Matter c-8

by Iain M. Banks

  There had not — Ferbin reflected as his sister swung open the circular door — really been enough time between the “Okay?” and the “Let’s go” bits of that last sentence for anybody to say very much at all.

  Outside, it was dark until you looked down, then the landscape shone in great stripes separated by a central band of grey near-dark. No stars were visible, hidden by vanes and ceiling structures. Djan Seriy squatted on the sill, one hand holding on to the top edge of the inward-opening door. She turned to Ferbin and touched him with her other hand. “You come straight out after me, all right, brother? Don’t delay.”

  “Yes, of course,” he said. His heart was hammering.

  Djan Seriy looked at him for a moment longer. “Or you could just go limp and the suit will do it all for you; climbing up and out, I mean. With your eyes closed—”

  “I shall do it myself, never fear,” Ferbin said, trying to sound braver and more certain than he felt.

  She squeezed his shoulder. “See you down there.”

  Then she threw herself out of the doorway.

  Ferbin pulled himself up to squat where his sister had, feeling Holse’s hands helping to steady him, then he swallowed as he looked down at the impossible drop below him. He closed his eyes after all, but he flexed legs and arms and threw himself out, curling into a ball.

  The view was tumbling about him when he opened his eyes again; light/dark, light/dark, light… then the flickering sequence started to slow as the suit whirred, gently teasing his limbs out. His breath sounded terribly loud in his head. After a few moments he was falling in an X shape, feeling almost relaxed as he lay looking back up at the shady mass of Filigree and vaning hanging from the ceiling above. He tried to see where he had thrown himself from, but couldn’t. He thought he caught a glimpse of another tiny dark dot far above, also falling, but could not be sure.

  “Can I turn over and look down?” he asked the suit.

  “Yes. It will be advisable to return to this orientation for entry into the atmosphere,” the suit told him in its crisp, asexual voice. “Or it is possible to transmit the view downward to your eyes in your present orientation.”

  “Is that better?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do that, then.”

  Suddenly it was as though he was dropping down into the distant landscape beneath rather than falling away from the view above. He felt disoriented and dizzy for a moment, but soon adapted. He looked in vain for Djan Seriy, falling somewhere below, but could see no sign of her. “Can you see my sister?” he asked.

  “She is probably within this area,” the suit said, creating a thin red circle over part of the view. “She is camouflaged,” it explained.

  “How far have we fallen so far?”

  “Six kilometres.”

  “Oh. How long did that take?”

  “Fifty seconds. Over the next fifty seconds we shall descend another twenty kilometres. We are still accelerating and will continue to do so until we encounter the atmosphere.”

  “When does that happen?”

  “In about ten minutes from now.”

  Ferbin settled back and enjoyed the topsy-turvy view, trying to spot the Hyeng-zhar cataract, then attempting to trace the course of the Sulpitine river and finally settling for working out where the Upper and Lower Sulpine Seas might be. He wondered if it was all still frozen. They’d been told it would be, though he found that hard to believe.

  The view expanded slowly in front of him. There; was that one of the seas? It looked too small. Was that the other? Too small and too close to the other one. It was so hard to tell. The gloom beneath was gradually filling more and more of his field of vision, leaving the bright, sunlit lands on the edges of the view.

  By the time he was sure those had been the two Seas, he had begun to realise how high up they had been when they’d started falling, how small even two substantial seas and a mighty river could look from a great altitude and how enormous the world he had lived in all his life really was.

  The landscape beneath was bulging up towards him. How were they to stop?

  The suit started to grow around him, extending a mass of bubbles from every part save that he must be looking through. The bubbles enlarged; some slowly broke and kept on extending, becoming a delicate-looking tracery of what appeared like an insect’s near-transparent wings or the infinitely fragile-looking skeleton structure that was left when a tree-leaf had lost all trace of its light-gathering surface and only the sustaining filigree of its sap-transporting veins was left.

  The top of the atmosphere imposed itself as a very slowly increasing sense of returning weight, pushing against his back, so that — as he continued to look downwards even though he was actually on his back — he experienced the vertiginous sensation of being propelled even faster towards the ground beneath. A faint whispering sound transmitted itself through the suit. The push grew harder and the whisper swelled to a roar.

  He waited to see the red, yellow and white glow which he had heard things meeting atmospheres produced about them, but it never appeared.

  The suit twisted, rotating so that he was actually facing downwards now. The tracery and the bubbles collapsed back in towards the suit and became crescent wings and thin fins protruding from his arms, sides and thighs; the suit had been gently reconfiguring his body so that his arms were stuck out ahead of him now, as though he was about to dive into a river. His legs were splayed behind him and felt as though they were connected by some sort of tether or membrane.

  The landscape was much closer now — he could see tiny dark rivers and hints of other surface features picked out in blacks and pale greys in the gloom far beneath — however, the ground was no longer rushing up towards him but sliding past beneath. The feeling of weight had shifted too and the air was whispering about him.

  He was flying.

  * * *

  Anaplian dropped back to touch with Hippinse as they flew. “Worked out what’s messing with the local systemry?” she asked. Hippinse was monitoring the disturbance in the surrounding level’s data complexes and analysing data they’d collected earlier while in the Aultridian scendship.

  “Not really,” the avatoid confessed, sounding both embarrassed and concerned. “Whatever’s corrupting it is almost untouchably exotic. Genuinely alien; unknown. In fact, right now, unknowable. I’d need the ship’s whole Mind to start attacking this shit.”

  Anaplian was silent for a moment. “What the fuck is going on here?” she asked quietly. Hippinse had no reply to that either. Anaplian let go and flew ahead.

  * * *

  Ferbin and the suit dipped, passing close enough to the ground to see individual boulders, bushes and small, scrubby trees, all tailed by narrow deltas of the same pale grey as though casting strange shadows. Gullies and ravines shone palely too, as if filled with softly shining mist.

  “Is that snow?” he asked.

  “Yes,” the suit said.

  Something lightly grasped his ankle. “Are you all right, Ferbin?” Djan Seriy’s voice said.

  “Yes,” he said, starting to twist round to look back but then stopping himself just as she said, “There is no point looking back, brother; you won’t be able to see me.”

  “Oh,” he said, “so you are behind me?”

  “I am now. I have been flying ahead of you for the last two minutes. We are in a diamond formation; you are in the right-hand position. Turminder Xuss flies a kilometre ahead of us.”

  “Oh.”

  “Listen, brother. While we were in the tube, just before we dropped, we picked up repeated signals from an Oct news service talking about the Falls and Oramen. They say that Oramen lives and is well but there was some sort of attempt on his life nine days ago; an explosion in the excavations and/or an attempt to knife him. It may not have been the first attempt on his life, either. He is aware he is in danger and may already have accused people around tyl Loesp, if not tyl Loesp himself, of being responsible.”

  “But he is well
?”

  “Lightly injured but well enough. Tyl Loesp in turn accuses Oramen of impatience in trying to wrest the crown from the properly appointed regent before he is legally of an age to do so. He returns from travels elsewhere on this level and has signalled forces loyal to him to gather just upstream from the Falls. Werreber — in charge of the greater army — has been contacted by both Oramen and tyl Loesp and has not declared for either side yet. He is on the Eighth, though, and is ten or more days away, even flying. His ground forces would be many weeks behind that again.”

  Ferbin felt a chill. “We are not quite too late, then,” he said, trying to sound hopeful.

  “I don’t know. There is more; some artifact long buried in the Nameless City was reported to be showing signs of life and all attention had been turned to it. But that was five days ago. Since then there has been nothing. Not just no news service but no fresh signals at all from the vicinity of the Falls or the Settlement or anywhere else within this section. The data networks all around this area are in a state of locked-in chaos. That is odd and worrying. Plus, we are picking up curious, anomalous indicators from the Nameless City itself.”

  “Is that bad?”

  Djan Seriy hesitated. This worried Ferbin all by itself. “Possibly.” Then she added, “We’ll set down on the city outskirts downstream in about twenty minutes. Tell the suit if you need to talk to me in the meantime. All right?”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t worry. See you soon.” His ankle was patted once, then the pressure on it was removed.

  He assumed she was resuming her position ahead of him in their diamond formation but he couldn’t see her pass him or spot her flying in front.

  They zoomed over a small hill without losing speed and Ferbin realised that they were doing more than just gliding; they were under power. He asked to look back and was given a view from the back of his head. There was a membrane filling the V between his legs and two small fat cylinders sticking out from his ankles. The view through them was a blur.

  He looked ahead again just as they went hurtling over what looked like a road, some old railway lines and a drained canal. Then the ground just fell away and he was staring at a flat, icy landscape another two hundred metres further beneath, a shadowy wasteland of broad, frozen waterways, slim, sinuously curved channels, rounded banks and mounds of sand and snow, the whole linear, winterbound plain punctuated at random by a variety of misshapen shards, stumps of arbitrary debris and jagged wreckage from what looked like ruined buildings or sunken ships all sticking chaotically aslant, broken and alone from the pitted, frozen surface.

  They swooped, dipping in towards the centre of this new and pitiless landscape contained by the sheer and distant cliffs on either side.

  When they got to the Nameless City, arriving over increasing amounts of fractured, haphazardly jumbled detritus trapped within the ice and the frozen wastes of sand and snow and mud, they could see many thin trails of smoke leading up into the sky from their left above the cliffs on that side. Hard against the cliffs, visible under modest magnification, they could make out zigzagging traceries of stairways and the open lattices of lift shafts. Nothing save the smoke was moving, drifting slowly upwards into the quiet, windless dim.

  In front of them, the city rose, its highest spires and towers still some kilometres distant. They crossed the first outskirt jumble of short, few-storey buildings and began to slow. The suit released Ferbin from its gentle grip, letting his arms and legs free.

  Moments later he felt himself tipped forward, slowing still further as his legs swung underneath him and he was lowered and positioned as though about to start walking. A small open space in front of him seemed to be their target. He realised that the few-storey-high buildings were actually much taller, their lower floors buried in the frozen mud and ice.

  His sister, Holse and Hippinse blinked into relative visibility, hazily indistinct shapes each ten metres or so away as they set down in the icy little clearing, and — finally, though it might have been in a strange place under no appreciable sun on the wrong level and through soles that would doubtless have insulated him from anything down to absolute zero, Ferbin’s feet again touched the ground of home.

  26. The Sarcophagus

  The object now being called the Sarcophagus lay almost in the dead centre of the Nameless City. It was located deep beneath the under-plaza within a building as fat and tall and impressive as any in the ancient, long-buried metropolis. The city’s heart was now accessed along a freshly directed rail track; the engineers had taken advantage of the freeze to build lines where they never could have before, over frozen expanses of river that would have swept any trestles or pylons away in an instant had they still held water rather than ice and straight across sand- and mudbanks that would have shifted, sunk and reappeared somewhere else in the course of a shift had the rapids still been roaring.

  From the thronging chaos of the railhead — an arc-lit station deep under the plaza whose traffic volume would have done justice to a terminus in a major city — the well-tramped way led, past whistling, roaring, bellowing machines and piles and coils of pipe and cable, along a thoroughfare twenty metres across crowded with pack creatures, warbeasts pressed into service as haulage animals, steam- and oil-powered traction engines, narrow-gauge trains and — more than anything else — with rank after rank and row after row and group and company and detail and shift and gang of workers, labourers, engineers, guards, specialists and professionals of a hundred different types.

  On a vast raised round structure that lay at the focus of a dozen ramps and roadways original to the Nameless City the great packed street split in a score of different directions. Conveyor belts, tramways and aerial wagonways spun off with the roadways, all dotted with faint oil lamps, hissing gas fixtures and sputtering electric lights. What had been the busiest ramp — attended by cableways, conveyors and funicular lines like too-steep railways with jagged stairways at their centres — led across a filled-in lake and a broad roadway of thick planking down to the great bulbous building housing the Sarcophagus.

  Through what had been a gigantic, elongated formal entrance a hundred metres across and forty high, flanked by a dozen soaring sculptures of cut-away Shellworlds and leading to a still taller mouth-shaped atrium within, the torrent of men, machines, animals and material had poured.

  That torrent had slowed to a trickle now as Oramen and the party which had come directly from the gathering he had held in the great marquee descended to the focus of the city and the excavations; the greatest concentrations of effort were elsewhere now, principally targeting the ten smaller artifacts similar to the one Oramen had gone to inspect when the attempt on his life had been made. That particular black cube was subject to the most intense exertions of all due to the partial collapse of the chamber which had been excavated around it.

  The central chamber housing the Sarcophagus was similar to — but far larger than — that around the black cube Oramen had seen. The excavations had emptied a huge cavity within the building, removing mud, silt, sand and assorted debris that had collected there over uncounted centuries to reveal what had always been an enormous central arena over a hundred metres across rather than an extemporised void blasted and torn from smaller rooms and spaces.

  At its centre, brightly lit by arc lights and cluttered by layers, levels and platforms of scaffolding and latticed by the resulting shadows, lay the Sarcophagus itself; a pale grey cube twenty metres to a side, its corners and edges subtly rounded. For nearly twenty days while it was fully excavated a controlled chaos had swirled about the artifact, a storm of men, machines and movement, attended by shouts, bangs, sparks, animal roars, gouts and bursts of steam and exhaust smoke. Now, though, as Oramen finally looked upon it, the chamber around the object was quiet and hushed and the atmosphere almost reverential, though possessed, unless Oramen was imagining it, of a certain tension.

  “It does not look very alive from here,” Oramen said. He and Poatas stoo
d, surrounded by guards, at the main entrance to the central chamber, a wide doorway stationed ten metres above the base of the shallow bowl at the centre of which the Sarcophagus sat on a round plinth raised by about five metres.

  “Well, you should come closer,” Poatas said.

  Oramen smiled at the man. “That is exactly what we are going to do, Mr Poatas.”

  They walked towards it. Oramen found the thing in many ways less intimidating than the pure black cube he’d taken an interest in earlier. The chamber was far larger and less oppressive-seeming — partly, no doubt, he was simply appreciating the lack of clamour — and the object itself, though much larger than the one he’d seen just a few days before, seemed less intimidating just because it was a relatively unthreatening shade of grey rather than the light-defying black that had so repelled and fascinated him in that other object. Nevertheless, it was large and he was seeing it from below rather than above, so that it appeared more massive still.

  He wondered how much he was still suffering from the effects of his injuries. He might have stopped another day in bed; his doctors had recommended it but he had been more concerned at losing the trust of the people and especially the ex-soldiers of the Settlement. He had had to rise, had to show himself to them, had to address them, and then — when the messenger had entered with news that the Sarcophagus had shown signs of life — he had had no choice but to accompany Poatas and his closest aides to the focus of their excavations. He felt breathless, sore in too many places to count and his head hurt, plus his ears still rang and he had to struggle to hear what people said sometimes, as though he was an already old man, but he was doing his best to appear well and hearty and unconcerned.