Surface Detail

Seven

The Halo 7 rolled magisterially across the misty plain, its stately progress marked by little lofted tufts and wisps of vapour which seemed to cling longingly to its tubes and spars as though reluctant to let go. The giant Wheel left a temporarily cleared track through the mist behind it like a wake, affording glimpses of the land beneath before the silent grey presence flowed slowly back in.

Veppers floated in the pool, looking out over the misted landscape to where some high, rounded hills rose out of the grey, maybe twenty or more kilometres away. The water around him trembled and pulsed as the pool car’s shock absorbers struggled to iron out the Halo 7’s trundling progress across the mist-swaddled terrain.

The Halo 7 was a Wheel, a vehicle built to navigate the great plains, rolling hills and shallow inland seas of Obrech, Sichult’s principal continent. One hundred and fifty metres in diameter by twenty across, the Halo 7 looked entirely like a giant fairground wheel which had broken free from its supports and gone rolling across the land.

The Veprine Corporation’s Planetary Heavy Industries Division (Sichult) constructed several standard sizes and types of Wheel. Most were mobile hotels, taking the rich on cruises across the continent; the Halo 7, Veppers’ own privately owned vehicle, was the grandest and most impressive of the largest spokeless class, being no greater in diameter than the rest but possessing thirty-three rather than thirty-two gondolas.

The Halo 7’s separate cars held sumptuous bedroom suites, banqueting halls, reception rooms, two separate pool and bath complexes, gyms, flower-filled terraces, kitchens, kitchen gardens, a command and communication pod, power and services units, garages for ground vehicles, hangars for fliers, boat-houses for speedboats, sailboats and minisubs, and quarters for crew and servants. Much more than a mode of transport, the Halo 7 was a mobile mansion.

Rather than being fixed to the Wheel’s rims, the thirty-three cars could alter position, either at Veppers’ whim or according to the dictates of the landscape beneath; negotiating — and especially traversing — a steep slope, where there was no ready-made Wheel road, all the heavier pods could be brought down close to the ground, preventing the device from becoming dangerously top-heavy and so allowing it take on angles of lean that looked both unlikely and alarming. Perched at the top in a gimballed observation gondola during such a manoeuvre, Veppers had been known to take great delight in terrifying guests with that trick. Getting from one pod to another could mean as little as a single step if the cars had been brought up against each other, or a ride in one of several circumferential elevator units that moved round a smaller-diameter ring fixed inside the Wheel’s principal structure.

Veppers gazed out at the distant blue hills, trying to remember if he owned them or not.

“Are we still within the estate?” he asked.

Jasken was standing at the pool-side, keeping politely out of his master’s view. Jasken was scanning the misty landscape, the Enhancing Oculenses covering his eyes zooming in on details, revealing the ground’s mostly chilly heat signature and showing him any radio sources. “I’ll ask,” he said, and muttered something, putting a finger to the comms bud attached to his ear as he listened. “Yes, sir,” he told Veppers. “Captain Bousser informs us we are about thirty kilometres inside the estate’s boundaries.” Jasken used a small keypad on the back of the cast covering his left arm to call up the requisite overlay on the view the Oculenses were presenting. Thirty klicks was about right.

The Halo 7’s commander, Captain Bousser, was female. Jasken suspected she had been hired for her pleasing looks rather than on merit, so, where possible, he checked any assertions she made, waiting, so far unsuccessfully, for a mistake he could use to convince Veppers of her unfitness for the post.

“Hmm,” Veppers said. Now he thought about it, he didn’t really care whether he owned the hills or not. His right hand went to his face without him thinking about it, his fingers very gently tracing the prosthetic covering that had replaced the tip of his nose while the flesh and cartilage re-grew beneath. It was a pretty good fake, especially with a bit of makeup on top, but he was still self-conscious about it. He’d cancelled a few engagements and postponed many more in the days since the debacle in the opera house.

What a mess that had been. They hadn’t been able to keep it completely quiet, of course, especially as he’d had to cancel that evening’s engagement at such short notice. Dr. Sulbazghi had come up with their cover story, which was that Jasken had accidentally sliced the tip of his master’s nose off while they were fencing.

“That’ll have to do,” Veppers agreed as he lay on the treatment couch in the clinic suite deep within the Ubruater town house, less than an hour after the girl had attacked him. He was painfully aware that his voice sounded strange, strangled and nasal. Sulbazghi was bandaging his nose and prepping it with coagulant, antiseptic and a stabilising preparatory gel; a specialist plastic surgeon had been summoned and was on his way. The girl’s body had already been bagged and placed in a mortuary freezer. Dr. Sulbazghi would see to its disposal later.

Veppers was still shaking a little, despite whatever Sulbazghi had given him for the shock. He lay there, thinking, as the doctor fussed about him. He was waiting for Jasken to return; he was on his way back from the opera house having made sure everything had been squared away and everybody had their stories straight.

He shouldn’t have killed the girl. It had been stupid, impetuous. On the rare occasion that sort of thing was necessary, you just never got involved directly; that was what delegation was for, what people like Jasken — and whoever he employed specifically for such tasks — was for. Always keep it deniable, always at a remove, always have a true alibi.

But, he’d been too excited by the chase, by the knowledge that the runaway was still so close, and so trapped within the opera house, practically waiting to be caught. Of course he’d wanted to be part of the hunt, the capture!

Still, he shouldn’t have killed her. It wasn’t just how much she’d been worth, how much wasted effort and money she represented, it was the embarrassment of having lost her. People would notice her continued absence. The cover story after she’d run off from the couturier’s had been that she was ill — the PR people had hinted at some rare ailment that only the intagliated suffered from.

Now they would either have to claim she’d died of it — meaning problems with the Surgeon’s Guild, the insurance people and possibly lawyers for the clinic that had overseen her intagliation in the first place — or go with the even more humiliating though partially true narrative that she’d run away. He’d already entertained the idea that they might claim she’d been kidnapped, or allowed to join a nunnery or whatever, but both would lead to too many complications.

At least he’d got the knives back. They were still tucked into the waistband of his trews. He touched their hilts again, reassuring himself they were still there. Jasken had wanted to dispose of them, the idiot. No need to dispose of the murder weapon when you were going to dispose of the body properly. Stealing the knives; the sheer fucking effrontery of it! In the end she’d been nothing more than an ungrateful little thief. And: biting him! Maybe even trying to bite his throat out and kill him! How dare the little bitch do that? How dare she put him in this situation!

He was glad he’d killed her. And it was a first for him, he realised; directly taking a life was one of the few things he’d never done. When this had all calmed down, when his nose had re-grown and things had gone back to normal, he’d still have that, he supposed.

He remembered that until he’d first taken her against her will, maybe ten years or so ago, he’d never raped anybody before either — there had been no need — so he’d got two firsts from her. If he was being generous, he would reluctantly concede that that was some sort of compensation for all the pain and inconvenience she was putting him through.

Quite a thing, though, doing something like that, actually plunging a knife into somebody and feeling them die. It shook you, no matter how strong you were. He could still see the look in the girl’s eyes as she’d died.

Jasken came in then, removing his Oculenses and nodding to the two Zei guarding the clinic suite’s door.

“You’ll have to be injured too, Jasken,” Veppers told him immediately, glaring at his chief of security as though it really had all been his fault. Which, now he thought about it, was true, as it had ultimately been Jasken’s responsibility to keep an eye on the scribble-child and make sure she didn’t go running off anywhere. “We’re going to say you took my nose off while we were fencing, but we can’t have people thinking you actually bested me. You’ll have to have an eye out.”

Jasken’s face, already pale, went paler. “Ah, but, sir…”

“Or a broken arm; something serious.”

Dr. Sulbazghi nodded. “I think the broken arm.” He looked at Jasken’s forearms, perhaps choosing on Veppers’ behalf.

Jasken glared at Sulbazghi. “Sir, please—” he said to Veppers.

“You could make it a clean break, couldn’t you Sulbazghi?” Veppers asked. “Quick to heal?”

“Easily,” Sulbazghi said, smiling at Jasken.

“Sir,” Jasken said, drawing himself up. “Such an action would compromise my ability to protect you, in the event that our other layers of security were disabled and I was all that stood between you and an assailant.”

“Hmm, I suppose so,” Veppers said. “Still, we need something.” He frowned, thinking. “How would you like a duelling scar? On the cheek, where everybody would see it.”

“It would have to be a very big, very deep scar,” Dr. Sulbazghi said reasonably. “Probably permanent.” He shrugged as Jasken glared at him again. “To be proportionate,” he protested.

“Might I suggest a fake cast, for a couple of weeks?” Jasken said, tapping his left arm. “The broken-arm story would still hold but I would not be truly disabled.” He smiled thinly at the doctor. “I might even conceal additional weaponry within the cast, for any emergency.”

Veppers liked that. “Good idea.” He nodded. “Let’s go with that.”

Now, floating in the pool at the summit of the Halo 7, his fingers feeling tentatively around the strange, warm surface of the prosthetic, Veppers smiled at the memory. Jasken’s compromise had been sensible, but seeing the look on his face when he’d thought they were going to put out one of his eyes or actually break his arm had been one of the few truly bright spots in a dreadful evening.

He gazed out at the mountains again. He’d ordered the gondola containing the pool to be kept at the summit of the great vehicle while he had his early morning swim. He turned round and struck out for the other side of the pool, where one of his Harem Troupe had fallen asleep wrapped in a thick robe and lying on a sun-bed.

Veppers had what he honestly believed was the best-looking ten-girl Harem Troupe in the Enablement. This girl, Pleur, was special even within that august selection: one of his two Impressionist girls, able to take on the appearance and mannerisms of whatever female public figure he had taken a shine to recently. Of course, he’d had his share — much more than his fair share, as he was the first to acknowledge — of super-famous screen stars, singers, dancers, screen presenters, athletes and the very occasional hot politician and so on, but such pursuits could be terribly time-consuming; the truly famous, even when they were available, not committed, expected to be wooed over time, even by the richest man in the Enablement, and it was usually a lot simpler just to have one of the Impressionist girls alter herself — and have herself altered surgically, where the change would take too long otherwise — to look like the relevant beauty. It wasn’t as though he really wanted them for their minds after all, and this way also had the advantage of letting you compensate for any bodily deficiencies in the original.

As he swam, Veppers looked over at Jasken, and nodded towards the sleeping girl, who currently looked identical to — unusually for Veppers — an academic. Pleur had recently taken on the appearance of a severely beautiful doctor of eugenics from Lombe whom Veppers had first glimpsed at a ball in Ubruater City earlier in the year but who had proved annoyingly determined to remain faithful to her husband, even in the face of the sort of blandishments and gifts that were guaranteed to turn almost anybody’s head (husbands included, where it merely meant turning a blind eye). Jasken walked over towards Pleur’s sleeping form as Veppers arrived at the side of the pool, then trod water and mimed what Jasken was to do.

Jasken nodded, went to the back of the sun-bed, gripped its lower frame and, only slightly hindered by the fake cast on his arm, swiftly hoisted the rear of the sun-bed up to head height, tipping the girl into the pool with a splash and a spluttering scream. Veppers was still laughing and fending off Pleur’s flapping blows, while pulling her robe off, when Jasken frowned, put one finger to his ear, then got down on both knees at the pool side and started waving urgently.

“What?” Veppers shouted at Jasken, exasperated. A near miss from one of Pleur’s hands skiffed one cheek and splashed water into his eyes. “Not on the nose, you dumb bitch!”

“It’s Sulbazghi,” Jasken told him. “Highest urgency.”

Veppers was much bigger and stronger than Pleur. He gripped her, turned her round and held her tightly while she cursed at both him and Jasken, coughing and spitting water all the while. “What? Something happening in Ubruater?” Veppers asked.

“No, he’s in a flier, on his way here. Four minutes out. Won’t say what, but insists it’s highest urgency. Shall I tell Bousser to summit the landing platform?”

Veppers sighed. “I suppose.” He got Pleur’s robe off at last. She had mostly stopped struggling and coughing. “Go and meet them,” he told Jasken, who nodded once and walked off.

Veppers pushed the naked girl towards the side of the pool. “As for you, young lady,” he said, biting her neck hard enough to produce a yelp, “you’ve been terribly ill-mannered.”

“I have, haven’t I?” Pleur agreed. She knew just what Veppers liked to hear. “I need to be taught a lesson, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes I would. Assume the position.” He shoved the floating weight of the robe out of the way as Pleur braced herself against the edge of the pool with both hands. “Won’t be long!” he called after Jasken’s retreating back.

Still a little breathless, still with the pleasant glow of satiation about him and still dripping from inside his fluffy robe, Veppers sat forward and looked at the thing lying in Dr. Sulbazghi’s broad, pale yellow palm. He, Sulbazghi — still wearing his lab coat, which was an unusual sight — Jasken and Astil, Veppers’ butler, were the only people in the lavishly furnished lounge. Outside, beyond plump brocade bolsters, waggling tassels, gently clinking chandeliers and trembling gold-thread window fringes, the view was of the slowly clearing mists before and behind the Wheel as it continued on its journey through the spreading pastel light of dawn.

“Thank you, Astil,” Veppers said, accepting a cup of chilled infusion from his butler. “That’s all.”

“Sir,” Astil said, bowing and exiting.

Veppers waited until he

Whatever it was, it looked like a small bunch of very fine wires, their colour a sort of dull matt silver with a hint of blue. Scrunch it up, he thought, and you’d have something like a pebble; something so small you could probably swallow it.

Sulbazghi looked tired, frazzled, almost ill. “It was found in the furnace,” he told Veppers, and ran a hand through his thin, unkempt hair.

“What furnace?” he asked. He’d come into this thinking it was going to prove to be one of those matters that seemed terribly important and momentous to those around him but which he could, having cast his eye over it, happily leave for them to worry about and sort out if possible. That was, after all, what he paid them for. Now, just from the feel in the room, he was starting to think there might be a real problem here.

“There shouldn’t have been anything left,” Jasken said. “What temperature—?”

“The furnace in the Veppers Memorial Hospital,” Sulbazghi said, rubbing his face with his hands, not looking Veppers in the eye. “Our little friend, from the other night.”

Great God, the girl, Veppers realised, with a disturbing feeling in his belly. Now what? Was the fractious bitch to pursue him from beyond the grave? “Okay,” he said slowly. “And all very unfortunate, I’m sure we can agree. But what has…?” He waved at the silvery-blue wires still displayed in Sulbazghi’s hand. “What has whatever this is got to do with that?”

“It’s what was left of her body,” Sulbazghi said.

“There shouldn’t have been anything left,” Jasken said. “Not if the furnace was—”

“The fucking furnace was at the right fucking temperature!” Sulbazghi shouted shrilly.

Jasken whipped off his Oculenses, his expression furious. He looked ready to start a fight.

“Gentlemen, please,” Veppers said calmly, before Jasken could reply. He looked at the doctor. “As simply as you can, Sulbazghi, for the non-technically minded; what the hell is this thing?”

“It’s a neural lace,” the doctor said, sounding exhausted.

“A neural lace,” Veppers repeated.

He’d heard of these things. They were the sort of device that highly advanced aliens who’d started out squidgy and biochemical — as squidgy and biochemical as Sichultians, for example — and who had not wanted to upload themselves into nirvana or oblivion or wherever, used when they wanted to interface with machine minds or record their thoughts, or even when they wanted to save their souls, their mind-states.

Veppers looked at Sulbazghi. “Are you saying,” he said slowly, “that the girl had a neural lace in her head?”

That shouldn’t be possible. Neural laces were illegal for Sichultians. Great God, fucking drug glands were illegal for Sichultians.

“Kind of looks like it,” Sulbazghi said.

“And it never showed up?” Veppers asked. He stared at the doctor. “Sulbazghi, you must have scanned that girl a hundred times.”

“They don’t show up using the equipment we’ve got to look with,” Sulbazghi said. He stared down at the thing in his hand, gave a tiny, despairing laugh. “Minor miracle we can see it with the naked eye.”

“Who put it in her?” Veppers asked. “The clinicians?”

Sulbazghi shook his head. “Impossible.”

“Then who?”

“I’ve done a quick bit of investigating since the doctor told me about this,” Jasken said. “We need help here, sir: somebody who properly knows about this sort of thing—”

“Xingre,” Sulbazghi said. “He’ll know, or know better how to find out.”

“Xingre?” Veppers said, frowning. The Jhlupian trader and honorary consul was his principal contact with the alien civilisation the Enablement was closest to. Jasken had a sour look on his face that Veppers recognised; it meant he was having to agree with Sulbazghi. Both men knew this had to be kept as quiet as possible. Why were they suggesting bringing the alien into this?

“He, she or it might know,” Jasken said. “The point is it’ll be able to find out if this thing really is what it looks like.”

“And what the fuck does it look like?” Veppers asked.

Jasken took a deep breath. “Well, like a… a neural lace device, the sort of thing the so-called ‘Culture’ uses.” He grimaced. Veppers saw the man grind his teeth for a moment. “It’s hard to tell; it could be a fake. With our technology—”

“Why would anyone go to this trouble to fake it?” Sulbazghi said angrily. Veppers held up one hand to quiet him.

Jasken glared at the doctor but went on, “It isn’t possible to be sure, which is why we might need Xingre and the sort of analysis and diagnostic equipment he has access to, but it looks like this thing is one of their devices. A Culture device.”

Veppers looked at them both in turn.

“It’s a Culture device?” he asked. He held out his hand and let Sulbazghi tip the thing into his palm. The closer he looked, the more tiny, still finer filaments he could see, branching and re-branching off the main, already very thin wires. It felt amazingly soft. It weighed next to nothing.

“Looks very likely,” the doctor agreed.

Veppers bounced the thing up and down in his hand a couple of times; a handful of hair would have weighed more. “Okay,” he said. “But what does this mean? I mean, she wasn’t a Culture citizen or anything, was she?”

“No,” Sulbazghi said.

“And… she didn’t seem to be able to interface with any equipment…?” Veppers looked from the doctor to Jasken, who was now standing with his Oculenses dangling, the arm in the cast folded across his chest, his other arm resting on it, hand stroking the skin around his mouth repeatedly. He was still frowning.

“No,” Sulbazghi said again. “She might not even have known the thing was in there.”

“What?” Veppers said. “But how?”

“These things grow inside you,” Jasken said. “If it really is one then it’ll have started as a seed and grown all around and into her brain. Fully developed these things link with just about every brain cell, every synapse.”

“Why didn’t she have a head the size of a basket fruit?” Veppers asked. He grinned but neither man responded. That was very unusual. And not a good sign.

“These things add less than half a per cent to the bulk of the brain,” Jasken said. He nodded at the thing lying in Veppers’ palm. “Even what you see there is mostly hollow; in the brain it’d be filled with fluid or bits of the brain itself. The tiniest filaments are so thin they’re invisible to the naked eye and they’ll probably have been burned off in the furnace anyway.”

Veppers stared at the strange, insignificant-looking device. “But what was it in her brain to do?” he asked both men. “What was it for? Given that we’ve established it didn’t seem to give her any super powers or anything.”

“These things are used to record a person’s mind-state,” Jasken said.

“Their soul, for want of a better word,” Sulbazghi said.

“It’s so Culture people can be reincarnated if they die unexpectedly,” Jasken said.

“I know,” Veppers said patiently. “I’ve looked into the technology myself. Don’t think I’m not jealous.” He tried another smile. Still no response. This must be serious.

“Well,” Jasken said, “it’s not impossible that such information — her mind-state — was transmitted somewhere else at the point of death. It’s what these things are for, after all.”

“Transmitted?” Veppers said. “Where?”

“Not far—” Jasken began.

“I can’t see how.” Sulbazghi shook his head, glancing at Jasken. “I’ve done my own research. It takes time, and a full clinical setup. It’s a person’s entire personality we’re talking about here, their every memory; you don’t squirt that out in a beat or two like a fucking text message.”

“We are dealing with what the aliens call Level Eight technology,” Jasken said contemptuously. “You don’t know what it might be capable of. We’re like pre-wheel primitives looking at a screen and saying it can’t work because nobody can re-draw a cave-painting that quickly.”

“There are still limits,” Sulbazghi insisted.

“Doubtless,” Jasken said. “But we have no idea what they are.”

Sulbazghi drew breath to speak but Veppers just talked over the start of whatever he had been about to say. “Well, in any event; bad news, perhaps, gentlemen.” He reached out, let Sulbazghi take the device back. The doctor bagged it, put it in a pocket of his lab coat, sealed it.

“So…” Veppers said. “If this stored her mind-state, I suppose it would know…”

“Everything up to the moment of her death,” Sulbazghi said.

Veppers nodded. “Jasken,” he said, “ask Yarbethile what our relations are with the Culture, would you?”

“Sir,” Jasken said, turning away for a moment while he contacted Veppers’ Private Secretary, doubtless already at his desk in the Halo 7’s executive office pod. Jasken listened, muttered something, turned back. “Mr. Yarbethile characterises our relations with the Culture as ‘Nebulous’,” Jasken said drily. He shrugged. “I’m not sure if he’s trying to be funny or not.”

“Well,” Veppers said. “We don’t really have much to do with them, with the Culture, do we?” Veppers looked at the other two men. “Not really.”

Jasken shook his head. Sulbazghi clenched his jaw and looked away to one side.

All three experienced a momentarily disquieting lurch as the Halo 7, which had been quietly and suitably re-configuring itself for the last couple of minutes, left the land precisely as scheduled and crunched down a long, broad beach in two giant troughs of pebbles to meet the misty, torpid waters of the Oligyne Inland Sea, turning itself into a giant paddle wheel as it ploughed on through the banks of mist, its pace only slightly reduced.

“We need to look into this, obviously,” Veppers said. “Jasken, use any resources required. Keep me informed, daily.” Jasken nodded. Veppers stood up, nodded to Sulbazghi. “Thank you, doctor. I trust you’ll stay for breakfast. If there’s nothing more for now, though, I think I’ll go and get dressed. Excuse me.”

He walked towards the link leading to his bedroom, currently joined with the lounge gondola. As sometimes happened, Veppers found that the giant Wheel’s faint bobbing motion as it rolled through waters was giving him a feeling of nausea.

He felt sure it would pass.