Surface Detail

So she was trying to flatter him. “Between that and forty, is the look I go for.” He smiled broadly. “Though I have the appetites of a man of twenty.” He shrugged as she looked down again, a smile on her lips. “So I’m told. As I say, it’s been so long since I was twenty I honestly can’t recall.” He sighed deeply. “Just as I can’t recall any of the details of the appallingly ancient case they’re going to bore me with this afternoon. I mean really can’t. I’m not lying when they ask me what I remember and I say I can’t remember anything. I’m just not able to; those memories all had to be excised decades ago to leave me room for new memories.”

“Really?”

“Had to be done; the medics insisted. Not my fault those memories are the ones the court would like to know about. I’d love to cooperate even more fully, tell them all they want to know, but I just can’t.”

“That does seem terribly convenient,” she said.

He nodded. “That is a word I have heard used in this context. Convenient.” He shook his head. “People can be so cynical.”

“I know. Shocking, isn’t it?” Crederre said, and again Veppers heard her stepmother’s phraseology.

“Shocking indeed. So, you’ll come for dinner?”

“Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure what my parents would say.”

He smiled tolerantly. “It’s dinner, dear girl, not a sex club.”

“Do you frequent those too?”

“Never. You’ve seen my Harem, haven’t you?”

“I have. You are so shameless, you know.”

“Thank you. I do my best.”

“I’m surprised you have any energy left even to think about other women, normal women.”

“Ah, but there’s the challenge, you see,” he told her. “For simple sex, just fulfilling a need, the Harem girls are perfect, quite wonderful. Uncomplicated. But to make a chap feel… treasured, wanted for his own sake, he has to feel that he can still make somebody want to have sex with him… just because she wants to, not because it’s her job.”

“Hmm. Yes.”

“So, how about you?”

“How about me what?”

“Do you frequent sex clubs?”

“Never either. Not yet.”

“Not yet?”

She shrugged. “Well, you never know, do you?”

“No,” he agreed, sitting back, smiling thoughtfully. “You never do.”

Jasken brought down a spevaline a little smaller than the one Veppers had killed earlier, but closer still to the rushing aircraft. Then the trees stopped abruptly and the view dropped away to a broad river, waters sparkling, wavy gravel banks unwinding beneath. Jasken clicked the laser rifle off and swung it to its stowed position. “Estate border, sir,” he said. He brought the Oculenses back down over his eyes. Veppers motioned towards the balcony door. “Excuse me,” Jasken said.

The aircraft started to gain height and speed, heading for more conventional air corridors now that it had left the Espersium estate and was in the shared airspace leading to the vast conurbation of Greater Ubruater.

Crederre watched Jasken close the door behind him. She turned back to Veppers. “You don’t have to buy me dinner first if you just want to fuck me.”

He shook his head. “Good heavens, you youngsters are so forward.”

She looked down at the seat Veppers was in, judging. She wriggled her skirt up. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. “But we’re only ten minutes from landing,” he said, watching her.

She pushed both laser rifles out of the way then hoisted herself out of her seat and brought one long leg curving over so that she straddled him. “Better get to it, then.”

He frowned as he watched her pulling at the laces securing his trousers’ crotch. “It wasn’t your mother put you up to this, was it?” he asked.

“Nope,” she said.

He laughed, put his hands under her skirt to her naked hips. “You young girls, I do declare!”

Fifteen

Here was a gulf of space, an infinite valley, stuffed full to choking with scenes of torment spread out to the furthest reach of sight, filled with the low moans and the chorused anguished of the torn and tormented and infested with a miasmic stench of shit and burned, corrupted flesh. Here was a pressure on the eyes of fractal detail – torment within torment within torment within torment, endlessly – just waiting, stacked, lined up, marking time until it could be dwelt upon, comprehended, made part of the self; guarantors of perpetual nightmare.

Here was a seemingly infinite realm of torture presided over by slavering, wild-eyed devils, a never-ending world of unbearable pain, humiliation beyond imagining and utter, unending hatred.

… She had decided there was a perverse beauty about it, an almost celebratory fecundity about the depths of creativity which must have been plumbed to produce such imaginative cruelty. The very bestiality, the absolute depravity of it raised it to the level of great art; there was a transcendent quality to its horror, its complete commitment to agony and degradation.