Iain Banks - Surface Detail

Orbitals could be moved, and some were, but it was an excruciatingly long-winded business. There was even, for this whole shifting-out-of-danger procedure, what was effectively a thing called a “waiting list”; a term and concept many devoutly pampered Culture citizens had some trouble getting entirely to grips with.

Regardless; having lots of pleasantly fitted-out buildings which could double as luxury lifeboats suddenly made unimpeachable sense. Even Orbitals almost certainly unreachably far away from the conflict took up the new construction trend, and giant skyscrapers, usually reassuringly sleek and ship-like in form, blossomed like colossal suddenly fashionable plants across the Culture’s Orbitals.

Distributed Cities came about when it was realised that even having the buildings/ships physically close to each other on the surface of an O was unwise, should an attack take place. Keeping them far apart from each other made the enemy’s targeting similarly distributed and confused. Fast, dedicated traveltube lines, in hard vacuum under the O’s outer surface, connected the buildings of any city cluster preferentially and directly, making the average journey time between buildings of any given city as quick or quicker than walking a conventional city block.

The absolute need to live in such cities or even such buildings had long since passed, unless you were cautious to the point of neuroticism, even paranoia, but the fashion still ebbed and flowed a little and throughout the fifty trillion people and many millions of Orbitals in the Culture there would always be enough people and Orbitals who still liked the idea for it never entirely to disappear. Some people just felt safer in a building that could casually survive even the destruction of an Orbital. Yime was one such person. It was why she lived in this building, and on this Orbital.

She combed her hair slowly, thoughtfully, looking out of the porthole window but not really seeing the view. She thought Costrile was not a particularly good supervisor for even a part of an Orbital’s emergency militia force. Ineffective. Altogether too lackadaisical. It was disgraceful that hardly anybody on most Orbitals even knew that such organisations existed. Even here, on staid, careful, buttoned-up, backed-up, fastened-down and just plain cautious Dinyol-hei, almost nobody was interested in such things. They were all too busy having fun. Attempts had been made before to get people more involved in last-ditch Orbital defence techniques, but to little avail. It was as though people just didn’t want to think about such things. When it was obviously so important. Odd.

Perhaps the problem was that it had been so long since there had been a proper, thorough-going war. It had been fifteen hundred years since the Idiran conflict; within living human memory for only the most determinedly so-called Immortalists, of whom there were surpassing few and who were anyway usually too obsessed with themselves to care about warning others what real warfare was like. Minds and drones who’d been involved were also surprisingly reluctant to share their experiences. Still, there had to be a way. The whole approach needed shaking up, and she might be just the person to make it happen. She doubted Costrile was up to it. Why, he hadn’t even bothered to reply in kind when she’d signed off with “Strength in depth”. How rude! She decided she would have to see about deposing Mr. Costrile from his post and having herself elected in his place.

One hundred and twenty-five, one hundred and twenty-six… She had almost reached her set number of morning hair-brushings. Yime had thick, lustrous brown hair which she kept in what was called an Eye cut, every hair on her head kept at a length such that when it was pulled round towards either eye, it was just too short either to obstruct her field of vision or otherwise cause annoyance.

A chime from her terminal, in the shape of a slim pen lying on another table, interrupted her reverie of power. She realised with an undignified lurch in her insides that the particular tone the terminal had used meant it was a call from Quietus.

She might actually be going to work.

Even so, she completed the last two hair-brushing strokes before answering.

One had to have rules.

In Valley 308, which was part of the Thrice Flayed Footprint district of the Pavulean Hell, level three, there was an old-fashioned mill with a tall external over-shot wheel, powered by blood. It was part of the punishment of some of the virtual souls in that place that each day they be profusely bled for as long as they could without falling unconscious. There were many thousands of such unfortunates to be bled during each session and they were duly dragged screaming from their nearby pens by grotesquely formed, irresistibly powerful demons and strapped to canted iron tables with drains at their foot. These tables were arranged in serried ranks on the steep banks of the arid valley, which, had one been able to look at it from far enough above, would have been revealed as a ridge forming part of a truly gigantic footprint; hence the district’s name.

The once very important person to whom the flayed hand belonged was still, in some sense, alive, and suffered every moment from having had their skin removed. They suffered in a magnified sense, too, concomitant with their pelt having been so grotesquely scale-exaggerated that a single ridge on one of their feet — or paws, there being some fairly irrelevant disagreement concerning the correct terminology — was now vast enough to form part of the landscape on which so many others lived their post-death lives and suffered the multitudinous torments which had been prescribed them.

The released blood from the iron tables ran glutinously down pipes and runnels to the stream bed where it collected, flowed downhill as liquids are prone to do, even in entirely virtual environments, and ran — with increasing vigour and force as the blood of more and more sufferers paid tribute to the stream — down to a deep, wide pool. Even there, bound by the synthetic rules of the Hell, it resolutely refused to coagulate. From the header pool a broad channel directed it to the summit of the mill’s wheel.

The wheel was constructed of many, many ancient bones, long bleached white by the action of the acid or alkali rains that fell every few days and caused such torment to the people held in the pens upstream. The wheel turned on bearings made of cartilage laced with the nerves of yet more of the condemned whose bodies had been woven into the fabric of the building, each creaking, groaning revolution of the wheel producing seemingly unbearable agony. Other sufferers made up the roof slates with their oversized, painfully sensitised nails — they too dreaded the harrowing rains, which stung with every drop — or the mill’s thin walls with their painfully stretched skins, or its supporting beams with their protesting bones, or its creaking gears and cogs, every tooth of which hurt as though riddled with disease, every stressed and straining bone bar and shaft of which would have screamed had they possessed voices.

Far beyond, beneath boiling dark skies, the stream gave out onto a great blood marsh where sufferers planted and rooted like stunted trees drowned again and again with every acidic rain and each fresh wash of blood.

Much of the time, the mill didn’t even use the flow of blood collecting in its upstream pool; the fluid simply went on down the overflow and back to the stream bed on its way to the dark swamp in the distance beneath the darkly livid, lowering skies.

And besides, the mill powered nothing; the little energy it produced when it did deign to function went entirely to waste. Its whole purpose and point was to add to the excruciation of those unfortunate enough to find themselves within Hell.