by Iain Banks
The game was over; after a thousand days they had done it, but they were still undecided what to give as an answer to the riddle. They couldn't think of anything they both agreed was a reasonable response. Quiss didn't care any more. It wouldn't make any difference, anyway. There was only death here, death or what the red crow had shown him. He looked down at the snow. It lay over the jumbled crags of slate far below, at the base of the castle. It was about a hundred metre drop. There would be a lot of wind noise, he would feel cold for a while, weightless for an instant, then... nothing. He should do it now, but he had to prepare himself. Still, Ajayi might not be away for very long (she had gone looking for books as usual), and he didn't want her seeing him there. He leaned forward, over the drop, biting his lip.
No machine-gun this time, he thought.
He had been down in the guts of the place.
More locked doors. The same ancient corridors, dimly lit. His scullions would not help him find keys for the doors; they said they had no influence with the keykeepers, they didn't know any of them and if they started to make any inquiries they would be under suspicion immediately; they thought the seneschal already knew of their allegiance to Quiss, and merely tolerated it.
Quiss tried to engage the attendants he met down here, deep under the castle, in conversation, on the odd occasions when he encountered them; but they were taciturn, unhelpful. He thought about knocking one over the head sometime, seeing if it had a key which he could steal and use, but as soon as he had even hinted he might try this his own scullions had started weeping and begging him not to. He and they would be terribly punished if he tried to open the castle's doors like that. The black minions, they said, in quivering voices; the black minions... Quiss assumed they were talking about the attendants he had seen only once, with the seneschal that one time he had found an open door and the seneschal and the black-robed minions arrived in the creaking elevator. He reluctantly shelved the idea of taking a key by force.
He walked along the corridor. He was in the general area of the door he had found open, many many days ago. He thought he could just make out a sort of half-felt, half-heard thumping noise, and suspected he was somewhere near the number-crunching room; dee pee as the snooty attendant had called it.
The corridor opened out to about twice the cross-section which he regarded as the castle's standard. A slate bench on one wall faced a row of twelve large, stout, metal-strapped doors.
He was weary, so he sat down on the bench, looking through the gloom at the tall, dark doors.
"Tired, old man?" a voice said, from above him. He turned and saw the red crow, perched on a peg stuck into the wall high above the slate bench, near the vaulted ceiling.
"What are you doing way down here?" he asked the creature, surprised to find it so deep in the castle's structure.
"Following you," the crow said.
"To what do I owe such an honour?"
"Your stupidity," the red crow said, stretching its wings as though stiff. One of its small eyes glinted in the dim light from the glowing, transparent tubes at the apex of the ceiling.
"Really," he said. If the red crow was just insulting him, let it. If it wanted to talk it would have to start things off. He suspected it did want to talk. It was here for a good reason.
"Yes, really," the red crow said testily. It flapped off the perch on the wall and landed in the middle of the floor, facing him. It folded its wings. A little dust swirled around it. "You won't listen to reason, so I'm going to have to rub your nose in things."
"Are you indeed?" Quiss said coldly. He didn't like its tone. "What 'things'?"
"Call it truth," the red crow said, spitting the word out like a lump of gristle.
"What would you know about that?" Quiss scoffed.
"Oh, quite a lot, as you'll discover, man." The red crow's voice was calm, measured and mocking. "If you want to, that is."
That depends," Quiss said, frowning at the bird. "What exactly are we talking about?"
The red crow jerked its head, indicating the wall and the doors behind it. "I can get you in there. I can show you what you have been looking for all this time."
"Can you really?" Quiss said, stalling. He wondered if the crow was telling the truth. If it was, why was it telling him?
The bird, its bright plumage dulled to burgundy by the gloom, nodded. "I can. Do you want to see behind the doors?"
"Yes," Quiss said. There was little point in denying it. "What's the catch?"
"Ah," the red crow said, and Quiss thought that if the bird could have smiled, it would. "I must have your word."
"On what?"
"That I show you what I show you of your own free will, that you go willingly on the understanding that without any outside influence from me or anything else you may not desire to come back, or may desire to kill yourself. You may not, of course, but if you stay, or if you kill yourself, you must give me your word you will say that I warned you of this first."
Quiss narrowed his eyes, leaned forward on the slate seat, putting one elbow on his knees, one hand to his lips. His chin was rough with stubble. "You are saying that what you will show me may make me wish to stay behind those doors, or may make me desire death."
"In a word: more-or-less," the red crow cackled. "But you won't use any dirty tricks to influence me."
"No need."
"Then I give my word."
"Good," the red crow said with some satisfaction. It flapped once and rose into the air, and Quiss had the impression that it was done too easily, that the wings had not powered the bird at all, that it flapped them merely for show. The bird turned and flew off down the corridor, in the direction Quiss had been heading. It disappeared round a corner in the dim distance.
Quiss got to his feet, wondering if he was supposed to follow the creature. He scratched his chin, looking at the dozen doors. His heart started to beat a little faster; what was behind the doors? The red crow wanted him and Ajayi dead; it wanted them to admit defeat and give up their struggle with the riddle. That was simply part of its job, though it claimed it really did want rid of them anyway, because they were boring. It knew that Quiss knew this, so it must be very confident that whatever was behind the doors would have a considerable effect on Quiss; enough to break him, perhaps. Quiss was nervous, keyed up, but determined. He could take whatever the red crow was going to throw at him, whatever it had to show him. Anything which might help him find the way out of this thing, even just give a new angle on his and Ajayi's plight, would be useful. Besides, he suspected the red crow did not know that he had been behind one of those doors once, even if only briefly. If the revelation beyond that heavy wood and metal strapping had something to with the ceiling-holes and the place called "Dirt', then Quiss vas already prepared.
The door nearest Quiss clicked. He heard a tapping noise, and went forward. There was a metal-lined slit in the door which he took to be a handle. He pulled on it; the door opened slowly, smoothly, and revealed the red crow hovering in a long corridor lit by small glowing globes fixed to the wall.
"Welcome," the crow said. It turned, flew slowly down the long corridor. "Close the door; follow me," it said. Quiss did as he was told.
The bird flew, and he walked, for about ten minutes. The tunnel led down and to the left, curving gradually. It was quite warm. The red crow flew, silently, about five metres in front of him. Finally they came to another door, similar to the one through which they had entered the tunnel. The red crow stopped at it.
"Excuse me," it said, and disappeared through the door. Quiss was startled. He touched the door, to make sure it was not a projection; it was solid, warm. It clicked. The red crow reappeared over Quiss's head. "Well, open it," it said. Quiss pulled the door towards him.
He walked, with the red crow behind him and over him, into a strange place.
His head swam; he felt himself stagger momentarily. He blinked his eyes and shook his head. He felt at once that he had walked into a place, but also out into the o
pen air.
It was as though he stood on a flat desert floor, or the dulled bed of a salt lake. But the sky was within touching distance, as if some flat layer of clouds had lowered to within a couple of metres of that salt or sandy surface.
Behind him (as he turned, dizzy, looking for a point of reference in the confusing, pillared infinity before him) was the door they had just come through. It was set in a black wall which at first sight seemed straight, but which he soon realised was curved; pan of a gigantic circle. The red crow flapped lazily just overhead, watching with amused malevolence as Quiss turned again to the space in front of them.
The floor was smooth slate, the ceiling composed of the glass and ironwork and water common to the castle's upper storeys. Slate and iron columns supported the roof, which was at the same height it had been in the room Quiss had found his way into such a long time ago, when he discovered the hole in the glass with the creature over and around it. All that was missing, in three out of the four directions, was a wall.
It was not bright, with only a few of the luminous fish waving lazily over his head and nearby, but it was light enough to see that the space he was now in seemed endless. Quiss peered into the distance, but all he could see were pillars and columns, growing smaller and smaller in the squeezed, twisted depths before him. Pillars and columns and... people. Human figures stood on small stools, or sat in high chairs, arms in iron hoops, shoulders hard up against the undersurface of the endless glass ceiling. Some of the things he had thought were pillars or columns at first, stunned sight were not; they were people with their heads stuck in the ceiling, dark shadowy forms above them in the glass, surrounding holes in the ceiling like the one he had stuck his own head into, briefly, in that small room long ago.
He shook his head again, peered again into the distance. The narrow space between floor and ceiling vanished, all around, into a thin line, hazed by distance. The line looked very slightly curved, like a horizon of empty water seen from a ship on a planetary ocean. He felt dizzy again. His eyes could not accept it; his brain took in the short space between floor and ceiling and so expected walls, expected a room-space. But if he was in a room (and if this was not some sort of projection, or even some unsubtle trick with mirrors) then its walls appeared to be somewhere over the horizon. He turned again, carefully, trying to recall his early training for the Wars, which had included balance and disorientation exercises that had left him feeling a bit like he did now, and looked again at the black wall just behind him, with the metal-strapped door in it. He looked along the very slightly curved wall, trying to estimate the diameter of the circle it implied. It must be several kilometres; sufficient to encompass the castle, mines and quarries. This wall was the castle's root, its foundation. This endless space some sort of vast basement.
"What is this place?" he said, and felt as though he was whispering; his brain expected echoes, but none came. It was like speaking in the open air. He looked round at the people stood on stools and slumped in tall chairs as the red crow said, "Let's take a walk. Follow me and I'll tell you." It flapped slowly past him, and he walked slowly after it. He passed near one of the standing figures: a man, dressed in furs similar to his own, but older-looking. The man looked skinny. A pipe led from the furs round the man's crotch to a stone jug on the floor. They passed him by. Some movement, far in the hazy distance, attracted Quiss's eyes. It looked like a small train; a narrow-gauge railway with a small locomotive on it, hauling hopper-like carriages. It was difficult to estimate the distance, but he guessed it was at least four hundred metres away, moving out from the castle, away into the thin space of standing people and supporting columns. He remembered the train he had seen, long ago, in the kitchens.
He looked round, trying to estimate the density of people in the place. There seemed to be about one person per ten metres square. Fascinated, he stared at them, seeing hundreds, thousands of them. If the density was the same throughout the space he could make out in the dim haze of distance before floor and ceiling seemed to meet, then there must be ...
"It has no name," the red crow said, flapping in front of him, facing away from him, its voice far away. Technically I believe this is part of the castle. It may even be thought of as the basement." Its voice became a chuckle for a moment. "I have no idea how large this place is. I have flown for ten thousand wingbeats in many directions and not even seen a wall. It is all very, very uniform. Apart from a greater concentration of railway lines in the floor, what you see here is what you would see anywhere, in any part of it. There must be many tens of millions of people here, with their heads stuck inside the ceiling, in these reverse goldfish-bowls."
Quiss didn't know what a goldfish-bowl was, but he thought it best to feign ignorance of what these people were doing with their heads stuck in the ceiling. He asked the crow about this.
"There is a type of animal which sits over the hollow glass semi-sphere the people have their heads inside," the red crow said. "The animal translates thoughts through time. Each of these people is inside the head of a human being from the past."
"I see," Quiss said, hoping he sounded more blase than the red crow expected. "The past, you say?" He scratched his chin. He still could not believe what his eyes told him; he was walking forward, not bumping into anything, but some part of him still expected to hit a projection screen or wall.
The red crow turned easily in the air in front of him, so that it was now flying backwards, something it appeared to do with the same facility with which it flew forwards, or smoked a cigar. "You haven't guessed, have you?" it said to him. There was a smirk in its voice, if not on its expressionless face. Iron reinforcing bands in the ceiling cast bands of shadow over the slowly flapping red wings.
"Guessed what?"
"Where this is. Where you are. The name of this place."
"Where? Tell me, then," Quiss said, and stopped walking. The small train had disappeared in the distance. He thought he could just hear it, though; rails singing. A whisper of that noise seemed to fill this place, like low voices.
"Hmm," the crow said, "well, you may not have heard of it; even at the times of the Therapeutic Wars the memory was being lost well, anyway. This is, as you might have guessed, a planet. Its name is Earth."
Quiss nodded. Yes, that made more sense that what the small attendant had told him in the room he had found his way into. "Dirt', indeed!
"That is the name of this place; that is where the castle is; on Earth, towards the end of the planet's life. In a few hundred million more years the sun will become a red giant, engulfing the inner planets of its system. In the meantime, with no moon anymore, and having stopped wobbling and spinning, with only the castle, as far as I know, on the surface and all trace of previous civilisations and the species of humankind just weathered away or ground beneath continental plates a billion years ago, this is your inheritance."
"Mine?" Quiss said. He looked about. Some distance behind him, the gentle curvature of the castle's base-wall was more evident than it had been closer to.
"This," the red crow said "is one of two fates that wait you. If you want, you can join these people; become one of them, dreaming of a past time, within the body of whoever they choose, billions upon billions of years ago."
"Why should I want, or not want that?"
"You might want it because you do not wish to die now. You may not want it because you have what they sometimes call a civilised consciousness. You see, each of these people has tried and failed to do what you and your lady-friend are trying - and will fail - to do; escape. Every one of them, all these millions of individuals, is a failure. Each one has given up trying to answer the riddle they were set, and while others have chosen oblivion, these have chosen to live out what time they have left as parasites, in the minds of others in forgotten times. They experience what others have experienced, they even have the illusion of altering the past, so that they seem to exercise free will, and apparently influence what their hosts do. It is to delay death, to turn
to something like a drug, to turn away from reality, to refuse to face one's own defeat. I have heard it said that this is better than nothing, but..." the creature's voice trailed off. Its beady eyes stayed fixed on Quiss.
"I see," he said. "Well, I must say I don't find it all that depressing."
"Perhaps you will, though, later."
"Perhaps," Quiss said, and did his best to assume a nonchalant air. "Do I take it that these people have to be fed, and that the castle kitchens are as large and as busy as they are because they must cater for them?"
"Oh well done," the red crow said, only a little sarcastically. "Yes, they run little trains from the kitchens, full of soups and gruels, to the furthest points of the place, wherever those may be; some trains get lost for years, others never return. Luckily these failed unfortunates need little in the way of nourishment, so the easily kitchens can just about cope, though even so they couldn't do it if they didn't mess around with subjective time... For all I know this universal basement extends right round the planet, and the castle supplies all those people; or perhaps there are other castles; one does hear rumours. Well, the castle feeds all the people you see, at any rate. They're eased out of the head-hole and given a bowl to sup from; they sit there with empty eyes, as though asleep, drink or sup, then like zombies go back to their own little world again. Their wastes are taken away in the same trains." The red crow cocked its head, and its voice sounded almost puzzled: "But don't you find this all rather... sapping? This is what awaits you, man. This is where almost all of them end up, and a lot of them were a lot brighter than you. Ask the seneschal, if you like. He will confirm what I say. Very few escape. Virtually none."
