Matter c-8

by Iain M. Banks

  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.

  That had been semi-retirement. Before it could get too weird or eccentric it had properly retired itself and drifted into a sort of slow sleep state inside a hollow mountain store for ships and other biggish stuff on Quitrilis’ home Orbital of Foerlinteul. He’d done proper asking-around-old-ships research to find a craft just like that, following a private theory. And it had worked! He’d lucked! It had been so grade, just so apropos!

  The old ship had woken itself up after a tickle-message from its old home MSV and, after only a little thought, agreed to act as personal transport for this youth, him!

  Naturally all his classmates had immediately tried doing the same thing, but they were too late. Quitrilis had already found the only likely contender and won the prize and even if there had been other retired ships of a similar disposition anywhere nearby they’d likely have refused such follow-on requests just because it would look like setting a pattern rather than expressing ship individuality and rewarding human initiative, etc. etc.

  So far, the relationship had been a pretty good one. The old AI seemed to find it amusing to indulge a young, enthusiastic human and it positively enjoyed travelling for the sake of it, with no real logic to the journeying, going wherever Quitrilis wanted to go for whatever reason he wanted to go there (often he cheerfully confessed he had no idea himself). Obviously they were constrained by the ship’s speed to a relatively limited volume — they’d hitched on a GSV to get here to the Inner Caferlitician Tendril — but that still left them with thousands of potential star systems to visit, even if there was, by general agreement, nothing especially undiscovered in the fairly well-travelled, beaten-track neighbourhood they had access to.

  And sometimes the ship let him pilot it by hand, the AI switching itself off or at least retreating inside itself and leaving Quitrilis to take the controls. He had always imagined that even though it claimed he was in complete control it was secretly still keeping an eye on him and making sure he wasn’t doing anything too crazy, anything that might end up killing them both, but now — right now, as the Primarian craft that should not have been there suddenly filled the star-specked darkness of the sky ahead, spreading entirely across his field of vision — he realised the old ship had been true to its word. It had left him alone. He really had been in full hands-on charge of it the whole time. He really had been risking his life, and he was about to lose it now.

  Twenty-two ships. There had been twenty-two ships; they’d agreed. Arranged in a pair of sort of staggered lines, slightly curved in tune with the planet’s gravity well. Quitrilis had gone up to have a look at them all but they were boring, just hanging there, only the one that had been there from the start even showed any sign of traffic with a few smaller craft buzzing about. The Oct Movement Monitoring and Control people had sort of shouted at him, he’d got the impression, but an Oct shouting was still a pretty involved, incomprehensible experience and he hadn’t taken much notice.

  He’d got the ship to let him have control and gone swooping and zooming and wheening about the fleet, carving round them and then deciding he’d have a blast right through the middle, so heading some way off — well off, like a good half a million klicks on the far side of the planet — and setting everything to Very Quiet, what the ship called Ssh mode, before turning back and coming bazonging back in before they had time to shout at him again and dipping and weaving and hurtling between the parked Primarians (he’d been bouncing up and down in the couch in the control room, whooping), and he thought he’d done it no problem; got to the end of the mass of ships and slung out from under that twenty-second ship on the way back into empty space again (he’d probably go visit one of the system’s gas giants for a day or two to let any fuss die down), when suddenly, as he came out from under that last Primarian — or what should have been the last Primarian — there, dead ahead, bang in front of him, filling the view so tall and wide and deep and fucking big he knew there was no chance he could avoid it, there was another ship! A twenty-third ship!

  What?

  Something flashed on the spread of retro control panel in front of him (he’d specced that himself). “Quitrilis,” the ship’s voice said. “What—?”

  “Sorry,” Quitrilis had time to say as the gantried, openwork innards of the Oct ship expanded in front of him, filling the ahead-view utterly now, getting down to detail.

  Maybe they could fly through, he thought, but knew they couldn’t. The internal components of the Primarian were too big, the spaces were too small. Maybe they could crash-stop, but they were just too damn close. The Now We Try It My Way had taken over control. The hand controls had gone limp. Indicator overlays flashed up engine-damage levels of braking and dump-turning, but it was all much too little much too late. They’d hit side on and barely ten per cent slower.

  Quitrilis closed his eyes. He didn’t know what else to do. The Now We Try It My Way made some noises he hadn’t known it could make. He waited for death. He’d been backed up before he left home, obviously, but he’d been away over five hundred days and changed immensely in that time. He was profoundly and maturely a different person compared to the brash young lad who’d sailed off in his persuadable accomplice ship. This would be a very real death. Wow; proper sinking feeling here. This would be no-shit, serious, never-again extinction. At least it’d be quick; there was that.

  Maybe the Oct had close-range defences against this sort of thing. Maybe they’d be blasted out of the skies before they hit the Primarian. Or they’d be beamed out of the way or something, nudge-fielded, fended off with something truly, stupendously skilful. Except the Oct didn’t have any of that sort of stuff. The Oct ships were relatively primitive. Oh! He’d just realised: he was probably just about to kill lots of Oct people. He got a sinking feeling that outdid the earlier, selfish sinking feeling. Oh fuck. Fucking major diplomatic incident. The C would have to apologise and… He was just starting to think that, Hey, you really could squeeze a lot of thoughts into a second or two when you knew you were about to die when the ship said, quite calmly, “Quitrilis?”

  He opened his eyes. Not dead.

  And nothing but the old star-specked depths of space ahead. Eh?

  He looked back. Stacked ships: twenty-plus Primarians, one ultra close behind, receding fast, like they’d just exited from it, travelling very fast indeed.

  “Did we dodge that thing?” he said, gulping.

  “No,” the ship said. “We went right through it because it’s not a real ship; it’s little better than a hologram.”

  “What?” Quitrilis said, shaking his head. “How? Why?”

  “Good question,” the ship said. “I wonder how many of the others are just pretend too.”

  “I’m fucking alive,” Quitrilis breathed. He clicked out of the command virtuality so he was sat in the couch properly with the p
hysical controls in front of him and the wraparound display showing in slightly less detail what he’d been looking at seemingly directly. “We’re fucking alive, ship!” he yelled.

  “Yes, we are. How odd.” The Now We Try It My Way sounded puzzled. “I’m sending a burst to my old Systems Vehicle about this. Something’s not right here.”

  Quitrilis waved his arms around and waggled his toes. “But we’re alive!” he yelled, ecstatic. “We’re alive!”

  “I am not disagreeing, Quitrilis. However… Wait. We’re being target-!”

  The beam from the original, first-arrived Primarian ship burst all around them, turning the little craft and the single human inside it entirely into plasma within a few hundred milliseconds.

  This time, Quitrilis Yurke didn’t have time to think anything at all.

  * * *

  Djan Seriy Anaplian, agent of the Culture’s renowned/notorious (delete to taste) Special Circumstances section, had her first dream of Prasadal while aboard the Seed Drill, an Ocean-class GSV. The details of the dream itself were not important; what exercised her on waking was that it was the kind of dream she had always associated with home. She had had dreams like that about the royal palace in Pourl and the estate at Moiliou, about the Eighth in general and even — if you counted the dreams of the Hyeng-zhar — about Sursamen as a whole for the first few years after she’d come to the Culture, and always woken from them with a pang of homesickness, sometimes in tears.

  Those had slowly disappeared to be replaced by dreams of other places where she’d lived, like the city of Klusse, on Gadampth Orbital, where she had begun her long introduction to, induction into and acceptance of the Culture. These were, sometimes, profound, affecting dreams in their own way, but they were never imbued with that feeling of loss and longing that indicated the place being dreamt about was home.

  She blinked awake in the grey darkness of her latest cabin — a perfectly standard ration of space in a perfectly standard Ocean-class — and realised with a tiny amount of horror, a degree of grim humour and a modicum of ironic appreciation that just as she had started to realise that she might finally be happy to be away from and free of Sursamen and all that it had meant to her, she had been called back.

  * * *

  She nearly caught the ball. She didn’t, and it hit her on the right temple hard enough to cause a spike of pain. It would, she was sure, have floored anybody human-basic. With all her SC stuff still wired in she’d have dodged it or caught it one-handed easily. In fact, with her SC stuff still on line she could have jumped and caught it in her teeth. Instead, Whack!

  She’d heard the ball coming, caught the most fleeting glimpse of it arcing towards her, but hadn’t been quite quick enough. The ball bounced off her head. She shook her head once, spread her feet wide and flexed her knees to make her more stable in case she might be about to topple, but she didn’t. The pain flicked off, cancelled. She rubbed her head and stooped to pick up the hard little ball — a crackball, so just a solid bit of wood, basically — and looked for who had thrown it. A guy sailed out of the group of people by the small bar she’d been passing on one of the outer balcony decks.

  “You all right?” he asked.

  She threw the ball to him on a soft, high trajectory. “Yes,” she told him.

  He was a small, round, almost ball-like man himself, very dark and with extravagant hair. He caught the ball and stood weighing it in his hand. He smiled. “Somebody said you were SC, that’s all. I thought, well, let’s see, so I threw this at you. Thought you’d catch it, or duck or something.”

  “Perhaps asking would have been more effective,” Djan Seriy suggested. Some of the people at the bar were looking at them.

  “Sorry,” the man said, nodding at the side of her head.

  “Accepted. Good-day.” She made to walk on.

  “Will you let me make you a drink?”

  “That won’t be necessary. Thank you, all the same.”

  “Seriously. It would make me feel better.”

  “Quite. No, thank you.”

  “I make a very good Za’s Revenge. I’m something of an expert.”

  “Really. What is a Za’s Revenge?”

  “It’s a cocktail. Please, stay; have one with us.”

  “Very well.”

  She had a Za’s Revenge. It was very alcoholic. She let it affect her. The round man and his friends were Peace Faction people, from the part of the Culture that had split away at the start of the Idiran War, hundreds of years earlier, renouncing conflict altogether.

  She stayed for more Za’s Revenges. Eventually the man admitted that, although he liked her and found her highly personable, he just didn’t like SC, which he referred to — rather sneeringly, Anaplian thought — as “the good ship We Know What’s Good For You”.

  “It’s still violence,” he told her. “It’s still what we ought to be above.”

  “It can be violent,” Anaplian acknowledged, nodding slowly. Most of the man’s friends had drifted off. Beyond the balcony deck, in the open air surrounding the GSV’s hull, a regatta for human-powered aircraft was taking place. It was all very gay and gaudy and seemed to involve a lot of fireworks.

  “We should be above that. Do you see?”

  “I see.”

  “We’re strong enough as it is. Too strong. We can defend ourselves, be an example. No need to go interfering.”

  “It is a compelling moral case you make,” Anaplian told the man solemnly.

  “You’re taking the piss now.”

  “No, I agree.”

  “But you’re in SC. You interfere, you do all the dirty tricks stuff. You do, don’t you?”

  “We do, I do.”

  “So don’t fucking tell me it’s a compelling moral case then; don’t insult me.” The Peace Faction guy was quite aggressive. This amused her.

  “That was not my intention,” she told him. “I was telling you — excuse me.” Anaplian took another sip of her drink. “I was telling you I agree with what you say but not to the point of acting differently. One of the first things they teach you in SC, or…” She belched delicately. “Excuse me. Or get you to teach yourself, is not to be too sure, always to be prepared to acknowledge that there is an argument for not doing the things that we do.”

  “But you still do them.”

  “But we still do them.”

  “It shames us all.”

  “You are entitled to your view.”

  “And you to yours, but your actions contaminate me in a way that mine do not contaminate you.”

  “You are right, but then you are of the Peace Faction, and so not really the same.”

  “We’re all still Culture. We’re the real Culture, and you’re the cancerous offspring, grown bigger than the host and more dangerous than when we split, but you resemble us well enough to make us all look the same to others. They see one entity, not different factions. You make us look bad.”

  “I see your point. We guilt you. I apologise.”

  “You ‘guilt’ us? This some new SC-speak?”

  “No, old Sarl-speak. My people sometimes use odds wordly. Words oddly.” Anaplian put her hand to her mouth, giggling.

  “You should be ashamed,” the man said sadly. “Really we’re no better — you’re no better — than the savages. They always find excuses to justify their crimes, too. The point is not to commit them in the first place.”

  “I do see your point. I really do.”

  “So be ashamed then. Tell me you’re ashamed.”

  “We are,” Anaplian assured him. “Constantly. Still, we can prove that it works. The interfering and the dirty-tricking; it works. Salvation is in statistics.”

  “I wondered when we’d get to that,” the man said, smiling sourly and nodding. “The unquestioned catechism of Contact, of SC. That old nonsense, that irrelevance.”

  “Is not nonsense. Nor… It is truth.”

  The man got down from his bar stool. He was shaking his head. This made his w
ild fawn hair go in all directions, floatily. Most distracting. “There’s just nothing we can do,” he said sadly, or maybe angrily, “is there? Nothing that’ll change you. You’ll just keep doing all that shit until it collapses down around you, around us, or until enough of everybody sees the real truth, not fucking statistics. Till then, there’s just nothing we can do.”

  “You can’t fight us,” Anaplian said, and laughed.

  “Hilarious.”

  “Sorry. That was cheap. I apologise. Profusely.”

  The man shook his head again. “However much,” he said, “it’ll never be enough. Good-day.” He walked off.

  Anaplian watched him go.

  She wanted to tell him that it was all okay, that there was nothing really to worry about, that the universe was a terrible, utterly uncaring place and then people came along and added suffering and injustice to the mix as well and it was all so much worse than he could imagine and she knew because she had studied it and lived it, even if just a little. You could make it better but it was a messy process and then you just had to try — you were obliged, duty-bound to try — to be sure that you did the right thing. Sometimes that meant using SC, and, well, there you were. She scratched her head.

  Anyway, of course they worried they were doing the wrong thing. Everybody she’d ever met in SC entertained such thoughts. And of course they satisfied themselves they were doing the right thing. Obviously they must, or they wouldn’t be in SC doing what they were doing in the first place, would they?

  Maybe he knew all this anyway. Part of her suspected that the guy was an SC agent too, or something similar; part of Contact, perhaps, or somebody sent by the ship, or by one of the Minds overseeing the Morthanveld situation, just to be on the safe side. Nearly cracking her skull with a solid wooden ball was one crude way of checking she had been properly disarmed.

  She left the final Za’s Revenge sitting on the bar, undrunk. “We’re all the fucking Peace Faction, you prick,” she muttered as she staggered away.