Matter

by Iain M. Banks

  And there you were; the further likeness being drawn here, unless Holse had it completely arse-before-cock, was that which held; As Game, So Life. And indeed, As Game, So Entire History Of Whole Universe, Bar Nothing And Nobody.

  Everything had already happened, and in every single possible way, too. Not only had everything that had already happened happened, everything that was going to happen had already happened. And not only that: everything that was going to happen had already happened in every single possible way that it possibly could.

  So if, say, he played a game of cards with Ferbin, for money, then there was a course, a line, a way through this already written, previously happened universe of possibilities which led to the outcome that involved him losing everything to Ferbin, or Ferbin losing everything to him, including Ferbin suffering a fit of madness and betting and losing his entire fortune and inheritance to his servant – ha! There were universe-lines where he’d kill Ferbin over the disputed card game, and others wherein Ferbin would kill him; indeed there were tracks that led to everything that could be imagined, and everything that would never be imagined by anybody but was still somehow possible.

  It seemed at first glance like utter madness, yet it also, when one thought about it, appeared somehow no less implausible than any other explanation of how things truly were, and it had a sort of completeness about it that stifled argument. Assuming that every branching fork on the universe map was taken randomly, all would still somehow be well; the likely things would always outnumber the unlikely and vastly outnumber the ludicrous, so as a rule things would happen much as one expected, with the occasional surprise and the very rare moment of utter incredulity.

  Pretty much as life generally was, in other words, in his experience. This was at once oddly satisfactory, mildly disappointing and strangely reassuring to Holse; fate was as fate was, and that was it.

  He immediately wondered how you could cheat.

  SIGNAL

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  To:Utaltifuhl, Grand Zamerin of Sursamen-Nariscene: Khatach Solus (assumed location; kindly forward).

  From:Morthanveld Shoum (Meast, Zuevelous, T’leish, Gavantille Prime, Pliyr), director general of the Morthanveld Strategic Mission to the Tertiary Hulian Spine: In-Mission Peregrinatory.

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  Signal Details [hidden; check to release: O]

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  Cherished friend, I hope this finds you well and that the Everlasting Queen’s 3044th Great Spawning continues both apace and favourably to yourself, your immediate family, sub-sept, sept, clanlet, clan and kin-kind. I am well.

  Firstly, worry not. This signal is sent under the provisions and in keeping with the terms of the Morthanveld– Nariscene Shellworld Management Co-prosperity Agreement (subsection Sursamen). I communicate at such distance to inform you only of a dispositionary detail further to the greater good and security of the mutually beloved world within our charge.

  This is that an uncrewed, high-AI defensive entity, in form similar to a Cat.2 CompressHull, accompanied by one dozen minor slaved co-defensive entities, will be emplaced by ourselves within the Sursamen Upper Core Space – also known as the Machine Space or Machine Core – under the auspices of the Morthanveld–Xinthian Shellworld Management Co-security Agreement (subsection Sursamen) with the full knowledge and co-operation of the Sursamen Xinthian, probably not later than within the next three to five peta-cycles.

  Although not required to do so by the terms of our highly pleasing and mutually beneficial Agreement, or indeed by the General Treaty Framework existing between our two most excellent Peoples, I am – both as a profound admirer of our Nariscene friends and allies and as a personal expression of the love and respect felt between yourself and me (either of which consideration would naturally entirely and wholly constitute an unarguable reason for said) – happy to inform you that this minor and surely by mutual consent intrinsically untroubling asset relocation has been made necessary by the deterioration in the relationship between the Nariscene’s client species the Oct/Inheritors and the Aultridia (said dispute remaining at the moment, fortunately, still specific to the subject Shellworld).

  While not, of course, in any way wishing to anticipate any measure or precaution our vastly esteemed and wise colleagues the Nariscene might wish to put in place, and entirely in the blessed and happy knowledge that whatever action we might seek, as here, to carry out to ensure the continuing viability and security of Sursamen will be but of a piece with and complementary to those the Nariscene will doubtless themselves wish to consider, it was felt that inaction at this point by ourselves might conceivably be seen – if subject to the most painstaking and rigorous (one might almost label it officious!) scrutiny – to constitute a dereliction of duty and would therefore be, of course, as unconscionable to ourselves as it would be to you.

  I know – and am, personally, delighted to acknowledge – that such is the assiduousness and seriousness with which the dutiful and admirable Nariscene people take their stewardship of Sursamen (and so many other Shellworlds!) that they would expect no less corresponding sedulity from their Morthanveld friends and allies. Such diligence and precautionary care is your byword, and we have joyously made it ours! Our inexhaustible and perpetual thanks for providing such inspiration and shining example!

  This minor and purely preclusionary resource location adjustment will, arguably, lose some of its efficacy if bruited unduly about our greater society of Involved Galactic co-partners and so I beg that you restrict disclosure of this to the absolute minimum of knowledgees. I also specifically request, most strongly, that you ensure that while the orders and arrangements required to ensure the smooth transition of our vessel and its accompanying units are of course made and carried out with all due correctness and the studied meticulousness for which the Nariscene are rightly famed, no subsequent record of these orders and arrangements remains in any part of your data system specific to Sursamen itself.

  Formal notification of such matters will of course be shared, acknowledged and recorded by the Morthanveld and Nariscene respective Exemplary Council and High Command, entirely obviating, as I am sure you are bound to agree, any requirement that such minor and operationally non-critical details need be fixed within the informational matrices of the very fine and efficient Nariscene Operational Nexus Command on Sursamen itself.

  That is all – no more!

  I beseech you to allow me to share with you the indisputable fact that I am so blissfully happy that something so small and unimportant nevertheless confers upon me the elationary privilege of addressing you, my good and faithful friend!

  Joy to you!

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  Your ever sincere patron and most dutiful colleague,

  (sigiled)

  Shoum

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  (Translated. Original in Morthanveld language.)

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  (Added by Grand Zamerin Utaltifuhl:)

  Distant under-nephew by marriage! There you have it. That’s us told. I shall on my return be fascinated to hear in some detail from you your version of the events which have compelled our civilisational Dominates to make this unprecedented intervention. Your having one less thing to explain to me will be ensured by doing just as Shoum demands. You personally will see to it that this is carried out.

  In duty, Utaltifuhl.

  Deputy Acting Zamerin Yariem Girgetioni (Deputy Acting Zamerin Of All Sursamen, The Esteemed Yariem Girgetioni, as he liked to be known; the added bit was not official Nariscene nomenclature, though Yariem was firmly of the opinion it ought to be) viewed the forwarded signal with some distaste and not a little nervousness, though he was careful to hide the latter emotion from the duty lieutenant who had delivered the flimsy bearing the signal.

  He was in his personal cloudcraft, floating over the 8-shaped greenery and bluery of Sursamen’s Twinned Crater. He was lounging in a whole-body micro-massage cradle, watching erotic entertainments and being fed dainty sweetmeats by attractively identical pleasure-whelps. He fli
cked the offending flimsy back at the duty lieutenant. “Just so. See to it.”

  “Ah, sir, it does say that you personally—”

  “Precisely. We personally are ordering you to make sure that all that is detailed here is carried out to the very letter or we personally shall crack you from your exoskeleton and fling you into the hydrochloric lagoons. Is that personal enough for you?”

  “Abundantly, sir.”

  “How splendid. Now leave.”

  The Nestworld of Syaungun was located in the region of space known as the 34th Pendant Floret and seemed almost farcically enormous to Ferbin. He could understand something the size of a Shellworld; for all that his background was one of relative primitiveness compared to others within the greater galactic hierarchy, he was not a savage. He might not understand how the spaceships of the Optimae worked – he was not even privileged to know quite how the far more crude and limited scendships of the Oct operated – but he knew that they did and he accepted it.

  He knew that there were levels of science and technology, and of understanding and wisdom, well above those he was privy to and he was not amongst those who chose simply to disbelieve in their existence. Nevertheless, the measure of the engineering behind Morthanveld Nestworlds – structures built on such a scale that engineering and physics started to become the same thing – quite defeated him.

  The Nestworld was an ordered tangle of massive tubes within gigantic braids forming colossal ropes making up stupefyingly vast cables constituting loops almost beyond imagining, and – despite the fact that the transparent outer casing of each tubular component was metres thick – it all twisted, turned and revolved, easy as a length of thread.

  The Nestworld’s principal components were giant tubes full of water; they varied in diameter between ten metres and many tens of kilometres and any individual tube might range over its length from the narrowest gauge to the greatest. They were bundled together without touching into larger braids which were contained within encompassingly greater pipes measuring a hundred kilometres or so across, also water-filled; these too revolved independently and were also bundled within yet greater cylinders – by now on a scale of tens of thousands of kilometres and more – and were frequently covered in engraved designs and patterns many scores of thousands of kilometres across.

  The average Nestworld was a great gathered crown of tangled tubes within tubes within tubes within tubes; a halo world tens of thousands of years old, millions of kilometres across and set circumference-on to its local star, its every million-kilometre-long strand twisting and revolving to provide the tens of billions of Morthanveld within the vast construction with the faint, pleasant tug of gravity they were used to.

  Syaungun was not average; it was half a million years old, the greatest world in the Morthanveld Commonwealth and, amongst the metre-scale species of the Involveds, one of the most populous settlements in the entire galaxy. It was three hundred million kilometres in diameter, nowhere less than a million klicks thick, contained over forty trillion souls and the whole assemblage rotated round a small star at its centre.

  Its final, open braid of cylinders altogether easily constituted sufficient matter to produce a gravity well within which a thin but significant opportunistic atmosphere had built up over the decieons of its existence, filling the open bracelet of twisted habitat-strands with a hazy fuzz of waste gas and debris-scatter. The Morthanveld could have cleaned all this up, of course, but chose not to; the consensus was that it led to agreeable lighting effects.

  The Hence the Fortress dropped them into a Nariscene-run satellite facility the size of a small moon – a sand grain next to a globe-encircling sea – and a little shuttle vessel zipped them across to the openwork braid of the vast corded world itself, slipstream whispering against its hull, the star at the world’s centre glinting mistily through Syaungun’s filigree of cables, each stout enough, it seemed, to anchor a planet.

  This was, Ferbin thought, the equivalent of a whole civilisation, almost an entire galaxy, contained within what would, in a normal solar system, be the orbit of a single planet. What uncounted lives were lived within those dark, unending braids? How many souls were born, lived and died within those monstrous curling twists of tubing, never seeing – perhaps never feeling the need to see – any other worlds, transfixed for ever within the encompassing vastness of this unexplorably prodigious habitat? What lives, what fates, what stories must have taken place within this star-surrounding ring, forever twisting, folding, unfolding?

  They were delivered into a chaotic-seeming port area full of transparent walls both concave and convex and curving caissons and tubing, the whole set like a gassy bubble within one huge water-filled cylinder and all arranged to suit air-breathing people like the Nariscene and themselves. A machine about the size of a human torso floated up to them, announced itself as being Nuthe 3887b, an accredited Morthanveld greeting device belonging to the First Original Indigent Alien Deep Spacefarers’ Benevolent Fund, and told them it would be their guide. It sounded helpful and was jollily coloured, but Ferbin had never felt further from home, or more small and insignificant.

  We are lost here, he thought as Holse chatted with the machine and passed on to it their pathetically few possessions. We might disappear into this wilderness of civility and progress and never be seen again. We might be dissolved within it for ever, compressed, reduced to nothing by its sheer ungraspable scale. What is one man’s life if such casual immensity can even exist?

  The Optimae counted in magnitudes, measured in light years and censused their own people by the trillion, while beyond them the Sublimed and the Elder peoples whom they might well one day join thought not in years or decades, not even in centuries and millennia, but in centieons and decieons at the very least, and centiaeons and deciaeons generally. The galaxy, meanwhile, the universe itself, was aged in aeons; units of time as far from the human grasp as a light year was beyond a step.

  They were truly lost, Ferbin thought with a kind of core-enfeebling terror that sent a tremor pulsing through him; forgotten, minimised to nothing, placed and categorised as beings far beneath the lowest level of irrelevance simply by their entry into this thunderously, stunningly phenomenal place, perhaps even just by the full realisation of its immensity.

  It came as something of a surprise, then, for Ferbin and Holse to be greeted, before Holse had finished chatting to the Morthanveld machine, by a short, portly, smiling gent with long, blond, ringletty hair who called them by name in excellently articulated Sarl and entirely as though they were old friends.

  “No, to a Morthanveld a Nestworld is a symbol of homeliness, intimacy,” their new friend informed them as they rode a little tube-car along a gauzily transparent tunnel threaded through one of the klick-thick hab tubes. “Bizarrely!” he added. The man had given his name as Pone Hippinse; he too was an Accredited Greeter, he said, albeit only gaining this distinction recently. For a machine, Nuthe 3887b did a very good impression of being annoyed by Hippinse’s arrival. “The nest a male Morthanveld weaves when he’s trying to attract a mate is a sort of torus of seaweed twigs,” Hippinse continued. “Kind of a big circle.” He showed them what a circle looked like, using both hands.

  They were on their way to another port area for what Hippinse described as a “short hop” in a spaceship round a small part of the vast ring to a suitable Humanoid Guest Facility. The Facility – the 512th Degree FifthStrand; 512/5 to most people – was most highly recommended by Hippinse.

  “Strictly speaking—” Nuthe 3887b began.

  “So, to a Morthanvelder, one of these things,” Hippinse said, ignoring the little machine and waving his arms about to indicate the whole Nestworld, “is a sort of symbol of their being wedded to the cosmos, see? They’re making their conjugal bower in space itself, expressing their connectedness to the galaxy or whatever. It’s quite romantic, really. Vast place, though; I mean truly, mind-boggling vast. There are more Morthanveld on this one Nestworld than there are Culture citi
zens anywhere, did you know that?” He gave the impression of looking stunned on their behalf. “I mean even including the Peace Faction, the Ulterior, the Elench and every other splinter group, casually connected associate category and loosely affiliated bunch of hangers-on who just happen to like the name Culture. Amazing! Anyway, just as well I came along.” He made a strange face at Ferbin and Holse that might have been meant to be friendly, comforting, conspiratorial or something else entirely.

  Holse was looking at Pone Hippinse, trying to figure the fellow out.

  “I mean, to remove you guys from the attentions of the media, the news junkies and aboriginistas; people like that.” Hippinse belched and fell silent.

  Ferbin used the opportunity to ask, “Where exactly are we going?”

  “To the Facility,” Hippinse said, with a glance at Nuthe 3887b. “Someone wants to meet you.” He winked.

  “Someone?” Ferbin asked.

  “Can’t tell you; spoil the surprise.”

  Ferbin and Holse exchanged looks.

  Holse frowned and turned deliberately to the Morthanveld machine, hovering in the air to one side of the three seated humans. “This Facility we’re heading for . . .” he began.

  “It’s a perfect place for—” Hippinse started to say, but Holse, now sitting side-on to him, held up one hand to him – held it almost into his face – and said,

  “If you don’t mind, sir. I’m talking to this machine.”

  “Well, I was just going to say—” Hippinse said.

  “Tell us about it,” Holse said loudly to the machine. “Tell us about this Facility we’re supposed to go to.”

  “. . . you can hole up there, unmolested . . .” Hippinse continued.

  “The 512th Degree FifthStrand, or 512/5, is a Humanoid Transfer and Processing Facility,” the machine told them as Hippinse finally fell silent.