Surface Detail (28 page)

He looked at Jolicci and Lededje. “Jolicci,” he said with obviously feigned concern, “you look offended.” He nodded, creased his eyes. “It’s a good look, trust me. Sour opprobrium: suits you.”

Jolicci said nothing.

Wheloube and Emmis resumed their seats. Standing there, Demeisen put out both hands and stroked the hair of one and the shaved head of the other, then cradled the finely chiselled chin of the one with the shaved head using his unsplinted hand. “And fascinatingly, the fellow” – he used his splinted fingers to tap the side of his head again, hard – “is quite defiantly heterosexual, with a fear of bodily violation that borders on outright homophobia.”

He looked round the table of young men, winking at one of them, then gazed radiantly at Jolicci and Lededje.

Lededje stamped across the floor of the dimly lit Smallbay. “There must be other SC ships,” she said furiously.

“None that will talk to you,” Jolicci said, hurrying after her.

“And the only one that would seemed solely to want to shock and demean me.”

Jolicci shrugged. “The Abominator class of General Offensive Unit, to which our friend belongs, is not known for its mildness or sociability. Probably specced when the Culture was going through one of its periods of feeling that nobody was taking it seriously because it was somehow too nice. Even amongst those, though, that particular ship is known as something of an outlier. Most SC ships conceal their claws and keep the psychopathy switched to Full Off except when it’s judged to be absolutely necessary.”

In the traveltube, deflated but calmer, Lededje said, “Well, thank

you for trying.”

“You are welcome. Was all that you said in there true?”

“Every word.” She looked at him. “I trust you’ll treat what you heard just now as in confidence.”

“Well, that is something you might have thought to say before-hand, but, all right, I promise what you said will go no further.” The fat little avatar looked thoughtful. “I realise it might not feel like it, but you may have just had a narrow escape, Ms. Y’breq.”

She looked coldly at him. “Then that makes two this evening, doesn’t it?”

Jolicci appeared unconcerned. If anything he looked amused. “As I said, I was never going to let you fall. What I did was a stunt. What you just saw in there was real.”

“The ship would really be allowed to treat a human like that?”

“If it was done voluntarily, if the bargain was struck with eyes open, as it were, yes.” Jolicci made an expansive gesture with both hands. “It’s what can happen if you put yourself in harm’s way by treating with SC.” The fat little avatar appeared to think for a moment. “Perhaps a rather extreme example, admittedly.”

Lededje took a deep breath, let it out. “I have no terminal. May I use you as one?”

“Feel free. Who would you like to contact?”

“The GSV. To tell it I’ll take its suggested ship tomorrow.”

“No need. It’ll be assuming so anyway. Anybody else?”

“Admile?” she said, her voice small.

There was a pause, then Jolicci shook his head regretfully. “I’m afraid he is otherwise engaged.”

Lededje sighed. She looked at Jolicci. “I desire a meaningless sexual encounter with a male, preferably one as good-looking as one of those young men round Demeisen’s table.”

Jolicci smiled, then sighed. “Well, the night is yet middle-aged.”

Yime Nsokyi lay awake in the darkness of her small cabin, waiting for sleep. She would give it another few minutes and then gland softnow to bring it on not-entirely-naturally. She possessed the same suite of drug glands as most Culture humans, the default set that you tended to be born with, but she preferred not to use them unless genuinely necessary, and almost never for pleasure, only to accomplish something of practical value.

She might have got rid of them completely, she supposed, just told them all to wither away and be absorbed into her body, but she had chosen not to. She knew of some within Quietus who had gone through with this, in some spirit of denial and asceticism that she thought was taking matters too far. Also, it was arguably more disciplined still to possess the glands but not to use them than it was to remove them and their temptations altogether.

But then the same might be said of her choice to become neuter. She put one hand down between her legs, to feel the tiny slotted bud – like a third, bizarrely placed nipple – which was all that was left of her genitals. When she had been younger, when her drug glands had still been maturing, that too had been a way of bringing on sleep: masturbate and then drift off in the rosy afterglow.

She rubbed the tiny bud absently, remembering. There was no hint of pleasure in touching herself there any more; she might as well have caressed a knuckle or an ear lobe. In fact there was more sensuality to be found in her ear lobes. The nipples of her reduced, near-flat breasts were similarly unresponsive.

Oh well, she thought, clasping her hands over her chest; it had been her choice. A way of making real to herself her dedication to Quietus. Nun-like, she supposed. On that reckoning, there were a lot of nuns and monks within Quietus. And, of course, the decision was entirely reversible. She wondered about changing back, becoming properly female again. She still thought of herself as female, always had.

Or she might become male; she was exactly poised between the two standard genders. She touched the little bud at her groin again. Just as much like a tiny penis as a relocated nipple, she supposed.

She clasped her hands over her chest once more, then sighed, turned on her side.

“Ms. Nsokyi?” the ship’s voice said quietly.

“Yes?”

“My apologies. I sensed you were still some way from sleep.”

“You sensed correctly. What?”

“I have been asked by a number of my colleagues whether your earlier comment regarding informing Special Circumstances about the matter in hand represented what one might call a formal suggestion or request.”

She waited a moment before replying. “No,” she said. “It did not.”

“I see. Thank you. That’s all. Good night. Sleep well.”

“Good night.”

Yime wondered whether she ship would even have bothered to ask had she not had the history she did with SC.

She had been drawn to Quietus even when she’d been a little girl. A serious, reserved, slightly withdrawn little girl who had been interested in dead things found in the woods and keeping insects in terraria. A serious, reserved, slightly withdrawn little girl who knew that she was easily capable of joining Special Circumstances if she wanted to, but who had only ever wanted to be part of the Quietudinal Service.

Even then she had known that Quietus – like Restoria and the third of Contact’s relatively recently specialist services, Numina, which dealt with the Sublimed – was seen by many people and machines as being second best to Special Circumstances.

SC was the pinnacle, the service that attracted the absolutely best and brightest of the Culture; in a society that held few positions of individual power, SC represented the ultimate goal for those both blessed and cursed with the sort of vaunting, hungry ambition to succeed in the Real that could not be bought off by the convincing but ultimately artificial attractions of VR. If you genuinely wanted to prove yourself, there was no question that SC was where you wanted to be.

Even then, still a child, she had known she was special, known that she was capable of doing pretty much whatever it was possible to do within the Culture. SC would have seemed like the obvious target for her aims and aspirations. But she hadn’t wanted to be in SC; she wanted to be in Quietus, the service everybody seemed to feel was a second best. It was unfair.

She had made her decision then, way back, before her drug glands were developed enough to use with any skill or finesse, before she was sexually mature at all.

She studied, trained, learned, grew a neural lace, applied to join Contact, was accepted, applied herself, both diligently and imaginatively within Contact, and all the while waited for the invitation to join SC.

The invitation duly came, and she declined it, so joining an exclusive club many orders of magnitude smaller than that of the elite of the elite that was SC itself.

She applied immediately to Quietus instead, having made her point, and was accepted with alacrity. She began to curtail her use of her drug glands and started the slow changes in her body that would turn her from female to neuter. She also abandoned her use of the neural lace, beginning an even longer process that saw the biomechanical tracery of the device gradually shrink and wither and disappear, the minerals and metals that had composed the bulk of it being slowly reabsorbed into her body. The last few parti-cles of exotic matter it had contained exited in her urine via the tiny sexless bud between her legs, a year later.

She was free of SC, committed to Quietus.

Only it could never be that simple. There was no sudden yes-or-no point when it came to joining SC. You were sounded out first, your intentions were questioned and your motivations and seriousness were weighed in the balance, at first through apparently innocuous, informal conversations – often with people you would have no idea were in any way associated with SC – then only later in rather more formalised settings and contexts where SC’s interest was made clear.

So, in a sense, she had had to lie – or at least constructively deceive – to get what she wanted, which was the formal invitation to join which she could then turn down but use in the future as proof that Quietus had been no second choice, no consolation prize, but rather something she had valued beyond the merits of SC right from the start.

She had finessed it as best she could at the time, giving answers that seemed straight and unambiguous when they were given and which only later, in the light of that obviously planned refusal, revealed a degree of dissemblance. Still, she had been guilty of a lack of openness if nothing else, and of simple dishonesty if you were judging severely.

SC considered itself above bearing grudges, but was patently disappointed. You did not come to the stage of being asked to join it without establishing quite strong relationships with people who had become mentors and friends while in Contact; relationships which normally would be expected to go on developing once you were in SC itself, and it was to those individuals, and even a couple of ship Minds, that she felt she owed apologies.

She duly said sorry and the apologies were duly accepted, but those had been her darkest hours, the moments in her life the memories of which still kept her awake when she wanted to sleep, or woke her up in the middle of the night, and she could never quite shake the feeling that this was the single least-resolved issue in her life, the loose end whose niggling presence would trouble her to the end of her days.

And, even though she had foreseen it, it had still come as something of a disappointment to her that her behaviour meant she existed within Quietus under a faint but undeniable cloud of suspicion. If she would turn down SC to prove a point, might she not repudiate Quietus too? How could you ever fully trust somebody like that?

And, was it not possible that she had never really resigned from SC at all? Might Yime Nsokyi not still be a Special Circumstances agent, but a secret one, planted within Quietus, either for reasons too arcane and mysterious to divine until some point of crisis arrived, or just as a sort of insurance for some set of circumstances still unenvisaged … or even with no clear motive at all beyond establishing that SC could do such a thing simply because it chose to, to prove it could?

She had miscalculated there. She had thought the whole bluff with SC would only prove how utterly dedicated to Quietus she was, and her subsequent flawless behaviour and exemplary service would serve to reinforce the point. It hadn’t worked out like that. She was of more value to Quietus as a symbol – subtly but effectively publicised – of its equality of worth with SC than she was as a functioning and fully trusted Quietus operative.

So she spent a lot of time frustrated; unused, twiddling her thumbs and kicking her heels (when she might have been kicking other people’s ass with SC, as at least one of her friends had pointed out). She had taken part in a few missions for Quietus and had been reassured that she had done well – indeed, near perfectly. Still, she was less used than she might have been, less used than inferior talents who had joined at the same time, less used than her skills and abilities would have implied she ought to be; offered occasional scraps, never anything of real substance.

Until now.

Now at last she felt she was being asked to behave like a true Quietus operative, on a mission of genuine importance, even if it might only be because where she lived happened to be quite close to the place where a Quietus agent was suddenly required.

Well, arguably she’d had bad luck in the way Quietus had chosen to react to her attempt to prove how much she valued it. Maybe that bad luck was just being balanced now. Luck came into it. Even SC recognised a place for chance, and being in the right place at the right time was, if not a gift, certainly a blessing.

Contact even had a phrase for it: Utility is seven-eighths Proximity.

Yime sighed, turned over, and fell asleep.

Auer. Lovely to see you. Radiant as ever. And Fuleow; this gorgeous creature still putting up with you?”

“So far, Veppers. Got your eye on her yourself, have you?”

“Never taken it off, you know that, Fuleow.” Veppers clapped the other man’s stout shoulder and winked at his slender wife.

“Oh, your poor nose!” Auer said, pushing back locks of soot-black hair to display glittering earrings.

“Poor? Nonsense; never richer.” Veppers flicked one finger against the new cover over his nose, which was still slowly growing back underneath. “This is pure gold!” He smiled, turned away. “Sapultride! Good to see you; glad you could make it.”

“What’s it look like, under there?” Sapultride asked, nodding at Veppers’ nose. He pulled down his sunglasses, revealing small green eyes above his own thin, expensively sculpted nose. “I was studying medicine before I was lassoed back into the family firm,” he said. “I could take a look. Wouldn’t be shocked.”