Surface Detail

“I can’t go that fast!” she shouted.

“Of course not,” he said, stopping; she thudded into him. “My apologies. Jump on my back; we’ll go faster. Just keep your head down.”

She was too breathless to argue. She climbed onto his back, legs round his waist, arms about his neck.

“Hold tight,” the avatar said. She did. They set off, whirling down the steps so fast it was almost falling.

Those who had seen the first two incursions reported seeing a cerise beam destroy first the high bridge and then the wheeled, airborne cable-craft. In both cases the beam simply came angling down from the ceiling of the cavern having bored through many tens of metres of rock before transfixing its target.

The third and the last time the beam assaulted Iobe Cavern City, it hit an ancient ornamental stone tower, part of the original Central University buildings. The beam struck the old tower near its base, bringing the whole edifice tumbling down.

At first it was thought there had been no casualties, until, half a day later, the bodies of a man and a woman were discovered, still locked together, her legs round his waist, her arms round his neck, under the hundreds of tonnes of rubble.

* * *

There was a house which was the shape of the galaxy. It was a virtual house, of course, but it was very highly detailed and well imagined, and although the scale on which it modelled the galaxy could vary quite a lot from time to time and from place to place within it, the general effect was convincing for the beings who had brought the house into existence, and, at least as far as they were concerned, the surroundings felt agreeably familiar.

The beings concerned were Culture Minds: the very high-level AIs which were, by some distance, the most complicated and intelligent entities in the whole civilisation, and — arguably — amongst the most complicated and intelligent entities in the whole galaxy-wide meta-civilisation.

The house was used to indicate where the individual Minds were in the real galaxy, so that a Mind which existed within an Orbital Hub close to the galactic centre would be located in the great bulbous, multi-storeyed centre of the house, while a ship Mind in a vessel currently somewhere towards the wispy tip of one of the galaxy’s arms would appear in one of the single-room tall outer wings. There were special arrangements for those Minds who didn’t want their location known by all and sundry: they tended to inhabit pleasingly dilapidated outbuildings within what were effectively the grounds of the main construction, communicating at a remove.

The house itself manifested as an echoingly vast baroque edifice of extraordinary, ornamental richness, every room the size of a cathedral and full of intricately carved wooden walls and pierced screens, gleaming floors of inlaid wood and semi-precious stone, ceilings dripping with precious metals and minerals, and populated, usually quite sparsely, by the avatars of the Minds, which took on pretty much every form of being and object known.

Unrestricted by such tiresome three-dimensional constraints as the laws of perspective, every one of the many thousands of rooms was visible from every other, if not through doorways then through tiny icons/screens/apertures in the walls which, on sufficiently close inspection, let one see into those immensely distant rooms in some detail. Minds, of course, being used to existing within four dimensions as a matter of tedious day-to-day reality, had no problem dealing with this sort of topological sleight-of-hand.

The only reality-based restriction the galactic house modelled accurately was that produced by the deeply annoying fact that even hyperspacial light did not travel with infinite speed. To carry on a normal conversation with another Mind, one had to be in the same room and reasonably close to it. Even two Minds being within the same vast room but on opposite sides created a noticeable delay as they shouted back and forth.

Being any further away meant sending messages. These usually showed up as gently glowing symbols flickering disembodied in the air in front of the recipient, but — subject to the witheringly prodigious imaginations of Minds in general and the particular and quite possibly highly eccentric predilections of the sender in particular — could show up as almost anything. Swift-moving ballets consisting of multiply-limbed aliens, on fire and throwing shapes which just happened briefly to resemble Marain symbols (for example) were by no means unknown.

Vatueil had vaguely heard of this place. He’d always wondered what it actually looked like. He gazed around, astounded, wondering how you would describe it, how a poet might find the words to portray something of its bewildering richness and complexity. In appearance he was a pan-human male; tall and wearing the dress uniform of a Space Marshal. He stood in this vast room — shaped like the inside of a vast beach-shell to resemble the general volume of space called the Doplioid Spiral Fragment — and watched as what looked like a substantial chandelier lowered itself from the ceiling. Inspected closely, the ceiling was mostly composed of such chandeliers. When its lower-middle section got level with his head, the chandelier — a riot of fabulously inter-twined multi- coloured glass spirals and corkscrew shapes — stopped.

“Space Marshal Vatueil, welcome,” it said. Its voice had a sort of gentle, tinkling quality appropriate to its appearance. “My name is Zaive; I’m a Hub-mind with a special interest in the Quietus section. I’ll let the others introduce themselves.”

Vatueil turned to find that — without him having noticed them arriving — there were two humans, a large, hovering blue bird and what looked like a crudely carved, garishly painted ventriloquist’s dummy sitting on a small multi-coloured balloon, all standing or floating around him.

“I’m the Fixed Grin,” the first human told him; the avatar had silvery skin and looked vaguely female. “Representing Numina.” It nodded/bowed.

“The Scar Glamour,” the blue bird told him. “SC.”

“Beastly To The Animals,” the other humanoid avatar said, a thin-looking male. “I represent the interests of Restoria.”

“Labtebricolephile,” the dummy may have announced, having what sounded like trouble with the “L” sounds. “Civilian.” It paused. “Eccentric,” it added, needlessly.

“And that,” the chandelier called Zaive said, as the others help-fully looked off to one side, “is the Dressed Up To Party.”

The Dressed Up To Party was a small orange-red cloud hanging more or less over the hovering blue bird.

“The Dressed Up To Party is also non-aligned and is some non-specific distance away; its contributions will be sporadic,” Zaive said.

“And probably beside the point, as well as trailing it,” the blue bird representing the Scar Glamour said. It cocked its iridescently plumaged head to look up at the orange-red cloud, but there was no visible response.

“Together,” Zaive said, “we make up the Specialist Agencies Prompt Response Committee, or at least the local chapter, as it were. A small number of other interested parties, each no less security-conscious than ourselves, will be listening in at greater removes and may contribute subsequently. Do you need any explanation regarding our titles or terminology?”

“No, thank you,” Vatueil said.

“We understand that you represent the highest strategic level of command within the anti-Hell side in the current confliction regarding the Hells, is that right?”

“Yes,” Vatueil confirmed.

“So, Space Marshal Vatueil,” the bird said flapping its short wings lazily — too slowly for it to have truly hovered had this all been taking place in the Real. “You indicated this was both urgent and of the highest importance. What is it you wish to tell us?”

“It’s about the war over the Hells,” Vatueil said.

“That kind of came presupposed,” the bird said.

Vatueil sighed. “Are you aware that the anti-Hell side is losing?”

“Of course,” the bird said.

“And that we attempted to hack the substrates of the pro-Hell side?”

“We had guessed as much,” the thin-looking male said.

“Those attempts failed,” Vatueil said. “Therefore we decided to bring the war into the Real, to construct a fleet of ships which would destroy as many of the Hell-containing substrates as possible.”