Iain Banks - Surface Detail

The avatar held one arm straight out and the tattoo — glinting, pristine — uncurled itself from Veppers’ body, spiralling lazily up into the air like a twister-wind in a stubble field and wrapping itself round the avatar’s hand like spun mercury, disappearing as it flowed over his skin and up his arm.

“Was that thing alive all the time?” she asked.

“Yup. Not just alive; intelligent. So fucking smart it’s even got a name.”

She held up one hand while he was drawing his next breath. “I’m sure it has,” she said. “But… spare me.”

Demeisen grinned. “Slap-drone, personal protection, weapon; all of the above,” he said, stretching again, as though the tattoo had spread itself all over him and he was testing how it fitted his body.

He looked down at her.

“You ready to go back? If you’re coming back?”

She sat, arms out behind her, blood in one eye, aching everywhere, feeling like shit. She nodded. “I suppose.”

“Want this?” offering her the knife handle first.

“Better,” she said, taking it, then struggling to her feet, helped by his other hand. “Family heirloom.” She looked at the avatar, frowning. “There were two,” she said.

He shook his head, tsk ed, stooped and pulled the other knife from where it had stuck in the ground. He took the double sheath from Veppers’ jacket, presenting it and both blades to her with a bow.

A scale-model battleship, still tied-up to its quayside, on fire from stem to stern, lifted suddenly in the middle, breaking its back as it blew up, dispensing fire and flames, debris and shrapnel and angrily buzzing and whining shells and rockets all about. The first, keel-sundering gout of fire briefly lit up two silvery ovoids stood on their ends on a small low island nearby, before they vanished, almost as quickly as they had appeared.

Ambassador Huen jumped before she was pushed, as was traditional. Even the very limited amount of interfering she’d suggested and sanctioned was somewhat more than was strictly allowable in the circumstances. She resigned her post, went home, spent the next few years raising her son and the following couple of centuries not regretting what she’d done at all.

The Abominator-class picket ship Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints manifested at the Board Of Inquiry Into The Recent Events Around The Sichultian Enablement as a fabulously tattooed limping albino dwarf with a speech impediment and double incontinence. Quickly cleared of all but the most allowable and — for an Abominator-class — expected malfeasance, it returned to its usual stand-by task of punctuated loneliness, sitting, generally in the middle of cold nowhere, waiting for stuff to happen and trying not to be too disappointed when nothing did.

It received from its fellow Abominator-class and other SC ships precisely the sort of congratulations and plaudits it might have expected for its actions around Tsung and Quyn; all deeply tinged with envy. It treasured them almost as much as the exquisitely rendered recordings of the engagements.

It spent quite a lot of time in or around the larger classes of GSVs, just for the company. Its avatar Demeisen continued to behave appallingly.

Joiler Veppers’ reputation survived more or less intact for a few weeks, but then as the weeks became months and the months years, it all fell apart as stories of his cruelty, greed and selfishness, and the extent of his callousness towards his own people and even his own planet, became clear. It was over a decade before the first revisionist right-wing historian attempted to restore his reputation, and even then to no lasting effect.

Yime Nsokyi really had been an SC plant, deep within Quietus, for all that time, even if, in a sense, she hadn’t known it herself after she’d both agreed to be so and then consented to have the memory of that agreement deleted. In any event, given that even in one of the most successful Specialist Agencies-led interventions in recent centuries she had been largely relegated to a supporting role, she resigned from the Quietudinal Service. More in frustration than disgust, but she resigned all the same.

She returned to her adopted home Orbital and began a successful political career, starting with the position of emergency drill supervisor on her home Plate and eventually becoming the representative for the entire Orbital. As with all hierarchic positions within the Culture it was almost entirely an honorary, figurehead role, but she found the achievement highly satisfying all the same.

Her personal life ended up consisting of a sort of cycle of being neuter, female and male in turn, each for a decade or so. She found that she was able to establish tender, meaningful relationships — with an agreeable physical component when she was not neuter — at every stage, but would have been the first to admit that real passion and true love, if there was such a thing, always eluded her.

The ex-Limited Offensive Unit Me, I’m Counting returned briefly to the Forgotten GSV Total Internal Reflection , then resumed a life of galactic tramping. It found new hobbies.

Hibin Jasken served some time in prison for his complicity in a few of his late master’s better-publicised crimes, though his efforts to pick up survivors from the firestorm around the Espersium mansion and his full cooperation with the authorities helped reduce his final sentence.

On his release he became a security consultant and successful businessman, living relatively modestly and contributing most of what he earned to charitable causes, especially those concerned with orphaned and disadvantaged children. He was instrumental in the Wheel Halo VII being turned into a mobile holiday home for the dependants of the bankrupt and destitute, and was an ardent supporter of the moves, eventually successful, to end the practice of Indented Intagliation.

The GCU Bodhisattva , its Mind re-housed in a new-build Escarpment class, remained attached to the Quietus section but subsequently spent a lot of time investigating — very carefully — Fallen and Unfallen Bulbitians, thinking to present a paper on the entities at some point in the future.

Auppi Unstril was reunited with a revented, slightly changed Lanyares Tersetier. It didn’t last long.

Legislator-Admiral Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III came very close indeed to abject denunciation, demotion and utter ruin — both personal and familial — as the GFCF tried to decide whether all that had transpired regarding events within the Sichultian Enablement in general and the Tsungarial Disk in particular had been basically a thorough-going and unmitigated catastrophe or a sort of subtle triumph.

On the one hand the GFCF had lost influence and credibility, the Culture didn’t want to be their friend any more, they had been humiliated in an unexpectedly and appallingly one-sided naval encounter, they’d had to hand back the supervisory role in the Disk — to the Culture, of all people — and they had been informed in no uncertain terms by the NR that a close eye was going to be kept on them in future.

On the other hand it could have been worse. And arguably one way of making it worse would be to admit just how badly things had actually gone.

Bettlescroy-Bisspe-Blispin III was duly promoted to Prime Legislator-Grand-Admiral-of-the-Combined-Fleets and presented with several terribly impressive medals. He was put in charge of finding new ways to impress, reassure and — ultimately — imitate the Culture.

Chayeleze Hifornsdaughter, saved from Hell and torment after many subjective decades and the best part of two lifetimes, found herself rescued from the dormant remains of one of the Hells that had existed beneath the trackways of the Espersium estate on Sichult and placed into a Temporary Recuperative Afterlife in a substrate on her home planet of Pavul. She met Prin twice thereafter: the first time when he came to see her during her convalescence, and once much later.