Matter by Iain M. Banks
The gun certainly kicked like a hefter – and barked louder than one – Oramen thought, but it fired straight and true.
He found a place for its lightly oiled ynt-hide holster, concealed in a plumped-out part of his tunic at the back, and promised to keep its safety catch secured.
12. Cumuloform
It was some time before Ferbin would accept he was not dead. He drifted up towards some sort of awareness to find himself suspended in airy nothing beneath a vast glowing mass of frozen bubbles. Enormous gold-tinged clouds stretched in every direction, mostly up. Far below was a startlingly blue ocean, devoid of land. Unchanging, patterned with a ruffled weave of waves, it seemed, for all its oceanic blueness, somehow frozen.
Sometimes, as he drifted over this apparition, it did seem to change, and he thought he saw tiny flecks appear on its surface, but then the tiny flecks disappeared with the same microscopic slowness with which they had come into being, and all was as before; serene, calm, unchanging, heavenly . . .
He had the feeling he had recently been in the ocean, though it had been warm rather than cold and he had been able to breathe despite being submerged in it. It was as though death was somehow like being born, like being still in the womb.
And now he was here in this strange scape of infinite cloud and never-ending ocean with only the comforting presence of slowly passing Towers to reassure him he was in the appropriate afterlife. And even the Towers seemed too far apart.
He saw a face. It was a human face and he knew he ought to recognise it.
Then he was awake again and the face had gone. He suspected he had dreamed the face, and wondered about dreaming when you were patently dead. Then he seemed to fall asleep. In retrospect, that was surprising too.
He was awake, and there was a strange numbness about his back and right shoulder. He could feel no pain or discomfort, but it felt like there was a huge hole in him covering a quarter of his torso, something that he couldn’t reach or feel or do anything with. Filling his ears was a distant roaring noise like a waterfall heard at a distance.
He floated over the unimpeachably perfect blueness. A sunset came on slowly, burnishing the huge clouds with red, violet and mauve. He watched a Tower slide past, its sallow trunk disappearing into the deepening azure mass of the sea, edged with white where the surfaces met.
Then it was dark and only distant lightning lit the ocean and the towering clouds, ushering him back to sleep with silent bursts of faraway light.
This must, he thought, be heaven. Some sort of reward, anyway.
Ideas about what happened after you died varied even amongst the priestly caste. Primitives were able to have more straightforward religions because they didn’t know any better. Once you knew even a little of the reality of the situation in the outside universe, it all got a bit more complex: there were lots of aliens and they all had – or had once had – their own myths and religions. Some aliens were immortal; some had constructed their own fully functional afterlives, where the deceased – recorded, transcribed – ended up after death; some had made thinking machines that had their own sets of imponderable and semi-godlike powers; some just were gods, like the WorldGod, for example, and some had Sublimed, which itself was arguably a form of ascension to Godhead.
Ferbin’s father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution.
A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever.
The more comfortably off, and those with real power, might choose to believe or not as their personal proclivities dictated, but their relatively easeful, pleasant lives were their own rewards, and for the highest in the land, posterity – a place in history itself – would be their prize after death.
Ferbin had never really bothered with thoughts of an afterlife. Where he was now did seem like heaven, or something like it, but he wasn’t sure. Part of him wished he’d paid more attention to the priests when they’d been trying to instruct him about this sort of thing, but then, given that he appeared to have achieved the afterlife without either faith or knowledge, what would have been the point?
Choubris Holse looked down on him.
Choubris Holse. That had been the name of the face he’d seen earlier. He stared at it and wondered what Holse was doing in the land of the dead, and wearing odd, too-loose-looking clothes, too, though he still had his belt and knife. Should Holse be here? Perhaps he was just visiting.
He moved, and could feel something in the place where before there had been no feeling or movement, in his right upper back. He looked around as best he could.
He was riding in something like a balloon gondola, lying prone on a large, subtly undulating bed, naked but for a thin covering. Choubris Holse was sitting looking at him, chewing on what looked like a stringy piece of dried meat. Ferbin suddenly felt ravenously hungry. Holse belched and excused himself and Ferbin experienced an odd amalgam of emotions as he realised that this was not the afterlife and that he was still alive.
“Good-day, sir,” Holse said. His voice sounded funny. Ferbin clung briefly to this scrap of evidence that he might still be safely dead with the ferocity of a drowning man clutching at a floating leaf. Then he let it go.
He tried working his mouth. His jaw clicked and his mouth felt gummy. A noise like an old man’s groan sounded from somewhere and Ferbin was forced to acknowledge it had probably been emitted by himself.
“Feeling better, sir?” Holse asked matter-of-factly.
Ferbin tried to move his arms and found that he could. He brought both hands up to his face. They looked pale and the skin was all ridged, like the ocean that still sailed by below. Like he’d been too long in it. Or maybe just too long in a nice warm bath. “Holse,” he croaked.
“At your service, sir.” Holse sighed. “As ever.”
Ferbin looked about. Clouds, ocean, bubble gondola thing. “Where is this? Not heaven?”
“Not heaven, sir, no.”
“You’re quite sure?”
“More than moderately positive, sir. This is a portion of the Fourth, sir. We are in the realm of the beings that call themselves Cumuloforms.”
“The Fourth?” Ferbin said. His voice sounded odd too. “But we are still within great Sursamen?”
“Assuredly, sir. Just four levels up. Halfway to the Surface.”
Ferbin looked around again. “How extraordinary,” he breathed, then coughed.
“Extraordinarily boring, sir,” Holse said, frowning at his piece of dried meat. “We’ve been sailing over this water for the past five long-days or so and while the prospect is most impressive at first and the air bracing, you’d be amazed how quickly the impressiveness and the bracingness become tedious when that’s all there is to contemplate all day. Well, all there is to contemplate all day save for your good self, of course, sir, and frankly you were no circus of boundless fun either in your sleeping state. Nary a word, sir. Certainly nary a word of sense. But in any event, sir, welcome back to the land of the living.” Holse made a show of looking beneath his feet, through a translucent membrane that showed a hazy version of the ocean far below. “Though land, as you might have noticed, is the one thing this level appears to be somewhat short of.”
“Definitely the Fourth?” Ferbin said. He leaned up on one elbow – something twinged in his right shoulder, and he grimace
“Definitely the Fourth, sir. Not that I had opportunity to count as it were, but that is most certainly what its denizens term it.”
Ferbin looked at the dried meat held in Holse’s hand. He nodded at it. “I say, d’you think I might have some of that?”
“I’ll get you a fresh piece, shall I, sir? They said you were all right to eat like normal when you wanted to.”
“No, no; that bit will do,” Ferbin said, still staring at the meat and feeling his mouth fill with saliva.
“As you wish, sir.” Holse handed Ferbin the meat. He crammed it into his mouth. It tasted salty and slightly fishy and very good.
“How did we come to be here, Holse?” he said through mouthfuls. “And who would be these ‘they’?”
“Well now, sir,” Holse said.
Ferbin had been badly wounded by a carbine bullet as they stumbled into the cylinder that had revealed itself on the Oct’s access tower. A lucky shot, Holse told him. Firing in near darkness from a beating air-beast at a running target, even the greatest marksman would need his fair share of good fortune for a month all gathered together at once to secure a hit.
The two of them had fallen into the interior of the cylinder, which then just sat there, door still open, for what had seemed like an eternity to Holse. He had cradled the already unconscious Ferbin in his arms, slowly becoming covered in blood, screaming at whoever or whatever to close the door or sink the effing tube thing back down into the tower, but nothing had happened until some of the men who had attacked them actually landed on the surface outside, then the cylinder did finally lower itself back into the tower. He’d yelled and hollered for help for Ferbin, because he was sure that the prince was dying. Meanwhile he had the impression that the round room they were in was continuing to sink deeper inside the access tower.
The room came to a stop, the doorway they’d fallen through had slid into being again and a machine the shape of a large Oct had scuttled in towards them. It took Ferbin’s limp body off him and quickly turned him this way and that, finding the hole in his back and the larger exit wound in his chest, sealing both with some sort of squirty stuff and cradling his head with a sort of hand thing. Pincers on that hand had seemed to slide into Ferbin’s neck and lower skull, but Ferbin had been too far gone to react and Holse had just assumed and hoped that this was somehow all part of the ministering or doctoring or whatever was going on.
A floating platform appeared and took them along a broad hallway with whole sets and sequences of most impressive doors – each easily the equal in size of the main gates to the palace in Pourl – which variously slid, rolled, rose and fell to allow them through. Holse had guessed that they were entering the base of the D’nengoal Tower itself.
The final chamber was a big sphere with an added floor, and this had sealed itself tight and started moving; possibly up – it was hard to say. The place had felt damp and the floor had patches of water on it.
The Oct doctor machine continued to work on Ferbin, who had at least stopped bleeding. A screen lowered itself from the ceiling and addressed Holse, who spent the next hour or so trying to explain what had happened, who they both were and why one of them was almost dead. From Ferbin’s jacket he had fished out the envelopes Seltis the Head Scholar had given them. They were covered in blood and one of them looked like it had been nicked by the carbine bullet on its way out of Ferbin’s chest. Holse had waved these at the screen, hoping their effectiveness was not impaired by blood or having a hole in one corner. He felt he was almost starting to get the hang of how to talk to an Oct when some clunking and gentle bouncing around told him they had arrived somewhere else. The door swung open again and a small group of real, proper Oct had looked in through a wall as transparent as the best glass but wobbly as a flag on a windy day.
Holse had forgotten the name of the Towermaster. Seltis had said the name when he’d given them the travel documents but Holse had been too busy trying to think what they were going to do next to pay attention. He waved the travel documents again. Then the name just popped into his head.
“Aiaik!” he exclaimed. It sounded like a cry of pain or surprise, he thought, and he wondered what he and Ferbin must look like to these clever, strange-looking aliens.
Whether the Towermaster’s name had any real effect was debatable, but the two of them – Ferbin carried by the limbs of the Oct doctor machine – found themselves, still on their little floating platform, riding along various water-filled corridors inside a bubble of air. The Oct who’d been looking in at them through the wobbly glass accompanied them, swimming alongside. They entered a large chamber of great complexity; the Oct doctor machine cut the clothes from Ferbin, a sort of jacket was wrapped round his chest, a transparent mask connected to long tubes was placed over his face, other tubes fastened to his head where the doctor’s pincers had entered and then he was placed in a large tank.
One of the Oct had tried to explain what was going on, though Holse hadn’t understood much.
Holse had been told Ferbin would take time to repair. Still sitting on the platform that had borne them earlier, he’d been shown through the watery environment to a nearby room from which all the water drained away while fresh air took its place. The Oct he’d been talking to had stayed with him, its body covered in a sort of barely visible suit of moisture. Another set of dry rooms had opened up which seemed to have been designed for human habitation.
The Oct had said he could live here for the few days Ferbin would take to repair, then left him alone.
He’d walked over to the set of round, man-high windows and looked out over the land of the Sarl as he’d never seen it before, from nearly fourteen hundred kilometres above the surface, through the vacuum which existed above the atmosphere that covered the land like a warm blanket.
“What a sight, sir.” Holse appeared lost for a moment, then shook his head.
“And how came we to be here, on the Fourth?” Ferbin asked.
“The Oct only control the D’nengoal Tower up to this level, as far as I can understand the matter, sir. They seemed reluctant to admit this, as though it was the cause for some embarrassment, which it may well indeed be.”
“Oh,” Ferbin said. He hadn’t known that the Conducer peoples ever controlled only part of a Tower; he’d just assumed it was all or nothing, from Core to Surface.
“And on account of the fact that beyond the Ninth one is in the realm of the Oversquare, transference from one Tower to another is not possible.”
“Over . . . what?”
“This has all been explained to me by the Oct I was talking to on the screen while being bled upon by your good self, and subsequently and at some length in my quarters near your place of treatment, sir.”
“Really. Then kindly explain it to me.”
“It’s all to do with the distances apart that the Towers are, sir. Below and up to the level of the Ninth, their Filigree connects, and the Filigree is of sufficient hollowness for scendships – which is the proper term for the spherical room which transported us—”
“I know what a scendship is, Holse.”
“Well, they can switch from one Tower to another through their connectings in amongst the Filigree. But above the Ninth the Filigree doesn’t connect, so to get from one Tower to another one has to travel between them, through whatever exists on the relevant level.”
Ferbin’s understanding of such matters was, like his understanding of most things, vague. Again, it would have been much less so if he’d ever paid any attention to the relevant lessons from his tutors. The Towers supported the ceiling over each level through a great fluted outbranching of this stuff called Filigree, whose greater members were as hollow as the Towers themselves. Given that the same number of Towers supported each level, whether it was the one closest to the Core or that supporting the Surface, the Towers would be at a gr
“The whole of the Fourth,” Holse said, “is home to these Cumuloform, which are clouds, but clouds which are in some sense intelligent in that mysterious and not especially useful way so many alien peoples and things tend to be, sir. They float over oceans full of fishes and sea monsters and such. Or rather over one big ocean, which fills the whole of the bottom part of the level the way land does on our own dear Eighth. Anyway, they’re seemingly happy to transport folk between Towers when the Oct ask them to. Oh, and I should say, welcome to Expanded Version Five; Zourd,” Holse said, looking up and around at the nebulous mass of cloud extending around and far above them. “For that is what this one is called.”
“Indeed,” Ferbin said.
“Good-day.” The voice sounded like a whole chorus of whispered echoes and seemed to issue from every part of the bubble-wall around them.
“And, ah, and to you, good, ah, Cumuloform,” Ferbin said out loud, looking up at the cloud above. He continued to gaze expectantly upwards for a few more moments, then looked back at Holse, who shrugged.
“It is not what you’d call talkative, sir.”
“Hmm. Anyway,” Ferbin said, sitting up and staring at Holse, “why do the Oct only control the D’nengoal up to the Fourth?”
“Because, sir, the Aultridia” – Holse averted his head to spit on the semi-transparent floor – “control the upper levels.”
“Oh my God!”
“WorldGod be preserved indeed, sir.”
“What? You mean they control the upper levels of all Towers?”
“No, sir.”
“But wasn’t the D’nengoal always an Oct Tower?”
“It was, sir. Until recently. This seems to be the principal cause of the embarrassment felt by the Oct, sir. Part of their Tower has been taken over from them.”