Feersum Endjinn

by Iain M. Banks

  The stream disappeared into a hole in the side of a grassy slope; steps carried the path winding upwards. She looked into the darkness of the tunnel. ‘Black. Smell of ... damp.’ Then she took the steps to the top of the slope and found a broader path leading between tall bushes and small trees.

  ‘Crunch crunch. Ow. Gravel. Feet. Ow ow ow. Walk on green. Walk on grass. Not pain . . . Better.’

  In the distance, beyond a tall hedge, there was a tower.

  ‘Building.’

  Then she came to something that made her stop and stare for some time; a huge square hedge in the shape of a castle, with four square towers, crenellations cut into its parapets, a raised drawbridge of exposed, intertwined tree-trunks and a moat of sunken, silver-leaved plants.

  She stood at the side of the pretend moat, looking down at the ruffled silver surface, then up at the castle walls, rustling quietly in the breeze. She shook her head. ‘Not water. Building? Not building.’

  She shrugged, turned on her heel and walked on, still shaking her head. Another minute along the grassy margin of the long avenue took her to where a series of huge heads faced each other across the gravel.

  Each head was two or three times her own height and made up of several different bushes and other types of plants, producing dark or light complexions, smooth or lined skin and varying hair colours. The lips were formed by leaves of a dusty-pink colour, the whites of the eyes by a plant similar to those impersonating the waters of the moat surrounding the castle-topiary further down the avenue, while the irises took their colour from clusters of tiny flowers of the appropriate shade.

  She stood and looked at the first face for some time, and eventually smiled. She walked on in the direction of the distant tower, and only stopped again when one of the heads started to talk.

  ‘. . . says there is no need to worry, and I think he is right. We are not primitives, after all. I mean, in the end it’s just dust. Just a big dust cloud. And another ice age is not the end of the world. We shall have power. There are already whole cities underground, each full of light and heat, and more are being built all the time. They have parks, lakes, architecture of merit, and no shortage of facilities. The world might be different for the duration of the Encroachment, and doubtless altered considerably after it has passed, as it surely will; many species and artifacts will have to be artificially preserved, and the glaciers will affect the planet’s geography, but we will survive. Why, if the worst came to the worst, we might enter suspended animation and wake to a newly scrubbed-clean planet and a bright fresh spring! Would that be so terrible?’

  She stood, only half-understanding the words. Her mouth hung open. She had been sure the heads were not real. They were pretend, like the hedge-castle. But this one had a voice; a voice deeper than hers. She wondered if she ought to say something in return. Somehow she did not think it had actually been talking to her. Then the head used another voice, more like her own:

  ‘If it is as you say, then no. But I’ve heard it may be much worse than that; people have talked of the world freezing, of every ocean becoming solid, of the sunlight reduced to the strength of moonlight, of this lasting for a thousand years, while others have said the sun will dim and then brighten; the dust will cause it to explode and all life on Earth will end.’

  ‘You see,’ said the first, deeper voice. ‘Some say we shall freeze, while others maintain that we shall roast. As ever, the truth will lie between the extremes and so the result must be that nothing much will change and things will remain largely as they are, which is exactly what tends to happen most of the time anyway. I rest my case.’

  She thought she ought to say something. ‘I rest my case too,’ she told the head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who—?’

  ‘Crisis! There’s somebody—’

  There were some noises from within the head, then a face appeared within the hedge-face, sticking out from the middle of one cheek. The face looked altogether heavier and thicker than her own; thin hair covered its top lip.

  ‘Man,’ she said to herself. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Grief,’ the man said, his eyes wide. He looked her up and down. She looked down at her feet, frowning.

  ‘Who is it?’ said the other voice from within the head.

  ‘A girl,’ the man said, speaking over his shoulder. He grinned and looked her up and down again. ‘A girl with no clothes on.’ He laughed, looking back again. ‘Bit like you.’ There was a slap and he said, ‘Ow!’, then he disappeared.

  She leant forward, wondering if she ought to look inside the head, while whispers and rustles came from within.

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘No idea.’

  The man and woman came out of the head. They wore clothes. The man held a light brown jacket.

  ‘Trousers,’ she said, pointing at the woman’s brightly coloured pantaloons as she tucked her blouse in.

  ‘Don’t gape, Gil,’ the woman told the man, who was standing smiling at her. ‘Give her your jacket.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ the man said, and handed her the jacket. He brushed some leaves off his shirt and out of his hair.

  She looked at his shirt, then put the jacket on, awkwardly but correctly. She stood there, her hands covered by the cuffs of the light jacket, which smelled musky.

  ‘Hello,’ she said again.

  ‘Hello yourself,’ the woman said. Her skin was pale and her hair was gold-coloured. The man was tall. He bowed, still grinning.

  ‘My name is Gil,’ he said. ‘Gil Velteseri.’ He indicated the woman. ‘This is Lucia Chimbers.’

  She nodded and smiled at the woman, who smiled back briefly.

  ‘What is my name?’ she asked the man.

  ‘Ah ... I beg your pardon?’

  ‘My name,’ she repeated. ‘You are Gil Velteseri, this is Lucia Chimbers. I am who?’

  They both stood looking at her for a moment. The woman looked down and tried to brush a smudge from her blouse. In a quiet, sing-song voice she said, ‘Sim-ple-ton.’

  The man laughed lightly. ‘Ah-ha,’ he said.

  2

  The wind was a never-ending edge within the air, a knife-wire sawing back and forth in Gadfium’s throat and lungs with each laboured, wheezing breath. The plain was a dead flat, almost featureless expanse of dazzling, eye-watering whiteness four kilometres across, splayed beneath a darkened purple sky. A thin, desiccated wind cut out of the bruise-coloured vault and keened across the sterile salt-flats, picking up a thin dry spray of particles which turned the air into a chill shot-blast for exposed skin.

  I am a fish, Gadfium thought, and might have laughed had she been able to breathe. A fish, dredged from the fluid-thick depths of warmth beneath us and dumped upon this high salt-crust of shore; landed here to suck in vain at the parched air and die drowning beneath a thin membrane of atmosphere where the stars shine clear and unwavering in daylight, in half the sky.

  She motioned to the assistant observer, and the woman brought over the small oxygen cylinder. Gadfium gulped in the mask’s cold cargo of gas, filling her lungs to their depths.

  This morning at the oxygen works, this afternoon sampling their future product, she thought. She nodded gratefully to the assistant observer as she handed the cylinder back.

  ‘Perhaps we ought to return inside now, Chief Scientist,’ the woman said.

  ‘In a moment.’ Gadfium lifted the visor from her eyes and squinted through the binoculars again. Salt dust and sand swirled in twisted veils in front of her and the cold wind made her eyes water. The grey-black stones nearest the observatory looked like nothing more than giant pucks from some huge game of ice hockey. Each stone was about two metres in diameter, half a metre high and supposedly made of pure granite. They had been sliding about this plain for millennia, riding the sporadically slicked surface of the salt-bowl whenever snow had fallen and a wind subsequently blew. Any snow and ice the plain collected was turned to water by a combination of the pipework buried beneath the plai
n itself and by the reflected sunlight of mirrors shining from the twentieth level of the fast-tower, rearing bright and solid to the north, three kilometres away.

  The Plain of Sliding Stones formed the flat roof of a complex of giant rooms on the eighth level of the fastness; these huge, almost empty, barely habitable spaces were arranged in a wheel-like formation, the exposed flank of which formed a great nave of kilometre-tall windows facing from south-south-east to west. It had always been assumed that the redundant systems of both buried pipework and tower-mirrors were there to ensure that no roof-destroying thickness of ice could ever accrue on the plain, though the reason the roof had been left flat in the first place had never been determined. Also unknown was exactly what the stones were there for, or how they contrived to move in ways that were subtly but undeniably at variance with the ways they should have moved according to both highly accurate computer models and carefully calibrated physical re-creations of their environment.

  The mobile observatory - a three-storey sphere supported by eight long legs each tipped with a motor and tyre and resembling nothing more than an enormous spider - had been following the mysterious stones across the plain for hundreds of years, gathering vast amounts of data in the process but without really contributing anything of great note to the anyway rather exhausted debate concerning the origin and purpose of the stones. More had been learnt when one of the stones had been partially analysed centuries earlier, though as the crux of what had been learnt was that to start chipping bits off one of the stones was to draw down some highly focused and scientist-evaporating sunlight from the fast-tower’s twentieth level (whether it was day or night), such a lesson was arguably something of a dead end.

  Gadfium looked back out across the Plain of Sliding Stones, to the edge of the darkly livid sky. A chill gust of razor-wind stung her face and made her close her eyes, the salt like grit between orb and lid. She could taste the salt; her nose stung.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, dry-gasping in the meagre air. She turned from the balustrade and had to be half-led to the lock by the assistant observer.

  ‘The circle began forming at six-thirteen this morning,’ the chief observer told them. ‘It was complete by six forty-two. All thirty-two stones are present. The distance between the stones is a uniform two metres - the same as their diameter. They have arranged themselves in a perfect circle with an accuracy of better than a tenth of a millimetre. The predicted-motion discrepancy factor for certain of the stones during the period they were forming the current pattern was as high as sixty per cent. It has never in the past exceeded twelve point three per cent and over the last decade has averaged below five per cent.’

  Gadfium, her aide Rasfline and assistant Goscil, the mobile observatory’s chief observer Clispeir and three out of the four junior observers - one was still on duty in the vehicle’s control room - sat in the observatory mess.

  ‘We are in the exact centre of the plain?’ Gadfium asked.

  ‘Yes, again to an accuracy of less than a tenth of a millimetre,’ Clispeir replied. She was fragile-looking and prematurely aged, with wispily white hair. Gadfium had known her at university forty years earlier. Nevertheless, like the other observers she was able to operate without extra oxygen and pressurisation, which was much more than Gadfium felt able to do. That she, Rasfline and Goscil were able to breathe easily now was only because the observatory had been lightly pressurised for their comfort. Still, she told herself, they had travelled from barely a thousand metres above sea level to over eight kilometres higher in less than two hours, and a human-basic individual would already be suffering from altitude sickness to which she was genetically resistant, which was some consolation.

  ‘However the circle did not actually form around the observatory.’

  ‘No, ma’am. We were stationary a quarter kilometre from here, almost due north, waiting on the wind to rise following the precipitation and melt last night. The stones began to move at four forty-one, holding pattern T-8 with drift-factor one. They veered—’

  ‘Perhaps a visual display would be more . . . graphic,’ Goscil interrupted.

  Embarrassed looks were exchanged around the mess-room table. ‘Unfortunately,’ Clispeir said, clearing her throat, ‘the pattern formed during an observation-system down-time event.’ She looked apologetically at Gadfium. ‘We are, of course, only a very small and perhaps insignificant research station and I don’t know if the chief scientist is aware of my reports detailing the increased incidence of maintenance-level-related breakdowns and our requests for increased funding over the last few years, but—’

  ‘I see,’ Rasfline said impatiently. ‘Obviously you lack implants, ma’am, but I assume one or more of your juniors recorded the events in their habitua.’

  ‘Well,’ Clispeir said, looking uncomfortable. ‘Actually, no; as it has turned out, the team here consists entirely of persons from Privileged backgrounds.’

  Rasfline looked shocked. Goscil’s mouth hung slightly open.

  Clispeir smiled apologetically and spread her hands. ‘It’s just the way it’s happened.’

  ‘So you don’t have anything on visual,’ Rasfline said, contriving to sound at once bored and exasperated. Goscil blew some hair away from her face and looked crestfallen.

  ‘Not of an acceptable standard,’ Clispeir admitted. ‘Observer Koir - ’ the elderly scientist nodded to one of the two young male observers, who smiled sheepishly ‘- took some footage on his own camera, but—’

  ‘May we see it?’ Rasfline asked, tapping his fingers on the table surface.

  ‘Of course, though—’

  ‘Ma’am, are you all right?’ Goscil asked Gadfium.

  ‘I’m - actually . . . no, not—’ Gadfium slumped forward over the table, head on forearms, mumbling and then going quiet.

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘I think some oxygen—’

  ‘I’m sorry; the observatory cannot be pressurised beyond this level, and we are so used to ... we forget. Oh dear.’

  ‘Thank you. Ma’am; oxygen.’

  ‘Perhaps we should leave . . .’

  ‘Let her lie down a moment first.’

  ‘My cabin is at your disposal, of course.’

  ‘I’m fine, really,’ Gadfium mumbled. ‘Bit of a headache.’

  ‘Come; if you’d take her . . . that’s it.’

  ‘I’ll bring the oxygen.’

  ‘We should leave . . .’

  ‘. . . always has to see things for herself.’

  ‘All right really . . .’

  ‘Down here.’

  ‘Please don’t fuss . . . How embarrassing . . . Terribly sorry.’

  ‘Ma’am, please; save your breath.’

  ‘Oh yes, sorry; how embarrassing . . .’

  ‘Mind the steps.’

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘In here. Sorry, it is a little small; let me . . .’

  Gadfium heard the voices of the others sounding loud in the small cabin, and felt herself lowered into a narrow bed. The oxygen mask was put to her face again.’

  ‘Let me stay with her. You take a look at observer Koir’s recordings; I’m sure the others can answer any questions . . .’

  ‘Are you sure? I could—’

  ‘There now, dear; let one old lady look after another.’

  ‘If you’re certain . . .’

  ‘Of course.’

  When she heard the door close with a clunk and a wheezy hiss, Gadfium opened her eyes.

  Clispeir’s face was above her, smiling hesitantly.

  Gadfium looked warily round the small cabin.

  ‘It is safe,’ Clispeir whispered, ‘providing we don’t shout.’

  ‘Clisp . . .’ Gadfium said, sitting up and holding out her arms; they hugged for a moment.

  ‘It is good to see you again, Gad.’

  ‘And you,’ Gadfium whispered. Then she took the other woman’s hands in hers and gazed urgently into her eyes. ‘Now; old friend, has it happened? Have we mad
e contact with the tower?’

  Clispeir could not contain her smile, though there was a hint of worry within it. ‘Of a sort,’ she said.

  ‘Tell me.’

  3

  The Count Sessine had died many times. Once in an aircraft crash, once in a bathyscape accident, once at the hand of an assassin, once in a duel, once at the hand of a jealous lover, once at the hand of a lover’s jealous husband and once of old age. Now, it was twice at the hand of an assassin; a male one this time, for a reason he was unable to determine, and - most distressingly - for the last time. Finally physically dead, for ever more.

  The venue for Sessine’s first in-crypt resuscitation had been a virtual version of his apartments in the clan Aerospace’s headquarters in the Atlantean Tower, it being normal for primimortis’ rebirths to be conducted in familiar and comforting surroundings and closely attended by images of friends and family.

  For his subsequent revivals he had stipulated an unpopulated, ambiently scaled version of Serehfa, and it was there he awoke in bed, alone, on what gave every appearance of being a fine spring morning.

  He lay in the bed and looked around. Silk sheets, brocade canopy, oil paintings on the wall, rugs on the floor, wooden panelling, tall windows. He felt oddly neutral, washed clean.

  He smoothed his hand over a fold of pinkly silk sheet, then closed his eyes and murmured, ‘Speremus igitur,’ and opened his eyes again.

  His smile was sad. ‘Ah well,’ he said quietly.

  It had been a statutory requirement almost from the dawn of what had then been called Virtual Reality that even the deepest and most radically altered and enhanced virtual environment (indeed, most especially those) must include periods of sleep - however truncated - and that towards the end of each sleep event a dream ought to intrude upon the sleeper in which they were offered the option of returning to reality. Sessine, of course, had been aware of no such opportunity just prior to waking up here, and the repetition of his private code to instigate a complete wake-up merely confirmed that this was not part of some voluntary virtual scenario; this was already as real as he could get, and it was a simulation; he was incrypted, now, for good, as well as for good or ill.