Surface Detail

No doubt this Chay, this one who had never seen Hell, would feel injured by his actions, and not understand how he could be so cruel to her, but then he had seen what real hurt and real cruelty was, and the person that he was now could never pretend that what had happened to the two of them in Hell had somehow not taken place, and changed who he was for ever.

The room where Lededje had woken, to see Sensia sitting outside on the balcony, was hers for as long as she stayed on the ship. After their tour in a small, very quiet aircraft – the GSV was appropriately mind-boggling from every external angle and internal corridor – Sensia had dropped Lededje off nearby, where one of the kilometres-long internal corridors abutted one of the little stepped valleys of accommodation units, given her a long, silvery and elaborate ring – a thing called a terminal that let her talk to the ship – then left her to find her own way back to the room and otherwise sort herself out. Sensia said she’d be a call away, happy to be a guide, companion or whatever. In the meantime, she imagined Lededje might want to rest, or just have some time to herself.

The ring fitted itself to Lededje’s longest finger and gave spoken directions back to her room. One wall of the room acted as a screen and allowed apparently unrestricted access to the ship’s equivalent of the Sichultian datasphere. She sat, started asking questions.

“Welcome aboard,” said the avatar drone of the Bodhisattva. “May I take your bag?”

Yime nodded. Instead of the avatar taking it from her, the bag simply disappeared from her hand, leaving the skin on her fingers with a tingling feeling. She wobbled on her feet and almost staggered as the bag’s weight was suddenly removed from that side of her body, leaving her unbalanced. “You’ll find it in your cabin,” the avatar said.

“Thank you.” Yime looked down. She was standing on nothing. It felt like a very hard nothing, but – just looking – there didn’t seem to be anything beneath her feet except stars arranged in familiar-looking wispy sprays and whorls. Stars to the sides, too. Above her, a vast dark presence; a ceiling of polished black reflecting the stars shining beneath her feet. Looking straight up, she saw a ghost-pale version of herself, looking straight back down.

Beneath, she recognised the patterns of the stars as those visible from her home Orbital of Dinyol-hei. Though given that she had just left her apartment in the later afternoon, these were not the stars she’d have expected to see if they’d simply moved straight down from her apartment to the part of the Orbital beneath where she lived. The ship was obviously some distance further away. She felt pleased with herself to have worked this out so quickly.

“Do you need time to freshen up, adjust, orientate yourself or otherwise-?” the drone began.

“No,” Yime said. She stood as she had before, though with feet spread a little. “May we begin?”

“Yes. Your full attention, please,” the Bodhisattva said.

Your full attention. Yime felt mildly insulted. Still, this was Quietus. It was known for its air of formal austerity and a degree of implicit asceticism. If you didn’t like the discipline involved in most things Quietudinal you shouldn’t have signed up in the first place.

There was a spiteful rumour, seemingly incapable of being entirely laid to rest, that the more recently manifested specialist divisions of the Culture’s Contact section were only there to provide substitute employment niches for those desperate but unable to make the cut and get into Special Circumstances itself.

Contact was the part of the Culture that handled more or less every aspect of the Culture’s interactions with everything and everybody that wasn’t the Culture, from the investigation of unexplored star systems to relations with the entire panoply of other civilisations at every developmental level, from those still unable to scrape together the plan for a world government or a functioning space elevator to the elegantly otiose but nevertheless potentially deeply powerful Elders and the still more detached-from-reality Sublimed, where any vestige or trace of such exotic entities remained.

Special Circumstances was, in effect, the Contact section’s espionage wing.

There had always been specialist sub-divisions within the organisational behemoth that was Contact. Special Circumstances was only the most obvious and, uniquely, it had been formally separate almost since its inception; largely because it sometimes did the sort of things the people who were proud to be part of Contact would have been horrified to have been remotely associated with.

As time had passed though, especially over the last half-thousand years or so, Contact itself had seen fit to introduce various re -organisations and rationalisations which had resulted in the creation of three other specialist divisions, of which the Quietudinal Service was one.