Surface Detail

Epilogue

Vatueil, revented once more and back to using what he liked to think of as his original name — even though it wasn’t — sipped his aperitif on the restaurant terrace. He watched the sun set across the dark lake and listened to the crick and chirp of insects hidden in the bushes and vines nearby.

He checked the time. She was late, as usual. What was it about poets?

What a long, terrible war that had been, he thought, idly.

He really had been a traitor, of course. He’d been planted in the anti-Hell side long ago by those who wished to see the Hells continue for ever, a cause he’d supported at the time partly out of sheer contrarianism and partly out of that despair he felt some-times, periodically — during this long, long life — at the sheer self-hurtful idiocy and destructiveness of so many types of sentient life, especially the meta-type known as pan-human, to which he had always had the dubious honour of belonging. You want suffering, pain and horror? I’ll give you suffering, pain and horror…

But then, over time, fighting away, again and again, yet again, he’d changed his mind. Cruelty and the urge to dominate and oppress started to seem childish and pathetic once more, the way he’d accepted they were, long ago, but had somehow turned away from in the meantime.

So he’d spilled all the beans, implicated all those he knew about who deserved to be implicated, and had been quite pleased to see so much of what he had pledged to fight for crumble away into disgraced and piecemeal nothing. Hell mend them.

There would be people who would never forgive him for betraying them, but that was just too bad. They ought to have guessed, of course, but people never did.

That was the thing about traitors: they were people who’d already changed their minds at least once.

He made a mental note never again to insist on working his way up through the ranks. He’d finally convinced himself he’d learned all the relevant lessons already, probably many times over, and the process was starting to smack too much of outright masochism.

The sun brightened slowly as it settled against the horizon, subsiding beneath a long sinuous line of intervening cloud to blaze through a channel of clear air with a languid, dying glory, hazy orange-red against a thin yellow arc of sky. He watched the star’s disk as it started to fall behind a line of dark, distant hills, far across the plains. Closer to him, fringed by its still hush of trees, the lake had gone dark as ink.

He drank in the sunlight’s slow dwindling.

From the first glint of dawn, and for the rest of the day, the sun was too bright to look at, he thought; you could only gaze steadily upon it, only truly see it, regard it, inspect and properly admire it, when it was at its most filtered — half hidden by the thickness of the atmosphere, with its cargo of the day’s dust — and just about to slip away altogether. He must have experienced this on a hundred planets, but was only really noticing it now.

He wondered if this counted as a poetic insight. Probably not. Or if it did it had already occurred to countless poets. Still, he’d mention it to her when she arrived. Likely, she’d snort, though it would depend or her mood; instead she might assume that wry, amused expression that told him he was impinging, clumsily if charmingly, upon her territory. Tiny crinkles of skin formed under her eyes when she had that look. It would be worth it for that alone.

He heard steps. The maître d’ crossed the terrace, arrived at his side, bowed fractionally and clicked his heels.

“Your table is ready, Mr. Zakalwe.”