Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks

complicated. They deferred to her, prioritised her own needs and wants over their own, seemed practically to worship her. She was their princess, their queen, almost their sacred goddess.
    It had changed gradually. She suspected her mother had used all the influence she possessed to protect her only child from the demeaning truth for as long as she’d been able, probably to the detriment of her own position and standing within the household.
    For the truth was that the Intagliate were more than just human exotica. They were both more, and less, than extravagant ornamentations in the household and retinue of the rich and powerful, to be displayed like walking, living jewellery at important social events and within the halls of financial, social and political power
    – though they were most certainly that.
    They were trophies, they were the surrendered banners of defeated enemies, the capitulation papers signed by the vanquished, the heads of fierce beasts adorning the walls of those who owned them.
    Intagliates recorded with their very being the fall of their families, the shame of their parents and grandparents. To be so marked was to bear witness to an inherited debt which your very existence was part of the paying-off.
    It was a feature of Sichultian law – carried over from the practices of the particular nation-caste that had emerged victorious in the fight to stamp their way of doing things on the coalescing world state, two centuries earlier – that if a commercial debt could not be fully settled, or if the terms in some deal were deemed not entirely sufficient due to shortage of funds or other nego -tiables by one of the parties, then the defaulting or inadequately provisioned side could compensate by undertaking to have a generation or two of their progeny made Intagliate, signing over at least some of their children and grandchildren – usually though not always for life – to the care and control, indeed the ownership, of those to whom they were either indebted or at a fiscal disadvantage.
    Sichultians, on encountering the rest of the galactic community following their contact by a species called the Flekke, were generally quite indignantly insistent that their rich and powerful loved their children just as much as the rich and powerful of any other decently civilised species, and that they simply had an elevated respect for the letter of the law and the honour involved in paying one’s debts on time, rather than a reduced regard for the rights of minors, or those who were otherwise innocent but indebted-by-inheritance in general.
    The rights and well-being of the Intagliate, they would point out, were protected by an entire network of strictly applied laws to ensure that they could not be neglected or mistreated by those who effectively owned them, and indeed those who were Marked could even be regarded as being amongst the most privileged people in society, in a sense, being raised in the absolute lap of luxury, mixing with the very cream of society, attending all the most important social events and formal court occasions and never being expected to have to work for their keep. Most people would happily surrender their so-called “freedom” to live like that. They were esteemed, precious, and almost – though not quite – beyond price. What more could somebody who would otherwise have been born into grinding poverty ask for?
    Like many societies finding their hitherto unquestioned customs and ethical assumptions impacting squarely with the breath -takingly sophisticated summed morality of a meta-civilisation inestimably older, vaster and by implication wiser than themselves, the Sichultia became highly protective of their developmental foibles, and refused to mandate away what some of them at least claimed to regard as one of their defining social characteristics and a vital and vibrant part of their culture.
    Not all Sichultians agreed with this, of course; there had always been opposition to the very