Surface Detail

As far as other species and civilisations were concerned, it was just another one of those little quirks you always encountered when you discovered a new member of the community, a rough edge that would probably get rubbed off like the rest as the Sichultia gradually found and settled into their place at the great galactic banquet table of pan-species revelry.

Lededje could still remember the dawning of the realisation that her markings were not glorious after all, but somehow shameful. She was imprinted as she was, not to distinguish her as someone more important and privileged than others, but to mark her as a chattel, to make it clear to others that she was less than them: an owned, bonded thing, a trophy, an admission of familial defeat and shame. It had been, it still was, the most important, defining and humiliating stage of her life.

She had immediately tried to run away, fleeing the nursery where one of the other children, a little older than she, had finally and categorically informed her about all this, but got no further than the base of one of the dozens of small satellite domes that surrounded the mansion; barely a kilometre from where she’d started.

She howled and screamed at her mother for not telling her the truth about her tattoo. She threw herself into her bed and didn’t emerge for days. Hunkered under the bedclothes, she’d heard her mother weeping in the next room, and been briefly glad of it. Later she hated herself for hating her mother and they wept together, hugging, but nothing would ever be the same again, either between them or between Lededje and the other children, whose deposed queen she now felt she was.

It would be years before she’d be able to acknowledge all that her mother had done to protect her, how even that first deceit, that absurd concocted dream of privilege, had been a way of trying to strengthen her for the vicissitudes she would inevitably encounter in her later life.

According to her mother the reason that she had been forcibly tattooed and Lededje had been born Intagliate – as would be the one or two children she was contractually and honour-bound to produce – was that her late husband, Grautze, Lededje’s father, had been too trusting.

Grautze and Veppers had been best friends since their school days and had been in business together since the beginning of their commercial careers. Both of them came from very powerful, rich and renowned families and both became even more powerful, rich and famous as individuals, making deals and making money. They had made some enemies too, certainly, but that was only to be expected in business. They were rivals, but it was a friendly rivalry, and they had many joint ventures and equal partnerships.

Then there came the prospect of a single great deal more lucrative and important than any they had ever taken part in before; a momentous, reputation-securing, history-making, world-changing deal. They took a solemn pledge that they would work together on this, equal partners. They even became blood brothers to seal the agreement and signify the importance of the deal to both of them; they used a paired set of antique knives that Lededje’s great-grandfather had presented to Veppers’ grandfather, decades earlier, to cut the palms of the hands they then clasped. Nothing had been signed between them, but then the two had always behaved like honourable men to each other, and taken the other’s word as being good enough.

The details of the betrayal and the slow, devastating unwinding of that pledge were such that whole teams of lawyers had struggled to come to terms with them, but the gist was that Lededje’s father had lost everything, and Veppers had gained it all, and more. Her father’s family lost almost everything too, the financial damage rippling out to brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins.

Veppers had made a great show of pretending to be supportive; in the complexity of the unravelling deal, much of the most immediate damage had been at the hands of other business rivals, and Veppers was assiduous in buying up the debts they accumulated from Lededje’s father, but always his support stopped short of preventing the damage in the first place. The final betrayal was the requirement, when all other ways of paying had been exhausted, that Grautze consent to his wife being Marked and his next child

– and any children that that child had – being an Indented Intagliate.

Veppers gave every sign of being devastated it had come to this, but said he could see no other way out; there was no other honourable course, and if they had not honour, what did they have? He received considerable sympathy for having to watch his best friend and his family suffer so, but was adamant that despite the personal anguish it caused him it was the right thing to do; the rich could not be, and did not want to be, above the law.