Feersum Endjinn

by Iain M. Banks

  As well as the bed, the wash-stand table and the table with the bread box in it, the room contained another small table with two chairs set at it, a couch with some cushions, a square carpet with a geometrical pattern, and one wooden-framed painting on the wall. The painting was of a beautiful garden filled with tall trees; at the centre of the picture was a small white stone rotunda set on a grassy hillside above a shallow valley where a stream sparkled.

  After she had washed and dried her face she would walk round the balcony a hundred times one way and then a hundred times the other way, occasionally looking out at the forest.

  The tower stood in a roughly circular clearing about a stone’s throw across. The tower was a little higher than the trees, which were broad-leaved. Sometimes she saw birds flying in the distance, but they never came close. The weather was always good; clear and breezy and warm. The sky was never free from clouds, but never covered by them either. It was a little colder at night.

  There was no lamp in the circular room and the only light at night came from the stars or the moon, which waxed and waned in the usual manner. She remembered that women had a body-cycle associated with the moon, but waited in vain for its appearance.

  On the very darkest nights, it rained sometimes. Once she had become familiar with the room in the darkness she began to get up and slip off her shift and go out onto the balcony into the pelting chill of the rain, standing naked under it, shivering. The rain felt good on her skin.

  She watched the stars on clear nights, and noted where the sun came up and set each day. The stars appeared to revolve overhead but did not change otherwise, and there was no terrible dark stain across the face of the night.

  The sun rose and set in the same place every day, as did the moon, despite its changing phases.

  She used her thumb nail to make little grooves on the wooden foot board at the end of her bed, counting the days; those did not disappear overnight. She still recorded each day, but after the first thirty or so she had decided to count the moons instead, keeping the number in her head. She vaguely recalled that each moon was a month, and so knew that she had been here for six months so far.

  She spent a lot of time just looking out at the forest, watching the shadows of the clouds moving over the tops of the trees. In the room, she busied herself by rearranging things, altering the position of the pieces of furniture, tidying them, cleaning things, counting things, and - after a month of doing this - by making up stories set in the garden in the painting on the wall, or in the landscape she conjured into being amongst the folds of her bedclothes, or in a maze-city she imagined within the geometric design of the carpet.

  She traced the shapes of letters on the wall and knew she could write things down if only she had something to write with, but she could not find anything; she thought of using her own night soil but that seemed dirty and anyway might disappear overnight, the way it did from the pot under the bed; her own blood might work but that seemed overly desperate. She just remembered the stories instead.

  She made up different people to populate her stories; at first they all involved her but later it amused her to make stories up in which she either played only a small part, or even no part at all. The people were based on the things in the room: there was a fat jolly man like the water pitcher, his broad-hipped wife who was like the bowl, their two plump daughters like the legs of the wash-stand, a beautiful but vain lady like the beaten-metal mirror, a pair of skinny men like the two chairs at the small table, a slim, languorous lady like the couch, a dark, skinny boy like the carpet, a rich man with a pointed hat who was the tower itself . . .

  Gradually, though, the handsome young prince began to figure in most of her stories.

  The prince came to the tower once every month. He was handsome and he would come riding out of the forest on a great dark horse. The horse was splendidly caparisoned; its bridle shone like gold. The young prince was dressed in white, purple and gold. He wore a long thin hat set with fabulous feathers. He had black hair and a trim beard and even from that distance she could tell that his eyes sparkled. He would take off his hat, make a sweeping bow, and then stand holding the reins of the great dark horse and shout up to her:

  ‘Asura! Asura! I’ve come to rescue you! Let me in!’

  The first time, she had seen him riding out of the forest and hidden down behind the balcony’s stone parapet. She’d heard him shouting up to her and she’d scuttled away back inside the room and closed the door and burrowed under the bedclothes. After a while she’d crept outside again and listened, but heard only the sighing of the wind in the trees. She’d peeped over the balustrade and the prince had gone.

  The second time, she’d watched him but hadn’t said anything. He’d stood calling up to her to let him in and she’d stood, frowning, looking down at him but not replying.

  He’d left his horse tied to a tree; it had grazed the nearby grass while he’d sat with his back to another tree and eaten a lunch of cheese, apples and wine. She’d watched him eat, her mouth watering as he’d crunched into an apple. He’d waved up to her.

  Later, he’d called to her again but still she hadn’t replied. It had started to get dark and he’d ridden away.

  The third time he’d appeared she’d hidden once more. He’d stood shouting for a time, then she’d heard something metallic strike the stonework outside on the balcony. She’d crept to the door and looked out; a three-hooked piece of metal on the end of a rope had come sailing over the balustrade and clunked down onto the balcony’s flagstones. It had scraped across the stones and up the wall with a rasping noise, then disappeared over the edge of the parapet. She’d heard a distant thud a few seconds later.

  It had reappeared a little while later, hitting the balcony stones with a clang and leaving a mark there. Again, it had been hauled up the wall in vain; it was as though the balustrade had been designed to offer nowhere such a hook could find purchase. It had disappeared again and she’d heard the distant thud as it hit the ground far below. She’d stared in horror at the mark it had left on the flagstones.

  On the fourth occasion the prince had arrived at the foot of the tower and again called out, ‘Asura! Asura! Let me in!’ she had already decided she would reply this time.

  ‘Who are you?’ she’d shouted to him.

  ‘She speaks!’ he’d laughed, a huge smile brightening his face. ‘Why, what joy!’ He’d stepped closer to the tower. ‘I’m your prince, Asura! I’ve come to rescue you!’

  ‘What from?’

  ‘Why,’ he’d said, laughing, ‘this tower!’

  She’d looked back at the room, then down at the stones of the balcony. ‘Why?’ she’d said.

  ‘Why?’ he’d repeated, looking puzzled. ‘Princess Asura, what do you mean? You cannot enjoy being imprisoned!’

  She’d frowned deeply. ‘Am I really a princess?’

  ‘Of course!’

  She’d shaken her head and run back to her bed in tears, burrowing under the bedclothes again and ignoring the distant sound of his cries until it had grown dark and she’d fallen into a troubled sleep.

  The next time he’d come she had hidden again, closing the door to the balcony and sitting on the couch singing to herself while she’d stared at the picture on the wall, softly singing a story about a prince coming to the white stone rotunda in the beautiful garden and leading the princess away to go with him and be his bride and live in the great castle in the hills.

  It had grown dark before she’d finished the story.

  She washed her face in the bowl and dried herself on the towel. She went outside for her walk round the balcony. A flock of birds flew over the forest, far in the distance. The weather was as it always was.

  She stopped in the shade of the tower’s roof, looking out at the shadow the tower cast, swinging imperceptibly over the canopy of forest as though together they formed some huge sundial. She was sure the prince would come today.

  The prince arrived just before noon, riding out of the
woods on his magnificent horse. He took off his hat and bowed deeply.

  ‘Princess Asura!’ he called. ‘I have come to rescue you! Please let me in!’

  ‘I can’t!’ she shouted.

  ‘Have you no ladder? No rope? Can you not let down your hair?’ he asked, laughing.

  Her hair? What was he talking about? ‘No,’ she told him. ‘I have none of those things. I have no way down.’

  ‘Then I shall have to come up to you.’

  He went to his horse and took a great slack bundle of rope from a saddle-bag. Attached to one end of the rope was the three-hooked metal thing he’d tried to scale the tower with earlier. ‘I’ll throw this up to you,’ he shouted. ‘You must tie it to something securely. Then I’ll climb up to you.’

  ‘What then?’ she shouted, as he readied the rope.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, then we’ll both be up here; what will we do then?’

  ‘Why, then we’ll make a sling for you; a sort of seat on the end of the rope. I’ll lower you down to the ground and climb down after you. Don’t you worry about that, my princess; just make sure this is tied firmly to something that won’t move.’

  He started to swing the hook round and round beside him.

  ‘Wait!’ she called.

  ‘What?’ he asked, letting the rope down.

  ‘Have you an apple? I would like an apple.’

  He laughed. ‘Of course! Coming right up!’

  He went to his saddle-bags and found a bright red shiny apple. ‘Catch!’ he shouted, and threw it up towards her.

  She caught the apple and he started to swing the hook round and round again.

  She looked at the apple; it was the brightest, reddest, shiniest apple she had ever seen.

  She held it up to her ear.

  ‘Better stand back, my dear!’ the prince shouted from below. ‘Don’t want to hit you on the head, do we?’

  She stood in the doorway, holding the apple to her ear.

  There was a tiny, furtive, squirming, liquid, burrowing, writhing noise from inside it. She walked quickly round the balcony until she was on the far side of the tower from the prince and threw the apple with all her might far into the forest. She heard a distant clang as the grappling iron hit the flagstones.

  She ran round and looked over the parapet.

  ‘All right, my princess?’

  ‘Yes! I’ll tie it to the bed!’ she shouted to the prince. ‘Wait a moment!’

  She took the grappling iron inside the room, pulled in some more rope and then untied the hooks from the rope. She left the grappling iron on the floor and then passed the end of the rope twice round one of the bed’s arm-thick wooden legs, pulling on the rope to test the friction, then giving the rope another turn round the leg and testing again before walking back out to the parapet, hauling the rope after her and wrapping it once round her waist and a couple of times round her hand.

  ‘Ready!’ she called down. She pulled on the rope as the prince tugged.

  ‘Well done, my princess!’ he shouted. He began to climb. She kept tension on the rope while looking over the parapet and watching the prince climb.

  When he was about two metres below the level of the parapet floor, she jerked her hand holding the rope; the prince cried out and clamped himself to the rope and looked anxiously up.

  ‘My love!’ he called. ‘The rope! It might be coming loose! Make sure it’s fast!’

  ‘Stop where you are,’ she told him, and raised the loose end of the rope above the parapet to show him she held it. ‘The rope will stay firm as long as I let it.’

  ‘What? But—!’

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked him. This close, she could see his short, jet-black hair, his firm, square jaw, his tanned, flawless skin and his blue, sparkling eyes.

  ‘I’m your prince!’ he cried. ‘Come to rescue you. Please! My love . . .’ He started to climb again and she let an arm’s length more rope out with a jerk. The prince bounced on the rope and almost fell off. He grabbed it tightly again and glanced fearfully down at the ground, then looked back to her. ‘Asura! What are you doing? Let me up!’

  ‘Who are you?’ she repeated. ‘Tell me or you drop.’

  ‘Your prince! I’m your prince, your rescuer!’

  ‘What is your name?’ she asked, slowly letting out a little more rope.

  ‘Roland! Roland of Aquitaine!’

  ‘Why does the water jug fill itself up every night, Roland of Aquitaine? Why does the moon change but not the season? Why do the birds never approach the tower?’

  ‘A spell! All these things arise from a spell put on you by a wicked wizard! Please; Princess Asura; I’m not sure how much longer I can hold on; let me up!’

  ‘And why was the apple you threw me poisoned?’

  ‘It wasn’t!’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘Then it must be the spell! The spell the wizard put on you, Asura! Please; I’m going to fall!’

  ‘What wizard is this?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know!’ the prince cried. She could see his hands and arms quivering as he gripped the rope. ‘Merlin!’ he said. ‘That was his name! I remembered. Merlin! Now, my love; please; I must come up or I’ll fall. Please . . .’ he said, and his gaze fixed upon her, beseeching and beautiful and tender.

  She shook her head.

  ‘You are not real,’ she told him, and let the rope go.

  The rope flicked across the balcony and into the room as the prince fell screaming towards the ground. She stepped back to let the end of the rope whip past her and plummet to the ground.

  The prince hit with a terrible thud. She looked over the parapet. He lay, still and broken-looking on the grass at the foot of the tower; the rope fell loosely about and on top of him.

  She picked up the grappling iron and dropped that on him for good measure; it missed his head and whacked into his back, bouncing off across the ground.

  She looked up at the sky and said, ‘Not that way, either.’

  Darkness.

  The young Cryptographer rose up from the couch, stretching as she rubbed her back. ‘Ouch,’ she said. She was small and dark and wore a disposable one-piece suit. She rubbed her eyes with her knuckles as she swung her legs off the couch and sat there for a moment. Then she looked over at the two Security people who’d brought the girl in. She shook her head.

  ‘Your woman’s fucking impregnable,’ she told them.

  The tall woman looked at the square-built man she’d called Lunce. The three were in a bland but comfortable staff suite in the minus-one cistern-level Security complex, deep beneath the fastness. The girl they’d called Asura was being held in a cell within the building’s basement.

  ‘Nobody’s impregnable,’ the woman with the blue gloves said.

  ‘Nobody’s indestructible,’ the girl corrected her, getting up from the couch. ‘But some people are impregnable.’ She went across to the curtains and drew them open. She was still rubbing her back, and stretching. She looked out at the light-strewn darkness. A ship moved in the distance, lights glittering on the black waters at the end of the Ocean Tunnel. The port was a multi-strand necklace in the distance.

  She gave a half-laugh as she rubbed her back. ‘What a bitch!’ she muttered, but sounded almost admiring.

  ‘You’re saying you can’t get through to her?’ the man said.

  ‘Right,’ the girl said. She looked back at them. ‘I’ve tried all the obvious scenarios and I’ve tried a few pretty obscure ones, too.’ She shrugged, looking away. ‘She’s wise to all of them. That last one — the princess in the tower: fairy story, legend; but it was like she’d never heard of it before, just accepted it on her own terms. And so suspicious! There was nothing nasty in the apple; it was a nice crunchy, scrumptious little piece of code; tasty and nutritious, dammit. If there was anything ulterior about it, it might have distracted her a bit while I climbed up, though what the hell

  ... but she imagined the worm or the maggot or wha
tever in it; just threw it away.’ The girl shook her head again, first at her reflection, then, turning, at the two Security people. ‘You can keep trying, but you won’t get anywhere; she’s even learning as she goes along, she’s remembering. Fuck knows how.’

  ‘Clearly you don’t, anyway,’ the man said. The woman looked at him sharply.

  The girl laughed. ‘Perhaps you’d like to try, Mr Lunce?’ She shook her head. ‘That . . . ingenue you brought in could skin you alive in there, if she wanted. She’s a natural. There’s nothing you can give her she won’t work out and exploit. You can destroy her - you can wake her up and start torturing her if you like — but it’d be strictly for your own enjoyment. Don’t kid yourself you’d have any chance of getting at her core; that’ll stay hidden until it’s triggered. Strip her brain molecule by molecule and you still won’t find out what was in there. I’d stake my life it’ll destruct.’ She snorted. ‘Well, I’d stake your life on it.’

  ‘But she is the asura?’ the woman with the blue gloves asked.

  ‘She’s an asura,’ the girl said, sitting back on the window sill. ‘But frankly if she is this rogue piece of chaos come to infect all our precious higher functions, announcing she is an asura—using it as a name — is a pretty strange way of going about it.’

  ‘A decoy, then?’ the woman asked, looking troubled.

  ‘Or an incredibly confident double-bluff.’

  The woman nodded, looking away. ‘Well, we have her now,’ she said, as if to herself.

  ‘Indeed you do,’ the girl said, yawning. ‘And, thankfully, she’s your problem. I’m just a hired hand and I’ve done all I’m going to do. I need some sleep.’ She pushed away from the window. ‘Probably have nightmares about that vicious little bitch,’ she muttered, heading for the door.

  ‘Well, pity you failed. Thank you for your help,’ the man said, sounding bored. ‘We’ll expect a full report; it may help your successors. Let’s hope their approach is a little less negative than yours was.’