Feersum Endjinn

by Iain M. Banks

  Beyond, still slightly blued with the distance, the fastness itself reared forever into the sky. She stared, slack-jawed.

  Serehfa was a frozen turbulence of architecture beyond the merely monumental: revetments rose like cliffs topped by broad, wooded scarps, stout bastions stood like jutting bluffs, serrated ridges of parapet lay stretched hazily like squared-off mountain ranges themselves, cloud-lined walls ascended sheer or stood pierced by the vast caves of dark windows, whole forested slopes of steep-pitched roofs lay serried green beneath the warmth of the high summer sun, and soaring arches of gables and buttresses climbed to higher and higher levels piled one on top of another, all swathed in whorling patterns of colour and climbing stacked, packed, placed and lifted to where the sparkling whiteness of snow and ice sat in a broad band of collected light thrown dazzlingly against the shining sky.

  Everywhere about the panoramic, sight-saturating expanse of the central structure gigantic towers of mountainous diameter forced their way into the atmosphere, piercing the few, drifting, scale-diminished clouds which left their barely moving shadows aslant along the soaring walls and were themselves thrown into shade by still higher reaches of further towers casting their own stone shadows across both the clouds and the monstrous upheaval of the edifice itself; a crescendo of form and colour filling the horizon and culminating in the stark shining column of the central tower, drawing the gaze upward like some anchored moon.

  ‘Well, there it is, in all its glory,’ Pieter Velteseri said, joining her at the balustrade. He waved his walking stick at the castle.

  Asura looked at him, eyes wide. ‘Big,’ she said.

  Pieter smiled and took in the view of the fastness. ‘Indeed. The single largest artefact on Earth. The capital of the world, I suppose. And the last city, in a sense.’

  She frowned. ‘There are no more cities?’

  ‘Well, yes, most of them survive, but someone from the Age of Cities would regard them more as large towns in terms of their populations.’

  She turned to stare at it again.

  ‘Do you know yet why you had to come here?’ Pieter asked her softly.

  She shook her head slowly, gaze fixed upon the fastness.

  ‘Well, I dare say you’ll remember when you have to.’ Pieter took a fob watch from his waistcoat, frowned, closed one eye for a second, then reset the watch. He sighed and looked around the broad piazza, where umbrellas and sun shades flapped over tables and café bars. The airship rode at anchor above them in the breeze, nose connected to the landing tower. There were still a few lingering groups of castilians greeting those who had arrived on the craft, but most of the people now were either about to embark or bidding passengers farewell.

  ‘Cousin Ucubulaire reports she is on her way,’ Pieter told her. He nodded towards the countryside of the bailey. ‘She’s under there somewhere, in a slow-running tube train.’

  ‘Tube train,’ she repeated.

  ‘My dear, I think you ought to have this.’ He fished in one pocket of his dress coat and handed her a small wallet containing a thin card with writing and numbers on it. She studied it. ‘It makes you an honorary member of our clan,’ Pieter explained. ‘Ucubulaire will look after you, but in case you feel you have to move on elsewhere from Serehfa, that ought to make sure you don’t have to rely on hostels for a bed or public kitchens for food; can’t have you hanging onto the outside of airships or trains, now can we?’

  She looked at him, uncomprehending.

  ‘Ah well,’ he said. He closed her hands over the small wallet and patted them. ‘You ought not to need it, but if anybody asks you what clan you’re from, just show them this.’

  She nodded. ‘Phremylagists and Incliometricists.’

  ‘Not one of the more active clans, I’ll grant you, but ancient, and honourable. I hope we have been of some service.’

  She smiled. ‘You have made me welcome, and brought me here. Thank you.’

  Pieter nodded to a wooden bench behind them. ‘Let’s sit, shall we?’

  They sat, and for a while simply contemplated the castle.

  She jumped when the airship sounded its horn. Pieter looked at his watch again. ‘Well, I must go. Cousin Ucubulaire ought to arrive presently. Will you be all right waiting here?’

  ‘Yes, thank you.’ She stood with him, and he took her hand and kissed it. She returned the gesture and he laughed gently.

  ‘I don’t know what your business is here, my dear, or what lies in store for you, but I do hope you will come and visit us again, when you know what all this has been about.’ Pieter hesitated and a troubled expression crossed his face for a moment, then he shook his head. ‘I’m sure it will all sort itself out happily. But do come back and see us.’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘I’m very glad to hear it. Goodbye, Asura.’

  ‘Goodbye, Pieter Velteseri.’

  He returned to the airship. A little later he appeared on the observation deck. He waved and she waved back, flourishing the wallet he’d given her before placing it carefully in a pocket. The airship’s engines hummed into life; it lifted, turned across the breeze and started back east across the hills of Xtremadur.

  She watched the vessel grow slowly smaller in the sky, then turned back to feast her sight upon the castle.

  ‘Ah, Asura?’ the woman said.

  She looked up. There was a tall lady standing by the bench. She wore cool blue clothes the same colour as her eyes. Her skin was pale.

  ‘Yes, I am Asura. Are you Ucubulaire?’

  ‘Yes.’ The woman put her hand out. ‘Yes, I am.’ Her grip was scratchy; her hands were covered with thin net gloves made from some fine but hard filaments. ‘Pleased to meet you.’ She indicated a tall, square-set, powerful looking man with deep-set eyes standing a little way off. ‘This is a friend; Lunce.’

  The man nodded. Asura smiled. He smiled, briefly.

  ‘Shall we go?’ the woman said.

  ‘To there, to the fastness, yes?’

  The woman smiled thinly. ‘Oh yes.’

  She stood up and went with them.

  2

  Consistory member Quolier Oncaterius VI sat in the single ice-scull, pulling hard on the oars while the seat slid under him, the breath whistled out of his lungs and the claw-blades bit and chipped into the smoothly glistening surface on either side. The scull was an A-shaped tracery of carbon tubing a child could lift with one hand; it skittered across the ice on its three hair-thin blades with a nervous, rumbling, hissing noise.

  The chill blast of air slid round his body-suit and licked up over the seat harness towards his face.

  He pulled, slid, pulled, slid, pulled, slid, settling into a steady rhythm of heart, lung and muscle, flicking the oars back and hauling them forward, the hooked claws at the shafts’ ends embedding in the ice and providing the leverage to snap himself forward on each explosive haul.

  The trick with ice-rowing was to judge precisely the weight and angle of attack of the stramazon - or downward cut - of the claws, while balancing the vertical and horizontal components of the stroke, thus ensuring both that one always had a sufficiently embedded grip on the ice’s skin to provide purchase while wasting as little effort as possible lifting the claw-tips out of the ice again, and that one was always just on the edge of lifting oneself and the scull partially off the ice, but never quite doing so. It was a delicate double-balance to maintain and required both finely tuned judgment and great concentration. There were many aspects of a politician’s - indeed a ruler’s - life which demanded exactly such equipoise.

  Oncaterius was proud of the skill he had developed at the sport.

  He stroked on, oblivious to the space around him save for the fuzzy black mark of the lane centre-line printed under the ice. Around him stretched kilometres of ice, lightly populated by people on skates, ice boards and ice yachts. The thin air of the level-five Great Flying Room sounded to the zizz of blades inscribing the floor-lake’s frozen surface and the propeller blades of the mi
crolights describing lazy arcs about its lofted spaces.

  Something clicked in Oncaterius’ mind and a display superimposed itself in his vision, giving him his time for the kilometre course.

  He shipped oars and sat back, breathing hard, the scull still skidding quickly across the ice. He gazed up at the microlights circling round the ornate, suspended architecture of the central stalactite at the crux of the room’s groin-vaulted ceiling.

  Soon, he thought, in perhaps as little as a century, all this would be gone. The Great Flying Room, Serehfa, Earth itself. Even the sun would never again be the same.

  It was a thought that filled Oncaterius with a sort of delicious gloom; a melancholic ecstasy which made the appreciation of this current life all the sweeter. To treasure each moment, to savour every experience, to evaluate individually one’s multitudinous feelings and sensations with the knowledge lodged within that events were hurrying to a close, that there was no longer a seeming infinitude of time stretching ahead of one; that was truly to live.

  All that they and their ancestors had known throughout the monotonous millennia of the past since the Diaspora had been a kind of elegant death, an automaton’s graceful impersonation of life; the surface without the substance. Well, it was going now. The arc of humanity’s purpose - that is, real humanity, the part that had chosen to stay true to the past and what it meant - was finally drawing itself back into the shade after whole long troubled ages spent in the vexatious light of day.

  Fruition. Consummation. Termination ... Closure.

  Oncaterius savoured the thoughts and correlations such words evoked, drawing their meanings and associations into his mind as he drew the cool, sharp air into his lungs; arid - even sterile - and yet invigorating. Especially when one knew that one would not necessarily have to share the fate of one’s fellows, or one’s surroundings.

  The scull skated on across the water-filmed ice, gradually slowing.

  Oncaterius leant back against the seat’s spindly head-rest, letting it cup his neck and scalp. He crypted for a moment, reviewing the current security condition.

  They still sought Sessine, who remained loose after all this time. Probably in hiding.

  Security’s quasi-official leak/rumour that any asuras would actually be agents of the crypt’s chaotic levels sent with the purpose of infecting the properly functioning Cryptosphere seemed to be meeting with a mixed reception; however, enough people/entities appeared to believe it for an atmosphere of satisfyingly useful paranoia to have settled over at least some sections of the data corpus.

  His Majesty himself had first reported the loss of a soldier at the bomb-workings; it remained to be seen to what extent this had jeopardised the project. There had been no reaction yet from the Chapel ambassadorial mission, though they had to assume that the Engineer emissaries had been informed through their secure channel to the Palace.

  Concern remained over unusual patterns within the lower crypt; some obscure species of chimeric bird appeared to have developed behaviour above its station and so was under suspicion of being an agent for the chaos; the birds would be sought out and apprehended as soon as was practical. Linked with that, perhaps, was a young Teller who’d been making a nuisance of himself and who also appeared to have a suspiciously unusual turn of mind. He too had got away, like Sessine. Oncaterius cursed the millennia of peace and prosperity which had left the Security service so unpractised in dealing with genuinely serious problems. Still, they were keeping watch; the boy would show up sooner or later.

  And, at last, his fellow Consistorians had finally agreed that it was time to act against the conspiracy they had known existed for the last five years.

  That ... was being dealt with satisfactorily.

  Chief Scientist Gadfium and her staff left the office of the High Sortileger with the issue of the stray crypt signals still not resolved. They returned to the Great Hall the following day and ascended to the Lantern Palace so that Gadfium could attend the weekly cabinet briefing. Gadfium found these meetings exasperating; they were supposed to keep people up to date with developments and help facilitate actions which might be of use in the current emergency, but so far all they ever seemed to do was pander to some of the attendees’ feelings of self-importance and produce vast amounts of talk that substituted for deeds rather than leading to them.

  Nevertheless, with that familiar feeling that she was wasting her breath on matters more easily - and far more quickly - dealt with by reference to the data corpus, she outlined her opinions on the various issues she had been involved with during the past seven days, including the progress on the oxygen works, the odd pattern formed on the Plain of Sliding Stones and the worrying irregularities in the Cryptosphere which were making the Sortileger’s predictions unreliable.

  The meeting - in a fair approximation of the Hall of Mirrors in ancient Versailles - was attended in person by most of the participants including the King and Pol Cserse for the Cryptographers, though Heln Austermise, the second Consistory member, was at the rocketry test site at Ogooué-Maritime and so represented at the meeting by her court attaché, and speaking through him. He was a slim, middle-aged man in a tight-fitting court uniform; Gadfium suspected Rasfline - sitting behind her along with Goscil - would look like this man when he was older.

  ‘Nevertheless, Chief Scientist, the tests with both the direct-lift and aerofoil-assist vehicles are proceeding as planned,’ the attaché said. It was his own voice; the only sign that it was not his thoughts and volition producing it was that he sat very still, with none of the usual shiftings and fidgets people tended to exhibit. Gadfium had long since ceased to find it odd talking to somebody who wasn’t there through somebody who - in a sense - wasn’t there either.

  ‘I don’t doubt it, ma’am,’ Gadfium said. ‘But some of us are a little concerned at the lack of raw data being provided. The critical nature of this project—’

  ‘I’m sure the Chief Scientist appreciates the importance of retaining the prophylactic distance we have been fortunate enough to achieve from the chaos of the Cryptosphere,’ the attaché said.

  Gadfium paused before replying. She glanced at some of the others seated around the long table; the group was made up of the King, Consistorian Cserse, Austermise’s attaché, representatives of other important clans and various civil servants, technicians and scientists. Gadfium thought the King - dressed soberly in a white shirt, black hose and tunic - looked bored in a handsome and elegant way.

  Probably crypting somewhere more interesting.

  ‘Indeed, ma’am,’ Gadfium said, and sighed. She was starting to lose patience. ‘I’m not sure I follow. Sending us data can pose no threat to—’

  ‘On the contrary,’ the attaché said. ‘If the Chief Scientist will consult with Consistory member Cserse, she will perhaps be reminded that recent cryptographic research indicates that the transmission of chaotic data virus is possible through interface-handshakes and error-checking mechanisms. Even the link through which I am talking to you now cannot be guaranteed totally proof against such contamination.’

  ‘I thought that there were comparatively simple, fully mathematically provable programs which could deal with—’

  ‘I think madam Chief Scien—’

  ‘Kindly allow me to finish a sentence, madam!’ Gadfium shouted. That woke the King up. Others around the table moved as though uncomfortable. The attaché appeared utterly unruffled.

  ‘I understood,’ Gadfium said icily, ‘that this problem had been dealt with.’

  At the end of the table, Adijine sat up a little in his seat. It was enough to turn every eye to him. ‘Perhaps madam Chief Scientist would like to detail the nature of her concerns regarding the lack of raw data?’ he said, smiling at her.

  Gadfium felt herself blush. This often happened when she addressed Adijine. ‘Sir, I’m sure those in the facility at Ogooué-Maritime are exemplary in their dedication and scrupulousness. However I do feel that an independent check on their results might en
sure that this project - of potentially vital importance, as I’m sure we all agree - ’ she glanced again at the others, looking for and receiving a few nods ‘—is beyond reproach in terms of its methodology and hence the reliability of its results.’

  The King was sitting forward, pinching his lower lip between his fingers and looking absorbed by what she was saying.

  ‘I would also suggest that regardless of their precautions it can anyway only be a matter of time before their data corpora are contaminated by nanotech chaos-carriers.’

  ‘I think if the Chief Scientist inquires of Consistory member Cserse—’ the attaché began.

  ‘Thank you, Madam Consistorian,’ the King said, smiling broadly and nodding as though in encouragement as he interrupted her. ‘I believe Gadfium may have a point,’ Adijine continued, frowning a little and looking at Cserse. ‘I think perhaps if we form a sub-committee to investigate data-transmission security and viral protection ...’

  Cserse nodded and looked wise. He turned to an aide and whispered to her, and she nodded too, sitting back and closing her eyes.

  Adijine smiled at Gadfium. She showed her teeth and tried to look grateful, meanwhile biting back on the urge to scream.

  ‘Another triumph for the decision-making process,’ Gadfium said as she, Rasfline and Goscil exited to the antechamber. The briefing had finished and the group was splitting up, breaking into smaller groups of people standing in the Hall of Mirrors itself or the antechamber beyond. Gadfium usually hung around at this point too - it was now, as well as before such briefings, that real decisions were occasionally arrived at - but on this occasion she doubted her ability to remain polite if she had to talk to some of those she imagined might want to speak with her.

  ‘I thought you made your points very well, ma’am,’ Rasfline said quietly as they passed between the mirrored doors.