Surface Detail

The private underground car system had various stops, most within Iobe city, almost all within buildings and other structures owned by Veppers. One, though, was inside an old mine, way out in the karst desert a quarter of an hour and over a hundred kilometres from the city outskirts.

The stealthed GFCF shuttle was waiting for him: a dark shape like a ragged shallow dome of night squatting on the serrations of rock. Moments after he’d boarded, it rose silently, kept subsonic, accelerated harder once it achieved space, threaded its way through the layers of the orbiting habs, fabs and satellites, and docked with a much larger but similarly secretive ship keeping a little above geosynchronous orbit. The dark, slimly ellipsoid vessel swallowed the shuttle craft and slipped away into hyperspace with barely a ripple to disturb the skein of real space.

He was met by a group of small, obviously alien but ethereally beautiful creatures with sliver-blue skin which turned to delicate scales – insect-wing thin and iridescent, like a tiny lacy rainbow

– where most pan-humans had head hair. They wore white, wispy clothes and had large, round eyes. One came forward and addressed him.

“Mr. Veppers,” it said, its sing-song voice soft, high and mellifluous, “how good to see you again. You are indeed most welcome back aboard the GFCF Succour-Class Contact Craft Messenger Of Truth.”

Veppers smiled. “Evening all. Great to be aboard.”

“And what are you supposed to be?”

“I am the angel of life and death, Chay. It is time.”

The thing had appeared in her sleeping chamber in the very middle of the night. There was a noviciate sleeping in a chair by Chay’s bedside, but Chay didn’t even bother trying to wake her. She knew in her heart this was something she would have to deal with, or endure, by herself.

The creature was something between quadri- and bi-pedal in form; its front legs still looked like legs but they were much smaller than its rear legs. It had a single trunk, and two vast, slowly beating wings which flared from its back. They were impossibly wide; far too big to fit into the chamber, and yet – by whatever logic was supposed to be operating here – they appeared to fit inside quite comfortably nevertheless. The thing claiming to be the angel of life and death hovered over the foot of bed, which was where such things were generally expected to show up, if you believed in that sort of thing. And perhaps even if you didn’t, she supposed.

She wondered again about reaching out and shaking the noviciate awake. But it would be such an effort, she thought. Everything was such an effort these days. Getting up, hunkering down, bending, standing, eating, defecating; everything. Even seeing, of course, though she noticed that she could see the self-proclaimed “angel of life and death” better than she ought to be able to.

An apparition, then; a virtuality or whatever you wanted to call it. After all these years, she thought, finally some proof beyond her own dimming memories and the fading ink in her charred page diary that all she had lived through in the Real and the Hell had been in some sense true, not just figments of her imagination.

“You mean time for me to die?”

“Yes, Chay.”

“Well, I must disappoint you, whatever you are or might claim to be. By one way of looking at things I am already dead. I was killed by the king of Hell himself.” She gave a bubbling, choking laugh. “Or at least by some big bugger of a thing. In another way of looking-”

“Chay, you have lived here and now it is time to die.”

“-at things, you cannot kill me,” said Chay, who, as Superior of the Refuge for many years, had become used to not being interrupted. “Because, in the place I came from originally, I am still alive, or at least I presume I am, and will continue to remain so, no matter what sort of tricks you-”

“Chay, you must be quiet now, and prepare to meet your maker.”

“I had no maker. My maker was the universe, or my parents. They were still alive when I entered the Hell. Can you do anything useful and tell me how they are? Still alive? Passed on? Well? Well? Eh? No? Thought not. ‘Maker’ indeed. What superstitious bollocks are you trying to-?”

“Chay!” the thing shouted at her. Quite loudly, Chay thought, and – what with her failing hearing – that must have meant extremely loudly. Still the young noviciate asleep in the chair by her bedside didn’t even stir. She was glad she hadn’t wasted the effort waking the girl up. “You are about to die,” the apparition told her. “Have you no wish to see God and be accepted into Her love?”

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous. There is no God.” It was what she believed, what she had always believed, but still she looked nervously at the sleeping noviciate.

“What?” the angel cried. “Will you have no thought for your immortal soul?”