Matter by Iain M. Banks
“You’ll have men,” tyl Loesp told him. “Half an army. My army. And others. Some little more than slaves, but they’ll work to keep their bellies full.”
The clouds throughout the vast complexity confronting them were rolling away from the new wind, lifting and dissipating at once.
“Slaves do not make the best workers. And who will command this army, this army which will like as not expect to go home to their loved ones now they think their job’s done here? You? You return to the Eighth, do you not?”
“The armies are well used to foreign travel and distant billets; however, I shall – in prudent portions, leaving nowhere unmanned – so allowance them with loot and easy return they’ll either beg to see the Ninth again or be each one a most zealous recruiting sergeant for their younger brothers. For myself, I return to Pourl only briefly. I intend to spend half each year or more in Rasselle.”
“It is the traditional seat of power, and of infinite elegance compared to our poor, ever-onward-tramping township here, but whether by train or caude it is two days away. More in bad weather.”
“Well, we shall have the telegraph line soon, and while I am not present you have my authority here, Poatas. I offer you complete power over the entire Falls, in my name.” Tyl Loesp waved one hand dismissively. “In bookish legality it may be in the name of the Prince Regent, but he is still little more than a boy. For the moment – and it may, in time, seem a long moment – his future power is mine now, entirely. You understand me?”
Poatas smiled parsimoniously. “My whole life and every work has taught me there is a natural order to things, a rightful stratification of authority and might. I work with it, sir, never seek to overthrow it.”
“Good,” tyl Loesp said. “That is as well. I have in addition thought to provide you with a titular head of excavations, someone I’d rather have quite near to me but not at my side, when I’m in Rasselle. Indeed, their presence here might aid the recruitment of many a Sarl.”
“But they would be above me?”
“In theory. Not in effect. I emphasise: their seniority to yourself will be most strictly honorary.”
“And who would this person be?” Poatas asked.
“Why, the very one we just talked of. My charge, the Prince Regent, Oramen.”
“Is that wise? You say he’s a boy. The Falls can be a pestilential place, and the Settlement a lawless, dangerous one, especially with the brethren gone.”
Tyl Loesp shrugged. “We must pray the WorldGod keeps him safe. And I have in mind a couple of knights I intend to make the essence of his personal guard. They will take all care of him.”
Poatas thought for a moment, nodding, and wiped a little moisture from the stick he leant on. “Will he come?” he asked doubtfully, looking out towards the great, gradually revealing spaces of the Hyeng-zhar’s awesomely complicated, twenty-kilometre-wide gorge of recession.
Tyl Loesp looked out to the gorge complex, and smiled. He had never been here until their armies had invaded and – having heard so much about its peerless beauty and fabulous, humbling grandeur from so many people – had been determined not to be impressed when he did finally see the place. The Hyeng-zhar, however, seemed to have had other ideas. He had indeed been stunned, awestruck, rendered speechless.
He had seen it from various different angles over the past week or so, including from the air, on a lyge (though only from on high, and only in the company of experienced Falls-fliers, and still he could entirely understand why it was such a dangerous place to fly; the urge to explore, to descend and see better was almost irresistible, and knowing that so many people had died doing just that, caught in the tremendous rolling currents of air and vapour issuing from the Falls, hauling them helplessly down to their deaths, seemed like an irrelevance).
Poatas himself expressed some astonishment at the Falls’ latest show. Truly, they had never been more spectacular, certainly not in his life, and, from all that he could gather from the records, at no point in the past either.
A plateau – perhaps, originally, some sort of vast, high plaza in the Nameless City, kilometres across – was being slowly revealed by the furiously tumbling waters as they exposed what was – by the general agreement of most experts and scholars – the very centre of the buried city. The Falls, in their centre section, four or five kilometres across, were in two stages now; the first drop was of a hundred and twenty metres or so, bringing the waters crashing and foaming and bursting down across the newly revealed plateau and surging among the maze of buildings protruding from that vast flat surface.
Holes in the plateau – many small, several a hundred metres across or more – drained to the darkened level beneath, dropping the mass of water to the gorge floor through a tortuous complexity of bizarrely shaped buildings, ramps and roadways, some intact, some canted over, some undercut, some altogether ruptured and displaced, fallen down and swept away to lie jammed and caught against still greater structures and the shadowy bases of the mass of buildings towering above.
By now the mists had cleared away from nearly half the Falls, revealing the site’s latest wonder; the Fountain Building. It was a great gorge-base-level tower by the side of the new plateau. It was still perfectly upright, appeared to be made entirely from glass, was a hundred and fifty metres tall and shaped like a kind of upwardly stretched sphere. Some chance configuration of the tunnels and hidden spaces of the Falls upstream had contrived to send water up into it from underneath, and at such an extremity of pressure that it came surging out in great muddily white fans and jets from all its spiralled levels of windows, bursting with undiminished force even from its very summit, showering the smaller buildings, tubes, ramps and lower water courses all around it with an incessant, battering rain.
“Well, sir?” Poatas demanded. “Will he? This boy-prince of yours; will he come?”
Tyl Loesp had sent the command to Aclyn’s husband just two days earlier, informing the fellow that he was to be the new mayor of the city of Rasselle; this would be a permanent position and he must bring his entire household with him from far Kheretesuhr with the utmost dispatch, on pain of losing both this once-in-a-lifetime promotion, and the regent’s regard.
“Oh, I think he will,” tyl Loesp said, with a small smile.
18. The Current Emergency
Bilpier, fourth of the Heisp Nariscene colony system, is small, solid, cold-cored, habiformed to Nariscene specifications within the last centieon, dynamically O2 atmosphered, one hundred per cent Nariscene and seventy-four per cent surface bubble-hived.”
Holse and Ferbin were lounging in the sitting area of their generously proportioned suite of cabins within The Hundredth Idiot, being kept fed and watered by a variety of subservient machines and entertained by images on wall screens. They knew they were going to Bilpier and the hive city of Ischuer and the journey would take ten days, though that was all they’d been told since Director General Shoum had secured their passage on a ship leaving only a day after she and Ferbin had spoken.
Ferbin had thought to ask the ship for more information. “Hmm,” he said, little the wiser. “I seek a man called Xide Hyrlis,” he continued. “Do you know if he is there, in this Bilpier place?”
“I do not,” The Hundredth Idiot replied. “It is doubtful that he is. You have preferential clearance to be conveyed to this person as requested, with emphasis, by the Morthanveld Tertiary Hulian Spine Director General. I can now confirm you are booked for onward travel from Ischuer, Bilpier, aboard the Morthanveld vessel ‘Fasilyce, Upon Waking’, a Cat.5 SwellHull. Its destination is not a matter of public record.”
Ferbin and Holse exchanged looks. This was news. “You have no idea how long our journey will be after we leave Bilpier?” Ferbin asked.
“Given you travel aboard a Cat.5 SwellHull, your destination is unlikely to be within the Heisp system,” the ship replied. “The Cat.5 SwellHull is a long-range interstellar class.”
Ferbin nodded thoughtfully. “Oh!” he said, as thoug
“That is within a mandated Nariscene Protectorate,” the ship interrupted smoothly, “and so subject to special clearance provisions regarding direct contact between individuals. Specific instructions forming part of your associated travel particulars mean that I may not even begin the relevant message process. I am sorry.”
Ferbin sighed. He went back to watching screenage of bat-like aliens hunting flying, twisty, gossamery things in a Towerless place of soaring yellow-pink canyons beneath pastel clouds.
“Worth a try, sir,” Holse told him, then returned to his own screen, which showed a sort of map-with-depth called a hologram depicting the courses of Nariscene and associated spaceships.
The galaxy was linked like chain mail, he thought. It was all loops and circles and long, joined-up threads and looked like that old-fashioned stuff some old knights from the deepest, darkest shires and valleys still wore when they ventured to court, even if they rarely polished it in case it got worn away.
The Hundredth Idiot settled smoothly into a valley between two huge dark bubbles kilometres across in a landscape that was nothing but more of the same; the foam of enormous blisters covered three-quarters of Bilpier’s surface, enclosing continents, smothering oceans, arcing over mountain ranges and leaving only so much of the planet’s original swamps and jungles exposed as seemed fit to the Nariscene aesthetic sense.
Ferbin and Holse were shown some impressive domes covering bulbously orange things that seemed to be half trees and half buildings. They met a Nariscene Zamerin and had to listen to some Nariscenic music for nearly an hour.
Within a local day they were standing on some worryingly open webbing high over more giant orange building-trees, at the lofty seam between two vast bubbles, in the half-kilometre-long shadow of a sleekly bulbous spaceship nestling in the open air of the valley formed by the two giant blisters.
They were greeted by a Morthanveld who introduced herself as Liaison Officer Chilgitheri.
They were carried for nearly thirty days on the “Fasilyce, Upon Waking”. It was a less pleasant journey than that on the Nariscene ship; they had to don suits to investigate the vast majority of the mostly water-filled ship, their quarters were smaller and, worst of all, the ship kept increasing its gravity field, to prepare them for wherever it was they were going. The Morthanveld, being aquatic, seemed rather to scorn gravity, but were gradually ramping up the apparent effect of that force felt on the ship to acclimatise their human guests. They were the only non-Morthanveld aboard and, as Holse said, they should have felt flattered to be so indulged, but it was hard to feel much gratitude when your feet and back and almost everything else ached so much.
The “Fasilyce, Upon Waking” carried a dozen smaller ships, arranged like rotund seeds around its waist and rear. One of these was the Cat.3 SlimHull “Now, Turning to Reason, & its Just Sweetness”; it was this craft that took Ferbin and Holse on the final leg of their journey. They shared two smallish cabins and would have spent almost all their time lying down if Chilgitheri hadn’t chivied them into standing up and walking around and even doing a few undemanding exercises in the ship’s impersonation of gravity, which was still slowly increasing.
“Not increasing slowly enough,” Holse observed, groaning.
The “Now, Turning to Reason, & its Just Sweetness” bellied in towards a fractured, broken land of rock and cinder. This, Liaison Officer Chilgitheri informed them, was what was left of the country of Prille, on the continent of Sketevi, on the planet Bulthmaas, in the Chyme system.
As the ship closed with this wasteland of grey and brown, the final increment of gravity that had settled like lead epaulets on the two Sarl men lifted; the Morthanveld ships had deliberately made them experience a gravity field slightly greater than the one they would be stepping out into so that the real thing wouldn’t feel quite so bad.
“A mercy so small as to be microscopic,” Holse muttered.
“Better than nothing,” Chilgitheri informed them. “Count your blessings, gentlemen. Come on.”
They found themselves on the flat, fused base of a great fresh-looking crater. Outside the ship’s rotated lower access bulge the air smelled of burning. A cold, keen wind swirled in the depression’s circular base, raising pillars and veils of ash and dust. The atmosphere caught at their throats and the air was shaken by what sounded like continual thunder from far away.
A small, bulbous thing like a carriage compartment made mostly of glass had ridden the access bulge with them as it had cycled round to present them to this ghastly place. Ferbin had wondered if this thing was some sort of guarding device. Thankfully, it was merely their means of conveyance; they would not have to walk any distance in this awful, crushing grip.
“Smell that air,” Chilgitheri told them as they settled into the welcoming couches of the transparent device. It closed its doors and the sounds from outside ceased. “You’ll smell nothing unfiltered for a while, but that is the authentic scent of Bulthmaas.”
“It stinks,” Holse said.
“Yes. There may still be a few of the later wide-spectrum pathogens around, but they ought not to affect you.”
Ferbin and Holse looked at each other. Neither had any idea what pathogens were, but they didn’t like the sound of them.
The little bubble vehicle lifted silently and they crossed the glassy surface of the crater to a construction made of thick metal plates jutting out from the jumbled debris of the lower crater wall like some monstrous iron flower growing from that riven, death-grey geography. A set of ponderously massive doors swung open and the dark tunnels swallowed them.
They saw war machines waiting darkly in alcoves, lines of dim lights stretching away down shadowy side-tunnels and, ahead, the first in a succession of enormous metal shutters which opened before them and closed behind. A few times they saw pale creatures which looked vaguely like men, but which were too small, squat and stunted to be human as they understood the term. They passed one Nariscene, floating in a complex metallic harness, bristling with extra appendages that might have been weapons, then they began descending a spiralled ramp like a hollow spring screwing its way into the bowels of the world.
They halted eventually in a large gloomy chamber cross-braced with thick struts. It was almost filled with parked vehicles; squashed, gnarled, misshapen-looking things. Their little made-of-near-nothing car settled amongst them like a downy seed blown amongst lumps of clinker.
“Time to use those legs!” Chilgitheri cried cheerfully. The car’s doors swung open. The two men unfolded themselves from the transparent conveyance, Holse hoisted the two small bags of clothing they had with them and groaned as they made their way to another opening door and up – up! – a short, narrow ramp to a smaller dimly lit chamber where the air smelled stale, yet with a medicinal tang. The ceiling was so low they had to walk and stand slightly stooped, which made the effects of the high gravity even worse. Holse dumped both bags on the floor at his feet.
One of the short, squat men sat in a chair behind a metal desk, dressed in a dark grey uniform. A Nariscene in one of the complicated-looking harnesses floated off to one side, behind and above the man’s shoulder, seemingly regarding them.
The squashed excuse for a human creature made a series of noises. “You are welcome,” the Nariscene translated.
“My responsibility and that of the Morthanveld ends here,” Chilgitheri told the two Sarl men. “You are now in Nariscene jurisdiction and that of their client species here, the Xolpe. Good luck to you. Take care. Goodbye.”
Ferbin and Holse both bade her well. The Morthanveld turned and floated away down the narrow ramp.
Ferbin looked round for a seat, but the only one in the chamber was occupied by the man behind the metal desk. Some papers issued from a slot in it. The man pulled them out, checked and folded them, bashed them with bits of metal and then pushed them a
Their papers were covered in tiny alien symbols. The only thing either man could recognise was a small monochrome representation of their own face. More sounds from the squashed little man. “You will wait,” the Nariscene told them. “Here. This way to wait. Follow me.”
More cramped corridors took them to a small, dimly lit room with four bunk beds and nothing else. The Nariscene closed the door, which made loud locking noises. Holse checked; it was locked. A smaller door at the other end of the cell gave access to a tiny toilet compartment. They took the two lower bunks and lay there, breathing hard, grateful to have the weight off their legs and backs. They had to lie folded; the bunk beds were too short for them to stretch out. A grey-blue suit of clothes hung on the end of each bunk. These were their uniforms, the Nariscene had told them. They had to be worn at all times.
“What sort of place is this, sir?”
“A terrible one, Holse.”
“I’d formed that impression myself, sir.”
“Try to sleep, Holse. It’s all we can do.”
“It may be our only escape from this shit-hole,” Holse said, and turned his face to the wall.