Surface Detail

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.

He really was experiencing bliss. This was only just short of sexual.

“What do you want to know?” he heard himself say, dreamily.

“Relate meeting,” Lagoarn-na said, and crossed its long, furmembraned arms across its chest, its wide unblinking yellow eyes seeming to stare into his soul.

“All right,” he heard himself say. He marvelled at how relaxed and unconcerned he sounded. “First let me introduce myself. My name is Vatueil; Gyorni Vatueil, my most recent rank — that I recall — being that of Space Marshal…”

He had never enjoyed relating anything more. Lagoarn-na proved to be a very good listener.

Twenty-four

Administrator-Captain Quar-Quoachali, commander of the GFCF Minor Destructor Vessel Fractious Person, took the priority call from Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III in his cabin, as ordered. The Legislator-Admiral was shown sitting at his private desk, a roller keyboard displayed on the surface in front of him. As Quar watched, Bettlescroy snicked a couple of keys into place, then folded his elegant hands under his chin, elbows on desk, leaving the keyboard’s Commit key winking.

He looked up at Quar, smiled.

“Sir!” Quar sat as upright in his seat as he could.

“Quar, good day.”

“Thank you, sir! To what do I owe the honour?”

“Quar, we have never really got on, have we?”

“No, sir! My apologies for that, sir. I have always hoped—”

“Accepted. Anyway, I thought that we might enter into a new phase in our professional relationship, and to that end I believe I need to divulge to you something of our plans regarding the Culture ship Hylozoist.”

“Sir, this is an honour, sir!”

“I’m sure. The thing is, the Hylozoist has just been informed that there are unauthorised ships being constructed in the fabricaria of the Disk.”

“I had no idea, sir!”

“I know you didn’t, Quar. That was deliberate.”

“Sir?”

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be blunt, Quar. We need to take action against the Culture ship; disable it at the very least, if not actually destroy it.”

“Sir? You mean, attack it?”

“As ever, your perspicacity and tactical awareness astonishes me, Quar. Yes, I mean attack it.”

“A… Culture ship, sir? Are we sure?”

“We are perfectly sure, Quar.”

Quar swallowed, gulped. “Sir,” he said, sitting even more upright in his seat, “I and the other officers