Surface Detail (8 page)

With one forelimb he picked her up by both of her trunks, the way he had seen demons do to his kind countless times before, and with a roar shrugged the cheval de frise off his back, letting it thunk down to one side, bodies and parts of bodies flopping and falling from its spikes.

There was a shrill scream; one of the carts carrying the corpses had been almost alongside, hidden by the weight of bodies on that side of the device, and when it had fallen, one of its spikes had pierced the foot of the Pavulean hauling the cart, pinning the creature to the ground. The osteophager who had been looking suspiciously in their direction took a step back, its ears suddenly bolt upright, an emotion between surprise and fear evident in its stance.

Prin snarled at it; the creature took another half-step back. Its fellows across the hillside had stopped and now stood motionless, looking on. They would wait and see which way this was going to go before deciding either to join in with leave-some-for-me! bravado, or pretend it had been nothing to do with them in the first place.

Prin shook the still-catatonically-inert Chay towards the osteophager. She’s mine! I saw first!

The osteophager blinked, looked round with apparent unconcern, checking to see what the rest of its detail was doing. Not coming bounding to its side to face down this sudden interloper steadfastly and together, clearly. The creature looked down, brushed at the ground in front of it with the back of one paw, claws mostly retracted.

Take it, it said in a grumbling, seemingly unconcerned voice. Consider it yours, with our blessing. We have plenty. It shrugged, lowered its head to sniff at the patch of ground it had scuffed, apparently having lost interest in the whole exchange.

Prin snarled again, clutched Chay to his chest, turned and bounded down the hillside past decaying corpses and spikes pennanted with ragged strips of flesh. He splashed through the dark stream of blood and went springing diagonally up the slope towards the mill. The group from the giant beetle had disappeared inside the building. The beetle itself had closed its abdomen and was unpacking its wings from beneath its gleaming wing covers. Prin was close enough to see demons moving inside its enormous faceted eyes.

Pilots, he thought, for an assemblage of code that might as well have been kept aloft through the wielding of an enchanted feather, or a magic anvil for that matter.

He leapt on up the hillside, towards the mill.

From somewhere came the idea that there were many different levels of sleeping, of unconsciousness, and therefore of awakening. In the midst of this pleasant woozy calm – warm, pleasantly swaddled, self-huggingly curled up, a sort of ruddy darkness behind the eyelids – it was an easy and comforting thing to contemplate the many ways one might be away, and then come back.

You fell asleep just for an instant sometimes; that sudden nod and jerk awake again, lasting a moment. Or you had short naps, often self-timed, limited by knowing you had a few minutes or a half-hour or whatever.

Of course you had your classic Good Night’s Sleep, however much things like shift systems and all-night facilities and drugs and city lighting might sometimes interfere.

Then there was the deeper unconsciousness of being knocked out, put carefully under for some medical procedure, or randomly banging your head and briefly not even knowing your own name. Also, people still lapsed into comas, and came out of those very gradually; that must be an odd feeling. And for a while there, for the last few centuries, though not so often these days because things had moved on, there was the sub-sleep of deep space travel, when you were put into a sort of deep, long-term hibernation for years or decades at a time, kept frigidly cold and barely alive, to be revived when your destination approached. Some people had been kept like this back at home, too, awaiting medical advances. Waking up from something like that must be quite a strange thing, she thought.

She felt an urge to turn over, as though she was nestled in a fabulously comfortable bed but now had spent enough time on this side and needed to shift to lie the other way. She felt very light, she realised, though even as she thought this she seemed to feel very slightly, reassuringly heavier.

She felt herself take a deep, satisfying breath, and duly turned over, eyes still tightly closed. She had a vague feeling that she didn’t entirely know where she was, but it didn’t bother her. Usually that was a slightly disturbing sensation, occasionally even a very disturbing, frightening experience, but not this time. Somehow she knew that wherever she was she was safe, cared for, and in no danger.

She felt good. Really good, in fact.

When she thought about it, she realised that she couldn’t remember ever having felt so good, so secure, so happy. She felt a tiny frown form on her face. Oh, come on, she told herself. She must have felt like this before. To her slight but undeniable irritation, she had only a vague memory of when she had last felt anything like this untroubled and happy. Probably in her mother’s arms, as a little girl.

She knew that if she woke up fully she would remember properly, but – much as a part of her wanted to be completely awake, to answer this question and sort all this out – another part of her was too happy just lying here, wherever she was, drowsy, secure and happy.

She knew this feeling. This was often the best bit of any day, before she had to wake and fully face the realities of the world and the responsibilities she had fallen heir to. If you were lucky, you really did sleep like a baby; completely, soundly and without care. Then it would be only as you awoke that you were reminded of all the things you had to worry about, all the resentments you harboured, all the injustices and cruelties you were subject to. Still, even the thought of that grim process somehow couldn’t destroy her mood of ease and happiness.

She sighed; a long, deep, satisfying sigh, though still with an element of regret as she felt her sleepiness drift away like mist under a gentle breeze.

The sheets covering her felt outrageously fine, almost liquidly soft. They moved about her naked body as she completed the sigh and stirred a little under the warm material. She was not sure that even Himself possessed such fine—

She felt herself spasm and jerk. A terrifying image, the face of someone hateful, started to form before her, then – as though some other part of her mind came to soothe her fears – the fear subsided and the anxiety seemed to be brushed away, like dust.

Whatever she had once feared, she didn’t need to fear it now. Well, that was nice, she supposed.

She supposed, too, that she really ought to wake up.

She opened her eyes. She had the vague impression of a wide bed, pale sheets and a large, high-ceilinged room with tall open windows from which gauzy, softly billowing white curtains waved out. A warm, flower-scented breeze stirred around her. Sunlight leant in golden shafts against the window apertures.

She noticed that there was some sort of fuzzy glow at the foot of the bed. It swam into focus and spelled out the word SIMULATION.

Simulation? she thought, sitting up and rubbing her eyes. The room swam properly into focus when she re-opened them. The place looked perfectly, entirely real, but she was no longer really paying attention to the room. Her jaw had dropped and her mouth hung open as she took in what she had glimpsed as she’d casually raised her arms and hands to her eyes a moment earlier.

She dropped her head very slowly and brought her hands up in front of her face again, staring at the backs, then at the palms of her hands, then at her forearms, then down at what she could see of her chest and breasts. She leapt back, upwards to the headboard of the bed, throwing the sheet off her as she did so, and stared down at her naked body.

She brought her hands up yet again, stared hard at them, inspecting her fingers, her fingernails, peering at them as though trying to see something which was almost but not quite too small to see. Finally she looked up, her gaze darting round the room; she threw herself out of the bed – the word SIMULATION stayed where it was, just visible at the bottom of her field of vision – and ran to a full-length mirror between two of the tall windows with their softly billowing curtains.

Nothing on her face, either. She stared at herself.

First of all, she was entirely the wrong colour. She ought to be almost soot black. Instead, she was … she wasn’t even sure what you called this colour. Dirty gold? Mud? Polluted sunset?

That was bad enough, but there was worse.

“Where the fuck is my intaglia?” she heard herself say.

SIMULATION, said the word now hovering around her feet as she took in the view of a beautiful but entirely un-bodymarked pale-skinned young woman standing naked in front of her. It looked something like her, she supposed, in bone structure and general bodily proportions, but that was being generous. Her featureless skin was a sort of wan, reddish-gold and her hair was entirely wrong; far too long and much too dark.

SIMULATION, the word still said. She slammed one fist into the side frame of the mirror, felt pretty much exactly the amount of pain she’d have anticipated, and sucked warm, fragrant air through her teeth (her teeth were also unmarked, too uniformly white, as were the whites of her eyes). When she’d hit it, the mirror frame had wobbled and the whole mirror and its base had shifted a few millimetres along the polished wooden floor, slightly altering the angle it presented to her.

“Ow ow ow,” she muttered, shaking her tingling hand as she stepped to the nearest window and, ducking a little, armed away the delicate translucence of a curtain.

She looked out from a bowed, balustraded stone balcony a floor above ground, gazing across a sunny landscape of elegantly sculpted green and blue trees, pale yellow-green grass and some mist foregrounding a soft tumult of wooded hills, the furthest ridges distance-blued against high, far-away mountains, summits glitteringly white. A river sparkled in the yellow-white sunlight off to one side, beyond a meadow where a herd of small dark-coated animals were grazing.

She stared hard at the view. She stepped back, snatched at the floating expanse of the wispy curtain, bringing a section of it up to her nose, frowning at it as she inspected the precision of its near microscopic weave. A set of shutters and glass windows lay open behind; she caught another glimpse of herself in the windows. She shook her head – how strange the hair on her head made the movement feel! – then went down on one knee by the stone balcony rail, rubbing two fingers along its ruddy broad top, feeling the slight graininess of sandstone under her fingertips, a little of which remained when she lifted her fingers away and rubbed them against each other. She put her nose to it; she could smell the stone.

Still, SIMULATION, the word said. She let out another sigh, of exasperation this time, and inspected the sky with its many little puffy white clouds.

She had experienced simulations before; she had been in virtual environments, but even the ones that relied on you being dosed with just the right drugs, so that you did a lot of the detail-filling yourself, were nothing like as perfectly convincing as this. The simulations she had experienced were closer to dreams than reality; convincing at the time, but pretty much the moment you started looking for the pixels or the grain or the fractals or whatever they were – or just the processing short cuts and inconsistencies – you found them. What she was looking at here – and feeling, and smelling – was effectively, uncannily flawless. She almost felt faint for an instant, head briefly swimming before quickly clearing again before she even started to sway or stagger.

Nevertheless: the sky was too blue, the sunlight too golden, the hills and especially the mountains didn’t quite fade and drop away like they did on a real planet, and while she still felt entirely like herself within herself – as it were – she was inside a body which was perfectly, flawlessly unmarked, causing her to feel more naked than she had ever felt in her life. No intaglia, no tattoo, no markage whatsoever. That was the biggest clue of all that this could not be real.

Well, the second biggest; there was that word, floating in red, always at the lower limit of her vision. SIMULATION. That was about as unambiguous as you got, she supposed.

From the balcony, she took a look around what she could see of the building. Just a big, rather ornate red sandstone house with lots of tall windows; some sticky-out bits, a few turrets, a pathway of small stones around the base. Listening carefully she could hear what might be the breeze in the nearest treetops, some high, slightly plaintive calls that probably represented birdsong and a faint lowing from the herd of four-legged grazing animals in the meadow.

She walked back into the bedroom and stood in its relative silence. She cleared her throat.

“All right, it’s a simulation. Anybody here I can talk to?”

No answer. She drew in the breath to say something else, but then there came a polite knocking from one of the room’s two broad wooden doors.

“Who’s there?” she called.

“My name is Sensia,” a pleasant-sounding female voice said. She’d have guessed it belonged to a relatively elderly woman, and one who was smiling as she spoke. She’d had a favourite aunt who’d sounded like this person, though perhaps not quite as well-spoken.

“One moment.” She looked down at herself. She imagined wearing a plain white dressing gown. Nope; her body remained stubbornly naked.

What looked like a tall wooden wardrobe stood near the door. She swung open the doors, wondering why she was doing so even as she did it. She was in a simulation, this didn’t even look like her own body anyway and she had never been especially self-conscious about her physical form – how could she be, as an Intagliate? The notion would have been hilarious if not so intimately connected with bitterness. Still, she did feel exceptionally naked with no markings, and the general feel and polite, highly monied ambience of this sim would appear to demand a certain decorum.

There were lots of rather gorgeous clothes inside the wardrobe; she threw on a plain, dark blue robe of what felt like the same material the liquid-soft sheet had been made of. She stood before the broad door, cleared her throat again, drew herself up and pulled on the fist-sized handle.