Matter

by Iain M. Banks

  The director general made a dry, spindly noise, like a sigh. “Perhaps it is different for humans, dear prince” she said, sounding sad, “but we have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lessons that way – albeit all the harder for their parents’ earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, though it may seem harsher at the time.”

  “To do nothing is always easy.” Ferbin did not try to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

  “To do nothing when you are so tempted to do something, and entirely have the means to do so, is harder. It grows easier only when you know you do nothing for the active betterment of others.”

  Ferbin took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. He looked down through the nearest transparent circle in the floor. It showed another Crater sliding by beneath them like a lividly shining yellow-brown bruise of life on Sursamen’s darkly barren Surface. It was gradually disappearing as they travelled over it, leaving only that dark absence of Sursamen’s unadorned face implied below them.

  “If you will not help me in getting a message to my brother warning him he is in mortal danger, ma’am, can you help me otherwise?”

  “Assuredly. We can direct you to the ex-Culture human and ex-Special Circumstances agent Xide Hyrlis, and facilitate your conveyance towards him.”

  “So it is true; Xide Hyrlis is now ex-Culture?”

  “We believe he is. With SC, sometimes it is hard to be sure.”

  “Is he still in a position to help us?”

  “Possibly. I do not know. All I can solve with any certainty is your first problem, which is finding him; this would be a problem otherwise because the Nariscene guard him jealously. He works, in effect, for them now. Even when Hyrlis was here on Sursamen his purpose was moot; his presence was requested by the Nariscene and disapproved of by ourselves, though we drew the line at requesting his removal. A Nariscene experiment, perhaps, possibly at the behest of the Oct, testing the rules regarding the transfer of technology to less-developed peoples; he gave you a great deal, prince, though he was careful to do so only in the form of ideas and advice, never anything material. Your second problem will be persuading Hyrlis to talk to you; that you must do yourselves. Your third problem, obviously, is securing his services. Yours again, I’m afraid.”

  “Well,” Ferbin said, “my good fortune arrives in small change these days, ma’am. Nevertheless, I hope I count my gratitude in larger coin. Even if that is all you can offer me, I am beholden. We have recently come to expect that every hand will be turned against us; to find mere indifference caused us joy. Any active help, however circumscribed, now seems like far more than we deserve.”

  “I wish you well in your quest, prince.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Ah; an open Tower end, do you see?”

  Ferbin looked down to see a small black spot on the dark brown expanse of the Surface. It only showed because the rest of the view was so dark; situated anywhere near a shining Crater, the dark dot would have been invisible beneath the wash of light. “That dark spot?”

  “Yes. Do you know of those? It is the end of a Tower which leads all the way down to the Machine Core, where your god resides.”

  “It is?” Ferbin had never heard of such a thing. The spot looked too small, for one thing. The Towers were known to taper, but they were still one and a half kilometres across when they reached the Surface. On the other hand, they were quite high up, here in the director general’s spacecraft.

  “They are rare,” she told him. “No more than six out of a million Towers on any Shellworld are fashioned so.”

  “That I did not know,” Ferbin said. He watched the tiny dot of darkness slide beneath them.

  “Of course, there are defence mechanisms on the Surface and all the way down – no freak piece of random space debris or maliciously directed ordnance would make it far down there, and various doors and lock systems exist at the level of the Core itself – however, essentially, when you stare straight down that shaft, you are looking across twenty-one thousand kilometres of vacuum to the lair of the Xinthian itself.”

  “The WorldGod,” Ferbin said. Even as one who had never been especially religious, it felt strange to hear its existence confirmed by an alien of the Optimae, even if she did use its common, dismissive name.

  “Anyway. I think now we’ll return you to your quarters. There is a ship leaving in half a day that will take you in the direction of Xide Hyrlis. I shall arrange your passage.”

  Ferbin lost sight of the tiny black dot. He returned his attention to the Morthanveld. “You are kind, ma’am.”

  The view from the craft tipped all around them as it flipped over, banking steeply. Holse closed his eyes and swayed, even though he was seated. Beside Ferbin, the surface of the wine in his glass barely trembled.

  “Your sibling,” the director general said as Ferbin watched the whole world tilt about them.

  “My sibling,” Ferbin said.

  “She is Seriy Anaplian.”

  “That sounds like the name.”

  “She, too, is of Special Circumstances, dear prince.”

  “Apparently. What of it, ma’am?”

  “That is a great deal of good connection for one family, let alone one person.”

  “I shan’t refuse any portion, if good it is.”

  “Hmm. It does occur to me that, no matter how distant, she may have heard about your father and the other recent events from your home level, which of course includes the news of your supposed death.”

  “May she?”

  “As I say, news osmoses. And where news is concerned, the Culture is of a very low pressure.”

  “I fail to understand you, ma’am.”

  “They tend to hear everything.”

  The Nariscene ship The Hundredth Idiot and the orbiting transit facility parted company as gently as lovers’ hands, Holse thought. He watched the process happen on a big circular screen inside one of the vessel’s human-public areas. He was the only person there. He’d wanted to watch from a proper porthole but there weren’t any.

  Tubes and gantries and stretchy corridors all sort of just kissed goodbye to each other and retracted like hands inside sleeves on a cold day. Then the transit facility was shrinking, and you could see the whole spindly, knobbly shape of it, and the start of the absurdly long cords that tethered it to the Surface of Sursamen.

  It all happened in silence, if you didn’t count the accompanying screechings which were allegedly Nariscene music.

  He watched Sursamen bulge darkly out across the great circle of screen as the transit facility shrank quickly to too-small-to-see. How vast and dark it was. How spotted and speckled with those shining circles of Craters. In the roughly quarter of the globe that Holse could see right now he guessed there were perhaps a score of such environments, glowing all sorts of different colours according to the type of atmosphere they held. And how quickly it was all shrinking, gathering itself in, concentrating, like something boiling down.

  The ship drew further away. The transit facility was quite gone. Now he could see all of Sursamen; every bit was there on the screen, the whole globe encircled shown. He found it hard to believe that the place where he had lived his entire life was appreciable now in one glimpse. Look; he glanced from one pole to another, and felt his eyes jerk only a millimetre or less in their sockets. Further away still now, their rate of progress increasing. Now he could hold all mighty Sursamen in a single static stare, extinguish it with a blink . . .

  He thought of his wife and children, wondering if he would ever see them again. It was odd that while he and Ferbin had still been on the Eighth and so exposed to the continual and sharp danger of being killed, or travelling up from their home level and still arguably at some risk, he had n
evertheless been sure he would see his family again. Now that they were – you’d hope – safe for the moment, on this fancy ship-of-space, he watched his home shrink to quick nothing with a less than certain feeling that he’d be safely back.

  He hadn’t even asked to get a message back to them. If the aliens were disinclined to grant the request of a prince, they’d surely ignore a more humble man’s petition. All the same, maybe he ought to have asked. There was even a possibility that his own request would be granted just because he was only a servant and so didn’t signify; news of his living might not matter enough to affect greater events the way knowledge of Ferbin’s continuing existence might. But then if his wife knew he was still alive and people in power heard of this, they would undoubtably treat this as part-way proof that Ferbin did indeed live, and that would be deemed important. They’d want to know how she’d come to know and that might prove uncomfortable for her. So he owed it to her not to get in touch. That was a relief.

  He’d be in the wrong whatever he did. If they ever did get back he’d certainly be blamed for turning up alive after being dependably dead.

  Senble, bless her, was a passably handsome woman and a good mother, but she had never been the most sentimental of people, certainly not where her husband was concerned. Holse always had the impression he somehow cluttered the place up when he was in their apartment in the palace servants’ barracks. They only had two rooms, which was not a lot when you had four children, and he rarely found a place to sit and smoke a pipe or read a news sheet in tranquillity. Always being moved on, he was, for the purposes of cleaning, or to let the children fight in peace.

  When he went out, to sit somewhere else and smoke his pipe and read his paper undisturbed, he was usually welcomed back with a scolding for having wasted the family’s meagre resources in the betting house or drinking shop, whether he’d actually been there or not. Though he had, admittedly, used the earlier unjust accusations as cause to excuse the subsequent commitment of precisely such contrabandly activities.

  Did that make him a bad man? He didn’t think so. He’d provided, he’d given Senble six children, holding her to him when she’d wept, mourning the two they’d lost, and doing all he could to help her care for the four who’d survived. Where he’d grown up, the proportions of live to dead would have been reversed.

  He’d never hit her, which made him unusual within his circle of friends. He’d never hit a woman at all, which by his count made him unique amongst his peers. He told people he reckoned his father had used up the family’s allowance of woman-hitting, mostly on Holse’s poor long-suffering mother. He’d wished his father dead every single day for many years, waiting until he grew big enough to hit him back and protect his mother, but in the end it had been his mother who’d gone; suddenly, one day, just dropping dead in the field during the harvest.

  At least, he’d thought at the time, she’d been released from her torment. His father was never the same man again, almost as though he missed her, just possibly because he felt in some way responsible. At the time Holse had nearly felt himself big enough to stand up to his father, but his mother’s death had reduced his father so, and so quickly, that he’d never needed to. He’d walked away from home one day and never gone back, leaving his father sitting in his cold cottage, staring into a dying fire. He’d gone to the city and become a palace servant. Somebody from his village who’d made the same journey a long-year later had told him his father had hanged himself just a month earlier, after another bad harvest. Holse had felt no sympathy or sorrow at the news at all, only a kind of vindicated contempt.

  And if he and Ferbin were gone so long he was declared officially dead, Senble might remarry, or just take up with another man. It would be possible. She might mourn him – he hoped she would, though frankly he wouldn’t have put his own money on it – but he couldn’t imagine her tearing her hair out in an apoplexy of grief or swearing on his cold unge pipe she’d never let another man touch her. She might be forced to find another husband if she was thrown out of the servants’ quarters. How would he feel then, coming back to find his place taken so, his children calling another man Daddy?

  The truth was that he would almost welcome the opportunity to start again. He respected Senble and loved his children, but if they were being looked after by a decent sort of fellow then he wouldn’t throw a fit of jealousy. Just accept and walk on might be the best idea; wish all concerned well and make a fresh start, still young enough to enjoy a new life but old enough to have banked the lessons he’d learned from the first one.

  Did that make him a bad man? Perhaps, though if so then arguably all men were bad. A proposition his wife would probably agree with, as would most of the women Holse had known, from his poor mother onwards. That was not his fault either, though. Most men – most women, too, no doubt – lived and died under the general weight of the drives and needs, expectations and demands they experienced from within and without, beaten this way and that by longings for sex, love, admiration, comfort, importance and wealth and whatever else was their particular fancy, as well as being at the same time channelled into whatever furrows were deemed appropriate for them by those on high.

  In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.

  He was still staring at the screen, though he hadn’t really been seeing it for some time, lost in this reverie of decidedly unromantic speculation. He looked for Sursamen, looked for the place – vast, multi-layered, containing over a dozen different multitudes – where he had lived all his life and left all he’d ever known quite entirely behind, but he couldn’t find it.

  Gone; shrunk away to nothing.

  He had already asked the Nariscene ship why it bore the name it did.

  “The source of my name,” the vessel had replied, “The Hundredth Idiot, is a quotation: ‘One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.’ It is an old proverb.”

  Holse had made sure Ferbin was not within earshot and muttered, “I think I’ve known a few hundredths in my time.”

  The ship powered away in the midst of faraway stars, an infinitesimal speck lost in the vast swallowing emptiness between these gargantuan cousins of the Rollstars and Fixstars of home.

  16. Seed Drill

  Quitrilis Yurke saw the giant Oct ship immediately ahead and knew he was about to die.

  Quitrilis was piloting his ship by hand, the way you were very much not supposed to, not in the presence of a relatively close-packed mass of other ships – in this case, a whole fleet of Oct Primarian Craft. Primarians were the biggest class of regular ships the Oct possessed. A skeletal frame around a central core, they were a couple of klicks long and usually employed more as a sort of long-distance travel aid for smaller ships than as fully fledged spacecraft in their own right. There was at least a suggestion that the Oct had ships of this size and nature because they felt they ought to rather than because they really needed them; they were a vanity project, something they seemed to think they were required to have to be taken seriously as a species, as a civilisation.

  The Primarian fleet was twenty-two strong and stationed in close orbit directly above the city-cluster of Jhouheyre on the Oct planet of Zaranche in the Inner Caferlitician Tendril. They had arrived there in ones and twos over the course of the last twenty days or so, joining a single Primarian that had arrived over forty days before.

  Quitrilis Yurke, a dedicated Culture traveller and adventurer, away from home for a good five hundred and twenty-six days now and veteran of easily a dozen major alien star systems, was on Zaranche to find out whatever he could about whatever there was to be found out there. So far he’d discovered that Zaranche was a boring planet of real interest only to the Oct and devoid of any humanoid life. That last bit had been bad news. It had seemed like really good news at first, but it wasn’t. He’d never been anywh
ere before where he was the only human. Only human on the planet; that was travelling. That was Wandering. That was exclusive. He’d like to see his fellow travellers beat that. He’d felt aloof for about a minute.

  After that it was just boring and made him feel alone, but he’d told people – and especially his class- and village mates from back home (not that they were actually at home; they were mostly travelling too) – that he intended to stay on Zaranche for a hundred days or so, doing some proper studying and investigating that would lead to genuine peer-reviewable publishable kind of stuff and it would feel like defeat to squilch out now.

  Of all his group, he was the luckiest; everybody agreed, including Quitrilis Yurke. He’d looked for and found an old ship that was up for a bit of vaguely eccentric adventure late in life, and so – rather than just bumming around, hitching, cadging lifts off GSVs and smaller ships the way everybody else was going to – he’d basically got his own ship to play with; estimable!

  The Now We Try It My Way had been an ancient Interstellar-class General Transport Craft, built so long ago it could remember – directly; like, living memory – when the Culture had been, by civilisational standards, scrawny, jejune; positively callow. The ship’s AI (not a Mind – way too old and primitive and limited to be called a Mind, but most definitely still fully conscious and with a frighteningly sharp personality) had long since been transferred into a little one-off kind of runabout thing, the sort of ship that people referred to as Erratic-class, even though there wasn’t really any such class. (Only there sort of was now, because even Minds used the term.) Anyway. In its remodelled form it had been designed to serve as a sort of glorified shuttle (but faster than any ordinary shuttle), shifting people and things around the kind of mature system with more than one Orbital.