Surface Detail

Veppers sat with Jasken, Lehktevi – another of his Harem-girls – and Crederre, the daughter of Sapultride and his first wife, who had stayed on at the estate after her father and the girl’s step-mother, Jeussere, had left after the weekend party that had included a couple of miniature sea battles. Veppers had taken particular care to make sure that his ships did not lose the second sea battle, the day after Xingre’s unsettling visit; the bets involved in the ship battles were always small, but that was not the point. For Veppers, winning was the point.

They were on the longest trackway, the one which led to Ubruater. The aircraft’s engines roared distantly as it followed the trackway trees into a slight hollow then powered upwards again. Veppers’ stomach lurched as they bottomed out and then zoomed again. A particularly large and fine spevaline rose wheeling out of the blizzard of dark leaves and somersaulting twigs behind, still sporting its mating season plumage. Veppers cradled the tripodded laser rifle, let the opticals grab the image of the bird and identify it as the largest moving entity in the viewfinder. The gun’s servos whined, lining it up, shaking it with what felt like a series of tiny spasms to allow for the aircraft’s movements. Veppers fired the instant the aiming grid flashed. A single shot passed straight through the great bird in a small explosion of feathers. The spevaline crumpled about itself like a man wrapping a cloak about him. It fell tumbling back into the forest.

“Oh, good shot, sir!” Lehktevi said, having to raise her voice only a little to make herself heard over the howling of the engines. The balcony was shielded from the slipstream by the bowed surface of ultraclear glass. The glass could be retracted to allow other weapons besides the laser rifles to be used against the birds and other animals, but that made the balcony a quite furiously noisy place to be, at any reasonable speed; you needed ear defenders, and the swirling slipstream caused total havoc to any hairstyle worth the name.

“Thank you,” Veppers said, smiling briefly at the achingly beautiful Lehktevi. He looked at the girl on his other side. “Crederre,” he said, nodding at the laser on its tripod in front of her. “Won’t you try a shot?”

The girl shook her head. “No, Joiler, I can’t. I feel sorry for the birds. I can’t shoot them.”

Crederre was young; still becoming a woman, really. Entirely legal, though. She was not bad-looking, though her wan, pale, blonde look was quite eclipsed by the dark magnificence of Lehktevi.

He’d watched the girl swim in the underground pool at the house just that morning.

The main indoor pool under the house took up some of the space where the rows and banks of computer servers had once stood, when the house had been even more the centre of the Veppers family power than it was now, and games and programs throughout the ever-expanding Sichultian Enablement had been controlled from there.

That amount of raw, bulky computational power was no longer necessary – you could build processing substrate into walls, hulls, carpets, chassis, ceiling tiles, monocoques; almost anything nowadays – so all that space under the mansion had come free, to be filled with storage, underground garages full of exotic machinery and a giant pool ornately decorated with waterfalls, giant naturally grown crystals the size of trees, perfume pools, bubble bays and water slides. Crederre’s slim, pale body had moved over the night black of the jet tiles on the pool’s floor, sinuous and quick.

He’d watched her, and known that she’d known he was watching her. Well, he watched all women he found attractive like that, and he’d thought no more about it.

Still, the girl might be a prize worth pursuing. He was aware that he hadn’t bedded – or even attempted to bed – anyone new since the unpleasantness which had resulted in that little scribbled-on slut biting the tip of his nose off. Too self-conscious, he supposed. He stroked the golden shield covering his nose.

He laughed gently. “Well, I feel sorry for the woodland creatures too, but then if it wasn’t for this sport then these trees wouldn’t be here in the first place. And there are an awful lot of trees and an awful lot of spevalines and other birds, and only me who really shoots them. Most people are like you: too squeamish. So they’re ahead on the deal, really,”

The girl shrugged. “If you say so.” She smiled at him. Quite a pleasant, winning smile, he thought. He wondered again why she’d chosen – and been allowed – to stay behind with him. She was of an age, of course; technically independent, an adult, but all the same. It amused him when his friends, acquaintances and business partners tried to pair him off with their daughters – or even wives. Perhaps that was the idea here. He doubted anyone still thought they could marry their females off to him, but even just a liaison, an affair, might be useful to somebody with ambitions.