Surface Detail (44 page)

Still, at least individual losers were quite obviously statistical freaks. You could allow for that, you could tolerate that, albeit with gritted teeth. What he would not have believed was that you could find an entire society – an entire civilisation– of losers who’d made it. And the Culture was exactly that.

Veppers hated the Culture. He hated it for existing and he hated it for – for far too damned many credulous idiots – setting the standard for what a decent society ought to look like and so what other peoples ought to aspire to. It wasn’t what other peoples ought to aspire to; it was what machines had aspired to, and created, for their own inhuman purposes.

It was another of Veppers’ deeply held personal beliefs that when you were besieged or felt cornered, you should attack.

He marched into the Culture ambassador’s office in Ubruater and threw the remains of the neural lace down on her desk.

“What the fuck is this?” he demanded.

The Culture ambassador was called Kreit Huen. She was a tall, statuesque woman, slightly oddly proportioned for a Sichultian but still attractive in a haughty, formidable sort of way. It had crossed Veppers’ mind on more than one occasion to have one of his impersonator girls change to look just like the Culture woman, so he could fuck her conceited brains out, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to; he had his pride.

When Veppers burst in she was standing at a window of her generously proportioned penthouse office looking out over the city to where, in the hazy sunlight of early afternoon, a large, dark, sleek ship was hovering over the massive Veprine Corporation tower, at the heart of Ubruater’s central business district. She was drinking something steaming from a cup and was dressed like an office cleaner; a barefoot office cleaner. She turned and looked, blinking, at the tangle of silvery-blue wires lying on her desk.

“Afternoon to you too,” she said quietly. She walked over, peered more closely at the thing. “It’s a neural lace,” she told him. “How bad are your techs getting?” She looked at the other man just entering the room. “Good afternoon, Jasken.”

Jasken nodded. Behind him, floating in the doorway, was the drone which had chosen not to get in Veppers’ way when he’d come storming through. They’d known Veppers was heading in their direction for about three minutes, as soon as his flier had left the Justice Ministry and set course for their building, so she had had plenty of time to decide exactly how to appear when he arrived.

“Ki-chaow! Ki-chaow!” a reedy voice sang out from behind one of the room’s larger couches. Veppers looked and saw a small blond head duck back down.

“And what is that?” he asked.

“That is a child, Veppers,” Huen said, pulling her chair out from the desk. “Really, what next?” She pointed at the window. “Sky. Clouds. Oh look; a birdy.” She sat down, picked up the lace. The drone – a briefcase-sized lozenge – floated nearby. Huen frowned. “How did you come by this?”

“It’s been in a fire,” the drone muttered. The machine had been Huen’s servant (or master – who knew!) for the three years she had been there. It was supposed to have a name or a title or some thing and Veppers had been “introduced” to it but he refused to remember whatever it was supposed to be called.

“Ki-chaow!”

The blond child was standing behind the couch, only its head and one hand – formed into a pretend gun – showing. The gun was pointing at Jasken, who had brought his Oculenses down from over his head and was frowning like a stage villain and pointing his own finger at the child, sighting carefully down it. He jerked his hand back suddenly, as though in recoil. “Urk!” the child said, and disappeared, flopping onto the couch with a small thud. Veppers knew Huen had a child; he hadn’t expected to find the brat in her office.

“It was found in the ashes of one of my staff,” Veppers told Huen, knuckles on her desk, arms spread, leaning over her. “And my extremely able techs reckon it’s one of yours, so my next question is, what the fuck is the Culture doing putting illegal espionage equipment into the heads of my people? You are not supposed to spy on us, remember?”

“Haven’t the foggiest idea what it was doing there,” Huen said, handing the lace to the outstretched maniple field of the drone, which teased it out to its maximum extent. The remains of the lace took on the rough shape of a brain. Veppers caught a glimpse and found the sight oddly unsettling. He slammed one palm on Huen’s desk.

“What the hell do you think gives you the right to do something like this?” He waved one hand at the lace as it glowed in the drone’s immaterial grasp. “I have every right to take this to court. This is a violation of our rights and the Mutual Contact Agreement we signed in good faith when you communist bastards first arrived.”

“Who had it in their head anyway?” Huen asked, sitting back in her seat and putting her hands behind her head, one shoeless foot over her other knee. “What happened to them?”

“Don’t evade the question!” Veppers slammed the desk again.

Huen shrugged. “All right. Nothing in particular gives us – whoever ‘us’ might be here – the right to do something like this.” She frowned. “Whose head was it in?”

The drone made a throat-clearing noise. “Whoever they were they either died in a fire or were cremated,” it said. “Probably the latter; high-temperature combustion, probably few impurities. Hard to tell – this has been cleaned and analysed. At first quite crudely and then only a little clumsily.” The machine swivelled in the air as though looking at Veppers. “By Mr. Veppers’ techs and then by our Jhlupian friends, I’d guess.” The barely visible haze around the machine had turned vaguely pink. Veppers ignored it.

“Don’t try to wriggle out of it,” he said, pointing one finger at Huen. (“Ki-chaow!” said a small voice from the other side of the room.) “Who cares who ‘us’ is? ‘Us’ is you; ‘us’ is the Culture. This thing is yours so you’re responsible. Don’t try to deny it.”

“Mr. Veppers has a point,” the drone said reasonably. “This is our tech – quite, ah, high tech – if you know what I mean, and I imagine it – or the seed that became it, as it were – was emplaced by somebody or something who might reasonably be described as belonging to the Culture.”

Veppers glared at the machine. “Fuck off,” he told it.

The drone seemed unruffled. “I was agreeing with you, Mr. Veppers.”

“I don’t need this thing’s agreement,” Veppers told Huen. “I need to know what you intend to do about this violation of the terms of the agreement that lets you stay here.”

Huen smiled. “Leave it with me. I’ll see what I can do.”

“That’s not good enough. And that thing leaves with me,” he said, pointing at the lace. “I don’t want it conveniently disappearing.” He hesitated, then snatched it from the drone’s grasp. The sensation was unsettling, like plunging one’s hand into a warm, cloying foam.

“Seriously,” Huen said. “Whose head was it in? It’ll help with our investigations if we know.”

Veppers pushed himself upright with one fist, folded his arms. “Her name was L. Y’breq,” he told the Culture woman. “A court authorised ward of mine and the subject of a commercial Generational Reparation Order under the Indented Intagliate Act.”

Huen frowned, then sat forward, looked away for a moment. “Ah, the Marked woman? … Lededje? I remember her. Talked to her, a few times.”

“I’m sure you did,” Veppers said.

“She was … okay. Troubled, but all right. I liked her.” She looked at Veppers with what he felt sure was meant to be profound sincerity. “She’s dead?”

“Extremely.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that. Please pass on my condolences to her family and loved ones.”

Veppers smiled thinly. “Myself, in other words.”

“I’m so sorry. How did she die?”

“She took her own life.”

“Oh …” Huen said, her expression pained. She looked down. Veppers wanted to smack her in the teeth with something heavy. She took a deep breath, stared at the surface of the desk. “That is … ”

Veppers took over before it got too sentimental. “I expect some sort of report, an accounting for this. I’m going to be away for the next few days—”

“Yes,” the drone said, pivoting to point towards the view, specifically at where the sleek shape of the ship stationed over the Veprine Corporation tower threw a slanted grey shadow over part of the city, “we saw your ride arrive.”

Veppers ignored it. He pointed at Huen again. (“Ki-chaow!” said the voice from the couch.) “And by the time I get back I expect to hear some sort of explanation. If not, there will be consequences. Legal and diplomatic consequences.”

“Did she leave a note?” Huen asked.

“What?” Veppers said.

“Did she leave a note?” Huen repeated. “Often when people kill themselves, they leave a note. Something to explain why they did it. Did Lededje?”

Veppers allowed his mouth to hang open a little, to attempt to express just how grotesquely insulting and irrelevant this piece of meddling effrontery was. He shook his head.

“You have six days,” he told the woman. He turned and walked to the door. “Answer any further questions she has,” he told Jasken as he passed him. “I’ll be in the flier. Don’t take too long.” He left.

“That man had a funny nose,” said the little voice from behind the couch.

“So, Jasken,” Huen said, smiling a little for a moment. “Did she leave a note?”

Jasken cradled his good hand in the sling. “No note was left, ma’am,” he told her.

She looked at him for a moment. “And was it suicide?”

Jasken’s expression remained just as it had been. “Of course, ma’am.”

“And you have no idea how the lace came to be in her head?”

“None, ma’am.”

She nodded slowly, took a breath, sat forward. “How’s the arm?”

“This?” he moved the arm in the cast out from his body a little. “Fine. Healing. Feels good as new.”

“I’m glad.” Huen smiled. She got up from the chair behind the desk and nodded. “Thank you, Jasken.”

“Ma’am,” he said, with a short bow.

Huen held her child in her arms as she and the drone watched Veppers’ wide-bodied flier depart from overhead, its rotund mirrored rear glinting in the golden sunshine as it banked. The craft straightened and headed directly towards the Veprine Corporation tower and the ship – barely smaller than the tower itself – poised immediately above it.

The drone’s name was Olfes-Hresh. “Well,” it said, “the nose injury’s real enough, but it was never done with a blade, and not a bone in Jasken’s arm has ever been broken. His arm is perfectly healthy save for about twenty days’ worth of minor atrophy due to partial immobility. Also? That cast has concealed hinges to let it come off easily.”

“Did you get a full reading on the lace?”

“As good as though he’d left it.”

She glanced at the machine. “And?”

The drone wobbled, its equivalent of a shrug. “SC tech, or good as.”

Huen nodded, staring at the Jhlupian ship as Veppers’ aircraft flew towards it. She patted her child’s back softly. “That’s interesting.”

Chay found herself in the Refuge. The Refuge took up the entire summit of a finger of rock which thrust up from the scrubby desert. The remains of a natural arch lay in great piles of sand blown stone between the Refuge mesa and the nearby plateau. The only access to the Refuge was by a rope and cane basket, lowered the thirty metres from the Refuge to the desert floor by pulleys worked by muscle power. The Refuge had expanded over the years to rise to six or seven storeys of cluttered wood and adobe buildings, and spilled over the side of the mesa itself via tree-trunk-propped platforms supporting further precariously poised architecture.

Only females were allowed in the Refuge. The more senior females copied things called manuscripts. She was treated, if not exactly as a servant, then certainly as somebody who was junior, whose opinions did not really matter, whose importance came solely from the menial tasks that she performed.

When not sleeping, eating or working she was at worship, joining everybody else in the Refuge praising God in the chapel. God here was a female deity, worshipped for Her fecundity by these celibates in long services full of chanting.

She tried to explain that she didn’t believe in God but this was at first dismissed as impossible nonsense – as absurd as denying the existence of the sun or gravity – then, when the others saw she was serious, she was hauled up before the fearsome Superior of the Refuge, who explained that belief in God was not a choice. She was newly arrived and would be indulged this time, but she must submit to the will of God and obey her betters. In the villages and cities they burned people alive for proclaiming that God did not exist. Here, if she persisted, she would be starved and beaten until she saw sense.

Not everybody, the Superior explained – and at this point the formidable female in her dark robes of office appeared suddenly old, Chay thought – was able to accept God into their hearts as easily or as fully as did the most pious and enlightened. Even if she had not yet opened herself completely to God’s love, she must realise that it was something that would come with time, and the very rituals and services, devotions and chants that she found so meaningless might themselves lead to the belief she lacked, even if at first she did not feel that she partook of them with any faith at all.

Just as one might do useful work without fully understanding the job one was engaged in, or even what the point of it was, so the behaviour of devotion still mattered to the all-forgiving God, and just as the habitual performance of a task gradually raised one’s skills to something close to perfection, bringing a deeper understanding of the work, so the actions of faith would lead to the state of faith.

Finally, she was shown the filthy, stinking, windowless cell carved into the rock beneath the Refuge where she would be chained, starved and beaten if she did not at least try to accept God’s love. She trembled as she looked at the shackles and the flails, and agreed she would do her best.

She shared a dorm with half a dozen others on the floor beneath the top, looking out in the other direction from the nearby plateau, towards the open desert. These were open rooms; one wall missing with only a heavy tarpaulin to lower if the dusty wind was blowing in, with stepped floors leading down to a wall that was hidden from the topmost tier. Open rooms, with a view over the plain, desert or grassland, were comforting places. Closed rooms felt wrong, imprisoning, especially for going to sleep in or waking up in. Similarly, being alone was a punishment to an individual from a herd species, so like most normal people she liked to bed down in a group with at least half a dozen others.