Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks Page B

with them, but the gist was that Lededje’s father had lost everything, and Veppers had gained it all, and more. Her father’s family lost almost everything too, the financial damage rippling out to brothers, sisters, parents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
    Veppers had made a great show of pretending to be supportive; in the complexity of the unravelling deal, much of the most immediate damage had been at the hands of other business rivals, and Veppers was assiduous in buying up the debts they accumulated from Lededje’s father, but always his support stopped short of preventing the damage in the first place. The final betrayal was the requirement, when all other ways of paying had been exhausted, that Grautze consent to his wife being Marked and his next child
    – and any children that that child had – being an Indented Intagliate.
    Veppers gave every sign of being devastated it had come to this, but said he could see no other way out; there was no other honourable course, and if they had not honour, what did they have? He received considerable sympathy for having to watch his best friend and his family suffer so, but was adamant that despite the personal anguish it caused him it was the right thing to do; the rich could not be, and did not want to be, above the law.
    The first part of the sentence, approved by Sichult’s highest court, was duly carried out; Lededje’s mother was taken, put into something resembling a coma, and tattooed. The night of the day they had taken her away, her husband slit his own throat with one of the two knives the original disastrous agreement had been solemnised by.
    They found Grautze’s body quite quickly. The medics were able to take a viable sample of his seed from him. Brought together with an egg, taken from his widow while she was still under from the tattooing procedure, the resulting embryo was altered, changed to become that of an Intagliate, and then implanted back into his widow. Many of the team who had overseen the designing and patterning of the embryo felt it was their finest work. The result was Lededje.
    The basis for the fabulous scroll work wrapping every square centimetre of her skin was that of the letter V, for Veppers, and the Veprine Corporation he commanded. Other elements included twin, crossed knives and images of the object the fateful deal had been about in the first place; Sichult’s soletta, the giant space-mounted fabrication which shielded the world from some of the light of the sun.
    Lededje tried running away a lot as she grew up. She never got very far. Around about the time she started to think of herself as a young woman rather than a girl, when her intaglia was revealing itself in its true, mature, astoundingly intricate and colourful glory, she began to realise just how fabulously rich her master Mr. Veppers was and how far his power and influence reached. She gave up trying to run away.
    It wasn’t until some years later, when Veppers started raping her, that she discovered that the richer the alleged perpetrator was, the more all those strictly enforced statutes regarding the rights of the Intagliate became, well, more like aspirations; general guidelines rather than properly enforced laws. That was when she started trying to run away again. The first time, she’d got to the edge of the estate, ninety kilometres from the house, after travelling down one of the great forested trackways that led to the estate perimeter.
    The day before Lededje was caught and brought back, her mother, despairing, had thrown herself from one of the towers in the part of the estate near the house Lededje and her friends called the water maze.
    Lededje had never confided to her mother that Veppers was raping her; he’d told her after the first time that if she did he’d make sure she never saw her mother again. Simple as that. She thought that her mother had suspected though. That might have been the real reason she took her own life.
    Lededje felt she understood