Matter

by Iain M. Banks

  Djan Seriy’s discomfiture was being caused by the fact that some of the Culture’s more self-congratulatingly clever Minds (not in itself an underpopulated category), patently with far too much time on their platters, had come up with the shiny new theory that the Culture was not just in itself completely spiffing and marvellous and a credit to all concerned, it somehow represented a sort of climactic stage for all civilisations, or at least for all those which chose to avoid heading straight for Sublimation as soon as technologically possible (Sublimation meant your whole civilisation waved farewell to the matter-based universe pretty much altogether, opting for a sort of honorary godhood).

  Avoid self-destruction, recognise – and renounce – money for the impoverishing ration system it really was, become a bunch of interfering, do-gooding busybodies, resist the siren call of selfish self-promotion that was Subliming and free your conscious machines to do what they did best – essentially, running everything – and there you were; millennia of smug self-regard stretched before you, no matter what species you had started out from.

  So. It was thought, by those Minds that especially concerned themselves with such matters, that the Morthanveld were on the cusp of going Culture; of undergoing a kind of societal phase-change, altering subtly but significantly into a waterworlder equivalent of the Culture. All that would need to happen for this to be effected, it was reckoned, would be the Morthanveld giving up the last vestiges of monetary exchange within their society, adopting a more comprehensive, self-consciously benign and galaxy-wide foreign policy and – probably most crucially – granting their AIs complete self-expressive freedom and full citizenship rights.

  The Culture wanted to encourage this, obviously, but could not be seen to interfere or to be trying to influence matters. This was the main reason for not upsetting the people who would be Djan Seriy’s hosts for the latter part of her journey back to Sursamen; this was why she was being stripped of almost all her SC enhancements and even some of the amendments she had chosen for herself before Special Circumstances had invited her aboard in the first place.

  “Probably a bluff anyway,” she told Turminder Xuss grumpily, looking out over the surface of cragged, chevronned ice below. The skies were clear and the balcony on which she stood and over which the drone silently hovered provided a calm, pleasantly warm environment; however, a furious torrent of air was howling all around the platform as the planet’s jetstream swept above the high mountains. Force fields beyond the balcony’s perimeter prevented the invisible storm from buffeting and freezing them, though such was the power of the screaming rush of air that a faint echo of its voice could be heard even through the field; a distant, thrumming wail, like some animal trapped and shrieking on the ice far below.

  When they had first taken up station here during the previous night the air had been perfectly still and you could hear the cracks and creaks and booms of the glacier as it ground against the torn shoulders of the mountains that formed its banks and scoured its way across the great gouged bed of fractured rock beneath.

  “A bluff?” Turminder Xuss sounded unconvinced.

  “Yes,” Anaplian said. “Could it not be that the Morthanveld merely pretend to be on the brink of becoming like the Culture in order to keep the Culture from interfering in their business?”

  “Hmm,” the drone said. “That wouldn’t work for long.”

  “Even so.”

  “And you’d wonder why the idea that the Morthanveld were poised in this manner was allowed to become so prevalent in the first place.”

  Anaplian realised they had got rather rapidly to the point that all such conversations regarding the strategic intentions of the Culture tended to arrive at sooner or later, where it became clear that the issue boiled down to the question What Are The Minds Really Up To? This was always a good question, and it was usually only churls and determinedly diehard cynics who even bothered to point out that it rarely, if ever, arrived paired up with an equally good answer.

  The normal, almost ingrained response of people at this point was to metaphorically throw their hands in the air and exclaim that if that was what it really all boiled down to then there was no point in even attempting to pursue the issue further, because as soon as the motivations, analyses and stratagems of Minds became the defining factor in a matter, all bets were most profoundly off, for the simple reason that any and all efforts to second-guess such infinitely subtle and hideously devious devices were self-evidently futile.

  Anaplian was not so sure about this. It was her suspicion that it suited the purposes of the Minds rather too neatly that people believed this so unquestioningly. Such a reaction represented not so much the honest appraisal of further enquiry as being pointless as an unthinking rejection of the need to enquire at all.

  “Perhaps the Minds are jealous,” Anaplian said. “They don’t want the Morthanveld to steal even the echo of their thunder by becoming like them. They patronise the waterworlders in order to antagonise them, make them do the opposite of what is supposedly anticipated, so that they become less like the Culture. Because that is what the Minds really desire.”

  “That makes as much sense as anything I’ve heard so far on the matter,” Turminder Xuss said, politely.

  She was not being allowed to take the drone with her on her return to Sursamen. SC agent + combat drone was a combination that was well known far beyond the Culture. Although perilously close to a cliché, it remained a partnership you could, allegedly, still frighten children and bad people with.

  Anaplian felt a faint tingle somewhere inside her head and experienced a sort of buzzing sensation throughout her body. She tried clicking into her skein sense, that let her monitor significant gravity waves in her vicinity and alerted her to any warp activity nearby, but the system was off-line, flagged indefinitely inoperable though not as a result of hostile action (nevertheless, she could feel at least one part of her SC-amended neural lace protesting, some automatic system forever watching for damage by stealth reacting to what it would register as the impairment of her abilities and the degradation of her inherent survivability with pre-programmed outrage).

  The platform’s own drone-standard AI was, with her permission, moving slowly through her suite of enhancements and gradually turning off those it was thought the Morthanveld might object to. Click. There went the electromagnetic effector ability. She tried interfering with the field unit buried in the ceiling overhead, which was keeping the air on the balcony insulated from the thin and well-below-freezing airstream coursing around the platform. No connection. She could still sense EM activity but she couldn’t affect it any more. She had lived most of her life without such abilities and to date had used very few of them in anger, but she experienced their going with a distinct sense of loss and even dismay.

  She looked down at her fingernails. They appeared normal at the moment, but she’d already thought the signal that would make them detach and fall off by the following morning. There would be no pain or blood and new nails would grow back during the next few days, but they wouldn’t be Coherent Radiation Emission Weapons, they wouldn’t be lasers.

  Oh well, she thought, inspecting them, even ordinary, unamended nails could still scratch.

  Click. There, she couldn’t radio now either. No transmissions possible. Trapped inside her own head. She tried to communicate via her lace, calling up Leeb Scoperin, one of her colleagues here and her most recent lover. Nothing directly; she would have to go through the platform’s systems, just like ordinary Culture people. She had rather hoped to see Leeb before she left, but he just hadn’t been able to get away from whatever it was he was doing at such short notice.

  Turminder Xuss’ own systems must have registered something happening. “That you?” it asked.

  She felt mildly insulted, as though the drone had enquired whether she’d just farted. “Yes,” she said sharply. “That was me. Comms off-line.”

  “No need to get snappy.”

  She looked at the machine th
rough narrowed eyes. “I think you’ll find there is,” she informed it.

  “My, it’s breezy out there!” Batra said, floating in through the force field from outside. “Djan Seriy; the module is here.”

  “I’ll get my bag,” Anaplian said.

  “Please,” Turminder Xuss said. “Allow me.”

  Batra must have read the expression on her face as she watched the drone make its way to the nearest interior door.

  “I think Turminder Xuss is going to miss you,” Batra said, extending loops of brittle-looking twigs and branches to take his/its weight and standing head-height in front of her like a framework for the sculpture of a human.

  Anaplian shook her head. “The machine grows sentimental,” she said.

  “Unlike yourself?” Batra asked neutrally.

  She guessed he was talking about Toark, the child she had rescued from the burning city. The boy was still asleep; she had crept into his cabin to say a one-sided farewell earlier that morning, stroking his hair, whispering, not waking him. Batra had agreed, reluctantly, to look after the child while she was away.

  “I have always been sentimental,” Anaplian claimed.

  The little three-seat module dropped from the sky, lowered itself gently through the roof of force field bowing over the platform’s flight deck and backed up towards the group waiting for it, rear door hingeing open.

  “Farewell, Djan Seriy,” Batra said, extending a less-than-skeletal assemblage at chest height, the extremity vaguely hand-shaped.

  Anaplian put her palm briefly against this sculpted image, feeling faintly ridiculous. “You will look after the boy?” she said.

  “Oh,” Batra said with a sighing noise, “as though he were your own.”

  “I am serious,” she said. “If I don’t come back, I want you to take care of him, until you can find somewhere and someone more fitting.”

  “You have my word,” Batra told her. “Just make sure you do come back.”

  “I shall endeavour to,” she said.

  “You have backed up?”

  “Last night,” Anaplian confirmed. They were both being polite; Batra would know very well that she had backed herself up. The platform had taken a reading of her mind state the evening before. Should she fail to return – whether due to death or in theory any other reason – a clone of her could be grown and all her personality and memories implanted into it, creating a new her almost indistinguishable from the person she was now. It did not do to forget that, in a disquietingly real sense, to be an SC agent was to be owned by SC. The compensation was that even death was just a temporary operational glitch, soon overcome. Again though, only in a sense.

  Turminder Xuss reappeared and deposited her bags in the module. “Well, goodbye, dear girl,” it said. “Try to avoid getting into any scrapes; I shan’t be there to save you.”

  “I have already adjusted my expectations,” Anaplian told it. The drone was silent, as though not sure what to make of this. Anaplian bowed formally. “Goodbye,” she said to both of them, then turned and walked into the module.

  Three minutes later she was stepping out of it again, aboard the Eight Rounds Rapid, a Delinquent-class Fast Picket and ex-General Offensive Unit which would take her to rendezvous with the Steppe-class Medium Systems Vehicle Don’t Try This At Home. This represented just the first leg of her complicated and languidly paced journey back to her old home.

  Djan Seriy was shown to a small cabin aboard the old ex-warship by a ship-slaved drone. She would be aboard for less than a full day; however, she had wanted somewhere to lie down and think.

  She opened her bag. She looked at what was lying on top of her few clothes and possessions. “I don’t recall packing you,” she muttered, and was immediately uncertain whether she was talking to herself or not (she instinctively tried to read the device with her active EM sense, but of course that didn’t work any more).

  She was not talking to herself.

  “Well remembered,” the thing she was looking at said. It appeared to be a dildo.

  “Are you what I think you are?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think I am?”

  “I think you are a knife missile. Or something very similar.”

  “Well, yes,” the small device said. “But then again no.”

  Anaplian frowned. “Certainly you would appear to possess some of the more annoying linguistic characteristics of, say, a drone.”

  “Well done, Djan Seriy!” the machine said brightly. “I am indeed one and both at the same time. The mind and personality of myself, Turminder Xuss, copied into the seasoned though still hale and hearty body of my most capable knife missile, lightly disguised.”

  “I suppose I ought to be gratified you chose to make your ruse known at this point rather than later.”

  “Ha ha. I would never have been so ungallant. Or intrusive.”

  “You hope to protect me from scrapes, I take it.”

  “Absolutely. Or at least share them with you.”

  “Do you think you’ll get away with this?”

  “Who can say? Worth a try.”

  “You might have thought to ask me.”

  “I did.”

  “You did? I appear to have lost more than I thought.”

  “I thought to ask you, but I didn’t. So as to protect you from potential blame.”

  “How kind.”

  “This way I may take full responsibility. In the I hope unlikely event you wish me to return whence I came, I shall leave you when you board the Don’t Try This At Home.”

  “Does Batra know?”

  “I most sincerely hope not. I could spend the rest of my Contact career toting bags, or worse.”

  “Is this even semi-official?” Anaplian asked. She had never entirely lost her well-developed sense of suspicion.

  “Hell’s teeth, no! All my own work.” The drone paused. “I was charged with protecting you, Djan Seriy,” it said, sounding more serious now. “And I am not some blindly obedient machine. I would like to continue to help protect you, especially as you are travelling so far outside the general protection of the Culture, to a place of violence, with your abilities reduced. For these reasons, I duly offer my services.”

  Anaplian frowned. “Save that for which your appearance would imply you are most suited,” she said, “I accept.”

  11. Bare, Night

  Oramen lay on the bed with the girl who’d called herself Jish. He was playing with her hair, tangling long brown locks of it around one finger then releasing it again. He was amused by the similarity in shape of the girl’s spiralled curls and the rolls of smoke she was producing from the unge pipe she was smoking. The smoke rolled lazily upwards towards the high, ornate ceiling of the room, which was part of a house in an elegant and respectable area of the city which had been favoured by many of the court over the years, not least by his brother Ferbin.

  Jish passed him the pipe, but he waved it away. “No.”

  “Oh, come!” she said, giggling. She turned towards him to try and force the pipe on him, her breasts jiggling as she moved across the broad, much-tousled bed. “Don’t be a spoil!” She tried to jam the stem of the pipe into his mouth.

  He turned his head, moved the pipe away again with the flat of one hand. “No, thank you,” he said.

  She sat cross-legged in front of him, perfectly naked, and tapped him on the nose with the stem. “Why won’t the Ora play? Won’t the Ora play?” she said in a funny, croaky little voice. Behind her, the broad, fan-shaped headboard of the bed was covered with a painting of mythical half-people – the satyrs and nymphs of this world – engaged in a pink-toned orgy upon fluffy white clouds, peeling faintly at the edges. “Why won’t the Ora play?”

  He smiled. “Because the Ora has other things to do.”

  “What’s to do, my lovely prince?” She puffed briefly on the pipe, releasing the grey smoke in a liquidic sheen. “The army’s away and all is quiet. Everyone’s gone, the weather is warm and there’s nothin
g to do. Play with your Jish, why not?”

  He lay back in the bed, stretching. One hand went out to the glass of wine that stood on the bedside table, as though about to grasp it, but then it fell away again.

  “I know,” Jish said, smiling, and turned half away from him, breasts outlined in the smoky sunlight pouring through the tall windows on the far side of the room. He could see she was pulling deeply on the pipe. She turned back to him, eyes bright, came forward and down and, holding the pipe away from the two of them, placed her lips over his, opening her mouth full of smoke and trying to make him breathe it from her lungs into his. He blew back sharply, making her draw away, coughing and hacking in an unruly cloud of bitter fumes.

  The pipe clattered to the floor and she coughed again, one hand at her mouth, almost sounding like she was retching. Oramen smiled. He sat upright quickly and grabbed her hand, pulling it sharply away from her and twisting his grip on her skin so that she gave a small cry of pain. Ferbin had told him that many women responded well to being treated roughly and – though he found this bizarre – he was testing this theory.

  “I would not force myself on you, my dear,” he told her. Her face was unattractively reddened, and tears were in her eyes. “You ought to reciprocate.” He let go her hand.

  The girl rubbed her wrist and glared at him, then sniffed and tossed her hair. She looked for the pipe and saw it on the floor. She levered herself half out of the bed to get it.

  “What’s all this?” Tove Lomma stuck his head over the fan-shaped headboard. The room contained two large beds which could be side-by-side or headboard-to-headboard, if one wanted just a little additional privacy. Tove was with another couple of girls on the other bed. His big, sweaty-looking face beamed down at them. “Not a tiff, I hope?” He gazed at Jish’s backside as she stretched across for the pipe. “Hmm. Most appreciable.” He looked at Oramen, nodding at Jish’s buttocks as she pulled herself back into the bed. “Perhaps we ought to swap shortly, eh, my prince?”