Surface Detail

Twenty-three

She woke up. She looked around.

She was in a standard-looking medium-dependency medical pod in a standard-looking medical facility. Could be anywhere; ship-board, on an Orbital — anywhere. She felt okay. She was physically whole, wrapped in light compression foam over almost her entire body and she had some sort of movement-restricting bandages round her head. Pain indicators minimal; bodily damage assessment said she was recovering fast from multiple fractures of most major bones. No brain damage, little major organ damage. Widespread tissue damage, healing fast. She should be on her feet in two days, in fragile good health the following day and back to normal a day or two after that.

She could flex her toes and move her arms. Both her hands were free of the recovery foam; she could waggle them, and feel the liquidic texture of the pod covering. Raising her right arm, she could sense the compression foam taking the physical strain, letting her muscles flex but leaving her knitting bones unstressed.

“Okay,” she said, “now where are we?”

“Ms. Nsokyi,” a voice said. It sounded like the ship. Or a ship. Or at least like something non-human trying to be reassuring. A ship-drone, bulbous and smooth, like a giant pebble, swung into view. “Welcome aboard. I am the Culture vessel Me, I’m Counting.”

“Oh,” Yime said. “Well, I was looking for you, but now you’ve found me. What of the Bodhisattva?”

“Severely damaged. Its remains are being held within my own field structure. I intend to leave it with the first GSV we encounter. The extent of the damage it sustained is such I suspect it will make more sense to re-house the Mind in a new ship. Frankly, the main fabric is mostly fit for recycling. In any event, a point may come shortly when I may have to suggest that the Mind of the Bodhisattva abandon ship and throw in its lot with me, allowing me to abandon the rest of the remains and so resume my habitual field structure and hence operational fitness.”

“Why would that be?”

“Because, Ms. Nsokyi, we appear to be heading into what will shortly become, if it is not already, a war zone.”

Over the many, many years of his sexually active life, Veppers had worked out how to manage the rhythms and stages of a sexual encounter, all with a view to maximising his own pleasure. It was definitely a skill worth having. He thought of mundane, nonsexual things when he wanted to hold himself back, and of particularly exciting moments from earlier sexual escapades when he wanted to bring on his orgasm. One of the downsides of becoming very old was that the remembered stuff was generally always better than the sex you were actually having right there and then, but that was a small price to pay, he reckoned.

That evening, he was fucking Diamle, another of his fabulous Harem Troupe girls, in the master bedroom of the Ubruater town house, while Sohne looked on. Sohne was the other girl besides Pleur who was an Impressionist, able to take on any appearance. Currently, she looked like a very famous actress. He was already looking forward to fucking her next. Right now though — sweating a little, his long blond-white hair tied back in a pony tail — he was concentrating on holding back, aiming for an orgasm in about a minute’s time that ought to be a good one. This was no more than he deserved, he thought; he’d only arrived back that morning from his trip to Vebezua and beyond and was intent on making up for lost fucking time.

The air in the room changed, there was a massive “Bang!” and he was stopped in mid-stroke, still holding Diamle’s perfectly formed hips while the girl herself — until that point yelping and moaning with possibly pretended pleasure — stared straight ahead at a small, rather beautiful-looking alien creature with large eyes and milky, slightly pink-tinged skin, most of it hidden by a slim-fitting grey uniform. The creature had materialised where some of the great bed’s plumper pillows and cushions had been, and had caused several of them either to split or to disintegrate, either way spilling bounteous amounts of feathers and almost air-light stuffing into the air. The alien looked like it was emerging from its own small snowstorm. It flapped ineffectually at the feathers and stuffing, gaze darting this way and that.

Diamle screamed.

Internally, as it were, this was quite a pleasurable experience for Veppers, not that it made the slightest bit of difference to his sense of shock, violation and even betrayal. Sohne fell forward, fainting on the bed in a dead weight, her forehead thudding into one of Diamle’s splayed calves. Diamle was whimpering now. Veppers let her go; she pulled a deflated cushion cover around her and jumped off the bed, stood there quivering, staring at the little alien. She coughed suddenly, spitting out feathers.

The creature wobbled in the midst of the slowly falling debris, then seemed to find its balance, composing itself. It was one of Bettlescroy’s immediate underlings. “Mr. Veppers,” it said. It looked first at his face, then down at his engorged penis. “Gracious,” it said. It looked back at his face. “Over-Lieutenant Vrept,” it told him, nodding once. “Answering directly to the honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III himself.”

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Veppers said. This was not funny, not forgivable.

“I have information. We must talk,” the GFCFian said. It glanced at the sprawled, still-fainted form of Sohne, and the no-longer-quivering, merely gulping Diamle. “Send these persons away.”

“Sir?” Jasken’s voice came distantly from the bedroom’s main doors. The locked handles were turned from outside, then released. The door thudded to knocks. “Sir?”

Veppers pointed back towards the doors. “Just before I have my chief of security take you away for—”

“Information. Talk. Immediately,” the little alien said. “No further delay. I have orders.”

“Sir?” Jasken shouted from beyond the doors again. “Are you all right? It’s Jasken, with two Zei.”

“Yes!” Veppers shouted. “Wait there!” He turned to Diamle.

“My robe.”

The girl twirled, scooped his robe from the floor. Veppers lifted Sohne’s head up by her long golden hair and slapped her across the face a couple of times, bringing her round. She sat back, looking woozy, cheeks reddened.

“Both of you, out,” Veppers told the women as he wrapped his robe around himself. “Leave the door unlocked and tell Jasken and the Zei to wait where they are. Let him know what’s happened here, but nobody else.”

Diamle wrapped herself and Sohne in sheets and helped the other girl to the doors. Veppers heard Diamle saying something to Jasken, then the doors thudded shut again.

Veppers turned to the small creature. “Are you familiar with the phrase, ‘This had better be good,’ Over-Lieutenant Vrept?” he asked, knee-walking his way up the bed towards the sitting alien, then looking down, towering over it.

“I am,” it told him. “This is not good though; this is bad. Hence the urgency. My commander, the aforesaid honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III, bids me inform you that there has been a security breach in the Tsungarial Disk; one of the currently ship-constructing fabricaria was damaged during the ongoing diversionary smatter outbreak containment action and a light space craft belonging to the Culture Restoria mission caught recorded sight of the extemporised ship being built within said fabricary, signalling this information to the rest of the Culture mission within the Disk, which has concomitantly relayed said information beyond to other Culture units while at the same time investigating other fabricaria to discover whether others amongst them are also building ships, the results of this investigation being positive, of course, though steps have been and are being taken to neutralise the Culture mission’s abilities.

“In sum: it is now known within the Culture, and feasibly beyond, that certain of the Disk elements are manufacturing a war fleet. The fleet is still a day and a half from earliest completion, excluding AM-fuelling. Several Culture ships are approaching the Disk. The NR seem not to have been informed of the full substance of the aforesaid intelligence, however they have expressed strong interest in knowing what precisely is going on in the matter of the Tsungarial Disk, and unconfirmed reports suggest they may be moving militarily relevant assets into position.

“That is the initial substance of my message. Any questions, good sir? Or, and also, you may wish to enlighten the aforesaid honourable Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III regarding the previously discussed but still unspecified targets pertaining to the still-being-built ships. That would be appreciated.”

Veppers stared open-mouthed at the little alien for at least two heartbeats, then wondered if he too was about to faint.

“Well, happy fucking day!” Demeisen said. He turned to Lededje with a grin that extended into a broad smile.

She looked at him. “I have the feeling that what you think of as good news might not strike everybody else as being quite so smashing.”

“Some nutter’s building a bunch of ships in the Tsungarial Disk!” Demeisen sat back in the seat, staring at the module’s screen, still smiling.

“How is that good news?”

“It’s not, it’s a fucking disaster,” Demeisen said, waving his arms. “This’ll end in tears, mark my words.”

“So stop smiling.”

“I can’t! There are natural… Okay, I can,” the avatar said, turning to her with a look of such abject sadness she instantly wanted to take him in her armour-suited arms, pat his back and reassure him everything would be all right. Even as Lededje realised quite how easily she was being manipulated, and started to feel furious at herself as well as Demeisen, he dropped the sad look and went back to looking quite gloriously happy. “I can help it,” he admitted, “I just don’t want to help it.” He waved his arms again. “Come on! This avatar naturally recognises my own emotional state and reflects it, unless I’m deliberately trying to deceive. Would you rather I lied to you?”

“Then what,” Lededje asked, trying to keep her voice cold and not get caught up in the avatar’s obvious enthusiasm, “is making you smile about a disaster?”

“Well, first, I didn’t cause it! Nothing to do with me; hands clean. Always a bonus. But it’s looking clearer and clearer there’s going to be some heavy fucking messing hereabouts very shortly and that’s precisely what I’m built for. I’m going to get to strut my stuff, I’m going to get to be me, girlie. I tell you, I can’t fucking wait.”

“We are talking about a shooting war?” she said.

“Well, yes!” Demeisen exclaimed, sounding borderline-exasperated with her. He waved his arms again. He seemed to be doing this a lot, she noticed.

“And people are going to die.”

“People? Very likely even ships!”

She just looked at him.

“Lededje,” the avatar said, taking one of her armour-fat hands in his own. “I am a warship. This is in my nature; this is what I’m designed and built for. My moment of glory approaches and you can’t expect me not to be excited at the prospect. I was fully expecting to spend my operational life just twiddling my metaphorical thumbs in the middle of empty nowhere, ensuring sensible behaviour amongst the rolling boil of fractious civs just by my presence and that of my peers, keeping the peace through the threat of the sheer pandemonium that would result if anybody resurrected the idea of war as a dispute-resolution procedure with the likes of me around. Now some sense-forsaken fuckwit with a death wish has done just that and I strongly suspect I shortly get a chance to shine, baby!”

On the word “shine”, Demeisen’s eyebrows shot up, his voice rose a tone or two and increased markedly in volume. Even through the armoured glove, she could feel the pressure of his hands squeezing hers.

Lededje had never seen anybody look so happy.

“And what happens to me?” she asked quietly.

“You should get back home,” the avatar told her. It glanced at the screen, where the black snowflake with too many limbs still filled the centre of the image. “I’d chuck you overboard in this shuttle right now and let you head for Sichult, but whatever the fuck that is might mistake you for a munition or just waste you for the target practice so I’d better deal with it first.” The avatar looked at her with a strange, intense expression. “Necessarily dangerous, I’m afraid. No getting away from it.” Demeisen took a deep breath. “You afraid to die, Lededje Y’breq?”

“I’ve already died,” she told him.

He spread his hands, looked genuinely interested. “And?”

“It’s shit.”

“Fair enough,” he said, turning to face the screen and sitting back properly in the shuttle command seat. “Let’s put that one down as a mistake and try to stop it turning into a habit.”

Lededje watched the seat contort itself around the avatar, securing his body in place with padded extensions of the chair’s own legs, arms, seat and back. She felt movement around and beneath her and realised her seat was doing the same thing, enclosing her one more time; another layer of confinement beyond the gel suit and the armoured outer suit. She was pressed and shuffled backwards until everything fitted snugly against the contours of the seat.

“Now we get foamed,” Demeisen told her.

“What?” she said, alarmed, as the suit’s visor swung smoothly down over her face. The shuttle’s interior went dark, but the visor showed some sort of compensated image that gave her a very clear view of what looked like red-glowing bubbling liquid filling up the space she’d been living in for the last twenty-plus days, rising quickly in a dark red tide around the base of the chair, flowing up and over her armoured body and then foaming all about her, rapidly covering the visor and leaving her briefly blind in the darkness before she heard the avatar speak again.

“Space view? Or some screen entertainment to while away the time?” Suddenly the visor was showing her the same view the screen had, but wrap-around. The wrong-looking, eight-limbed black snowflake was still centre-image.

“You might have done better to ask whether I was afraid of forced immobility and confined spaces,” Lededje told the avatar.

“I forgot. Of course, the suit can just put you under for the duration of… well, whatever.”

“No, thanks.”

“So, make you mind up. Real space view with potential scariness, or some screen; gentle feel-good, wistful comedy, razor-sharp witterage, outright slapstick hilarity, engrossing human drama, historical epic, educational documentary, ambient meanderance, pure art appreciation, porn, horror, sport or news?”

“Real space view, thanks.”

“I’ll do my best. Might all happen too quickly if anything happens at all. Though prepare for disappointment and anti-climax; chances are still that this particular encounter will be resolved peacefully. Bastarding things usually are.”

“You are astoundingly bad at hiding your feelings in such matters,” she told the ship. “I hope your space-battle tactics are more subtle.”

The avatar just laughed.

Then everything went quiet for a moment. She could hear her own heart beat distantly. There was a noise just like a single in drawn breath and then the avatar’s voice said quietly, “Okay…”

On the screen before her eyes, the black snowflake image flickered.

There came a time when she found the shallow valley with the iron cages where the acid rain fell to torment the howling inmates, and each day the demons dragged them screaming to the canted slabs where their blood was spilled to form the gurgling stream at the valley’s foot which flowed glutinously into the header pond just upstream from the little mill.

She beat her great dark wings over the scene, watching as a giant flying beetle machine arrived to disgorge the latest batch of the badly behaved who’d been appropriately terrified by their tour round Hell. The beetle landed in a storm of dust, caking the mill and adding to the patina on the black-dark blood pond.

On the side of the mill, the wheel revolved ponderously, eliciting screams and groans from the still-living tissues, sinews and bones from which it was made.

Every beat of her wings caused her a tiny twinge of pain.

Chay had killed her thousand souls, enveloping them to release them into oblivion. This had happened some time ago. She still had no idea how quickly time moved within the virtual environment of the Hell. For her, it had been over thirteen hundred days; nearly three years in Pavulean terms, back in the Real.

With every death she took on a little more pain; the lantern-headed uber-demon had not lied. An aching tooth here, a stabbing feeling in her gut there, a persistent headache, what felt like a trapped nerve in one hip, a twinge every time she clenched her talons, a cramp when she flexed her wings in a certain way… a thousand almost infinitesimal little pangs and stings and sprains and strains and ulcers and chafings, either adding incrementally to some established hurt or starting a fresh site. She had long since stopped assuming that there were no bits of her great dark body left to experience pain; there always were. She remembered being the old Superior, near the end of her life in the Refuge; filled with aches and pains. At least there, death was always on its way, a release from suffering.

No single ache dominated, and even when taken together the sum of them was not utterly debilitating, but they all nagged, all had their effect, filling her days with the grumbling torment of continual, grinding misery; all the worse, on those days when she was feeling sorry for herself, for being self-inflicted.

Still she beat on though, still she flew across the calamitous geographies of Hell; watching, witnessing, and worshipped. She didn’t wonder that she had become part of this constructed world’s emergent mythology. Had she still been a lost soul wandering these reeking morasses, denuded, fire-blacked forests, crater-pitted concrete aprons and blasted, cinder-strewn hillsides, so traumatised she had started to believe there never had been a Real in which she’d lived… she too might have worshipped something like herself, praying to the half-fabled, occasionally glimpsed angel of death for a release from her torments.

She had toured the Hell to its limits, many tens of days flight away, and, beating upright by those iron walls, talons scrabbling at their vast, unyielding extent, accepted that this was indeed not an infinite space. It had its boundaries, distant though they may be.

She established a sort of mental map of the place. Here were the scorched plains, the poisoned marshes, the arid badlands, the steaming swamps, the bleached salt pans, the alkali lakes, acid ponds, bubbling mud craters and sintered lava flows amongst all the other bewilderingly varied wastelands of the place; here were the tremendous peaks of iron-frozen mountains, their glaciers red with blood, here the encircling sea of Hell, which lapped at the foot of the boundary wall and teemed with voracious monsters.

Here were the great valved doors that admitted the newly condemned; here were the roads the towering juggernauts of dead and dying trundled down, delivering their grisly cargoes to the vast prisons, camps, factories and barracks of the place; here the damned were set to their slave labour within the munitions factories or condemned to wander the ruins and the wilderness, or were chosen to fight in the everlasting war that consumed, recycled and re-consumed lives by the thousands and tens of thousands each and every day by, both sides.

Because there were two sides to Hell, though you’d have struggled to spot the slightest difference if you’d simply found yourself set down in the midst of either. The unfortunates delivered into Hell were allocated sides before they even entered the place, generally half going to one and half to the other.

There were two sets of the great valved doors — only admitting, impossible to exit through — two vast sets of boulevards paved with wracked backs and splintered bones, two whole sets and systems of prisons and factories and camps and barracks, two hierarchies of demons and — she’d been surprised to find — two of the colossal king-demons. They fought over the centre ground of Hell, throwing forces into the fray with a sort of manic relish, uncaring how many fell because they would always be resurrected again within days for fresh punishment.

In the rare event that one side established military superiority over the other, through simple luck or an accident of good leadership — threatening the balance of territory and forces and so the continuance of the war — extra recruits would be funnelled to the temporarily losing side by the simple expedient of shutting down one of the sets of gates, channelling all the new arrivals to the disadvantaged side, gradually restoring balance through sheer weight of numbers.

She thought of the gates she and Prin had entered through as the Eastern gate, for no particularly good reason. So they had been on the East side, but basically every aspect of the East side in this vast dispute was replicated in the West as well, and the two appeared identical in their gruesomeness. From a distance, anyway. She was not welcome in the West; smaller winged demons came up to mob her when she overflew too far beyond the front of the everlasting war, so she had to keep away entirely, or fly so high that the detail of what went on was denied her.

Still, she had flown to see the opposing Western gates, soared above the scattered dark clouds of the Western hinterland and even landed on occasion — usually only for a few minutes at a time — on certain jagged, frozen peaks, well away from the most intense fighting and the greatest numbers of enemy demons.

Whether in the West or the East, she looked down from such high crags, wrapped from the cold in her own gale-fluttering wings, and watched the scudding shreds of bruise-coloured clouds move over the distant landscapes of terror and pain with a sort of horrified amusement.

When she had killed the thousandth soul, she had taken the half-eaten body and dropped it at the feet of the great lantern-headed demon sitting in his red-glowing iron throne looking out over the vast reeking valley of smokes and fumes and screams.

“What?” the colossal creature boomed. With one enormous foot it kicked aside the husk of body she’d deposited in front of it.

“A thousand souls,” she told it, treading the air with deep, easy sweeps of air, keeping herself level with its face but too far away for it to swipe at her easily. “A thousand days since you told me that once I’d released ten times one hundred souls you’d tell me what happened to my love, the male I first came here with: Prin.”

“I said I’d think about it,” the great voice thundered.

She stayed where she was, the black, leathery wings fanning some of the valley’s noxious fumes towards the uber-demon’s face. She gazed into the gaseous impression of a face writhing and billowing behind the house-sized pane of glass, trying to ignore the four fat, dripping candles at each of the lantern’s four corners, their carbuncled surfaces veined with a hundred screaming nerve clusters. The creature stared back at her. She kept station, refused to move.

“Please,” she said, at last.

“Long dead,” the vast voice burst out across her. She heard the words with her wings. “Time moves more slowly in here, not faster. He is barely a memory. He died by his own hand, ashamed, penurious, disgraced and alone. There is no record of whether he remembered you at the end. He escaped being sent here, more’s the pity. Satisfied?”

She stayed where she was a while longer, upright in the air before it, beating her cloak wings like slow, mocking applause.

“Huh,” she said at last, and turned, dropping, swooping only to zoom again, beating away up and across the valley’s slope to its furthest ridge.

“How are the pains, bitchlet?” she heard the demon shout after her. “Do they grow?” She ignored it.

She waited until they came back out of the mill: the three demons and the one sad, screaming soul who had not been released after his tour of Hell. The demons held the howling, frantically struggling male between them; one holding both front feet, one each at the rear legs. They laughed and talked, taunting the screeching male as they carried him back to the beetle-shaped flier.

She stooped upon them, slaughtering the three demons easily; the two at the rear with a single pinch of one of her great talons. The unfortunate male lay quivering on the scaly ground, watching the demons’ blood pool dustily in towards him from three different directions. The beetle tried to take off; she screamed at it and with a two-legged blow ripped one of its wings right off and then tipped it over onto its back. It lay making clicking, chirring noises. When the pilot crawled out she wanted to rip him apart too, but instead she let him go.

She picked the trembling male up with one talon and stared into his petrified face while he voided his bowels noisily on the ground beneath.

“When you left the Real,” she said to him, “what date was it?”

“Eh?”

She repeated the question. He told her.

She asked him a couple of other questions about banal things like current affairs and civilisational status, then she let him go; he scurried away along the road leading from the mill. She might have killed him, she supposed, but she had already released one soul from its torments that day; all this had been a sudden inspiration, brought on for some reason when she’d come upon the mill.

She trashed the building too, scattering its screaming, protesting components across the valley’s slope, throwing wreckage splashing into the mill race and the header pond, displacing sloshing tons of blood while the building’s operators ran scampering for their lives. The blue-glowing door was not glowing at all, of course. It was just a plain, rough wooden door, now hanging off its hinges; a doorway to nowhere.

Oddly satisfied, she swept back into the grim skies with a single great clap of her wings, then beat off across the valley. She dropped the massive lump of wood that had been the door’s lintel towards the fleeing figures of the mill operators as they ran away, missing them by less than a metre.

She wheeled once above the valley, just a collection of pains and sundered lives, then struck out, cloudward, rising all the time, heading for her roost.

Always assuming the hapless male had been telling the truth, the uber-demon had lied.

Barely a quarter of a year had passed in the Real.

Vatueil was hanging upside down. He wondered absently if there were any circumstances when this could be a good sign.

He appeared to be inhabiting a physical body. Hard to tell whether he’d actually been embodied in a real one or this was just a full-sensory-spectrum virtuality. He was in no pain, but the blood roared in his ears due to the gravitational inversion and he felt distinctly disoriented, beyond the obvious fact that he was the wrong way up.

He opened his eyes to see a creature like a giant flying something-or-other staring straight back at him. It was also hanging upside down, though unlike him it appeared to be entirely happy with the situation. It was human-size, had a long, intelligent-looking face with large bright yellow eyes. Its body was covered in soft folds of golden-grey fur. It had four long limbs with what looked like thick membranes of the same soft fur linking the limbs on each side of its body to each other.

It opened its mouth. It had a lot of very small very sharp teeth.

“You are… Vatch-oy?” it said in a thick accent.

“Vatueil,” he corrected it. Looking away from the creature, he seemed to be hanging in the blue-green foliage of a great, tall tree. Further away, he could glimpse the trunks of other tall trees. The tree he was in was nothing like the size of the impossible tree, where he had spent many a happy holiday, winged and flying, but it was still too big for him to be able to see the ground. The branches and trunks he could see looked substantial. His feet, he noticed, were tied together with what looked like rope, while another length of rope ran through the noose his feet were in and then right round the metre-broad branch he was hanging from.

“Vatoy,” the creature said.

“Close enough,” he conceded. He felt he ought to know what this creature was, what species it was part of, but he had no internal access to any remote networks here; he was effectively just human, just meat, hanging here. All he had to rely on was his own all-too-fallible memories, such as they’d survived all the transcriptions they’d had to undergo over the years and regenerations, plus whatever unexpected intervention had led to him being here. His memories were anyway suspect, jumbled by a hundred different reincarnations in as many different environments, the vast majority virtual, unreal, militarily metaphorical.

“Lagoarn-na,” the creature beside him said, thumping itself on the chest.

“Yeah, hello,” Vatueil said cautiously. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased meet you too,” Lagoarn-na said, nodding, its big yellow eyes staring at him, unblinking.

Vatueil felt a little groggy. He tried to remember where he’d been last. Where this version of himself had been last, anyway. A fellow could lose track when he was copied and re-copied so often. He started to recall sitting round a table with a bunch of aliens, in… had it been a ship? A meeting. In a ship. Not fighting a war then, trapped in tunnels or trenches or the guts of a land ship or a sea ship or a gas-giant dirigible the shape of a gigantic bomb, or finding himself downloaded into a smart battle tank or some sort of cross between a microship and a missile, or… his memories flickered past him, detailing what certainly felt like every single time he’d played a part in the vast war he’d been a part of, the war over the Hells.

It made a pleasant change for his last deployment not to have involved nuts-and-bolts, blood-and-guts soldiering — a meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well. On the other hand, he felt he had just been… read somehow. All those deployments, mostly indicating gradually increasing seniority of rank and importance and responsibility, all flickering past in his memory — all tumbling past, like a pack of nearly a hundred cards — that had felt like something triggered, something called up.

Meeting. The meeting. The meeting in the ship. Lots of little aliens; one other pan-human. Big guy. Or at least important guy. He should know the name of that species too, but he couldn’t remember it.

He’d been far away for that meeting. In some rarely travelled bit of the sim… no, he’d been in the Real. In the Real again; how about that? He’d been given a re-useable, download-ready body and he’d been physically present at that meeting with the cute little aliens with the big eyes and the single larger pan-human with the hunched look and the attitude.

Still couldn’t remember the species the guy belonged to. Maybe he’d have better luck with his name. Vister? Peppra? It had been something like that. Important. Top brass in his civilian field. A big wheel. Paprus? Shepris?

He remembered not being bored at the meeting. It really had been important. In fact, he remembered feeling nervous, excited, energised, feeling that something genuinely momentous was being agreed here, and he was a part of it.

He’d been beamed into that body, transcripted into it. He might have been transcripted back out again, sent back to where he’d come from, his meeting-attending duties over. He probably had.

He looked at the big creature hanging beside him, gazing into its staring yellow eyes. “How did I come to be here?” he asked.

“How did you… get me?”

“Guff-Fuff-Kuff-Fuff not so smart.”

He stared at the creature. He closed his eyes, shook his head.

“No, sorry; didn’t get the first part of that at all.”

“GFCF not so smart,” the creature said.

Shaking his head seemed to have helped. Now he could see that the creature had straps and pouches distributed across his golden-grey furred body. Some sort of head-set — thin, metallic, glittering like jewellery — wound round the back of its skull, little armatures seeming to clasp near but not in its ears and eyes and nose and mouth.

“The GFCF?” Vatueil said. A feeling that was equal parts dread and sadness seemed to settle over him. He struggled not to show it.

“Protocols in messagery,” Lagoarn-na told him. “Gifts of knowledge, from high to low, not always maximally one-way. That which is given may give back, in time, where time is potentially quite long time. Still less so in cases of knowledge gained by chicanery, thefting. And so, resultingly, to this, and here. Plainly? Plainly: ancient code, buried; consequencing trapdoors therefore. Their ignorance thereof.”

The GFCF. And the NR. The Nauptre Reliquaria. That was the name of the species Lagoarn-na belonged to. The Nauptre, anyway. The Reliquaria bit usually referred to the machines that had taken over from them while the Nauptre themselves, the biological part of the super-species, prepared — everyone assumed — for Sublimation. That’s what had thrown him: the NR always presented as machines. You never saw the original bio species except in historical, contextual stuff.

They must have intercepted him. He’d been taken in some handover the GFCF had made of his personality construct, his mind-state, while attempting to transmit his updated, downloaded soul back to the war sim.

He wondered how bad this was, because it could be very bad. If he hadn’t made it back at all, at least people would know there had been a problem. He might only have been copied, though; maybe an identical copy had got back, and nobody had any suspicions.

He tried to recall what the latest tech implied; could comms be made completely proof against interception? It kept changing. One time they told you it was impossible to read a signal without it being obvious to whoever it had been sent to, another time they seemed to have changed their minds, and it was possible again; even easy. Trivial, frankly.

Then it would go back to being impossible, for a while.

Whatever; he was here when he shouldn’t be, and the NR — or just the N, just the bio Nauptre, though he doubted that — could intercept GFCF comms, because some of the code the GFCF used in their comms protocols had been given by the Nauptre — or stolen from them by the GFCF — and it had come with holes in it, ways the NR or the Nauptre could listen in when they wanted to.

Not as smart as they thought they were.

Guff-Fuff-fucking-Kuff-Fuff.

Shit.

He wondered why they were bothering to embody him, either in the Real or in a decent sim. But then even when you had all the information, sometimes it could be difficult to find the bit you really wanted. Embodying helped. Especially when you looked upon what you had downloaded as some sort of strange alien.

That was what he was to them. An alien. An alien they had refashioned from comms-code-information into something at least resembling what resulted from genetic information; a creature of flesh and blood. Him. And now they would want the truth.

“Meeting,” Lagoarn-na said, with what might have been a smile.

“GFCF. Pan-hu-man Vipperz. Scheme. War in afterlife. Tsung Disk? Tsung Disk.” The creature nodded.

Shit; it already knew too much of it. Had he told them that already, inadvertently? What more would they ask? He couldn’t see any obvious torture instruments about the creature’s webbing and pouches, but who knew?

Please not torture. Why did so much of everything have to come down to pain? We are creatures of pain, creatures of suffering. He had been through this, done this. Not more, please not more.

“You not to worry,” the creature told him. It gestured encompassingly. “Is one of trillions scarnations,” it told him. “Quantum stuff. In one you bound to tell trute. Maybes this one.”

The creature tipped its head to one side and Vatueil felt a feeling of utter relief and almost boundless pleasure wash through him. He knew he was being manipulated, but he didn’t care.

Lagoarn-na didn’t want to hurt him, had no intention of hurting him. The Nauptre had every right to the information he had. All they wanted was the truth.

The truth. All so simple. Just stick to the truth and it made life so much simpler. Just the one set of facts or assertions to remember. The force of this simple truth — the truth about truth! — hit him like a cannon shell.

He really was experiencing bliss. This was only just short of sexual.

“What do you want to know?” he heard himself say, dreamily.

“Relate meeting,” Lagoarn-na said, and crossed its long, furmembraned arms across its chest, its wide unblinking yellow eyes seeming to stare into his soul.

“All right,” he heard himself say. He marvelled at how relaxed and unconcerned he sounded. “First let me introduce myself. My name is Vatueil; Gyorni Vatueil, my most recent rank — that I recall — being that of Space Marshal…”

He had never enjoyed relating anything more. Lagoarn-na proved to be a very good listener.