Matter

by Iain M. Banks

  “They try to break us!” Elime had told Ferbin. Elime was a big, burly, energetic young man, always full of enthusiasm and opinions and tirelessly keen to hunt or drink or fight or fuck. “They try to put a little voice in our heads that will always say, ‘You don’t matter. What you do means nothing!’”

  Elime, like their father, was having none of this. So the aliens could sail within the Towers and cruise between the stars and construct whole worlds – so what? There were powers beyond them that they didn’t fully understand. Perhaps this nesting, this shell-after-shell-beyond-what-you-knew principle went on for ever! Did the aliens give up and do nothing? No! They had their disputes and contentions, their disagreements and alliances, their wins and losses, even if they were somehow more oblique and rarefied than the wars, victories and defeats that the Sarl both enjoyed and suffered. The stratagems and power-plays, the satisfactions and disillusions that the Sarl experienced mattered as much to them as those of the aliens did to their own overweeningly cosmopolitan and civilised souls.

  You lived within your level and accepted that you did; you played by the rules within that level, and therein lay the measure of your worth. All was relative, and by refusing to accept the lesson the aliens were implicitly trying to teach here – behave, accept, bow down, conform – a hairy-arsed bunch of primitives like the Sarl could score their own kind of victory against the most overarching sophisticates the galaxy had to offer.

  Elime had been wildly excited. This visit had reinforced what he’d seen during his first time at the Surface and had made sense of all the things their father had been telling them since they were old enough to understand. Ferbin had been amazed; Elime was positively glowing with joy at the prospect of returning to their own level with a kind of civilisational mandate to carry on his father’s work of unifying the Eighth – and who knew, perhaps beyond.

  At the time, Ferbin, who was just starting to take an interest in such things, had been more concerned with the fact that his beautiful second cousin Truffe, who was a little older than he and with whom he’d started to think he might be falling in love, had succumbed – with frightening, indecent ease – to Elime’s bluff charms during the visit to the Surface. That was the sort of conquering Ferbin was starting to take an interest in, thank you, and Elime had already beaten him to it.

  They had returned to the Eighth, Elime with a messianic gleam in his eye, Ferbin with a melancholic feeling that, now Truffe was forever denied him – he couldn’t imagine she’d settle for him after his brother, and besides, he wasn’t sure he wanted her any more anyway – his young life was already over. He also felt that – in some strange, roundabout way – the aliens had succeeded in lowering his expectations by the same degree they had inadvertently raised Elime’s.

  He realised he had drifted off in this reverie when he heard Holse shouting at him. He looked about. Had he missed a Tower? He saw what looked like a new Tower some distance off to his right and forward. It looked oddly bright in its paleness. This was because of the great wall of darkness filling the sky ahead. He was damp all over; they must have flown through a cloud. The last he recalled they had been flying just under the surface of some long grey mass of vapour with hazy tendrils stretching down like forest creepers all around them.

  “. . . grit-cloud!” he heard Holse yell.

  He looked up at the cliff of darkness ahead and realised it was indeed a silse cloud; a mass of sticky rain it would be dangerous and possibly fatal to try and fly through. Even the caude he was riding seemed to have realised things weren’t quite right; it shivered beneath him and he could hear it making moaning, whining noises. Ferbin looked to either side. There was no way round the great dark cloud and it was far too tall for them to go over the top. The cloud was loosing its gritty cargo of rain, too; great dragged veils of darkness swept back along the ground beneath it.

  They’d have to land and sit it out. He signalled to Holse and they wheeled right round, back the way they’d come, descending fast towards the nearest forest on the side of a tall hill bound on three sides by the loop of a broad river. Drops of moisture tickled Ferbin’s face and he could smell something like dung.

  They landed on the broad, boggy summit of the hill near a rough-edged pool of dark, brackish water and squelched through a quaking mire of shaking ground, leading the grumbling caude down to the tree line. They persuaded the caude to trample down a few springy saplings so they could all shoulder their way far enough in. They sheltered under the trees while the whole day darkened until it was like night. The caude promptly fell asleep.

  The grit-rain whispered in the branches high above, growing slowly louder. The view of the hill’s top and a line of remaining brightness in the sky beyond disappeared.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a pipe of good unge leaf,” Holse said, sighing. “Bloody nuisance, eh, sir?”

  Ferbin could barely make out his servant’s face in the gloom, though he was almost within touching distance. “Yes,” he said. He squinted at the chronometer, which he was keeping inside his jacket. “We won’t get there in daylight now,” he said.

  A few leaf-filtered drops of the dirty rain plopped down about them; one landed on Ferbin’s nose and trickled to his mouth. He spat.

  “My old dad lost a whole crop of xirze to one of these buggering silse storms once,” Holse said.

  “Well, they destroy but they build up too,” Ferbin said.

  “I have heard them compared to kings, in that regard,” Holse said. “Sir.”

  “We need them, both.”

  “I’ve heard that too, sir.”

  “In other worlds, they have no silse, no sticky rain. So I’ve been told.”

  “Really? Doesn’t the land just wear away to nothing?”

  “Apparently not.”

  “Not even eventually, sir? Don’t these places have rain and such – ordinary rain, I mean, obviously – that would wear the hills down and carry them all away to lakes and seas and oceans?”

  “They generally do. Seemingly they also have such hydrological systems that can build up land from beneath.”

  “From beneath,” Holse said, sounding unconvinced.

  “I remember one lesson where it sounded like they had oceans of rock so hot it was liquid, and not only flowed like rivers but also could flow uphill, to issue from the summits of mountains,” Ferbin said.

  “Really, sir.” Holse sounded like he thought Ferbin was trying to fool him into believing the sort of preposterous nonsense a child would dismiss with derision.

  “These effects serve to build up land,” Ferbin said. “Oh, and the mountains float and can grow upwards wholesale, apparently. Entire countries crash into each other, raising hills. There was more, but I rather missed the start of that lesson and it does all sound a bit far-fetched.”

  “I think they were having you on, sir. Trying to see how gullible you might be.” Holse might have sounded hurt.

  “I thought that, I have to say.” Ferbin shrugged, unseen. “Oh, I probably got it wrong, Choubris. I wouldn’t quote me on this, frankly.”

  “I shall take care not to, sir,” Holse said.

  “Anyway, that is why they don’t need silse rain.”

  “If a tenth of all that stuff’s true, sir, I think we have the better side of the bargain.”

  “So do I.”

  Silse rebuilt land. As Ferbin understood it, tiny animalcules in the seas and oceans each grabbed a particle of silt and then made some sort of gas that hoisted creature and particle to the surface, where they leapt into the air to become clouds which then drifted over the land and dropped the lot in the form of dirty, sticky rain. Silse clouds were relatively rare, which was just as well; a big one could drown a farm, a village or even a county as efficiently as a small flood, smothering crops with knee-deep mud, tearing down trees or leaving them stripped of branches, breaking roofs of too shallow a pitch, paving over meadows, blanketing roads and damming rivers – usually only temporarily, swiftly resulting in real
floods.

  The gritty rain was dripping on to them even under the cover of the trees as it found its way through the now heavy, drooping branches.

  From all directions around them, a sporadic series of loud cracks rang out above the sound of the silse storm, each followed by a rushing, tearing, crashing noise concluding in a great thump.

  “If you hear that right above us, sir,” Holse said, “best jump.”

  “I most certainly shall,” Ferbin said, trying to uncloy his eyes from the gritty stuff falling on them. The silse stank like something from the bottom of a latrine trench. “Though right now, death does not seem so unattractive.”

  The cloud passed eventually, the day brightened again and a strong wind veered about the hilltop. They squelched out on to the doubly treacherous summit. The newly dumped silse mud covering the already unstable surface of the bog pulled at their feet and those of the caude, both of which showed signs of distress at being forced to walk in such conditions. The mud reeked like manure. Ferbin and Holse brushed as much as they could from their skin and clothes before it caked.

  “Could do with a shower of nice clean rain now, eh, sir?”

  “What about that sort of pool thing up there?” Ferbin asked.

  “Good idea, sir,” Holse said, leading the caude to the shallow, now overbrimming tarn near the summit of the hill. The caude whinnied and resisted, but eventually were persuaded to enter the water, which came to halfway up their bellies.

  The two men cleaned the beasts and themselves as best they could. The caude were still unhappy, and their slipping, sliding take-off run only just got them above the trees in time. They flew on into the late afternoon.

  They kept flying even as the dusk slowly descended, though the caude were whining almost constantly now and continually tried to descend, dropping down and answering only slowly and with much grumbling to each up-pulling of the reins. On the landscape below must be farms, villages and towns, but they could see no sign of them. The wind was to their left side, constantly trying to push them towards the Towers they needed to keep to their right. The clouds had settled back to a high overcast and another ragged layer at about half a kilometre; they kept beneath this, knowing that getting lost in night cloud might easily be the end of them.

  Eventually they saw what they thought must be the D’nengoal Tower, a broad, pale presence rising across an extensive marsh still just about reflecting the slow-fading embers that Obor had left on the under-surface of the sky high above.

  The D’nengoal Tower was what was known as a Pierced Tower; one through which access might be gained to its interior and so to the network of thoroughfares in which the Oct – and the Aultridia – sailed their scendships. This was at least the popular understanding; Ferbin knew that all the Towers had been pierced originally, and in a sense still were.

  Every Tower, where it fluted out at its base on each level, contained hundreds of portals designed to transport the fluid which it was alleged the Involucra had planned to fill the World with. On the Eighth the portals were, in any case, all buried under at least a hundred metres of earth and water, but in almost every Tower the portals had all long since been firmly sealed by the Oct and Aultridia. There were rumours – which the Oct did nothing to deny – that other peoples, other rulers, had sunk mines down to where the sealed portals were and had tried to open them, only to find that they were utterly impenetrable to anybody without the kind of technology that let one sail the stars, never mind the interior of Towers, and also that even attempting to meddle with them inevitably brought down the wrath of the Oct; those rulers had been killed and those peoples scattered, often across other, less forgiving levels.

  Only one Tower in a thousand still had a single portal which gave access to the interior, at least at any useful height – telescopes had revealed what might be portals high above the atmosphere, hundreds of kilometres above ground level – and the usual sign of a Pierced Tower was a much smaller – though still by human standards substantial – access tower sited nearby.

  The D’nengoal’s access tower proved surprisingly difficult to spot in the gloom. They flew round the Tower once, under the thickening layer of cloud, feeling pressed between the mists rising from the ground below and the lowering carpet of darkness directly above. Ferbin was worried first that they might crash into the lesser tower in the darkness – they were being forced to fly at only a hundred metres above the ground, and that was about the usual altitude for the top of an access tower – and then that they had chosen the wrong Tower in the first place. The map they’d looked at earlier had shown the Tower was pierced, but not exactly where its accompanying access tower was. It also showed a fair-sized town, Dengroal, situated very close to the nearpole base of the main Tower, but there was no sign of the settlement. He hoped it was just lost in the mists.

  The access tower lit up in front of them as the top twenty metres of the cylinder suddenly flashed in a series of giant, tower-encircling hoops so bright they dazzled the eye. It was less than a hundred strides in front of them and its summit was a little above their present level, almost in the clouds; the blue light picked out their gauzy under-surface like some strange, inverted landscape. He and Holse pulled up and banked and then, with gestures, agreed to land on the top. The caude were so tired they hardly bothered to complain as they were asked to climb one more time.

  The summit of the access tower was fifty strides across; a concentric series of blue hoops of light was set into its surface like a vast target. The light pulsed slowly from dim to bright, like the beat of some vast and alien heart.

  They landed on the tower’s nearest edge; the startled caude scrambled and beat their wings with one last frantic effort as the smooth surface under their grasping feet failed to bring them to a halt as quickly as ground or even stone would have, but then their scraping claws found some purchase, their wingbeats pulled them up and finally, with a great whistling sigh that sounded entirely like relief, they were stopped. They each settled down, quivering slightly, wings half outstretched with exhaustion, heads lying on the surface of the tower, panting. Blue light shone up around their bodies. The vapour of their breath drifted across the flat, blue-lit summit of the tower, dissipating slowly.

  Ferbin dismounted, joints creaking and complaining like an old man’s. He stretched his back and walked over to where Holse was standing rubbing at the leg he’d hurt when the mersicor had fallen on top of him.

  “Well, Holse, we got here.”

  “And a strange old here it is, sir,” Holse said, looking around the broad circular top of the tower. It appeared to be perfectly flat and symmetrical. The only visible features were the hoops of blue light. These issued from hand-wide strips set flush with whatever smooth material made up the tower’s summit. They were standing about halfway between the centre of the surface and the edge. The blue light waxed about them, giving them and their beasts a ghostly, otherworldly appearance. Ferbin shivered, though it was not especially cold. He looked about them. There was nothing visible beyond the circles of blue. Above, the slow-moving layer of cloud looked almost close enough to touch. The wind picked up for a moment, then fell back to a breeze.

  “At least there’s nobody else here,” he said.

  “Thankful for that, sir,” Holse agreed. “Though if there is anybody watching, and they can see through the mist, they’ll know we’re here. Anyway. What happens now?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Ferbin admitted. He couldn’t recall what one had to do to gain access to one of these things. On the occasion when he’d gone to the Surface with Elime and the others he’d been too distracted by everything that was happening to take note of exactly what the procedure was; some servant had done it all. He caught Holse’s expression of annoyance and looked around again, gaze settling on the centre of the tower’s surface. “Perhaps . . .” he started to say. As he’d spoken, he’d pointed at the glowing dot at the focus of the pulsing blue hoops, so they were both looking right at it when it rose slowly,
smoothly into the air.

  A cylinder about a foot across extended like a section of telescope from the dead centre of the tower’s summit, rising to around head height. Its top surface pulsed blue in time with the widening circles radiating out from it.

  “That might be useful,” Ferbin said.

  “As a hitching post for the beasts, if nothing else, sir,” Holse said. “There’s bugger all else to tie them to up here.”

  “I’ll take a look,” Ferbin said. He didn’t want to show Holse he felt frightened.

  “I’ll hold the reins.”

  Ferbin walked over to the slim cylinder. As he approached, an octagon of grey light seemed to swivel into place, facing him, level with his own face. It showed a stylised Oct in silhouette. The cylinder’s surface beaded with moisture as a light rain began to fall.

  “Repetition,” said a voice like rustling leaves. Before Ferbin could say anything in reply, the voice went on, “Patterns, yes. For, periodicity. As the Veil become the Oct, so one iteration becomes another. Spacing is the signal, so creates. Yet, also, repetition shows lack of learning. Again, be on your way. Signal that is no signal, simply power, follows. Unrepeats.” The octagonal patch showing the silhouetted Oct shape faded and the cylinder started to sink silently back into the surface.

  “Wait!” Ferbin shouted, and grabbed at the smooth round shape, putting both arms round it and attempting to prevent it disappearing. It felt cold and seemed to be made of metal; it would have been slick enough anyway but the drizzle made it more so and it slid imperturbably downwards as though his efforts to retrain it were having no effect whatsoever.