Surface Detail (26 page)

“Re-creation of a tall building elevator shaft,” he told her. “Don’t you have these?”

“We have skyscrapers,” she said, holding on to the right-hand door as she leant in. “And elevators.’ There was the rather grimy-looking top of an elevator car reassuringly close beneath, only a metre or so down. Looking up she saw the shafts and cables climbing into the darkness. “I’ve just never seen inside a lift shaft before. Except in a screen, I suppose. Then there’s always just the one, you know, shaft.”

“Uh-huh,” Jolicci said. “Jump on; I’ll let go the doors. Careful, though; no safety net.”

She jumped onto the roof of the car beneath. Jolicci followed her, making the roof’s surface quiver. The doors above hissed closed and the car started to ascend immediately. She held on to one of the cables – it was greasy with dark, gritty oil – and looked over the edge. The great dark shaft held space for ten elevators, five on each side. The car accelerated smartly, the slipstream tugging at her hair and making Jolicci’s dressing gown flap as they whizzed upwards. She looked down, leaning a little further out as they shot past sets of closed double doors, almost too fast to count. The bottom of the shaft was lost in the darkness.

She was grabbed from behind by one shoulder.

She heard herself yelp as she thudded into Jolicci’s surprisingly solid body. An instant later a dark shape plunged past her in a storm of disturbed air. She had narrowly missed getting decapitated by a rapidly descending car. Jolicci released his hold on her. “Like I said; no safety net. This is a dangerously faithful physical re-creation. No sensors on the cars to stop them hitting or crushing you, no AG down the bottom if you fall. Nobody to see you fall, let alone stop you. You backed-up?”

She found she was shaking a little. “You mean my, my self? My personality?” He just looked at her. She suspected it was just as well it was so gloomy it was hard to tell precisely what his expression was. “I’m only a day out of a … a thing, a jar, a body tank.” She swallowed. “But no.”

The car was slowing, drawing to a stop. Jolicci looked upwards from the far side of the car. “Right. Here comes the fun bit.” He glanced at her. “You ready?”

“What for?” she asked.

“Get over here. Jump when I say. Don’t hesitate. You’ll need to let go of that cable first.”

She let go of the cable, stepped to stand beside him at the other side of the elevator roof. Looking up, tentatively, she saw the bottom of another dark car descending quickly towards them. She heard some sudden, distant whoops and then laughter from further down in the great depth of shadows; the sounds echoed and re-echoed. Their car was still slowing. “Okay, steady, steady …” Jolicci said as their car and the one above approached each other.

“Should I hold your hand?” she asked.

“Do not hold my hand,” he said. “Okay, okay, steady …”

Their car had come almost to a stop; the one coming towards them from above whooshed past.

“Jump!” Jolicci shouted as the car’s roofs were almost level.

He jumped. She jumped too a moment later, but found that she’d jumped as though to land where the other car’s roof had been when she’d leapt, not where it was going to be as she dropped after it. She landed awkwardly and would have fallen against the car’s cables if Jolicci hadn’t caught her. Lededje heard herself gasp.

She held on to the little fat avatar for a moment as they steadied on the roof of the car. The one they’d jumped from was stopped several storeys above and getting further away all the time as their car descended. It too was starting to slow now.

“Wow!” she said, letting go of Jolicci. Her fingers had left dark, greasy marks on his dressing gown lapels. “That was . . . exciting!” She frowned at him. “Do you do this a lot?”

“Never before,” he told her. “Heard of it.”

That shook her a little. She had rather assumed she was in safe or at least experienced hands. The car drew to a stop. Beneath, she could feel and hear its doors open; a bar of light shone from that edge of the roof, showing Jolicci’s face. He was looking at her oddly, she thought. She felt a strange little frisson of fear.

“This Special Circumstances thing,” he said.

“Yes?” she said as he took a step closer to her. She stepped backward, tripped on a piece of the roof’s cross-bracing and staggered. He grabbed her again, pulling her to the rear edge of the roof.

Deep below, she could see the car whose rear faced their car’s rear rising quickly towards them. The two sets of five cars per side were separated by nearly two metres; three or four times the separation of the cars on each side of the shaft.

Jolicci nodded down, indicating the approaching car. “Think we can make that jump when it comes?” he said into her ear. She could feel his warm breath on her skin. “No safety nets, remember. Not even any surveillance inside here.” He pulled her a little closer to the edge, brought his mouth closer to her ear. “What do you think? Think we can do it?”

“No,” she told him. “And I think you should let go of me.”

Before she could do anything to stop him he gripped her hard by one elbow and pushed her out over the drop, only her feet still in contact with the car’s roof. “Still want me to let go?”

“No!” she shouted, grabbing his arm with her free hand. “Don’t be stupid! Of course not!”

He pulled her in towards him, though still not out of danger. “If you had a terminal it would hear you scream if you happened to fall,” he told her. He made a show of looking down. He shrugged. “Might be just enough time for the ship to realise what was happening and get a drone to you before you hit the bottom.”

“Stop doing this, please,” she said. “You’re frightening me.”

He pulled her close to him, his breath in her face now. “Everybody thinks SC is so glamorous, so … sexy!” He shook her, rubbed his groin against her leg. “Thrilling fun, all danger and excitement, but not too much danger. Is that what you think? Heard the rumours, absorbed the propaganda? Read the right assessments, listened to the relevant experts, self-proclaimed, have we?”

“I’m just trying to find out—”

“You feel frightened?” he asked her.

“I just said—”

He shook his head. “This isn’t dangerous.” he shook her again. “I’m not dangerous. I’m a nice roly-poly GCU avatar; I wouldn’t drop somebody down an antique lift shaft to let them splatter on the concrete. I’m one of the good guys. But you still feel frightened, don’t you? You do feel frightened, don’t you? I hope you feel frightened.”

“I already told you,” she said coldly, trying to keep any expression from her face or voice as she stared into his eyes.

He smiled, pulled her inwards as he stepped back. He let go of her and held on to the cables as the car started downwards again. “As I say, I’m one of the good guys, Ms. Y’breq.”

She gripped another of the cables, hard. “I never told you my full name.”

“Well spotted. Seriously though, I really am one of the good guys. I’m the sort of ship who’d always do everything to save somebody, not kill them, not let them die. SC – its ships, its people – might be on the side of the angels, but that doesn’t mean they always behave like the good guys. In fact, as you’re falling down the metaphorical lift shaft, I can virtually guarantee it will feel like they’re the bad guys, no matter how ethically sound the carefully worked out moral algebra was that led to them chucking you into it in the first place.”

“You have made your point, sir,” she told him frostily. “Perhaps we might abandon this pastime now.”

He looked at her for a few moments longer. Then he shook his head, looked away.

“Well, so you’re tough,” he said. “But you’re still a fool.” He let out a deep breath. The elevator car was pulling to a stop. “I’ll take you to an SC ship.” He smiled without any humour. “If and when it all goes horribly wrong, feel free to blame me, if you still can. It’ll make no difference.”

“The Forgotten,” the Bodhisattva told Yime Nsokyi. “Also known as Oubliettionaries.”

There were times, Yime might occasionally be forced to admit, when a neural lace would indeed be useful. If she had one she could be quizzing it now, asking it for mentions, references, definitions. What the hell was an Oubliettionary? Of course, the ship would know she was making such inquiries – she was on the ship now, not the Orbital, so any lace or terminal business would be conducted through the Bodhisattva’s Mind or its sub-systems – but at least with a lace you could have the relevant knowledge just dumped into your head rather than have to listen to it one word at a time.

“I see,” Yime said. She folded her arms. “I’m listening.”

“They’re ships of a certain … predisposition, shall we say, normally a GSV, usually with a few other ships and a small number of active drones aboard and often containing no humans at all,” the Bodhisattva told her. “They resign from the day-to-day informational commerce of the Culture, stop registering their position, take themselves off into the middle of nowhere and then they just sit there, doing nothing. Except listen, indefinitely.”

“Listen?”

“They listen to one or more – probably all, I’d imagine – of the handful of widely scattered broadcast stations which send out a continual update on the general state of matters in the greater galactic community in general and the Culture in particular.”

“News stations.”

“For want of a better word.”

“Broadcasting.”

“It’s a wasteful and inefficient way to communicate, but the advantage of a broadcast in this context is precisely that it goes everywhere and nobody can tell who might be listening.”

“How many of these ‘Forgotten’ are there?”

“Good question. To most people they appear simply as ships that have gone into an especially uncommunicative retreat, an impression the ships concerned do nothing to contradict, of course. At any time anything up to one per cent of the Culture ship fleet might be on a retreat, and perhaps point three or point four per cent of those have been silent since quitting what one might call the main sequence of normal ship behaviour. I hesitate to call it discipline. It’s not a much-studied field, so even the quality of the relatively few guesstimates is hard to evaluate. There might be as few as eight or twelve of these ships, or possibly as many as three or four hundred.”

“And what’s the point of all this?”

“They’re back-up,” the Bodhisattva said. “If, through some bizarre and frankly unfeasibly widespread and complete calamity, the Culture somehow ceased to be, then any one of these ships could re-seed the galaxy – or a different one, perhaps – with something that would be recognisably the Culture. This does beg the question what would be the point if it had been so comprehensively expunged in the first place, but I suppose you could argue some lesson might have been learned that might make version two more resilient somehow.”

“I thought the entire Contact fleet was supposed to represent our ‘back-up’,” Yime said. In its relationships with other civilisations, especially with those that were encountering it for the first time, much tended to be made of the fact – or at least the assertion – that each and every GSV represented the Culture in its entirety, that each one held all the knowledge the Culture had ever accumulated and could build any object or device that the Culture was capable of making, while the sheer scale of a General Systems Vehicle meant they each contained so many humans and drones they were more or less guaranteed to hold a reasonably representative sample of both even without trying to.

The Culture was deliberately and self-consciously very widely distributed throughout the galaxy, with no centre, no nexus, no home planet. Its distribution might make it easy to attack, but it also made it hard to eradicate altogether, at least in theory. Having hundreds of thousands of vessels individually quite capable of rebuilding the entire Culture from scratch was generally held to be safeguard enough against civilisational oblivion, or so Yime had been led to believe. Obviously others thought differently.

“The Contact fleet is what one might call a second line of defence,” the ship told her.

“What’s the first?”

“All the Orbitals.” the ship said reasonably. “And other habs; Rocks and planets included.”

“And these Forgotten are the last ditch.”

“Probably. So one might imagine. As far as I know.”

That, in ship-speak, Yime thought, probably meant No. Though she knew better than to try to coax a less ambiguous answer out of a Mind.

“So they just sit there. Wherever ‘there’ might be.”

“Oort clouds, interstellar space, within or even beyond the outer halo of the greater galaxy itself; who knows? However, yes, that is the general idea.”

“And indefinitely.”

“Indefinitely until now, at least,” the Bodhisattva said.

“Waiting for a catastrophe that’ll probably never happen but which if it did would indicate either the existence of a force so powerful it could probably discover these ships regardless and snuff them out too, or an existential flaw in the Culture so deep it would certainly be present in these ‘Forgotten’ as well, especially given their … representativeness.”

“Put like that, the entire strategy does sound a little forlorn,” the ship said, sounding almost apologetic. “But there we are. Because you never know, I suppose. I think a part of the whole idea is that it provides a degree of comfort for those who might otherwise worry about such matters.”

“But most people don’t know about these ships in the first place,” Yime pointed out. “How can you be comforted by something you don’t know about?”

“Ah,” the Bodhisattva said. “That’s the beauty of it: only people who do worry are likely to seek out such knowledge, and so are suitably reassured. They also tend to appreciate the need not to make the knowledge too well known, and indeed take additional pleasure in helping to keep it from becoming so. Everybody else just gets happily on with their lives, never fretting in the first place.”

Yime shook her head, frustrated. “They can’t be completely secret,” she protested. “They must be mentioned somewhere.”

The Culture was notoriously bad at keeping secrets, especially big ones. It was one of the very few areas where most of the Culture’s civilisational peers and even many much less advanced societies thoroughly eclipsed it, though, being the Culture, this was regarded as being the legitimate source of a certain perverse pride. That didn’t stop it – the “it” in such contexts usually meaning Contact, or (even more likely) SC – from trying to keep secrets, every now and again, but it never worked for very long.