Surface Detail (62 page)

“What?” the colossal creature boomed. With one enormous foot it kicked aside the husk of body she’d deposited in front of it.

“A thousand souls,” she told it, treading the air with deep, easy sweeps of air, keeping herself level with its face but too far away for it to swipe at her easily. “A thousand days since you told me that once I’d released ten times one hundred souls you’d tell me what happened to my love, the male I first came here with: Prin.”

“I said I’d think about it,” the great voice thundered.

She stayed where she was, the black, leathery wings fanning some of the valley’s noxious fumes towards the uber-demon’s face. She gazed into the gaseous impression of a face writhing and billowing behind the house-sized pane of glass, trying to ignore the four fat, dripping candles at each of the lantern’s four corners, their carbuncled surfaces veined with a hundred screaming nerve clusters. The creature stared back at her. She kept station, refused to move.

“Please,” she said, at last.

“Long dead,” the vast voice burst out across her. She heard the words with her wings. “Time moves more slowly in here, not faster. He is barely a memory. He died by his own hand, ashamed, penurious, disgraced and alone. There is no record of whether he remembered you at the end. He escaped being sent here, more’s the pity. Satisfied?”

She stayed where she was a while longer, upright in the air before it, beating her cloak wings like slow, mocking applause.

“Huh,” she said at last, and turned, dropping, swooping only to zoom again, beating away up and across the valley’s slope to its furthest ridge.

“How are the pains, bitchlet?” she heard the demon shout after her. “Do they grow?” She ignored it.

She waited until they came back out of the mill: the three demons and the one sad, screaming soul who had not been released after his tour of Hell. The demons held the howling, frantically struggling male between them; one holding both front feet, one each at the rear legs. They laughed and talked, taunting the screeching male as they carried him back to the beetle-shaped flier.

She stooped upon them, slaughtering the three demons easily; the two at the rear with a single pinch of one of her great talons. The unfortunate male lay quivering on the scaly ground, watching the demons’ blood pool dustily in towards him from three different directions. The beetle tried to take off; she screamed at it and with a two-legged blow ripped one of its wings right off and then tipped it over onto its back. It lay making clicking, chirring noises. When the pilot crawled out she wanted to rip him apart too, but instead she let him go.

She picked the trembling male up with one talon and stared into his petrified face while he voided his bowels noisily on the ground beneath.

“When you left the Real,” she said to him, “what date was it?”

“Eh?”

She repeated the question. He told her.

She asked him a couple of other questions about banal things like current affairs and civilisational status, then she let him go; he scurried away along the road leading from the mill. She might have killed him, she supposed, but she had already released one soul from its torments that day; all this had been a sudden inspiration, brought on for some reason when she’d come upon the mill.

She trashed the building too, scattering its screaming, protesting components across the valley’s slope, throwing wreckage splashing into the mill race and the header pond, displacing sloshing tons of blood while the building’s operators ran scampering for their lives. The blue-glowing door was not glowing at all, of course. It was just a plain, rough wooden door, now hanging off its hinges; a doorway to nowhere.

Oddly satisfied, she swept back into the grim skies with a single great clap of her wings, then beat off across the valley. She dropped the massive lump of wood that had been the door’s lintel towards the fleeing figures of the mill operators as they ran away, missing them by less than a metre.

She wheeled once above the valley, just a collection of pains and sundered lives, then struck out, cloudward, rising all the time, heading for her roost.

Always assuming the hapless male had been telling the truth, the uber-demon had lied.

Barely a quarter of a year had passed in the Real.

Vatueil was hanging upside down. He wondered absently if there were any circumstances when this could be a good sign.

He appeared to be inhabiting a physical body. Hard to tell whether he’d actually been embodied in a real one or this was just a full-sensory-spectrum virtuality. He was in no pain, but the blood roared in his ears due to the gravitational inversion and he felt distinctly disoriented, beyond the obvious fact that he was the wrong way up.

He opened his eyes to see a creature like a giant flying something-or-other staring straight back at him. It was also hanging upside down, though unlike him it appeared to be entirely happy with the situation. It was human-size, had a long, intelligent-looking face with large bright yellow eyes. Its body was covered in soft folds of golden-grey fur. It had four long limbs with what looked like thick membranes of the same soft fur linking the limbs on each side of its body to each other.

It opened its mouth. It had a lot of very small very sharp teeth.

“You are … Vatch-oy?” it said in a thick accent.

“Vatueil,” he corrected it. Looking away from the creature, he seemed to be hanging in the blue-green foliage of a great, tall tree. Further away, he could glimpse the trunks of other tall trees. The tree he was in was nothing like the size of the impossible tree, where he had spent many a happy holiday, winged and flying, but it was still too big for him to be able to see the ground. The branches and trunks he could see looked substantial. His feet, he noticed, were tied together with what looked like rope, while another length of rope ran through the noose his feet were in and then right round the metre-broad branch he was hanging from.

“Vatoy,” the creature said.

“Close enough,” he conceded. He felt he ought to know what this creature was, what species it was part of, but he had no internal access to any remote networks here; he was effectively just human, just meat, hanging here. All he had to rely on was his own all-too-fallible memories, such as they’d survived all the transcriptions they’d had to undergo over the years and regenerations, plus whatever unexpected intervention had led to him being here. His memories were anyway suspect, jumbled by a hundred different reincarnations in as many different environments, the vast majority virtual, unreal, militarily metaphorical.

“Lagoarn-na,” the creature beside him said, thumping itself on the chest.

“Yeah, hello,” Vatueil said cautiously. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Pleased meet you too,” Lagoarn-na said, nodding, its big yellow eyes staring at him, unblinking.

Vatueil felt a little groggy. He tried to remember where he’d been last. Where this version of himself had been last, anyway. A fellow could lose track when he was copied and re-copied so often. He started to recall sitting round a table with a bunch of aliens, in … had it been a ship? A meeting. In a ship. Not fighting a war then, trapped in tunnels or trenches or the guts of a land ship or a sea ship or a gas-giant dirigible the shape of a gigantic bomb, or finding himself downloaded into a smart battle tank or some sort of cross between a microship and a missile, or … his memories flickered past him, detailing what certainly felt like every single time he’d played a part in the vast war he’d been a part of, the war over the Hells.

It made a pleasant change for his last deployment not to have involved nuts-and-bolts, blood-and-guts soldiering – a meeting was a benign environment; potentially just as tremendously boring as war, but without the slivers of utter terror stuck in there as well. On the other hand, he felt he had just been … read somehow. All those deployments, mostly indicating gradually increasing seniority of rank and importance and responsibility, all flickering past in his memory – all tumbling past, like a pack of nearly a hundred cards – that had felt like something triggered, something called up.

Meeting. The meeting. The meeting in the ship. Lots of little aliens; one other pan-human. Big guy. Or at least important guy. He should know the name of that species too, but he couldn’t remember it.

He’d been far away for that meeting. In some rarely travelled bit of the sim … no, he’d been in the Real. In the Real again; how about that? He’d been given a re-useable, download-ready body and he’d been physically present at that meeting with the cute little aliens with the big eyes and the single larger pan-human with the hunched look and the attitude.

Still couldn’t remember the species the guy belonged to. Maybe he’d have better luck with his name. Vister? Peppra? It had been something like that. Important. Top brass in his civilian field. A big wheel. Paprus? Shepris?

He remembered not being bored at the meeting. It really had been important. In fact, he remembered feeling nervous, excited, energised, feeling that something genuinely momentous was being agreed here, and he was a part of it.

He’d been beamed into that body, transcripted into it. He might have been transcripted back out again, sent back to where he’d come from, his meeting-attending duties over. He probably had.

He looked at the big creature hanging beside him, gazing into its staring yellow eyes. “How did I come to be here?” he asked.

“How did you … get me?”

“Guff-Fuff-Kuff-Fuff not so smart.”

He stared at the creature. He closed his eyes, shook his head.

“No, sorry; didn’t get the first part of that at all.”

“GFCF not so smart,” the creature said.

Shaking his head seemed to have helped. Now he could see that the creature had straps and pouches distributed across his golden-grey furred body. Some sort of head-set – thin, metallic, glittering like jewellery – wound round the back of its skull, little armatures seeming to clasp near but not in its ears and eyes and nose and mouth.

“The GFCF?” Vatueil said. A feeling that was equal parts dread and sadness seemed to settle over him. He struggled not to show it.

“Protocols in messagery,” Lagoarn-na told him. “Gifts of knowledge, from high to low, not always maximally one-way. That which is given may give back, in time, where time is potentially quite long time. Still less so in cases of knowledge gained by chicanery, thefting. And so, resultingly, to this, and here. Plainly? Plainly: ancient code, buried; consequencing trapdoors therefore. Their ignorance thereof.”

The GFCF. And the NR. The Nauptre Reliquaria. That was the name of the species Lagoarn-na belonged to. The Nauptre, anyway. The Reliquaria bit usually referred to the machines that had taken over from them while the Nauptre themselves, the biological part of the super-species, prepared – everyone assumed – for Sublimation. That’s what had thrown him: the NR always presented as machines. You never saw the original bio species except in historical, contextual stuff.

They must have intercepted him. He’d been taken in some handover the GFCF had made of his personality construct, his mind-state, while attempting to transmit his updated, downloaded soul back to the war sim.

He wondered how bad this was, because it could be very bad. If he hadn’t made it back at all, at least people would know there had been a problem. He might only have been copied, though; maybe an identical copy had got back, and nobody had any suspicions.

He tried to recall what the latest tech implied; could comms be made completely proof against interception? It kept changing. One time they told you it was impossible to read a signal without it being obvious to whoever it had been sent to, another time they seemed to have changed their minds, and it was possible again; even easy. Trivial, frankly.

Then it would go back to being impossible, for a while.

Whatever; he was here when he shouldn’t be, and the NR – or just the N, just the bio Nauptre, though he doubted that – could intercept GFCF comms, because some of the code the GFCF used in their comms protocols had been given by the Nauptre – or stolen from them by the GFCF – and it had come with holes in it, ways the NR or the Nauptre could listen in when they wanted to.

Not as smart as they thought they were.

Guff-Fuff-fucking-Kuff-Fuff.

Shit.

He wondered why they were bothering to embody him, either in the Real or in a decent sim. But then even when you had all the information, sometimes it could be difficult to find the bit you really wanted. Embodying helped. Especially when you looked upon what you had downloaded as some sort of strange alien.

That was what he was to them. An alien. An alien they had refashioned from comms-code-information into something at least resembling what resulted from genetic information; a creature of flesh and blood. Him. And now they would want the truth.

“Meeting,” Lagoarn-na said, with what might have been a smile.

“GFCF. Pan-hu-man Vipperz. Scheme. War in afterlife. Tsung Disk? Tsung Disk.” The creature nodded.

Shit; it already knew too much of it. Had he told them that already, inadvertently? What more would they ask? He couldn’t see any obvious torture instruments about the creature’s webbing and pouches, but who knew?

Please not torture. Why did so much of everything have to come down to pain? We are creatures of pain, creatures of suffering. He had been through this, done this. Not more, please not more.

“You not to worry,” the creature told him. It gestured encompassingly. “Is one of trillions scarnations,” it told him. “Quantum stuff. In one you bound to tell trute. Maybes this one.”

The creature tipped its head to one side and Vatueil felt a feeling of utter relief and almost boundless pleasure wash through him. He knew he was being manipulated, but he didn’t care.

Lagoarn-na didn’t want to hurt him, had no intention of hurting him. The Nauptre had every right to the information he had. All they wanted was the truth.

The truth. All so simple. Just stick to the truth and it made life so much simpler. Just the one set of facts or assertions to remember. The force of this simple truth – the truth about truth! – hit him like a cannon shell.