen others of Veppers’ retinue plus the Jhlupian’s principal aide and a medium-ranking officer from the Ucalegon were sharing a tethered flier making its way through one of the great karst caves that made up Iobe Cavern City. The cave averaged a kilometre or so across; a huge pipe whose floor held a small, winding river. The city’s buildings, terraces, promenades and boulevards rose up from the riverside, increasingly precipitously as they approached the mid-way point of the cave, where the buildings became sheer cliffs; a few went even beyond that, clinging to the overhanging curve of the cavern’s upper wall. The flier tether-rails were stationed further up still, cantilevered out from the cave’s roof on gantries like a sequence of giant cranes. A series of enormous oval holes punctured the roof’s summit, letting in great slanting slabs of withering Vebezuan sunlight.

Lying close to its slowly ever-brightening star, the planet was cursed with too much sunlight but blessed with entire continents made mostly of deeply eroded limestone, providing vast cave systems in which its inhabitants — native animals and Sichultian incomers — could hide. You had to travel to the very high and very low latitudes to find pleasantly balmy climates. The poles were havens of temperate freshness. Very occasionally the hills there even got snow.

“Xingre,” Veppers said with a sorrowful shake of his head, “you are my trusted business associate and even a friend in your own strange alien way, but I may have to go over your head here. Or carapace.”

“Carapace. Though in our language the expression is I may have to go beyond your reach.”

“So who would I have to ask?”

“About what?”

“About buying a ship.”

“No one. There is no one to ask because such things are not covered.”

“Not covered? Is that the same as being not policy?”

“Yes.”

“Lieutenant,” Veppers said, turning to the ship’s officer, who also floated, twelve limbs neatly folded on one of the shiny cushions that doubled as chairs and translators, “is this really true?”

“Is what true, sir?”

“That it’s not possible to buy one of your ships.”

“It is not possible to buy navy ships of our navy.”

“Why not?”

“It is not policy.”

Veppers sighed. “Yes, so I’ve been told,” he said, looking at Xingre.

“Navies rarely sell their vessels, not if they are of the best,” Xingre said.

“You’re already hiring it to me,” Veppers said.

“Not the same,” the officer told him. “We remain in control. Sold to you, you assume control.”

“It’d only be one ship,” Veppers insisted. “I don’t want your whole navy. Really, such a fuss. You people are positively purists.” Veppers had once asked ambassador Huen if it was possible to buy a Culture ship. She’d stared at him for a second, then burst out laughing.

The flier zoomed, rising to avoid a high bridge barring their way. The craft stayed flat rather than pointing its nose up, the winch bogey travelling the network of flier tether rails above reeling in the craft’s four invisibly fine mono-filament lines equally.

Iobe city had banned flying machines entirely for centuries, then allowed fliers to be used but suffered one or two accidents which had resulted in the destruction of several notable buildings and prized historic cross-cavern bridges, so had compromised by allowing fliers but only if they were tethered to tracks in the cavern roofs and controlled automatically.

“The best Jhlupian ships are of the Jhlupian navy,” the lieutenant said. “We prefer to keep it that way. For the benefit of not being outrun by civilian vessels. Embarrassment might ensue otherwise. Most governmental entities share this policy.”

“Do the Sichultians sell their best ships to their lessers?” Xingre asked.

“I’d give you a very good price,” Veppers said. He turned from Xingre to the lieutenant. “Very good. You could even take the weapons off. It’s the speed I’m after.”

“Culture ships are even faster, sir,” Jasken said.

Veppers looked coldly at him. “Are they now?”

“Some are,” the lieutenant said.

“How much would a ship like the Ucalegon cost?” Jasken asked the lieutenant. “If it was for sale?”

“Impossible to say,” the officer said.

“You must know how much they cost,” Veppers said. “You have to price them, you must have a budget for how many you can build and operate.”

“Realistic price might be more than entire gross economic product of Sichultian Enablement,” Xingre said.

Veppers smiled. “I doubt that.”

Xingre made a chuckling sound. “Nevertheless.”

“Additionally,” the lieutenant said, “there are treaties to be considered.”

Veppers exchanged looks with Jasken. “Oh, I bet there are.”

“As responsible members of galactic community and Galactic Council,” the officer said, “we are signatories to treaties forbidding us from over-runging certain technologies.”

“Over-runging?” Veppers asked in his best what-the-fuck-does-that-mean tone. He looked from the lieutenant to Jasken, who shrugged.

“Technical term,” Xingre said. “One may gift or sell technology one rung down the ladder of civilisational attainment, but no further.”

“Ah, that,” Veppers said sourly. “That keeps us all in our place, doesn’t it?”

Xingre rocked backwards on his shiny pillow, looking outward from the flier. “My, is beautiful city!” he said.

“And,” the ship’s officer said, “one is behoved to retain control over said technology to prevent it being re-sold further down relevant tech ladder by rascalish peoples acting purely as middle-men, fraudulently.”

“End-user certificates,” Xingre said, agreeing.

“So we have to wait until we’re about to invent something our selves before we can buy it from somebody else?” Veppers asked.

“Much like that,” Xingre said. It waved a thin green limb at a particularly slim, highly ornate bridge they were passing over. “See, great elegance of form!” It waved at the road and pedestrian traffic crossing the bridge, not that anybody was looking at them, and anyway the flier’s bubble canopy was mirrored on the outside.

“Such treaties and agreements prevent free-for-all,” the lieutenant said helpfully.

Veppers looked unimpressed.

“Hmm. Free-for-alls,” Xingre agreed. “Tsk.”

The flier swung round, banking as it turned to enter a side cavern. This new tunnel was about half the diameter of the one they had been heading down until now. The craft levelled out but dropped, still level, and flew on into darkness; this cavern had no roof piercings to let in the sunlight, or buildings within. A display on the flier’s forward screen lit up to show what the cavern looked like ahead. Rocky, uneven walls stretched curving away into the distance.

“I like free-for-alls,” Veppers said quietly.

They sat in a paper boat floating on a lake of mercury, lit by a single distant ceiling hole producing a searchlight shaft of luminescence. Veppers had brought an ingot of pure gold specially. He took his mask off for a moment. “Plop it in,” he told Jasken.

Jasken didn’t take his mask off. “You can talk through the mask, sir,” he told Veppers, who just frowned, then nodded impatiently.

Jasken slid the soap-bar-size lump of gold out of his tunic, held it by one end, reached over the side of the boat and dropped the thick glossy sliver overboard. It vanished into the silver surface.

Veppers took part of the boat’s gunwale between his fingers, wobbled it. “Paper, really?” he asked Xingre, pulling his mask away again.

The Jhlupian didn’t need a mask; mercury vapour wasn’t poisonous to Jhlupians. “Paper,” the alien confirmed. “Compressed.” It made an expanding then contracting gesture with its limbs. “Easier disposing of.”

The flier had reached the limit of the cave system’s tether rails, had landed, been released from its cables and flown on through another two junctions’ worth of smaller and smaller side tunnels until it had reached the cavern holding Mercury Lake, one of Vebezua’s modest number of tourist attractions.

The flier had hovered centimetres off the surface of the lake and let them step straight into the paper boat. They could have walked across the surface of the mercury, of course, and Veppers had wanted to, but apparently that was forbidden, or at least frowned on, or gave you seasickness or something. The mercury could have been cleaner, Veppers reckoned. Its surface held dust and grit and swirls of little rock particles like dark sand.

The boat was slightly absurd; it looked like a scaled-up version of the sort of paper boat a child might make. Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn’t. It was one number down the Periodic Table and so ought to float. Veppers looked over the side of the vessel at where his ingot of gold had entered the liquid metal, but it showed no sign of surfacing yet.

After dropping them at the boat, the flier had taken off again, carrying the other two Jhlupians with it. Apart from showing his importance to the Jhlupian navy, Xingre hadn’t needed his aide along with him in the first place, and the Navy itself, while being contractually obliged to bring Veppers here safely, had wanted no part of whatever might transpire or be agreed here.

Another, smaller flier approached. Jasken watched it on his Oculenses. The paper boat lay about two hundred metres off the nearest section of cavern wall. Mercury Lake was not natural, though nobody knew who had chosen to place such a huge amount of the metal in an out-of-the-way spot within a natural labyrinth in a planet that was itself quite isolated. The approaching flier was only about three metres by four. Small, for two people of different species, Jasken thought. He had several weapons with him, including one concealed by the cast over his arm. He felt a need to check them again, but didn’t. He already knew they were primed and ready.

The Oculenses were a little confused by the mercury vapour swirling within the chamber. The cavern was roughly spherical, about half a kilometre across. It was a little under half full of mercury, and volcanic activity kept the very bottom of the chamber heated, producing — every now and again — gigantic belching bubbles within the liquid metal. Those bubbles produced the gasses that made the air in the chamber poisonous to pan-humans and many other biological beings, as well as making it next to impossible to monitor any vibrations through the air by laser or any other form of surveillance.

The paper boat kept near but not too close to the centre of the lake, sufficiently distant to ride any waves produced by the sporadic bubbles. The volcanic activity wasn’t natural either; several hundred thousand years earlier — long before the Sichultians arrived on the scene to find a happily habitable but sentiently uninhabited planet — a hole had been drilled down through many tens of kilometres of rock to create the tiny magma chamber that heated the base of the cavern and so kept the mercury simmering. Nobody knew who had done this, or why. The best guesses were that it was either a religious thing or an artwork.

While Jasken was watching the flier approach, Veppers looked over the side of the boat and saw the shining lozenge of the gold ingot, surfaced again at last. He prodded Jasken on the shoulder and he retrieved it.

The flier set down by the side of the paper boat. It looked like a fat bullet made of chrome and coloured glass. It split, opened and revealed a glistening mass within. Just about discernible inside was a dark elliptical shape, fringed or tentacled at either end.

“Welcome, friend from Flekke,” Xingre said.

“Good day,” said an obviously synthesised voice from the opened bullet of the flier. “Chruw Slude Zsor, Functionary-General.”

“An honour,” Xingre said, dipping on its floating cushion.

“We were expecting you to arrive with the Nauptrian negotiator,” Veppers said, talking through the mask.

“That is me, I am here,” said the flier containing the Flekke in what was — somewhat counter-intuitively, Veppers thought — a more organic-sounding voice. “Though I am not Nauptrian. I am of the Nauptre Reliquaria. Were you expecting a sample of our feeder species, or making a mistake?”

“Humble apologies,” Xingre said, extending the limb nearest Veppers towards the man by just enough for the movement to be interpreted as a gesture at all. Veppers had seen, and — reluctantly — kept quiet. “We biological species,” Xingre said, putting a laugh into its voice, “in such niceties’ matterings err, with sporadic effect.”

Veppers had to suppress a smile. He had noticed before that Xingre’s grasp of language ebbed and flowed quite usefully on such occasions, allowing the Jhlupian to present itself as any where between razor smart and hopelessly bumbling, as desired.

The Reliquarian might have been nonplussed by this. It said nothing for a moment, then, “To introduce: I am 200.59 Risytcin, Nauptre Reliquaria Extra-Jurisdictional Service, rank Full Mediary.”

“Please,” Xingre said, gesturing. “On-boarding.”

The opened bullet shape slid forward, up and over the shallow gunwale of the boat, coming to rest just above the flat interior surface of the vessel’s hull. “Most splendid,” Xingre said, and, reaching up with half of its dozen limbs, drew a compressed paper cover right over the whole of the boat’s open surface, enclosing them. Gentle glows from the Jhlupian’s floating pillow and the interior of the Reliquarian’s bullet-shaped casing kept them all visible to each other. It was almost romantic, Veppers thought, if your taste ran to weird, inhuman aliens and fanatical machines with a taste for torment.

“Well, hello to you both,” Veppers said to the Flekkian and the Reliquarian. “Thank you for coming, and for agreeing to conduct our meeting in Sichultian.”

“It is easier for us to talk down to you than it is for you to aspire to our far more sophisticated language,” the Reliquarian said.

Veppers smiled. “Well, I have to hope that lost something in the translation. Now, however, I understand we have to do this ridiculous thing with the masks.”

The ridiculous thing with the masks meant them wearing a sort of helmet — or similar — each, from which a hose led to a central junction chamber. This way they could all talk and listen to each other without anybody else hearing. It all seemed madly contrived to Veppers but apparently in this age of summed-state super quantum phase-parsed encryptography it was the last thing anybody would be looking for. The Nauptre Reliquaria especially thought it was just the greatest thing imaginable and had insisted on it.

It took a while to get everything and everybody set up and adjusted. 200.59 Risytcin insisted on inspecting both the ingot of gold in Jasken’s pocket and his Oculenses, taking some time over the latter — turning them over and over in a maniple field and at one point seemingly trying to twist them apart — but eventually pronounced them safe and handing them back. Jasken looked unhappy, and carefully cleaned and readjusted them before putting them back on.

“To business,” Xingre said, once they were all technically happy and the pleasantries had been dealt with. Its voice sounded at once muffled and echoey, coming through the inter-linked set of tubes. All linked up together, barely lit, hunkered down in this crude approximation of a boat, they looked, Veppers thought, like some bizarrely motley set of desperate survivors from some strange and terrible shipwreck.

The Reliquarian said, “Introductory statement and opening position of the NR, with superposition of same relevant to Flekke: We have good reason to believe that the anti-Hell faction in the relevant confliction — concerning proposed unwarranted intrusions in certain virtual realities — grows desperate. They may attempt to intrude within the Real. A possible source of intrusion might conceivably come via the Tsungarial Disk. We will seek to prevent this happening and expect our allies and friends to cooperate in this. The cooperation of the Veprine Corporation falls within this definition. To Mr. Veppers of the Veprine Corporation: kindly state your position and intentions.”

Veppers nodded. “All very interesting,” he said. “So, we are to take it that the NR representative speaks for the Flekke as well?”

“Indeed,” the ellipsoid shape within the Reliquarian said. “As stated.” Its voice sounded appropriately watery through the linking tubes.

“And do you also talk on the behalf of the GFCF?” Veppers asked.

“The Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy need not be present,” the Reliquarian informed them. “Their acquiescence is assured and assumed.”

Veppers smiled broadly. “Splendid!”

“To repeat: your position and intentions, Mr. Veppers, speaking on behalf of yourself, the Veprine Corporation and the Sichultian Enablement to the extent that you are able to answer for it,” the Reliquarian said.

“Well then, subject to a satisfactory negotiationary outcome here,” Veppers said, “my position is that I fully support the stance and values of our good friends and allies the NR and the Flekke and will do whatever is within my modest means to facilitate their strategic goals.” He smiled, opened his arms wide. “I am on your side, of course.” He smiled again. “Providing the price is right, naturally.”

“What is this price?” Chruw Slude Zsor, Functionary-General for the Flekke said.

“I recently lost something very precious to me,” Veppers said. “And discovered that I had gained something at the same time, something I might not have wished on myself.”

“Would this be linked to the remains of the Culture neural lace which is in one of your servant’s pockets?” 200.59 Risytcin asked.

“How well spotted,” Veppers said. “Yes. I would like to investigate the possibility of replacing the thing that I lost with an identical item, and I would like to have the assistance, even protection, of both the NR and the Flekke, should somebody — anybody — wish to harm me due to any circumstances which might be linked with the neural lace being in my possession.”

“This sounds a little vague,” Chruw Slude Zsor said.

“I intend to be much less vague when we discuss financial remuneration and technology transfer,” Veppers said. “What I’m looking for right now is a declaration of goodwill more than anything else.”

“The Flekke are happy to give this,” Chruw Slude Zsor said.

There was another inscrutable pause before the Reliquarian said, “Similarly.”

“Subject to contract,” the Flekkian added.

“Also similarly,” 200.59 Risytcin confirmed.

Veppers nodded slowly. “Good,” he said. “We can do details later, but for now I’d like to approach the monetary strand of these talks. Mr. Jasken here will record our deliberations using his Oculenses from this point on until further notice, each of us having a veto. Is that agreed?”

“Agreed,” 200.59 Risytcin said.

“The principle is allowed,” Chruw Slude Zsor said. “Though given that all we ask of you is to do nothing, and the price of inaction traditionally is significantly less than that of action, we might wish that you do not approach such negotiations with too unrealistic a set of hopes.”

Veppers smiled. “I shall, as ever, be the very soul of reasonableness.”

Veppers had extensive business interests on Vebezua and throughout the rest of that day he attended a series of more conventional meetings following the one held in the paper boat on Mercury Lake. The Iobe city authorities held a reception for him that evening in a great ballroom complex suspended on cables in the centre of the single greatest circular piercing above the main city caverns. The ceiling was opened to the night.

Vebezua was uncomfortably close to its star and Iobe lay almost right on the equator; by day it would have been insufferably hot and bright in the ballroom with the ceiling irised back, but by night the full glory of the stars was displayed, a distant speckled wash of multi-coloured lights enhanced by a large waning moon and the layered, slow- and not-so-slow-moving sparkle of junk and hab light as the planet’s various halos of artificial satellites rotated overhead.

Veppers had been coming to Vebezua on business for decades and possessed one of the finest mansions in the inner city; however, it was being remodelled, again, and so he had elected to stay in Iobe’s finest hotel, his suite of suites and his retinue taking up the two top floors. He owned the hotel, of course, so making the arrangements, even at relatively short notice, had been trivial.

For security reasons he slept right at the back of the hotel where its largest, finest but windowless grand bedroom had been carved out of the rock of the cavern wall.

Before retiring for the night he had Jasken meet him in one of the saunas. They sat facing each other, naked in the steam.

“My, how pale that arm is becoming,” he told the other man. Jasken had taken his cast off and left it outside.

Jasken flexed his arm, clenched his fist. “I’m due to take it off next week.”

“Mm-hmm,” Veppers said. “The Reliquarian. Did it put something in the Oculenses?”

“I think so. Probably a tracker. Too small to tell. Do I give it to Xingre’s techs to check?”

“Tomorrow. Tonight you stay here.”

Jasken frowned. “You sure?”

“Quite sure. Don’t worry about me.”

“Can’t I just leave the Oculenses?”

“No. And do something memorable.”

“What?”

“Something memorable. Go back out, to a club, start a fight, or get two girls fighting over you, or throw a whore into a wine barrel; whatever it takes to be noticed. Nothing so heinous anyone would think to wake me, obviously, but something that‘ll make it very clear you’re still here.” Veppers frowned; Jasken was frowning at him. Veppers looked down at his own lap. “Oh, yes, well; just the mention of whores will do that. Better deal with it.” He grinned at Jasken. “Meeting over. Tell Astil I’ll manage by myself tonight and send Pleur up on your way out.”

The suite’s giant circular bed could be surrounded by multiple concentric layers of soft and floaty curtains. Once they were all fully drawn round and the hidden monofils within the fabrics had been activated and stiffened, it was impossible to tell from outside that the bed had descended into the deep floor and retreated into the rock wall behind and beneath.

Veppers left Pleur sleeping; the tiny drug-delivery bulb attached to her neck would keep her under for days if necessary. The drug bulb looked just like an insect, which was a nice touch, he thought. He must get Sulbazghi to provide more of the things.

The bed went back to where it had come from; Veppers walked across the gently lit tunnel and into a little underground car. Not too dissimilar to the Reliquarian’s bullet shape, he thought as he swung the door down, switched the thing on and flicked a button to tell it to go. He was pressed back in the couch as the car accelerated. The Reliquaria. Annoying species, or machine type — whatever the fuck they were. Again, though; useful on occasion. Even if it was to be little better than a decoy. He punched in the destination code.

The private underground car system had various stops, most within Iobe city, almost all within buildings and other structures owned by Veppers. One, though, was inside an old mine, way out in the karst desert a quarter of an hour and over a hundred kilometres from the city outskirts.

The stealthed GFCF shuttle was waiting for him: a dark shape like a ragged shallow dome of night squatting on the serrations of rock. Moments after he’d boarded, it rose silently, kept subsonic, accelerated harder once it achieved space, threaded its way through the layers of the orbiting habs, fabs and satellites, and docked with a much larger but similarly secretive ship keeping a little above geosynchronous orbit. The dark, slimly ellipsoid vessel swallowed the shuttle craft and slipped away into hyperspace with barely a ripple to disturb the skein of real space.

He was met by a group of small, obviously alien but ethereally beautiful creatures with sliver-blue skin which turned to delicate scales — insect-wing thin and iridescent, like a tiny lacy rainbow — where most pan-humans had head hair. They wore white, wispy clothes and had large, round eyes. One came forward and addressed him.

“Mr. Veppers,” it said, its sing-song voice soft, high and mellifluous, “how good to see you again. You are indeed most welcome back aboard the GFCF Succour-Class Contact Craft Messenger Of Truth.”

Veppers smiled. “Evening all. Great to be aboard.”

“And what are you supposed to be?”

“I am the angel of life and death, Chay. It is time.”

The thing had appeared in her sleeping chamber in the very middle of the night. There was a noviciate sleeping in a chair by Chay’s bedside, but Chay didn’t even bother trying to wake her. She knew in her heart this was something she would have to deal with, or endure, by herself.

The creature was something between quadri- and bi-pedal in form; its front legs still looked like legs but they were much smaller than its rear legs. It had a single trunk, and two vast, slowly beating wings which flared from its back. They were impossibly wide; far too big to fit into the chamber, and yet — by whatever logic was supposed to be operating here — they appeared to fit inside quite comfortably nevertheless. The thing claiming to be the angel of life and death hovered over the foot of bed, which was where such things were generally expected to show up, if you believed in that sort of thing. And perhaps even if you didn’t, she supposed.

She wondered again about reaching out and shaking the noviciate awake. But it would be such an effort, she thought. Everything was such an effort these days. Getting up, hunkering down, bending, standing, eating, defecating; everything. Even seeing, of course, though she noticed that she could see the self-proclaimed “angel of life and death” better than she ought to be able to.

An apparition, then; a virtuality or whatever you wanted to call it. After all these years, she thought, finally some proof beyond her own dimming memories and the fading ink in her charred page diary that all she had lived through in the Real and the Hell had been in some sense true, not just figments of her imagination.

“You mean time for me to die?”

“Yes, Chay.”

“Well, I must disappoint you, whatever you are or might claim to be. By one way of looking at things I am already dead. I was killed by the king of Hell himself.” She gave a bubbling, choking laugh. “Or at least by some big bugger of a thing. In another way of looking—”

“Chay, you have lived here and now it is time to die.”

“—at things, you cannot kill me,” said Chay, who, as Superior of the Refuge for many years, had become used to not being interrupted. “Because, in the place I came from originally, I am still alive, or at least I presume I am, and will continue to remain so, no matter what sort of tricks you—”

“Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.”

“I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents. They were still alive when I entered the Hell. Can you do anything useful and tell me how they are? Still alive? Passed on? Well? Well? Eh? No? Thought not. ‘Maker’ indeed. What superstitious bollocks are you trying to—?”

“Chay!” the thing shouted at her. Quite loudly, Chay thought, and — what with her failing hearing — that must have meant extremely loudly. Still the young noviciate asleep in the chair by her bedside didn’t even stir. She was glad she hadn’t wasted the effort waking the girl up. “You are about to die,” the apparition told her. “Have you no wish to see God and be accepted into Her love?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. There is no God.” It was what she believed, what she had always believed, but still she looked nervously at the sleeping noviciate.

“What?” the angel cried. “Will you have no thought for your immortal soul?”

“Oh, fuck off,” Chay said. Then she stopped, and felt terrible. Swearing in front of the noviciate! She hadn’t sworn aloud for over two decades. She was the Superior; the Superior didn’t swear. But then she was annoyed at herself for being embarrassed and penitent in the first place. What did it matter? “Yes,” Chay said, while the so-called “angel of life and death” flapped its impossible wings and stared wide-eyed at her. “Fuck off. Entirely fuck off, you ersatz, cobbled-together, neither-one-thing-nor-the-other piece of poor-quality animation. Do whatever it is you have to do and let’s just get this charade over with.”

The great dark angel seemed to pull briefly back, then came forward again, enfolding her vast black wings about the bed, then just around Chay, who said, “Oh, shit. And I bet this is going to hurt.”

The ship towered within the shadowy space of its hangar, a little over three hundred and fifty metres in height, its trim, pale hull girdled about its waist with five dark weapon blisters, its sleekly pointed nose housing three even longer bubbles.

“It looks fabulously retro,” Veppers said. “What exactly is it?”

The alien who had addressed him earlier turned to him. “Technically, to allow for legal challenges based on laws which admittedly do not yet exist, it is a one-point-zero-one-two-five to one scale model of a Culture ‘Murderer’ General Offensive Unit,” it said.

Veppers thought about this. “Doesn’t that mean it’s a model which is bigger than the original?”

“Yes!” the GFCFian said, clapping its little hands. “Bigger is better, yes?”

“Well, generally,” Veppers agreed, frowning.

They were standing in a viewing gallery looking out into a cylindrical hangar a kilometre from top to bottom and half that wide. The hangar had been carved out of the compacted ice and rock making up one of the Tsung system’s half-trillion or so Oort cloud objects. The lumpy conglomerate of ice housing the GFCF base — and within it this hangar — was sufficiently massive to provide less than one per cent of standard gravity; point your mouth down when you sneezed and you could take off. The ship they were looking at — its hull a lustrous golden hue Veppers strongly suspected had been chosen to resemble as closely as possible his own usual skin colour — sat lightly on its flat, circular rear, its sharply pointed nose spiring toward the hangar’s ceiling.

“Its working name is the Joiler Veppers,” the little alien told him, “though it may be re-named anything you wish, of course.”

“Of course.” Veppers looked round the rest of the gallery. They were alone; the other GFCF people had remained on the ship when they’d shuttled across to the ancient lump of space debris, one of the near uncountable bits of debris left over after the stellar system had come into being billions of years earlier.

“You approve of the ship?”

Veppers shrugged. “Maybe. How fast is it?”

“Mr. Veppers! This obsession with speed! Let us say, faster than the original. May we not deem that sufficient?”

“What would that be in figures?”

“I sigh! However: the craft is capable of velocities up to approximately one hundred and twenty-nine thousand times the speed of light.”

Veppers genuinely had to stop for a moment and think. That did sound like a lot. He’d have to check, but he was fairly certain the Jhlupian ship which had taken him to Vebezua had travelled slower than that. The ships which the Veprine Corporation Heavy Industries Deep Space Division constructed measured their maximum velocities in hundreds of times lightspeed. This thing was a galaxy-crosser. Even so, he refused to look impressed.

“‘Up to’?” he asked. The GFCFian was called Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III and was androgynous. Bettlescroy held the rank of Legislator-Admiral, though, like most people in the GFCF, the little alien seemed almost ashamed of having any rank at all. In fact, officially, Bettlescroy’s full title was — and most species required a deep breath at this point — The Most Honourable Heritably Concurrent Delegated Vice Emissary Legislator-Admiral Elect Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III of Turwentire — tertiary, demesne & c. (This was the short version of course, excluding his educational qualifications and military service medals.) Certain components of this startlingly grand honorific apparently indicated that Bettlescroy was the trusted, word-good-as-the-original clone of somebody back home who was even more imposingly magnificent, to the point of being too posh even to do anything as vulgar as actually travelling.

Bettlescroy looked, briefly, very slightly pained. “The precise operational parameters are still being optimised as the vessel is fitted out,” it explained. “As in original, it utilises hyper-spacial aggregation motors and additionally applied induction factoring rather than the more common warp engine technology which powers the vessels your own society builds. Again as in the original, of course, the maximum apparent velocity is achievable over a defined period.”

“A defined period?”

“Indeed.”

“What you mean is, only in bursts?”

“Of course. Again, as in the the original. Though — again again, as it were — a higher maximum and for longer.”

“So what’s its indefinitely sustainable maximum?”

The little alien sighed. “We are still working that out, but in excess of ten kilolights, assuredly.”

“Ah. What about the weapons?”

“Generally similar to and in some cases improvements on and refinements of the originals. In a word, formidable. Far beyond anything the Sichultian Enablement currently possesses. To be frank, so far beyond they will remain arguably non-analysable and certainly non-reproducible for the foreseeable near to medium future. This, sir, will be a space yacht capable of successfully engaging entire fleets of vessels representing state-of-the-art technology by Sichultian Enablement standards, and some way beyond. Great care will need to be taken drawing up the — how shall I put this? — the generally available component of the Use and Ownership Contract for this to pass muster with the sadly all-too-zealous bureaucrats of the Galactic Council’s Technology Transfer Oversight Board.”

“Hmm. Well, we’ll see. It does look terribly retro in style, don’t you think?”

“It is not styled. It is simply designed. See: the form allows all weapons to point forward, five out of the eight to point rearward and never less than five to point to any side, without rotation. In event of field failure, the highly fluid-dynamic directional profile outline provides high abrasive-environment survivability. The internal component layout and field substrate deployment are generally held to be as close to perfection as it was then possible to achieve and has not been significantly improved upon since. I beseech you, Veppers; inquire. Such inquiry will prove what I say: the Murderer class is rightly regarded as a design classic.”

“So it is actually quite old?”

“Let us say that it is proven. In many ways, it has never been bettered for purposeful elegance.”

“Still, though; old.”

“Veppers, my dear friend, the example you see before you is better than the original, and that was the best there was at the time. Warship design has improved only incrementally since, with gradual though significant improvements to raw speed, crude weapon-power effectiveness and so on, but, in a sense, all the various design teams have ever been trying to do is to re-create the design you see here before you for future ages. Any given design produced right now to represent the sum of all subsequent improvements will quickly itself be improved upon and so eclipsed within a relatively short interval. The beauty of the Murderer class is that in a way it never was improved upon. That legacy is secure, endures and ensures that its reputation, rather than fade, will likely only grow the brighter.”

“Accommodation?”

“The original could accommodate up to one hundred and twenty humans, in admittedly relatively cramped conditions. Our improved version requires minimal operational crew — perhaps three or four — and so allows for, say, equal numbers of twenty servant-crew and twenty passengers, the latter existing in conditions of some considerable luxury. The exact disposition of the apartments and suites would be up to your good self.”

“Hmm,” Veppers said. “Okay, I’ll think about it.”

“Well said. Like our civilisational inspirates we worship nothing, but if we and they did worship anything, it would be thought, reason and rationality. As such, your ambition to think leaves us assured that our offer will be seen as the generous — indeed, generous almost to a fault — one that it is.”

“Your confidence is an inspiration to us all, I’m sure.”