Matter

by Iain M. Banks

  “Arguably,” Anaplian agreed.

  “You are interested in the Morthanveld?” Ghasartravhara made a clicking noise with his mouth as the bataös board indicated it would move a piece for him if he didn’t move one himself soon. He folded a piece, moved it, set it down. It unfolded itself as it settled and clicked down a few leaves of nearby pieces, subtly altering the balance of the game. But then, Anaplian thought, every move did that.

  “I am going amongst them,” Djan Seriy said, studying the board. “I thought I’d do a little research.”

  “My. Privileged. The Morthanveld are reluctant hosts.”

  “I have connections.”

  “You go to the Morthanveld themselves?”

  “No, to a Shellworld within their influence. Sursamen. My homeworld.”

  “Sursamen? A Shellworld? Really?”

  “Really.” Anaplian moved a piece. The piece’s leaves clicked down, producing a small cascade of further leaf-falls.

  “Hmm,” the man said. He studied the board for a while, and sighed. “Fascinating places, Shellworlds.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “Might I ask? What takes you back there?”

  “A death in the family.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  Anaplian smiled thinly.

  One of Djan Seriy’s earliest memories from when she had been a little girl was of a funeral. She had been just a couple of long-years old, maybe less, when they’d buried her father’s brother, the Duke Wudyen. She was with the other children of the court, being looked after by nurses back at the palace while the adults were off doing the burying and mourning and so on. She was playing with Renneque Silbe, her best friend, making houses out of screens and pillows and cushions on the rug in front of the nursery fire, which roared and crackled away behind its fire guard of hanging chains. They were looking through the pillows and cushions to find one the right size for their house’s door. This was the third house they’d built; some of the boys kept coming over from where they were playing near the windows and kicking their houses down. The nurses were meant to be looking after them all but they were in their own room nearby drinking juice.

  “You killed your mother,” Renneque said suddenly.

  “What?” Djan Seriy said.

  “I heard you did. Bet you did. Mamma said so. You killed her. Why was that? Did you? Did you really? Did it hurt?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “She says you did.”

  “Well I didn’t.”

  “I know you did; my mamma told me.”

  “Didn’t. Didn’t kill her. Wouldn’t have.”

  “My mamma says you did.”

  “Stop it. I didn’t.”

  “My mamma does not lie.”

  “Didn’t kill her. She just died.”

  “My mamma said it was you who killed her.”

  “She just died.”

  “People don’t just die. Somebody has to kill them.”

  “Wasn’t me. She just died.”

  “Like Duke Wudyen was killed by who gave him the black cough. That’s reason.”

  “Just died.”

  “No, you killed her.”

  “Didn’t.”

  “Did so! Come on now, Djan. Did you? Did you really?”

  “Leave me alone. She just died.”

  “Are you crying?”

  “No.”

  “Is that what you’re doing now? Are you crying?”

  “Not crying.”

  “You are! You’re crying!”

  “Not.”

  “Toho! Kebli! Look; Djan’s crying!”

  Humli Ghasartravhara cleared his throat as he moved his next piece. He wasn’t really playing any longer, just shifting pieces about. They might have sent somebody better, Anaplian thought, then chided herself for making assumptions. “Will you be staying long?” the man asked. “On Sursamen? Or with the Morthanveld?”

  “I don’t know.” She made a move. Quick, easy, knowing she had won.

  “The ship you arrived on,” the man said. He left a space she was meant to fill, but Anaplian just raised her eyebrows. “It wasn’t very forthcoming, that’s all,” Humli said, when she refused to speak. “Just kind of dropped you. No passenger manifest or whatever they call it.”

  Anaplian nodded. “They call it a passenger manifest,” she confirmed.

  “The ship’s a bit concerned, that’s all,” Ghasartravhara said, with a bashful smile. He meant his ship, this ship; the Don’t Try This At Home.

  “Is it? The poor thing.”

  “Obviously, we – it – would never normally be this, ah . . .”

  “Intrusive? Paranoid?”

  “Let’s say . . . concerned.”

  “Let’s.”

  “However, with the whole Morthanveld situation, you know . . .”

  “I do?”

  He gave a nervous laugh. “It’s like waiting for a birth, almost, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?”

  Humli sat back, slumped a little and cleared his throat again. “You’re not really making this very easy for me, Ms Anaplian.”

  “Was I supposed to? Why?”

  He looked at her for a while, then shook his head. “Also,” he said, on a deep breath in, “I was, ah, asked by the ship Mind to ask you about an item in your luggage.”

  “Were you now?”

  “Unusual. Basically a knife missile.”

  “I see.”

  “You are aware it is there.”

  “I am aware there is something there.”

  Ghasartravhara smiled at her. “You’re not being spied on or anything. It’s just these things show up on the scans ships do of anything and everything coming aboard.”

  “Are MSVs always so concerned with every intimate part of a traveller’s luggage?”

  “Not normally. As I say—”

  “The Morthanveld situation.”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Let me tell you the truth, Mr Ghasartravhara.”

  The man sat back. “Okay,” he said, as though preparing himself for something unpleasant.

  “I work for Special Circumstances.” She saw his eyes widen. “But I’m off duty. Maybe even off message, and possibly off for good. They’ve pulled my claws, Humli,” she told him, and flexed an eyebrow. She held up one hand, exposing her fingernails. “See those?” Humli nodded. “Ten days ago I had nails with embedded CREWs, any one of which could have drilled a hole in your head big enough to stick a fist through.” Mr. Ghasartravhara looked suitably impressed. Even nervous. She inspected her new nails. “Now . . . well, they’re just fingernails.” She shrugged. “There’s a lot of other stuff I’m missing, too. All the really useful, harmful, hi-gadgetry stuff. It’s been taken from me.” She shrugged. “I surrendered it. All because of what we’re calling the Morthanveld situation. And now I’m making a private visit to my home, after the recent death of both my father and my brother.”

  The man looked relieved and embarrassed. He nodded slowly. “I really am sorry to hear that.”

  “Thank you.”

  He cleared his throat again and said apologetically, “And the knife missile?”

  “It stowed away. It was supposed to stay behind but the drone which controls it wants to protect me.” She was choosing her words very carefully.

  “Aw,” Ghasartravhara said, looking and sounding mawkish.

  “It is old and getting sentimental,” she told him sternly.

  “Yeah, but still.”

  “Still nothing. It will get us both into trouble if it’s not careful. All the same, I’d appreciate it if the fact of that device’s presence here didn’t get back to SC.”

  “Can’t imagine that will be a problem,” Humli said, smiling.

  Yes, she thought, grinning complicitly, everybody likes feeling they’ve got something over SC, don’t they? She nodded at the board. “Your move.”

  “I think I’m beaten,” he admitted ruefully. He looked at her dubiously. “I didn’
t know you were in SC when I agreed to play you.”

  She looked at him. “Nevertheless, I was playing by the same rules all the time. Unhelped.”

  Humli smiled, still uncertain, then stuck his hand out. “Anyway. Your game, I think.” They pressed palms.

  “Thank you.”

  He stretched, looked around. “Must be lunchtime. Will you join me?”

  “Happily.”

  They started packing away the bataös set, piece by piece.

  Well, she had done her best by her idiot drone, she reckoned. If word of its adventure did get back to SC, it wouldn’t be her fault. Anyway, it sounded like she and it might both get away with the fact that it was the mind of an experienced SC drone inside the knife missile, not a normal – and therefore relatively dim – knife missile brain.

  It sounded like it. You still never knew.

  The MSV Don’t Try This At Home was relatively small and absolutely crowded, packed with people and ships in a chance convergence of itineraries, building schedules and travel arrangements. Anaplian had been given quarters not within the craft’s own accommodation but inside a ship it contained and was still building, the Subtle Shift In Emphasis, a Plains-class General Contact Vehicle. This was a relatively new class of Culture ship and one that, apparently, couldn’t make up its mind whether it was a big Contact Unit or a small System Vehicle. Whatever else it was it was unfinished, and Anaplian occasionally had to wait for bits and pieces of the structure to be moved around inside the Don’t Try This At Home’s single Intermediate bay where the smaller ship was being constructed before she could move to or from her cabin.

  Even this was not really a cabin, and not really part of the new ship either. She’d been allocated the whole of one of the GCV’s modules; a small short-range transit craft which was nestled inside the vessel’s lower hangar with a half-dozen others. The module had morphed its seating into more varied furniture and walls, and she was gratified at the scale of her accommodation – the module was designed to carry over a hundred people – however, there was nobody else quartered aboard either the rest of the under-construction ship or any of its other modules and it felt odd to be so isolated, so apart from other people on a ship so obviously crowded.

  She didn’t doubt she’d been quarantined like this to make some sort of point but she didn’t care. To have such space in a small, packed ship was something of an indulgence. Others might have felt they were being treated like a pariah, being so prophylactically isolated from everybody else; she felt privileged. There were, she reflected, times when having been raised as a princess came in useful.

  On her third night aboard the Don’t Try This At Home she dreamt about the time she been taken to see the great waterfall of Hyeng-zhar, a level down, in the Ninth, when she was still little.

  Semi-conscious control over one’s dreams was not even an amendment, more of a skill, a technique one learned – in childhood for those born within the Culture, in early adulthood for Anaplian – and in all but her most banal, memory-detritus-clearing dreams, Djan Seriy was used to watching what was going on with a vaguely interested, analytical eye and, sometimes, stepping in and affecting proceedings, especially if the dream threatened to turn into a nightmare.

  She had long since ceased to be surprised that one could experience surprise in one’s sleep at something one was watching oneself dreaming. Compared to some stuff that could happen after SC gave you total control over a thoroughly amended and vastly enhanced body and central nervous network, that was small doings.

  Their party disembarked from the small train. She was holding the hand of her nurse and tutor, Mrs Machasa. The train itself was a novelty; a long, articulated thing like many land steamers all connected together and pulled by just one great engine, and running not on a road, but on railings! She’d never even heard of such a thing. She found trains and tracks and stations all very wonderful and advanced. She would tell her father to get some trains when they all returned to Pourl, and when he next returned from making the bad people stop being bad.

  The station was crowded. Mrs Machasa held her hand tightly. They were a large party, and had their own escort of royal guard – her very important brother Elime, who would be king one day, was with them, which made them all special – but, all the same, as Mrs M had told her that morning as they were getting her dressed, they were far away from home, on another level, amongst foreigners, and everybody knew that foreigners was just another word for barbarians. They had to be careful, and that meant keeping hold of hands, doing as you were told, and no wandering off. They were going to see the greatest waterfall in all the world and she didn’t want to be swept away by all the horrible water, did she?

  She agreed she didn’t want to be swept away by all the horrible water. The weather was cold; the Hyeng-zhar lay in a place where the weather varied a lot and it was not unknown for the river and the great cataract to freeze. Mrs M fastened her into her coat and leggings and hat, pulling and jerking her whole body as she tightened this and buttoned that. Mrs M was big and wide and had grey brows that bowed towards each other. There was always something that didn’t meet with her approval, often something about Djan Seriy, but she never hit her, sometimes cried over her and always hugged her, which was the best bit. Djan Seriy had tried to hug her father once when he was all dressed up for business and had been laughed at by some of the men in his court. Her father had pushed her away.

  Anaplian felt she was floating in and out of her own younger consciousness, sometimes being her earlier self, sometimes watching from outside. She could see most of the scene quite clearly, though, as usual, when she was floating detached like this the one thing that was vague and unformed was her own younger self. It was as if even in dreams you couldn’t truly be in two places at once. Bobbing in the air to one side of her dream self, she could not see herself as a child, just a sort of vague, fuzzy image of approximately the right size and shape.

  She was already criticising her own dream. Had Mrs Machasa really been that big? Had their party really been that many?

  Back inside her head, she watched the train huff and puff and cough out great white clouds and a smell of dampness. Then they were in steam carriages being taken along a road through a great flat plain. There were clouds against a blue sky. Some trees. Scrubby grass that Zeel, her mersicor gelding, would have turned his pretty nose up at. All very flat and rather boring.

  In her memory there was no warning; the Falls were just there. Snapshot of a by-child-standards interminable carriage journey (probably about ten minutes), then Bang; the Hyeng-zhar, in all their vast, chaotic glory.

  There must have been sight of the enormous river, its far bank lost in its own created mists so that it appeared as though an entire sea was spilling to oblivion; whole rolling, billowing fleets of clouds piled above the massive curve of the colossal cataract, rising without cease into the invaded sky; shaled continents of banked and broiling mists disappearing to the horizon; entire sheets and walls and cliffs of spray, the everywhere thunder of that ocean of water tipping over the exposed rock and pounding into the dizzying complex of linked plunge pools beneath where enormous canted blocks, bulging, monstrous curves, hollowed husks and jagged angles of jumbled debris jutted and reared.

  She must have seen some of the monks of the Hyeng-zharia Mission, the religious order which controlled the Falls’ excavation, and there must have been, if nothing else, all the squalor and slummery of the shanty town of ever-moving buildings that was the sprawling, peripatetic township called the Hyeng-zhar Settlement and all the equipment, spoil and general material associated with the desperate, ever-time-pressed excavations . . . but she recalled none of it, not before the shock of the Falls themselves, suddenly there, like the whole world twisting and falling sideways, like the sky upended, like everything in the universe falling forever in on itself, thrashing and pulverising all to destruction in a mad welter of elemental pandemonium. Here the air shook, the ground shook, the body shook, the brain shook ins
ide the head, assaulted, rattled like a marble in a jar.

  She had gripped Mrs M’s hand very tightly.

  She had wanted to shriek. She had felt that her eyes were bulging out of her head, that she was about to wet herself – the water squeezed out of her by the sheer force and battery of the trembling air wrapped pressing all around her – but mostly she wanted to scream. She didn’t, because she knew if she did Mrs M would take her away, tutting and shaking her head and saying that she had always known it was a bad idea, but she wanted to. Not because she was frightened – though she was; quite terrified – but because she wanted to join in, she wanted to mark this moment with something of her own.

  It didn’t matter that this was the single most stunning thing she had ever seen in her life (and, despite everything, despite all the wonders even the Culture had had to show her in her later years, it had, in all the important ways, remained so), that there was no matching it, no measuring it, no competing with it, no point in even trying to be noticed by it; all that mattered was that she was here, it was here, it was making the greatest noise in the history of everything and she needed to add her own acknowledgement to its mighty, overwhelming voice. Her own tininess in comparison to it was irrelevant; its unheeding vastness drew the breath out of her, sucked the sound of screaming from her little lungs and delicate stem of throat.

  She filled her chest to the point she could feel her bones and skin straining against her tightly buttoned coat, opened her mouth as wide as it could possibly go and then shook and trembled as though shrieking for all she was worth, but making no noise, certainly no noise above that stunning clamour overwhelming the air, so that the scream was caught and stayed clenched inside her, suffusing out into her miniature being, forever buried under layer after layer of memory and knowing.

  They stood there for some time. There must have been railings she looked through or perhaps climbed up on to. Maybe Mrs M had held her up. She remembered that they all got wet; the rolls of mists curled up and over them and drifted this way and that on the cool, energising breeze and came down soaking them.