Matter c-8

by Iain M. Banks

  That was not what she was being trained to do.

  Her father had sent her to the Culture as payment, if you wished to be brutal about it. She was here as the result of a debt of honour. She had not been banked far away from Sursamen as some sort of insurance, neither was it assumed she would be educated further and returned an even more fit bride for some foreign prince, to cement an alliance or tie-in a far away conquerance. Her duty, in perpetuity, was to serve the Culture to repay it for the help — through the man called Xide Hyrlis — it had given her father and the Sarl people. King Hausk had made it perfectly clear that he did not expect ever to see his only daughter again.

  Well, he had been right about that.

  When this bargain had first been suggested, she had struggled with the competing emotions of pride at being asked to play such an important role, and anguish at experiencing a rejection even more final and complete than all the other rejections her father had made her suffer. At the same time there had been a kind of triumph coursing through her that had been stronger still than either feeling.

  At last! At last she would be free of this idiot backwater, at last she could develop as she wished, not as her father and this female-fearing, woman-demeaning society demanded. She was accepting an obligation she might spend the rest of her life fulfilling, but it was one that would take her away from the Eighth, away from the Sarl and the constrictions of the life she had gradually realised — with increasing dismay through her girlhood — she would otherwise have been expected to lead. She would still be going into service, but it was service in faraway exotic places, service in a greater cause and perhaps even one that actually involved action, not simply the requirement to please a man and produce a litter of petty royals.

  Her father had thought the Culture representatives effeminate fools for being more interested in her than in her brothers when he’d insisted on sending one of his children into their employ. Even his respect for Xide Hyrlis had suffered, when he too had suggested little Djan should be the one to go, and Anaplian didn’t know of anyone, save perhaps tyl Loesp, that her father had thought as highly of as Hyrlis.

  Her father had barely pretended to be sorry that they had chosen his troublesome, discontented, discounted daughter rather than one of his precious sons. If, of course, she wished to go; the Culture’s representatives made it very clear that they had no desire to coerce her into their employ. Naturally, as soon as they’d asked she’d had no choice — her father had been convinced he’d been presented with an absolute bargain, and hurried her departure before the Culture could see sense and change its mind — but it was precisely what she would have chosen anyway.

  She had pretended. She had pretended — to her father and the rest of the court — to be reluctant to go to the Culture, in just the way that a girl chosen to be a bride was expected to pretend to be reluctant to go to her new home and husband, and she had trusted that the Culture people would see that this was an act, for appearances’ sake, to observe the niceties. They had, and she’d duly gone with them when the time came. She had never regretted it for a moment.

  There had been times, many of them, when she’d missed her home and her brothers and even her father, times when she’d cried herself to sleep for many nights at a time, but not once, not even for an instant, had she thought that she might have made the wrong choice.

  Her duty was here, then. Her father had said so. The Culture — Special Circumstances, no less — assumed so, and was relying on her to remain here. No one on the Eighth would expect her to return. And if she did, there was probably nothing useful she could do.

  Yet what was duty? What was obligation?

  She had to go, and knew it in her bones.

  She had been silent just a few moments. She did something she only ever did with reluctance, and clicked into her neural lace and through it into the vast, bludgeoningly vivid meta-existence that was the SC version of the Culture’s dataverse.

  A clamorous, phantasmagoric scape opened instantly in front of her and flicked all around. Confronting, pervading Anaplian in this mind-dazzling, seemingly frozen blink of time was a collection of inputs using every amended-range sense available; this barely graspable riot of sensory overload presented itself initially as a sort of implied surrounding sphere, along with the bizarre but perfectly convincing sensation that you could see every part of it at once, and in more colours than even the augmented eye possessed. The immediately appreciable surface of this vast enclosing globe was less than tissue thin, yet seemed to connect with senses deep inside her as the colossal but intricate simulation suffused into what felt like every fragment of her being. You thought through to an apparent infinitude of further membranes, each with its own sensory harmonics, like a lens adjusting to bring different depths within its field of vision into focus.

  It was a given that this perceptual frenzy was as close as a human, or anything like a human, could get to knowing what it was like to be a Mind. Only politeness prevented most Minds pointing out that this was the drastically coarsened, savagely cut-down, vastly inferior, well-below-nursery-level version of what they themselves were immersed within throughout every moment of their existence.

  Even without consciously thinking about it, she was there with a diagrammatic and data-ended representation of this section of the galaxy. The stars were shown as exaggerated points of their true colour, their solar systems implied in log-scaled plunge-foci and their civilisational flavour defined by musical note-groups (the influence of the Culture was signalled by a chord sequence constructed from mathematically pure whole-tone scales reaching forever down and up). An overlay showed the course schedules of all relevant ships and a choice of routes was already laid out for her, colour-coded in order of speed, strand thickness standing for ship size and schedule certainty shown by hue intensity, with comfort and general amenability characterised as sets of smells. Patterns on the strands — making them look braided, like rope — indicated to whom the ships belonged.

  Circles and ellipses, mostly, confronted her. A few supplementally more complicated shapes squiggled through the view where ships anticipated describing more eccentric courses between the stars over the next few tens and hundreds of standard days.

  Seemingly unbidden, another line formed in the overlay, almost perfectly straight, showing her how quickly the nearest available unit of the Culture’s fleet of Very Fast Pickets could get her there. Crude flight time was a little over a dozen days, though it would take almost as long for the ship to get to Prasadal to pick her up in the first place. Other ships could have made the journey in even less time, though they were too far away. There was a degree of favourable uncertainty in the projection; it applied only to Culture vessels that were currently making their whereabouts known. It was entirely possible that another ship of the Rapid Asset fleet not currently bothering to circulate its location was even closer and would respond positively to a broadcast request.

  But that wasn’t going to happen — Batra had made that clear. She wiped the offending overlay from the view. She would have to take the prescribed route, and be passed like a baton from ship to ship. It looked complicated.

  A lot of very clever processing had already gone on in her neural lace to predict what she’d want to look at effectively before she knew herself, and — fabulously convenient and highly technically impressive though this might be — it was this aspect of lace-use that most disturbed Anaplian and caused her to keep its application to a minimum. In the end, she didn’t even need to pull out any data-ends to check the raw figures; there was one fairly obvious route through this tangled scribble from Prasadal to Sursamen, and it would indeed take at least one hundred and twenty-nine and a bit days if she left any time within the next two days, assuming that the Morthanveld end of things went as fortuitously as it might. A lot seemed to depend on whether the Morthanveld Great Ship Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown decided to take in the Nestworld Syaung-un on its way from one globular cluster to another.

  Sh
e was about to click out when a barely formed thought regarding exactly what a Morthanveld Great Ship and a Nestworld actually were started to blossom into a whole hierarchy of increasingly complicated explanations as the lace raced to retrieve and present the relevant information with all the desperate enthusiasm of an overenthusiastic child asked to perform a party piece. She shut it down with a sort of inward slam and clicked out again with the usual sense of relief and vague guilt. The last vestige of the lace’s presence informed her that her heart was still completing the beat it had been beginning when she’d first clicked in.

  It was like waking up, though from a dream world where everything was more detailed, vivid, splendid and even plausible than reality, not less. That was another reason she didn’t like using the lace. She wondered briefly how Jerle Batra’s normality compared to hers.

  “I’m sorry. I think I have to go,” she told him.

  “Think, Djan Seriy?” Batra asked, sounding sad.

  “I am going,” she said. “I must.”

  “I see.” Now the man who looked like a fuzzy little bush sounded apologetic. “There will be a cost, Djan Seriy.”

  “I know.”

  6. Scholastery

  Ferbin otz Aelsh-Hausk’r and his servant Choubris Holse were riding along an ill-kept road through a forest of cloud trees towards the Xiliskine-Anjrinh Scholastery. They had chosen to travel through the long half-night of the Rollstar Guime, which showed as a sullen red glow spread like a rosy bruise across the farpole horizon. They had pulled off the road only twice so far, once to avoid a troop of mounted Ichteuen and once when a steam truck had appeared in the far distance. The prince no longer looked like himself; Holse had close-cut his scalp, his facial hair was growing quickly (darker than his head hair; nearly brown, which peeved him disproportionately), he had removed all his rings and other regal jewellery and he was dressed in clothes Holse had obtained from the battlefield.

  “From a corpse?” Ferbin had spluttered, staring down at himself wide-eyed. Holse had thought to inform the prince of the provenance of his new-to-him civvies only after he’d put them on.

  “One with no obvious wounds, sir,” Holse had assured him reasonably. “Just a little bleeding from the ears and nose. Dead a good two or three days, too, so any fleas would assuredly have caught cold and jumped ship. And he was a gentleman, too, I might add. An army private provisioner, unless I’m mistaken.”

  “That’s not a gentleman,” Ferbin had told his servant patiently. “That’s a merchant.” He’d pulled at his sleeves, held out his hands and shaken his head.

  If there had been any aerial activity — unlikely in the near darkness — they didn’t see it. At any rate, nobody came swooping down to inspect them as they trudged on, Holse on his rowel and Ferbin on the mersicor his servant had brought to the folly overlooking the river four days earlier. Holse had dug a couple of wads of crile root from a saddle bag to help keep them awake as they rode, and they chewed on this while they talked. It gave their conversation what Holse felt was a rather comical, munchy sort of quality, though he thought better of mentioning this to Ferbin.

  “Choubris Holse, it is your duty to accompany me to wherever I might choose to go.”

  “I’d beg to differ, sir.”

  “There’s no differing involved. Duty is duty. Yours is to me.”

  “Within the kingdom, and within the rule of the king’s law, I’d not argue with you, sir. It is my duty beyond that reach I might think to question.”

  “Holse! You are a servant! I am a prince! You’d be best advised to do as you’re damn well told even were I some lowly gent with no more than a tumbledown fort, a flea-bitten nag and too many children to his name. As servant to a prince — the senior prince, I might add — of the royal house of Hausk…” Ferbin broke off, choking on his own amazement and disgust at encountering such obduracy in a servant. “My father would have you thrashed for this, Holse, I tell you! Or worse! Damn it, man, I am the rightful king!”

  “Sir, I am with you now, and intend to stay with you until the varsity and thence to whatever conveyance you might find beyond that which they are able to recommend you to. To that very point I shall be at your side, as faithful as ever.”

  “And there you damn well have to stay! Wherever I go!”

  “Sir, pleasing your pardon, my allegiance — at the bottom of the pot, after all reduction, as it were — is to the throne rather than to your good self. Once you remove yourself from the furthest extent of your father’s conquests, it is my understanding that I am bound to return to the seat of authority — which I would take to be the royal palace in Pourl, all other matters being in normal balance — there to take fresh instruction from, well, whomsoever—”

  “Holse! Are you a lawyer?”

  “Dear God forbid, sir!”

  “Then shut up. Your duty is to stay with me. That’s the all and end of it.”

  “My duty, begging your pardon, sir, is to the king.”

  “But I am the king! Haven’t you been telling me for the last four days that I’m the rightful heir to the throne?”

  “Sir, excuse my bluntness, but you are an uncrowned king who is riding most determinedly away from his throne.”

  “Yes! Yes, to save my life! To seek help so that I may return to claim that throne, if the WorldGod lets. And, I would point out, in doing so I am following the highest precedents; does not the WorldGod find its own sanctuary from cares here at the core of our blessed world? Did not the Sarl people themselves flee persecution on their homeworld, escaping here to our own dear Sursamen?”

  “Still, sir. Being a king has its expectations. One is letting people know you’re alive.”

  “Is it really? Well, well,” Ferbin said, deciding to be witheringly sarcastic. “Do you tell me that now? And what else, might one ask?”

  “Well, sir, acting in a kingly manner regarding the taking up of the reins of power, by dispute if needs be, rather than leaving them to fall to—”

  “Choubris Holse, you will not lecture me in the art of kingcraft or my regal obligations and responsibilities!”

  “Indeed not, sir. I agree most completely. Lecturing is the province of the scholastic monk types towards which we make our way. No argument there from me, sir.”

  Holse’s rowel snored as though in agreement. Their animals were bred to night-walk and could literally walk in their sleep, though they needed the odd prod to keep them on the road.

  “I decide my duty, Holse, not you! And my duty is not to let myself be murdered by those who have already killed one king and would not flinch from adding another — that is, me — to their score!”

  Holse looked up at the near-unGodly vastness of the Hicturean Tower, rising to their left like fate. The sky-supporting stem was skirted with grassed and forested slopes, their steepness increasing as they approached the topmost edge where, piled up against the smooth, uncanny surface of the Tower, the ground and foliage broke like a dark green wave against the trunk’s vast pale roundness, glowing in the low red light like the bone of some long-dead god.

  Holse cleared his throat. “These documents we go in search of, sir. They don’t work the other way, do they?”

  “The other way? What do you mean, Holse?”

  “Well, would they let you travel downwards, to the Core, to see the WorldGod, sir?” Holse had no idea how these things worked; he had never really bothered with religion, though he had always paid lip-service to the church for the sake of an easy life. He had long suspected that the WorldGod was just another convenient semi-fiction supporting the whole structure that sustained the rich and powerful in their privilege. “To see if its Divineness might help you?” He shrugged. “It would save all the bother of travelling to the Surface and then to the external stars, sir.”

  “That is impossible, Holse,” Ferbin said patiently, trying not to lose his temper at such childish drivel. “The Oct and — thank God — the Aultridia are forbidden from interfering with the WorldGod; they may not
descend to the Core. Therefore neither may we.” He might have replied at greater length, but — following an inopportune partial inhaling of a well-chewed wad of crile root — he was struck by an attack of coughing, and spent much of the next few minutes wheezing and spluttering and refusing Holse’s repeated offers to administer a forceful slap on the back.

  * * *

  The Hicturean-Anjrinh Scholastery sat on a low hill a day’s ride from the Hicturean Tower in the direction of nearpole, so that the great column was almost directly between it and Pourl. Like most Scholasteries, the place was forbidding-looking, even if technically it was unfortified. It looked like a long, low castle with its curtain wall removed. It had two turrets, but they housed telescopes rather than guns. The visible walls actually looked quite jolly, painted in all sorts of different colours, but it still appeared somehow grim to Ferbin. He had always been rather in awe of such places and the people who inhabited them. To give yourself up to a life of study, thought and contemplation seemed like, well, such a waste. He tipped continually between contempt for anyone who could cut themself off from so much that made life fun just to pursue this abstraction they called learning, and something close to reverence, deeply impressed that seriously clever people would willingly choose such an abstemious existence.

  It was to one of these places that he knew Djan Seriy would have wanted to go, had she been free to choose. She hadn’t been, of course, and anyway the Culture had made off with her. Some of her letters home to her family after she had gone with them had spoken of places of learning that sounded a lot like Scholasteries. Ferbin had formed the impression that she’d learned a great deal. (Far too much, in the snorting estimation of their father.) Later letters seemed to hint that she had become some sort of warrior, almost a champion. They had worried about her sanity at first, but woman warriors were not unknown. Everybody had thought they belonged firmly in the past, but — well — who knew? The ways of the aliens — the superior, mentor and Optimae races, and who could say what others — were beyond knowing. So much of life went in great circles, in wheels of good and ill fortune; maybe woman warriors were part of some utterly strange and incomprehensible future.