Matter

by Iain M. Banks

  PTA?

  He was signalling a Permission To Approach burst. It was a ship signal, originally. It had been adopted as a sort of acronymic shorthand by Culture people wanting to get in closer contact with other people they weren’t sure would welcome them.

  PTA?

  She nodded very slightly.

  Djan Seriy, the signal said. I think you are receiving me, but please scratch your right cheek with your left hand if you are understanding all of this. Scratch once if this is too slow a rate of transmission, twice for acceptable and three times for too fast.

  The information was coming in faster than it could have been spoken intelligibly, but not ungraspably quick. She gently scratched her right cheek with her left hand, twice.

  Wonderful! Allow me to introduce myself properly. The LP you asked about earlier stands for “Liveware Problem”. I am not a properly normal human being. I am an avatoid of the Liveware Problem, a Stream-class Superlifter; a modified Delta-class GCU, a Wanderer of the ship kind and technically Absconded.

  Ah, she thought. An avatoid. A ship’s avatar of such exquisite bio-mimicry it could pass for fully human. A ship Wanderer. And an Absconder. Absconders were ships that had chosen to throw off the weight of Cultural discipline and go off on their own.

  Even so, a proportion were known, or at least strongly suspected, to be using this state of self-imposed exile purely as a disguise, and were still fully committed to the Culture, allegedly adopting Absconder status as cover for being able to carry out actions the main part of the Culture might shrink from. The granddaddy, the exemplary hero figure, the very God of such vessels, was the GSV Sleeper Service, which had selflessly impersonated such eccentric indifference to the Culture for four decades and then, some twenty-plus years ago now, suddenly revealed itself as utterly mainstream-Culture-loyal and – handily – harbouring a secretly manufactured, instantly available war fleet just when the Culture most needed it, before disappearing again.

  She allowed her eyes to narrow a little. She was fully aware this was her own signature signal; suspicion, distrust.

  Sorry about all the subterfuge. The air in here is kept scrubbed to remove the possibility of nanoscale devices watching in on such eye-to-eye communication and the room’s coverings are themselves wrapped in film for the same reason. Even the smoke I inhaled at the bar contains an additive which clears my lungs of any such possible contamination. I was only able to get close enough to contact you after you’d arrived on board the Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown, and of course everybody is being so wary of upsetting the Morthanveld. I thought it best to adopt the trappings of ultra-caution! I’m aware, of course, that you can’t reply in kind to me, so let me just tell you why I’m here and why I’m contacting you in this way.

  She raised her brows a fraction.

  I am, as I say, an Absconder, though only technically; I spent three and a half thousand years faithfully tugging smaller ships around Systems Vehicles throughout the greater galaxy and saw active service during the Idiran War – serving, if I may say so, with some distinction, especially in the first few desperate years. After all that I decided I was due a protracted holiday – probably a retirement, to be quite honest, though I reserve the right to change my mind!

  I have wandered the galaxy for the last eight hundred years, seeing all I could of other civilisations and peoples. There is always more to see, of course; the galaxy renews and re-forms itself faster than one can make one’s way round it. Anyway, I am, truly, fascinated by Shellworlds and have a particular interest in Sursamen, not the smallest part of which concerns your level, the Eighth. When I heard rumours regarding your father’s death – and please accept my condolences in that regard – and the events surrounding this sad occasion, including the death of your brother Ferbin, I immediately thought to make myself available to help the Sarl, and the children of the late king in particular.

  I’d assumed you’d be going back home with many of your powers removed or reduced. I know that you return with no ship or drone or other aid about you, and so I’d like to offer my own services. Not as a day-to-day servant or courier or anything like that – our Morthanveld hosts would not tolerate such a thing – but as a last resort, if you will. Certainly as a friend in case of need. Sursamen, and especially the Eighth, seems like a dangerous place these days, and a person travelling alone, no matter how able, may need all the friends they can muster.

  I – that is, the ship – am currently some distance off but keeping pace with the Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown, to stay in reasonable proximity to this avatoid and facilitate its speedy retrieval should I need to do so. However, it is my intention, shortly, to make my way to Sursamen directly and this avatoid, or another – for I have several – will be there. It and myself are ready to afford you such assistance as you may require.

  You need not respond now; please think about this at your leisure and make your mind up in your own time. When you meet my avatoid on Sursamen you can let me know what you think then, through it. I shall completely understand if you want nothing to do with me. That is entirely your right. However, please be assured of my continuing respect and know that I am, dear lady, entirely at your service.

  I shall end this signal shortly; please decide whether you wish to pretend I have in any way read your mind, just on the off-chance we are somehow being observed.

  Signal ends at implied zero: four, three, two, one . . .

  Djan Seriy stared into the eyes of the young man sitting opposite her. She was thinking, Dear shafted WorldGod, all my potential bedfellows are machines. How depressing.

  Only about half a minute had passed since they’d started staring into each other’s eyes. She sat back slowly, smiling and shaking her head. “I think your trick does not work on me, sir.”

  Quike smiled. “Well, it doesn’t work with everybody,” he said. He raised his goblet. It emitted a high, pleasant, ringing tone. “Perhaps I might be permitted to try again some other time?”

  “Perhaps.” They clinked bell-goblets; the twin sound was surprisingly mellifluous. She had dismissed the idea of taking seriously the offer he’d just made before the glasses had stopped ringing.

  She engaged him in conversation for some time after that, listening to him recount tales of various explorations and adventures during his many travels. It was not unpleasant, she did not have to pretend interest and it was amusing to try to work out in his stories which parts were probably true and had been experienced by the ship concerned directly (assuming there really was a ship involved), which parts had been lived by the avatoid while the ship had looked on and which might have been entirely made up to try to fool anybody listening that all this related to a real human, not a ship-plus-avatar-in-human-form.

  In exchange, she related something of her life on Sursamen as a child and adolescent and answered most of the eagerly asked questions Quike had, though she steered clear of certain areas and tried not to give any indication of how she would eventually react to his offer.

  But of course she would reject his help, the ship’s help. If the Liveware Problem was working completely alone then it was probably either hopelessly naïve or quietly insane; neither inspired confidence. If not then it presumably represented a part of SC or something even more rarefied and it was just pretending to be hopelessly naïve or quietly insane, which was even more worrying. And if Quike and the Liveware Problem were SC then why hadn’t she been briefed about them turning up before she’d left Prasadal, or at least before she’d left the last vestige of the Culture proper and been batonned onwards to the Morthanveld?

  What was going on here? All she wanted to do was go back home and pay her respects to her late father and her presumed-deceased brother, reconnect with her past a bit and perhaps lay something to rest (she was not entirely sure what, but maybe that would come to her later). She doubted she’d be able to provide much help to her surviving brother, Oramen, but if she could offer some small service or other, she would. But that was kind of it
. After that she’d be off; away back to the Culture – and, if they’d take her, back to SC and the job that, for all its frustrations, dilemmas and heartbreaks, she loved.

  Why was a Culture ship trying to get involved in her returning to Sursamen in the first place? At most, this was still all about a pretty paltry thing; a grubby dispute regarding the succession of power within a very minor and embarrassingly violent and undemocratic tribe whose principal claim on the interest of others was that they happened to live inside a relatively rare and exotic world-type. Was she expected to do something on Sursamen? If so, what? What could she be expected to do, unbriefed, lacking any specified mission and de-fanged?

  Well, she didn’t know. She strongly suspected she’d be crazy to do anything other than keep her head down, do what she’d said she was going to do and no more. She was in enough trouble already just for quitting the mission on Prasadal and heading home on compassionate leave without adding to the charge-sheet. SC training was full of stories of agents who’d gone dramatically off-piste and had taken on bizarre missions all of their own devising. They usually ended badly.

  There were only a few stories leaning in the other direction, of agents who had passed up obvious opportunities to make some beneficial intervention unbriefed, without some specific mandate or instruction. The implication was, as ever, to stick to the plan, but be prepared to improvise. (Also, listen to your drone or other companion; they were expected to be more level-headed, less emotional than you – that was one of the main reasons they were there.)

  Stick to the plan. Not just obey orders. If you were being asked to do something according to a plan, then the way the Culture saw it, you should have had at least some say in what that plan actually was. And if circumstances changed during the course of trying to follow that plan then you were expected to have the initiative and the judgement to alter the plan and act accordingly. You didn’t keep on blindly obeying orders when, due to an alteration in context, the orders were in obvious contradiction to the attainment of whatever goal it was you were pursuing, or when they violated either common sense or common decency. You were still responsible, in other words.

  It sometimes seemed to SC trainees, and especially to SC trainees coming to the organisation having been raised in other societies, that those people sworn just to obey orders had the easier time of it, being allowed to be single-minded in whatever purpose they pursued rather than having to do that and wrestle with its ethical implications. However, as this difference in approach was held up as one of the principal reasons that the Culture in general and SC in particular was morally superior to everybody else, it was generally regarded as a small operational price to pay for the allegedly far greater reward of being able to feel well ahead in the ethics stakes compared to one’s civilisational peers.

  So she would stick to the plan. And the plan was: go home, behave, return, apply herself. That ought to be fairly simple, ought it not?

  She joined in Mr Quike’s laughter as he reached the end of a story she’d been barely half listening to. They drank more of the spirit from the delicate, tinkling little bell-goblets and she felt herself grow pleasantly tipsy, her head ringing in a sort of woozy, complicit sympathy with the crystals.

  “Well,” she said at last. “I had better go. It has been interesting talking to you.”

  He stood up as she did. “Really?” he said. He looked suddenly anxious, even hurt. “I wish you’d stay.”

  “Do you now?” she asked coolly.

  “Kind of hoping you would,” he confessed. He gave a nervous laugh. “I thought we were getting on really well there.” He looked at the puzzled expression on her face. “I thought we were flirting.”

  “You did?” she said. She felt like rolling her eyes; this was not the first time this had happened. It must be her fault.

  “Well, yes,” he said, almost laughing. He waved one arm to an internal door. “My sleeping quarters are more, well, welcoming than this rather spare space.” He smiled his little-boy smile.

  “I’m sure they are,” she said.

  She noticed the room lights were dimming. A little late, she thought.

  So; another about-turn. She inspected her own feelings and knew that, despite the abruptness and the fact she was tired, she was at least a little interested.

  He came up to her and took one of her hands in his. “Djan Seriy,” he said quietly, “no matter what image of ourselves we try to project upon the world, upon others, even back upon ourselves, we are still all human, are we not?”

  She frowned. “Are we?” she said.

  “We are. And to be human, to be anything like human, is to know what one lacks, to know what what one needs, to know what one must look for to find some semblance of completeness amongst strangers, all alone in the darkness.”

  She looked into his languidly beautiful eyes and saw in them – well, being cold about it, more precisely in the exact set of his facial features and muscle state – a hint of real need, even genuine hunger.

  How close to fully, messily, imperfectly human did an avatoid have to be to pass the close inspection afforded by an equivtech civilisation like the Morthanveld? Perhaps close enough to have all the usual failings of meta-humanity, and the full quota of needs and desires. Whether he was a sophisticated avatar constructed from the cellular level up, a subtly altered clone of an original human being or anything else, Mr Quike, it seemed, was still very much a man, and in looking into his eyes and seeing that craving desperation, that anxious desire (with its undertone of pre-prepared sullenness, aching yearning ready to become hurt contempt on the instant of rejection), she was only experiencing what untold generations of females had experienced throughout the ages. And, oh, that smile, those eyes, that skin; the warm, enveloping voice.

  She thought, A real Culture girl would definitely say yes at this point.

  She sighed regretfully. However, I am still – deep down, and for my sins – both my father’s daughter and a Sarl.

  “Perhaps some other time,” she told him.

  She left in an all-species pod taxi. She sat there in the damp, strange-smelling air, closed her eyes and laced in to the Great Ship’s public information systems to review the next few days. There had been no recent schedule changes; they were still on course for the Morthanveld Nestworld of Syaungun, due there in two and a half days.

  She considered looking at humanoid dating/quick-contact sites (there were over three hundred thousand humanoids aboard – you’d think there would be somebody . . .), but still felt both too tired, and restless in the wrong way.

  She returned to her own quarters, where the twice-disguised drone whispered good night to her.

  She thought good night back to it, then lay, eyes closed but unable or unwilling to sleep, continuing to use her neural lace to interrogate the ship’s dataverse. She checked up – at a remove, over distances and system translations that introduced delays of five or six seconds – on the agents she’d left running in the Culture’s dataverse. She was both slightly disappointed and highly relieved to find that there was no known intrusive, close-observational recordage from the Eighth or indeed any of Sursamen’s interior levels. Whatever happened there happened once and was never seen again.

  She clicked out of the Culture’s interface. One last roving agent system was waiting to report back from the local dataverse. It told her that her brother Ferbin was not dead after all; he was alive, he was on a Morthanveld tramp ship and he was due to arrive on the Nestworld of Syaungun less than a day after her.

  Ferbin! In the hushed darkness of her cabin, her eyes blinked suddenly open.

  21. Many Worlds

  A strange thing had happened to Choubris Holse. He had become interested in what was, if he understood such matters rightly, not a million strides away from being philosophy. Given Ferbin’s unrestrainedly expressed views on that subject, this felt tantamount to treason.

  It had started with the games that they had both been playing on the Nariscene ship Hence
the Fortress to pass the time on the way to the Nestworld of Syaungun. The games were played floating inside screen-spheres which were linked to the brain of the ship itself. Such ships, Holse had realised, were not merely vessels, that is, empty things you put stuff into; they were things, beings in their own right, at least as far as a mersicor, lyge or other mount was a being, and perhaps a lot more so.

  There were even more realistically fashioned diversions available, games in which you really did seem to be awake and moving physically around, talking and walking and fighting and everything else (though not peeing or shitting – Holse had felt he had to ask), but those sounded daunting and overly alien to both men, as well as unpleasantly close to some of the disturbing stuff Xide Hyrlis had been bending their ears about back on the disputed, burned husk that was Bulthmaas.

  The ship had advised them on which games they would find most rewarding and they’d ended up playing those whose pretended worlds were not all that different from the real one they’d left behind on Sursamen; war games of strategy and tactics, connivance and daring.

  Holse had taken at first guilty and then unrestrained delight in playing some of these games from the point of view of a prince. Later he had discovered works, analyses and comments related to such games, and, intrigued, started to read or watch these too.

  Which was how he came to be interested in the idea that all reality might indeed be a game, most specifically as this concept related to the Infinite Worlds theory, which held that all possible things had already happened, or were happening now, all together.

  This alleged that life was very like a game or simulation where every possible course and outcome has already been played out, noted down and drawn up, as though on an enormous map, with the beginning of the game – before a piece has been moved or a move has been made – in the centre, and every single possible end state arranged along the outer fringe of this implausibly stupendous chart. By this comparison, all that one does in mapping out the course of one particular game is trace a path from that central Beginning of things out through more and more branches, chances and possibilities, to one of the near infinitude of Ends at the periphery.