Surface Detail

“Not covered? Is that the same as being not policy?”

“Yes.”

“Lieutenant,” Veppers said, turning to the ship’s officer, who also floated, twelve limbs neatly folded on one of the shiny cushions that doubled as chairs and translators, “is this really true?”

“Is what true, sir?”

“That it’s not possible to buy one of your ships.”

“It is not possible to buy navy ships of our navy.”

“Why not?”

“It is not policy.”

Veppers sighed. “Yes, so I’ve been told,” he said, looking at Xingre.

“Navies rarely sell their vessels, not if they are of the best,” Xingre said.

“You’re already hiring it to me,” Veppers said.

“Not the same,” the officer told him. “We remain in control. Sold to you, you assume control.”

“It’d only be one ship,” Veppers insisted. “I don’t want your whole navy. Really, such a fuss. You people are positively purists.” Veppers had once asked ambassador Huen if it was possible to buy a Culture ship. She’d stared at him for a second, then burst out laughing.

The flier zoomed, rising to avoid a high bridge barring their way. The craft stayed flat rather than pointing its nose up, the winch bogey travelling the network of flier tether rails above reeling in the craft’s four invisibly fine mono-filament lines equally.

Iobe city had banned flying machines entirely for centuries, then allowed fliers to be used but suffered one or two accidents which had resulted in the destruction of several notable buildings and prized historic cross-cavern bridges, so had compromised by allowing fliers but only if they were tethered to tracks in the cavern roofs and controlled automatically.

“The best Jhlupian ships are of the Jhlupian navy,” the lieutenant said. “We prefer to keep it that way. For the benefit of not being outrun by civilian vessels. Embarrassment might ensue otherwise. Most governmental entities share this policy.”

“Do the Sichultians sell their best ships to their lessers?” Xingre asked.

“I’d give you a very good price,” Veppers said. He turned from Xingre to the lieutenant. “Very good. You could even take the weapons off. It’s the speed I’m after.”

“Culture ships are even faster, sir,” Jasken said.

Veppers looked coldly at him. “Are they now?”

“Some are,” the lieutenant said.

“How much would a ship like the Ucalegon cost?” Jasken asked the lieutenant. “If it was for sale?”

“Impossible to say,” the officer said.

“You must know how much they cost,” Veppers said. “You have to price them, you must have a budget for how many you can build and operate.”

“Realistic price might be more than entire gross economic product of Sichultian Enablement,” Xingre said.

Veppers smiled. “I doubt that.”

Xingre made a chuckling sound. “Nevertheless.”

“Additionally,” the lieutenant said, “there are treaties to be considered.”

Veppers exchanged looks with Jasken. “Oh, I bet there are.”

“As responsible members of galactic community and Galactic Council,” the officer said, “we are signatories to treaties forbidding us from over-runging certain technologies.”

“Over-runging?” Veppers asked in his best what-the-fuck-does-that-mean tone. He looked from the lieutenant to Jasken, who shrugged.

“Technical term,” Xingre said. “One may gift or sell technology one rung down the ladder of civilisational attainment, but no further.”

“Ah, that,” Veppers said sourly. “That keeps us all in our place, doesn’t it?”

Xingre rocked backwards on his shiny pillow, looking outward from the flier. “My, is beautiful city!” he said.

“And,” the ship’s officer said, “one is behoved to retain control over said technology to prevent it being re- sold further down relevant tech ladder by rascalish peoples acting purely as middle-men, fraudulently.”

“End-user certificates,” Xingre said, agreeing.

“So we have to wait until we’re about to invent something our selves before we can buy it from somebody else?” Veppers asked.

“Much like that,” Xingre said. It waved a thin green limb at a particularly slim, highly ornate bridge they were passing over. “See, great elegance of form!” It waved at the road and pedestrian traffic crossing the bridge, not that anybody was looking at them, and anyway the flier’s bubble canopy was mirrored on the outside.

“Such treaties and agreements prevent free-for-all,” the lieutenant said helpfully.

Veppers looked unimpressed.

“Hmm. Free-for-alls,” Xingre agreed. “Tsk.”

The flier swung round, banking as it turned to enter a side cavern. This new tunnel was about half the diameter of the one they had been heading down until now. The craft levelled out but dropped, still level, and flew on into darkness; this cavern had no roof piercings to let in the sunlight, or buildings within. A display on the flier’s forward screen lit up to show what the cavern looked like ahead. Rocky, uneven walls stretched curving away into the distance.

“I like free-for-alls,” Veppers said quietly.

They sat in a paper boat floating on a lake of mercury, lit by a single distant ceiling hole producing a searchlight shaft of luminescence. Veppers had brought an ingot of pure gold specially. He took his mask off for a moment. “Plop it in,” he told Jasken.

Jasken didn’t take his mask off. “You can talk through the mask, sir,” he told Veppers, who just frowned, then nodded impatiently.

Jasken slid the soap-bar-size lump of gold out of his tunic, held it by one end, reached over the side of the boat and dropped the thick glossy sliver overboard. It vanished into the silver surface.

Veppers took part of the boat’s gunwale between his fingers, wobbled it. “Paper, really?” he asked Xingre, pulling his mask away again.

The Jhlupian didn’t need a mask; mercury vapour wasn’t poisonous to Jhlupians. “Paper,” the alien confirmed. “Compressed.” It made an expanding then contracting gesture with its limbs. “Easier disposing of.”

The flier had reached the limit of the cave system’s tether rails, had landed, been released from its cables and flown on through another two junctions’ worth of smaller and smaller side tunnels until it had reached the cavern holding Mercury Lake, one of Vebezua’s modest number of tourist attractions.

The flier had hovered centimetres off the surface of the lake and let them step straight into the paper boat. They could have walked across the surface of the mercury, of course, and Veppers had wanted to, but apparently that was forbidden, or at least frowned on, or gave you seasickness or something. The mercury could have been cleaner, Veppers reckoned. Its surface held dust and grit and swirls of little rock particles like dark sand.

The boat was slightly absurd; it looked like a scaled-up version of the sort of paper boat a child might make. Even as a raft, of course, it could have been made from gold, or any element with a molecular number lower than mercury. Lead would still sink in mercury, but gold shouldn’t. It was one number down the Periodic Table and so ought to float. Veppers looked over the side of the vessel at where his ingot of gold had entered the liquid metal, but it showed no sign of surfacing yet.

After dropping them at the boat, the flier had taken off again, carrying the other two Jhlupians with it. Apart from showing his importance to the Jhlupian navy, Xingre hadn’t needed his aide along with him in the first place, and the Navy itself, while being contractually obliged to bring Veppers here safely, had wanted no part of whatever might transpire or be agreed here.

Another, smaller flier approached. Jasken watched it on his Oculenses. The paper boat lay about two hundred metres off the nearest section of cavern wall. Mercury Lake was not natural, though nobody knew who