Surface Detail (21 page)

“And who’d I be appealing to? You?”

“The court of informed public opinion,” Sensia said. “This is the Culture, kid. That’s the court of last resort. If I was convinced I’d made a mistake, or even if I thought I was right but everybody else appeared to think otherwise, I guess I’d reluctantly have to abandon the slap-drone thing. Being a ship Mind I’d take more notice of what other ship Minds thought, then other Minds in general, then AIs, humans, drones and others, though of course as this would be a dispute ultimately about a human’s rights I’d have to give more than usual weight to the human vote. It sounds a little complicated but there are all sorts of well-known precedents and much-used, highly respected processes involved.”

Sensia dipped forward and looked round at Lededje, trying to get her to look at her, though Lededje refused. “Look, Lededje, I don’t mean to make it sound off-putting at all; the whole process would seem incredibly quick and informal to somebody with your background and understanding of the way courts and legal systems work and you wouldn’t have to stay aboard me to see it through; you could start back for home and see how things turn out while you’re en route. I say it would seem informal, but it’d be extremely thorough, and, frankly, much less likely to produce an unjust result than a similar case going through the courts you have back home. If you’d like to do this, please feel free. At any time. It’s your right. Personally I don’t think you’d have a hope in hell of getting off the slap-drone thing, but one never entirely knows with such matters and continually having seemingly obvious judgements challenged is pretty much how the system works.”

Lededje thought about this. “How … secret has me being brought back to life been until now?”

“Right now, it’s just between you and me, given that I can’t find the Me, I’m Counting, the ship that we’re assuming put the neural lace into your head in the first place.”

Only after she’d done it did Lededje realise she’d put one hand to the back of her head as soon as Sensia had mentioned a lace. Her fingertips moved through the soft, short fair hair covering her scalp, tracing the contours of her own skull.

She’d been offered another neural lace, before she’d been woken up in this new body. She’d said no, and was still unsure why she’d made that choice. Anyway, one could be … installed later, even if the process required time to come to fully functioning fruition. That was what had happened with the last one, after all.

“What might have happened to the ship?” she asked. She had a sudden recollection of Himerance, sitting in the seat in her bedroom, dimly lit, talking quietly to her, ten years earlier.

“Happened to it?” Sensia sounded surprised. “Oh, it’ll be off on a retreat, probably. Or wandering aimlessly, tramping the galaxy, or doggedly pursuing some weird obsession all of its own; either way all it needs is to stop telling people where it is and it disappears off the screens. Ships do that, especially old ships.” She snorted. “Especially old ships that saw active service in the Idiran war. They’re very prone to going Eccentric.”

“So ships don’t get slap-droned?” She tried to sound sarcastic.

“Oh, but they do, if they’re especially strange, or of a certain … capital substance; a major ship.” Sensia leaned in close and said, “Ship like me went Eccentric once, or seemed to. Can you imagine?” she said, pretending horror as she nodded out at the view. “Something this size? Went totally off the rails in a crisis and shook off the ship detailed to be its slap-drone.”

“And how did that end?”

Sensia shrugged. “Not too badly. Could have been a bit better, could have been an awful lot worse.”

Lededje thought a little more. “Then I think I’ll just have to accept your judgement.” She turned and smiled smoothly at the avatar. “I don’t accept that it’s necessary, but I’ll … acquiesce.” Sensia wore an expression of regret, and a small frown. “Though you should know,” Lededje said, fighting to keep her voice under control, “that there is no possibility of the man who killed me being brought to justice for what he did to me, let alone suffering any punishment for it. He is a very charming, very powerful but completely evil man. He is utterly selfish and self-centred, and due to his position he can and does get away with anything – anything at all. He deserves to die. It would absolutely be the correct moral thing to do to kill Joiler Veppers, my personal grievance against him set entirely aside. If I am going back to my home with murder in my heart, as you put it, then you are making exactly the wrong moral choice in deciding to protect him.”

“I understand how you feel, Lededje,” the avatar said.

“I doubt it.”

“Well, I certainly understand the force of what you’re saying; please accept that at least. It’s just not my place to pass judgement at such a remove on somebody I have no conceivable moral jurisdiction over.”

“The Culture never interferes in other societies?” Lededje said, trying to sound scornful. It was one of the few things she could recall having heard about the Culture back in Sichult: its people were hopelessly effeminate, or unnaturally aggressive females (the story changed according to exactly which aspect of the Culture’s alleged demeanour the Sichultian press and establishment wanted to portray as shocking, depraved or despicable), it didn’t use money and it was ruled by its giant robot ships that interfered in other civilisations. Despite herself, she could feel tears welling up behind her eyes.

“Good grief, yes, we’re interfering all the time,” the avatar admitted. “But it’s all carefully thought out, long-term managed and there’s always got to be some strategic goal that’ll benefit the people being interfered with.” Sensia looked away for a moment. “Well, usually. That’s not to say things don’t go awry on occasion.” She looked back at Lededje. “But that’s all the more reason to take care. Especially when this is a person of such importance, with such a degree of fame, notoriety or whatever, and with control over so much of your civilisation’s productive—”

“So his position, his money protects him even here?” Lededje protested, trying hard not to cry now.

“I’m sorry,” Sensia said. “That’s the reality of the situation. We don’t make your rules. As an alien being he has as much right as anybody else has not to have me collude in any plot against his life; as a focus of power within your society, anything that happens to him matters more than it does to almost anybody else. It would be irresponsible not to take that into account even if I did share your desire to kill him.”

“What chance would I have anyway,” Lededje said, sniffing and looking away. “I’m no assassin. I could happily kill him but I’ve no particular skill in such matters. My only advantage is I know something of his estates and houses and the people who surround him.” She raised her hand, studied its back and front. “And I don’t look like I used to look, so I might have a chance of getting close to him.”

“I imagine he’s well protected,” Sensia said. She paused for a moment. “Yes, I see that he is. “Your news services seem most taken with these cloned people, the Zei.”

Lededje thought to say something to the effect that Jasken was the real bodyguard, Veppers’ true last line of defence, but then thought the better of it. Best not be seen to be thinking in such terms. She sniffed some more, wiping her nose on her hand.

“You don’t have to go back, Lededje,” Sensia said gently. “You could stay here, make a new life in the Culture.”

Lededje used the heels of her hands to dry round her eyes. “You know, for almost as long as I can remember that was the one thing I wanted?” she said. She glanced at Sensia, who looked puzzled. “All those years, all those times I tried to run away, the one thing nobody ever asked me was where I might be running to.” She smiled a small, thin smile at the avatar, who looked surprised now. “If they had asked,” Lededje told her, “I might even have told them: I was running away to the Culture, because I’d heard they’d escaped the tyranny of money and individual power, and that all people were equal here, men and women alike, with no riches or poverty to put one person above or beneath another.”

“But now you’re here?” Sensia offered, sounding sad.

“But now I’m here I find Joiler Veppers is still deferred to because he is a rich and powerful man.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “And I find I need to return because that is my home, like it or not, and I must make my peace with it somehow.” She looked sharply at Sensia. “Then I might come back. Would I be allowed to come back?”

“You’d be allowed.”

Lededje nodded once and looked away.

They were both silent for a few moments. Then Sensia said, “Slap-drones can be quite useful companions, anyway; willing and obedient servants – bodyguards, too – so long as you don’t try to kill or injure somebody. I’ll choose you a good one.”

“I’m sure we’ll get on just fine,” Lededje said.

She wondered how easy it would be to lose a slap-drone. Or to kill it, too.

Yime Nsokyi stood in the main room of her apartment, her stance upright, her booted feet together, her head slightly back, her hands clasped behind her back. She was dressed formally in long dark grey boots, grey trousers, a light blouse and a plain grey jacket with a stiff, high collar. She had a pen terminal in the breast pocket of the jacket and a back-up terminal in the shape of an earbud attached to the lobe of her left ear. Her hair was very neatly combed.

“Ms. Nsokyi, hello.”

“Good day.”

“You look very … poised. Wouldn’t you rather sit?”

“I prefer to stand.”

“Okay.” The avatar of the GCU Bodhisattva, OAQS had appeared, Displaced apparently, in front of her a moment earlier, its coming heralded half an hour before by the call she’d received. She had had time to dress and compose herself. The avatar took the form of an old-looking drone, nearly a metre long, half that across and a quarter-metre in height. It floated at eye level. “I shall take it we may dispense with any pleasantries,” it said.

“That would be my choice,” Yime agreed.

“I see. In that case, are you ready to …?”

Yime flexed her knees, picked up a small soft bag at her feet and stood again. “Fully,” she said.

“Okay then.”

The avatar and the human female disappeared inside two silver ellipsoids which had hardly appeared before they shrank to two points and vanished, not quite fast enough to create two tiny claps of thunder, but sufficiently quickly to cause a draught that ruffled the leaves of nearby plants.

Prin awoke from the long and terrible real nightmare of his time in Hell and found Chay, his true love, gazing over at him as he lay, blinking, on the clinic bed. He was on his side, looking at her; she was on her other side on a bed a metre away, facing him. Her eyes blinked slowly.

It had taken a while for him to register where he was, who this person looking over at him was, even who he himself was. At first all he knew was that he was somewhere vaguely medical, that he felt something very sweet and special for the female lying opposite, and that he had done something important and terrifying.

Hell. He had been in Hell. They had been in Hell; he and Chay. They had gone in there to prove that it was real, not a myth, and that it was a vile, perverted version of an afterlife, a place of unredeemed cruelty, impossible to defend in any civilised society.

They had sought to witness this and then to bring the evidence back and do what they could to make it public; get it disseminated as widely as possible, defying the state, the government, the political-commercial establishment and all the various vested interests which wanted their Hell – all the hells – to continue.

Now, here they were, back in the Real, the two of them.

He couldn’t quite speak yet. He was lying on this bed, in what certainly looked like the clinic they had left from, with Chay on the bed opposite his. They had transferred their personalities into electronic or photonic form or whatever it was – he had never been interested in the technical details – and they had set out together for Hell.

He could hear faint beeping noises, and see various pieces of medical equipment and communications gear stationed around their two beds.

“Prin! You’re back!” a voice said. He recognised the voice, or at least knew that he ought to know who the speaker was. A male came into view.

He did recognise him. Irkun. He was called Irkun and he was the medic-cum-comms-wizard who had been overseeing the transfer of their personalities, their beings, from their own bodies, through the communications network to wherever the state-run link to Hell was, and then on to the Hell itself. And back, of course. That was the point; they had to come back, and so they’d been sent with lengths of code attached that would let them come back. In the Hell these had been disguised as necklaces of barbed wire. They gave the wearer one brief spell to impersonate one of the more powerful and privileged demons within the Hell, and one chance to get back out of the virtual world back to the Real.

He remembered the blue glowing gate and the mill and the valley side with the X-shaped devices bearing the rotting corpses.

Blue glowing gate, and his desperate leap, holding her …

Tumbling in the air, somersaulting so that he went through first, her in his limbs immediately afterwards, if possible.

“You made it!” Irkun said, clapping both trunks together. He was dressed like a medic; white waistcoat, tail bunned and pinned, hooves in little white bootees. “You’re back! You made it! And Chay, is she … ?”

Irkun turned to look at Chay. She was still staring straight ahead. Prin had thought she was gazing at him, but of course, she wasn’t. She blinked slowly, again, exactly as she had a little earlier.

“… right behind you?” Irkun asked, voice trailing away a little as he looked at the medical units and comms gear gathered around her bed. He pulled out a tablet remote and started tapping at it, trunk-fingers dancing over the icons, letters and numbers. “Is she … ?” he said, falling silent. He stopped tapping at the remote and looked, stricken, at Prin.

Irkun, Chay, the bed she was lying on and the whole small clinic room – on a houseboat in a lagoon off a shallow sea – all started to waver and dissolve as tears began to fill Prin’s eyes.