Surface Detail

Sometimes when she did this she got the impression some of the other children thought she hadn’t seemed hurt enough, and they tried to hurt her some more, but then she would just tell them they were being immature. Leave it behind; move on; learn and progress. They were just about at the age when this sort of adult talk could be successfully used.

They played in the places they were supposed to play, places where nobody had said they couldn’t, and – best of all – in the places where they definitely weren’t supposed to play at all.

Of the latter, her favourite had always been the water maze: the complex of shallow channels, ponds and lakes where the adults played with big toy battleships and where they watched the mini -ature sea battles take place from all the big towers and soaring arches and canals in the air.

She had been allowed to watch one of the battles once with her mother, though it had taken a lot of nagging and her mother had had to ask it as a big favour and even then it wasn’t one of the really important battles with lots of rich and famous people watching, it was just a sort of trying out and testing sort of battle that people from the estate could watch sometimes if they didn’t have other duties. Her mother hadn’t enjoyed it because she didn’t like heights; she kept her eyes closed most of the time, her hands grasping the sides of the little flat-bottomed boat they rode around in on the canals in the sky.

Lededje had liked it at first but eventually got bored. She thought it would be more interesting if she could be inside one of the battleships herself rather than have to watch other people working them. Her mother, still without opening her eyes, told her that was a stupid idea. For one thing she was too small. And anyway, only men were stupid and aggressive enough to want to get inside those floating death-traps and be shot at with live ammunition for the entertainment of the spoiled rich.

In the distance, Lededje had seen one of the old dome plinths, busy with people. Teams of workmen with cranes and big vehicles full of electronics were dismantling all the sat domes, two dozen of which had surrounded the mansion house in a ring a couple of kilometres across for as long as she could remember. The first time she had run away, it had been at the foot of one of those stone-clad plinths she had been caught. That had been years and years and years ago; maybe half her life. Now the gleaming white satellite domes were useless and outdated and being dismantled.

Right there and then, for the first time, she felt herself growing old.

They had to wait to be allowed to dock at the little pier on one of the towers, then go down in the coffin-like elevator and through the tunnel that led safely away from the lake and the towers and the channels and the ships. You could hear the guns firing even from the house.

She and the other children – well, most of them; two were too frightened – used to sneak under the fence that went all the way round the water maze. They kept well away from the miniature docks where the ships were maintained and repaired. The docks were usually only busy for the few days around one of the big proper battles, but even on the quietest days there would be one or two grown-ups working there.

Misty days were best. It all looked very strange and mysterious and bigger somehow, as though the toy landscape of the channels and little lakes had grown to be the right bigness for full-size battleships. She had an old foametal plank for her ship; the others used various bits and pieces of plastic, foametal and wood as theirs. They learned how to tie and glue extra bits and scraps of other stuff that floated to their ships, or plastic bottles or that sort of thing, to make them float better. They hid their ships in the reeds so they wouldn’t get caught.

They had their own races, battles and games of group-tag and hide-and-seek. When they had proper battles they threw lumps of earth and mud at each other. One time it was almost dark before they heard adults calling for them. The others said she only won that one because she was black as the night.

A couple of their ships were found one time when somebody doing something to one of the flat-bottom boats in the sky canals saw them playing. Those two ships were taken away and they all got a lecture about danger and Unexploded Munitions. They solemnly promised not to do it again, and watched as the hole in the fence they’d got in through was wired up. It was okay because they’d already found another hole further round.

After that they were supposed to carry comms – kid-phones – that told the adults where they were at all times but a couple of the older kids had shown everybody how to turn them off completely or make them give out signals that said they were a hundred metres away from where they really were.