Matter c-8

by Iain M. Banks

  “Stop saying ‘Sir?’,” Oramen told him gently, “or I swear I’ll stick this point through either one of your idiot eyes. Now answer me.”

  “Sir! I lose my latest meal near on sight of an air-beast! I swear! Ask anyone! I’d not wish you harm, sir! Not me! You don’t think I had any part in this, do you? Sir?” Neguste sounded horrified, shocked. His face drained of colour and his eyes filled with tears. “Oh!” he said faintly, and crumpled, his back sliding down the wall, his backside thumping heavily down on the floor of the carriage, his knees splayed on either side. Oramen let the tip of the sword follow him down so that it was still angled at his nose. “Oh, sir!” he said, and put his face in his hands. He started sobbing. “Oh, sir! Sir, kill me if it pleases you; I’d rather you did that and found me innocent later than live apart from you, accused, even just in your heart, a free man. A limb to a hair, sir; I swore that to Mr Fanthile when he instructed me I was to be your last sticking shield as well as your most faithful servant. I’d lose arm or leg than see a hair on your littlest toe unkindly plucked!”

  Oramen looked down at the crying youth. The Prince Regent’s face was set, his expression neutral, as he listened — through the ringing — to the fellow’s hand-muffled sobs.

  He sheathed the sword — that hurt too, a little — then leant down to grasp Neguste’s hand, slippery and hot with tears, and pulled the lad to his feet. He smiled at him. Neguste’s face had some blood in it now, all reddened with crying, his eyes already puffed. He wiped his nose on one sleeve, sniffing strenuously, and when he blinked tiny beads of moisture arced from his eyelids.

  “Calm yourself, Neguste,” Oramen said, clapping him gently on his shoulder. “You are my shield, and my conscience too in this. I’m poisoned by this too-slow-seen conspiracy against me. I’m late inoculated against it and suffering a fever of suspicion that makes every face around me look mean and every hand, even those that would help, seem turned against. But here; take mine. I offer apology. Ascribe my wronging you as your share of my injury. We infect those closest in the very act of caring for us, but mean them no harm.”

  Neguste gulped and sniffed again, then wiped his hand on his britches and took Oramen’s offered hand.

  “Sir, I swear—”

  “Hush, Neguste,” Oramen told him. “No more’s to say. Indulge me in silence. Believe me, I long for it.” He drew himself up, his very bones protesting at the movement, and gritted his teeth. “Now, tell me. How do I look?”

  Neguste sniffed and a small smile broke across his face. “Very well, sir. Most smart, I’d say.”

  “Come then, I’ve my poor face to show to the people.”

  * * *

  Vollird too had started down the adit, carbine drawn, then turned back. He’d been challenged by some surface official, shot and killed the fellow then made off into the dark landscape of the under-plaza, followed by, or taking with him — reports varied — the diggings’ blasting marshal. This man was found later a short way off, also shot.

  Only a handful of men had survived the blast and subsequent fire in the chamber at the bottom of the adit, which had been badly damaged and had partially collapsed. The excavations on that black cube — mercifully itself probably undamaged — had been set back many days. Poatas seemed to regard this as Oramen’s fault entirely.

  * * *

  Oramen was holding court in the greatest marquee available. He’d summoned everybody he could think of. Poatas was there, fretting and vexed at this forced absence from the diggings but commanded to attend with the rest and obviously judging it unwise to resist the authority of a prince who had so recently escaped murder.

  “Understand that I do not accuse tyl Loesp,” Oramen told the assembly, coming towards the end of his address. “I do accuse those who have his ear and think they have his interest at heart. If Mertis tyl Loesp is guilty of anything it may only be failing to see that some around him are less honourable and devoted to the rule of law and good of all than he is himself. I have been most unjustly preyed upon, and have had to kill not one but three men merely to protect my own existence, and while I have been lucky, or blessed, in escaping the fate these wretches have desired for me, many around me have suffered in my stead through no fault of their own.”

  Oramen paused and looked down. He took a couple of deep breaths and bit his lip before looking up again. If those present chose to interpret this as emotion close to tears, then so be it. “A season ago I lost my best friend in the sunshine of a courtyard in Pourl. This company lost fifty good men in the darkness of a pit in the under-plaza not four days ago. I ask the forgiveness of their shades and survivors for allowing my youthfulness to blind me to the hatefulness that threatened me.”

  Oramen raised his voice. He felt weary and sore and his ears still rang, but he was determined not to let this show. “All I can offer in return for their hoped-for forgiveness is the vow that I shall not let my guard down again and so endanger those close to me.” He paused and looked around the whole gathering. He could see General Foise and the other people tyl Loesp had put in charge of the Settlement’s security and organisation looking distinctly worried at how this was going. “So it is that I ask you all to be my sentinels. I shall constitute a formal watch of some of the most trusted veterans here amongst you to protect me most closely from harm and to preserve the rightful continuance of our heritage, but I ask you all to play whatever part you can in the proper security of my being and our purpose. I have, also, sent a messenger to Field Marshal Werreber informing him of the attack upon me here and requesting both a pledge of his continuing and undoubted loyalty and a contingent of his finest troops to protect us all.

  “You are engaged in great works here. I have come late to this mighty undertaking but it has become part of who I am as it has become part of who you are, and I well know I am privileged to be here when the unbaring of the City approaches its zenith. I would not think to tell you how to do what you do; Jerfin Poatas knows better than I what needs be done and you yourselves know better than anybody how to do it. All I ask is that you remain vigilant as you go about your works, for the betterment of all of us. By the WorldGod, I swear we do labour here the like of which will never be seen again in the whole history of Sursamen!”

  He gave a single deep nod, as though he saluted them, then, before he could sit down and while only the vaguest hint of sound, as yet unidentifiable in its import, was forming in the throats of those present, Neguste Puibive — seated at the side of the dais — leapt to his feet and shouted at the top of his lungs, “WorldGod save the good Prince Regent Oramen!”

  “Prince Regent Oramen!” the whole assembly — or very nearly the whole assembly — shouted in a great ragged cheer.

  Oramen, who had been expecting quietly grudging respect at best and querulous alarm and hostile questioning at worst, was genuinely surprised. He had to blink back tears.

  He remained standing, so that, before anybody else there, he saw the messenger dash into the rear of the marquee, hesitate and stop — patently momentarily bewildered by the tumult — then collect himself and rush forward to Jerfin Poatas, who tipped his head to listen to the message over the continuing sound of cheering before hobbling with his stick closer to the dais. Guards at the front — veterans of the Sarl army — barred his way but looked round to Oramen, who nodded Poatas through and stepped down to him to hear his news.

  Shortly, he strode back, raising both arms into the air.

  “Gentlemen; your various duties await! The object at the centre of the under-plaza, the very focus of all our energies, an artifact we believe has been buried there for deciaeons, has shown signs of life! I command and beseech you: to work!”

  25. The Levels

  The Liveware Problem had started out life as a relatively slim 3D delta shape like an elegantly pointed pyramid. After conversion to a Superlifter — a glorified tug, really — it took on a block-like brutality. Three hundred metres long, square-sectioned, slab-sided, only the vaguest implication
of its older, more slender shape remained.

  It had not cared about such aesthetic considerations then and it did not care now. The petalled surround of its field complex, abundant as any party dress wrapped in dozens of gauzy layers, could bestow a kind of beauty on it if the viewer chose to look for it, and its hull skin could take on any design, hue or pattern it desired.

  All that was irrelevant anyway; the transformation had made it powerful, the transformation had made it fast.

  And that was before Special Circumstances came calling.

  It swung through hyperspace on what was in effect a near-straight attack path to the star Meseriphine, deviating only to keep the chances of detection low. It had snapped the humans and its own avatoid off the shuttle without incident and scour-turned about to head back in the direction of Sursamen at something uncomfortably over its design-parameter maximum allowed sustainable velocity. It felt the damage accruing to its engines like a human athlete might feel a cramp or a shin splint starting to develop, but knew it would get its little cargo of souls to Sursamen as fast as it sensibly could.

  After some negotiation with Anaplian they had agreed it would push its engines to a profile consistent with a one per cent possibility of total failure, thus shaving another hour off their ETA, though even a one in one hundred and twenty-eight chance seemed quite shockingly risky to the ship. With this in mind it had massaged its own performance parameters and lied; the time saving was real but the failure profile was better than one in two hundred and fifty. There were some advantages to being a self-customised one-off based on an ancient Modified.

  In one of the two small lounges that was all its rather miserable allocation of accommodation could afford, the ship’s avatoid was explaining to the SC agent Anaplian the extent to which the Liveware Problem would be limited in its field of operations if it had actually to enter Sursamen. It still hoped, rather fervently, this would not be necessary.

  “It’s a hypersphere. In fact, it’s a series of sixteen hyperspheres,” the avatoid Hippinse told the woman. “Four D; I can no easier jump into it than an ordinary, non-HS-capable ship can. I can’t even gain any traction off the Grid because it’ll cut me off from that too. Didn’t you know this?” the avatoid said, looking puzzled. “It’s their strength, it’s how the heat’s managed, how the opacity comes about.”

  “I knew Shellworlds were four-dimensional,” Anaplian admitted, frowning.

  It was one of those things that she’d learned only long after leaving the place. In a sense, knowing this before she’d left would have been fairly meaningless; a so-what? fact. When you lived in a Shellworld you just accepted them for what they appeared to be, same as if you lived on the surface of an ordinary rocky planet or within the waters or gases of a waterworld or a gas giant. That Shellworlds had such a profound and extensive four-dimensional component only made any difference once you knew what four-dimensionality implied and allowed in the first place; access to hyperspace in two handy directions, contact with the universes-separating energy Grids so that ships could exploit their many fascinating properties and the easy ability of anything with the appropriate talent to shift something entirely into hyperspace and then make it reappear in three-dimensional space through any amount of conventional solidity as though by magic.

  You got used to that sort of capability. In a sense, the more inexplicable and supernatural these skills seemed before you learned how they were done, the less you thought about them afterwards. They went from being dismissible due to their essential absurdity to being accepted without thought because thinking cogently about them was itself so demanding.

  “What I had not realised,” Anaplian said, “is that that means they’re closed off to ships.”

  “They’re not closed off,” Hippinse said. “I can move about inside them as freely as any other three-dimensional entity of my size, it’s just that I can’t move about in the extra fourth dimension that I’m used to and designed for. And I can’t use my main engines.”

  “So you’d rather stay out?”

  “Precisely.”

  “What about Displacing?”

  “Same problem. From outside I can Displace down into open Tower-ends. Line-of-sight within a level is possible too, if I can get inside somehow, but that’d be all. And of course once inside I couldn’t Displace back to outside.”

  “But you can Displace items short distance?”

  “Yes.”

  Anaplian frowned. “What would happen if you did try to Displace into 4D matter?”

  “Something a lot like an AM explosion.”

  “Really?”

  “Good as. Not recommended. Wouldn’t want to break a Shellworld.”

  “They are not easily broken.”

  “Not with all that 4D structure. What are in effect a Shellworld’s operating instructions say you can let off thermonuclear weapons inside them without voiding the warranty as long as you steer clear of Secondary structure, and anyway the internal stars are basically thermonukes and a bundle of exotic matter the most elderly of which have been trying to burn their way through the ceiling of their shell for deciaeons. All the same; anti-matter weaponry is banned inside and a misplaced Displace would have a highly similar profile. If and when I do have to do any Displacing, it’ll be very, very carefully.”

  “Is anti-matter banned entirely?” Anaplian asked, sounding worried. “Most of the high-end gear I work with uses AM reactors and batteries.” She scratched the back of her neck, grimacing. “I even have one inside my head.”

  “In theory as long as it’s not weaponry it’s allowed,” the ship told her. “In practice… I wouldn’t mention it.”

  “Very well,” Anaplian said, sighing. “Your fields; will they work?”

  “Yes. Running on internal power. So limited.”

  “And you can go in if you have to.”

  “I can go in,” the ship confirmed through Hippinse, sounding unhappy. “I’m preparing to reconfigure engine and other matter to reaction mass.”

  “Reaction mass?” Djan Seriy said, looking sceptical.

  “To be used in a deeply retro fusion drive I’m also putting together,” Hippinse said with an embarrassed-sounding sigh. He was himself looking reconfigured, becoming taller and less rotund with every passing day.

  “Oh dear,” Anaplian said, thinking it seemed called for.

  “Yes,” the ship’s avatoid said with evident distaste. “I am preparing to turn myself into a rocket.”

  * * *

  “They’re saying some terrible things about you, sir, where they mention you at all any more.”

  “Thank you, Holse. However, I am scarcely concerned with the degree to which my own reputation has been defamed by that tyrant-in-waiting tyl Loesp,” Ferbin said, lying. “The state of our home and the fate of my brother is all that matters to me.”

  “Just as well, sir,” Holse said, staring at the display hovering in mid-air in front of him. Ferbin sat nearby, inspecting another holo-screen. Holse shook his head. “They’ve painted you as a proper rapscallion.” He whistled at something on the screen. “Now I know you’ve never done that.”

  “Holse!” Ferbin said sharply. “My brother lives, tyl Loesp goes unpunished and disports himself round the Ninth. The Deldeyn are entirely defeated, the army is partially disbanded, the Nameless City is more than half revealed and — we’re told — the Oct gather round Sursamen. These things are of far greater import, would you not agree?”

  “Course I do, sir,” Holse agreed.

  “Then to those things attend, not gossip germed by my enemies.”

  “Just as you say, sir.”

  They were reading material about Sursamen and the Eighth (and, now, the Ninth) from news services run by the Oct, the Nariscene and the Morthanveld, as commented upon by people, artificial minds and what appeared to be non-official but somehow still respected organisations from within the Culture, all of it expressed in commendably succinct and clear Sarlian. Ferbin hadn’t known whether
to be flattered that they drew so much attention or insulted that they were so spied upon. He had searched in vain — or at least he had asked the ship to search for, unsuccessfully — any sort of verbatim recordings of the sort Xide Hyrlis had suggested might exist of what had happened to his father, but had found none. Djan Seriy had already told him such records did not appear to exist but he had wanted to check.

  “All highly interesting,” Ferbin agreed, sitting back in his almost excessively accommodating seat. They were in the ship’s other small lounge area, one short sleep and a half-day into their journey. “I wonder what the latest information is regarding the Oct ships…?” Ferbin’s voice trailed off as he inadvertently read another vicious exaggeration regarding his own past behaviour.

  “What do you want to know?” the ship’s voice asked, making Holse jump.

  Ferbin collected himself. “The Oct ships,” he said. “Are they really there, around Sursamen?”

  “We don’t know,” the ship admitted.

  “Have the Morthanveld been told the Oct might be gathering there?” Ferbin asked.

  “It has been decided that they’ll be told very shortly after we arrive,” the ship said.

  “I see.” Ferbin nodded wisely.

  “How very shortly afterwards?” Holse asked.

  The ship hesitated, as though thinking. “Very very shortly afterwards,” it said.

  “Would that be a coincidence?” Holse enquired.

  “Not exactly.”

  * * *

  “He died in his armour; in that sense he died well.”

  Ferbin shook his head. “He died on a table like a spayed cur, Djan Seriy,” he told her. “Like some traitor of old, broken and cruelled, made most filthy sport of. He would not have wished upon himself what I saw happen to him, believe me.”

  His sister lowered her head for a few moments.