Matter

by Iain M. Banks

  Hyrlis turned to Holse. “Meaning that this whole conflict, this entire war here is manufactured. It is prosecuted for the viewing benefit of the Nariscene, who have always regarded waging war as one of the highest and most noble arts. Their place among the Involveds of the galactic community sadly precludes them from taking part in meaningful conflicts themselves any more, but they have the licence, the means and the will to cause other, mentored, client civilisations to war amongst themselves at their behest. The conflict we observe here, in which I am proud to play a part, is one such artificial dispute, instigated and maintained for and by the Nariscene for no other reason than that they might observe the proceedings and draw vicarious satisfaction from them.”

  Ferbin made a snorting noise.

  Holse looked sceptical. “That really true, sir?” he asked. “I mean, as acknowledged by all concerned?”

  Hyrlis smiled. A great distant, rumbling, roaring sound seemed to make the airship shiver on the wind. “Oh, you will find many a superficially convincing excuse and casus belli and there are given and seemingly accepted justifications, everything modelled to provide pretexts and keep people like the Culture from intervening to stop the fun, but it is all dressing, disguise, a feint. The truth is as I have said. Depend on it.”

  “And you are proud to take part in what you effectively describe as a travesty, a show-war, a dishonourable and cruel charade for decadent and unfeeling alien powers?” Ferbin said, trying to sound – and, to some degree, succeeding in sounding – contemptuous.

  “Yes, prince,” Hyrlis said reasonably. “I do what I can to make this war as humane in its inhumanity as I can, and in any case, I always know that however bad it may be, its sheer unnecessary awfulness at least helps guarantee that we are profoundly not in some designed and overseen universe and so have escaped the demeaning and demoralising fate of existing solely within some simulation.”

  Ferbin looked at him for a few moments. “That is absurd,” he said.

  “Nevertheless,” Hyrlis said casually, then stretched his arms out and rolled his head as though tired. “Let’s go back, shall we?”

  The Nariscene ship Hence the Fortress, a venerable Comet-class star cruiser, lifted from a deep ravine where a poisoned stream of black water moved like liquefied shadow. The craft rose above the rim of the fissure into light airs moving quietly across a landscape of livid sands beneath a soft-looking grey overcast. It accelerated into the darker skies above, finding space within minutes. The ship carried a cargo of several million human souls held petrified within a variety of nanoscale storage matrices, and two human males. The gravity was back to what the Nariscene regarded as normal, and so was much more acceptable to both men.

  They had to share one small cabin extemporised for human occupation from some storage space, but were uncomplaining, being mostly just thankful to be away from the oppressive gravity of Bulthmaas and the unsettling presence of Xide Hyrlis.

  They had stayed only two more days and nights – as far as such terms meant anything in the warren of deeply buried caverns and tunnels where they’d been kept. Hyrlis had appeared casually unbothered when they professed a desire to be away as soon as possible after he’d told Ferbin he was unable to help.

  The morning after he’d taken them to the great airship full of the wounded, Hyrlis summoned them to a hemispherical chamber perhaps twenty metres in diameter where an enormous map of what looked like nearly half of the planet was displayed, showing what appeared to be a single vast continent punctuated by a dozen or so small seas fed by short rivers running from jagged mountain ranges. The map bulged towards the unseen ceiling like a vast balloon lit from inside by hundreds of colours and tens of thousands of tiny glittering symbols, some gathered together in groups large and small, others strung out in speckled lines and yet more scattered individually.

  Hyrlis looked down on this vast display from a wide balcony halfway up the wall, talking quietly with a dozen or so uniformed human figures who responded in even more hushed tones. As they murmured away, the map itself changed, rotating and tipping to bring different parts of the landscape to the fore and moving various collections of the glittering symbols about, often developing quite different patterns and then halting while Hyrlis and the other men huddled and conferred, before returning to its earlier configuration.

  “There’s a Nariscene vessel scheduled to call in a couple of days’ time,” he told Ferbin and Holse, though his gaze was still directed at the great bulge of the dully glowing display, where various numbers of the glittering symbols, which Ferbin assumed represented military units, were moving about. It was clear now that some of the units, coloured grey-blue and shown fuzzily and in less detail than the rest, must represent the enemy. “It’ll take you to Syaungun,” Hyrlis said. “That’s a Morthanveld Nestworld, one of the main transfer ports between the Morthanveld and the Culture.” His gaze roamed the huge globe, never resting. “Should find a ship there’ll take you to the Culture.”

  “I am grateful,” Ferbin said stiffly. He found it difficult to be anything other than formally polite with Hyrlis after being rejected by him, though Hyrlis himself seemed barely to notice or care.

  The display halted, then flickered, showing various end-patterns in succession. Hyrlis shook his head and waved one arm. The great round map flicked back to its starting state again and there was much sighing and stretching amongst the uniformed advisers or generals clustered around him.

  Holse nodded at the map. “All this, sir. Is it a game?”

  Hyrlis smiled, still looking at the great glowing bubble of the display. “Yes,” he said. “It’s all a game.”

  “Does it start from what you might call reality, though?” Holse asked, stepping close to the balcony’s edge, obviously fascinated, his face lit by the great glowing hemisphere. Ferbin said nothing. He had given up trying to get his servant to be more discreet.

  “From what we call reality, as far as we know it, yes,” Hyrlis said. He turned to look at Holse. “Then we use it to try out possible dispositions, promising strategies and various tactics, looking for those that offer the best results, assuming the enemy acts and reacts as we predict.”

  “And will they be doing the same thing as regards you?”

  “Undoubtably.”

  “Might you not simply play the game against each other then, sir?” Holse suggested cheerily. “Dispensing with all the actual slaughtering and maiming and destruction and desolating and such like? Like in the old days, when two great armies met and, counting themselves about equal, called up champions, one from each, their individual combat counting by earlier agreement as determining the whole result, so sending many a frightened soldier safely back to his farm and loved ones.”

  Hyrlis laughed. The sound was obviously as startling and unusual to the generals and advisers on the balcony as it was to Ferbin and Holse. “I’d play if they would!” Hyrlis said. “And accept the verdict gladly regardless.” He smiled at Ferbin, then to Holse said, “But no matter whether we are all in a still greater game, this one here before us is at a cruder grain than that which it models. Entire battles, and sometimes therefore wars, can hinge on a jammed gun, a failed battery, a single shell being dud or an individual soldier suddenly turning and running, or throwing himself on a grenade.”

  Hyrlis shook his head. “That cannot be fully modelled, not reliably, not consistently. That you need to play out in reality, or the most detailed simulation you have available, which is effectively the same thing.”

  Holse smiled sadly. “Matter, eh, sir?”

  “Matter.” Hyrlis nodded. “And anyway, where would be the fun in just playing a game? Our hosts could do that themselves. No. They need us to play out the greater result. Nothing else will do. We ought to feel privileged to be so valuable, so irreplaceable. We may all be mere particles, but we are each fundamental!”

  Hyrlis sounded close to laughing again, then his tone and whole demeanour changed as he looked to one side, where no one was standing
. “And don’t think yourselves any better,” he said quietly. Ferbin tsk-ed loudly and turned his head away as Hyrlis continued, “What is the sweet and easy continuance of all things Cultural, if not based on the cosy knowledge of good works done in one’s name, far away? Eh?” He nodded at nobody and nothing visible. “What do you say, my loyal viewers? Aye to that? Contact and SC; they play your own real games, and let the trillions of pampered sleepers inhabiting all those great rolling cradles we call Orbitals run smoothly through the otherly scary night, unvexed.”

  “You’re obviously busy,” Ferbin said matter-of-factly to Hyrlis. “May we leave you now?”

  Hyrlis smiled. “Yes, prince. Get to your own dreams, leave us with ours. By all means be gone.”

  Ferbin and Holse turned to go.

  “Holse!” Hyrlis called.

  Choubris and Ferbin both turned to look back.

  “Sir?” Holse said.

  “Holse, if I offered you the chance to stay here and general for me, play this great game, would you take it? It would be for riches and for power, both here and now and elsewhere and elsewhen, in better, less blasted places than this sorry cinder. D’you take it, eh?”

  Holse laughed. “Course not, sir! You fun me, sure you must!”

  “Of course,” Hyrlis said, grinning. He looked at Ferbin, who was standing looking confused and angry at his servant’s side. “Your man is no fool, prince,” Hyrlis told him.

  Ferbin stood up straight in the grinding, pulling gravity. “I did not think him so.”

  Hyrlis nodded. “Naturally. Well, I too must travel very soon. If I don’t see you before you go, let me wish you both a good journey and a fair arrival.”

  “Your wishes flatter us, sir,” Ferbin said, insincerely.

  Hyrlis was indeed not there to see them off when they departed.

  Over thirteen long days during which Ferbin and Holse were left to themselves by the ship and its crew and spent most of their time either sleeping or playing games, the star cruiser Hence the Fortress took them to the Nariscene Globular Transfer Facility of Sterut.

  A Morthanveld tramp ship with no name, just a long serial number they both forgot, picked them up from there on one of its semi-regular, semicircular routes and took them onwards to the great Morthanveld Nestworld of Syaungun.

  19. Dispatches

  Oramen was standing by the window looking out over the city from his chambers in the palace in Pourl. The morning was bright and misty and Neguste, singing noisily but tunelessly, was next door, running him a bath when Fanthile rapped at the door. Neguste, who patently believed that volume was the ideal compensation for being tone-deaf, didn’t hear the door, so Oramen answered it himself.

  He and Fanthile stood out on the apartment balcony while Oramen read a note the palace secretary had brought.

  “Rasselle?” he said. “The Deldeyn capital?”

  Fanthile nodded. “Your mother’s husband has been ordered there, as mayor. They will arrive during the next few days.”

  Oramen let out a deep breath and looked first at Fanthile and then out at the city; canals glinted in the distance and banners of steam and smoke rose from a scattered forest of factory chimneys. “You know that tyl Loesp suggests I go to the Falls of the Hyeng-zhar?” he said, not looking at the palace secretary.

  “I have heard, sir. They are a few days from Rasselle, I’m told.”

  “I would be in charge of the excavations.” Oramen sighed. “Tyl Loesp believes it would help the bringing together of the people and institutions of the Ninth and the Eighth, that my presence there would help the effort to recruit more Sarl to the great project of the investigation of the mysterious ruins there. Also, it would give me a serious and proper purpose in life, so improving my reputation with the people.”

  “You are the Prince Regent, sir,” the palace secretary said. “That might be thought reputation enough by some.”

  “By some, perhaps, but these are changed days, Fanthile. Perhaps they are even the New Age that my father talked about, when feats of practical business matter more than those of arms.”

  “There are reports that certain far dependencies dispute with various of tyl Loesp’s decrees, sir. Werreber already wants to form a new army to help instil some provincial discipline. The gentleman we speak of would be wise not to disband all the forces.”

  Tyl Loesp’s clamorous triumph had been held just a few days earlier; parts of the city were still recovering. It had been a celebration on a scale and of an intensity Pourl had never seen before, certainly not under the late king. Tyl Loesp had provided for banquets in every street, a week’s free drink from every public house and a bounty for every inhabitant within the walls. Games, sports, competitions and concerts of every sort, all freely open to all, had taken place and a patchwork of small riots had broken out in various sections of the city, requiring quelling by constables and militia.

  An enormous parade had been staged consisting of the victorious army all bright and polished, smiling and whole under a sea of fluttering banners, complete with wildly caparisoned warbeasts and a host of captured Deldeyn soldiery, artillery pieces, military vehicles and war engines. Streets had been widened, buildings knocked down and rivers and gullies covered over to provide a thoroughfare long and wide enough to accommodate the great procession.

  Tyl Loesp had ridden at the head, Werreber and his generals a little behind. In the Parade Field where the kilometres-long procession had ended up, the regent had announced a year without tax (this later turned out to mean a short-year without certain mostly rather obscure taxes), an amnesty for minor criminals, the disbandment of various ancillary regiments with the release – with pensions – of nearly one hundred thousand men, and an extended mission to the Ninth that would mean that both he and the Prince Regent would spend significant time in Rasselle and the Deldeyn provinces, bringing the benefits of Sarl rule and wisdom to that reduced but highly fruitful and promising land.

  Oramen, sitting in the shade of the flag-fluttering parade stand with the rest of the nobility, had been warned of this last provision only an hour before, and so was able not to look surprised.

  He had felt an initial burst of fury that he had been simply told this rather than consulted, or even asked, but that had gone quickly. He’d soon started to wonder if such a move, such a break with Pourl might not be a good idea. All the same, to be so instructed . . .

  “You might refuse to go, sir,” Fanthile pointed out.

  Oramen turned away from the view over the city. “I might, in theory, I suppose,” he said.

  “That’s the bath ready, sir! Oh, hello, Mr Palace Secretary sir!” Neguste called, marching into the room behind them.

  “Thank you, Neguste,” Oramen said, and his servant winked and retreated.

  Fanthile nodded at the note in Oramen’s hand. “Does this make the decision for you, sir?”

  “I had already decided I might go,” Oramen said. He smiled. “The very idea of the Hyeng-zhar fascinates me, Fanthile.” He laughed. “It would be something to control all that power, in any sense!”

  Fanthile refused to be impressed. “May I speak bluntly, sir?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Tyl Loesp might worry that leaving you here while he tightens his grip on Rasselle would allow you to build too independent a foundation of regard amongst the nobles, the people and even parliament here. Removing you to somewhere so out of the way, however impressive that place might be as an attraction, could appear to some almost like a form of exile. You could refuse to go, sir. You’d be within your rights. By some arguments your place is here, amongst the people who might love you all the better with greater acquaintance. I have heard who will be there around you. This General Foise, for one; he is entirely tyl Loesp’s man. They all are. All his men, I mean. They are loyal to him rather than to Sarl or your father’s memory, or you.”

  Oramen felt relieved. He’d been expecting a scolding or something equally disagreeable. “That is your bluntes
t, dear Fanthile?” he asked, smiling.

  “It is as I see things, sir.”

  “Well, tyl Loesp may arrange me as he sees fit, for the moment. I’ll play along. Let him have his time. These men you mention may see their loyalty as lying with him, but as long as he is loyal in turn, which he most unquestionably is, then there’s neither difference nor harm. I shall be king in due course and – even allowing for all our New Age talk of parliamentary oversight – I’ll have my time then.”

  “That gentleman might grow used to arranging things to his liking. He may wish to extend his time.”

  “Perhaps so, but once I am king, his choices become limited, don’t you think?”

  Fanthile frowned. “I certainly know I’d like to think that, sir. Whether I can in honest conscience allow myself to hold such a view’s another thing.” He nodded at the note which Oramen still held. “I think the fellow may be forcing your actions in this, sir, and I believe he may come to enjoy the habit of doing so, if he does not already.”

  Oramen took a deep breath. The air smelled so good and fresh up here. Unlike the depths of the city, where, annoyingly, so much of the fun was to be found. He let the air out of his lungs. “Oh, let tyl Loesp enjoy his triumph, Fanthile. He’s continued my father’s purpose as he himself might have wished, and I’d be a churl – and look one, too, in the eyes of your precious people – if I tantrummed now while I am still, in so many eyes, an untried youth.” He smiled encouragingly at the troubled-looking face of the older man. “I’ll bend with tyl Loesp’s current while it’s at its strongest; it might be bruising not to. I’ll beat against its ebb when I see fit.” He waved the letter Fanthile had given him. “I’ll go, Fanthile. I think I need to. But I thank you for all your help and advice.” He handed the note back to the palace secretary. “Now, old friend, I really must go to my bath.”

  “Open your eyes, prince,” Fanthile said, for a moment – astoundingly! – not standing aside to let the Prince Regent past. “I do not know what ill’s been done about us since your father’s death, sir, but there’s a smell that hangs over too much that’s happened. We need all take care not to be infected by its noxiousness; it might prove each one of us all too mortal.” He waited another moment, as though to see whether this had sunk in, then nodded a bow and, head still lowered, stood to one side.