Surface Detail

The others appeared one by one. You could have told who were his friends and who were his enemies by whether they did or did not meet his gaze. The ones who had always thought the hacking attempts were a waste of valuable time and little more than a cack-handed way of telling their enemies that they were getting desperate looked at him and smiled, happy to look him in the eye. Those who had agreed with him afforded him a quick nod and a fleeting glance at most, looking away when he tried to look at them, pursing their lips, scratching their fur, picking at their toenails and so on.

“It didn’t work,” yellow said.

So much for preamble, Vatueil thought. Oh well; it wasn’t as though they kept minutes.

“It did not,” he agreed. He picked at a little knotted tuft of red fur on his belly.

“I think we all know what the next level, the last resort is,” purple said. They all looked at each other, a sort of formal symmetry to their sequential one-to-one glances, nods and muttered words.

“Let us be clear about this,” Vatueil said after a few moments. “We are talking about taking the war into the Real. We are talking about disobeying the rules we freely agreed to abide by right at the start of all this. We are talking about going back on the commitments and undertakings we took so solemnly so long ago and have lived and fought by from then until now. We are talking about making the whole confliction to which we have dedicated three decades of our lives irrelevant and pointless.” He paused, looked round them all. “And this is the Real we are talking about. There are no resets, and while there might be extra lives for some, not everybody will be so blessed: the deaths and the suffering we cause will be real, and so will the blame we attract. Are we really prepared to go through with this?” He looked round them all again. He shrugged. “I know I am,” he told them. “But are you?”

“We have been through all this,” green said. “We all-”

“I know, but-”

“Shouldn’t-?”

“Can’t we-?”

Vatueil talked over them. “Let’s just vote and get it over with, shall we?”

“Yes, let’s not waste any more time,” purple said, looking pointedly at Vatueil.

They took the vote.

They sat, still or gently swinging on their trapezes for a while. Nobody said anything. Then:

“Let havoc be unleashed,” yellow said resignedly. “The war against the Hells brings hell to the Real.”

Green sighed. “If we get this wrong,” he said, “they won’t forgive us for ten thousand years.”

Purple snorted. “A lot of them won’t forgive us for a million years even if we get it right.”

Vatueil sighed, shook his head slowly. He said, “Fate help us all.”

Eighteen

There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked – part of the complexity of life, he supposed – that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration.

At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who’d made it always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance – he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he’d often been informed – but it had to be deserved, you had to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor had to have worked for it.

Arrogance without cause, arrogance without achievement – or that mistook sheer luck for true achievement – was an abomination. Losers made everybody look bad. Worse, they made the whole thing – the great game that was life – appear arbitrary, almost meaningless. Their only use, Veppers had long since decided, was as examples to be held up to those who complained about their lack of status or money or control over their lives: look, if this idiot can achieve something, so can anybody, so can you. So stop whining about being exploited and work harder.

Still, at least individual losers were quite obviously statistical freaks. You could allow for that, you could tolerate that, albeit with gritted teeth. What he would not have believed was that you could find an entire society – an entire civilisation- of losers who’d made it. And the Culture was exactly that.

Veppers hated the Culture. He hated it for existing and he hated it for – for far too damned many credulous idiots – setting the standard for what a decent society ought to look like and so what other peoples ought to aspire to. It wasn’t what other peoples ought to aspire to; it was what machines had aspired to, and created, for their own inhuman purposes.

It was another of Veppers’ deeply held personal beliefs that when you were besieged or felt cornered, you should attack.

He marched into the Culture ambassador’s office in Ubruater and threw the remains of the neural lace down on her desk.

“What the fuck is this?” he demanded.