Surface Detail

A faint rising and falling feeling, and a sensation that the whole room and lightwell were moving a little from side to side, clashed with the obvious impression that they were in a conventional building on land. There was a degree of regularity, a periodicity to the various oscillations, and Vatueil was trying to work out the intervals involved. There seemed to be at least two: a long one lasting about fifteen or sixteen heartbeats and a shorter one of about a third of that. He was using heartbeats because he had no watch or phone or terminal and there wasn’t a clock visible anywhere in the room either. The doctor wore a watch but it was too small for him to make out.

They must be on a ship or barge. Maybe some sort of floating city. He had no idea; he’d just woken up here, sitting in this cheap looking chair in this bland office room, being made to watch lo-fi video on an ancient screen device called a television. He’d already had a prowl round the space; the door was locked, the lightwell went down another four storeys to a small, leaf-litter-filled courtyard. The young doctor had just sat there, asking him to sit down and making notes on her clipboard while he’d looked round. The drawers in the room’s single desk – wood, battered-looking – were locked too, as was the single dented grey mild steel filing cabinet. No telephone, comms screen, terminal or sign that there was anything intelligent and helpful listening or present. There was even a switch for the ceiling light, for fate’s sake.

He’d looked over the doctor’s shoulder at the notes she was taking, but they were in a language he didn’t recognise. He wondered how long he was expected to give it before he tried threatening the doctor or shoulder-charging the flimsy-looking door.

He looked up at what was obviously a suspended ceiling. Maybe he could crawl his way out.

“Just tell me what you want to know,” he said.

The doctor made another note, crossed her legs, said, “What do think we might want to know?”

He put his hands to his face, wiped back from his nose to his cheeks and then ears. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know, do I?”

“Why did you think we might want to know anything?”

“I attacked you,” he told her, pointing at the wooden box that held the screen. “That was me, in that – I was that thing attacking you.” He waved his hands, looked around. “But I got shot down. I’m guessing we all got intercepted. And now I’m here. Whatever you saved of me, you must have been able to learn all you needed to directly, just looking at the code, running bits of it. You don’t need me so I’m just puzzled why I’m here. All I can think of is you still want to know something else. Or is this just the first circle of Hell? Do I stay here for ever being bored to death?”

She made another note. “Maybe we should watch the screen again,” she suggested. He sighed. She turned the television back on. The black spearhead shape fell from the lightning-cracked sky.

“It’s nothing – just a death.”

Yime smiled thinly. “I think you make light of our calling, Mr. Nopri, if you treat the cessation of life in quite so off-hand a fashion.”

“I know, I know, I know,” he said, agreeing heartily and nodding vigorously. “You’re absolutely right, of course. But it is in a good cause. It is necessary. I do take the whole Quietus ethic seriously; very seriously. These are – ha-ha! – well, special circumstances.”

Yime looked at him levelly. Nopri was a skinny, dishevelled looking young man with bright blue eyes, pale skin and a gleamingly bald head. They were in what was apparently entitled the Officers’ Club, the main social space for the forty or so Culture citizens who made up about a half per cent of the Bulbitian’s highly diverse – and dispersed – population. The Club was part of what had once been some sort of games hall for the Bulbitian species, what had been its ceiling – and was now its floor – studded with enormous multi-coloured cones like gaudy versions of fat stalagmites.

Food, drink and – for Nopri – a drug bowl were brought by small wheeled drones which roamed the wide space; apparently the Bulbitian could display unpredictable reactions when it came to other entities using fields inside it, so the drones used wheels and multi-jointed arms instead of just levitating by AG and using maniple fields. Still, Yime noticed, the ship’s drone seemed to be doing all right, floating level with their table.