Surface Detail

For all that she had no real heart or mouth, that all this was a simulation, she felt her heart leap, her mouth start to go dry. “That is possible?”

“Possible, advisable, kind of standard in such situations.” Sensia gave a sort of throttled-back laugh and waved out at the desert. As she swept her arm across the view, Lededje caught brief glimpses of what she guessed were other virtual worlds within or alongside this one: great gleaming cities, a mountain range at night criss-crossed with a tangle of tubes and lights, a vast ship or mobile city sailing on a creamy white sea beneath a cerulean sky, a limitless-looking vista of nothing but air full of vast striped trees like green-blue curlicues, and views and structures that she saw but could hardly have described, which she guessed were possible in a virtual reality but impractical in what Sensia blithely called the Real. Then the desert resumed. “You could stay here, of course,” Sensia told Lededje. “In whatever environment or mix of them you find congenial, but I’d expect you might want a real physical body.”

Lededje nodded. Her mouth was still dry. Could it really be this easy? “I think,” she said, “I would.”

“Sensible. There are, believe me, innumerable other things you could be revented into, in theory, but if I were you I’d stick with the form you’re used to, at first at least. Context is everything, and the first context we find ourselves in is that of our own body.” She looked Lededje down and up. “You happy with the way you look now?”

Lededje opened the blue robe she still wore, looked down at herself. She closed the robe again. Its hems fluttered in the hot breeze. “Yes.” She hesitated. “I can’t decide if I want some form of tattoo or not.”

“Easy to add later, though not at the genetic level you’ve been used to. Can’t really sort you out with that. That info didn’t travel.” Sensia shrugged. “I’ll leave you with an image you can manipulate until you’re happy with it, take a spec from that.”

“You’ll grow a body for me?”

“Complete a suspended one.”

“How long will that take?”

“Here, as little or as much time as you like. In the Real, about eight days.” Sensia shrugged again. “My standard stock of mindless bods doesn’t include the Sichultian form – sorry.”

“Is there a body I could be put into now, without waiting?”

Sensia smiled. “Can’t wait, eh?”

Lededje shook her head, felt her skin grow warm. The truth was that if this was some cruel joke, she wanted to know as quickly as possible. If it was all genuine then she didn’t want to wait to have a real body to take her back to Sichult.

“It’ll still take about a day or so,” Sensia said. She nodded at a female human figure suddenly suspended in the air in front of them; naked, eyes closed. It looked vaguely Sichultian. Its skin was a sort of muddy grey. Then it changed to pure black, then to near white, then shifted through a modest spectrum of different colours. At the same time the girth and height of the figure increased and then decreased. The shape of the head and the facial features changed a little too. “That’s the parameters you can play with, given the time available,” Sensia told her.

Lededje was thinking. She recalled Veppers’ own skin tone. “How long might it take to make it look properly Sichultian, and not black, but sort of reddish-gold?”

Sensia’s eyes might have narrowed a fraction. “A few hours more; a full day in total perhaps. You’d look Sichultian, but you wouldn’t really be so all the way through, not inside. A blood test, tissue sample or almost any invasive medical procedure would quickly reveal that.”

“That’s all right. I think that’s what I’d like,” Lededje said. She looked Sensia in the eye. “I have no money to pay for this.” She had heard that the Culture survived without money, but hadn’t believed a word of it.

“That’s as well,” Sensia said reasonably, “I have no charge to levy.”

“You would do this out of kindness, or for my obligation?”

“Let’s call it kindness, but it’s my pleasure.”

“Then, thank you,” Lededje said. She bowed formally. Sensia smiled. “I would also,” Lededje said, “need to work my passage back to Sichult.”

Sensia nodded. “I’m sure that can be arranged. Though the word ‘work’ doesn’t really mean quite the same in the Culture as it does in the Enablement.” Sensia paused. “May I ask what you intend to do when you get back?”

Kill Mr. Joiler Fucking Veppers, of course, Lededje thought grimly. And-… but there were some things, some thoughts which were so secret, so potentially dangerous, she had learned in effect to keep them even from herself.

She smiled, wondered if this friendly-seeming virtual creature could read her thoughts, in here.

“I have business to conclude there,” she said smoothly.

Sensia nodded, expressionless.

They both looked out towards the desert again.

Six