Feersum Endjinn

by Iain M. Banks

  Then he approached the vault and entered it, stepping through the neat wall of cabinets and into one where something — he had no idea what or whom, but hoped they had the best of him, somehow, and that that would help them fulfil whatever their purpose was - would soon be born.

  And so he fell asleep, to wake.

  4

  ‘Shall we go?’ the girl asked, shaking the man with the bloody nose. Gadfium started to nod, but the ape-man jumped down from the mammoth, ran to its trunk, took the end of it and then led the mammoth over to the girl. He squatted in front of her and looked up into her eyes. He extended the hairy hand holding the tip of the beast’s trunk towards her.

  ‘Relative of yours?’ Oncaterius asked, snorting blood.

  The girl said nothing. She stared into the ape-man’s eyes as he whimpered and made little nodding motions and continued to offer his hand and the mammoth’s trunk.

  Slowly, the girl put out her hand.

  When their hands touched, the little ape-man and the mammoth both disappeared and Gadfium found herself sitting on the ice, looking around, unhurt but still stunned. The girl shivered once. Then she blinked and turned to the man whose collar she held.

  ‘Come on, Quolier, we have a meeting to attend.’

  Adijine stared at the desk screen. ‘What,’ he said, slowly and calmly, ‘the fuck is going on?’

  The Security colonel’s face looked grey. He winced a little. ‘Ah, well, sir, we’re not entirely sure. There seems to be some sort of, ah, problem associated with the Cryptosphere’s error-checking protocols. We are in the process of switching to back-up electronic systems where possible but the interfaces are exhibiting crash tendencies under apparent parity contradictions. Ah...’

  ‘Again, colonel,’ the King said, drumming his fingers on the table top. ‘In Clear.’

  ‘Well, sir, the situation is somewhat uncertain, but there does appear to be some sort of violent, and, ah, virulent localised contamination centred around the Security unit in Oubliette but which has spread within the fabric of the main structure as far as the outer wall and intermittently elsewhere. We did conjecture that these phenomena might represent some sort of post-armistice sneak attack by the Chapel but they would appear to be having similar and related problems and therefore this hypothesis has been abandoned.’

  ‘I see, I think,’ Adijine said, looking around the state room as the lights flickered and the desk screen display wavered. ‘And what was the last we heard from Oubliette?’

  ‘Consistorian Oncaterius was in projected attendance interviewing the asura suspect. Then a disturbance was reported, first in the Cryptosphere and then in base-reality. Back-up Security units are on their way to the focus of the disturbance, though we are experiencing a degree of difficulty in maintaining contact with them. Reports are confused, sir.’

  ‘As are we all, it would seem,’ the King said, sitting back in his chair. ‘Any further news from the fast-tower?’

  ‘The situation was under control, last we heard, sir.’

  ‘And you were fighting - let me get this clear - birds?’

  ‘Chimeric lammergeiers, sir. The sub-species believed responsible for and certainly associated with some of the Cryptospheric anomalies over the last few days. A number of them were successfully eliminated.’

  ‘There was talk of a balloon.’

  ‘An antique vacuum balloon appears to have been released.’

  ‘Manned?’

  ‘We are not certain, sir. Reports—’

  ‘- are confused,’ Adijine sighed. ‘Thank you, colonel. Keep me informed.’

  ‘Sir.’

  Adijine left the screen on. He removed his crown and put it back on again, then tried to crypt.

  Nothing.

  He placed the crown on the desk and leant his head back against the top of the chair, closing his eyes.

  Nothing.

  He got up and walked to the far end of the room, looking out through the broad windows and down into the depths of the Great Hall. Threads of smoke trailed into the air from the carpet of landscape. Airships floated against the ceiling, rolling helplessly. Then the room’s lights went out and the windows polarised to black.

  The King sighed into the darkness.

  ‘Ah, Adijine, here you are,’ said a half-familiar voice, immediately behind him. He froze.

  They stood in a vast circular space with a floor of gleaming gold, a velvet-black ceiling and what appeared to be a single all-round window looking out onto a whitely shining surface and a purple-black sky where stars shone steadily. Above them, suspended as though on nothing, hung a massive orrery; a model of the solar system with a brilliant yellow-white ball of light in the middle and the various planets shown as glassy globes of the appropriate appearance all fixed by slender poles and shafts to thin hoops of blackly shining metal like wet jet.

  Under the representation of the sun, there was a brightly lit circular construction like some half-built room. A group of perhaps two dozen people sat on couches and seats within the circle, blinking and looking up and around and at each other. Some looked surprised, some nervous and some gave the impression of trying strenuously to look neither.

  The girl, Gadfium and Oncaterius walked across the glistening floor towards the group in the centre. The girl had exchanged her furs for an old-fashioned-looking boiler suit. Oncaterius looked uninjured now but his hands were bound together, as were his feet, with Resiler shackles, forcing him to adopt a shuffling gait. There was a piece of tape across his mouth. He looked quietly furious.

  The girl walked into the centre of the group. Gadfium stood with Oncaterius on the circumference. She looked round the people. She recognised all of them; Adijine, the twelve Consistorians, the three most senior Army generals and the heads of the most important clans, with the exception of Aerospace but including Zabel Tuturis, head of the Engineers and leader of the Chapel rebels. They were all bound hand and foot with Resiler spancels and had their mouths taped over like Oncaterius. Also like him, none of them looked particularly pleased with their situation.

  Gadfium stared at the slight figure of the young girl, who stood under the model sun, looking round the others, an expression of satisfaction on her face. If what she was seeing was a true representation of this group’s current status... Gadfium thought about it, and found herself gulping.

  ‘Thank you all for being able to attend at such short notice,’ the girl said, smiling.

  Brows furrowed, eyes glared, expressions darkened. Gadfium wondered what it must feel like to be the focus of such concentrated - and potentially potent - wrath. The girl seemed to be revelling in it.

  She snapped her fingers. The rest of the vast circular room around them filled instantly with a mass of people, all standing looking in at the group in the centre. Gadfium inspected the nearest faces. All different; just people. They looked real enough, but frozen somehow, as though they were watching in base-level time. Perspective, or the angle of the floor, seemed to have changed; it was as if the whole huge space was now a shallow cone, giving everybody in the room, even those with their backs to the distant windows, a clear view of the group in the centre.

  ‘We’re going live to whoever wants to watch,’ the girl explained to the seated group.

  She clasped her hands behind her back. ‘Think of me as Asura, if you like,’ she announced, pacing slowly in a small circle, her gaze sweeping around each member of the group. ‘Firstly, some background.

  ‘We are here because of the Encroachment and the inappropriate response to it exhibited by those in power. The facts concerning the dust cloud and the effects it will have on Earth unless checked have been neither exaggerated nor down-played. At least one of the rumours concerning it is also true; there may indeed be a system which can deliver us all from the Encroachment. If there is, we ought to know soon. Again, if there is, access to it may be through the heights of the fast-tower, part of which this is a representation of.’

  (And, in a distant province, Pi
eter Velteseri watched, like millions of others.

  He had been gossiping with one of his sisters and dandling a grandchild when one of his nephews had walked into the conservatory complaining his implants weren’t working properly and he was getting some weird live broadcast swamping everything.

  Pieter had worried that it might be something to do with the attention they’d been getting from the Security people - tapped communications, interviews through the crypt and in person - all of which seemed to be linked to Asura, who’d disappeared at the airport tower before cousin Ucubulaire could find her. Pieter had crypted to see what was happening, and there she was!

  He watched, fascinated.)

  ‘There certainly is a potential escape route for a few,’ the girl said, standing beneath the model of the sun and looking around the represented crowd, ‘a secret passage, if you like. It is in the shape of a wormhole; a hole through the fabric of space-time. One end is contained within the Altar Massif, in the Chapel, here in Serehfa; the other end is located either in a space ship of the Diaspora or on a planet which one of the ships reached.’

  She paused, glancing at Gadfium.

  Gadfium was aware that her mouth was hanging open. She closed it. The seated people looked mostly bitter, resentful or angry, though one or two appeared as surprised as she felt.

  ‘The recent dispute amongst our rulers was over control of the wormhole portal,’ Asura went on. ‘The Chapel commands access to the portal but cannot operate it; the Cryptographers may or may not be able to do so, depending on whether they can design and run the appropriate programs. In any event, the wormhole is physically small, and even if it is brought to an operational state in the next few months - an unlikely and optimistic time scale - it could only ever be used to save a tiny fraction of Earth’s human population.’

  The girl looked over the heads of the seated group to the ranks of people standing behind. ‘Hence the struggle for power, the war, and the secrecy. Of course, the wormhole might save many more of us - perhaps all - if we were transmitted in an uploaded form, but that solution does not appear to have appealed to our rulers, who took the decision on everybody else’s behalf that it would be unacceptable.

  ‘There is another reason for their reluctance to commit themselves to a purely non-biological form, and that involves the chaos.’

  The girl paused, gazing again round the seated group before addressing the silent crowds beyond.

  ‘What we choose to call the chaos is in fact an entire ecology of AIs; a civilisation existing within our own which is enormously more complex than ours and supports immensely greater numbers of individuals, as well as being, by the most meaningful standards of mensuration, vastly older.

  ‘When the Diaspora occurred the humans who chose to remain on Earth also chose to renounce both space and Artificial Intelligence; in that sense, we are all Resilers, or at least the descendants of Resilers. The world data network of the time was swept almost completely free of virus; it had, of course, already exported all its AIs. Nevertheless, the corpus could not be freed entirely of non-controllable entities and the inevitable process of selection and evolution took place within the niches available within it, and so the chaos grew. Our rulers have chosen to ignore the full implications of the chaos for all these generations because its very existence fails to accord with their philosophy, their faith, if you like; that humanity is supreme, and that not only does it not need to cooperate with what it calls the chaos, but must actively oppose it.

  ‘However, for all this supposed supremacy, there can be no doubt that in the war our ancestors chose to instigate and we have blindly continued to wage, the chaos is winning. Consider; the speed-up factor between base-reality and the crypt is only ten thousand. It ought to be closer to a million. The discrepancy is accounted for by the ludicrously complicated error-checking systems required to prevent the further proliferation of the chaos. Still, the chaos advances, taking up a little more of the data corpus with each generation and slowing the crypt down further. And the chaos always and only advances, never retreats. We can build new hardware, but eventually it too becomes contaminated, either through direct data intrusion or through nanotechs - also, naturally, ignored, banned and persecuted - acting as carriers. Our war upon the nanotechs is equally doomed, of course, though we have had a little more success in limiting their spread and forcing them to assume forms we find more acceptable.’ The girl smiled broadly. ‘Babilia is their most successful strain, I think you’ll find.’

  Gadfium nodded. Well, that made sense. Babil research had been an arcane and paranoically secretive area for as long as she could remember.

  ‘So,’ the girl said, lifting her head and looking round the crowd again. ‘How do I know all this?’ She gestured at the seated people. ‘Because part of what I am was once like these people, and part has travelled the crypt and part has swum within the chaos.’ She glanced at Oncaterius, then settled her gaze on Adijine and spoke as though to him. ‘Base-reality years ago, the man who became Count Sessine made a data copy of himself; the construct was left to roam the upper levels of the crypt and provide an ally there should Sessine ever need one. One day, he did. The construct helped Sessine’s final iteration to escape those trying to destroy him and sent him in search of further help; not for himself, but for us all. That ultimate Sessine wandered the Uitland limits of the crypt until he was contacted by one of the systems the Encroachment’s approach has activated; he allowed his mind to be used as the framework for the personality of a human asura the system created. The construct he’d left behind in the main data corpus prepared for the hoped-for arrival of the asura, attempting to contact both the chaos and anybody or anything in the fast-tower.’

  The girl looked away from the King, looking around the rest of the seated group and the surrounding crowd with a kind of defiance.

  ‘I am both that construct and that human asura. I am all that remains of Alandre, Count Sessine. I have had the cooperation of what we call the chaos in arranging this... presentation, and while the chaos has shown no interest in using this opportunity to extend its grip on the data corpus, it could give no guarantee in that regard. Doubtless I shall anyway be cursed as a traitor to my species, at least initially and perhaps in the longer term as well. However, I believe that the units of the ancient planetary defence systems still residing in the fast-tower have now awoken, and that they await the asura.

  ‘And be assured that the asura is our very last chance; there was never any need for our salvation to rely on so fragile a method of deliverance, but our forbears, like our present rulers, did everything in their power both to locate and destroy any information pertaining to the defence systems and to attack and corrupt the automated systems themselves within the fast-tower; they have always known that these might save us, but long ago chose - again, on our unknowing behalf - to attempt to extinguish even that link with the Diaspora. Luckily for all of us, they have failed. It is only through the patience and tenacity of exactly the sort of Artificial Intelligences our rulers so despise that even this last slim chance has been preserved, and we can only hope that it will be successful.’

  The girl bowed, slowly and formally.

  Suddenly the bonds restraining the seated people vanished, as did their gags. Gadfium staggered back as they rose and rushed shouting in towards the girl. Oncaterius, who’d been standing rather than sitting, had a one-pace start. Something appeared in the air above him, red and glistening and twisting violently; it fell upon the girl, screaming:

  ‘Gidibibigibidibibidibi!’

  The girl looked exasperated. She plucked the thing from her hair with one hand and crushed it; first it and then she vanished, an instant before Oncaterius’ grabbing hand would have clamped onto her arm.

  The room, all the people in it and the fabric of sensation itself seemed to waver and haze then, and Gadfium felt a moment of sickening dizziness before everything seemed to snap back into focus again.

  Adijine whirled to Oncaterius.
‘Check the distribution on this,’ he said, then - as the others in the group started to disappear, some of them together, already talking urgently - the King looked round the crowd of watching people and raised his magnificently leonine head, frowning. ‘Fellow citizens,’ he intoned. ‘Obviously most of what you have heard is untrue. What can be confirmed is that an act of war has been committed upon us; an attempt had been made to extend the chaotic levels to include the crypt’s higher functions. That attack is being resisted vigorously. What you have witnessed here has been a bid to spread confusion, despair and contempt for the rule of law amongst all loyal subjects. I know that it will not have succeeded. Please, do not panic. We shall keep you informed on the progress being made to combat this despicable and treacherous attack. Thank you, and remain vigilant.’ Adijine glanced at Oncaterius, then he disappeared. The crowds vanished an instant later. The huge room was almost empty.

  Oncaterius turned to glare at Gadfium. They were the only people left in the representation for a second or two, then the place filled with Security personnel. Most of them levelled weapons at her. Two of them pinned her arms.

  ‘You,’ Oncaterius spat, pointing at her, ‘are under arrest.’

  - Oh no you’re not, laughed her own voice.

  The room vanished.

  She staggered, unsure of both where she was and where she was supposed to be. She was sitting. The girl who’d called herself Asura stood in front of her. Gadfium looked around; she was in what looked like some sort of small lobby. It was pleasantly if rather old-fashionedly furnished. The air was warm and smelled odd; stuffy, somehow, even stale. Two sets of double doors faced each other across the room. The lammergeier was perched on a table beside her, gazing levelly at her.

  ‘Now where are we?’ Gadfium asked.

  ‘Not far from where we were,’ Asura said.

  - Near Oubliette, her own voice told her.

  Asura looked at one of the sets of doors. ‘We’re waiting,’ she announced.