Surface Detail (23 page)

“Good,” the ship said. “Mr. Veppers controls the largest part of the Enablement’s productive capacity and – through one of his interests in particular – has access to this.” A star near the outer limit of the Enablement’s volume blazed too, attracting attention. The view zoomed in vertiginously until it showed a single-ringed gas giant planet. Between its broad, dun-coloured polar regions, the planet displayed seven horizontal bands coloured various shades of yellow, red and brown.

“This,” the ship said, as the entirety of the single equatorial ring surrounding the planet flashed green once, “is the artificial planetary nebula of the Tsungarial Disk, around the planet Razhir, in the Tsung system. The Disk comprises over three hundred million separate habitats and – mostly – manufacturies, usually called fabricaria. The Disk was abandoned two million years ago by the then Subliming Meyeurne and has been a Galactic Protectorate since shortly after their disappearance. The Protectorate status was agreed to be necessary due to a chaotic, dangerously uncontrolled war both over and enabled by the very considerable ship-and-weapon-system-manufacturing capacity left behind, at least irresponsibly, possibly mischievously and arguably maliciously by the Meyeurne. The civilisations involved were the Hreptazyle and the Yelve.”

The ship didn’t bother to display any images of the Meyeurne, Hreptazyle or Yelve. Certainly Yime had never heard of any of them, which meant they were either long gone or just irrelevant.

“Shortly following the Idiran War,” the Bodhisattva said, “the Culture became the latest in a long line of trusted Level Eights to be given Protectorate custody of the Disk. However, as part of what were in effect war reparations after the Chel debacle, six hundred years ago, we ceded overarching control of the Disk to the Nauptre Reliquaria and their junior partners the GFCF.”

Yime most certainly had heard of the Nauptre Reliquaria and the GFCF. Like the Culture, the Reliquaria was a Level Eight civilisation; technologically the societies were equals. Originally a species of giant, furred, gliding marsupials, for the last couple of millennia they had expressed themselves almost exclusively as their machines: GSV-sized constructor ships, smaller though still substantial space vessels, lesser independent space-faring units and a multifarious variety of metre-scale individuals roughly equivalent to drones, though with no standard model; each design was unique or close to it. Their presence then extended down through the centimetre and millimetre scales to collectivised nanobots.

The furry marsupials still existed, but they’d retreated to their home planets and habitats to lives of cheerfully selfish indolence, leaving their machines to represent them in the galactic community. Generally reckoned to be well on the slippery (if confusingly, by convention, upward) slope to Subliming, the Reliquaria’s relations with the Culture were formal – perhaps even frosty – rather than friendly, largely due to the Nauptrians’ robust attitude to punishment in their artificial Afterlife.

Basically, they were very much for it.

Unlike the Culture, which – despite being firmly of a mind with the anti-Hell side of the confliction – had thought it politic to take no active part in the virtual war, the Nauptrians had made themselves an enthusiastic part of the pro-Hell war effort.

The Geseptian-Fardesile Cultural Federacy was a Level Seven civilisation. Pan-human, smaller and more delicate than the average but generally reckoned to be quite beautiful, with large heads and large eyes, they had a strange relationship with the Culture, professing to love it – they had even chosen their name partly in honour of the Culture – but often seeming to want to criticise it and even work against it, as though they so much wanted to be of help they needed the Culture reduced to a level of neediness that would make such aid something it would genuinely be grateful for.

The mention of Chel was randomly appropriate, Yime thought. Before that particular stain on the Culture’s reputation people had seemed reticent to talk about the whole issue of Afterlives. After it, for a while at least, they’d appeared to talk of little else.

“The components of the Tsungarial Disk have mostly been mothballed for all this time,” the ship continued, “left as a kind of monument or mausoleum. Over the last few decades, however, as the Sichultia have expanded their sphere of influence out to and around it, they have been granted limited, low-level control over the Disk and allowed, in the shape of Veppers’ Veprine Corporation, to use a handful of the orbital manufacturies to construct trading and exploratory ships, all of this supervised by the Nauptre Reliquaria and the GFCF.

“Veppers and the Sichultia have long sought greater operational control over the Disk and its manufacturing capacity to aid their commercial, military and civilisational expansion. They are now on the verge of achieving their goal due to the changing attitudes, not to say connivance, of the GFCF and the Reliquaria. This is because the GFCF covets at least some of that capacity as well – their medium-term aim is to step up a civilisational level, and control of the reactivated Disk’s productive capacity would go some way to securing it – while the Nauptre Reliquaria are pro-Hell, in the short term wanting the pro/anti-Hell confliction ended – and with what they see as the right result – as well as, in the long term, and assuming they do not Sublime in the meantime, by their own admission planning to combine all Afterlives with their own and others Sublimed. That nobody else thinks this is even possible does not seem to trouble them and is anyway beside the point.”

“Why does the Reliquaria being pro-Hell have anything to do with control of the Disk?” Yime asked.

“Because the Disk’s productive or possibly computational capacity may come into play in an outbreak from the confliction into the Real.”

“An outbreak?” Yime felt genuinely shocked. Conflictions – virtual wars – were there specifically to stop people warring in the Real.

“The pro/anti-Hell confliction may be about to end,” the ship said, “in victory for the pro-Hell side.”

That was a blow for the Culture, Yime thought. Even though it had seemingly stood aside from the war, there had never been any doubt which side it believed in.

It was all just bad timing, in a way. At the point when the war began, the Culture had been in one of its cyclic eras of trying not to be seen to be throwing its weight around. Too many others of the In-Play Level Eights had objected to the Culture being involved with the War in Heaven for it to be able to do so without looking arrogant, even belligerent.

The assumption had somehow always been that the pro-Hell forces were going to be fighting a losing battle anyway and their defeat was probably inevitable no matter who did or didn’t join in. Seemingly, the more the In-Play and the Elders thought about it, the more obvious it became that the whole idea of Afterlives dedicated to extended torture was indeed barbaric, unnecessary and outdated, and the course of the confliction over the continued existence of the Hells was expected to follow this slow but decisive shift in opinion. At the time, the prospect of the Culture getting involved seemed likely to most people to make the conflict less fair, its outcome effectively fixed before it even began.

For a virtual war to work, people had to accept the outcome; the losing side in particular had to abide by the result rather than cry foul, revoke the solemn pledges they had made in the War Conduct Agreement drawn up before the conflict began, and continue as things had been before. The consensus had been that the Culture taking part would give the pro-Hell side the excuse to do just that, if and when they lost.

“The anti-Hell side,” the ship continued, “was the first to attempt to hack the other’s conflict-direction processing substrates. The opposing side retaliated. The anti-Hell side has additionally attempted direct hacking attacks on some of the Hells themselves, seeking either to release the inmates or to destroy the virtual environments completely.

“The various hacking attacks by both sides have almost all failed, those that succeeded did little damage and the vast majority of those by both sides were detected by those targeted, leading to multiple judging and arbitration disputes, all of which are currently being kept sub judice; successfully so far though probably not for much longer. Extensive legal and diplomatic disputes are anticipated and almost certainly being prepared for.

“There are certain so-far unsubstantiated reports that some of the secret substrates within which several major Hells are running are located not where one might expect to find them – essentially, within the volumes of influence of their parent civilisations – but instead within the Tsungarial Disk or elsewhere within the Sichultian Enablement. The worry is that an outbreak of the confliction into the Real may involve the Tsungarial Disk, especially the until-now dormant majority of the fabricaria and the hidden substrates that may also lie there. If this is truly the case then the potential for a substantial war in the Real would seem high.

“Thus the Sichultian Enablement suddenly and unexpectedly finds itself in a position of power well beyond that which its developmental level would lead one to expect. It is poised to contribute significantly, possibly decisively, to a situation of extreme importance, the outcome of which might lead directly to a significant conflict in the Real involving several high-level Players. Given that Mr. Veppers is so powerful within the Sichultian Enablement, what he thinks and does therefore becomes of profound importance.”

Yime thought about this. “Why would we – why would Quietus be involved?”

“There is a complication,” the ship told her.

“I thought there might be.”

“In fact, there are two.”

“That I did not anticipate,” Yime admitted.

“The first concerns this person.” A figure appeared.

“Hmm,” Yime said, after a moment. The figure was of a pan-human: a Sichultian, Yime would have guessed from the rather odd bodily proportions. This one was female, bald or shaven-headed and dressed in a short sleeveless tunic which displayed extensive and intricate multi-coloured abstract markings on her night-black skin. She was smiling. Looking closely, Yime could see further markings on the female’s teeth and the whites of her eyes. The two naked figures she’d been shown earlier hadn’t had anything like that. Those, though, had been generalised, textbook figures. The person shown here, like the image of Veppers, was an individual. “Sichultian?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“The markings aren’t natural.”

“Correct.”

“Are they … real?”

“They were real and permanent. They continued within her body. She was an Intagliate, one of a subset of humans within the Sichultian Enablement who are tattooed throughout their physical being. The practice began as an art form though later also became a form of punishment, especially for matters regarding private civil debt.”

Yime nodded. What a bizarre thing to do, she thought.

“Her name is Lededje Y’breq,” the ship told her.

“She was an Intagliate,” but “Her name is …” Yime noticed. Ship Minds didn’t make mistakes like that. She suspected she already knew where this was going.

“Ms. Y’breq died between five and ten days ago in Ubruater, the capital city of the Sichultian Enablement’s originating planet, Sichult,” the ship told her. “She may have been murdered. If so then the murderer may have been Joiler Veppers, or somebody controlled by him, somebody in his employ. The Sichultia do not possess, or, as far as we know, have even limited access to mindstate transcription or ‘soulkeeper’ technology, however there is an unconfirmed report that Ms. Y’breq’s personality was somehow retrieved from her when she died and that she was revented aboard the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly.”

“Oh. It was nearby?”

“It was nowhere near nearby; it was over three thousand light years distant from the nearest part of the Sichultian Enablement at the time, and no ships or other entities representing or associated with the vessel were closer than approximately nine hundred years away at the time either. Nor had the ship or any of its known associates ever had any recorded dealings with the Sichultian Enablement.”

“How mysterious.”

“There is a possible link, however, between these seemingly unrelated components.”

“Ah-hah.”

“We’ll come to that shortly. The salient point to be made here is that it is believed that Ms. Y’breq may be on her way back to the Sichultian Enablement, revented within a quite different body – probably still Sichultian in form, though, for all we know, male – and bearing the intention of doing some violence, likely fatal, to Mr. Veppers, in revenge for her earlier murder.”

“So what am I supposed to do? Stop her? Help her?”

“As things stand, simply finding her and keeping in touch would be sufficient achievement. You would then await further orders.”

“So she’s our excuse,” Yime suggested.

“I beg your pardon, Ms. Nsokyi?”

“This girl, being revented. She’s our excuse for getting involved in all this.”

“Her revention is one reason to get involved. I’m not sure that characterising it as an ‘excuse’ is entirely helpful.” The ship’s voice sounded frosty. “Also, this entire confliction is specifically about the fate of the dead. It is entirely within the remit of Quietus.”

“But isn’t this more of an SC thing?” Yime suggested. “In fact, hasn’t this got Special Circumstances written all over it?”

She waited for a reply, but one did not appear to be immediately forthcoming. She went on. “This does sound like it involves tangling with equiv-tech galactic Players with the intention of stopping a proper ships-and-everything full-scale shooting war. I’m not sure how much more hardcore SC than that a situation can get.”

“That’s an interesting observation.”

“Is SC involved in this?”

“Not that we know of.”

“Who would ‘we’ be within this context?”

“Let me re-phrase that last reply: Not that I know of.”

This was mildly illuminating. Quietus had a deliberately flat organisational structure; in theory perfectly so at ship level, all the Minds concerned having equal knowledge and an equal say. In practice there was a degree of legislative/executive, strategic/ tactical distinction, some Minds and ships doing the planning while others subsequently undertook the execution.