Surface Detail (46 page)

Twenty years later she was the Superior, and had it not been for the book of her life, written in the manuscript blank with the charred page, she might not still have believed that she had had any sort of existence before that: no life as a gifted academic in a free, liberated society with superconductors, space elevators, AIs and life-extension treatments, and no few months spent in the utter ghastliness of the virtual Hell, accumulating the evidence to present to an unbelieving world – an unbelieving galaxy, for that matter – that might help bring about the destruction of the Hells for ever.

She had kept writing her book, continuing on beyond all that she could recall of her life in the Real and her time with Prin in the virtual Hell, writing down everything that happened to her since, here in this quiet, untroubled existence which she had come to love and believe in and still expected to be dragged away from, back to Hell, every single night …

She had become wizened. Her face was lined, her pelt was grey and her gait had stiffened and become awkward with age. She oversaw the workings of the Refuge to the best of her ability and did all that she could for the noviciates and other occupants. At least once per season, now that she was Superior, she had to clamber into a basket and be lowered to the austere cluster of small buildings at the foot of the mesa to deal and negotiate with the representative of the charity which distributed their manuscripts in the cities. The representatives were always male, so she had no choice but to descend to them; they could not be winched up to come and see her, because it was forbidden.

Usually, as she was lowered carefully towards the desert floor, she reflected on how much she had changed. Her old self – the person she had been back in the Real, before the brief but traumatising excursion in the Hell – would have wanted to break with that tradition, would have wanted to change things, would have wanted to insist that there was nothing beyond idiotic, absurdly unquestioned tradition stopping males from being brought up into the Refuge itself.

The person she had become, the person she was now, could see the force in all such arguments and yet still thought it was right to continue with the tradition. Perhaps it was wrong in some theoretical way, but perhaps not, and if it was, well, it did no great harm. Maybe it was even charming, just eccentric. Anyway, she would not like to have to be the Superior on whose shift the tradition was changed.

She had always wondered how faithful to a real, changing society and world this simulation was. Did the cities that the noviciates, travellers and charity representatives spoke of and claimed to have come from really exist? Did people within those cities work and struggle and study and improvise as they would in the Real? If you left this sim running, would somebody somewhere invent moveable type and printing, and so make what they did here in the Refuge irrelevant and all its occupants redundant?

She kept waiting for one of the charity representatives to turn up for their latest meeting with a regretful look and a copy of something hot off this brand new thing called a press.

However, as she approached what must be the end of her life in this virtuality, the freshly illuminated manuscripts kept on being taken away and the supplies of writing materials and of food and other necessities kept on being delivered. She realised that she would die – as far as that idea had any meaning here – in the same society she had been born into. Then she would have to remind herself that she had not been born here, she had simply woken up, already an adult.

One year, a noviciate was brought before her for denying the existence of God. She found herself saying pretty much what had been said to her by the old Superior. Showing the girl the deep buried cell and the whips and flails gave Chay no pleasure, though the dank, lamp-lit dungeon didn’t smell as bad as it had when she’d been shown it, she thought. She’d never had cause to use it; that was probably why. Or maybe her sense of smell was going with everything else. Thankfully, the noviciate relented – albeit with ill-disguised contempt – and no further action needed to be taken. She wondered if she could have ordered the punishment carried out if things hadn’t gone so agreeably.

Her eyesight gradually grew too poor for her to continue to write her life story in her part-charred book. The letters had become larger and larger as her sight had failed. One day, she thought, she would be writing only a single letter per page. Just as well in way, as she had only filled two-thirds of the blank and would die soon with lots of pages unfilled. But writing the bigger and bigger letters made the whole undertaking start to appear ridiculous and self-important, and eventually she gave in and stopped writing altogether. She had long since caught up with herself anyway and was effectively just keeping a rather boring diary.

So she bored the noviciates with her stories instead. She was the Superior, so they had to listen. Or maybe young people these days were just very polite. Her voice had almost gone but still she would be carried to the chapel each day to listen, enraptured, eyes closed, to the beautiful, transcendent singing.

Eventually she lay on her death bed and an angel came for her.

The Jhlupian heavy cruiser Ucalegon – forty times as fast as any ship possessed by the Sichultian Enablement – delivered Veppers to Iobe Cavern City on Vebezua in less than two days. Vebezua was the furthest flung of the Enablement’s planets, lying in a small spiral of stars called the Chunzunzan Whirl, a sparse twist of old stars that also held the Tsung system.

“Of course I’m serious. Why can’t I just buy one?”

“They are not for sale.”

“Why not?”

“It is not policy.”

“So change the policy.”

“The policy is not to be changed.”

“Why is the policy not to be changed?”

“Because changing policies is not policy.”

“Now you’re just going round in circles.”

“I am merely following you.”

“No you’re not. I am being direct. You are being evasive.”

“Nevertheless.”

“… Is that it? ‘Nevertheless’ and we just leave things there?”

“Yes.”

Veppers, Jasken, Xingre, half a dozen others of Veppers’ retinue plus the Jhlupian’s principal aide and a medium-ranking officer from the Ucalegon were sharing a tethered flier making its way through one of the great karst caves that made up Iobe Cavern City. The cave averaged a kilometre or so across; a huge pipe whose floor held a small, winding river. The city’s buildings, terraces, promenades and boulevards rose up from the riverside, increasingly precipitously as they approached the mid-way point of the cave, where the buildings became sheer cliffs; a few went even beyond that, clinging to the overhanging curve of the cavern’s upper wall. The flier tether-rails were stationed further up still, cantilevered out from the cave’s roof on gantries like a sequence of giant cranes. A series of enormous oval holes punctured the roof’s summit, letting in great slanting slabs of withering Vebezuan sunlight.

Lying close to its slowly ever-brightening star, the planet was cursed with too much sunlight but blessed with entire continents made mostly of deeply eroded limestone, providing vast cave systems in which its inhabitants – native animals and Sichultian incomers – could hide. You had to travel to the very high and very low latitudes to find pleasantly balmy climates. The poles were havens of temperate freshness. Very occasionally the hills there even got snow.

“Xingre,” Veppers said with a sorrowful shake of his head, “you are my trusted business associate and even a friend in your own strange alien way, but I may have to go over your head here. Or carapace.”

“Carapace. Though in our language the expression is I may have to go beyond your reach.”

“So who would I have to ask?”

“About what?”

“About buying a ship.”

“No one. There is no one to ask because such things are not covered.”

“Not covered? Is that the same as being not policy?”

“Yes.”

“Lieutenant,” Veppers said, turning to the ship’s officer, who also floated, twelve limbs neatly folded on one of the shiny cushions that doubled as chairs and translators, “is this really true?”

“Is what true, sir?”

“That it’s not possible to buy one of your ships.”

“It is not possible to buy navy ships of our navy.”

“Why not?”

“It is not policy.”

Veppers sighed. “Yes, so I’ve been told,” he said, looking at Xingre.

“Navies rarely sell their vessels, not if they are of the best,” Xingre said.

“You’re already hiring it to me,” Veppers said.

“Not the same,” the officer told him. “We remain in control. Sold to you, you assume control.”

“It’d only be one ship,” Veppers insisted. “I don’t want your whole navy. Really, such a fuss. You people are positively purists.” Veppers had once asked ambassador Huen if it was possible to buy a Culture ship. She’d stared at him for a second, then burst out laughing.

The flier zoomed, rising to avoid a high bridge barring their way. The craft stayed flat rather than pointing its nose up, the winch bogey travelling the network of flier tether rails above reeling in the craft’s four invisibly fine mono-filament lines equally.

Iobe city had banned flying machines entirely for centuries, then allowed fliers to be used but suffered one or two accidents which had resulted in the destruction of several notable buildings and prized historic cross-cavern bridges, so had compromised by allowing fliers but only if they were tethered to tracks in the cavern roofs and controlled automatically.

“The best Jhlupian ships are of the Jhlupian navy,” the lieutenant said. “We prefer to keep it that way. For the benefit of not being outrun by civilian vessels. Embarrassment might ensue otherwise. Most governmental entities share this policy.”

“Do the Sichultians sell their best ships to their lessers?” Xingre asked.

“I’d give you a very good price,” Veppers said. He turned from Xingre to the lieutenant. “Very good. You could even take the weapons off. It’s the speed I’m after.”

“Culture ships are even faster, sir,” Jasken said.

Veppers looked coldly at him. “Are they now?”

“Some are,” the lieutenant said.

“How much would a ship like the Ucalegon cost?” Jasken asked the lieutenant. “If it was for sale?”

“Impossible to say,” the officer said.

“You must know how much they cost,” Veppers said. “You have to price them, you must have a budget for how many you can build and operate.”

“Realistic price might be more than entire gross economic product of Sichultian Enablement,” Xingre said.

Veppers smiled. “I doubt that.”

Xingre made a chuckling sound. “Nevertheless.”

“Additionally,” the lieutenant said, “there are treaties to be considered.”

Veppers exchanged looks with Jasken. “Oh, I bet there are.”

“As responsible members of galactic community and Galactic Council,” the officer said, “we are signatories to treaties forbidding us from over-runging certain technologies.”

“Over-runging?” Veppers asked in his best what-the-fuck-does-that-mean tone. He looked from the lieutenant to Jasken, who shrugged.

“Technical term,” Xingre said. “One may gift or sell technology one rung down the ladder of civilisational attainment, but no further.”

“Ah, that,” Veppers said sourly. “That keeps us all in our place, doesn’t it?”

Xingre rocked backwards on his shiny pillow, looking outward from the flier. “My, is beautiful city!” he said.

“And,” the ship’s officer said, “one is behoved to retain control over said technology to prevent it being re-sold further down relevant tech ladder by rascalish peoples acting purely as middle-men, fraudulently.”

“End-user certificates,” Xingre said, agreeing.

“So we have to wait until we’re about to invent something our selves before we can buy it from somebody else?” Veppers asked.

“Much like that,” Xingre said. It waved a thin green limb at a particularly slim, highly ornate bridge they were passing over. “See, great elegance of form!” It waved at the road and pedestrian traffic crossing the bridge, not that anybody was looking at them, and anyway the flier’s bubble canopy was mirrored on the outside.

“Such treaties and agreements prevent free-for-all,” the lieutenant said helpfully.

Veppers looked unimpressed.

“Hmm. Free-for-alls,” Xingre agreed. “Tsk.”

The flier swung round, banking as it turned to enter a side cavern. This new tunnel was about half the diameter of the one they had been heading down until now. The craft levelled out but dropped, still level, and flew on into darkness; this cavern had no roof piercings to let in the sunlight, or buildings within. A display on the flier’s forward screen lit up to show what the cavern looked like ahead. Rocky, uneven walls stretched curving away into the distance.

“I like free-for-alls,” Veppers said quietly.

They sat in a paper boat floating on a lake of mercury, lit by a single distant ceiling hole producing a searchlight shaft of luminescence. Veppers had brought an ingot of pure gold specially. He took his mask off for a moment. “Plop it in,” he told Jasken.

Jasken didn’t take his mask off. “You can talk through the mask, sir,” he told Veppers, who just frowned, then nodded impatiently.

Jasken slid the soap-bar-size lump of gold out of his tunic, held it by one end, reached over the side of the boat and dropped the thick glossy sliver overboard. It vanished into the silver surface.

Veppers took part of the boat’s gunwale between his fingers, wobbled it. “Paper, really?” he asked Xingre, pulling his mask away again.

The Jhlupian didn’t need a mask; mercury vapour wasn’t poisonous to Jhlupians. “Paper,” the alien confirmed. “Compressed.” It made an expanding then contracting gesture with its limbs. “Easier disposing of.”

The flier had reached the limit of the cave system’s tether rails, had landed, been released from its cables and flown on through another two junctions’ worth of smaller and smaller side tunnels until it had reached the cavern holding Mercury Lake, one of Vebezua’s modest number of tourist attractions.