Surface Detail (22 page)

There were three others besides Prin and Irkun. They had kept the core team as small as they possibly could to avoid the pro-Hell people finding out.

They lay on couches on a deck looking out over the lagoon towards the distant dunes and the sea. Birds flew across the reflection of a livid sunset, dark shapes against the long rips and tearings of the cloud-streaked sky. There were no other boats or houseboats visible. The one they were on looked innocent enough, though it concealed some very hi-tech gear and a buried optic cable linking them to a satellite array in the nearest small town, kilometres distant. Prin had been awake for about half a day now. They needed to decide what to do next, especially about Chay.

“If we leave her under we can re-integrate her fine, whenever she comes back,” Biath said. He was their mind-state expert.

“Even with a broken mind?” Prin asked.

“Certainly,” Biath said, as though this was some sort of accomplishment.

“So we take a perfectly healthy sleeping mind and plonk a broken one into it and it’s the broken one that wins, that emerges?” Yolerre said. She was their main programmer, the whiz that had come up with the barbed-wire code to let them escape from the Hell.

Biath shrugged. “The newer writes over the older,” he told her. “That’s just normal.”

“But if we wake her—?” Prin began.

“If we wake her she’ll be just as she was before the two of you went under,” Sulte said. He was their mission controller, their main ex-government source and another comms expert. “But the longer she’s awake and living any sort of normal life, the harder it gets to re-integrate her two personalities: the unconscious one here that doesn’t include her experiences in the Hell and the virtually conscious one – wherever it is – that does.” He looked at Biath, who nodded to this.

“Which, given that the latter will probably leave her out of her mind,” Irkun said, “may be for the best.”

“She could be treated,” Irkun said. There are techniques.”

“These techniques ever been tried on somebody carrying all the nightmares of Hell in their head?” Yolerre asked.

Irkun just shook his head and made a sucking noise.

“How long before any re-integration becomes impossible?” Prin asked.

“At worst, problematic within hours,” Biath said. “Few days probably. Week at the most. Over-write would be brutal, could leave her … catatonic at best. Only humane course would be trying to prise the Hell memories in piecemeal.” He shook his head. “Very likely her continuance personality would just reject the memories completely. Nightmares would need watching.”

“You really don’t think she’s likely to pop out soon?” Irkun asked Prin. Irkun had his tablet remote propped up in front of him, monitoring Chay’s condition in the clinic room just a few metres away.

Prin shook his head. “I don’t think there’s any chance,” he said. “She’d forgotten what the emergency code was, what it was for, how you operated it; like I keep saying, she even denied that there was any Real. And those bastard demons would have been on her in seconds after I barged through. If she didn’t follow me in a few heartbeats, she isn’t following me for . . . months.” He started crying again. The others saw, huddled closer, made soothing noises, and those closest reached out to touch him with their trunks.

He looked round them all. “I think we have to wake her,” he told them.

“What happens if we do get her back?” Yolerre asked.

“She can be given some sort of existence in a virtual world,” Sulte said. “Fact is it’ll be easier to treat her there, yes?” he said glancing at Biath, who nodded.

“Do we need to take a vote?” Irkun asked.

“I think it’s Prin’s call,” Sulte said. The others nodded, made noises of assent.

“You’ll have her back, Prin,” Yolerre said, reaching out to stroke him gently with one trunk.

Prin looked away. “No, I won’t,” he said.

When they did wake her, the following morning, he had already left.

He didn’t want to see her. He didn’t want to abandon the one he loved and who was still in Hell by accepting the love of the one who had never been there, no matter how whole, perfect and un-traumatised she might be.

No doubt this Chay, this one who had never seen Hell, would feel injured by his actions, and not understand how he could be so cruel to her, but then he had seen what real hurt and real cruelty was, and the person that he was now could never pretend that what had happened to the two of them in Hell had somehow not taken place, and changed who he was for ever.

The room where Lededje had woken, to see Sensia sitting outside on the balcony, was hers for as long as she stayed on the ship. After their tour in a small, very quiet aircraft – the GSV was appropriately mind-boggling from every external angle and internal corridor – Sensia had dropped Lededje off nearby, where one of the kilometres-long internal corridors abutted one of the little stepped valleys of accommodation units, given her a long, silvery and elaborate ring – a thing called a terminal that let her talk to the ship – then left her to find her own way back to the room and otherwise sort herself out. Sensia said she’d be a call away, happy to be a guide, companion or whatever. In the meantime, she imagined Lededje might want to rest, or just have some time to herself.

The ring fitted itself to Lededje’s longest finger and gave spoken directions back to her room. One wall of the room acted as a screen and allowed apparently unrestricted access to the ship’s equivalent of the Sichultian datasphere. She sat, started asking questions.

“Welcome aboard,” said the avatar drone of the Bodhisattva. “May I take your bag?”

Yime nodded. Instead of the avatar taking it from her, the bag simply disappeared from her hand, leaving the skin on her fingers with a tingling feeling. She wobbled on her feet and almost staggered as the bag’s weight was suddenly removed from that side of her body, leaving her unbalanced. “You’ll find it in your cabin,” the avatar said.

“Thank you.” Yime looked down. She was standing on nothing. It felt like a very hard nothing, but – just looking – there didn’t seem to be anything beneath her feet except stars arranged in familiar-looking wispy sprays and whorls. Stars to the sides, too. Above her, a vast dark presence; a ceiling of polished black reflecting the stars shining beneath her feet. Looking straight up, she saw a ghost-pale version of herself, looking straight back down.

Beneath, she recognised the patterns of the stars as those visible from her home Orbital of Dinyol-hei. Though given that she had just left her apartment in the later afternoon, these were not the stars she’d have expected to see if they’d simply moved straight down from her apartment to the part of the Orbital beneath where she lived. The ship was obviously some distance further away. She felt pleased with herself to have worked this out so quickly.

“Do you need time to freshen up, adjust, orientate yourself or otherwise—?” the drone began.

“No,” Yime said. She stood as she had before, though with feet spread a little. “May we begin?”

“Yes. Your full attention, please,” the Bodhisattva said.

Your full attention. Yime felt mildly insulted. Still, this was Quietus. It was known for its air of formal austerity and a degree of implicit asceticism. If you didn’t like the discipline involved in most things Quietudinal you shouldn’t have signed up in the first place.

There was a spiteful rumour, seemingly incapable of being entirely laid to rest, that the more recently manifested specialist divisions of the Culture’s Contact section were only there to provide substitute employment niches for those desperate but unable to make the cut and get into Special Circumstances itself.

Contact was the part of the Culture that handled more or less every aspect of the Culture’s interactions with everything and everybody that wasn’t the Culture, from the investigation of unexplored star systems to relations with the entire panoply of other civilisations at every developmental level, from those still unable to scrape together the plan for a world government or a functioning space elevator to the elegantly otiose but nevertheless potentially deeply powerful Elders and the still more detached-from-reality Sublimed, where any vestige or trace of such exotic entities remained.

Special Circumstances was, in effect, the Contact section’s espionage wing.

There had always been specialist sub-divisions within the organisational behemoth that was Contact. Special Circumstances was only the most obvious and, uniquely, it had been formally separate almost since its inception; largely because it sometimes did the sort of things the people who were proud to be part of Contact would have been horrified to have been remotely associated with.

As time had passed though, especially over the last half-thousand years or so, Contact itself had seen fit to introduce various re -organisations and rationalisations which had resulted in the creation of three other specialist divisions, of which the Quietudinal Service was one.

The Quietudinal Service – Quietus, as it was usually called – dealt with the dead. The dead outnumbered the living in the greater galaxy by some distance, if you added up all those individuals existing in the various Afterlives the many different civilisations had created over the millennia. Happily – mercifully – the dead generally tended to keep themselves to themselves and caused relatively little trouble compared to those for whom the Real was still the place to exist within and try to exploit. However, the sheer scale of their numbers ensured that important issues involving the deceased still arose now and again; the dead Quietus dealt with might be technically departed, but they were, sometimes, far from quiet.

A lot of the time such matters were effectively about legality, even about definitions; in a lot of societies the principal difference between a live virtual person – possibly just passing through, as it were, between bodies, back in the Real – and a dead virtual person was that the latter had no right to property or any other kind of ownership outside of their own simulated realm. Perhaps not unnaturally, there were those amongst the dead who found such a distinction unfair. This sort of thing could lead to trouble, but Quietus was skilled in dealing with the results.

Relatively small in terms of ships and personnel, Quietus could nevertheless call on whole catalogued suites of dead but preserved experts and expert systems – not all of which were even pan-human in origin – to help them deal with such matters, bringing them back from their fun-filled retirement or out of suspended animation, where they had left instructions that they were ready to be revived if they could be of use when circumstances required.

Slanged as “Probate” by some of those in SC, Quietus had links with Special Circumstances, but regarded itself as a more specialised service than its much older and larger sibling utility. Most of the humans within Quietus regarded any links with SC as deplorable in essence and only very occasionally necessary, if ever. Some just plain looked down on Special Circumstances. Theirs, they felt, was a higher, more refined calling and their demeanour, behaviour, appearance and even dress reflected this.

Quietus ships added the letters OAQS – for On Active Quietudinal Service – to their names while they were so employed, and usually took on a monochrome outer guise, either pure shining white in appearance or glossily black. They even moved quietly, adjusting the configuration of their engine fields to produce the minimum amount of disturbance both on the sub-universal energy grid and the 3D skein of real space. Normal Culture ships either went for maximum efficiency or the always popular let’s-see-whatwe-can-squeeze-out-of-these-babies approach.

Similarly, the human and other biological operatives of Quietus were expected to be sober, serious people while they were on duty, and to dress appropriately.

It was to this division of Contact that Yime belonged.

Your full attention, indeed. Oh well. Rather than reply, Yime just nodded.

Suddenly she was surrounded waist deep in stars. The drone, the far-distant stars beneath her feet and their reflections had all disappeared. “This is the Ruprine Cluster, in Arm One-one Near-tip,” the ship’s voice said all around her.

Arm One-one Near-tip was a little under three hundred light years distant from the region of space where the Orbital Dinyolhei lay circling around the sun Etchilbieth. In galactic terms, this was practically next door.

“These stars,” the ship said as a few dozen of the suns shown turned from their natural colours to green, “represent the extent of a small civilisation called the Sichultian Enablement, a Level Four/Five society originating here.” One of the green stars blazed brightly, then reduced in brilliance. “The Quyn system; home of the planet Sichult where the pan-human Sichultians evolved.” A pair of pan-humans were shown, standing just outside the ball of stars surrounding Yime. Curious physical proportions, Yime thought. Two sexes; each a little odd-looking to her eyes, just as she would have been to theirs, she supposed. Their skin colours changed as she looked at them, from dark to pale then back to dark, with yellow, red and olive tones exhibited en route. The two naked beings were replaced by one clothed one. He appeared tall, powerfully built and had long white hair.

“This is a man called Joiler Veppers,” the ship told her. “He is the richest individual in the entire civilisation, and by some margin. He is also the most powerful individual in the entire civilisation – though unofficially, through his wealth and connections rather than due to formal political position.”

The image of the stellar cluster with its artificially green stars and the tall, white-haired man both vanished to be replaced by the earlier image of the stars constituting the Sichultian Enablement, with the Quyn system’s sun still shown as the brightest.

“Ms. Nsokyi,” the ship said, “are you aware of the current, long-running confliction over the future of the Afterlives known as Hells?”

“Yes,” Yime said.

Confliction was the technically correct term for a formal conflict within a virtual reality – i.e. one where the outcome mattered beyond the confines of the virtual battle environment itself – but mostly people just called this one the War in Heaven. It had been running now for nearly three decades and had yet to produce a result. She’d heard reports recently that it was finally coming close to a conclusion, but then there had been similar reports almost every hundred days since it had started so she had taken no more notice than anybody else. Most people had long since lost interest.