Surface Detail
Chapters - Iain M. Banks
Chapter 1
Lededje Y'breq, the bodymarked Intagliate property of Joiler Veppers, is hunted through the fly tower of his opera house by Veppers, his security chief Jasken (wearing Enhancing Oculenses), and Dr Sulbazghi. Pressed against a scenery flat above the stage, she edges along a narrow ledge, stalling Veppers with feigned surrender. When the lights come on and the ledge breaks, she stabs two stolen antique knives into the canvas to arrest her fall. The carousel rotates the wrong way, letting her climb to a rooftop set, where Jasken's tranquilliser dart drops her into the fake star-net. Coming round before her captors expect, she bites the tip off Veppers's nose and swallows it. Enraged, Veppers straddles her and stabs the knives into her throat and heart on the hard surface beneath the carousel rooftop set.
POV: Lededje Y'breq·On page: Joiler Veppers, Jasken, Sulbazghi
Chapter 2
Conscript Vatueil, demoted from the cavalry to the Third Expeditionary Sappers for insubordination, toils in a mining tunnel beneath a besieged castle. Bullied by a junior captain, he breaks through into a dressed-stone water conduit feeding the fortress. Brought before the colonel and majors, he suggests the channel supplies the castle's wells and volunteers for the exploratory party. Twenty men wade up the conduit past iron bars and sloped sections to a locked grating, which they prise open. As they raise it, hidden bottles of poison gas drop and shatter on stepping blocks below; the cloud kills the lead tunneller and the others flee, doomed by the bars behind. Vatueil alone heaves the grating up and forces himself through to clean air. He surrenders at the castle's far end, tells everything, is tortured to confirm it, and is finally trussed and fired from the great trebuchet, landing near his old comrades.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe
Chapter 3
Yime Nsokyi finds herself the last gunner firing as her Orbital is overwhelmed: the Hub is destroyed by a CAM burst, ships are picked off by Line-guns, defensive Nodes are knocked out, and waves of unmarked attack craft pop into being only thousands of kilometres away. She fights an antique plasma turret via neural lace, watches her comrades' tell-tales turn red one by one, then a skull-faced six-legged machine smashes the diamond blister and announces "Drill over!" The scenario was a militia simulation. Yime complains to her supervisor Hvel Costrile that the drill was punishing and pointless, and objects to being given a simulated neural lace she would never accept. She lives in a ship-shaped building of the Distributed City of Irwal on the Orbital Dinyol-hei, brushing her hair carefully, considering ousting Costrile, when her terminal chimes with a call from Quietus. She finishes her last two strokes before answering.
POV: Yime Nsokyi
Chapter 4
In Valley 308 of the Pavulean virtual Hell, a mill powered by the blood of the bled-out damned secretly operates one of the few gates leading back to the Real. Two small Pavuleans, Prin and his despairing mate Chay, hide beneath a corpse-laden cheval de frise nearby. Chay insists Hell is the only reality and refuses to hope; Prin pleads with her to remember they are code, sent in to gather evidence, and that the barbed-wire necklaces they wear contain contraband code that will briefly disguise them as demons. A beetle-shaped flier lands and disgorges a tour group of eight live Pavuleans escorted by demons. As osteophagers approach their hiding place, Chay refuses to trigger her barb and presses it the wrong way; Prin pulls his own and transforms into a giant predator demon. He bluffs the osteophager into yielding "his" prey, scoops up the catatonic Chay, and bounds across the bloody stream up the hillside towards the mill.
Chapter 5
Lededje wakes in what proves to be a Culture simulation, occupying a pale, unmarked body that horrifies her absent intagliation. The avatar Sensia, of the GSV Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amidst Folly, explains that Lededje arrived undocumented via a one-way entanglement event from a legacy system. Sensia gently restores her edited memories: her birth as an Intagliate trophy paying off her father's debt to Veppers, her mother's tattooing and suicide, the years of rape, her runs for freedom, and her murder in the opera house. Lededje recalls a Jhlupian reception years earlier where the alien Himerance, secretly the avatar of the Eccentric ship Me, I'm Counting, asked permission to take a 4D image of her and, in payment for her saying "surprise me," planted the neural-lace seed that has now saved her. Sensia offers to revent her in a fresh Sichultian body, eight days or so to grow, and arrange passage home. Lededje accepts, privately resolving to kill Veppers.
POV: Lededje Y'breq·On page: Sensia·Mentioned: Himerance, Joiler Veppers, Jasken, Sulbazghi
Chapter 6
Carrying the petrified Chay, Prin in his stolen demon body bursts into the blood-powered mill as the beetle flier lifts off. Inside, six demons stand with the remaining tour Pavuleans before the blue glowing gateway. He hears a mill demon count "Three" as two male Pavuleans are released and scuttle through. The countdown reveals the gate is rationed: only a set number may return to the Real. The warning barbs in his neck tell him his contraband code is about to expire. Prin charges, headbutting one mill demon aside and crushing another's body in his jaws, hurling it into a third. As he leaps for the blue mist with only one transit left, he shoves Chay out in front of him so she will go through rather than him, choosing to stay behind and face whatever punishment follows. The code runs out mid-leap; he reverts to his small broken body an instant before the two Pavulean forms tumble into the gateway together.
POV: Prin·On page: Chay, Lededje Y'breq, Sensia
Chapter 7
Aboard his rolling mansion-vehicle, the Wheel Halo 7, Veppers floats in a summit pool with Jasken in attendance, his nose still healing under a prosthetic after Lededje bit off the tip. He recalls the cover story Sulbazghi invented (a fencing accident) and how he made Jasken wear a fake arm cast to balance the tale. He has Jasken tip the Impressionist harem girl Pleur into the pool for his amusement, then breaks off when Dr Sulbazghi arrives by flier with highest urgency. In the lounge Sulbazghi shows him a small bunch of silvery filaments recovered from the hospital furnace where Lededje's body was cremated: a neural lace, Culture technology, illegally grown inside her brain. Jasken and Sulbazghi argue over whether her mind-state could have been transmitted at death, and recommend consulting the Jhlupian honorary consul Xingre. Veppers asks his secretary to assess relations with the Culture, told they are "Nebulous," and orders Jasken to investigate. The Wheel rolls down a beach into the Oligyne Inland Sea, and Veppers feels a faint nausea he expects to pass.
POV: Joiler Veppers·On page: Jasken, Sulbazghi·Mentioned: Lededje Y'breq
Chapter 8
In an Abandoned Space Factory above a blue-and-white planet, Captain Vatueil sits inside an Armoured Combat Unit, fighting because his download was incomplete and he no longer recognises any superior without the correct codes. He has already killed a trooper called Xagao and ignores pleas from Major Q'naywa to stand down. Between firefights, Vatueil watches the planet's whorls and finds them beautiful. Interspersed is the wider context: the galactic War in Heaven over the Hells, fought as a simulation overseen by the Ishlorsinami, which the anti-Hell side is losing. Vatueil dispatches several attackers - Xagao, Drueser, Gulton, Koviuk, Q'naywa - but is pinned by wreckage and eventually blown into the atmosphere to burn up. He awakens in the Primary Strategic Situation Overview Space, and in the Trapeze sub-committee the holdout Blue finally agrees to cheat: hack, infiltrate, sabotage. The council later votes to abandon this asteroid battle by one vote. He feels little, only the weight of another betrayal.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe
Chapter 9
Lededje sits with the avatar Sensia on a cliff edge inside a fifteen-kilometre canyon carved into the General Systems Vehicle Sense Amid Madness, Wit Amongst Folly, taking in the ship's scale. She has been revented into a fresh body shaped to look Sichultian, and tests her new senses. She asks about getting back to Sichult. Sensia agrees to arrange passage but imposes a condition: a slap-drone escort, because Sensia suspects Lededje means to kill Joiler Veppers in revenge for her murder. Lededje argues Veppers deserves to die; Sensia refuses to collude but explains the appeals route through informed Culture opinion. Lededje reluctantly acquiesces. The scene shifts to Yime Nsokyi, formally dressed in her apartment, met by the avatar drone of the GCU Bodhisattva, OAQS, who Displaces her aboard. Then Prin wakes on a houseboat clinic, back from Hell, to find Chay's body unresponsive beside him - she did not follow him through the portal. The team Irkun, Biath, Yolerre and Sulte debate whether to wake Chay's untouched backup or leave her sleeping; Prin chooses to wake her, but cannot face her, and leaves before she does. Aboard the GSV, Yime is briefed: about Joiler Veppers, the Tsungarial Disk of three hundred million abandoned fabricaria around Razhir, the Nauptre Reliquaria and GFCF, the confliction edging towards a pro-Hell victory, possibly spilling into the Real. The complications are Lededje Y'breq, possibly revented after Veppers murdered her, and a smatter infestation that keeps Restoria stationed at the Disk. The link between Lededje and the GSV may be the wandering Hooligan-class Me, I'm Counting, thought to be with the GSV Total Internal Reflection.
POV: Lededje Y'breq·On page: Sensia·Mentioned: Joiler Veppers
Chapter 10
Lededje resolves to make the most of her one night on the GSV. At Divinity In Extremis, a loud Chug-music drug bar, she picks up an attractive young man called Admile, who throws her terminal ring away. He introduces her to Jolicci, the fat avatar of the GCU Armchair Traveller, who is cheating at a coin trick. She tells Jolicci she wants a disreputable ship, not the boring The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory that Sensia has arranged. Earlier, alone in her room, she researched ships and Special Circumstances and left messages with SC-linked vessels. A cross woman returns the still-talking ring. Jolicci takes her body surfing on a water slide and then to an antique elevator-shaft re-creation, where he jumps between moving cars and frightens her, making the point that SC ships can feel like the bad guys even when they are on the side of the angels. He warns her, then agrees to introduce her to one. Meanwhile aboard the Bodhisattva, Yime is briefed about the Forgotten or Oubliettionaries - ships that quietly listen to broadcasts in case the Culture is wiped out. The Total Internal Reflection is probably one, ferrying a population of severe-retreat humans, with its next rendezvous in eighteen days at the Semsarine Wisp. Yime accepts the mission. Jolicci takes Lededje to a war-porn club aboard the Hidden Income to meet Demeisen, avatar of the SC General Offensive Unit Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints. Demeisen, cadaverous and with splinted fingers, mocks Lededje, dismisses her plea to kill Veppers as melodrama, then reveals the human inside the avatar is a competition winner who took the gig voluntarily and whom Demeisen is happily torturing as an Abominator-class lesson. Lededje storms out, decides to take the boring ship after all, and asks Jolicci to help her arrange a meaningless sexual encounter.
POV: Lededje Y'breq·On page: Jolicci, Yime Nsokyi, Demeisen·Mentioned: Sensia, Joiler Veppers
Chapter 11
At Espersium, Veppers greets weekend guests - Auer and Fuleow, Sapultride and his wife Jeussere, Raunt and Hilfe, Peschl - aboard slim barges on the estate's aqueducts. His nose, bitten off by Lededje, is still healing under a gold cover, and Jasken's arm is in a sling. Veppers boasts and trades barbs about the duel. He announces his miniature naval battle: small armoured warships piloted by his staff, each crewed by one man pedalling and aiming guns through slits, fighting on the watery maze below. Bets are placed. Background is given on Espersium's torus-shaped mansion, its size, and the family fortune built on screen games, virtual realities and the Veprine Corporation. Two ships engage in a T-junction, then two others collide and fight at point-blank range, blasting each other's command citadels. Mid-battle Jasken signals that an alien craft has landed at the house. Veppers hands command to Sapultride and returns with Jasken and Doctor Sulbazghi to a shielded sub-basement room to meet Xingre, the Jhlupian. Xingre returns the device taken from Lededje's body and confirms it is a Level Eight (Player) Culture neural lace, with one-time signalling capacity already used. It probably transmitted her mind-state elsewhere, and the Culture can revent her. Veppers drops the lace onto a glass table; it falls slowly and silently. Back at the battle, Sapultride tells him both his ships were sunk.
POV: Joiler Veppers·On page: Jasken, Sulbazghi, Xingre·Mentioned: Lededje Y'breq
Chapter 12
Sensia introduces Lededje to her slap-drone, Chanchen Kallier-Falpise Barchen-dra dren-Skoyne, known as Kall or KP. The previous night's lover Shokas clings on at the farewell, then leaves. Demeisen turns up to release the human host inside his avatar body in front of Lededje, Sensia and Jolicci; the bewildered man cannot remember being an avatar at all. Lededje boards the Fast Picket The Usual But Etymologically Unsatisfactory for a ninety-day journey to Sichult, settling into a generous cabin with a billow bed and dismissing Kallier-Falpise for privacy. She wakes to find a simulated Demeisen sitting cross-legged in her cabin, having hacked the ship's privacy. He offers to take her home in twenty-nine days with no slap-drone, warning that Contact will try to distract her with news of the Me, I'm Counting at the Semsarine Wisp. He refuses to help her kill Veppers but admits he is heading that way anyway, and reveals he is broadly part of Special Circumstances. Next morning, when the ship-drone and Kallier-Falpise mention the Semsarine Wisp, Lededje asks to be put through to the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints. Over Kallier-Falpise's protests she agrees to transfer ships. Demeisen agrees that Kallier-Falpise will come too; both are Displaced together. Mid-Displace Demeisen's warship snatches Lededje alone, leaving Kallier-Falpise spat back at the Fast Picket along with the surveillance tech it had planted on her. The ship-drone and slap-drone call Demeisen a meatfucker as the SC warship vanishes.
POV: Lededje Y'breq·On page: Sensia, Demeisen, Jolicci, Kallier-Falpise, Prin, Chay
Chapter 13
Vatueil, now in the form of a tissue-thin organism designed to slip through flaws in the pressure ice of a water planet, leads a crack platoon of thirty marines on a sabotage mission to destroy an enemy core. He commands by electrochemical signalling through the linked net of bodies. An ice-quake squeezes them; Corporal Byozuel kills the first guard. A second, larger quake kills Captain Meavaje and four others. They drop down a new fissure. Byozuel is fatally wounded by a guard from a side-crevice and stays behind to cover retreat. They spot green light below: the core. Outnumbered by guards swarming up, they take losses to barbed nets, poisons and electric jolts, but six break through, releasing solvent and falling as dark spearheads into a vast spherical space above an alien glowing landscape they have come to destroy. On Pavul, Representative Filhyn debates Representative Errun in the Senate; Errun insists the Pavulean Hell does not really exist and that any genuine afterlife is God's business. Filhyn flounders, but her aide Kemracht tells her a witness has been found. At lunch in a mud wallow, Errun confides that the Hells are merely a threat to keep citizens honest, and that some condemned souls are simply deleted, not stored. In the afternoon Special Witness Session, Prin testifies about Hell: forced nudity, sanctioned rape, war as the only social structure, repeated deaths, sadist demons copied to order. Errun cross-examines viciously, then springs the trap by asking where Prin's wife is. Prin answers that he left his beloved Chay behind, and that he kept silent about her because he fears an offer to return her in exchange for retraction - an offer he is afraid he would accept. The chamber erupts; the Speaker rears up on his hind legs. Filhyn, weeping openly, becomes famous for her tears.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Filhyn, Errun·Mentioned: Prin
Chapter 14
Joiler Veppers takes the aircraft out over the Espersium estate for a bird-shoot with Jasken, the Sapultride girl Crederre and the actress Lehktevi. Crederre slips into his lap as the flier banks over the lake, and Veppers takes their courtship as another acquisition by another route.
POV: Joiler Veppers·On page: Jasken, Crederre
Chapter 15
Without Prin beside her, Chay wanders the lower levels of the Pavulean Hell alone. Two demons named Klomestrum and Ruriel take her up out of the worst of it - a 'rescue' that turns out to be the latest cruelty. They deliver her to the lantern-headed Prime Demon of the Surrogate, who kills her in front of the others to demonstrate that hope, once cultivated, is the most efficient torture of all.
POV: Chay·Mentioned: Kallier-Falpise, Joiler Veppers
Chapter 16
Fifteen days into the journey to Sichult aboard the Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints, Demeisen offers Lededje a gift that looks like a neural lace but is, he claims, a tattoo. He demonstrates by letting the silvery-blue filaments flow over his own skin, taking on swirls, angular patterns, mirror silver, soot black or any motif on command. Lededje, who has been studying Veppers and rehearsing how to seduce and kill him, accepts. The tat flows from his palm onto her arm, then over her whole body, settling close to her vagina and anus without covering them. She tests it: it can support her breasts, vanish to skin tone, or harden into a protective grid against a poke to the eye. Demeisen warns it will not save her from a long fall. Lededje hugs the avatar in thanks, considers but does not pursue him as a lover.
POV: Yime Nsokyi·Mentioned: Lededje Y'breq, Joiler Veppers, Himerance
Chapter 17
The GCU Bodhisattva carries Quietus agent Yime Nsokyi into the Semsarine Wisp to rendezvous at an Unfallen Bulbitian, a vast double-cake habitat whose AI is reputedly mad and linked to the Sublimed. She is met by Fal Dvelner of the Numina team, then by Nopri, her local Quietus contact, who admits cheerfully he has already been killed and revented twenty-three times trying to talk to the Bulbitian. That night Yime dreams she is a marionette and is drawn to the singularity at the structure's core. The Bulbitian confesses it is a conduit for the Sublimed, fears an anti-Hell attack on Bulbitians as suspected Hell-substrates, and notices she carries an unconventional neural lace planted by Special Circumstances. The conversation ends in a violent ambush: the ship-drone and a knife missile are blown apart by violet bolts, Yime is Displaced back aboard the Bodhisattva, scalped and burned. The ship accelerates hard and goes to total. Meanwhile Vatueil, having watched his hack attempt on the enemy fail and after being killed by Dr Miejeyar in the impossible-tree sim, meets the Trapeze group; they vote to take the war into the Real.
POV: Joiler Veppers·On page: Jasken·Mentioned: Xingre
Chapter 18
Veppers storms into Culture ambassador Kreit Huen's office in Ubruater and slams down the burnt remains of the neural lace pulled from Lededje, demanding to know why the Culture is spying on his people. Huen, her child playing pretend-shooting behind a couch, plays unruffled. She asks how Lededje died, whether there was a note. Veppers says suicide and leaves, telling Jasken to answer further questions. Once he is gone, Huen confirms with Jasken that there was no note, then with her drone Olfes-Hresh that Jasken's nose injury is real but his arm was never broken and the cast is hinged. The drone reads the lace as SC-grade tech. Above the city the Jhlupian cruiser waits to take Veppers away. Then Chay wakes in the Refuge, a clifftop convent of celibate females copying manuscripts in a pre-industrial world. Threatened with starvation if she denies God, she conforms. Years pass: she sleeps in dormitories, sings chants, survives a fire that kills sixteen sisters - ten lost to smoke and flames trying to save manuscripts, six more when a fire-weakened wing later collapses - starts a secret diary using charred-timber ink in a salvaged blank book, rises through the hierarchy, becomes Superior, grows wizened and frail. She dies of old age in her bed as an angel comes for her.
POV: Cheradenine Zakalwe·On page: Kreit Huen
Chapter 19
The Jhlupian heavy cruiser Ucalegon delivers Veppers to Iobe Cavern City on Vebezua in under two days. In a tethered flier he badgers his Jhlupian friend Xingre and a navy lieutenant about buying a warship; they refuse, citing policy and treaties against over-runging technology. Veppers is taken to Mercury Lake, a cavern half-full of simmering liquid metal where surveillance is impossible. In a paper boat, masked and hose-linked, he meets a Nauptre Reliquarian, 200.59 Risytcin, and the Flekkian Functionary-General Chruw Slude Zsor. They warn of an anti-Hell intrusion possibly routing through the Tsungarial Disk and seek his cooperation; he agrees in principle, subject to price. The Reliquarian slips a tracker into Jasken's Oculenses. That night Veppers orders Jasken to stay behind and make himself memorable, sedates his companion Pleur with a drug-bulb disguised as an insect, takes a private underground car to an old mine, and boards a stealthed GFCF shuttle. Aboard the GFCF Messenger Of Truth, Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III shows him a one-point-zero-one-two-five scale copy of a Culture Murderer-class warship, gold-hulled and named Joiler Veppers, capable of 129,000 lights in bursts. Bettlescroy presses him to accept the gift.
POV: Lededje Y'breq·On page: Demeisen, Himerance·Mentioned: Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints
Chapter 20
Aboard the Messenger Of Truth, Bettlescroy takes Veppers to the Tsungarial Disk, registers at the Initial Contact Facility past the Culture Fast Picket Hylozoist, then shuttles him to an unremarkable fabricary. A recording plays: clockwork-like machines in a web of filaments grow a fully working six-hundred-metre warship in nine to fifteen days. Bettlescroy reveals that up to roughly 230 million such ships could be built across the Disk's fabricaria, and around fifty million would be enough to overwhelm the Hell-substrates by sheer numbers on suicide runs. The whole operation will be framed on the Culture. Meanwhile Chay wakes in Hell as a great winged predator hanging in a giant fleshy fruit. She flies out, finds she cannot pierce the iron sky, wheels over the battlefield, and is led by a beetle-thing to the lantern-headed king of demons. He shows her Prin's face briefly to taunt her, then commands her to kill one suffering soul per day, permanently. The hunger to kill will gnaw at her if she refuses, and she will absorb a fraction of each victim's pain. That evening she finds a young female impaled on a cheval de frise, enfolds her in her wings, kills her and eats from the body. She has become an angel in Hell. Back on the Messenger Of Truth, Veppers, Bettlescroy, other GFCF and a hologram of Space-Marshal Vatueil agree the plan: the GFCF will stage a fake smatter outbreak to distract the Culture while the fabricaria build the fleet. All they still need from Veppers is the locations of the Hell substrates.