Matter

by Iain M. Banks

  She acknowledged a few people as she walked to the circular bar in the middle of the Lounge, sitting glowing in the darkened space like a giant halo.

  “Shjan! You’re here!” shouted Tulya Puonvangi, who was what passed as the Culture’s ambassador on the Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown. Djan Seriy regarded the man rather as she did the fluttering creature fad; immature and vaguely annoying. He had introduced himself shortly after she’d arrived and done his best to make himself a nuisance more or less ever since. Puonvangi was obese, pinkish, bald, and fairly human-basic on the surface save for two long, fang-like incisors which distorted his speech (he couldn’t manage the hard “D’ sound at the start of her first name, for example). Plus he had an eye in the back of his head which he claimed was fully functional but was apparently really no more than an affectation. He often, as now, kept it covered with an eye patch, though the eye patch – again, as now – was frequently clear. He also – he’d told her after a remarkably short time during their first meeting – had exquisitely altered genitalia, which he’d offered to show her. She had demurred.

  “Hello, jear!” Puonvangi said, clutching at her elbows and bringing her close to kiss her cheeks. She allowed this to happen while remaining stiff and unresponsive. He smelled of brine, tangfruit and some sweet, unashamedly psychotropic scent. His clothes were loose, voluminous, ever gently billowing and showed slow-motion scenes of humanoid pornography. His sleeves were rolled up and she could see from the thin, fiercely glowing lines incised on his forearms that he had been grazing tattoo drugs. He released her. “How are you? Looking ra’iant as ezher! Here’sh the young fellow I wanted you to meet!” He pointed at the young, long-limbed man sitting by his side. “Shjan Sheree Araprian, this is Kra’sri Kruike. Kra’sri; say hi!”

  The young man looked embarrassed. “How do you do,” he said in a quiet, deep, deliciously accented voice. He had gently glowing skin of something between deep bronze and very dark green and a mass of shining, ringleted black hair. He wore perfectly cut, utterly black close-fitting trous and a short jacket. His face was quite long, his nose fairly flat, his teeth were normal but very white and his expression, beneath hooded eyes, was diffident, amused, perhaps a little wary, though modulated by what looked like a permanent smile. He had laughter lines, which made someone so otherwise young-looking appear oddly vulnerable. Chevron-cut brows and moustache looked like something new he was trying and was unsure he was getting away with. Those eyes were dark, flecked with gold.

  He was almost unbearably attractive. Djan Seriy had therefore naturally gone instantly to what she regarded as her highest alert state of suspicion.

  “I am Djan Seriy Anaplian,” she told him. “How is your name properly pronounced?”

  He grinned, glanced apologetically at a beaming, eyebrow-waggling Puonvangi. “Klatsli Quike,” he told her.

  She nodded. “Pleased to meet you, Klatsli Quike,” she said. She took the bar stool on the far side of him, putting the young man between her and Puonvangi, who looked disappointed, though only briefly. He slammed the bar with the flat of one hand, bringing a serving unit zinging over on shining rails strung along the far side of the bar.

  “Jhrinks! Shmokes! Shnorts! Inshisions!”

  She agreed to drink a little to keep Puonvangi company. Quike lit up a small pipe of some fabulously fragrant herb, purely for the scent as it had no known narcotic effect, though even the aroma was almost drug-like in its headiness. Puonvangi ordered a couple of styli of tattoo drugs and – when both Djan Seriy and Quike refused to join him – grazed one into each of his arms, from wrist to elbow. The drug lines glowed so brightly at first they coloured his pink face green. He sighed and sat back in his high seat, exhaling and closing his eyes, going slack. While their host was enjoying his first rush, Quike said,

  “You’re from Sursamen?” He sounded apologetic, as though he wasn’t supposed to know.

  “I am,” she said. “You know it?”

  “Of,” he said. “Shellworlds are a subject of mine. I study them. I find them fascinating.”

  “You’re not alone in that.”

  “I know. Actually, I find it perplexing that everyone doesn’t find them utterly fascinating.”

  Djan Seriy shrugged. “There are many fascinating places.”

  “Yes, but Shellworlds are something special.” He put his hand to his mouth. Long fingers. He might have been blushing. “I’m sorry. You lived there. I don’t need to tell you how fabulous they are.”

  “Well, for me it is – was – just home. When one grows up in a place, no matter how exotic it may seem to others, it is still where all the usual banalities and indignities of childhood occur. Home is always the norm. It is everywhere else that is marvellous.”

  She drank. He puffed on his pipe for a bit. Puonvangi sighed deeply, eyes still closed.

  “And you,” she said, remembering to be polite. “Where are you from? May I ask your Full Name?”

  “Astle-Chulinisa Klatsli LP Quike dam Uast.”

  “LP?” she said. “The letters L and P?”

  “The letters L and P,” he confirmed, with a small nod and a mischievous smile.

  “Do they stand for something?”

  “They do. But it’s a secret.”

  She looked at him doubtfully.

  He laughed, spread his arms. “I’m well travelled, Ms Seriy; a Wanderer. I am older than I look, I have met many people and given and shared and received many things. I have been most places, at a certain scale. I have spent time with all the major Involveds, I have talked to Gods, shared thought with the Sublimed and tasted, as far as a human can, something of the joy of what the Minds call Infinite Fun Space. I am not the person I was when I took my Full Name, and I am not definable just by that any more. A nested mystery in the centre of my name is no more than I deserve. Trust me.”

  Djan Seriy thought about this. He had called himself a Wanderer (they were talking Marain, the Culture’s language; it had a phoneme to denote upper case). There had always been a proportion of people in the Culture, or at least people who were from the Culture originally, who termed themselves so. She found it difficult not to think of them as a class. They did indeed just wander; most doing so within the Culture, going from Orbital to Orbital, place to place, travelling on cruise ships and trampers as a rule and on Contact vessels when they could.

  Others travelled amongst the rest of the Involved and Aspirant species, existing – when they encountered societies shockingly unenlightened enough not to have cast off the last shackles of monetary exchange – through inter-civilisational co-supportive understandings, or by using some vanishingly microscopic fraction of the allegedly infinite resources the Culture commanded to pay their way.

  Some cast their adventures wider still, which was where problems sometimes occurred. The mere presence of such a person in a sufficiently undeveloped society could change it, sometimes profoundly, if that person was blind to what their being there might be doing to those they had come to live among, or at least look at. Not all such people agreed to be monitored by Contact during their travels, and even though Contact was perfectly unabashed when it came to spying on travellers who strayed into vulnerable societies whether they liked it or not, it did sometimes miss individuals. There was a whole section of the organisation devoted to watching developing civilisations for signs that some so-called Wanderer had – with prior intent, opportunistically or even accidentally – turned into a local Mad Professor, Despot, Prophet or God. There were other categories, but these four formed the most popular and predictable avenues people’s fantasies took them along when they lost their moral bearings down amongst the prims.

  Most Wanderers caused no such problems, however, and such itinerants normally found somewhere to call home eventually, usually back in the Culture. Some, though, never settled anywhere, roaming all their lives, and of these a few – a surprisingly large proportion compared to the rest of the Culture’s population – lived, effectively, for ever. Or a
t least lived until they met some almost inevitably violent, irrecoverable end. There were rumours – usually in the form of personal boasts – of individuals who had been around since the formation of the Culture itself, nomads who’d drifted the galaxy and its near infinitude of peoples, societies, civilisations and places for thousands upon thousands of years.

  Trust me, he had said. “I think I do not,” she told him at last, narrowing her eyes a little.

  “Really?” he asked, looking hurt. “I’m telling the truth,” he said quietly. He seemed half small boy and half untroubled ancient, darkly self-possessed.

  “I’m sure it appears so to you,” she said, arching one eyebrow. She drank some more; she had ordered a Za’s Revenge, but said concoction was unknown to the bar machine, which had made its own speciality. It served. Quike took another pipe of incense herb.

  “And you’re from the Eighth?” Quike said, coughing a little, though with a broad smile wreathed in violet smoke.

  “I am,” she said. He smiled shyly and hid behind some smoke. “You’re well informed,” she told him.

  “Thank you.” He suddenly mugged an expression of what might have been pretended fear. “And an SC agent too, yes?”

  “I wouldn’t get too excited,” she told him. “I have been demilitarised.”

  He grinned again. Almost cheekily. “All the same.”

  Djan Seriy would have sighed if she had felt able to. She had a feeling she was being set up here – Mr Quike was so handsome and attractive it was positively suspicious – she just wasn’t sure yet by whom.

  They left Puonvangi at the 303rd in the company of a riotous party of Birilisi conventioneers. The Birilisi were an avian species and much given to excessive narcoticism; they and Puonvangi were guaranteed to get on. There was much fluttering.

  They suited up and went to a place Quike knew where the aquaticised gathered. These were humanoids fully converted to water-dwelling. The space was full of what looked like every kind of watergoing species – or at least those below a certain size. The warm, hazy water was full of skin scents, incomprehensible sounds of every appreciable frequency and curious, musical pulsations. They had to stay suited up and laughed bubbles as they tried drinking underwater, using smart cups and self-sealing straws. They talked via what was basically a pre-electricity speaking tube.

  They got to the end of their drinks together.

  She was looking away from him, watching two thin, flamboyantly colourful, fabulously frilled creatures three metres tall with great long, expressionless but somehow dignified heads and faces. They were floating a short distance away from her, poised facing each other just out of the touching range of their frills, which waved so fast they flickered. She wondered were they talking, arguing, flirting?

  Quike touched her arm to attract her attention. “Shall we go?” he asked. “There’s something you’ve got to see.” She looked down, at his hand still resting on her arm.

  They took a bubble car through the enclosed galaxy of the Great Ship’s main internal space to where his quarters were. They were still suited up, sat side by side in the speeding car, communicating by lace as the gaudily bewildering expanses of the ship’s interior swept around them.

  You really must see this, he said, glancing at her.

  No need to overstate, she told him. I am already here, going with you. She had never been very good at being romantic. Wooing and seduction, even played as a kind of game, seemed dishonest to her somehow. Again, she blamed her upbringing, though she wouldn’t have argued the point too determinedly if pressed on it; ultimately she was prepared to concede that maybe, at some level beyond even childhood indoctrination, it was just her.

  His living space was a trio of four-metre spheres bunched in with thousands of others on a kilometres-long string of alien habs situated near the vast curved wall of the main space’s outer periphery. The room was entered by entirely the stickiest, slowest-working gel field lock she’d ever encountered. Inside it was rather small and brightly lit. The air tasted clean, almost sharp. Nothing in it looked personalised. Furniture or fittings of debatable utility lay scattered about the floor and wall. The general colour scheme was of green components over cerise backgrounds. Not, to Djan Seriy’s eye, a happy combination. There was a sort of glisteny look to a lot of the surfaces, as though a film or membrane had been shrink-wrapped around everything.

  “Another drink?” he suggested.

  “Oh, I suppose so,” she said.

  “I have some Chapantlic spirit,” he said, digging in a small floor chest. He saw her run a finger along the edge of what appeared to be a sponge-covered seat, frowning as her skin encountered something slick and smooth coating it, and said, “Sorry. Everything is sort of sealed in; covered. All a bit antiseptic. I do apologise.” He looked embarrassed as he waved a couple of glittering goblets shaped like inverted bells and a small bottle. “I picked up some sort of weird allergy thing on my travels and they can only fix it back in the Culture. Wherever I live I need it to be pretty clean. I’ll get it dealt with, but for now, well . . .”

  Djan Seriy was not at all convinced this was true. “Is it in any way infectious?” she asked. Her own immune system, still fully functioning and well into the comprehensive end of the spectrum of congenital Culture protection, had signalled nothing amiss. After a couple of hours in such close proximity to Mr Quike there would have been at least some hint of any untoward virus, spore or similar unpleasantness.

  “No!” he said, motioning her to sit down. They sat on opposite sides of a narrow table. He poured some of the spirit; it was brown and highly viscous.

  The seat Djan Seriy was sitting on felt slidey. A tiny new suspicion had entered her head. Had the fellow thought to bring her here for something other than sex? She found the shrink-wrapped nature of the fittings in the man’s quarters disturbing. What was really going on here? Ought she to be worried? It was almost beyond imagining that any civilian in their right mind might think to offer some sort of mischief or mistreatment to an SC agent, even a de-fanged one, but then people were nothing if not varied and strange; who knew what strangenesses went on their heads?

  Just to be on the safe side, she monitored the Great Ship’s available systems with her neural lace. The living space was partially shielded, but that was normal enough. She could see where she was in the ship, and the ship knew where she was. A relief, she supposed.

  The young-looking Mr Quike offered her a crystal bell-goblet. It rang faintly the instant she touched it. “They’re meant to do that,” he explained. “The vibrations are supposed to make it taste better.”

  She took the little goblet and leant forward. “LP Quike,” she said, “what exactly are your intentions?” She could smell the spirit, albeit faintly.

  He looked almost flustered. “First a toast,” he said, holding up his bell-goblet.

  “No,” she said, lowering her head a little and narrowing her eyes. “First the truth.” Her nose was reporting nothing unexpected in the fumes rising from the goblet of spirit in her hand but she wanted to be sure, giving bits of her brain time to do a proper processing job on the chemicals her nasal membranes were picking up. “Tell me what it was you wanted to show me here.”

  Quike sighed and put down his bell-goblet. He fastened her with his gaze. “I picked up an ability to read minds on my travels,” he said quickly, possibly a little annoyed. “I just wanted to show off, I suppose.”

  “Read minds?” Djan Seriy said sceptically. Ship Minds could read human minds, though they were not supposed to; specialist equipment could read human minds and she imagined you could make some kind of android machine embodying the same technology that could do so too, but an ordinary human being? That seemed unlikely.

  This was depressing. If Klatsli Quike was a fantasist or just mad then she was certainly not going to have sex with him.

  “It’s true!” he told her. He sat forward. Their noses were now a few centimetres apart. “Just look into my eyes.”

&nbs
p; “You are serious?” Djan Seriy asked. Oh dear, this was not turning out as she’d wished at all.

  “I am perfectly serious, Djan Seriy,” he said quietly, and something in his voice persuaded her to humour him just a little longer. She sighed again and put the bell-goblet of spirit down on the narrow table. By now, it was clear the drink was highly alcoholic though otherwise harmless.

  She looked into his eyes.

  After a few moments, there was the hint of something there. A tiny red spark. She sat back, blinking. The man in front of her, smiling faintly – looking quite serious and not at all pleased with himself – put his finger to his lips.

  What was going on? She ran what was basically an internal systems check, to reassure herself that she hadn’t been unconscious even for a moment, or that she hadn’t performed some movement or function she hadn’t been aware of, or that less time had elapsed than she assumed. Nothing out of kilter, nothing wrong. She seemed to be okay.

  Djan Seriy frowned, leant forward again.

  The red spark was still there in his eyes, almost vanishingly faint. It was, she realised, coherent light; one single, pure, narrow frequency. It flickered. Very quickly.

  Something approaching . . .

  What approaching? Where had that thought come from? What was going on here?

  She sat back again, blinking fast and frowning deeply, running her systems check again. Still nothing untoward. She sat forward once more. Ah. She was starting to guess what was going on.

  The flickering red spark came back and she realised he was indeed signalling her. A section of his retina must be a laser, capable of sending a beam of coherent light through his eye and into hers. The signal was expressed in nonary Marain, the nine-part binary base of the Culture’s language. She’d heard of this ability in SC training, though purely as an aside. It was a multi-millennia-ancient, now almost never-used amendment, long made redundant by the technology behind the neural lace. It was even something she could have made herself capable of, with a few days’ notice, before she’d had her claws pulled. She concentrated.