Surface Detail (9 page)

“Hello,” said the rather plain but very amiable-looking lady of late middle age standing outside. Behind her was a broad hallway with more doors leading off on one side and balustrades giving out onto a double-level hall on the other. “May I come in?” She had bunned white hair, sparkling green eyes and was dressed in a plain dark suit, unadorned.

“Please, do,” she said.

Sensia looked around, softly clapping her frail-looking hands once. “Shall we sit outside? I’ve sent for some drinks.”

They dragged a couple of heavy, brocaded seats out through the middle window onto the most generous of the room’s balconies, and sat down.

Her eyes stay too wide, she found herself thinking. She’s facing into the sunlight; a real person would be squinting by now, wouldn’t they?

On a ledge above, two small blue birds appeared to be fighting, rising at each other on a furious flutter of wings and almost touching breasts in mid-air before falling back again, all of this accompanied by a great deal of high-pitched twittering.

Sensia smiled warmly, clasping her hands. “So,” she said. “We are in a simulation.”

“I gathered,” she said, the word itself seemingly printed across the legs of the woman opposite.

“We’ll remove that,” Sensia said. The word disappeared from her field of vision. That felt briefly scary, though presumably she was always going to be under somebody’s control, in a sim. Sensia sat forward. “Now, this might sound a little odd, but would you mind terribly telling me your name?”

She stared at the other woman. Just for the merest instant, she had to think. What was her name? “Lededje Y’breq,” she said, almost blurted. Of course.

“Thank you. I see.” Sensia looked up towards the mad tweeting coming from the little birds above. The noise stopped suddenly. A moment later both birds flew down, settled briefly on one of Sensia’s fingers and then darted off in different directions. “And you are from where exactly?”

Another nearly imperceptible delay. “Well, I … I’m of the Veppers retinue,” she said. Veppers, she thought. How odd to think of him without fear. It was as though all that was in another life, and one that she would not have to go back to. Even as she thought about it, turning it over in her mind, the idea still held no terror. She started trying to remember where she had been last, before she ended up here. It felt like something she’d been hiding from herself, like something that some other part of her had been keeping from her. “I was born in Ubruater City and brought up in the mansion house of the estate of Espersium,” she told Sensia. “Lately, I still generally live either in Ubruater, Espersium, or sometimes just wherever Mr. Veppers might be.”

Sensia was nodding, gaze distant. “Ah-hah!” she said, sitting back, smiling. “Ubruater City, Sichult, Quyn system, Ruprine Cluster, Arm One-one Near-tip.”

Lededje recognised “Quyn” as the name the Sun went by in the rest of the galaxy and she had heard the term “Ruprine Cluster” before. She had no idea what “Arm One-one Near-tip” was; this bit of the galaxy, she supposed.

“Where am I?” she asked as a small, thick-bottomed tray arrived, floating out from the room. It held glasses and a pitcher of pale green liquid with ice in it. The device lowered between them so that it effectively became a table.

Sensia poured their drinks. “Presently, literally,” she said, settling back again, swirling her drink, “you’re in a computational substrate node of the General Systems Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, which is currently travelling through the ’liavitzian Blister, in the region called God’s Ear, Rotational.”

Rather than fully catching all this, Lededje had been thinking. “‘Vehicle’?” she said. “Is that a Wheel, or … ?” She took a drink. The pale green liquid was delicious, though probably non-alcoholic.

Sensia smiled uncertainly. “A Wheel?”

“You know; a Wheel,” Lededje said, and became aware they were now staring at the other with mutual incomprehension.

How could this woman not know what a Wheel was?

Then Sensia’s face brightened. “Ah, a Wheel! A specific thing, with a capital letter and so on. I see. Yes, sorry; got you now.” She looked away, seemingly distracted. “Oh, yes, fascinating things …” She shook her head. “But no, not a Wheel. Bit bigger than that. Plate-class General Systems Vehicle: getting on for a hundred kilometres long if you go tip-to-tip of the outer field structure and four klicks high measuring just the naked hull. Roughly six trillion tonnes, though the mass assay gets fiendishly complicated with so much exotic matter making up the engines. About a fifth of a billion people aboard right now.” She flashed a smile. “Not counting those in virtual environments.”

“What’s it called again?”

“The Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly.” Sensia shrugged. “Where I take my name from; Sensia. I’m a ship’s avatoid.”

“That sounds like a Culture ship,” Lededje said, feeling her skin warm suddenly.

Sensia stared at her, looking genuinely surprised. “Good gracious,” she said. “You mean you didn’t even know you were on a Culture ship, even within the Culture at all? I’m surprised you’re not more disoriented. Where did you think you might be?”

Lededje shrugged. She was still trying to recall where she’d been last, before she woke up here. “No idea,” she said. “I’ve never been in a sim this good. I’m not sure we have them to this standard. I don’t think even Veppers has them this detailed.”

Sensia nodded.

“Where am I really?” Lededje asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Where’s my real self, my physical body?”

Sensia stared at her again. She put the drink down on the floating tray, her expression unreadable. “Ah,” she said. She made an o with her mouth and sucked air in, turning her head to look out at the parkland surrounding the house. She turned back to look at Lededje. “What is the last thing you remember, before you woke up here?”

Lededje shook her head. “I can’t remember. I’ve been trying.”

“Well don’t try too hard. From what I can gather it’s … traumatic.”

Lededje wanted to say something to that, but couldn’t think what. Traumatic? she thought with a sudden shiver of fear. What the hell did that mean?

Sensia took a deep breath. “Let me start by explaining that I have never had to ask for somebody’s name in these circumstances. I mean, someone – you – suddenly popping into existence un -announced.” She shook her head. “Doesn’t happen. Mind-states, souls, dynamic full-brain process inventories; whatever you call them, they always come with copious notes. You didn’t.” Sensia smiled again. Lededje formed the uncomfortable impression that the other woman was trying hard to be reassuring. This had never proved to be a good sign in Lededje’s past and she seriously doubted the pattern was about to change now. “You just immaterialised here, my dear,” Sensia told her, “in a one-time, one-way emergency-entanglement vicariously inherited legacy system event of what us Minds would generally call Laughably High Unexpectancy. And most bizarrely of all you came with what one might call no paperwork, zero documentation. Absolutely without accompanying context material. Docketless.”

“Is that unusual?”

Sensia laughed. She had a surprisingly deep, almost raucous laugh. Lededje found herself smiling despite the apparent gravity of the subject. “Not so much unusual,” Sensia said. “More entirely without precedent in roughly the last fifteen hundred busy years. Frankly I’m finding that hard to believe myself and, trust me, I have lots and lots of other avatars, avatoids, agents, feelers and just plain old requests out at the moment asking if anybody else has heard of such a thing – all without positive reply so far.”

“So you had to ask me my name.”

“Quite. As a ship Mind – as any kind of Mind, or even AI – I’m sort of constitutionally forbidden from looking too deeply into you, but even so I had to do a bit of delving just to get a matchable body profile for you to wake up in without causing you further trauma, here in the Virtual.”

Didn’t entirely work, Lededje thought. I’m a negative of my real self’s colour, and— Where’s my damn tat?

Sensia continued: “Plus there’s the language protocols, obviously. They’re actually quite involved, but highly localised across pan-humanity, so easy enough to pinpoint. Could have gone deeper and got your name and other details but that would have been invasively rude. However, following some ancient guidelines so obscure that I had to actively dig them out and consult them

– designed to cover situations like this – I did what is called an Immediate Post-Traumatic Emergency Entanglement Transfer Psychological Profile Evaluation.” Another smile. “So that whatever suddenly caused you to need an entanglement event in the first place, back wherever you came from, didn’t compromise your safe transfer into Virtuality.” Sensia raised her glass again. She looked at it then put it back down again. “And what I discovered was that you’ve had a traumatic experience,” she said, quite quickly, her gaze not meeting Lededje’s. “Which I’ve sort of held back, edited from your transferred memories, just for now, while you settle in, get yourself sorted out, until you’re ready. You know.”

Lededje stared at her. “Really? You can do such a thing?”

“Oh, trivially easy, technically,” Sensia said, sounding relieved. “The constraints are entirely moral; rule-based. And it is, obviously, up to you when you come fully up to speed with yourself, if you know what I mean. Though frankly if I were you I wouldn’t be in too great a hurry.”

Lededje tried very hard to recall what had happened before she came here. She remembered being at Espersium, walking down a tree-lined avenue in the estate, alone, thinking that … it was time to escape.

Hmm, she thought. That was interesting. Was that what had happened? Had she finally found a practical, Veppers-proof method of getting away from the bastard and all his money, power and influence, using this entanglement thing? But that still left the question: where was her real self? Not to mention, why could she remember so little, and what exactly was this “trauma” Sensia kept talking about?

She drained her glass, sat up straight. “Tell me everything,” she demanded.

Sensia looked at her. She looked worried, concerned, compassionate. “Lededje,” she began slowly, carefully, “would you say that you’re a … psychologically strong person?”

Oh, fuck, thought Lededje.

When she had been very young, there had been a time she could still remember when she had felt nothing but loved, privileged and special. It was something more than the usual feeling of blessed distinction that all good parents naturally communicate to their children. There was that – that feeling of being at the focus of unquestioning regard and care – but for a while she had been just about sufficiently mature to realise that she was lucky enough to have even more than that. First of all, she lived in a great and beautiful house within a vast rural estate of extraordinary, even unique grandeur, and, secondly, she looked utterly different from the other children, just as her mother looked quite different from the other adults in the great household.

She had been born an Intagliate. She was certainly a human, and a Sichultian (you learned early on there were other types of human, but it was taken for granted that Sichultians were the best sort) but more than just a Sichultian: an Intagliate, somebody whose skin, whose entire body, whose every internal organ and part of their external physical appearance was different – markedly different – from that of everybody else.

Intagliates looked like ordinary people only in silhouette, or in lighting conditions so poor you could hardly see them at all. Turn on a lamp, come out into the daylight, and they were revealed as the fabulous creatures they were. An Intagliate was covered, head to foot, in what was called a congenitally administered tattoo. Lededje had been born tattooed, emerging from the womb with the most fabulously intricate patterns indelibly encoded at a cellular level onto her skin and throughout her body.

Usually, a true Indented Intagliate, as fully recognised by the Sichultian judicial and administrative system, was born with mist-white skin, the better to display the classically ink-dark designs imprinted on them. Their teeth bore similar designs, the whites of their eyes were similarly ornamented, their translucent fingernails held one design while another was just visible on the nail-pad beneath. The pores on their skin were arranged in a precisely formulated, non-random way, and even the minute tracery of their capillary system was patterned just so, according to design, not developmental chance. Cut them open and you would find similar designs on the surfaces of their internal organs, their designated motif carried into their heart and guts. Bleach their bones; the design would be stamped on the pale surface of their very skeleton; suck out their marrow and break those bones open, the ornamentation continued. At every possible level of their being they bore the mark that distinguished them from the blank sheets that were other people, as well as from those who had merely chosen to have themselves in some way marked.

Some, especially over the last century or so, were born almost night black rather than nearly snow white, their skins, especially, laced with even more exotic and colourful designs that could usefully include iridescence, fluorescence and the effect of mercurial silver, all of which were held to show up better on black skin. Lededje had been one of these even more flamboyantly marked creatures, the elite of the elite as she’d thought and felt at the time.

Her mother, who carried her own marks on her much paler skin

– though hers were simple conventional ink – cared for Lededje and made her feel exceptionally fortunate to be what and who she was. The girl was proud that she was even more fabulously tattooed than her mother, and fascinated both by her mother’s wildly swirling patterns and her own. Even then, when she was just little, less than half her mother’s height, she could see that for all the greater area of her mother’s body surface and the fabulous artistry of the designs on her skin, her own flesh was the more intricately patterned, the more precisely and minutely marked. She noticed this but didn’t like to say anything, feeling slightly sorry for her mother. Maybe one day, she’d thought, her mother too could have skin as beautifully intagliated as her own. Lededje decided she would grow up rich and famous and would give her mother the money to make this happen. This made her feel very grown-up.