Feersum Endjinn

by Iain M. Banks

  Uris Tenblen had fallen, still screaming hoarsely, onto the steep side of a tall spire in the second circle of the city, bounced once, hit a sheer wall opposite the spire, rebounded again and plummeted, still hardly slowed, into a flower bed on a stone-flagged courtyard. He had left a shallow elliptical crater in the earth and scattered blossoms like soft shrapnel as he’d bounced a third time and finally come to a halt crashing into a group of tables outside a cafe.

  Most of Tenblen’s precipitous descent and each successive part of its termination had been captured by an automatic camera on a seventh-level tower.

  By the time a medic had arrived Tenblen had been quite irretrievably dead for some minutes, but the glancing nature of his first two contacts with the tower and then the wall, along with the comparative softness of his third impact in the flower bed, meant that there had been time for the alerted rebel Cryptographers to target and interrogate the dying man’s bioware. The Army, as a matter of course, retro-fitted devices to its soldiers’ implants to prevent this sort of thing, but - as was not unknown when an individual sustained a series of individually non-fatal impacts - these had been slow to react, and the rebel army had been furnished with recordings of what at first appeared to be merely the nightmares of a dying man but which were later realised to be accurate if still horrific records of reality. They were also, collectively, war intelligence of the first order.

  Deep beneath the fastness ground level, in a tiny alcove off a larger alcove off a great arched tunnel off an even more enormous tunnel, Gadfium - exhausted after her escape and the various ensuing traverses and descents - slept.

  When she awoke it was to her own voice crackling in her head and breaking up.

  ——kup, will you? — —thing — —gon!——fium!—

  She opened her eyes. A blast of fetid breath rolled over her. She looked along the dust-dry floor and in the grey almost-light saw what looked like two hairy tree trunks with something resembling a furred snake dangling between them.

  She looked up slowly. The tree trunks were joined at the top; a bulging hairy cliff continued up to a tusked, seemingly eyeless head which was broader than her whole body. On top of the domed head was another head, pale and hairless and half human, staring down at her. Weaving above and to either side of it was yet another head, with tiny staring eyes and a thick, curved beak, balanced on a long, scaly, snake-like neck.

  A series of snorts and deep, chest-shaking breaths drew her attention to the fact that the enormous creature in front of her was only one of many, standing in a rough semi-circle around the alcove she had taken shelter in. One of the animals stamped a foot. She felt the ground shake.

  Gadfium stared. She waited to faint but it would not happen.

  Adijine walked to the window of his private office, shaking his head. ‘You mean we might have to give those bastard Engineers in the Chapel what they want?’

  ‘We don’t appear to have very much choice,’ Oncaterius said, crossing his legs and brushing one careful hand over his knee to free his robe of creases. ‘It would seem the war is becoming recognised as unwinnable even by those who were originally most in favour of it.’

  Adijine wrinkled his nose at this but did not rise to the bait.

  ‘Time draws on,’ Oncaterius said evenly. ‘The Encroachment draws closer, and perhaps therefore so should we to our, ah, Engineer cousins in the Chapel. We require the access they claim to have to—’

  ‘Yes, claim,’ the King said, staring out of the window and down into the depths of the Great Hall; rivers, roads and rail tracks threaded the landscape below in ascending orders of directness.

  ‘Well, let’s say, appear to possess,’ Oncaterius continued, unruffled. ‘They would appear not to possess our access to the necessary systems within the Cryptosphere, therefore an accommodation would appear to make sense for all concerned.’

  ‘An accommodation in which those bastards get to call far too many fucking shots,’ Adijine spat.

  ‘I believe Your Majesty knows my opinions on the wisdom of having antagonised the clan Engineers in the first place.’

  ‘Yes,’ the King said, rolling his eyes and then turning round. ‘I think you’ve made them clear on more occasions than I care to remember, except when it might have made a difference, right at the start.’

  Adijine stood behind the imposingly heavy and ornate swivel chair on the far side of his even more imposingly heavy and ornate desk.

  Oncaterius looked wounded. ‘If I may say so, Your Majesty does me a disservice. I’m sure the records will show my voice was one of those raised in—’

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ the King said, turning the chair round and sitting heavily in its enveloping frame. ‘If we have to compromise we have to. We can thrash it out at the Consistory meeting this evening, assuming the Chapel delegation have come up with their answer by then.’ The King smiled ruefully, shaking his head once. ‘At least we won’t be making any concessions to some cross-clan posse of concerned scientists and mathematicians.’

  Oncaterius smiled coldly. ‘I accept Your Majesty’s thanks on behalf of the Security service.’

  Adijine narrowed his eyes. ‘Is Gadfium still free?’

  Oncaterius sighed. ‘For now. She’s an old lady scientist who got lucky, not a—’

  ‘Couldn’t we have tried to capture her? What was the point of trying to kill her?’

  ‘On the confirmation of the existence of the conspiracy,’ Oncaterius said, sounding a little as though he was reciting, ‘and having received permission to proceed with its amelioration, it was she who happened to be in the position to do the most immediate damage. Rapid action was called for. Our operative took appropriate steps, considering the urgent nature of the circumstances. And I am sure Your Majesty understands that it is usually considered a great deal more straightforward to kill somebody than it is to capture them.’ Oncaterius favoured the King with a thin smile. ‘Given that our agent’s attempt merely to murder Chief Scientist Gadfium resulted in three deaths it is perhaps just as well we did not endeavour to effect her capture.’

  ‘Given the level of competence your people brought to the operation, I’m sure you’re right,’ the King said, taking some pleasure in the facial flinch this produced on the other man. ‘Now, was there anything else?’

  ‘Your Majesty has been informed of the capture of an asura?’

  ‘Held for questioning,’ Adijine said, waving one hand. ‘Any progress?’

  ‘We are being gentle. However, I think I may attempt to question her myself,’ Oncaterius said smoothly.

  ‘What about the child, the Teller who was under suspicion of crypt-hacking or whatever? Didn’t he get away too?’

  Oncaterius smiled. ‘Dealt with.’

  3

  Sessine stood on the sloped desert sands, looking towards the tall grey tower at the end of the peninsula, cut off from the sands by a high black wall. Within, gardens formed a green triangle at the tower’s base. Beyond and to either side, the sea rolled in, waves like creased bronze where they reflected the light of the network of red-orange burning in the sky. He looked away for a moment, trying to cancel the display in the heavens, but it refused to disappear.

  The cliffs behind him were rosy with the same light, the sand beneath his soles strewn with shadows like wavelets. The air smelled of salt.

  He felt something he had not felt for a long time, and it took a while before he admitted to himself that it was fear. He shrugged, hoisted his pack over his shoulder and continued on towards the distant tower, leaving a deep, scuffed trail of footprints behind him in the talc-fine sand. A vague, gauzy cloud of accompanying dust hung in the air.

  It was the ten thousand, two hundred and seventh day of his time in the crypt. He had been here for almost twenty-eight years. Outside, in the other world, a little more than a day had passed.

  The wall was obsidian; pitted in places, still highly polished in others. It met the sands and plunged into them like a black knife a kilometre long and
fifty metres high at least. He stood in the silence, staring up at the almost featureless cliff, then trod down to the nearest shore. The wall extended a hundred metres or so out to sea. He turned on his heel and set off for the other end.

  It was the same. He squatted by the shore and tested the water as a wave broke and rolled, pushing foam up the slope of sand. It was warm. He’d have to swim. He’d thought he might.

  He started to undress.

  He had not ever paid very much attention to his geographical position in the crypt, though it did roughly correspond to hardware in the base-level world. He supposed he must have wandered over much of South and North America before he had encountered the tonsured woman with her elaborately coded message; that had been, as nearly as he could make out, in a position which equated to somewhere in the North American Midwest; Iowa or Nebraska, he thought. His path since then had led him through Canada, Greenland, Iceland, Britain, Europe and Asia Minor to Arabia.

  The sea crossings had been the most dangerous parts of his journey; whether they were effected by the likeness of a bridge or a tunnel, they represented choke points for travellers, and such a focusing of potential prey had in most cases produced a predatory exaggeration of the level’s ecological balance. He had had to use the sword a few times, and — on occasion—opponents had attempted to best him through other levels of the crypt, imagining him into situations within which they thought he could more easily be defeated and absorbed.

  He found, however, that he had little difficulty in assuming control in such situations. Much appeared to depend on one’s wit; a general flexibility and quickness of mind plus an extensive and catholic knowledge-base - as long as these attributes were combined with a generous dash of ruthlessness - were all that one really needed to operate successfully within such imagined realities.

  He had walked over broad bridges and within great tunnels hundreds upon hundreds of kilometres long, travelling within the spaces afforded by the slow sweeps of the writhing data highways, in something like a trance sometimes when the pace was forced and he could not afford to sleep, imagining himself to be a molecule of water trapped within the fold of some Archimedean Screw, a wave carried upon some articulation of light within a subsea cable, a fleck of sand-dust borne on the dark gurglings of a submerged water course veined beneath the baking desert.

  He swam round the wall, at first attempting to keep his pack balanced on his head, then, when the waves became too rough, resorting to pushing it before him.

  The waves mounted, the wind increased, and he realised that he was being blown away from the shore and the wall. He swam on as best he could but after swallowing water and being continually overwhelmed he was finally forced to surrender his heavy, waterlogged pack and all it contained to the sea; it sank quickly. He struck out with all his remaining strength for the just-glimpsed beach beyond the surf-skirted blackness of the wall.

  Only his dreams had disturbed him on his journey to this place, still nagging at him with their images of slow eclipses and the death of stars all glimpsed above impressions of battle.

  As he’d neared what he still only guessed and hoped was his goal, the dreams had begun to change, and instead of pan-historical images of the Encroachment, he had started to experience what appeared to be presentiments of its effects.

  He’d seen the night sky, utterly black but for a twice-dimmed moon. He’d seen a cloudless day that was nevertheless dim, and a sun shining within that faded clarity that was high and full and yet dull orange, not fiery yellow-white; a sun it was possible to gaze at comfortably with the naked eye.

  In his dreams he’d seen the weather change and the plants die, and later the people.

  By virtue of its location Serehfa did not have a four-season year, alternating between seasons of dry and wet heat whose external effects were moderated by the construction’s altitude as well as the carefully altered geography of its surroundings, but he remembered the spring and later the summer coming to Seattle and to Kuybyshev in the year that he had left base-reality behind, and in his dreams that summer did not last as long as the one before, and winter came earlier. The pattern was repeated more intensely in the southern hemisphere.

  The following winter lasted throughout the spring before finally delivering a summer hardly warmer than the autumn it quickly lapsed into, and after that there was nothing but winter; winter with the dim face of thee sun high in the sky, or a winter set within a winter when the sun dipped nearer the horizon.

  The pack ice grew continually, permafrost buckled the ground and thrust blisters of ice through what had been temperate soils, the currents of the air and of the sea changed as lakes and rivers froze and the hearts of the continents and the upper levels of the oceans cooled.

  Plants died back, creating new deserts where vegetation used to copious heat and light had withered and plants better suited to the colder conditions had not yet had time to colonise, while those plants themselves succumbed to the sudden, smothering weight of the advancing snow and ice.

  Animals of all descriptions found themselves being concentrated in a smaller and smaller band around the waist of the world, raising the contest to survive to new levels of ferocity, while even in the comparative warmth of the oceans life became gradually less abundant as the white shutters of freezing sea irised slowly closed over the brash-ice waves, and the trickling streams of sunlight energising the top of the food chain were reduced almost to nothing.

  As though in mocking compensation for the shaded sun, great storms of light played about the heavens at night, flickering like aurorae, cold and vast, inhuman and numbing.

  Still in those dreams he saw people crouched round fires, struggling through snow drifts with packs and possessions, taking refuge in mines and tunnels as the snow piled and the glaciers advanced and the icebergs crunched aground off equatorial shores and the pack ice spread from either pole like crystals in some drying solution.

  No spears of fire or engines of more sophisticated energies lifted exiles into space, but for all the corpses abandoned at roadsides, for all the men, women and children left to die or freezing together in cars, carriages, houses, villages, towns and cities, still people persevered; retreating, stocking up, burrowing down, sealing up.

  The fastness that had been Serehfa fell slowly, surrendering to aggregated megatonnes of ice until only the fast-tower itself remained, a listing cenotaph to human hubris. Then the glaciers swept down from the mountains to north and south and scoured even that from the surface of the world; the fast-tower’s only memorial was a brief volcanic eruption wrenched from the earth by the thermonuclear-level energies its final fall created.

  And so humanity left the surface of the world to the ice, wind and snow, and sheltered, reduced and impoverished, within the stony depths of the planet’s skin, finally coming to resemble nothing more than parasites in the cooling pelt of some huge dying animal.

  With it it took all its knowledge of the universe and all the memories of its achievements and all the coded information defining the animals and plants that had survived the vicissitudes of time and evolution and - especially - the pressure of the human species’ own until then remorseless rise.

  Those buried citadels became whole small worlds of refugee communities and spawned still smaller worlds as new machines took over the job of maintaining the levels of the crypt, until gradually more and more of what was in any sense humanity came to reside not simply in the created world of its tunnels, caverns and shafts but within those worlds in the generated realities produced by its computers.

  Then the sun began to swell. The Earth shucked off its mummifying cocoon of ice, passed quickly through a feverish spring full of flood and storm, then wrapped itself in deeper and deeper cloud and more torrential rain. The atmosphere thickened and the heat and pressure built up while lightning played across the boiling clouds; the oceans shrank; the swollen bulk of the invisible sun poured energy into the deepening cauldron of gases around the planet, transforming it into a v
ast caustic foundry of chemical reactions and precipitating a welter of corrosive agents to pour upon the razed, enfumed surface of the Earth.

  Earth turned into what Venus had once been, Venus began to resemble Mercury and Mercury ruptured, flowed and disintegrated to become a ring of molten slag spiralling in through the livid darkness towards the surface of the sun.

  Still, what was left of humanity persisted, retreating further from the open oven of the surface until it became trapped between it and the heat of the planet’s own molten sub-surface. It was then that the species finally gave up the struggle to remain in macrohuman form, pulling back fully into a virtual environment and resorted to storing its ancient biochemical inheritance as information only, in the hope that one day such fragile concoctions of water and minerals could exist again upon the face of the Earth.

  Its time from then was long as people reckoned it from that point, short as they would have before. The sun’s photosphere continued to expand until it swallowed Venus, and Earth did not survive much longer; the last humans on Earth perished together in a crumbling machine core as its cooling circuits failed, the half-finished life-boat spaceship they had been attempting to construct already melted to a hollow husk beside them.

  ... He suffered with each child abandoned to the snow; with every old man or woman left - too exhausted to shiver any more - under piles of ice-hard rags; with all the people swept away by the howling, fire-storm winds; with each consciousness extinguished — its ordered information reduced to random meaninglessness - by the increasing heat.