Matter by Iain M. Banks
Holse frowned. “What sort of processing?”
“Identity establishment, in-world alien behaviour legal agreement-making, knowledge-sharing—”
“What does that mean? Knowledge-sharing?” Holse had once helped a town constable with his enquiries regarding the theft of some tableware from the local County House; it had been a considerably rougher and more painful experience than the phrase Helping With Enquiries implied. He was worried that “knowledge-sharing” might be a similar lie dressed up pretty.
“Any data held is requested to be shared with the knowledge reservoirs of the Nestworld,” Nuthe 3887b said, “on a philanthropic or charitable basis, as a rule.”
Holse still wasn’t happy. “Does this process hurt?” he asked.
“Of course not!” the machine said, sounding shocked.
Holse nodded. “Carry on.”
“The 512th Degree FifthStrand Facility is a Culture-sponsored Facility,” the machine told them. Ferbin and Holse both sat back and exchanged looks.
“I was coming to that!” Hippinse exclaimed in a sudden release of pent-up exasperation, waving his arms about.
They transferred to the Facility in a fat little ship which swallowed the car they were riding in whole. The ship lurched and they were away.
A screen showed them the view ahead for the duration of the twenty-minute journey; Hippinse chattered continually, pointing out sights, especially famous or well-executed patterns of cables or designs engraved on the cables, noteworthy spacecraft arriving and departing, stellar-atmospheric effects and a few of the favela structures which were not officially part of the world at all but which had been constructed within Syaungun’s surrounding network of cylinders and inside the partial protection, both physical and symbolic, afforded by the lattice of mighty cylinders and their accompanying wrap of gases.
The 512th Degree FifthStrand was a kind of fully enclosed mini-Orbital, fashioned to look as much like the Nestworld itself as possible. It was only eight hundred kilometres across and – until you were right up at it – it looked quite insignificant within the loops and swirls of the giant world’s main cylinders; just a tiny finger-ring lost amongst the openwork vastness of the braided super-cables submerged in their accidental haze of found atmosphere.
Close up, the Facility looked a little like a pushbike wheel. They docked at the hub. Nuthe 3887b stayed aboard; it wished them well. Hippinse’s long blond hair floated about his head like a curly nebula and he pulled it back and bunned it with a little hair-net. Their car was released from the stubby ship and floated into and down a curved, hollow spoke like a thin, twisted Tower.
“Keen on being able to see through things, aren’t they?” Holse said, staring down through the clear floor of the car, the transparent side of the hollow spoke and the seemingly non-existent roof of the miniature habitat below.
“The Morthanveld have this thing about clarity,” Hippinse told them. “The Culture wouldn’t think of being so rude as to fashion their own places any differently.” He snorted, shook his head.
Inside, the Facility was a little ribbon-world of its own, a rotating loop of landscape dotted with parkland, rivers, lakes and small hills, the air above filled with delicate-looking flying machines. Ferbin and Holse both felt the gravity building up as they descended.
Halfway down, approaching a conglomeration of what looked like huge half-silvered glass beads stuck on to the spoke like some aquatic accretion, the car began to slow. It fell out of the hazy sunshine into darkness and drew smoothly to a stop deep inside the cluster of silvery globes.
“Gentlemen!” Hippinse announced, clapping his chubby hands together. “Our destination!”
They entered the gently lit, pleasantly perfumed interior opening before them and walked along a curved, broadening corridor – the gravity was a little more than they were used to, but entirely tolerable – to an open space dominated by enormous rocks, small streams and broad pools, all overseen by a host of giant yellow-green and blue-brown plants joined together by nets of foliage. Silvery birds flitted silently across the scene. Overhead, the twisted lattice of the Nestworld revolved with a silent, steady, monumental grace.
Humans of a variety of body-types and skin colours were scattered amongst the plants, streams and pools. One or two glanced casually over in their direction, then away again. A few were entirely naked; a lot were mostly so. They appeared, to a man and woman, to be in excellent physical condition – even the more alien-looking ones somehow gave off an impression of glossy health – and so relaxed in their demeanour that the sight of their nudity wasn’t quite as shocking to the two Sarl men as they might have expected. Still, Ferbin and Holse glanced at each other. Holse shrugged. A man and a woman, each wearing only jewellery, walked past them, smiling.
Ferbin glanced at Holse again and cleared his throat. “Would appear to be permitted,” he said.
“So long as it’s not compulsory, sir,” Holse replied.
A small machine shaped like a sort of squared-off lozenge floated up to them. It said, again in perfect Sarl, “Prince Ferbin, Choubris Holse, LP Hippinse; welcome.”
They said their various hellos.
A woman – compactly elegant, dark-haired, clad in a long, plain blue shift that left only her arms and head exposed – was walking towards them. Ferbin felt himself frown. Was it really her? Older, so different . . .
She walked right up to him. The others around him were silent, even Hippinse, as though they knew something he didn’t. The woman nodded once and smiled, in a guarded but not unfriendly way.
He realised it really was Djan Seriy an instant before she opened her mouth to speak.
22. The Falls
This is currently our most impressive sight,” Jerfin Poatas said, waving his stick at the bizarre building looming out of the dim bronze mists. The fellow had to raise his voice to be heard above the thunderous cacophony of the Falls, though he did so with a kind of ease that implied he didn’t even know he did it himself, Oramen thought.
The Fountain Building was indeed impressive. They were approaching it in a little covered carriage rattling along one of the many light railways which threaded their precarious and often dangerous ways across the islets, sandbars, parts of fallen buildings and anchored pylons set into the foaming waters themselves. The roof and side of the rail car were made from salvage gleaned from the unnamed city; a substance like glass, but lighter, flexible, far more clear than any glass Oramen had ever seen outside of a telescope or microscope, and without flaws. He drew one fingertip down the interior surface of the material. It did not even feel cold like glass. He put his glove back on.
The weather was chilly. In the sky, far to facing, almost directly down the gorge of the Sulpitine after the river had tumbled away from the Falls, the Rollstars Clissens and Natherley had dropped to the horizon – Clissens seeming to graze it, Natherley already half-hidden by it – and only the fading Rollstar Kiesestraal was left to shed any new light on the Hyeng-zhar, rising from the direction Clissens and Natherley were setting.
Kiesestraal shed a weak, watery-looking blue-white light, but provided almost no warmth. Rollstars had a life of less than half a billion years and Kiesestraal’s was almost over: nearly burned out, it probably had only a few thousand years until extinguishment altogether, whereupon it would drop, falling from the ceiling fourteen hundred kilometres above to come crashing down through the atmosphere – producing one last, brief, awful burst of light and heat – to smack on to the surface of the Ninth somewhere along its course, and, if the star sages and catastrophists, astrologers and scientists had been mistaken in their calculations, or if their warnings went unheeded, cause utter catastrophe where it fell, potentially killing millions.
Even with nobody present directly underneath, the fall of a dead star, especially on to a level featuring a majority of solid ground, was an apocalyptic event, pulverising earth and rock to dust and fire, sending projectiles the size of mountains soaring like shrapnel all ab
Thankfully, such catastrophes were rare; the last one suffered by Sursamen had been decieons ago. They were also, apparently, part of the natural life of a modified Shellworld. So the Oct and Aultridia and other Shellworld Conducer species claimed. All such destruction led to forms of creation, they assured, producing new rocks, landscapes and minerals. And stars could be replaced, new ones emplaced and kindled, even though such technology was seemingly beyond species like the Oct and Aultridia, who relied on the good graces of the Optimae for these actions.
This fate awaited Kiesestraal and whatever part of the Ninth it fell upon; for now though, as if it was a great wave drawing the waters back before charging furiously back in, the star gave out a thin, attenuated seep of light, and over the whole course of the Sulpitine and well beyond, including the great inland seas at both ends of the river, a partial winter was making itself felt, first the air cooling and then the land and waters too as they radiated their heat away into the encroaching darkness. Soon the Sulpitine would start to freeze over and even the vast unending chaos of the Falls would be stilled. It seemed impossible, unbelievable, Oramen thought, looking about at the sudden, sporadic visions of madly dancing waters and waves which the eccentricities of Falls-created wind and pummelling walls of spray afforded, and yet it had happened in centuries past and would surely happen again.
The rail car was slowing. It was racketing along a raised section of narrow, uneven-looking track held above a shallow sandbar by tall pylons. The sandbar was surrounded by sweeps and curves of dashing, booming waters which looked like they could change course at any moment and wash the sands and pylons away. A gale seemed to shake the little rail car, briefly pulling away some of the surrounding mist and spray.
The Fountain Building soared above them now, bursting with curved fountains of water that turned to spray and rain and came dropping all around in an unceasing torrent that was starting to drum and beat upon the roof of the rail car, shaking it bodily. A chill wind moaned through spaces in the rail car’s body and Oramen felt the cold draught on his face. He wondered if the barrages and veils of water hitting the car would turn to snow as the winter came on but before the whole Falls froze. He tried to imagine this. How magnificent it would look!
These partial winters were almost unknown on the Eighth. On that level, the ceiling above was nearly completely smooth, so that a star, whether a Fixstar or a Rollstar, shed its light freely, casting its rays in every direction save where the horizon itself intervened. Here on the Ninth, for reasons known only to the Veil themselves and implied by the equations of whatever fluid physical figurings they employed, the ceiling – and, in places, the floor too – was much interrupted by the great vanes, blades and channels required to make the Shellworlds work according to their mysterious original purpose.
These features generally extended kilometres or tens of kilometres from the floor or ceiling and frequently right across the horizon; some ceiling strakes were known to stretch halfway round the world itself,
The result was that the light of a star was often much more localised here than it was on the Eighth, so that bright sunshine shone along one line of landscape while just to the side the rest would be held in deep shade, receiving only the light reflected from the general spread of the shining sky itself. Some benighted lands, usually those caught between tall surface vanes, received no direct sunlight whatever, at any time, and were truly barren.
The little rail car chuffed and steamed its way to a halt, shuddering to a stop in a screech of brakes some few metres shy of a set of damaged-looking buffers, the water crashing and bursting across the car’s roof and sides, rocking it like a demented cradle. Steam rolled up from its wheels.
Oramen looked down. They were poised above the side of a great, tipped, fallen building made of, or at least clad in, material much like that which provided the rail car with its sides and roof. The rail tracks rested on trestles like wedges attached to the side of the building itself, making it feel more secure than the flimsy-looking pylons they had recently traversed.
Metres beyond the buffers, the edge of the building fell away sharply to reveal – between this upended edifice and the still upright Fountain Building – a cauldron of wildly swirling mist and spray fifty metres or more deep, at the base of which – on the rare occasions when the clouds of vapour were torn apart sufficiently for such a view to be opened – giant surging waves of brown-tinged foam could briefly be glimpsed.
A large platform of wood and metal extended from the rail tracks on the down-slope side, awash with the near-solid torrents of water falling from the Fountain Building. One or two bits of machinery lay scattered about the platform’s surface, though it was hard to imagine how anyone could work on the platform in this stunning, down-crashing deluge. Parts of the platform’s edges seemed to have broken off, presumably washed away by the sheer weight of the falling water.
“This was a staging platform for workings within the building beneath us,” Poatas said, “until whatever cave-in or tunnel collapse upstream caused the building before us to become the Fountain Building.”
Poatas sat alongside Oramen behind the rail car’s driver. The seats behind were taken up by Droffo, Oramen’s equerry, and his servant, Neguste Puibive – Oramen could feel the fellow’s bony knees pressing into his back through the seat’s thin back whenever Neguste shifted his long legs. In the last row were the knights Vollird and Baerth. They were his personal guard, specifically chosen by tyl Loesp and most highly recommended and able, he’d been told, but he’d found them somewhat prone to surliness and their presence vaguely offputting. He’d rather have left them behind – he found excuses to whenever he could – but there had been space in the rail car and Poatas had talked darkly of needing all the weight in the little conveyance they could muster to help keep it anchored to the tracks.
“The platform looks in some danger of being washed away,” Oramen shouted, perhaps a little too loudly, to Poatas.
“No doubt it is,” the small, hunched man conceded. “But this will not happen quite yet, one hopes. For now, it provides the best view of the Fountain Building.” He jabbed his stick up at the tall, improbably spray-plumed structure.
“Which is quite a sight,” Oramen conceded, nodding. He gazed up at it in the bronze wash of sunset-gloom. Folds and waves of water came crashing down on the rail car’s roof, a particularly heavy clump slamming off the near invisible material protecting them and causing the whole car to quiver, making it seem that it was about to be thrown off the tracks beneath and hurled across the water-drenched surface of the railing-less platform, doubtless to be dashed to smithereens somewhere far below.
“Three balls of God!” Neguste Puibive blurted. “Sorry, sir,” he muttered.
Oramen smiled and held up one hand, forgiving. Another wave of solid water hit them, making something on one lower side of the seats creak.
“Chire,” Poatas said, tapping the driver on the shoulder with the end of his stick. “I think we might reverse a way.”
Oramen held out one hand. “I thought I might try standing outside for a bit,” he said to Poatas.
Poatas’ eyes went round. “And try is all you’d do, sir. You’d be battered down and swept away before you drew a single breath.”
“And, sir, you’d get awfu
Oramen smiled and looked out at the maelstrom of crashing water and swirling wind. “Well, it would only be for a moment or two, just to experience something of that fabulous power, that mighty energy.” He shivered with the anticipation of it.
“By that logic, sir,” Droffo said, sitting forward to talk loudly into Oramen’s ear, “one might experience something of the power and energy of a piece of heavy artillery by positioning one’s head over the barrel just as the firing lanyard’s pulled; however, I’d venture to suggest the resulting sensation would not remain long in one’s brain.”
Oramen grinned, looking round at Droffo and then back at Poatas. “My father warned all his children there would be times when even kings must allow themselves overruled. I suppose I must prepare for such moments. I accept the judgement of my parliament here gathered.” He waved one flat hand from Poatas to the driver, who was looking round at them. “Chire – was that your name?”
“Indeed, sir.”
“Please do as Mr Poatas says, and let’s retreat somewhat.”
Chire glanced at Poatas, who nodded. The train clanked gears and then went, huffing, slowly backwards in clouds of steam and a smell of hot oil.
Droffo turned round to Vollird and Baerth. “You are well, gentlemen?”
“Never better, Droffo,” Vollird replied. Baerth just grunted.
“You seem so quiet,” Droffo said. “Not sickened by the rocking, are we?”
“It takes rather more,” Vollird told him with an insincere smile. “Though I can sicken well enough with sufficient provocation.”
“Of that I’m sure,” Droffo said, turning away from them again.
“The Falls are, what? Ten thousand strides across?” Oramen asked Poatas as they withdrew.
Poatas nodded. “Bank to bank, straight across; one has to add another two thousand if one follows the curve of the drop-off.”