Surface Detail (47 page)

The flier had hovered centimetres off the surface of the lake and let them step straight into the paper boat. They could have walked across the surface of the mercury, of course, and Veppers had wanted to, but apparently that was forbidden, or at least frowned on, or gave you seasickness or something. The mercury could have been cleaner, Veppers reckoned. Its surface held dust and grit and swirls of little rock particles like dark sand.

The boat was slightly absurd; it looked like a scaled-up version of the sort of paper boat a child might make. Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn’t. It was one number down the Periodic Table and so ought to float. Veppers looked over the side of the vessel at where his ingot of gold had entered the liquid metal, but it showed no sign of surfacing yet.

After dropping them at the boat, the flier had taken off again, carrying the other two Jhlupians with it. Apart from showing his importance to the Jhlupian navy, Xingre hadn’t needed his aide along with him in the first place, and the Navy itself, while being contractually obliged to bring Veppers here safely, had wanted no part of whatever might transpire or be agreed here.

Another, smaller flier approached. Jasken watched it on his Oculenses. The paper boat lay about two hundred metres off the nearest section of cavern wall. Mercury Lake was not natural, though nobody knew who had chosen to place such a huge amount of the metal in an out-of-the-way spot within a natural labyrinth in a planet that was itself quite isolated. The approaching flier was only about three metres by four. Small, for two people of different species, Jasken thought. He had several weapons with him, including one concealed by the cast over his arm. He felt a need to check them again, but didn’t. He already knew they were primed and ready.

The Oculenses were a little confused by the mercury vapour swirling within the chamber. The cavern was roughly spherical, about half a kilometre across. It was a little under half full of mercury, and volcanic activity kept the very bottom of the chamber heated, producing – every now and again – gigantic belching bubbles within the liquid metal. Those bubbles produced the gasses that made the air in the chamber poisonous to pan-humans and many other biological beings, as well as making it next to impossible to monitor any vibrations through the air by laser or any other form of surveillance.

The paper boat kept near but not too close to the centre of the lake, sufficiently distant to ride any waves produced by the sporadic bubbles. The volcanic activity wasn’t natural either; several hundred thousand years earlier – long before the Sichultians arrived on the scene to find a happily habitable but sentiently uninhabited planet – a hole had been drilled down through many tens of kilometres of rock to create the tiny magma chamber that heated the base of the cavern and so kept the mercury simmering. Nobody knew who had done this, or why. The best guesses were that it was either a religious thing or an artwork.

While Jasken was watching the flier approach, Veppers looked over the side of the boat and saw the shining lozenge of the gold ingot, surfaced again at last. He prodded Jasken on the shoulder and he retrieved it.

The flier set down by the side of the paper boat. It looked like a fat bullet made of chrome and coloured glass. It split, opened and revealed a glistening mass within. Just about discernible inside was a dark elliptical shape, fringed or tentacled at either end.

“Welcome, friend from Flekke,” Xingre said.

“Good day,” said an obviously synthesised voice from the opened bullet of the flier. “Chruw Slude Zsor, Functionary-General.”

“An honour,” Xingre said, dipping on its floating cushion.

“We were expecting you to arrive with the Nauptrian negotiator,” Veppers said, talking through the mask.

“That is me, I am here,” said the flier containing the Flekke in what was – somewhat counter-intuitively, Veppers thought – a more organic-sounding voice. “Though I am not Nauptrian. I am of the Nauptre Reliquaria. Were you expecting a sample of our feeder species, or making a mistake?”

“Humble apologies,” Xingre said, extending the limb nearest Veppers towards the man by just enough for the movement to be interpreted as a gesture at all. Veppers had seen, and – reluctantly

– kept quiet. “We biological species,” Xingre said, putting a laugh into its voice, “in such niceties’ matterings err, with sporadic effect.”

Veppers had to suppress a smile. He had noticed before that Xingre’s grasp of language ebbed and flowed quite usefully on such occasions, allowing the Jhlupian to present itself as any where between razor smart and hopelessly bumbling, as desired.

The Reliquarian might have been nonplussed by this. It said nothing for a moment, then, “To introduce: I am 200.59 Risytcin, Nauptre Reliquaria Extra-Jurisdictional Service, rank Full Mediary.”

“Please,” Xingre said, gesturing. “On-boarding.”

The opened bullet shape slid forward, up and over the shallow gunwale of the boat, coming to rest just above the flat interior surface of the vessel’s hull. “Most splendid,” Xingre said, and, reaching up with half of its dozen limbs, drew a compressed paper cover right over the whole of the boat’s open surface, enclosing them. Gentle glows from the Jhlupian’s floating pillow and the interior of the Reliquarian’s bullet-shaped casing kept them all visible to each other. It was almost romantic, Veppers thought, if your taste ran to weird, inhuman aliens and fanatical machines with a taste for torment.

“Well, hello to you both,” Veppers said to the Flekkian and the Reliquarian. “Thank you for coming, and for agreeing to conduct our meeting in Sichultian.”

“It is easier for us to talk down to you than it is for you to aspire to our far more sophisticated language,” the Reliquarian said.

Veppers smiled. “Well, I have to hope that lost something in the translation. Now, however, I understand we have to do this ridiculous thing with the masks.”

The ridiculous thing with the masks meant them wearing a sort of helmet – or similar – each, from which a hose led to a central junction chamber. This way they could all talk and listen to each other without anybody else hearing. It all seemed madly contrived to Veppers but apparently in this age of summed-state super quantum phase-parsed encryptography it was the last thing anybody would be looking for. The Nauptre Reliquaria especially thought it was just the greatest thing imaginable and had insisted on it.

It took a while to get everything and everybody set up and adjusted. 200.59 Risytcin insisted on inspecting both the ingot of gold in Jasken’s pocket and his Oculenses, taking some time over the latter – turning them over and over in a maniple field and at one point seemingly trying to twist them apart – but eventually pronounced them safe and handing them back. Jasken looked unhappy, and carefully cleaned and readjusted them before putting them back on.

“To business,” Xingre said, once they were all technically happy and the pleasantries had been dealt with. Its voice sounded at once muffled and echoey, coming through the inter-linked set of tubes. All linked up together, barely lit, hunkered down in this crude approximation of a boat, they looked, Veppers thought, like some bizarrely motley set of desperate survivors from some strange and terrible shipwreck.

The Reliquarian said, “Introductory statement and opening position of the NR, with superposition of same relevant to Flekke: We have good reason to believe that the anti-Hell faction in the relevant confliction – concerning proposed unwarranted intrusions in certain virtual realities – grows desperate. They may attempt to intrude within the Real. A possible source of intrusion might conceivably come via the Tsungarial Disk. We will seek to prevent this happening and expect our allies and friends to cooperate in this. The cooperation of the Veprine Corporation falls within this definition. To Mr. Veppers of the Veprine Corporation: kindly state your position and intentions.”

Veppers nodded. “All very interesting,” he said. “So, we are to take it that the NR representative speaks for the Flekke as well?”

“Indeed,” the ellipsoid shape within the Reliquarian said. “As stated.” Its voice sounded appropriately watery through the linking tubes.

“And do you also talk on the behalf of the GFCF?” Veppers asked.

“The Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy need not be present,” the Reliquarian informed them. “Their acquiescence is assured and assumed.”

Veppers smiled broadly. “Splendid!”

“To repeat: your position and intentions, Mr. Veppers, speaking on behalf of yourself, the Veprine Corporation and the Sichultian Enablement to the extent that you are able to answer for it,” the Reliquarian said.

“Well then, subject to a satisfactory negotiationary outcome here,” Veppers said, “my position is that I fully support the stance and values of our good friends and allies the NR and the Flekke and will do whatever is within my modest means to facilitate their strategic goals.” He smiled, opened his arms wide. “I am on your side, of course.” He smiled again. “Providing the price is right, naturally.”

“What is this price?” Chruw Slude Zsor, Functionary-General for the Flekke said.

“I recently lost something very precious to me,” Veppers said. “And discovered that I had gained something at the same time, something I might not have wished on myself.”

“Would this be linked to the remains of the Culture neural lace which is in one of your servant’s pockets?” 200.59 Risytcin asked.

“How well spotted,” Veppers said. “Yes. I would like to investigate the possibility of replacing the thing that I lost with an identical item, and I would like to have the assistance, even protection, of both the NR and the Flekke, should somebody – anybody – wish to harm me due to any circumstances which might be linked with the neural lace being in my possession.”

“This sounds a little vague,” Chruw Slude Zsor said.

“I intend to be much less vague when we discuss financial remuneration and technology transfer,” Veppers said. “What I’m looking for right now is a declaration of goodwill more than anything else.”

“The Flekke are happy to give this,” Chruw Slude Zsor said.

There was another inscrutable pause before the Reliquarian said, “Similarly.”

“Subject to contract,” the Flekkian added.

“Also similarly,” 200.59 Risytcin confirmed.

Veppers nodded slowly. “Good,” he said. “We can do details later, but for now I’d like to approach the monetary strand of these talks. Mr. Jasken here will record our deliberations using his Oculenses from this point on until further notice, each of us having a veto. Is that agreed?”

“Agreed,” 200.59 Risytcin said.

“The principle is allowed,” Chruw Slude Zsor said. “Though given that all we ask of you is to do nothing, and the price of in -action traditionally is significantly less than that of action, we might wish that you do not approach such negotiations with too unrealistic a set of hopes.”

Veppers smiled. “I shall, as ever, be the very soul of reasonableness.”

Veppers had extensive business interests on Vebezua and throughout the rest of that day he attended a series of more conventional meetings following the one held in the paper boat on Mercury Lake. The Iobe city authorities held a reception for him that evening in a great ballroom complex suspended on cables in the centre of the single greatest circular piercing above the main city caverns. The ceiling was opened to the night.

Vebezua was uncomfortably close to its star and Iobe lay almost right on the equator; by day it would have been insufferably hot and bright in the ballroom with the ceiling irised back, but by night the full glory of the stars was displayed, a distant speckled wash of multi-coloured lights enhanced by a large waning moon and the layered, slow- and not-so-slow-moving sparkle of junk and hab light as the planet’s various halos of artificial satellites rotated overhead.

Veppers had been coming to Vebezua on business for decades and possessed one of the finest mansions in the inner city; however, it was being remodelled, again, and so he had elected to stay in Iobe’s finest hotel, his suite of suites and his retinue taking up the two top floors. He owned the hotel, of course, so making the arrangements, even at relatively short notice, had been trivial.

For security reasons he slept right at the back of the hotel where its largest, finest but windowless grand bedroom had been carved out of the rock of the cavern wall.

Before retiring for the night he had Jasken meet him in one of the saunas. They sat facing each other, naked in the steam.

“My, how pale that arm is becoming,” he told the other man. Jasken had taken his cast off and left it outside.

Jasken flexed his arm, clenched his fist. “I’m due to take it off next week.”

“Mm-hmm,” Veppers said. “The Reliquarian. Did it put something in the Oculenses?”

“I think so. Probably a tracker. Too small to tell. Do I give it to Xingre’s techs to check?”

“Tomorrow. Tonight you stay here.”

Jasken frowned. “You sure?”

“Quite sure. Don’t worry about me.”

“Can’t I just leave the Oculenses?”

“No. And do something memorable.”

“What?”

“Something memorable. Go back out, to a club, start a fight, or get two girls fighting over you, or throw a whore into a wine barrel; whatever it takes to be noticed. Nothing so heinous anyone would think to wake me, obviously, but something that‘ll make it very clear you’re still here.” Veppers frowned; Jasken was frowning at him. Veppers looked down at his own lap. “Oh, yes, well; just the mention of whores will do that. Better deal with it.” He grinned at Jasken. “Meeting over. Tell Astil I’ll manage by myself tonight and send Pleur up on your way out.”

The suite’s giant circular bed could be surrounded by multiple concentric layers of soft and floaty curtains. Once they were all fully drawn round and the hidden monofils within the fabrics had been activated and stiffened, it was impossible to tell from outside that the bed had descended into the deep floor and retreated into the rock wall behind and beneath.