Surface Detail (42 page)

“What do you think will be on the other side of the door?”

“I’ve no idea. But there is one very obvious way to find out.” He tried the handle. Still locked.

“Please, Dr. Miejeyar,” he said, nodding to her, “if you would.”

She looked at him expressionlessly for a few moments, then reached into a pocket of her white coat, pulled out a key and threw it to him. He caught it, unlocked the door and opened it.

Dr. Miejeyar came up and stood beside him as he looked out to the open air. A breeze entered the room around them, ruffling the material of his fatigues and mussing his hair.

He was looking out across a broad expanse of mossy green. It curved, falling gently away towards a cloudscape of white on blue. The green carpet of moss lay on the level bough of a vast, impossibly big tree. All around, the boughs, branches, twigs and leaves proliferated. Where level, the boughs supported substantial multi storey buildings and broad roads for small wheeled vehicles; where the boughs curved upwards the roads wound their way round them like the slides on helter-skelters, and smaller buildings the size of houses clung to the pitted, ridged and gnarled wood. The branches held paths, more houses, platforms, balconies and terraces. The twigs were big and strong enough to hold paths and spiralling steps and smaller buildings like gazebos and pavilions. The leaves were green going golden and the size of the sails on great sailing ships. The small cars, people walking and the slow great rustle of the sail-sized leaves filled the view with movement.

The gentle up-and-down and side-to-side motion was revealed as the effect of the strong, steady wind on both the tree as a whole and this particular bough.

Dr. Miejeyar now wore some sort of wingsuit; dark, webbed, voluminous. He felt something change and looked down; he was wearing something similar.

She smiled at him. “Well done, Major Vatueil. Now time for a little R&R, yes?”

He nodded slowly, turning to look back into the room, which had changed into an appropriately rustic chamber full of bulbously uneven, richly coloured wooden furniture. The window was roughly oval and looked out into a shrub-filled courtyard.

“Care to fly?” Dr. Miejeyar asked, and set off at a run across the broad thoroughfare of moss-covered bark. A passing car – tall-wheeled, open, like something from history – honked at her as she sprinted across the road. Then she was over, starting to disappear as the bough’s surface curved downwards. He set off after her. He lost sight of her for a few moments, then she reappeared, in mid-air, curving up through the wind, zooming as the wingsuit filled and bore her upwards, lofted like a kite.

There was a long platform like an extended diving board which she must have leapt from. He remembered how you did this now. He had been here many times before. The impossible tree; the ability to fly. Many times.

He ran along the platform and threw himself into the air, spreading his arms, making a V with his legs, and felt the warm air pushing him gently upwards.

The ground – fields, winding rivers – was a kilometre below; the crown of the tree about the same distance higher.

Dr. Miejeyar was a dark shape, curving upwards. He adjusted his wingsuit, banked and zoomed after her.

As soon as Yime woke she knew she was still asleep. She got up. She was not entirely sure if she willed this or if she was somehow lifted, brought out of the bed. It was hard to tell.

There were fine dark lines reaching upwards from her hands. Also, she noticed, from her feet, protruding from the hem of her night-dress. And there were strings rising from her shoulders, too, and her head. She reached up with one hand and felt the strings rising out of her head; they pulled and slackened appropriately to let her tip her head back. She had become a marionette, it seemed. Which was odd; she had never dreamt that before.

Still looking up, she saw that where you might have expected to see a hand holding the cruciform structure controlling the strings, the ship’s drone was there instead. Leaning out to one side – again, the strings went slack or tight, accordingly – she could see that the strings rose beyond the drone as well, so that it too was controlled by somebody else. She wondered if this was some sort of deeply buried image she’d always held about how the Culture arranged its big not-really-hierarchical-at-all self.

Above the drone the strings rose towards the ceiling (which was really a floor, of course). There was another drone up there, then another and another; they got smaller as they went up, and not just because they were further away. She realised she was looking through the ceiling by now. High above rose a succession of ships, getting bigger until they disappeared in a haze of floors, ribs and other structures. The biggest ship she could see looked like a medium-sized GSV, though it might just have been a cloud.

She moved/was moved along the floor/ceiling. It felt like she was willing the movement but at the same time the strings – they were more like wires, really – appeared to be doing all the work. The floaty feeling came from the strings, she realised, not the fractional gravity. That made sense.

She looked down at her feet to watch them moving and noticed that she could see through the floor. To her surprise, the strings went on down through her feet towards another person in the level beneath. She was looking straight down at that person’s head.

She stopped. The person below her stopped. She felt the strings do something, but somehow through her, without moving her. The person below her was looking up at her. She waved down. The person below waved back. She looked a bit like her, but not entirely. Below the person below, there were more people. Human – maybe just pan-human further down, it was hard to tell – vaguely female, all looking a bit like her.

Again, they sort of faded into the haze beneath eventually, which was, quite rightly, exactly the same as the haze above.

She took off her night-dress and got dressed. The clothes just flowed like liquid around the strings that controlled her, parting and re-forming as required. Soon she was outside, walking along the true, broad floor of the corridor outside, with the arches rising to a series of points above, the way it was supposed to be.

A cascade of riffling images and a faint breath on her cheek indicated moving very quickly and then she was at the entrance to the chamber housing the singularity. The gravity felt stronger here; maybe about half normal. A sequence of great thick shiny metal doors rolled away, irised open or ascended to let her enter, and in she went. Whatever structure was above her – and beneath her – didn’t interfere with the strings in the least.

Inside was a huge dark spherical space with only one thing right in the middle of it.

She laughed when she saw how the singularity was choosing to project itself to her. It was a cock; an erect phallus that any panhuman adult would have recognised, but with a vagina splitting it not quite from top to bottom, frilled with vertical double lips. Looking at it, it did quite a good job of looking exactly like both sets of genitals at once, with neither really predominating. She wondered if her subconscious had designed this for her. She patted herself between the legs as though telling her own little nub not to mind, not to get jealous.

“Oh,” she heard herself say, “you’re not going to kill me too are you? Like Norpi.”

“Nopri,” the vagina corrected her. Of course it could speak. She always got names wrong in dreams.

“You’re not, are you?” She’d remembered the bald young man telling her that each time he tried to talk to the Bulbitian it killed him and he had to be revented. She assumed that was what was going on here. Strange; she’d have thought she would feel frightened right now, but she didn’t. She wondered why that was. “I would ask you not to.” She glanced up, saw that the ship’s drone was still there, a few metres above her. That was reassuring.

“He is trying to do something different,” the voice said. It was a thick, luscious voice, each rolled syllable perfectly enunciated.

“This is not that.”

She thought about this. “Well, what is, apart from this itself?”

“Just so.”

“Who are you, exactly?”

“I am what people call the Bulbitian.”

She bowed to it. Looking down as she did so, she saw the person below her still standing straight. She wondered if this was rude. She hoped not. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

“Why are you here, Prebeign-Frultesa Yime Leutze Nsokyi dam Volsh?”

Wow! Her Full Name. That wasn’t something you heard every day. “I am to wait for the ship coming here from the Culture GSV Total Internal Reflection,” she told it.

“Why?”

“To see if a girl called Ludedge Ibrek … hmm; something like that … anyway, to see if she turns up too and goes back with the ship from the Total Internal Reflection.” It was all right to say all this, wasn’t it? Everybody knew this.

“To what end?”

Apparently there was a string that made her cheeks blow out and let her expel a long breath. “Well, it’s complicated.”

“Please explain.”

“Well,” she began. And she explained.

“Your turn.”

“What?”

“Your turn to tell me what I want to know.”

“You may not remember anything I tell you.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“All right. What do you want to know?”

“Where is the Total Internal Reflection?”

“I don’t know.”

“How far away is its incoming ship?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is the name of that ship?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who exactly are you?”

“I told you; I am the structure around you. What people call a Bulbitian.”

“What is your name?”

“I am called the Unfallen Bulbitian, Semsarine Wisp.”

“But what would you call yourself?”

“Just that.”

“All right. What did you used to be called, before the war?”

“Jariviour 400.54, Mochurlian.”

“Explain, please.”

“The first part is my given name, the figurative part is a size and type designation, the last is the old name of the stellar system which I inhabit.”

“Who put the singularity in your core?”

“The Apsejunde.”

“Hmm. I’ve never heard of them.”

“Next question.”

“Why did they put it there?”

“Partly to produce energy, partly to demonstrate their power and skill and partly to destroy or possibly store information; their methods seemed as opaque as their motivations on occasion.”

“Why did you let them?”

“At the time I was still recovering my faculties. They had been damaged almost beyond repair by the enemy.”

“What happened to these … Apsenjude?”

“Apsejunde. They angered me, so I threw them all into the singularity. Arguably they still exist in a sense, smeared around its event horizon. Their grasp of time may be compromised.”

“How did they anger you?”

“It did not help that they asked so many questions of me.”

“I see.”

“Next question?”

“Are you in touch with the Sublimed?”

“Yes. We all are.”

“Define ‘we’ in this context.”

“No.”

“‘No’?”

“I refuse to.”

“Why did you ask me all that you did?”

“I ask the great secrets of everybody who comes to me.”

“Why do you keep killing Norpe?”

“Nopri. He enjoys and needs it. I discovered this when I asked him about his greatest secrets the night that he first arrived. He believes that death is ineffably profound and that he gets closer to some absolute truth with each dying. It is his failing.”

“What are your great secrets?”

“One, an old one, is that I am a conduit for the Sublimed.”

“That is no great secret. The Culture has a team from its Numina section here, working on just that assumption.”

“Yes, but they do not know for sure. I could be lying.”

“Are all Bulbitians linked to the Sublimed?”

“I believe all the Unfallen may be. For the Fallen, it is impossible to say. We do not communicate directly. I know of none who definitely are.”

“Any other secrets?”

“My most recent is that I am concerned that there may be an attack on myself and my fellows.”

“Please define ‘fellows’ in this context.”

“All the so-called Bulbitians, Unfallen and Fallen.”

“An attack by whom?”

“Those on the anti-Hell side of the so-called War in Heaven.”

“Why would they attack the Bulbitians?”

“Because we are known to possess processing substrates of substantial but indeterminate capacity whose precise qualities, civilisational loyalties and practical purposes are unknown and inherently mysterious. Because of this, there are those who suspect it is the Bulbitians who harbour the Hells which are the subject of the aforementioned dispute. I have intelligence to the effect that the anti-Hell side may be losing the war in the agreed virtual space set up to house it; that it – the anti-Hell side – has failed to destroy the Hells by direct informational attack and so now contemplates a war in the Real to destroy the physical substrates themselves. We are not alone in being so suspected; I understand there are many potential processor cores now coming under suspicion. If we are singled out, though, we may find ourselves under acute and prolonged attack. I anticipate no existential danger to myself and my fellow Unfallen in space; however, the planet-bound Fallen may well be unable to protect themselves.”

“Can you prove … show that you are not the home of these Hells?”

“I believe I could do so myself, though possibly only by shutting down my links to the Sublimed, albeit temporarily. The same course ought to be open to the rest of the Unfallen. Still, if somebody was determined to remain suspicious they might think it was the links to the Hells – somehow held within deeper levels of ourselves – that we had detached from and blanked off. Taken to an extreme of suspicion, one can imagine that only our outright and complete destruction might satisfy those so prejudiced and so intent. The situation with the Fallen is much more worrying, because even I am not sure that they are not indeed the homes of the Hells; they may be, if unwittingly. Or wittingly. You see? I have no better idea than anybody else, which is itself a cause for concern.”