Matter

10. A Certain Lack

She had been a man for a year.

That had been different. Everything had been different. She had learned so much: about herself, about people, about civilisations.

Time: she came to think in Standard years, eventually. To her, at first, they were about one and a half short-years or very roughly half a long-year.

Gravity: she felt intolerably heavy and worryingly fragile at once. A treatment she had already agreed to started to thicken her bones and reduce her height before she left the Eighth, but even so, for the time she was on the ship that took her from the Surface and during the first fifty days or so after her arrival, she towered over most people and felt oddly delicate. Allegedly, the new clothes she had chosen had been reinforced to save her from breaking any bones if she fell badly in the stronger gravity. She had assumed this was a lie to make her feel less frightened, and just took care instead.

Only the measures of human-scale length were roughly as she knew them; strides were near enough metres, and she already thought in kilometres, even if she’d grown up with ten raised to the power of three rather than two to the power of ten.

But that was just the start of it.

For the first couple of years after arriving in the Culture she had been simply as she was, save for that amendment of thickening and shortening. Meanwhile she got to know the Culture and it got to know her. She learned a lot, about everything. The drone Turminder Xuss had accompanied her from the day she’d stepped from the ship she’d arrived on, the space vessel called Lightly Seared on the Reality Grill (she found their ships’ names absurd, childish and ridiculous at first, then got used to them, then thought she kind of understood them, then realised there was no understanding the Mind of a ship, and went back to finding them annoying). The drone answered any questions she had and sometimes talked on her behalf.

Those first three years had been spent on the Orbital Gadampth, mostly on the part called Lesuus, in a sort of extended, teased-out city built on a group of islands scattered across a wide bay on the edge of a small inland sea. The city was named Klusse, and it had some similarities to an ordinary city, despite being much cleaner and lacking any curtain walls or other defensive components that she could discern. Mostly, though, it seemed to be a sort of vast Scholastery.

It took her some time to work out why, as she went walking about the boulevards, terraces, promenades and piazzas of the place, she had felt — not initially, but gradually, just when she ought to have felt herself getting used to the place — an odd mixture of comfort and disturbance at the same time. Eventually she realised it was because in all the faces that she saw there, not one held a disfiguring tumour or had been eaten half away by disease. She had yet to see even a mildly disfiguring skin condition or a lazy eye. Similarly, in all the bodies she moved among, not one was limping or supporting itself on a crutch or trolley, or went hobbling past on a club foot. And not a single madman, not one poor defective standing flecked screaming on a street corner howling at the stars.

She hadn’t appreciated this at first because at the time she was still being amazed at the sheer bewildering physical variation of the people around her, but once she had become used to that, she started to notice that although there was near infinite physical variety here, there was no deformity, and while there was prodigious eccentricity, no dementia. There were more facial, bodily and personality types than she could have imagined, but they were all the product of health and choice, not disease and fate. Everyone was, or could be if they so desired, beautiful in both form and character.

Later she would find that, as this was the Culture after all, of course there were people who embraced ugliness and even the appearance of deformity or mutilation just to be different or to express something inside that they felt ought to be broadcast to their peers; however — once she had passed over her initial sense of irritation and exasperation at such people (did they not, even if unknowingly, mock those truly afflicted, those with no choice in how hideous they looked?) — she realised that even that deliberate adoption of unsightliness displayed a kind of societal confidence, a thumbing of the collective nose at the workings of crude providence and the ancient tyranny, now itself long overthrown, of genetic aberration, gross injury and transmissible pestilence.

A star named Aoud shone down upon the ten-million-kilometre bracelet of the Orbital. This sun was what everybody else seemed to regard as a real star; one which had been naturally formed. To her it sounded incredibly old and absurdly, almost wastefully enormous.

There, in Klusse, she learned about the history of the Culture and the story of the galaxy itself. She learned about the other civilisations that she had been taught as a child were called the Optimae. They generally referred to themselves as the Involveds or the In-Play, though the terms were loose and there was no exact equivalent of the Sarl word Optimae, with its implication of supremacy. “High-level Involved” was probably as close as you could get.

She also learned pretty much all there was to be learned about her own people, the Sarl: their long-ago evolution on a faraway planet of the same name, their involvement in a terrible war, their condemnation, exile and displacement (partly for their own good, partly for that of the peoples they had shared that original planet with; the consensus was that they would either kill everybody else or be killed) and their eventual sanctuary/internment in Sursamen under the auspices of the Galactic Council, the Morthanveld and Nariscene. This version felt like the truth, she thought; close enough to the myths and legends of her own people, but less self-serving, less dramatically glorious, more equivocal in its moral implications.

This area of study turned up surprising details. The fact that the Deldeyn and the Sarl were the same people, for example; the Deldeyn were a sub-group of the main population who had been transported to the level below by the Oct over a thousand years ago. And the Oct had done this without permission from their Nariscene mentors; that level, while once supporting many peoples, had seen them all evacuated millennia ago and was supposed to have been left empty of intelligent life until further notice. The Oct had been forced to apologise, undertake never to do such a thing again and pay reparations in the form of surrendered influence elsewhere; however, the unauthorised movement of people had finally, reluctantly, been accepted as a fait accompli.

She learned about pan-humanity, about the great diasporic welter of human-like, human-ish and humanoid species scattered throughout so much of the galaxy.

She learned about the present sociopolitical set-up that existed in the galaxy and felt a sort of widespread satisfaction that there was just so much of it, and almost all of it peaceful. There were millions of species, hundreds of different types of species, even casting one’s definition wide, and that was without taking into account civilisations that were composed more of machines than biological beings at all. Ultimately the galaxy, indeed the sum of the universe in its entirety, was mostly nothing; average it all out and it made a pretty good vacuum. But within the foci of matter that were the systems, the stars and planets and habitats — what a cornucopia of life was there!

There were bogglingly large numbers just of these pan-humans (of which, of course, she was one), but they still formed less than a single per cent of all the aggregated life-mass of the greater galaxy. Also, where they did exist, men and women were mostly — most places, most of the time — equals. In the Culture this was even guaranteed by birthright; you could be whatever gender you wished — just by thinking about it! She found this highly satisfactory, and a kind of vindication.

Life buzzed in, fumed about, rattled around and quite thoroughly infested the entire galaxy, and probably — almost certainly — well beyond. The vast ongoingness of it all somehow put all one’s own petty concerns and worries into context, making them seem not irrelevant, but of much less distressing immediacy. Context was indeed all, as her father had always insisted, but the greater context she was learning about acted to shrink the vast-seeming scale of the Eighth Level of Sursamen and all its wars, politics, disputes, struggles, tribulations and vexations until it all looked very far away and trivial indeed.

She learned about Contact, the part of the Culture that went out to discover and interact with other civilisations, especially new and fast-developing ones, and about its slightly scurrilous, tentatively raffish, arguably shadowy division called Special Circumstances. It was some time before she realised that she herself was expected to have at least a chance of becoming part of this prestigious, if not entirely respectable organisation. This was, she gathered, supposed to be a most singular and unusual honour and almost the only worthwhile distinction the Culture had to offer that was not available on demand. However, she was, again, instantly suspicious.

For some time the aspect of Orbital life she marvelled at more than anything else was the geography: mountains, cliffs and gorges, pinnacles, scree and boulder fields. That none of it was truly natural, that it had all been designed and manufactured from debris found in the solar system when the world was made only added to her amazement. She hiked the high mountains and learned to ski. She took part in various sports and discovered she even enjoyed being part of a team. She hadn’t expected that, somehow.

She had made friends and taken lovers, when she had grown to believe that her new, squat self was not hideous. Not all pairings worked, even, as it were, mechanically — there was a wide variety of body shapes. Another treatment she chose monitored her womb, to alert her on the very low off-chance that she mated with somebody her own physical system found sufficiently compatible for her to conceive by. She had wondered if this was not a lie, too, but nothing ever happened.

She played with her own dreams, and took part in shared dreams that were vast games, using nothing more exotic-seeming than special pillows or nightcaps to access these strange sub-realities. She realised that she slept much more than most of her friends, missing out on a potential part of waking life. She asked for another treatment, which solved that problem as though it had never existed; she slept deeply for a few hours each of these clockworkly regular and dependable nights and awoke thoroughly refreshed each morning.

She took part in other semi-hallucinatory experiences that seemed like games but which she knew were also lessons and evaluations, submerging her entirely conscious self into simulations of reality that were sometimes based on real, earlier events and experiences, and sometimes were as entirely deliberately created as the Orbital and its amazingly vertiginous landscape. Some left her troubled to know the terrible things people — pan-humans and beyond, but all people — could do to each other. The implication, though, was that such ghastliness was an affliction, and could be at least partially cured. The Culture represented the hospital, or perhaps a whole caring society, Contact was the physician and SC the anaesthetic and the medicine. Sometimes the scalpel.

Almost the only aspect of her new life that she adapted to without pause for thought was the total absence of money in the Culture. She had been a princess, after all, and so was perfectly used to that.

She watched some of her friends enter states she could not share, and, after great initial wariness, asked for more treatments that caused glands in her body she hadn’t even known she possessed to alter over a few tens of days until she possessed a simple drug-gland suite inside her head and a modest choice of mixtures of trace chemicals she could now choose to release into her bloodstream and brain whenever she wanted.

That had been interesting.

Amongst the Sarl, at least on the Eighth, every drug had at least one unwanted and unpleasant side effect. Here; nothing. You got what you wanted, no more. She remained highly sceptical, unconvinced such light was possible without shade. She no longer needed the drone Turminder Xuss, who went off to tend to others. She used a finger-ring terminal to connect with the dataverse instead.

She began to collect amendments, treatments, as one might accumulate jewellery. She even had a couple of treatments rescinded, just removed from her altogether, simply to make sure that the processes truly were fully reversible. A new tutor, one who was present only rarely but seemed in some sense senior to the others, a bush-like being who had once been a man, called Batra, sounded amused when he/it said she was a suspicious child. Amused and somehow approving. She got the feeling she was supposed to feel flattered, but she’d been more concerned about the mild insult contained in the word “child”.

People shifted, went away, relationships ended. She asked one of her female mentors about how one changed from female to male. Another treatment. Over most of a year she grew slightly, bulked out further, grew hair in strange places, and watched, fascinated, as her genitals went from fissure to spire. She did wake up a couple of nights covered in sweat, appalled at what was happening to her, feeling herself, wondering if this was all some enormously laboured joke and she was being made a freak of deliberately, for sport, but there were always people to talk to who had been through the same experience — both in person and via screens and sims — and no shortage of archived material to explain and reassure.

She kept a couple of intermittent, unbothered lovers even as she changed, then, as a man, took many more, mostly female. It was true: one made a better, more considerate lover when one had once been as one’s partner. He woke up one morning after a strenuous night with a small group of old friends and just-mets, blinking in the sunshine of a brilliant new day, looking out over a broad balcony and a sparkling sea to a great columnar mountain that reminded him of a Tower back home, and woke everybody else up with his laughter.

He was never sure why he decided to change back. For a long time he thought to return to Sursamen as a man, see what they made of him then. Apart from anything else, there had been a couple of ladies at the court he had always been fond of, and now felt something more for. By that point he knew his brother Elime had been killed and he was the eldest child of the King; the next king, indeed, if you looked at it in a certain way. He might return, claim the throne, in time. By then, with further treatments, he might have martial skills and attributes beyond those of any warrior who had ever lived on the Eighth. He’d be unstoppable; he could take the throne if he wanted. That would be hilarious. Oh, the looks on certain faces!

But that would be cruel at best, he thought. At worst, the results might be something between melodrama and the bloodiest of tragedies. Anyway, to be king of the Sarl no longer seemed like the greatest thing a soul might aspire to, not by some long measure.

He changed, became a she again. The lesson regarding being a considerate lover did not change.

She took her Full Name. In her father’s kingdom, she had been called Djan Seriy Hausk’a yun Pourl, yun Dich — this translated as Djan, Prince-Consort Hausk’s daughter of Pourl, of the Eighth.

Here, now that she thought of herself as a Culture citizen — albeit still one that had been born and brought up elsewhere — she took the name Meseriphine-Sursamen/VIIIsa Djan Seriy Anaplian dam Pourl.

Marain, the Culture’s exquisitely formed meta-language, used its Secondary Numbering Series to denote Shellworld levels. The Anaplian part came from her mother’s name: Anaplia. The word Seriy — indicating she had been raised to be fit to be married to a prince — she kept for a laugh. She expressed disappointment that there was no ceremony to mark the taking of one’s Full Name. Her friends and colleagues invented one for her.

She had further treatments, to give her control of many more aspects of her body and mind. Now she would age very slowly, and did not really need to age at all. Now she was proof against any natural disease under this or any other sun, and even losing something as major as a limb would prove only a temporary inconvenience, as a new one would simply grow back. Now she had the full panoply of drug glands, with all the benefits and responsibilities that entailed. Now she gained fully augmented senses — so that, for example, her vision became sharper and brought her information about the infrared and the ultraviolet — now she could sense radio waves, now she was able to interface directly with machines via a thing called a neural lace that had grown about and through her brain like a flimsy, three-dimensional net, now she could switch off pain and fatigue (though her body seemed to scorn them anyway), now her nerves changed to become more like wires, shifting impulses far faster than before, while her bones accreted strands of carbon to make them stronger and her muscles went through chemical and microscopically scaled mechanical changes that made them more effective and more powerful. Every major internal organ grew more efficient, more tolerant, more capable, resilient and adaptable, even as many of them grew smaller.

She became part of Contact and joined the crew of the General Contact Unit Transient Atmospheric Phenomenon. She’d had the luxury of a choice in the matter and had turned down the Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall and the Pure Big Mad Boat Man just because of their ridiculous names. She served with distinction for only five years aboard the GCU before the invitation to join Special Circumstances arrived. A surprisingly short period of additional training ensued; almost all the new skills she would now need were already there, pre-implanted. She was reunited with the drone Turminder Xuss, who had always been intended as her companion. She discovered the old machine came complete with a small squadron of knife, attack and scout missiles and was effectively a little arsenal of wide-spectrum destruction all on its own.

SC added its own final, finessed layers of additional characteristics to her already heady mix of bodily enhancements, empowering her still further: here were fingernails that could lase, to signal, blind or kill, here was a tiny reactor within her skull that, amongst other things, could provide the power to keep her alive and conscious for years without oxygen, here was a whole-body fibre structure welded to her very bones that could sense distortions in the skein of space itself; here was a level of conscious control over her own body and, almost incidentally, over any merely electronic machine within fifty metres which exceeded that of any rider over their mount or any champion swordsman over his blade…

She felt, she realised one day, like a god.

She thought then of Sursamen, and her old self, and knew there was no going back.

She was going back. And she was losing some of those skills and attributes, some of those martial enhancements.

“You’re gelding me,” she said to Jerle Batra.

“I’m sorry. The Morthanveld are very wary of Special Circumstances agents.”

“Oh, really.” She shook her head. “We’re no threat to them.” She looked at the man who looked like a small bush. “Well, we’re not, are we?”

“Of course not. On the contrary.” Batra made a shrugging motion. “It’s a courtesy.”

“It feels like a discourtesy to me.”

“That is unfortunate.”

“We may be overdoing the coddling thing here, you know,” she said.

“All the same.”

They were on the platform Quonber, riding frigid waves of air above a high mountain range; kilometres beneath, a grey-white glacier streaked with lines of shattered rock curved and corrugated its way towards the limits of a tungsten sky.

The coddling Djan Seriy was referring to involved the almost exaggerated respect the Culture as a whole had recently been showing the Morthanveld. The Morthanveld were technologically on a par with the Culture and the two civilisations had co-existed on good terms since they had encountered each other thousands of years earlier, sharing extensive cultural links and co-operating on a variety of projects. They were not exactly allies — the waterworlders had kept scrupulously neutral during the Idiran war, for example — but they were of a mind on most matters.

Djan Seriy’s discomfiture was being caused by the fact that some of the Culture’s more self-congratulatingly clever Minds (not in itself an underpopulated category), patently with far too much time on their platters, had come up with the shiny new theory that the Culture was not just in itself completely spiffing and marvellous and a credit to all concerned, it somehow represented a sort of climactic stage for all civilisations, or at least for all those which chose to avoid heading straight for Sublimation as soon as technologically possible (Sublimation meant your whole civilisation waved farewell to the matter-based universe pretty much altogether, opting for a sort of honorary godhood).

Avoid self-destruction, recognise — and renounce — money for the impoverishing ration system it really was, become a bunch of interfering, do-gooding busybodies, resist the siren call of selfish self-promotion that was Subliming and free your conscious machines to do what they did best — essentially, running everything — and there you were; millennia of smug self-regard stretched before you, no matter what species you had started out from.

So. It was thought, by those Minds that especially concerned themselves with such matters, that the Morthanveld were on the cusp of going Culture; of undergoing a kind of societal phase-change, altering subtly but significantly into a water-worlder equivalent of the Culture. All that would need to happen for this to be effected, it was reckoned, would be the Morthanveld giving up the last vestiges of monetary exchange within their society, adopting a more comprehensive, self-consciously benign and galaxy-wide foreign policy and — probably most crucially — granting their AIs complete self-expressive freedom and full citizenship rights.

The Culture wanted to encourage this, obviously, but could not be seen to interfere or to be trying to influence matters. This was the main reason for not upsetting the people who would be Djan Seriy’s hosts for the latter part of her journey back to Sursamen; this was why she was being stripped of almost all her SC enhancements and even some of the amendments she had chosen for herself before Special Circumstances had invited her aboard in the first place.

“Probably a bluff anyway,” she told Turminder Xuss grumpily, looking out over the surface of cragged, chevronned ice below. The skies were clear and the balcony on which she stood and over which the drone silently hovered provided a calm, pleasantly warm environment; however, a furious torrent of air was howling all around the platform as the planet’s jetstream swept above the high mountains. Force fields beyond the balcony’s perimeter prevented the invisible storm from buffeting and freezing them, though such was the power of the screaming rush of air that a faint echo of its voice could be heard even through the field; a distant, thrumming wail, like some animal trapped and shrieking on the ice far below.

When they had first taken up station here during the previous night the air had been perfectly still and you could hear the cracks and creaks and booms of the glacier as it ground against the torn shoulders of the mountains that formed its banks and scoured its way across the great gouged bed of fractured rock beneath.

“A bluff?” Turminder Xuss sounded unconvinced.

“Yes,” Anaplian said. “Could it not be that the Morthanveld merely pretend to be on the brink of becoming like the Culture in order to keep the Culture from interfering in their business?”

“Hmm,” the drone said. “That wouldn’t work for long.”

“Even so.”

“And you’d wonder why the idea that the Morthanveld were poised in this manner was allowed to become so prevalent in the first place.”

Anaplian realised they had got rather rapidly to the point that all such conversations regarding the strategic intentions of the Culture tended to arrive at sooner or later, where it became clear that the issue boiled down to the question What Are The Minds Really Up To? This was always a good question, and it was usually only churls and determinedly diehard cynics who even bothered to point out that it rarely, if ever, arrived paired up with an equally good answer.

The normal, almost ingrained response of people at this point was to metaphorically throw their hands in the air and exclaim that if that was what it really all boiled down to then there was no point in even attempting to pursue the issue further, because as soon as the motivations, analyses and stratagems of Minds became the defining factor in a matter, all bets were most profoundly off, for the simple reason that any and all efforts to second-guess such infinitely subtle and hideously devious devices were self-evidently futile.

Anaplian was not so sure about this. It was her suspicion that it suited the purposes of the Minds rather too neatly that people believed this so unquestioningly. Such a reaction represented not so much the honest appraisal of further enquiry as being pointless as an unthinking rejection of the need to enquire at all.

“Perhaps the Minds are jealous,” Anaplian said. “They don’t want the Morthanveld to steal even the echo of their thunder by becoming like them. They patronise the waterworlders in order to antagonise them, make them do the opposite of what is supposedly anticipated, so that they become less like the Culture. Because that is what the Minds really desire.”

“That makes as much sense as anything I’ve heard so far on the matter,” Turminder Xuss said, politely.

She was not being allowed to take the drone with her on her return to Sursamen. SC agent + combat drone was a combination that was well known far beyond the Culture. Although perilously close to a cliché, it remained a partnership you could, allegedly, still frighten children and bad people with.

Anaplian felt a faint tingle somewhere inside her head and experienced a sort of buzzing sensation throughout her body. She tried clicking into her skein sense, that let her monitor significant gravity waves in her vicinity and alerted her to any warp activity nearby, but the system was off-line, flagged indefinitely inoperable though not as a result of hostile action (nevertheless, she could feel at least one part of her SC-amended neural lace protesting, some automatic system forever watching for damage by stealth reacting to what it would register as the impairment of her abilities and the degradation of her inherent survivability with pre-programmed outrage).

The platform’s own drone-standard AI was, with her permission, moving slowly through her suite of enhancements and gradually turning off those it was thought the Morthanveld might object to. Click. There went the electromagnetic effector ability. She tried interfering with the field unit buried in the ceiling overhead, which was keeping the air on the balcony insulated from the thin and well-below-freezing airstream coursing around the platform. No connection. She could still sense EM activity but she couldn’t affect it any more. She had lived most of her life without such abilities and to date had used very few of them in anger, but she experienced their going with a distinct sense of loss and even dismay.

She looked down at her fingernails. They appeared normal at the moment, but she’d already thought the signal that would make them detach and fall off by the following morning. There would be no pain or blood and new nails would grow back during the next few days, but they wouldn’t be Coherent Radiation Emission Weapons, they wouldn’t be lasers.

Oh well, she thought, inspecting them, even ordinary, unamended nails could still scratch.

Click. There, she couldn’t radio now either. No transmissions possible. Trapped inside her own head. She tried to communicate via her lace, calling up Leeb Scoperin, one of her colleagues here and her most recent lover. Nothing directly; she would have to go through the platform’s systems, just like ordinary Culture people. She had rather hoped to see Leeb before she left, but he just hadn’t been able to get away from whatever it was he was doing at such short notice.

Turminder Xuss’ own systems must have registered something happening. “That you?” it asked.

She felt mildly insulted, as though the drone had enquired whether she’d just farted. “Yes,” she said sharply. “That was me. Comms off-line.”

“No need to get snappy.”

She looked at the machine through narrowed eyes. “I think you’ll find there is,” she informed it.

“My, it’s breezy out there!” Batra said, floating in through the force field from outside. “Djan Seriy; the module is here.”

“I’ll get my bag,” Anaplian said.

“Please,” Turminder Xuss said. “Allow me.”

Batra must have read the expression on her face as she watched the drone make its way to the nearest interior door.

“I think Turminder Xuss is going to miss you,” Batra said, extending loops of brittle-looking twigs and branches to take his/its weight and standing head-height in front of her like a framework for the sculpture of a human.

Anaplian shook her head. “The machine grows sentimental,” she said.

“Unlike yourself?” Batra asked neutrally.

She guessed he was talking about Toark, the child she had rescued from the burning city. The boy was still asleep; she had crept into his cabin to say a one-sided farewell earlier that morning, stroking his hair, whispering, not waking him. Batra had agreed, reluctantly, to look after the child while she was away.

“I have always been sentimental,” Anaplian claimed.

The little three-seat module dropped from the sky, lowered itself gently through the roof of force field bowing over the platform’s flight deck and backed up towards the group waiting for it, rear door hingeing open.

“Farewell, Djan Seriy,” Batra said, extending a less-than-skeletal assemblage at chest height, the extremity vaguely hand-shaped.

Anaplian put her palm briefly against this sculpted image, feeling faintly ridiculous. “You will look after the boy?” she said.

“Oh,” Batra said with a sighing noise, “as though he were your own.”

“I am serious,” she said. “If I don’t come back, I want you to take care of him, until you can find somewhere and someone more fitting.”

“You have my word,” Batra told her. “Just make sure you do come back.”

“I shall endeavour to,” she said.

“You have backed up?”

“Last night,” Anaplian confirmed. They were both being polite; Batra would know very well that she had backed herself up. The platform had taken a reading of her mind state the evening before. Should she fail to return — whether due to death or in theory any other reason — a clone of her could be grown and all her personality and memories implanted into it, creating a new her almost indistinguishable from the person she was now. It did not do to forget that, in a disquietingly real sense, to be an SC agent was to be owned by SC. The compensation was that even death was just a temporary operational glitch, soon overcome. Again though, only in a sense.

Turminder Xuss reappeared and deposited her bags in the module. “Well, goodbye, dear girl,” it said. “Try to avoid getting into any scrapes; I shan’t be there to save you.”

“I have already adjusted my expectations,” Anaplian told it. The drone was silent, as though not sure what to make of this. Anaplian bowed formally. “Goodbye,” she said to both of them, then turned and walked into the module.

Three minutes later she was stepping out of it again, aboard the Eight Rounds Rapid, a Delinquent-class Fast Picket and ex-General Offensive Unit which would take her to rendezvous with the Steppe-class Medium Systems Vehicle Don’t Try This At Home. This represented just the first leg of her complicated and languidly paced journey back to her old home.

Djan Seriy was shown to a small cabin aboard the old ex-warship by a ship-slaved drone. She would be aboard for less than a full day; however, she had wanted somewhere to lie down and think.

She opened her bag. She looked at what was lying on top of her few clothes and possessions. “I don’t recall packing you,” she muttered, and was immediately uncertain whether she was talking to herself or not (she instinctively tried to read the device with her active EM sense, but of course that didn’t work any more).

She was not talking to herself.

“Well remembered,” the thing she was looking at said. It appeared to be a dildo.

“Are you what I think you are?”

“I don’t know. What do you think I am?”

“I think you are a knife missile. Or something very similar.”

“Well, yes,” the small device said. “But then again no.”

Anaplian frowned. “Certainly you would appear to possess some of the more annoying linguistic characteristics of, say, a drone.”

“Well done, Djan Seriy!” the machine said brightly. “I am indeed one and both at the same time. The mind and personality of myself, Turminder Xuss, copied into the seasoned though still hale and hearty body of my most capable knife missile, lightly disguised.”

“I suppose I ought to be gratified you chose to make your ruse known at this point rather than later.”

“Ha ha. I would never have been so ungallant. Or intrusive.”

“You hope to protect me from scrapes, I take it.”

“Absolutely. Or at least share them with you.”

“Do you think you’ll get away with this?”

“Who can say? Worth a try.”

“You might have thought to ask me.”

“I did.”

“You did? I appear to have lost more than I thought.”

“I thought to ask you, but I didn’t. So as to protect you from potential blame.”

“How kind.”

“This way I may take full responsibility. In the I hope unlikely event you wish me to return whence I came, I shall leave you when you board the Don’t Try This At Home.”

“Does Batra know?”

“I most sincerely hope not. I could spend the rest of my Contact career toting bags, or worse.”

“Is this even semi-official?” Anaplian asked. She had never entirely lost her well-developed sense of suspicion.

“Hell’s teeth, no! All my own work.” The drone paused. “I was charged with protecting you, Djan Seriy,” it said, sounding more serious now. “And I am not some blindly obedient machine. I would like to continue to help protect you, especially as you are travelling so far outside the general protection of the Culture, to a place of violence, with your abilities reduced. For these reasons, I duly offer my services.”

Anaplian frowned. “Save that for which your appearance would imply you are most suited,” she said, “I accept.”

11. Bare, Night

Oramen lay on the bed with the girl who’d called herself Jish. He was playing with her hair, tangling long brown locks of it around one finger then releasing it again. He was amused by the similarity in shape of the girl’s spiralled curls and the rolls of smoke she was producing from the unge pipe she was smoking. The smoke rolled lazily upwards towards the high, ornate ceiling of the room, which was part of a house in an elegant and respectable area of the city which had been favoured by many of the court over the years, not least by his brother Ferbin.

Jish passed him the pipe, but he waved it away. “No.”

“Oh, come!” she said, giggling. She turned towards him to try and force the pipe on him, her breasts jiggling as she moved across the broad, much-tousled bed. “Don’t be a spoil!” She tried to jam the stem of the pipe into his mouth.

He turned his head, moved the pipe away again with the flat of one hand. “No, thank you,” he said.

She sat cross-legged in front of him, perfectly naked, and tapped him on the nose with the stem. “Why won’t the Ora play? Won’t the Ora play?” she said in a funny, croaky little voice. Behind her, the broad, fan-shaped headboard of the bed was covered with a painting of mythical half-people — the satyrs and nymphs of this world — engaged in a pink-toned orgy upon fluffy white clouds, peeling faintly at the edges. “Why won’t the Ora play?”

He smiled. “Because the Ora has other things to do.”

“What’s to do, my lovely prince?” She puffed briefly on the pipe, releasing the grey smoke in a liquidic sheen. “The army’s away and all is quiet. Everyone’s gone, the weather is warm and there’s nothing to do. Play with your Jish, why not?”

He lay back in the bed, stretching. One hand went out to the glass of wine that stood on the bedside table, as though about to grasp it, but then it fell away again.

“I know,” Jish said, smiling, and turned half away from him, breasts outlined in the smoky sunlight pouring through the tall windows on the far side of the room. He could see she was pulling deeply on the pipe. She turned back to him, eyes bright, came forward and down and, holding the pipe away from the two of them, placed her lips over his, opening her mouth full of smoke and trying to make him breathe it from her lungs into his. He blew back sharply, making her draw away, coughing and hacking in an unruly cloud of bitter fumes.

The pipe clattered to the floor and she coughed again, one hand at her mouth, almost sounding like she was retching. Oramen smiled. He sat upright quickly and grabbed her hand, pulling it sharply away from her and twisting his grip on her skin so that she gave a small cry of pain. Ferbin had told him that many women responded well to being treated roughly and — though he found this bizarre — he was testing this theory.

“I would not force myself on you, my dear,” he told her. Her face was unattractively reddened, and tears were in her eyes. “You ought to reciprocate.” He let go her hand.

The girl rubbed her wrist and glared at him, then sniffed and tossed her hair. She looked for the pipe and saw it on the floor. She levered herself half out of the bed to get it.

“What’s all this?” Tove Lomma stuck his head over the fan-shaped headboard. The room contained two large beds which could be side-by-side or headboard-to-headboard, if one wanted just a little additional privacy. Tove was with another couple of girls on the other bed. His big, sweaty-looking face beamed down at them. “Not a tiff, I hope?” He gazed at Jish’s backside as she stretched across for the pipe. “Hmm. Most appreciable.” He looked at Oramen, nodding at Jish’s buttocks as she pulled herself back into the bed. “Perhaps we ought to swap shortly, eh, my prince?”

“Perhaps,” Oramen said.

One of Tove’s girls appeared at his side and stuck her tongue in his ear. Oramen nodded at this. “I think you’re wanted,” he told Tove.

“I hear and obey,” Tove said, with a wink. He and the girl disappeared.

Oramen stared up at the ceiling. How much had changed, he thought. How much he’d grown and matured, just in the month since his father’s death. He’d been with girls, learned to smoke and drink and waved a ceremonial goodbye to an entire army. He had found a few pretty words to say, both to the girls — though they needed no cajoling, save the rattle of a purse — and to the army. His little speech there had been of his own devising — the one tyl Loesp had prepared for him had seemed vainglorious and immodest (the regent had done his best to hide his displeasure). Well, it had been mostly of his own devising; he had borrowed a little from The House of Many Roofs by Sinnel, with a hint of the executioner’s speech in act three of Baron Lepessi by Prode the younger.

And off the fabulous spread of their forces had gone, under banners of bright cloth and cloud-white steam, with many a clank and hiss and whinny and roar and rattle and cheer, all bound for glory, destined to fall upon the now near-defenceless Deldeyn and finally complete King Hausk’s grand plan of unity across the Eighth and beyond. Thus would come the Golden Age of peace his father had talked about, when a prince of his, that is Oramen’s, stamp might take his people on to still greater accomplishments and recognition.

Such was the theory. They had to win their battle first. The army was not taking the obvious route and would be gone longer than might have been anticipated, which ought to make the result all the more certain — the Deldeyn would presumably have most of what was left of their much-reduced forces waiting at the most obvious portal Tower, so would be surprised as well as overwhelmed — but one still never knew for sure. He hadn’t been allowed to go with the army. Still a boy, they said; better not risk their last prince, not after what had happened to Ferbin…

He wasn’t sure if he’d wanted to go or not. It would have been interesting, and it seemed a pity that there would not even be one of the late king’s children there to witness this last great campaign. He yawned. Well, never mind; he doubted there would be more than one man in a hundred in the army who would not rather be where he was right now than where they were.

His father had asked him if he wanted to come to a house like this, a few seasons earlier, but he hadn’t felt ready. He had anyway not been utterly unprepared; for a couple of years Ferbin had been regaling him with tales of debauchery, mostly centred around such houses, so he knew what went on and what was required. Still, the full experience was most surprisingly congenial. It certainly beat studying. He’d wished Shir Rocasse a happy retirement.

And Tove had been, well, like the best and most accommodating, most encouraging and helpful friend a fellow could ever have. He’d told him as much, and been glad to see the resulting look of pleasure on Tove’s face.

Jish was refilling the pipe. Oramen watched her for a little, listening to the noises coming from the far side of the headboard, then he swung gently out of the bed and started to pull on his clothes. “I have to go,” he told the girl.

“You don’t really want to go,” she said, a sly expression on her face. She nodded. “That doesn’t want to go.”

He looked down. He was hard again. “That’s not me,” he told her, “that’s only my cock.” He tapped his head. “This wants to go.”

She shrugged and lit the pipe.

He pulled on his trous then stood, tucking his shirt in.

The girl looked darkly through wreaths of grey smoke as he turned towards the door, holding his boots in one hand.

“Ferbin would have been more of a sport,” she said.

He turned and sat by the footboard, reaching to pull the girl towards him and saying quietly, “You were with my brother?” He glanced up. The top edge of the other bed’s headboard was swaying back and forth. “Quietly,” he warned her.

“A few times,” Jish said with a sort of shy defiance. “He was a laugh. Not like they’re saying now. He’d have stayed.”

“I bet he would,” Oramen said. His gaze searched her eyes, then he smiled and put one hand out to stroke her face. “I really do have to go, Jish. Another time.”

He padded to the door, boots still in one hand. Jish fell back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, pipe out to the side, as the door closed quietly.

A little while later, Tove, breathing hard, stuck his head round the side of the headboard and looked, puzzled, at Jish and the otherwise empty bed.

“Piss break?” he asked the girl.

“If it is, the little fuck’s fucked off to the palace for it,” she told him. “And taken his fucking togs with him.”

“Shit!” Tove said, and disappeared. Moments later he too was getting dressed, to protests.

“Dr Gillews?”

The physician had his consulting offices in the palace’s lower backing wing, only a few minutes’ walk from the King’s chambers by a couple of corridors and a long gallery under the eaves of one of the main buildings. It was a surprisingly quiet place, so close to the centre of things. The chambers looked out over a medicinal garden, tipped and terraced to catch the best of the light. Oramen had found the door unlocked after knocking on it a couple of times. He called the doctor’s name again, from just inside the threshold. Gillews was known to get very caught up in the various experiments and distillations he carried out in his principal work chamber, and sometimes did not hear — or affected not to hear — people calling him.

Oramen went further along the hall, then through an archway into what appeared to be the doctor’s sitting room; windows beyond looked out to the little garden, distant clouds high above. “Dr Gillews?” he called. He could see what looked like a bench in front of the windows, covered in books, cases, phials and retorts. He could hear a faint dripping sound, and smell something acrid. He walked through the sitting room, making sure there was nobody there as he went; he didn’t want to disturb the doctor if he was sleeping. The dripping sound came louder and the smell of something bitter grew stronger.

“Doctor…?”

He stopped, staring.

The doctor was sitting in a wooden chair of ornately twisted carving, his head lying on the bench in front of him. It appeared to have hit some phials and beakers when he had fallen forward, scattering some and breaking others. The dripping noise came from liquids spilled from some of the smashed glassware. One of the liquids fumed in the air and made a sizzling noise as it struck the wooden floor.

A syringe stuck out of Gillews’ exposed left lower arm, plunger fully in. His eyes stared sightlessly along the equipment-strewn bench.

Oramen put one hand to his mouth. “Oh, Dr Gillews,” he said, and sat down on the floor, fearing his legs were about to give out. He stood up again quickly, coughing, and supported himself on the bench. The fumes were worse lower down. He leant across and pushed open two of the windows looking over the courtyard.

He took some deep breaths and reached out to feel for a pulse on the doctor’s neck, a little surprised and ashamed that his hand was shaking so. Gillews’ skin was quite cold, and there was no pulse.

Oramen looked around. He wasn’t really sure for what. Everything was untidy but that might well be the norm for such a place. He could see no note or last scratched message.

He supposed he ought to go and inform the palace guard. He looked, fascinated, at the syringe. There was blood around the puncture wound where the needle had entered, and some bruising and scratches around a handful of other small wounds, as though the doctor had had some trouble finding a vein, stabbing at himself before he found the right place.

Oramen touched Gillews’ skin again, at the exposed wrist, where there was a dull bruise. He coughed once more, throat catching on the fumes, as he pulled up the cuff of the shirt covering the doctor’s other wrist, and saw some similar bruising there. The arms of the chair were quite broad and flat.

He pulled the cuff down again, went to find a guard.

The Oct used hundreds of their largest scendships and a half-dozen scend tubes, cycling loops of vessels like stringed counting-stones in the hands of merchants tallying the day’s takings. They filled up with men, beasts, engines, artillery, wagons, supplies and materiel on the Eighth then dropped fast to the Ninth to spill their contents and race back up the Illsipine Tower for another load. Still the process took a full long-day, with all the inevitable delay caused by the sheer complexity of the vast undertaking. Animals panicked in the scendships, would not enter or would not leave — hefters, the most numerous of the beasts of burden, seemed to be particularly sensitive — roasoaril tankers leaked, risking conflagrations; steam wagons broke down (one blew up while inside a scendship, causing no damage to the vessel but killing many inside — the Oct took that one out of its loop to clean it up), and a hundred other small incidents and accidents contrived to make the whole procedure draw itself out beyond what felt like its reasonable limit.

Regent tyl Loesp and Field Marshal Werreber wheeled on their lyge about the dimly lit Illsipine Tower, watching the vast army assemble on the Tower’s only slightly brighter sun side, then, still accompanied by their escorting squadron, landed on a hill overlooking the plain. Above and all around, scouts on lyge and caude swung about the dark skies, dimly seen shapes watching for an enemy that did not appear to know they were there.

The Fixstar Oausillac, seeming to hover low over the flat plain to farpole, cast a balefully red light over the scene as tyl Loesp walked over to Werreber, taking off his flying gauntlets and clapping his hands. “It goes well, eh, Field Marshal?”

“It goes, I’ll give you that,” the other man said, letting a squire lead his lyge away. The beast’s breath smoked in the cool, still air.

Even the air smelled different here, tyl Loesp thought. Air smelled different across any level he supposed, but that now seemed like a tactical distinction; here was a strategic difference, something underlying.

“We are undiscovered.” Tyl Loesp looked out at the gathering army again. “That is sufficient for now.”

“We have come by an odd route,” Werreber said. “We are a long way from our goal. Even further from home.”

“Distance from home is irrelevant, as long as the Oct remain allies,” tyl Loesp told him. “Right now we are an hour away from home, little more.”

“As long as the Oct remain allies,” Werreber echoed.

The regent looked at him sharply, then slowly gazed away again. “You don’t distrust them, do you?”

“Trust? Trust seems irrelevant. They will do certain things or not, and those things will match with what they have said they will do, or not. Whatever guides their actions is hidden behind so many layers of untranslatable thought it might as well be based on pure chance. Their alien nature precludes human attributes like trust.”

Tyl Loesp had never heard Werreber give so long a speech. He wondered if the field marshal was nervous. He nodded. “One could no more trust an Oct than love it.”

“Still, they have been true to their word,” Werreber said. “They said they would deceive the Deldeyn, and they did.”

Tyl Loesp glanced at the other man, searching for any sign of irony, or even wit. Werreber, oblivious, continued. “They said they would bring us here, and they have.”

“The Deldeyn might take a different view.”

“The deceived always will,” Werreber pronounced, unshakeable.

Tyl Loesp could not but think that they were now in a position very similar to that the Deldeyn had been in when they had been issuing from the Xiliskine Tower barely a month ago, convinced — no doubt — that the Oct had allowed them special access to a normally inaccessible Tower to allow them to carry out their sneak attack on the very heartland of the Sarl people.

Had they felt smug, believing that the Oct were now on their side? Had they listened to the same lectures about how the Oct were direct descendants of the Shellworld builders, and nodded just as indulgently? Had they felt righteous, believing that the justice of their cause was being recognised by higher powers? For no doubt that was how they did think. It seemed to tyl Loesp everybody always thought they were right, and shared, too, the quaint belief that the very fervency of a belief, however deluded, somehow made it true.

They were all of them fools.

There was no right and wrong, there was simply effectiveness and inability, might and weakness, cunning and gullibility. That he knew this was his advantage, but it was one of better understanding, not moral superiority — he had no delusions there.

All that he and Werreber, the army and the Sarl could truly rely on was somehow fitting in with the plans that the Oct had and staying useful to them until matters had reached a conclusion. The Oct had their own reasons for wanting the Deldeyn reduced and the Sarl promoted, and tyl Loesp had an idea what those reasons were and why they were taking this route, not the obvious one, but he was willing to accept that for now they were all simply tools the Oct were using. That would change, if he had any say in it, but for now they were, undeniably, wielded.

Change it would, though. There were times, points, when a relatively small but decisive motion could trigger a weighty cascade of most momentous consequences, when the user became the used and the tool became the hand — and the brain behind it, too. Had he not been the King’s right arm? Had he not been the very epitome of trusted, valiant helper? And yet, when the time had been right, had he not struck, with all the suddenly unimpounded force of a lifetime’s unjust deference and subservience?

He had killed his king, the man to whom all around him, not just the credulous masses, thought he owed everything. But he knew the truth, which was that to be king was only to be the biggest bully in a race of bullies and bullied, the greatest braggart charlatan in a species of blustering priests and cowed acolytes with nary a thought to rub between them. The King had no inherent nobility or even right to rule; the whole idea of inheritable dominion was nonsensical if it could throw up particles like the studiously malleable Oramen and the hopelessly loose-living Ferbin. Ruthlessness, will, the absolute application of force and power; these were what secured authority and dominance.

He won who saw most clearly the way the universe really worked. Tyl Loesp had seen that Hausk was the one to take the Sarl so far along their course, but no further. The King had not seen that. Too, he had not realised that his most trusted helper might have plans, desires and ambitions of his own, and they might be best served by replacing him. So Hausk had trusted tyl Loesp, and that had been stupid. That had been a misty, self-deceptive kind of seeing. And, on a pinnacle so exposed and high as that of monarch, you paid for such foolishness.

So he had killed his king, but that meant little. It was no more wrong to kill a king than any man, and most men could see that all lives were cheap and eminently disposable, including their own. They held that in such high regard only because it was all they had, not because they thought it meant much to the universe; it took a religion to convince people of that, and he would make sure that the emphasis on that aspect of the Sarl faith was reduced in future, to the benefit of those tenets which invoked humility and obedience.

His only regret in killing Hausk, he’d realised, was that Hausk had had so little time to appreciate what had happened, to think back on what must have been going on in his faithful lieutenant’s mind for all those years, as he’d died.

But it was a small regret.

They had made the journey unharmed so far; more than three-quarters of the army was safely delivered and a more than sufficient force had been left on the Eighth to deal with any possible desperate attack by the Deldeyn.

They probably still had the advantage of surprise, too. A small outpost of lyge scouts — there specifically to watch the Tower and report if it ever was used to conduct an incursion — had been surprised and quickly overwhelmed in the first action of this latest stage of the war; a contingent of the new Regent’s Guard, the very cream of the army’s best units, had been entrusted with this and had triumphed. The Deldeyn had no telegraph so their fastest communications moved by heliograph, signal light, carrier bird or a messenger on an air beast. The elite force which had taken the little fort reported that they were sure no message had left it.

Still, the Deldeyn must have felt confident at a similar stage, too, when they had issued from the Xiliskine Tower. How quickly had they realised that they had not just been unlucky, but deceived? At what point did it dawn on them that far from being about to inflict a crushing defeat on their enemies, they were about to suffer one themselves, and the war would be not won on that morning, but lost?

How deluded are we? he thought. How often, how multiply are we used? He still remembered the alien-man Xide Hyrlis coming to them with his glum prognostications regarding the future of warfare on their level, nearly a dozen long-years ago.

They would fall, he warned them, under the power of the first ruler to realise that the new discoveries in distillation, metallurgy and explosives spelled the end of the old, chivalrous ways. The immediate future, Hyrlis had told them, meant leaving the air to scouts, messengers and hit-and-fly raiding forces. There was an invention called the telegraph that could move information more quickly than the fleetest lyge and more reliably than by heliograph; use that. It would lead to still greater things.

Later there would be some disagreement over whether Hyrlis had pointed them towards an inventor who had already developed such an instrument, or pointed the inventor himself in the right experimental direction.

Abandon the great and noble tradition of well-bred men mounted on well-bred caude and lyge, Hyrlis said; build bigger guns, more guns, better guns, give more guns to more men, train them and arm them properly, mount them on animals and wheeled and tracked transports powered by steam — for now — and reap the benefits. Or pay the penalty, when somebody else sensed the change in the wind before you did.

Hausk, still a young man and the inexperienced, newly crowned king of a small, struggling kingdom, had — to tyl Loesp’s surprise and initial chagrin, even disbelief — fallen on these ideas like a starved man on a banquet. Tyl Loesp had, with all the other nobles, tried to argue him out of the infatuation, but Hausk had pressed ahead.

In time, tyl Loesp heard the first rumblings of something beyond mere discontent amongst his fellow nobles, and had had to make a choice. It was the turning point of his life. He made his choice and warned the King. The ringleaders of the conspiring nobles were executed, the rest had their lands seized and were disgraced. Tyl Loesp became despised by some, lauded by others, and trusted utterly by his king. The disputatious nobles had neatly removed the main obstacle to change — themselves — and Hausk’s reforms roared ahead unstayed.

One victory led to another and soon there seemed to be nothing but victories. Hausk, tyl Loesp and the armies they commanded swept all before them. Xide Hyrlis had left long before, almost before any of the reforms had been effected, and it seemed he was quickly forgotten; few people had known about him in the first place and those who had mostly had good reason to downplay his contribution to this new age of innovation, progress and never-ending martial success. Hausk himself still paid tribute to the man, if only in private.

But what had Hyrlis left? What course had he set them on? Were they not his tools, somehow? Were they perhaps doing his bidding, even now? Were they puppets, playthings, even pets? Would they be allowed to achieve only so much and then — as he, after all, had done to the King — have everything taken away on the very brink of complete success?

But he must not fall prey to such thoughts. A little caution, and some rough idea of what to do if things happened for the worst, that was excusable, but to wallow in doubt and presentiments of disaster only served to help bring about that which was most feared. He would not give in to that weakness. They were set for victory; if they struck now they would win, and then the territory opened up where the Oct might find themselves no longer in full control.

He raised his nose and sniffed. There was a smell of burning in the air, something unpleasantly sweet and somehow despoiled loose on the slowly strengthening breeze. He’d sensed this before, at the battle before the Xiliskine Tower, and noted it then. The smell of warfare had a new signature; that of distilled, incinerated roasoaril oil. Battle itself now smelled of smoke. Tyl Loesp could remember when the relevant scents had been sweat and blood.

“How awful for you!”

“Rather more so for the doctor.”

“Well indeed, though when you saw him he was past caring.” Renneque looked from Oramen to Harne. “Wouldn’t you say, ma’am?”

“A most unfortunate incident.” Harne, the lady Aelsh, sat dressed in her finest and most severe mourning red, surrounded by her closest ladies-in-waiting and a further group of ladies and gentlemen who had been invited to her salon within her apartments in the main palace, less than a minute’s walk from the throne room and the court principal’s chamber. It was a select group. Oramen recognised a famous painter, an actor and impresario, a philosopher, a falsettist and an actress. The city’s most fashionable and handsome priest was present, long black hair glistening, eyes twinkling, surrounded by a smaller semi-court of blushing young ladies; a brace of ancient noblemen too decrepit to venture to war completed the company.

Oramen watched Harne absently stroking a sleeping ynt lying curled on her lap — the animal’s fur had been dyed red to match her dress — and wondered why he’d been invited. Perhaps it was a gesture of conciliation. Just as likely it was to have him tell his somewhat grisly tale in person. And, of course, he was the heir to the throne; he’d noticed that many people felt a need to display their faces before him as often as possible. He had to keep reminding himself of that.

He smiled at Renneque, imagining her naked. After Jish and her friends, he had a template; something to go on, now. Or there was another of Harne’s attendant ladies called Ramile, a slim blonde with tightly curled hair. She had rather caught his eye, and did not seem to resent his interest, looking back shyly but frequently, smiling. He sensed Renneque glancing at the younger woman, then later glaring at her. Perhaps he might use one to get to the other. He was starting to understand how such matters worked. And then, of course, there was the lady actor, who was the most beautiful woman in the room. There was a refreshing directness in her look he rather liked.

“The doctor was known to indulge himself in the more pleasantly affective cures and potions of his trade, I believe,” the priest said, then sipped his infusion. They were gathered to take a variety of recently fashionable drinks, most not long arrived from a variety of foreign parts, all newly opened-up dependencies of the greater kingdom. The infusions were nonalcoholic, though some were mildly narcotic.

“He was a weak man,” Harne pronounced. “If a good physician.”

“It was so written, in his stars,” said a small man Oramen had seen and half recognised; Harne’s latest pet astrologer. The philosopher, sitting as far from the astrologer as practically possible, gave a small snort and shook his head. He muttered something to the nearest lady-in-waiting. She looked blank, though politely so. The astrologer represented the latest fad in astrology, which claimed that human affairs were affected by the stars beyond Sursamen. The old astrology had ascribed influences to the Fixstars and Rollstars of the Eighth and beyond — especially those of the Ninth, which, after all, swept by just under one’s feet, and so were technically closer than those hundreds of kilometres overhead. Oramen had little time even for the old stuff, but it seemed more plausible to him than this new nonsense. However, the Extra-Sursamen Astrology (for so it was termed) was new, and so for this reason alone, he supposed, possessed an irresistible attraction to a certain class of mind.

Renneque was nodding wisely at the small astrologer’s words. Oramen wondered if he really should attempt to bed Renneque, the lady Silbe. He was troublingly aware that he would once again be following his brother. The court would doubtless find out; Renneque and her peers were indiscreet. What would people think of him for going where his wastrel brother had already been? Would they think he was trying to prove he had the equal of Ferbin’s appetites, or was seeking to emulate him, unable to decide on his own tastes? Or would they even think that he sought to pay homage to him? He was still worrying at this, and not really listening to the conversation — which appeared to have spun off into some rather self-consciously clever talk about cures and addictions, benefits and curses — when Harne suddenly suggested the two of them take a turn on the balcony beyond the room.

“My lady,” he said, when the tall shutters had swung to behind them. The evening lay stretched out across the nearpole sky, filling the air with purples, reds and ochres. The lower palace and city beyond was mostly dark, just a few public lights showing. Harne’s dress looked darker out here, almost black.

“I am told you seek the return of your mother,” Harne said.

Well, she was direct. “I do,” he said. He had written to her several times since the King’s death, and told her that he hoped to bring her back to Pourl, back to the court, as soon as possible. He had sent more formal telegraphed messages as well, though they would have to be translated into a paper message at some point too, as the telegraph wires did not extend so far round the world as the benighted spot his mother had been exiled to (she often said how beautiful the place was, but he suspected she dissembled to spare his feelings). He supposed Harne had heard through the telegraph network; the operatives were notorious gossips. “She is my mother,” he told Harne. “She should be here at my side, especially once I become king.”

“And I would not seek to prevent her return, had I the power, please believe me,” Harne said.

You thought to cause her exile in the first place, Oramen wanted to say, but didn’t. “That is… as well,” he said.

Harne appeared distracted, her expression, even by the uncertain light of the drawn-out sunset and the candles of the room behind them, patently confused and uncertain. “Please understand that my concern is for my own place following her return. I wish her no ill, quite none at all, but I would know if her enhancement requires my own degradation.”

“Not through any choice of mine, madam,” Oramen said. He felt a deliciousness in the situation. He felt he was a man now, but he could still too well remember being a boy, or at least being treated like one. Now this woman, who had once seemed like a queen, like the strictest stepmother, like a powerful, capricious ogre to him, hung on his every word and turn of phrase, beseeching him from outside the citadel of his new and sudden power.

“My position is secure?” Harne asked.

He had thought about this. He still resented what Harne had done, whether she had demanded outright that his own mother be banished, presented the King with a choice between the two of them, or just inveigled, schemed and suggested her way towards the idea that such a choice must be made, but his only thought was for Aclyn, the lady Blisk; his own mother. Would Harne’s reduction be to her good? He doubted it.

Harne was popular and liked, and even more so now; she was pitied as the tragic widow and grieving mother all in one, representing in that woe something of what the whole kingdom felt. To be seen to persecute her would reflect badly on him and by immediate extension on his mother too. Harne, the lady Aelsh, had to be shown every respect, or his mother’s just advancement and restoration would be a hollow, bitter thing indeed. He would rather it was otherwise, for in his heart he wanted to banish Harne as his own mother had been banished, but it could not be, and he had to accept that.

“Madam, your position is perfectly secure. I honour you as she who was queen in all but name. I wish merely to see my mother again and have her take her rightful place at court. It will in no sense be at your expense. You were both loved by my father. He chose you over her and fate has chosen me over your son. You and she are equal in that.”

“It is a sad equality.”

“It is what we have, I’d say. I would have my mother back, but not above you — she never could be, in the affections of the people. Your position is unimpeachable, madam; I’d not have it otherwise.” Well, I would, he thought. But what would be the point in telling you?

“I am grateful, prince,” Harne said, laying one hand briefly on his arm. She took a breath, looking down. My, Oramen thought, how my power affects people and things! Being king could be highly agreeable!

“We ought to go in,” Harne said, smiling up at him. “People might talk!” she said, and gave an almost coquettish laugh such that, just for an instant, without in any way desiring her for himself, he saw suddenly what it might be about the woman that could have so captivated his father he would banish the mother of two of his children to keep her, or even just to keep her happy. She paused as she put her hand to the handle of the door leading back to the room. “Prince?” she said, gazing up into his eyes. “Oramen — if I may?”

“Of course, dear lady.” What now? he thought.

“Your reassurance, perversely, deserves its opposite.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I would have a care, Prince Regent.”

“I fail to understand you, ma’am. One always cares, one always has cares. What more specific—?”

“Specific I cannot be, Oramen. My concerns rest on vaguenesses, associations that may be perfectly innocent, coincidences that may be just those and no more; mere hints of rumours of gossip. Nothing solid or incontrovertible at all. Indeed, only just enough to say that the Prince Regent should take care. That is all. We are all of us forever on the brink of whatever fate may hold for us, even though we might not know it.” She put her hand to his arm again. “Please, Prince Regent, don’t think I seek to discomfit you; there is no malice in this. If I thought only for myself, I would take what you have just told me to my great relief and say no more, for I realise that what I say now may sound disquieting, even allied to a threat, though it is not. Please believe me it is not. I have had the most obscure and reluctant intelligences that suggest — no more — all is not as it appears, and so I ask you: take care, Prince Regent.”

He wasn’t sure what to say. Her gaze searched his eyes. “Please say I have not offended you, Oramen. You have done me generous service in reassuring me as you have and I would despair if I caused you to retract any part of that, but such grace commands I find the last seamed scrap I have to offer in grateful return, and what I’ve said is all I have. I beg you neither to scorn it nor ignore it. I fear we both might suffer from dismissal.”

Oramen still felt mightily confused and was already determined to revisit this conversation as accurately as he could when he had the leisure, but he nodded gravely, though with a small smile, and said, “Then be doubly reassured, ma’am. I regard you no less for what you’ve said. I thank you for your thoughtfulness and counsel. I shall think on it, assuredly.”

The lady’s face, lit from the side by candlelight, looked suddenly care-worn, Oramen thought. Her gaze flicked across his eyes again, then she smiled tremulously, and nodded, and let him open the door for her. The red-coloured ynt that had been sleeping on her lap curled out through the sliver of opening and whined and circled round her feet.

“Oh, Obli,” the lady cried, stooping to scoop the animal into her arms and rubbing her nose against its. “Can’t I leave you for a moment?”

They went back into the room.

They crossed a Night, and a region of Bare at the same time. It was the least propitious combination known to the superstitious, and even the most practical and hard-headed amongst them felt the tension. It was a long stretch, but there would be no supply dumps or fortlets left here; ordering men to stay in such a place was like consigning them to a living death. The animals complained mightily, hating the darkness and perhaps the strange, smooth feel of the material beneath them. The steam wagons and transports could not have been more suited to the terrain, or lack of it, and quickly pulled ahead. Good discipline, orders given sternly in briefings over the days before and perhaps a degree of fear ensured that the army did not become too attenuated. Searchlights shone upwards to help guide the airborne escorts and returning scouts. There would be three long-days of this.

The Night was caused by a series of great vanes that both hung from the level’s ceiling high above — obstructing all but the faintest air-glow of the Fixstar Oausillac to farpole — and had risen, like the blade of some infinite knife, from the ground ten or so kilometres to their right until they sat like a slice of night above them, six or seven kilometres high and hooked and curved over like some incomprehensibly colossal claw.

Men felt appropriately tiny in the shadow of such manufactured vastness. In a place like this, the heads of even the most unimaginative of beings began to fill with questions, if not outright dread. What titans had forged such vast geographies? What star-encompassing hubris had dictated the placement of these enormous vanes just so, like scimitared propellers from ships the size of planets? What oceanic volumes of what outlandish materials could ever have required such prodigious impelment?

A fierce wind arose, coming straight at them at first, forcing the air-beasts down for shelter. It scoured the last few grains of sand and grit from the Bare, making it entirely clear how this arid region came to be stripped not just of any ground cover but of any ground at all. They were travelling across the very bones of their vast world, tyl Loesp thought, the absolute base and fundament of all that gave them life.

When the wind eased a little and veered, he ordered his half-track command vehicle to stop and got down from it. The machine grumbled beside him, headlights picking out twin cones of creamy Bare ahead of it. All around, the army trundled past, engines blattering, unseen fumes rising into the inky dark. He took his glove off, knelt and pressed his open palm against the Bare, against the pure Prime of Sursamen’s being.

I touch the ancient past, he thought, and the future. Our descendants might build on this mighty, God-threatening scale, one day. If I cannot be there — and the aliens had the gift of eternal life, so he might be there if all went as he dared to hope — then my name shall.

Nearby in the loud darkness, a supply wagon’s tractor had broken down; a spare was being attached.

He put his glove back on and returned to the half-track.

“Frankly, sir, it’s a murder weapon,” Illis, the palace armourer, said. He was squat and sturdy. His hands were dark, ingrained.

Oramen turned the slim but allegedly powerful pistol over in his hand. He had fretted about Harne’s warning for some days before eventually deciding to dismiss it, but had then woken from a dream wherein he’d been trapped in a chair while faceless men shoved knives into his arms. He had been going to dismiss that too, but then came to the conclusion that something inside him was worried, and even if it was just to keep such nightmares at bay, carrying a weapon more powerful than just his usual long knife might be advisable.

The gun felt heavy. Its mechanism was worked by a strong spring so that it could be used single-handed and it contained ten one-piece shells, arranged in a sort of staggered vertical within the handle and propelled to the firing chamber by another spring, cocked by a lever that folded away after use.

The shells were cross-cut on their tips. “A man-stopper,” Illis said, then paused. “Actually, a hefter-stopper, to serve truth fair.” He smiled, which was a little disconcerting as he had very few teeth left. “Try to avoid accidents with it, sir,” he said reasonably, then insisted the prince practise using it in the long firing gallery attached to the armoury.

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 grimaced — to look over the side of the bed he was lying on, peering down through the hazy surface Holse was standing on. It all looked rather alarming.

“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’neng-oal 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’neng-oal 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 greater distance from each other the closer they got to that last outward level and the Filigree would no longer need to join up to support the weight above.

“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’neng-oal 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’neng-oal 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.”

“And by the Vileness!” Ferbin said, genuinely horrified. “The very filth of God!”

The Aultridia were an Upstart species; recent arrivals on the Involved scene who had wasted no time in establishing themselves, shouldering their way to as near the front of the galactic stage as possible. They were far from alone in that. What distinguished them was the manner and location of their coming to sentient fruition as a species.

The Aultridia had evolved from parasites which had lived under the carapaces and between the skin layers of the species called the Xinthia; Xinthian Tensile Aeronathaurs to give them their proper name. It was one of these that the Sarl called the WorldGod.

The Xinthia were regarded with something approaching affection by even the most ruthless and unsentimental of the galaxy’s Involved, partly because they had done much great work in the past — they had been particularly active in the Swarm Wars of great antiquity, battling runaway nanotech outbreaks, Swarmata in general and other Monopathic Hegemonising Events — but mostly because they were no threat to anybody any more and a system of the galactic community’s size and complexity just seemed to need one grouping that everybody was allowed to like. Utterly ancient, once near-invincibly powerful, now reduced to one paltry solar system and a few eccentric individuals hiding in the Cores of Shellworlds for no discernible reason, the Xinthia were seen as eccentric, bumbling, well-meaning, civilisationally exhausted — the joke was they hadn’t the energy to Sublime — and generally as the honoured good-as-dead deserving of a comfortable retirement.

The Aultridia were regarded as having spoiled that comfortable twilight. Over the space of several hundred thousand years, the great air-dwelling, spacefaring Aeronathaurs had been greatly troubled by the increasingly active creatures they were playing host to, the infestation of super-parasites running round the necklace of Aeronathaur habitats orbiting the star Chone like a disease.

It hadn’t lasted; the advantage of a truly intelligent parasite was that you could reason with it, and the Aultridia had long since abandoned their old ways, leaving their one-time hosts alone in return for material advancement and what seemed like alien super-science to them but was like a box of broken toys discovered in a dusty attic to the Xinthia.

They had constructed their own purpose-built habitats and taken up the task of opening up and maintaining Shellworlds; this swiftly turned into a real and useful speciality. It was conventionally assumed that burrowing into a Shellworld was somehow something they were suited for just by their history and nature.

The stigma of their birthright remained, however, and it didn’t help that the mat-like Aultridia stank like rotting meat to most oxygen-breathing species.

The only remaining suspicion regarding the Aultridia’s present existence was that they had established at least a token presence on all the Shellworlds which contained Xinthians, often at impractical cost and to the considerable annoyance of other Conducer species like the Oct. To date, as far as anyone knew, the Aultridia had never even tried to penetrate all the way down through the levels of a Shellworld to a Core-dwelling Xinthian — even the more established Conducer species tended to leave the ancient beings alone, out of respect and possibly an almost superstitious wariness — but that didn’t reassure many people, least of all those like the Sarl, who treated the Xinthian at the Core of the world as a God and were appalled at the idea of the ghastly Aultridia worming their way down to the Core to do God-knew-what to their deity. Only the Iln, the fabled and happily long-departed species which had spent so much of their hateful existence destroying Shellworlds, were more despised by the Sarl and all right-thinking people.

The Oct, of course, had not been shy about promoting this view of the Aultridia amongst their client species like the Sarl, arguably exaggerating both the incorrigibility of Aultridian nature and the concomitant threat the species posed to the WorldGod. The Oct were also not slow in pointing out that they were, by their own claim at least, directly descended from the Involucra — the very people who had designed and constructed the deeply wonderful Shellworlds — and so part of a line of almost God-like creators nearly a billion years old. By comparison, the Aultridia were ghastly parasitic newbie slime barely worthy of the term civilised.

“So,” Ferbin said. “We’re floating to another Tower? We are still on our way to the Surface, I trust?”

“We are, sir.”

Ferbin looked through the near-perfectly transparent bed he lay on, down to the waves far below. “We do not seem to be moving especially quickly.”

“Apparently we are, however, sir. We’re going four or five times faster than even a lyge can fly, though certainly not as quickly as an alien flying machine.”

“It doesn’t look very fast,” Ferbin said, still staring at the ocean.

“We are very high, sir. That makes our progress look slow.”

Ferbin looked up. They appeared to be on the very lowest wisp of a vast mass of golden whiteness. “And this thing is basically just a cloud?” he asked.

“It is, sir. Though it sticks together better than the clouds we’re used to, and it is, by allegement, intelligent.”

Ferbin thought about this. He had never really been trained to think properly for himself, or thought much of thinking, as it were, but over the past few days and adventures he had discovered that the pastime was not without its benefits. “Is it not, then, at the mercy of the winds?”

Holse looked mildly surprised. “You know, sir, I thought that! However, it appears the Cumuloforms can control their height with some exactness, and because the level is so arranged with winds heading in different directions at different elevations, they can navigate near well as a bird just by taking care how high off the ground — well, sea — they are.”

Ferbin felt the edge of the simple sheet covering his nakedness. “Do we still have the documents Seltis gave us?”

“Here, sir,” Holse said, pulling them from his loose-fitting tunic.

Ferbin collapsed back on the bed, exhausted. “Is there water here? I’m thirsty.”

“I think you’ll find that tube there will provide the necessary, sir.”

Ferbin took a dangling transparent tube and sucked at it, taking his fill of pleasantly sweet-tasting water, then lay back. He looked over at Holse.

“So, Choubris Holse, you are still with me.”

“Plain as, sir.”

“You did not go back, even though we have now most certainly left my father’s kingdom.”

“I thought the better of it, sir. The gentlemen on the lyge who tried to detain us at the tower did not seem overenthusiastic regarding the niceties of establishing the innocence of one acting merely as a faithful servant. It occurred to me that you might be of most use to the current regime dead, if you see what I mean, sir, and — on account of you having been already so pronounced — some effort might be made to turn this incorrect statement into a true one, only backdated, if you get my drift. Your being alive does rather contradict the official version of events and it strikes me that knowledge of that fact is somewhat like an infective disease, and a fatal one at that.” While Ferbin was still thinking his way through this, Holse frowned, cleared his throat and gathered his tunic about him. “And it did occur to me, sir, that you did somewhat save my life on that tower thing, when that little lyge flier chappie was quite set, it seemed to me, on taking it.”

“Did I?” Ferbin asked. He supposed he had. He had never saved anybody’s life before. Realising that he had was a rather agreeable sensation.

“Not that it wasn’t my sticking with you that had got me into said parlous situation in the first place, mind, sir,” Holse went on, seeing a look of dreamy self-satisfaction appear on Ferbin’s pale, lightly bearded face.

“Indeed, indeed,” Ferbin said. He was thinking again. “You will be some time away from those you love, I fear, dear Holse.”

“It has barely been three weeks, sir. Quite possibly they have yet to miss me. In any event, I’m best to stay away until matters are sorted, sir. Also, if the palace officials work at their customary pace in such affairs, my stipend will continue to be paid for a good long-year or more.”

“Your wife will be able to collect it?”

“She always has, sir. To protect it and me from funding an overfamiliarity with such pleasures as a fellow might meet with in drinking and smoking establishments, betting parlours and the like.”

Ferbin smiled. “Still, you must miss her, and your children. Three, isn’t it?”

“Four at the last count, sir.”

“You will see them again, good Holse,” Ferbin said, feeling oddly tearful. He smiled again at Holse and put his hand out. Holse stared at it, confused. “Good servant, take my hand. We are as much friends now as master and servant, and when I return to reclaim what is rightfully mine, you shall be most richly rewarded.”

Holse took Ferbin’s hand awkwardly. “Why, that’s most kind, sir. Right now, I’d settle for a glass of something other than water and a pipe of leaf, frankly, but it’s nice to have something to look forward to.”

Ferbin felt his eyes closing, seemingly of their own volition. “I think I need to sleep some more,” he said, and was unconscious almost before the last word was uttered.

The Cumuloform called Expanded Version Five; Zourd drifted into the lee of the two-kilometre-wide Vaw-yei Tower and started elongating itself, eventually extending one single trailing tip of cloud down to the surface of a much smaller though still substantial tower protruding fifty metres or so from the ocean. A great swell, near long as the world was round, washed about it, waves rising and falling back like the beat of some vast heart. A Fixstar sat low on the horizon, staining the clouds and waves with an everlasting sunrise/sunset of red and gold.

The air smelled sharp. The circular surface of the tower was strewn with seaweed and sun-bleached fish bones.

Ferbin and Holse stepped out of a hole which had appeared in the side of the lowest of the bubble chambers they had occupied for the last few days. Waiting for them at the centre of the tower was a raised portion like the one in which they had taken shelter back on the Eighth. Ferbin turned and called, “Farewell, and thank you!” to the cloud, and heard the same strange chorus of whispers say, “Goodbye.”

Then the cloud seemed to gather itself up and spread itself out, great billowing wings of cloud-stuff starting to catch the wind on the edges of the Tower’s lee and pulling the strange, huge but insubstantial creature up and away. They stood and watched it go, fascinated, until a chime sounded from the open door of the access tower’s raised portion.

“Better not miss the coach,” Holse said. They stepped into the chamber, which took them down towards the base of the nearby Tower. A scendship was waiting for them at the far end of the great hall and the gleaming, multifarious doors. The part they could see was a simple sphere, perhaps twenty metres in diameter, with a transparent roof. Its doors closed. A distant Oct told them via a screen that their documents were in order without Ferbin even having to take them from his pocket and brandish them.

The two men looked up through the roof, at a vast blackness threaded with tiny lights and criss-crossed with pale struts and tubes describing a complicated set of spirals around and through the seemingly infinite space.

Holse whistled. “Didn’t spot that last time.”

The scendship moved smoothly away, accelerating upwards into the darkness. The lights flowed silently around them until they both felt dizzy and had to look away. They found a dry part of the mostly still damp floor and sat there, talking occasionally, glancing upwards a lot, for the hour or so until the scendship slowed and stopped, then nudged on upwards through more enormous doors — some sliding, some rolling, some seeming to pull back from the centre in every direction at once — to another level of the colossal cylinder. The scendship picked up speed again, tearing silently up the light-strewn tube of darkness and flickering tubework.

They stretched their legs. Ferbin exercised the shoulder where he’d been shot; it was no more than slightly stiff. Holse asked a patch of screen on the wall if it could hear him and was rewarded with an informative speech in an eccentric version of the Sarl language which he only realised was recorded when he tried to ask it questions. They were now passing the third level, which was dark. No land, all just Bare, just Prime, and no water or atmosphere or even interior stars at all. The next level up was also vacuum, but it did have stars and there were things called Baskers that lived there and apparently just lay about, absorbing sunlight like trees. The last level before the Surface was vacuum again, and was a Seedsail nursery, whatever that was or they were.

The scendship slowed for the final time. They watched the last few lights disappear around the side of the craft. Thumps, squelches and sighing noises announced some sort of conclusion, and the door rolled open to the side. They passed down one broad, tall but very plain corridor and negotiated a round lift at the far end which ascended with multiple hesitations, then they walked through another great corridor of what looked like very thin-cut sandstone, lit from within. Whole sets of massive doors opened in front of them and closed behind them as they went. “They like their doors, don’t they, sir?” Holse observed.

A single Oct in a glistening membrane was waiting between two of the sets of doors.

“Greetings,” it said. It extended one limb holding a small device, which beeped. It extended another limb. “Documents, if pleased. Authority of Vaw-yei Towermaster Tagratark.”

Ferbin drew himself up. “We would see the Nariscene Grand Zamerin.”

“Oct documents remain Oct. To surrendering on arrival Surface.”

“Is this the Surface?” Ferbin asked, looking around. “It doesn’t look like it.”

“Is Surface!” the Oct exclaimed.

“Show us,” Ferbin said, “on our way to the Grand Zamerin.” He tapped the pocket holding the envelopes. “Then you shall have your documents.”

The Oct seemed to think about this. “To follow,” it said, turning abruptly and heading for the doors beyond, which were now opening.

They revealed a broad chamber on the far side of which large elliptical windows gave out on to a view of extensive gardens, broad lakes and distant, rocky, and fabulously steep mountains. Creatures, machines and things which might have been either moved about the vast concourse in a confusing mêlée of colour and sound.

“See? Is Surface,” the Oct said. It turned to them, “Documents. Pleased.”

“The Grand Zamerin, if you please,” Ferbin said.

“Others await. They cause confluence of you/Grand Zamerin, possibility. Or authorised in place of. Additional, explanatory. Grand Zamerin not present. Gone off. Distantly. Documents.”

“What do you mean, gone off?” Ferbin asked.

“What do you mean, others await?” Holse said, looking around, hand going to his knife.

13. Don’t Try This At Home

Djan Seriy Anaplian had been doing her homework, reacquainting herself with Sursamen and Shellworlds and studying the various species involved. She had discovered a Morthanveld image she liked: “When in shallows we look up and see the sun, it seems to centre upon us, its soft rays spreading out around us like embracing arms” (/tentacles, the translation noted), “straight and true with celestial strength, all shifting and pulsing together with the movement of each surface wave and making of the observer an unarguable focus, persuading the more easily influenced that they alone are subject to, and merit, such solitary attention. And yet all other individuals, near and far, so long as they too can see the sun, will experience precisely the same effect, and therefore, likewise, might be as justly convinced that the sun shines most particularly and splendidly upon them alone.”

She sat aboard the Medium Systems Vehicle Don’t Try This At Home, playing a game of bataös with one of the ship’s officers. The Delinquent-class Fast Picket and ex-General Offensive Unit Eight Rounds Rapid had rendezvoused with the Steppe-class MSV the day before and dropped her off before heading on its inscrutable way. So far, nothing had been said about the stowaway knife missile with the drone-quality brain in it which had made itself part of her luggage. She could think of several explanations for this but was choosing to believe the simplest and most benign, which was that nobody had spotted it.

It was possible, however, that this game of bataös might be the excuse for it being mentioned. Humli Ghasartravhara, a member of the ship’s governing board and on the rota of passenger liaison officers, had befriended her over breakfast and suggested the game. They had agreed to play unhelped, trusting the other not to seek advice elsewhere through implants or any other addenda, and not to gland any drugs that might help either.

They sat on tree stumps in a leafy glade of tropel trees by a small stream on the vessel’s topside park. A black-backed borm lay on the far side of the small clearing like a discarded cloak with legs, patiently stalking each errant patch of sunlight as the vessel’s sun line arced slowly overhead. The borm was snoring. Overhead, children in float harnesses or suspended under balloons squealed and shrieked. Anaplian felt something on her head, patted her short dark hair with one hand, then held her palm out flat and looked up, trying to see the floating children from beneath the intervening canopy.

“They’re not peeing on us, are they?” she asked.

Humli Ghasartravhara looked up too, briefly. “Water pistols,” he said, then returned his attention to the game, which he was losing. He was an elderly-looking fellow, pretty much human-basic, with long white hair held in a neat ponytail. His face and upper torso — revealed by some very high-waisted pantaloons of a particularly eye-watering shade of green — were covered in exquisitely detailed and intensely swirly abstract tattoos. The yellow-white lines glowed bright on his dark brown skin like veins of sunlight reflected from water.

“Interesting image,” Ghasartravhara said. Anaplian had told him about the Morthanveld idea of sunlight seen from under water. “The aquatic environment.” He nodded. “Quite different, but the same concerns. Surfacing.” He smiled. “That we are and are not the focus of all reality. All solipsists.”

“Arguably,” Anaplian agreed.

“You are interested in the Morthanveld?” Ghasartravhara made a clicking noise with his mouth as the bataös board indicated it would move a piece for him if he didn’t move one himself soon. He folded a piece, moved it, set it down. It unfolded itself as it settled and clicked down a few leaves of nearby pieces, subtly altering the balance of the game. But then, Anaplian thought, every move did that.

“I am going amongst them,” Djan Seriy said, studying the board. “I thought I’d do a little research.”

“My. Privileged. The Morthanveld are reluctant hosts.”

“I have connections.”

“You go to the Morthanveld themselves?”

“No, to a Shellworld within their influence. Sursamen. My homeworld.”

“Sursamen? A Shellworld? Really?”

“Really.” Anaplian moved a piece. The piece’s leaves clicked down, producing a small cascade of further leaf-falls.

“Hmm,” the man said. He studied the board for a while, and sighed. “Fascinating places, Shellworlds.”

“Aren’t they?”

“Might I ask? What takes you back there?”

“A death in the family.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Anaplian smiled thinly.

One of Djan Seriy’s earliest memories from when she had been a little girl was of a funeral. She had been just a couple of long-years old, maybe less, when they’d buried her father’s brother, the Duke Wudyen. She was with the other children of the court, being looked after by nurses back at the palace while the adults were off doing the burying and mourning and so on. She was playing with Renneque Silbe, her best friend, making houses out of screens and pillows and cushions on the rug in front of the nursery fire, which roared and crackled away behind its fire guard of hanging chains. They were looking through the pillows and cushions to find one the right size for their house’s door. This was the third house they’d built; some of the boys kept coming over from where they were playing near the windows and kicking their houses down. The nurses were meant to be looking after them all but they were in their own room nearby drinking juice.

“You killed your mother,” Renneque said suddenly.

“What?” Djan Seriy said.

“I heard you did. Bet you did. Mamma said so. You killed her. Why was that? Did you? Did you really? Did it hurt?”

“I didn’t.”

“She says you did.”

“Well I didn’t.”

“I know you did; my mamma told me.”

“Didn’t. Didn’t kill her. Wouldn’t have.”

“My mamma says you did.”

“Stop it. I didn’t.”

“My mamma does not lie.”

“Didn’t kill her. She just died.”

“My mamma said it was you who killed her.”

“She just died.”

“People don’t just die. Somebody has to kill them.”

“Wasn’t me. She just died.”

“Like Duke Wudyen was killed by who gave him the black cough. That’s reason.”

“Just died.”

“No, you killed her.”

“Didn’t.”

“Did so! Come on now, Djan. Did you? Did you really?”

“Leave me alone. She just died.”

“Are you crying?”

“No.”

“Is that what you’re doing now? Are you crying?”

“Not crying.”

“You are! You’re crying!”

“Not.”

“Toho! Kebli! Look; Djan’s crying!”

Humli Ghasartravhara cleared his throat as he moved his next piece. He wasn’t really playing any longer, just shifting pieces about. They might have sent somebody better, Anaplian thought, then chided herself for making assumptions. “Will you be staying long?” the man asked. “On Sursamen? Or with the Morthanveld?”

“I don’t know.” She made a move. Quick, easy, knowing she had won.

“The ship you arrived on,” the man said. He left a space she was meant to fill, but Anaplian just raised her eyebrows. “It wasn’t very forthcoming, that’s all,” Humli said, when she refused to speak. “Just kind of dropped you. No passenger manifest or whatever they call it.”

Anaplian nodded. “They call it a passenger manifest,” she confirmed.

“The ship’s a bit concerned, that’s all,” Ghasartravhara said, with a bashful smile. He meant his ship, this ship; the Don’t Try This At Home.

“Is it? The poor thing.”

“Obviously, we — it — would never normally be this, ah…”

“Intrusive? Paranoid?”

“Let’s say… concerned.”

“Let’s.”

“However, with the whole Morthanveld situation, you know…”

“I do?”

He gave a nervous laugh. “It’s like waiting for a birth, almost, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

Humli sat back, slumped a little and cleared his throat again. “You’re not really making this very easy for me, Ms Anaplian.”

“Was I supposed to? Why?”

He looked at her for a while, then shook his head. “Also,” he said, on a deep breath in, “I was, ah, asked by the ship Mind to ask you about an item in your luggage.”

“Were you now?”

“Unusual. Basically a knife missile.”

“I see.”

“You are aware it is there.”

“I am aware there is something there.”

Ghasartravhara smiled at her. “You’re not being spied on or anything. It’s just these things show up on the scans ships do of anything and everything coming aboard.”

“Are MSVs always so concerned with every intimate part of a traveller’s luggage?”

“Not normally. As I say—”

“The Morthanveld situation.”

“Well, yes.”

“Let me tell you the truth, Mr Ghasartravhara.”

The man sat back. “Okay,” he said, as though preparing himself for something unpleasant.

“I work for Special Circumstances.” She saw his eyes widen. “But I’m off duty. Maybe even off message, and possibly off for good. They’ve pulled my claws, Humli,” she told him, and flexed an eyebrow. She held up one hand, exposing her fingernails. “See those?” Humli nodded. “Ten days ago I had nails with embedded CREWs, any one of which could have drilled a hole in your head big enough to stick a fist through.” Mr. Ghasartravhara looked suitably impressed. Even nervous. She inspected her new nails. “Now… well, they’re just fingernails.” She shrugged. “There’s a lot of other stuff I’m missing, too. All the really useful, harmful, hi-gadgetry stuff. It’s been taken from me.” She shrugged. “I surrendered it. All because of what we’re calling the Morthanveld situation. And now I’m making a private visit to my home, after the recent death of both my father and my brother.”

The man looked relieved and embarrassed. He nodded slowly. “I really am sorry to hear that.”

“Thank you.”

He cleared his throat again and said apologetically, “And the knife missile?”

“It stowed away. It was supposed to stay behind but the drone which controls it wants to protect me.” She was choosing her words very carefully.

“Aw,” Ghasartravhara said, looking and sounding mawkish.

“It is old and getting sentimental,” she told him sternly.

“Yeah, but still.”

“Still nothing. It will get us both into trouble if it’s not careful. All the same, I’d appreciate it if the fact of that device’s presence here didn’t get back to SC.”

“Can’t imagine that will be a problem,” Humli said, smiling.

Yes, she thought, grinning complicitly, everybody likes feeling they’ve got something over SC, don’t they? She nodded at the board. “Your move.”

“I think I’m beaten,” he admitted ruefully. He looked at her dubiously. “I didn’t know you were in SC when I agreed to play you.”

She looked at him. “Nevertheless, I was playing by the same rules all the time. Unhelped.”

Humli smiled, still uncertain, then stuck his hand out. “Anyway. Your game, I think.” They pressed palms.

“Thank you.”

He stretched, looked around. “Must be lunchtime. Will you join me?”

“Happily.”

They started packing away the bataös set, piece by piece.

Well, she had done her best by her idiot drone, she reckoned. If word of its adventure did get back to SC, it wouldn’t be her fault. Anyway, it sounded like she and it might both get away with the fact that it was the mind of an experienced SC drone inside the knife missile, not a normal — and therefore relatively dim — knife missile brain.

It sounded like it. You still never knew.

The MSV Don’t Try This At Home was relatively small and absolutely crowded, packed with people and ships in a chance convergence of itineraries, building schedules and travel arrangements. Anaplian had been given quarters not within the craft’s own accommodation but inside a ship it contained and was still building, the Subtle Shift In Emphasis, a Plains-class General Contact Vehicle. This was a relatively new class of Culture ship and one that, apparently, couldn’t make up its mind whether it was a big Contact Unit or a small System Vehicle. Whatever else it was it was unfinished, and Anaplian occasionally had to wait for bits and pieces of the structure to be moved around inside the Don’t Try This At Home’s single Intermediate bay where the smaller ship was being constructed before she could move to or from her cabin.

Even this was not really a cabin, and not really part of the new ship either. She’d been allocated the whole of one of the GCV’s modules; a small short-range transit craft which was nestled inside the vessel’s lower hangar with a half-dozen others. The module had morphed its seating into more varied furniture and walls, and she was gratified at the scale of her accommodation — the module was designed to carry over a hundred people — however, there was nobody else quartered aboard either the rest of the under-construction ship or any of its other modules and it felt odd to be so isolated, so apart from other people on a ship so obviously crowded.

She didn’t doubt she’d been quarantined like this to make some sort of point but she didn’t care. To have such space in a small, packed ship was something of an indulgence. Others might have felt they were being treated like a pariah, being so prophylactically isolated from everybody else; she felt privileged. There were, she reflected, times when having been raised as a princess came in useful.

On her third night aboard the Don’t Try This At Home she dreamt about the time she been taken to see the great waterfall of Hyeng-zhar, a level down, in the Ninth, when she was still little.

Semi-conscious control over one’s dreams was not even an amendment, more of a skill, a technique one learned — in childhood for those born within the Culture, in early adulthood for Anaplian — and in all but her most banal, memory-detritus-clearing dreams, Djan Seriy was used to watching what was going on with a vaguely interested, analytical eye and, sometimes, stepping in and affecting proceedings, especially if the dream threatened to turn into a nightmare.

She had long since ceased to be surprised that one could experience surprise in one’s sleep at something one was watching oneself dreaming. Compared to some stuff that could happen after SC gave you total control over a thoroughly amended and vastly enhanced body and central nervous network, that was small doings.

Their party disembarked from the small train. She was holding the hand of her nurse and tutor, Mrs Machasa. The train itself was a novelty; a long, articulated thing like many land steamers all connected together and pulled by just one great engine, and running not on a road, but on railings! She’d never even heard of such a thing. She found trains and tracks and stations all very wonderful and advanced. She would tell her father to get some trains when they all returned to Pourl, and when he next returned from making the bad people stop being bad.

The station was crowded. Mrs Machasa held her hand tightly. They were a large party, and had their own escort of royal guard — her very important brother Elime, who would be king one day, was with them, which made them all special — but, all the same, as Mrs M had told her that morning as they were getting her dressed, they were far away from home, on another level, amongst foreigners, and everybody knew that foreigners was just another word for barbarians. They had to be careful, and that meant keeping hold of hands, doing as you were told, and no wandering off. They were going to see the greatest waterfall in all the world and she didn’t want to be swept away by all the horrible water, did she?

She agreed she didn’t want to be swept away by all the horrible water. The weather was cold; the Hyeng-zhar lay in a place where the weather varied a lot and it was not unknown for the river and the great cataract to freeze. Mrs M fastened her into her coat and leggings and hat, pulling and jerking her whole body as she tightened this and buttoned that. Mrs M was big and wide and had grey brows that bowed towards each other. There was always something that didn’t meet with her approval, often something about Djan Seriy, but she never hit her, sometimes cried over her and always hugged her, which was the best bit. Djan Seriy had tried to hug her father once when he was all dressed up for business and had been laughed at by some of the men in his court. Her father had pushed her away.

Anaplian felt she was floating in and out of her own younger consciousness, sometimes being her earlier self, sometimes watching from outside. She could see most of the scene quite clearly, though, as usual, when she was floating detached like this the one thing that was vague and unformed was her own younger self. It was as if even in dreams you couldn’t truly be in two places at once. Bobbing in the air to one side of her dream self, she could not see herself as a child, just a sort of vague, fuzzy image of approximately the right size and shape.

She was already criticising her own dream. Had Mrs Machasa really been that big? Had their party really been that many?

Back inside her head, she watched the train huff and puff and cough out great white clouds and a smell of dampness. Then they were in steam carriages being taken along a road through a great flat plain. There were clouds against a blue sky. Some trees. Scrubby grass that Zeel, her mersicor gelding, would have turned his pretty nose up at. All very flat and rather boring.

In her memory there was no warning; the Falls were just there. Snapshot of a by-child-standards interminable carriage journey (probably about ten minutes), then Bang; the Hyeng-zhar, in all their vast, chaotic glory.

There must have been sight of the enormous river, its far bank lost in its own created mists so that it appeared as though an entire sea was spilling to oblivion; whole rolling, billowing fleets of clouds piled above the massive curve of the colossal cataract, rising without cease into the invaded sky; shaled continents of banked and broiling mists disappearing to the horizon; entire sheets and walls and cliffs of spray, the everywhere thunder of that ocean of water tipping over the exposed rock and pounding into the dizzying complex of linked plunge pools beneath where enormous canted blocks, bulging, monstrous curves, hollowed husks and jagged angles of jumbled debris jutted and reared.

She must have seen some of the monks of the Hyeng-zharia Mission, the religious order which controlled the Falls’ excavation, and there must have been, if nothing else, all the squalor and slummery of the shanty town of ever-moving buildings that was the sprawling, peripatetic township called the Hyeng-zhar Settlement and all the equipment, spoil and general material associated with the desperate, ever-time-pressed excavations… but she recalled none of it, not before the shock of the Falls themselves, suddenly there, like the whole world twisting and falling sideways, like the sky upended, like everything in the universe falling forever in on itself, thrashing and pulverising all to destruction in a mad welter of elemental pandemonium. Here the air shook, the ground shook, the body shook, the brain shook inside the head, assaulted, rattled like a marble in a jar.

She had gripped Mrs M’s hand very tightly.

She had wanted to shriek. She had felt that her eyes were bulging out of her head, that she was about to wet herself — the water squeezed out of her by the sheer force and battery of the trembling air wrapped pressing all around her — but mostly she wanted to scream. She didn’t, because she knew if she did Mrs M would take her away, tutting and shaking her head and saying that she had always known it was a bad idea, but she wanted to. Not because she was frightened — though she was; quite terrified — but because she wanted to join in, she wanted to mark this moment with something of her own.

It didn’t matter that this was the single most stunning thing she had ever seen in her life (and, despite everything, despite all the wonders even the Culture had had to show her in her later years, it had, in all the important ways, remained so), that there was no matching it, no measuring it, no competing with it, no point in even trying to be noticed by it; all that mattered was that she was here, it was here, it was making the greatest noise in the history of everything and she needed to add her own acknowledgement to its mighty, overwhelming voice. Her own tininess in comparison to it was irrelevant; its unheeding vastness drew the breath out of her, sucked the sound of screaming from her little lungs and delicate stem of throat.

She filled her chest to the point she could feel her bones and skin straining against her tightly buttoned coat, opened her mouth as wide as it could possibly go and then shook and trembled as though shrieking for all she was worth, but making no noise, certainly no noise above that stunning clamour overwhelming the air, so that the scream was caught and stayed clenched inside her, suffusing out into her miniature being, forever buried under layer after layer of memory and knowing.

They stood there for some time. There must have been railings she looked through or perhaps climbed up on to. Maybe Mrs M had held her up. She remembered that they all got wet; the rolls of mists curled up and over them and drifted this way and that on the cool, energising breeze and came down soaking them.

It had been some time before she even noticed that the great blocks and bulges that dominated the watery landscape beneath the Falls themselves were gigantic buildings. When she looked properly, once she knew what to look for, she started to see them everywhere; tilted and broken around the lake-sized plunge pools, tumbled amongst the mists downstream, poking like bone bits out of the dark walls of falling water before they filled and blossomed with dirty grey spray that settled into white as it rose and rose and rose, becoming cloud, becoming sky.

At the time, she had worried that the people of the city must be getting drowned. A little later, when they had been telling her it really was time to go and trying to prise her fingers off the railings, she had seen the people. They were nearly invisible, hidden inside the mists most of the time, only revealed when the walls and canopies of spray parted briefly. They were at the absolute limit of the eye’s ability to make out; dwarfed, insected by the inhuman scale imposed by the arced sweep of the encompassing Falls, so tiny and reduced that they were just dots, unlimbed, only possibly or probably people because they could not be anything else, because they moved just so, because they crossed flimsy, microscopic suspension bridges and crawled along tiny threads that must be paths and grouped in miniature docks where minuscule boats and diminutive ships lay bobbing on the battering surface of hectic, dashing waves.

And of course they were not the people who had built and originally inhabited the buildings of the great city being revealed by the steady encroachment of the ever-retreating Falls, they were just some of the tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of looters, scavengers, diggers, climbers, breakers, tunnellers, bridge-builders, railway workers, pathfinders, mapmakers, crane men, hoist operators, fisherfolk, boat people, provisioners, guides, authorised excavationers, explorers, historians, archaeologists, engineers and scientists who had re-inhabited this ever-changing, unceasing ruin of torn sediment, tumbling rock, plunging water and scoured monumentality.

They peeled her fingers away one by one. Mrs M scolded her. She didn’t hear, never looked round, couldn’t care. She kept her wide-open eyes focused on that vast arena of water, rock, architecture and spray, kept her gaze fastened on the tiny dots that were people, turning all her attention and diminutive being to just that — not even bothering to expend the energy on struggling or protesting — until an exasperated guard finally pulled her away and put her over his shoulder, marching off with her, Mrs M just behind, wagging her finger at her. She still didn’t care and could not hear; she looked over and past Mrs Machasa at the Falls, just grateful the guard had put her over his shoulder this way, facing backwards, so she could keep looking at the great cataract of Hyeng-zhar for as long as possible, until it disappeared behind the lip of the land, and only the towers and spires and walls of mist and spray and cloud were left, filling half the shining waste of sky.

The Hyeng-zhar cataract emptied one sea into another down a river two thousand kilometres long and in places so broad one bank was invisible from the other. The Sulpitine river flowed smoothly and gradually across a broad plain in a series of vast loops until it came to the gorge it had created, where it plunged two hundred metres into an enormous bite gouged from the surrounding land; indeed into a series of bites within bites, as a whole fractal series of waterfalls ate into the multiply gouged ground; hundreds of U-shaped falls fed in groups into a succession of huge holes shaped like shattered cups, themselves set within the still greater complexity of the arc of the continually lengthening gorge.

The cataract had once formed part of the shore of the Lower Sulpine Sea — the remaining cliffs still wrapped around a quarter of the sea’s facing shore — but had quickly retreated as its titanic force washed away its own foundations, leaving a gorge two hundred metres deep and — when Djan Seriy had first seen it — four hundred kilometres long.

The gorge wore rapidly because of the nature of the stratification of the land. The cap rock supporting the river at the very lip of the Falls was sandstone, and so itself easily worn away. The layer underneath it was barely rock at all, more severely compacted mud from a series of huge floods hundreds of millions of years earlier. In a more intense gravity field the muds would have turned to rock as well; on Sursamen, some stayed so soft a human hand could crumble them.

The whole cataract was the Hyeng-zhar. It had been called that from the time the river had first started to plummet straight into the Lower Sulpine Sea six thousand years earlier and was still called that even though the complex of waterfalls had now retreated four hundred kilometres from its original position. What the city had been called, nobody knew. Its people had been wiped out in a cataclysm hundreds of millions of years ago and the whole level left abandoned for tens of millions of years subsequently, before — eventually, and with some trepidation — being colonised all over again by its present inhabitants.

They hadn’t even known the city was there and certainly had no idea what its name was. The Oct, the Nariscene, the Morthanveld and even the allegedly near-omniscient Elder cultures of the galaxy didn’t appear to know either; it had all been long ago and under earlier owners, the responsibility of the previous management, an unfortunate problem associated with the last, late, lamented tenants. The one thing everybody did know was that the city’s name wasn’t Hyeng-zhar.

The result was that the city came to be called the Nameless City. Which meant, of course, that its very name was a contradiction.

The Falls had been a Wonder of Sursamen for millennia just due to their sheer scale, famed even on levels of the great world the vast majority of whose inhabitants would never see them directly. Even so, the most prominent or important or just plain rich denizens of the Kiters of the Twelfth and the Naiant Tendrils of the Eleventh and the Vesiculars of the Tenth and the Tubers and Hydrals of the Fourth sometimes made the effort to come and see the Hyeng-zhar, so were transported by the Oct or the Aultridia up or down one or more Towers and then across to the site — those from profoundly different environments encased in whatever suit or vessel they required to survive — to gaze, usually through glass or screen or other intervening material, at the thunderous majesty of the celebrated cataract.

When the Falls began to expose the outskirt buildings of the buried city — almost a hundred years before Djan Seriy first saw them — their renown increased and spread even further, and took on too an air of mystery. The gradually uncovered metropolis was no mere primitives’ settlement, albeit — as more and more of it was excavated by the Falls and its true scale started to become clear — one of extraordinary size; it was undeniably ancient but it had been highly advanced. Even ruined, it held treasures. Most of the plunder was conventional in form; precious metals and stones that would struggle to occur naturally on a Shellworld with its lack of plate tectonics and crustal recycling. Some, though, was in the form of exotic materials that could be used, for example, to fashion blades and machine parts of conventionally unsurpassable sharpness or hardness and fabulous if incomprehensible works of what was assumed must be art.

The materials the buildings were made from themselves possessed properties almost unthinkable to the people who did the discovering on the Ninth. Spars and beams and thin claddings could be used to build bridges of enormous strength and amazing lightness; the main problem those who would use this extravagance of booty faced was that the raw materials rarely came away in handy lengths and chunks and were usually impossible to cut or trim.

Intact or ruined, the interiors of the buildings also often provided strange artifacts and occasionally useful supplies, though never any bodies, fossils or tombs.

The city grew as it was eaten away, the extent of the building debris eventually spreading to beyond the width of the Falls on both sides — the cataract was over seven kilometres across at present, and the city must be broader than that.

Its buildings were of a hundred different types and styles, to the extent that it had been suggested the city had been host to several — possibly many — diverse types of being; doors and interior spaces were different shapes, entire structures were built on disparate scales and some had basement or foundation levels of bizarre designs that went deep below the floor of the gorge base, all the way down to the Prime of the Shellworld itself, another eighty metres below, so that these few buildings remained standing even after the Falls had exposed them and retreated far beyond, leaving them as enormous slab-sided islands towering above the braid of streams that formed the reconstituted river making its way down the great gorge to the Lower Sea.

A series of wars amongst the humans who inhabited the Ninth, centred around the control of the Falls and their supply of treasure, resulted in an Oct-brokered peace that had held for a few decades. The Sarl and a few other peoples from the Eighth — allowed to travel to the relevant region of the Ninth by the Oct — had taken a peripheral part in some of the wars and a greater part in the peace, generally acting as honest brokers and providing relatively neutral administrational and policing contingents.

By then the fame of the Falls had grown sufficiently that even the Nariscene had taken an interest and declared the whole area a Site of Extraordinary Curiosity, effectively putting their stamp of authority on the peace deal and prodding the Oct to help guarantee it, at least within the limits of the general Shellworld mandate decreeing that the inhabitants of each level should basically be left to get on with their odd and frequently violent little lives.

The Deldeyn had other ideas. They’d been fortunate or skilful in the conduct of distant wars not immediately associated with the issue of the Hyeng-zhar, and, identifying an opportunity too good to miss — plus having at the time nothing else to do with the great armies they’d built up in the course of their far-flung victories — had annexed the neutral zone around the Falls, thrown out the administrators and police forces from the other peoples and, just for good measure, attacked anybody who protested too loudly. This latter group included the Sarl. It was in what the Deldeyn regarded as a small punitive raid to make clear to their inferiors that they were in charge now and were not to be trifled with, on the last Sarlian outpost on the Ninth at the foot of the Peremethine Tower, that King Hausk’s eldest son, Elime, had been killed. So had started the war between the Deldeyn and the Sarl, the war between the levels.

Anaplian woke gently from her dream of the Falls, surfacing to full consciousness with uncharacteristic slowness. How strange to dream of the Hyeng-zhar again after all this time. She could not immediately recall the last time she’d dreamt of them, and chose not to use her neural lace to investigate and tell her the exact date (as well as, no doubt, what she’d eaten the evening before, the disposition of the furnishings of the room she’d had the dream in and any company present at the time).

She looked across the billow-bed. A young man called Geltry Skiltz lay cutely curled and sweetly asleep, naked amongst the gently circulating wisps of soft fabric and what looked like large, dry snowflakes. She watched a few of the flakes swirl near his still most attractive if slightly slack-jawed face, each one neatly avoiding his nose and mouth, and thought back to the dream and through the dream to the reality of that first visit to the cataract.

She had been back again, after years of pleading, on just one other occasion, less than a year before Elime’s death and the start of the war that now might be approaching its end. She’d still been a girl really, she supposed, though she’d thought of herself as a mature young woman at the time and been convinced that her life was already mostly behind her. The Hyeng-zhar had been no less impressive; just the same though utterly different. In the years between her two visits — what she would now think of as about ten Standard years — the cataract had retreated nearly seven hundred metres upstream, revealing whole new districts of fascinating and grotesquely different buildings and structures and changing its shape profoundly.

From the ceiling of the level it would no doubt look roughly similar — that distinctive broken-cup look, that vast bite out of the land — but, close to, there was nothing left to recognise from the last time; all that had been there originally had been swept away, flushed as silt, mud, sand, rocks and rubble to the ever more distant sea or left crooked and askew in the great broad rush of water, clogged and skirted with sandbanks and debris tailings, forlorn.

Looking back, there had been signs of Deldeyn intentions even then, she realised. Just so many men in uniform, and a general air of grievance that other people were allowed to tell the Deldeyn what they could and couldn’t do on what was now, they seemed to believe, their level entirely. And all because of some idiot treaty signed in a time of weakness.

She’d been just mature enough to register some of this, though sadly not sufficiently so to be able to analyse it, contextualise it, act upon it. She wondered briefly if she had been capable of realising the dangers, would it have made any difference? Could she have warned her father, alerted him to the threat?

There had been warnings, of course; Sarlian spies and diplomats at the Falls themselves, in the regional capital of Sullir and the Deldeyn court itself and beyond had reported the mood and detailed some of the preparations for war, but their intelligence had gone unheeded. Such reports always arrived in great quantity and many invariably contradicted each other; some would always be simply mistaken, some would always be from agents and officials trying to exaggerate their own importance or swell their retainer and some would always be deliberate misinformation sown by the other side. You had to pick and choose, and therein lay the potential for mistake.

Even her father, wise warrior though he’d already become by then, had sometimes been guilty of hearing what he wanted to hear rather what was clearly being said, and at the time a potential war with the Deldeyn had been the last thing he’d wanted to be told about; he had his hands full with his campaigns on the Eighth and the armies of Sarl were in no way prepared to face what were at the time the superior forces of the Ninth.

She shouldn’t deceive, or blame, herself. Her warning, if she’d even had the wit to deliver one, would have made no difference. Apart from anything else she was just a girl, and so her father would have taken no notice anyway.

She lay awake in the cabin, young Mr Skiltz soundly asleep at her side, the disguised knife missile, drone-mind dormant, also effectively asleep, safely tucked up in her bag in a cupboard. She could still use her neural lace within the reach of the Culture’s dataverse, certainly within the ship, and through it she asked for an image to be thrown across the far wall of her bedroom showing the real space star field ahead of the Don’t Try This At Home.

The vessel was making modest speed. The stars looked almost stationary. She looked ahead into the swirled mix of tiny light-points, knowing that Meseriphine, the star Sursamen orbited, would be far in the distance and most likely still invisible. She didn’t ask for it, or its direction, to be displayed. She just watched the slow, slow drift of onward falling stars for a while, thinking of home, and fell gradually into a dreamless sleep.

14. Game

“Toho! A crown to your smallest coin you drop it!”

“Done, bastard that you are, Honge,” the gentleman in question said through gritted teeth. He took the weight of the stick and tankard on his chin and stood very still as one of the laughing serving girls filled it almost to the brim with beer. His friends whooped and laughed and called out insults. Bright sunlight from Pentrl’s first passing since the death of the King poured through tall windows into the smoky interior of the Gilder’s Lament.

Oramen grinned as he watched. They had been here most of the day. The latest game used beer, sticks, the galleries on either side of the Lament’s main room and two of the serving girls. Whoever’s turn it was had to stand beneath the gallery on one side while a girl filled a tankard full of beer, then the fellow had to walk from one side of the room to the other with the glass balanced on a stick resting on his chin, so that a girl on the opposite gallery could relieve him of the glass and bring it down to the assembly, for the purposes of drinking.

It was no easier than it sounded and most of the men had spilled beer on themselves by now, many to the point they were so soaked they had stripped off to the waist. They were using caulked leather tankards rather than ceramic or glass ones so that it didn’t hurt too much when you got hit on the head by one. The game became gradually more difficult as more beer soaked into both the floorboards and the players. About twenty such bravards were in the group, including Oramen and Tove Lomma. The air was thick with smoke and laughter, the smell of spilled beer and ribald taunts.

Tohonlo, the most senior of those present and the most highly ranked save for Oramen himself, pulled slowly away from the gallery and slid his way gradually across the floor, the tankard wobbling and describing a tight little circle above him. A small amount of ale sloshed over the side, splashing on his brow. The other men roared and stamped their feet but he just blinked, wiped the beer away from his eyes and carried on, tankard re-steadied. The foot-stamping got louder and, briefly, more co-ordinated.

Tohonlo neared the gallery on the other side, where a well-built serving lass in a low-cut blouse stretched out over the balustrade, one hand extended, looking to grab the handle of the wobbling tankard. Below, the men were happy to let her know the extent to which she was admired.

“Come on, Toho, tip it on to her tits!”

The tankard wobbled its way to the girl’s outstretched fingers, she grasped it and lifted, giving a little eek as the extra weight nearly tipped her over the edge of the gallery, then she pulled herself back. A great cheer went up from the men. Tohonlo pulled his chin back and let the stick fall. He grabbed it at one end like a sword and made to thrust it at the men who’d been making the most noise while he’d been distracted. The fellows made motions and noises of pretended fear.

“Oramen!” Tove said, slapping him on the back and thumping down on the bench beside him, depositing two leather tankards of beer in front of them with a slop and slosh of spillage. “You should take a turn!” He punched Oramen’s arm.

“I told you I didn’t want another drink,” Oramen said, raising the tankard and waving it in front of Tove’s sweatily gleaming face.

Tove leaned closer. “What?” It was very noisy.

“Never mind.” Oramen shrugged. He put his old drink to one side of their table and sipped at his new one.

“You should!” Tove shouted at him as another of their company put the balancing stick on his chin and waited for the first serving girl to fill the tankard on top. Meanwhile the tankard of ale Tohonlo had transported from one gallery to the other was duly delivered to him by the second serving girl, who then skipped back upstairs, neatly avoiding most of the slaps aimed at her behind. “You should take a turn!” Tove told Oramen. “Go on! Take a turn! Go on!”

“I’d get wet.”

“What?”

“Wet,” Oramen shouted above the din. The lads were clapping loudly and rhythmically.

“Well of course it’s wet! ’S the idea!”

“Should have worn an older tunic.”

“You don’t have enough fun!” Tove said, leaning close enough for Oramen to smell his breath.

“I don’t?”

“You don’t come out as often as you ought, prince!”

“Really?”

“I hardly see you! When was the last time we went out whoring, for fuck’s sake?”

“Not for a bit, I’ll grant.”

“You can’t be fed up with it, can you?”

“With what?”

“Girls!”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“You’re not becoming a man-fucker, are you?”

“Indeed not.”

“You don’t want to fuck men, do you?”

“Heaven forfend.”

“So what’s the matter?”

“I have other things to do, Tove. I’d love to spend more time with you but I—”

“You’re not becoming some fucking man-fucker, are you? They’re worse than fucking republicans.”

“Listen: no.”

“Because I fucking love you, prince, seriously, but I fucking hate fucking man-fuckers, I really fucking do.”

“Tove, I believe you. It would be hard not to. I do not want to fuck men. Please; believe. Even just remember.”

“Well then, come on out with us. Come and have some fun!”

“I shall, I promise.”

“But do you promise?”

“Will you listen? I promise. Now stop being—”

They hadn’t even seen the fight break out. Next thing they knew, tankards and glasses were flying and men were falling over each other and themselves. Blades were supposed to be left at the door, but in the sudden mêlée Oramen thought he saw the flash of sunlight on a steel edge. He and Tove both instinctively sat back and grabbed their tankards as a man — an especially substantial and well-built man — thudded back towards them, half stumbling, half falling.

Their bench was joined by spars to the table in front of them, so everything still went flying, including them; however, Oramen had remembered that bench and table were one even as the fellow came clattering and staggering towards them, and had pulled his legs up and started swivelling on his buttocks as the man’s back and head collided with the empty bench and full table in front of them; Oramen was able to roll out of the way as the whole assemblage went careering backwards taking Tove with it, crashing into another bench and table set behind, causing curses. Oramen even saved most of his ale, which was an achievement; every drink still on the table and the one in Tove’s fist went splashing back, mostly over the people sitting at the table behind, to their unalloyed and most vocal consternation. Tove and the people at the table behind were addressing each other:

“You fucker!”

“Fuck yourself!”

Oramen stood up, then immediately had to duck as a thrown glass sailed through the air where his head had been.

Tove and the people of the bench behind were still conversing. Oramen took a sip of his beer, checked for flying objects and took a step back. It was a most impressive fight. He liked the way you could see the smoke sort of roll and part when people went flying through it. Two burly knights charged forward and came between Tove and the argumentative inhabitants of the table behind, getting briefly tangled up with him.

Tove extracted himself and stumbled over to Oramen, wiping beer off his tunic. “We’d better go,” he said. “Follow me.”

“What?” Oramen protested as Tove grabbed his arm. “I was just starting to enjoy myself.”

“Time for that later. Now’s time to run away.” Tove pulled him by the sleeve round the side of the main fight, across the floor — the two serving girls were screaming from either gallery, encouraging, disparaging, throwing tankards both full and empty at the chaos of brawling bodies below — towards the back door which led to the yard and the toilets.

“But this is fun!” Oramen yelled at Tove, still trying to pull his arm free.

“Some of these fuckers might be anarchists; let’s away.”

A glass shattered on the wall near Oramen’s head. “Oh,” he sighed. “All right.”

“Seeing sense. Late than never.”

They clattered down some steps towards the courtyard and got to the door. Tove stopped in the narrow passageway and said, “After you, pr—”

“Oh, get out there,” Oramen told him, pushing him one-handed.

They burst through a door into the intense afternoon brightness of the tavern’s yard. Oramen caught the sudden stench of a nearby tannery.

A man swung round from one side of the door and sank a long dagger into Tove’s belly, ripping quickly upwards.

“Not, not me!” Tove had time to bubble, then he dropped as the man who’d struck him stepped around him and — with a second man — pulled his arm back, blade aimed straight at Oramen.

Oramen had had his hand at the small of his back all the way down the stairs, pulling his tunic top and shirt out, feeling until the warmth of the gun’s handle was there in his fist. He hauled it out, used his other hand to click the safety off as he’d practised a hundred times in his bedchamber and pulled the trigger in the face of the man who’d knifed Tove.

The man’s forehead formed a small round mouth which gave up a little spitting kiss of red; the hair at the back of his head bounced up and out, releasing a pink spray like a consumptive’s cough. He fell back as though he was collared, some charging beast just got to the end of his lead, jerking rearwards and falling on his shoulder blades and head, eyes staring up at the shining sky. The other man flinched at the incredibly loud bang the gun made and hesitated in his lunge, perhaps even took a half-step back. It was enough. Oramen swung his arm round and shot him — he was little further away — in the chest. He fell back as well, and stayed sitting on the strawy, shitty, uneven stones of the courtyard of the Gilder’s Lament.

The gunshots had left Oramen’s ears ringing.

Tove lay moving slowly, leaking huge amounts of dark red blood, which made a sort of rectangular graph-paper pattern along the spaces of the yard’s cobbles. The first man lay on his back, perfectly motionless, eyes fixed staring upwards. The man Oramen had just shot still sat upright, legs splayed in front of him, dagger dropped to one side, both his hands up at the small wound in his chest, his gaze directed somewhere on to the cobblestones between him and Oramen. He seemed to be hiccuping. Oramen wasn’t sure what to do and was not thinking straight, so he stepped forward and shot the sitting man in the head. He fell over like he’d thrown himself that way, as though gravity somehow wasn’t enough. Oramen hardly noticed that bang, his ears were ringing so.

There was nobody else about. He sat down too, before he fell down. The courtyard seemed very quiet after all the noise.

“Tove?” he said.

Tove had stopped moving. The graph pattern of blood moving along the spaces between the courtyard stones was reaching out towards Oramen’s outstretched feet. He moved them before it touched them, and shivered. There was a roaring noise which he took to be the continuing brawl in the room above.

“Tove?” he said again. It was surprisingly cold in the brightly sunlit courtyard.

Eventually, people came.

The Deldeyn had dug a series of canals and broad, water-filled ditches across their land, seeking to impede the land-based forces of the Sarl. Due to the direction the Sarl attacked from, itself determined by the Tower they had descended within, only one of these new obstacles lay in their way. They had already beaten off a massed attack by riflemen and grenadiers mounted on caude and lyge shortly after leaving the Night they had encountered near the Illsipine. The Deldeyn had attacked in good order and eventually had to flee in tatters, those who could. They fought bravely and the grenadiers in particular caused some damage and deaths, especially when a roasoaril tanker exploded, but they still had no answer to massed ground guns, which picked the slow-moving beasts and their riders out of the air like hunters firing into a tight flock of birds.

The Sarl’s own flighted forces were mostly held back until the Deldeyn fliers turned away in full retreat, then took off after them, harrying, shooting and tackling in mid-air where the riders were brave or foolish enough. The army dusted itself down and resumed its onward progress, the way marked by the commingled wreckage of dead Deldeyn fliers and their air-beasts. Tyl Loesp counted at least a dozen of the enemy’s to every Sarlian casualty.

They passed one mound of shattered bone, seeping gristle and leathery wing fabric lying on the dusty ground where the Deldeyn rider was still alive. Tyl Loesp himself noticed movement as they passed and ordered his command car stopped and the badly injured flier disentangled from his dead mount, a process which even done without deliberate roughness still caused him to scream hoarsely. They brought him aboard and set him on a litter at the rear of the open car where a doctor attempted to tend to him and an interpreter tried to question him about Deldeyn morale and their remaining forces. The man was near his end anyway, but found the strength to push the doctor away and spit in the interpreter’s face before he died. Tyl Loesp told them to push his body off the rear of the car without further ceremony.

The great plain stretched away to every horizon. The Sulpitine river was some twenty kilometres to their left. High clouds of faint pink stood against the too-blue sky as they came to the single wide canal which was the last defendable barrier between them and the region which held the Deldeyn capital city of Rasselle. The Deldeyn had stationed land forces on the near side of the canal but they had mostly fled on boats during the night. Their trenches were shallow and unshored, just as the canal was not properly lined and its banks were continually collapsing, leaving beaches of sand all along its length. The water was draining away in any case; only a diversionary feeder canal and hastily thrown-up breakwater affair further up the Sulpitine had kept the improvised water barrier supplied, and that had been destroyed by Sarlian sappers that morning, leaving the waters to drain back to the main river or just soak away into the sands.

Desultory artillery fire from the far side of the canal — from somewhere a good distance beyond it — mostly fell short and anyway seemed virtually unspotted. The Sarls had the air now; no Deldeyn fliers were rising to meet their scouts and patrols and spotters. The Sarlian artillery was mostly still being drawn up and the first few batteries were test-firing even now, finding their range. Tyl Loesp stood on the shallow berm of excavated sand, binoculars in hand, and listened to the explosions. The guns of the batteries fired in short order, almost rhythmically, like a troop of well-drilled riflemen, though the reports were naturally deeper-voiced. Such close-spaced regularity was a good sign. The spotters flew their grids, turning and swivelling in the air, signalling with heliographs where the shots from their allotted batteries were falling. On the far side, distant puffs of sand and veils of slowly drifting dust showed where the rounds landed.

Werreber came up in his land steamer, jumped out, said good day to some of tyl Loesp’s staff — keeping a respectful distance back from their chief — and strode on up to him.

“Question is,” he said abruptly, “do we wait for the water to drain or risk an attack now?”

“How long till it is drained sufficiently?” tyl Loesp asked.

“Perhaps till the start of the next short-night, when Uzretean sets. That’s a very short one; just three hours, then Tresker rises. The engineers are loath to commit themselves to exact times. Patches of the bed may remain muddy; other parts might be wadeable now.”

“Can we identify such variations?”

“We are trying to.” The field marshal nodded at a particularly large caude labouring its way low over the retreating waters, two men on its back. “That’s one of the engineers taking a look from above now. They seem generally of the opinion we should wait till dawn of Tresker. That would be prudent. Even if we can find a few dry paths sooner, crossing by them concentrates our attack to too pinched and vulnerable a focus. Better to attack broadly.”

“But would we not be well to attack sooner rather than later?” tyl Loesp asked. “If we have all our forces ready, I think we ought.”

“Perhaps. They don’t seem to have a lot of men on the far side, though there are reports of many roads and tracks; they might be there and well dug in.”

“Are not the fortifications on this side crude and shallow?”

“They are. That does not mean those on the far side are the same. They might even have left those on this side in such a poor state to lure us onwards.”

“We could be too cautious here,” tyl Loesp said. “The longer we wait, the more time they have to assemble what forces they have.”

“Our own reinforcements arrive too. And we can see any of theirs on their way. The scouts report none so far, though there is too much mist drifting from the great Falls to see further than thirty kilometres down the road. River mists may obscure matters here later, too, especially in the early morning of Tresker, though we may be able to use that to our own advantage.”

“I feel we should attack now,” tyl Loesp said.

“If the enemy are there in any numbers,” Werreber said, nodding at the far bank, “attacking now might lose us the war this afternoon.”

“You take too much care, Werreber. They are broken. We have the momentum. And even if they are there, even if we are temporarily thrown back, the war would not be lost. We have reached a stage where even on their homelands we can afford greater loss than they.”

“Why hurry? Why suffer such loss at all? By morning we’ll have pounded them all night and be set for a broad attack in overwhelming force that’ll trample them beneath us. The men and vehicles need resting anyway, tyl Loesp. To charge onward would be intemperate and risk severe attenuation. We can repel anything they choose to face us with, but only if our forces remain cohesive.”

“Nevertheless, to keep that momentum, even if we then halt and draw breath on the far side, we shall attack as soon as we have crossing points identified.”

Werreber drew himself up to his full, straight-backed height, staring down his hook of a nose at the other man. “I don’t understand you, tyl Loesp; you introduce delay by insisting on taking this circuitous route, then you drive us faster than a stooping lyge.”

“It is my way of maintaining a balance,” tyl Loesp said.

The field marshal looked frosty. “I advise against this attack, tyl Loesp.”

“And I note that.” Tyl Loesp smiled thinly. “Even so.”

Werreber gazed out across the expanse of shining sand and breeze-ruffled waters to the far bank. He sighed. “As you wish, sir,” he said. He inclined a small bow, turned and left.

“Oh, and Field Marshal?”

Werreber turned, frowning.

“Take no prisoners.” Tyl Loesp shrugged. “Save perhaps a few for interrogation.”

Werreber glared at him for a few moments, then gave the most cursory of nods and turned away again.

“You had not killed before?” Fanthile asked.

“Of course not!”

“Had you ever drawn blood, or been in a fight?”

Oramen shook his head. “Barely touched a sword, let alone a gun. My father never wanted me to be a warrior. That was Elime’s role. Ferbin was his reserve in that, though unsuited, perhaps through an overconcentration on Elime; my father felt Ferbin went to seed, from ripeness to spoiled almost before he was fully a man. I was too young to figure as a combateer when father was ascribing us our parts and planning his assault on posterity. My role was always to be the studious one, the thinker, the analyser, the futurian.” Oramen snorted.

Fanthile poured a little more of the sweet iced wine into Oramen’s crystal. They sat in the palace secretary’s private apartments. Oramen had not known who to talk to after the attack. Eventually his steps had led him to Fanthile. “Then you did especially well, did you not?” the palace secretary said. “Many a man who thinks himself brave finds he is not when faced with such expeditious assault.”

“Sir, did you not hear? I practically fainted. I had to sit before I fell. And I had the advantage; without my pistol, I’d not be here. Couldn’t even defend myself like a gentleman.”

“Oramen,” Fanthile said gently, “you are still a youth. And besides, you thought to arm yourself. That was wise, was it not?”

“So it proved.” Oramen drank deeply.

“And those who attacked you were not overly concerned with etiquette.”

“Indeed not. I imagine they only used a knife rather than a gun because one is silent and the other reports its use over half the city. Unless they turn out to be strict gentlemen, of course,” Oramen said with a sneer. “Such scorn guns, reckoning blades the honourable recourse, though I believe a rifle in a hunt is lately becoming allowable in even the most regressive shires.”

“And they did kill your best friend.”

“Oh, they killed Tove well; stuck him. He was most surprised,” Oramen said bitterly. A small frown creased his brow. “Most surprised…” he repeated, hesitating.

“Then do not blame yourself,” Fanthile was saying. Then it was his turn to frown. “What?”

Oramen shook his head. “Just the way Tove said ‘Not me’, when…” He wiped his face with one hand. “And before, when we were at the door…” He stared up at the ceiling for a few moments, then shook his head decisively. “No. What am I saying? He was my best friend. He could not.” He shivered. “Great grief, the man dies in my place and I look to blame him.” He drank again.

“Steady, young man,” Fanthile said, smiling, nodding at the glass.

Oramen looked at the glass, appeared to be about to argue, then set it down on the table between them.

“The blame is mine, Fanthile,” he said. “I sent Tove first through that door, and I was stupid enough to finish off the one I’d hit first in the chest. Through him we might have discovered who sent them.”

“You think they were sent, by somebody else?”

“I doubt they were just loitering around the courtyard waiting to rob the first person to come through that door.”

“Then who might have sent them?”

“I don’t know. I have thought, and, on thinking, realised there is a dismayingly large cast of suspects.”

“Who might they be?”

Oramen stared at the other man. “The same people you might think of.”

Fanthile met the prince’s gaze. He nodded. “Indeed. But who?”

Oramen shook his head. “Deldeyn spies, republicans, radical parliamentarians, a family with a personal vendetta against my family, from this generation or one before, an out-of-pocket bookmaker mistaking me for Ferbin. Who knows? Even anarchists, though they seem to exist more in the minds of those who oppose them most fervently than in awkward reality.”

“Who,” Fanthile asked, “would gain most from your death?”

Oramen shrugged. “Well, pursued to the absolute limits of logicality, tyl Loesp, I suppose.” He looked at the palace secretary, who met his gaze with a studiedly blank expression. He shook his head again. “Oh, I thought of him, too, but if I distrust him I distrust everybody. You, Harne, Tove — WorldGod welcome him — everybody.” Oramen made a fist and punched at the nearest cushion. “Why did I kill that wounded one? I should have kept him alive!” He stared at the palace secretary. “I’d have wielded the pliers and the glowing iron myself on that cur.”

Fanthile looked away for a moment. “Your father frowned on such techniques, prince. He used them most rarely.”

“Well,” Oramen said, discomfited, “I imagine these… occurrences are best avoided. Best… delegated.”

“No,” Fanthile said. “He would be present, but it was the only thing I ever saw make him physically sick.”

“Yes, well,” Oramen said, feeling suddenly awkward. “I doubt I really could do it. I would faint, or run away, no doubt.” He lifted his glass again, then set it down once more.

“You will need a new equerry, prince,” Fanthile said, looking pleased to be changing the subject. “I am sure one will be chosen for you.”

“Doubtless by Exaltine Chasque,” Oramen said. “Tyl Loesp has left him ‘in charge’ of me while he’s gone.” Oramen shook his head.

“Indeed,” Fanthile said. “However, might I suggest you present the Exaltine with your own choice, already made?”

“But who?” Oramen looked at the palace secretary. “You have someone in mind?”

“I have, sir. Earl Droffo. He is young but he is wise, earnest and reliable, devoted to your late father and your family and only lately come to Pourl. He is — how shall I put this? — not overly contaminated by the cynicisms of the court.”

Oramen regarded Fanthile a little longer. “Droffo; yes, I remember him from the day Father died.”

“Also, sir, it’s time you had your own dedicated servant.”

“Very well, arrange that too, if you would.” Oramen shrugged. “I have to trust somebody, palace secretary; I shall choose to trust you.” He drained his glass. “Now I trust you will refill my glass,” he said, and giggled.

Fanthile poured him a little more wine.

The battle of the canal crossing was neither the disaster Werreber had feared nor the stroll tyl Loesp had anticipated. They lost more men and materiel than the field marshal thought necessary to get to the far side, and even then they still needed to stop and regroup and resupply for so long that they might as well have waited for the dawn to attack on a broad front after a serious overnight artillery barrage and possibly with the cover of morning mists. Instead they had been funnelled into three long crossings over the shallow pools of standing water and damp sands, and, so concentrated, had suffered from the attentions of Deldeyn heavy machine-gunners and disguised mortar pits well dug in on the far side.

Still, the battle had been won. They had traded saved, unfired artillery shells for the expended lives and limbs of ordinary soldiers. Werreber thought this a shameful, ignominious bargain when there was no pressing need to hurry. Tyl Loesp thought it a reasonable one.

Werreber comforted himself in the knowledge that decreeing something did not necessarily make it so on the ground; knowing the order was to take no prisoners, many of the Sarl units chose to disarm the Deldeyn they captured and let them run away. Werreber had chosen not to hear of such insubordination.

The two men quarrelled again about splitting their forces; the regent wanted to send a substantial body of men to take the Hyeng-zhar Settlement while the field marshal thought it wiser to have all the troops available to attack the capital, where the last significant Deldeyn forces were massing. The regent prevailed there too.

Reduced by the forces assigned to take the Falls, the remaining army spread out, splitting into three sections for the final assault on the Deldeyn capital.

15. The Hundredth Idiot

As soon as Ferbin saw the knights Vollird and Baerth he knew they were here to kill him. He knew precisely who they were. They had stood on either side of the interior of the door at the abandoned factory where his father had been killed. They had stood there and they had watched their king being brutally murdered by tyl Loesp. The shorter, broader, more powerful-looking one was called Baerth — he was the one Ferbin had recognised at the time. The taller, skinnier knight was Vollird, well known to be one of tyl Loesp’s closest allies and who, Ferbin was sure beyond surety, had been the taller knight whose face he had not seen standing on the other side of the door from Baerth.

“Gentlemen,” said Vollird, nodding fractionally and smiling thinly. Baerth — the shorter, more powerful-looking one — said nothing.

The two had appeared on the broad, crowded concourse which stretched away from the Tower exit Ferbin and Holse had just been led from while the Oct — who was still demanding their documents — was attempting to explain why the Nariscene Grand Zamerin wasn’t there to be met with. The two knights were escorted by a Nariscene in a glittering exoskeleton of gold and precious stones. They were dressed in leggings and long tunics covered in tabards, with sheathed swords and pistol holsters hanging from thick belts.

Ferbin did not reply. He just stared at them, fixing their faces in his mind for ever. He could feel himself starting to shake as his pulse quickened and a cold, clenching sensation came from his guts. He was furious with his body for betraying him so, and did all he could to relax, breathe evenly and generally display every outward sign of steady normality.

“And you, sirs,” Holse said, hand still resting on the pommel of his long knife, “who would you be?”

“Documents, if please,” the Oct at Holse and Ferbin’s side said, unhelpfully.

The taller knight looked at Ferbin as he said, “Do us the courtesy of informing your servant that we don’t answer to the pet when the owner stands before us.”

“My servant is a man of honour and decency,” Ferbin said, trying to keep his voice calm. “He may address you in any form or manner he sees fit and by God you ought to be grateful for even the most meagre courtesy he accords you, for you deserve less than a dry spit of it, and if I were you I’d hoard most jealously what little comes your way, for trust me, sirs, leaner times lie ahead if you but knew.”

The short knight looked furious; his hand twitched towards his sword. Ferbin’s mouth was very dry; he was horribly aware how mismatched their two sides were in armament. The taller one appeared surprised and mildly wounded. “These are unkind words, sir, to two who desire only to help you.”

“I believe I know the fate to which you’d like to help us. It is a condition I’m determined to avoid for some time yet.”

“Sir,” the taller knight said, smiling tolerantly, “we have been sent by the current and rightful ruler of our shared homeland, who wishes you only good, to aid you in your passage. I regret any misunderstanding that might have led you to think ill of us before we are even correctly introduced. I am Vollird of Sournier, knight of the court; my companion here is Baerth of Charvin, also so ennobled.” Vollird swivelled fractionally and indicated the shorter man by his side with one hand as he spoke these words, though his gaze stayed fixed upon Ferbin. “We are here at your service, good sir. Grant us civility, I beg you, if for no other reason than that we are in front of our otherworldly friends here, and might risk demeaning the reputation of our whole people by seeming to squabble or fret.” Vollird waved at the brilliant, static forms of the Oct and Nariscene at their sides, his gaze still fastened on Ferbin.

“If you are at my service,” Ferbin replied, “you will remove yourselves from us at once and take this message to your master, who is no more the rightful ruler of our ‘shared homeland’ than my last turd, indeed somewhat less so: I go only to return, and when I do, I shall treat him with all the grace and respect he showed my father, at his end.”

There was the tiniest of jerking motions at one extremity of Vollird’s dark brow; it was the merest hint of surprise, but Ferbin was glad to see it. He knew he could say more, but also knew, with a sort of fascinated certainty, that this constituted one charge of powder he ought to keep aside for now. There might be a moment when some further revelation of his most detailed knowledge of what had happened in the half-ruined factory that evening would be of a use beyond just discomfiting these men.

Vollird was silent for a half-moment, then smiled and said, “Sir, sir, we still misunderstand each other. We would help you, escort you on your way away from here. That is our earnest wish and most specific instruction.” He smiled, quite broadly, and made an open gesture with both hands. “We all of us wish the same thing, which is to see you on your way. You have departed the land and level to which you have belonged with some urgency and dispatch, and we would merely assist you on whatever further flight you may be determined on. We ought not to dispute.”

“We do not wish the same—” Ferbin started to say, but then the shorter knight, Baerth, who had been frowning mightily for the last few moments, said, under his breath, as though to himself, “Enough talk. Sheath this, whore.” He drew his sword and lunged at Ferbin.

Ferbin started to take a step back; Holse began to move in front of him, his left arm making as though to push Ferbin behind him. At the same time Holse’s right arm arced across his body and out; the short knife tore through the air and—

And was whipped out of the air by one limb of the Nariscene at Baerth’s side, at the same time as one of its other legs tripped up the lunging knight and sent him sprawling to the floor at Holse’s feet. Holse stamped sharply on the man’s wrist and scooped his sword from his broken grip. Baerth grunted in pain. Vollird was drawing his pistol.

“Stop!” the Nariscene said. “Stop!” it repeated as Holse made to stab the prone knight with one hand and take his pistol with the other. The sword was knocked from his hand by the Oct while the Nariscene turned and snapped the pistol from Vollird’s grip, producing a sudden gasp. Sword and pistol went clattering to the floor in opposite directions.

“To stop, hostilities,” the Oct said. “Inappropriate behaviour.”

Holse stood, glaring at the eight-limbed alien, shaking his own right hand and blowing on it as though trying to get blood back into it on a cold day. He had moved the foot he’d stamped on Baerth’s wrist with so that it now lay on the man’s neck, with most of Holse’s weight on it. Vollird stood shaking his right hand vigorously, and cursing.

Ferbin had observed it all, keeping back and low and watching with an odd detachment who had done what and where all the weapons were at each moment. He found he still possessed a very clear idea of where both pistols were; one over there on the floor, the other still in Baerth’s side holster.

A device swung down from the ceiling. It looked like a bulky rendition of a Nariscene in an entire symphony of coloured metals.

“Fighting is not allowed in public spaces,” it said loudly in oddly accented but perfectly comprehensible Sarl. “I shall take charge of all weapons in this vicinity. Resistance will incur physical penalties not excluding unconsciousness and death.” It was already gathering up the sword and pistol from the floor, swinging through the air with a whooshing sound. The Nariscene handed it Holse’s long knife. “Thank you,” it said. It removed Baerth’s pistol from its holster — the man was still flat out under Holse’s boot, and starting to make gurgling sounds — took another, smaller gun from the prone knight’s boot and also found a dagger and two small throwing knives in his tunic. From Vollird, now holding his right hand delicately and grimacing, it took a sword, a long knife and a length of wire with wooden grips at each end.

“All unauthorised weapons have now been removed from the vicinity,” the machine announced. Ferbin noticed that a small crowd of people — aliens, machines, whatever one might call them — had gathered at a polite distance, to watch. The machine holding all the weapons said, “Nariscene Barbarian Relational Mentor Tchilk, present, is in notional charge here until further Authority arrives. All involved will hold approximate position under my custody, meantimes. Failure to comply will incur physical penalties not excluding unconsciousness and death.”

There was a pause. “Documents?” the Oct said to Ferbin.

“Oh, have your damned documents!” he said, and fished them from his jacket. He nearly threw them at the machine, but didn’t, in case this was taken as a violent act by the device hovering over them.

“So,” the glittering Nariscene said, floating slowly round about them a metre or so over their heads and between two and three metres away from them, “you claim to be a prince of this royal family of the Sarl, of the Eighth.”

“Indeed,” Ferbin said crisply.

He and Holse stood within a great, softly green-lit cave of a room. Its walls were mostly of undressed stone; Ferbin found this quite shockingly crude for beings supposedly so technologically advanced. The complex they had been taken to was set deep within a cliff which formed part of an enormous spire of rock sitting in a great round lake a short machine-flight from the concourse where they had first arrived. Once Vollird and Baerth had been taken away, apparently already adjudged to have been the guilty parties without anything as crude and time-consuming as a formal trial — as Vollird had pointed out, quite loudly — Ferbin had asked one of the Nariscene judicial machines if he could talk to somebody in authority. After a few screen conversations with persons distant, all visibly Nariscene, they had been brought here.

The Nariscene officer — he had been introduced as Acting Craterine Zamerin Alveyal Girgetioni — was encased in a kind of skeletal armour like that worn by the Nariscene who had been escorting Vollird and Baerth. He seemed to like floating above and around people he was talking to, forcing them to twist this way and that to keep him politely in sight. About him in the great cavern, at some distance, other Nariscene aliens did incomprehensible things from a variety of cradles, harnesses and holes in the ground filled with what looked like quicksilver. “This royal family,” the Acting Craterine Zamerin continued, “is the ruling entity of your people, and the executive positions are inheritable. Am I right?”

Ferbin thought about this. He looked at Holse, who shrugged unhelpfully. “Yes,” Ferbin said, less certainly.

“And you claim to have witnessed a crime on your home level?”

“A most grievous and disgraceful crime, sir,” Ferbin said.

“But you are unwilling to have the matter dealt with on your own level, despite the fact you claim to be the rightful ruler, that is, absolute chief executive, of this realm.”

“I am unable to do so, sir. Were I to try, I would be killed, just as the two knights today tried to kill me.”

“So you seek justice… where?”

“A sibling of mine is attached to the empire known as the Culture. I may gain help there.”

“You travel to some part, ship or outpost of the Culture?”

“As a first step, we thought to find one human man called Xide Hyrlis, whom we last heard was a friend of the Nariscene. He knew my late father, he knows me, he has — I hope and trust — still some kind sympathies for my family, kingdom and people and may himself be able to aid me in my fight for justice. Even if he cannot help us directly he will, at the least, I feel sure, vouch for me to the part of the Culture called Special Circumstances within which my sibling is located, allowing me to contact and appeal to them.”

The Nariscene stopped dead, becoming quite perfectly stationary in the air. “Special Circumstances?” it said.

“Indeed,” Ferbin said.

“I see.” The Nariscene resumed its orbit, sailing silently through the oddly scented air while the two humans stood patiently, swivelling their heads as the creature circled slowly round them.

“Also,” Ferbin said, “it is imperative that I get a message to my brother Oramen, who is now the Prince Regent. This would have to be done in the greatest secrecy. However, if it was possible — and I would hope that the mighty Nariscene would find this neither beneath nor beyond them—”

“That will not be possible, I think,” the Nariscene told him.

“What? Why not?” Ferbin demanded.

“It is not our place,” the Acting Craterine Zamerin said.

“Why not?”

Alveyal Girgetioni stopped in the air again. “It is not within our remit.”

“I am not even sure I know what that means,” Ferbin said. “Is it not right to warn somebody they might be in mortal danger? For that is—”

“Mr Ferbin—”

“Prince, if you please.”

“Prince Ferbin,” the Nariscene said, reinstating its slow circling. “There are rules to be observed in such interactions. It is not the duty or the right of the Nariscene to interfere in the affairs of our developing mentorees. We are here to provide an overall framework within which a species like that to which you belong may mature and progress according to their own developmental timetable; we are not here to dictate that timetable or hasten or delay any such advancement taking place along that timeline. We merely maintain the superior integrity of the entity that is Sursamen. Your own fates are allowed to remain your own. They are, in a sense, within your own gift. Our gift is that already stated, of overarching care for the greater environment, that is to say the Shellworld Sursamen itself, and the protection of your good selves from undue and unwarranted interference, including — and this is the focus of my point — any undue and unwarranted interference we ourselves might be tempted to apply.”

“So you’ll not warn a young fellow he may be in mortal danger? Or tell a grieving mother her eldest son lives, when she is in mourning for a dead husband and a son as well?”

“Correct.”

“You do realise what that means?” Ferbin said. “I’m not being mistranslated, am I? My brother could die, and soon. He will die in any event before he is of an age to inherit the full title of king. That is guaranteed. He is a marked man.”

“All death is unfortunate,” the Acting Craterine Zamerin said.

“That, sir, is no comfort,” Ferbin said.

“Comforting was not my intention. My duty is to state facts.”

“Then the facts tell a sorry truth of cynicism and complacency in the face of outright evil.”

“That may seem so to you. The fact remains, I am not allowed to interfere.”

“Is there no one who might help us? If we are to accept that you will not, is there anybody here on the Surface or elsewhere who might?”

“I cannot say. I do not know of anyone.”

“I see.” Ferbin thought. “Am I — are we — free to leave?”

“Sursamen? Yes, fully free.”

“And we may pursue our aims, of contacting Xide Hyrlis and my sibling?”

“You may.”

“We have no money about us with which to pay our fare,” Ferbin said. “However, on my accession to—”

“What? Oh, I see. Monetary exchange is not required in such circumstances. You may travel without exchange.”

“I will pay our way,” Ferbin said firmly. “Only I cannot do so immediately. You have my word on this, however.”

“Yes. Yes, well. Perhaps a cultural donation, if you insist.”

“I would also point out,” Ferbin said, gesturing at himself and Holse, “that we have nothing else, either, save what we stand up in.”

“Systems and institutions exist to aid the needy traveller,” the Acting Craterine Zamerin said. “You will not go without. I shall authorise such provisions as you may require.”

“Thank you,” Ferbin said. “Again, generous payment will be forthcoming when I have taken charge of what is rightfully mine.”

“You are welcome,” Alveyal Girgetioni told them. “Now, if you will excuse me…”

The Baeng-yon Crater was of Sursamen’s most common type, supporting a water- and landscape filled with a gas mixture designed to be acceptable to the majority of oxygen breathers, including the Nariscene, most pan-humans and a wide spectrum of aquatic species. Like most of the world’s Craters it had an extensive network of wide, deep canals, large and small lakes and other bodies of water both open and enclosed providing ample living space and travel channels for seagoing creatures.

Ferbin looked out from a high window set in a great cliff of a building poised over an inlet of a broad lake. Steep-pitched hills and outbreaking cliffs and boulder fields were scattered everywhere amongst a landscape mostly covered in grass, trees and tall, oddly shaped buildings. Curious obelisks and pylons that might have been works of art were dotted about, and various lengths and loops of curved transparent tubing lay draped between and across nearly every feature. A giant sea creature, trailed by a shoal of smaller shapes each twice the length of a man, floated serenely along one of these conduits, passing between gaudily coloured buildings and over some form of steamless ground vehicle to dip into the broad bowl of a harbour and disappear beneath the waves amongst the hulls of bizarrely shaped boats.

All about, Nariscene moved through the air in their glittering harnesses. Overhead, an airship the shape of a sea monster and the size of a cloud moved slowly across a distant line betokening an immensely tall and steep-sided ridge, its barely curved top a serrated row of tiny, regular, jagged peaks. All lay under a startlingly bright sky of shining turquoise. He was looking towards the Crater Edgewall, apparently. An invisible shield held the air inside the vast bowl. It was so bright because a vast lens between the sun and the Crater concentrated the light like a magnifying glass. Much of what he looked at, Ferbin thought, he didn’t even start to understand. Much of it was so strange and alien he hardly knew how to frame the questions that might provide the answers which would help explain what he was looking at in the first place, and he suspected that even if he did know how to ask the questions, he wouldn’t understand the answers.

Holse came through from his room, knocking on the wall as he entered — the doors disappeared when they opened, petals of material folding away into the walls. “Decent quarters,” he said. “Eh, sir?”

“They will do,” Ferbin agreed.

They had been escorted to this place by one of the judicial machines. Ferbin had been tired and — finding what he took for a bed — slept for a while. When he woke a couple of hours later, Holse was inspecting a pile of supplies in the middle room of the five they had been assigned. Another machine had appeared with the loot while Ferbin had been asleep. Holse reported that the door to the outside corridor was not locked. They appeared to be free to go about their business if they so desired, not that Holse had been able to think, offhand, of any business to go about.

They had more clothes now, plus luggage. Holse had discovered a device in the main room that brought entertainments into it; as many different entertainments as there were pages in a book, and seemingly there in the room with them. Almost all were utterly incomprehensible. After he’d muttered as much under his breath the room itself had talked to him and asked if he wanted the entertainments translated. He had said no, and been studious in not talking to himself since.

He’d also discovered a sort of chilly wardrobe full of food. Ferbin found himself to be remarkably hungry, and they ate well of the foods they recognised.

“Sirs, a visitor would meet with you,” a pleasant voice from nowhere said in a well-bred Sarl accent.

“That’s the voice of the room,” Holse whispered to Ferbin.

“Who is this visitor?” Ferbin asked.

“A Morthanveld; Tertiary Hulian Spine Strategic Mission Director General Shoum, of Meast, of Zuevelous, of T’leish, of Gavantille Prime, Pliyr.”

“Morthanveld?” Ferbin said, latching on to almost the only word in all this that he actually understood.

“She is some ten minutes away and would like to know if you’d care to receive her,” the disembodied voice said.

“Who exactly is this person?” Ferbin asked.

“The director general is currently the highest-ranked all-species office-holder on Sursamen and most senior Morthanveld official within the local galactic region. She is charged with oversight of all Morthanveld interests within approximately thirty per cent of the Tertiary Spine. She is present on Sursamen Surface in a semi-official capacity but wishes to visit you in an unofficial capacity.”

“Is she any threat to us?” Holse asked.

“None whatsoever, I’d imagine.”

“Kindly tell the directing general we shall be happy to receive her,” Ferbin said.

Five minutes before the director general arrived, a pair of strange globular beings appeared at the door of their suite. The creatures were about a stride in diameter and shaped like a huge glistening drop of water with hundreds of spines inside. They announced that they were the pilot team for Director General Shoum and asked, in highly polite and almost unaccented Sarl, to be allowed in for a look round. Holse obliged them. Ferbin was staring thunderstruck at what appeared be an entertainment showing aliens having sex, or possibly wrestling, and hardly noticed the two real aliens.

The two Morthanveld floated in, wafted about for less than a minute and announced themselves satisfied that all was well. A formality, they explained in what sounded like cheerful tones.

Holse was well-educated enough to know that the Morthanveld were an aquatic species and he was still considering the etiquette of offering such beings a drink when the director general herself and her immediate entourage descended. Ferbin switched the alien pornography off and started paying attention. He and the director general were introduced, she and her half-dozen attendants spread out around the room, making admiring comments about the furnishings and pleasant view and then the director general herself — they had been informed she was a she, though there was no way to tell that Holse could see — suggested they take a ride in her barque.

Holse had to shrug when Ferbin looked at him.

“That would be our pleasure, ma’am,” Ferbin told her graciously.

Half a minute later an enormous pancake of an air vehicle with a skin that glittered like innumerable fish scales floated down from above and presented its curved, open rear to the windows, which hinged down to allow them access to the barque.

The transparent walls and clear circles on the floor showed them rising quickly into the air. Soon they could see the whole of the great straggled settlement they had just left, then the entirety of the circular sea on whose margins it lay, then other seas and circular patches of green and brown before — the view seemed to blink as they passed through some gauzy barrier — they were looking down on an entire enormous circle of blue and green and brown and white, with hints of what must be the dark, near-lifeless Surface of Sursamen itself at the edges. Circular patches in the craft’s ceiling showed tiny points of light. Holse supposed they must be the stars of empty space. He took a funny turn and had to sit down quickly on one of a variety of couch-shaped bumps on the floor, all of which were very slightly damp.

“Prince Ferbin,” the director general said, indicating with one of her spines a long, shallow seat near what Ferbin took to be the prow of the craft, some distance away from everybody else. He sat there while she rested on a bowl-shaped seat nearby. A tray floated down to Ferbin’s side. It held a small plate of delicacies and an opened jug of fine wine with one glass.

“Thank you,” Ferbin said, pouring himself some wine.

“You’re welcome. Then, if you please, tell me what brings you here.”

Ferbin told her the short version. Even at this distance in time, relating his father’s murder left him flushed and breathing hard, boiling with fury inside. He took a drink of wine, went on with the rest of his tale.

The director general was silent until the end, then said, “I see. Well then, prince, what are we to do with you?”

“Firstly, ma’am, I must get a message to my younger brother Oramen, to warn him of the danger he is in.”

“Indeed. What else?”

“I should be grateful if you would assist me in finding our old ally Xide Hyrlis, and, perhaps, my other sibling.”

“I should hope that I shall be able to assist with your onward travel,” the waterworlder replied.

This did not sound like an unequivocal yes to Ferbin. He cleared his throat. “I have made it clear to the Nariscene representative I encountered earlier that I will pay for my passage, though I am unable to do so at the moment.”

“Oh, payment is irrelevant, dear prince. Don’t worry yourself about that.”

“I was not worried, ma’am, I seek only to make it quite clear that I need accept no charity. I will pay my way. Depend on it.”

“Well,” Shoum said. There was a pause. “So, your father is dead; murdered by this tyl Loesp man.”

“Indeed, ma’am.”

“And you are the rightful king, by birthright?”

“I am.”

“How romantic!”

“I cannot tell you how gratified I am that you feel that way,” Ferbin said. He had obviously, he realised now, absorbed more courtier-speak than he’d given himself credit for. “However, my most pressing need is to warn my young brother that he is in danger of his life, if it is not already too late.”

“Ah,” the Morthanveld said. “I have what may be news unknown to you on such matters.”

“You do?” Ferbin sat forward.

“Your mother is well. Your brother Oramen lives and appears to prosper and mature most quickly at court. You are presumed dead, though of course tyl Loesp knows you are not. Your reputation has been traduced. Regent Mertis tyl Loesp and Field Marshal Werreber command an army which has been lowered to the level of the Deldeyn by the Oct and even now is on the brink of a decisive battle with the depleted remains of the Deldeyn forces which our modellers believe your people will be victorious in, with less than three per cent doubt.”

“You have spies there, ma’am?”

“No, but information osmoses.”

Ferbin leant forward. “Madam, I must get a message to my younger brother, but only if there is no chance of it being intercepted by tyl Loesp or his people. Might you be able to help?”

“That is not impossible. However, it would, arguably, be illegal.”

“How so?”

“We are not supposed to take such a close, and… dynamic interest in your affairs. Even the Nariscene are not supposed to, and they are technically in charge here.”

“And the Oct?”

“They are allowed limited influence, of course, given that they control so much of the access to Sursamen’s interior and were largely responsible for making it safe, though they have, arguably, overstepped their marked allowance by some margin already in co-operating with the Sarl to deceive and so — almost certainly — defeat the Deldeyn. The Aultridia have subsequently laid a charge before the Nariscene Mentoral Court against the Oct alleging just that. The underlying reasons causing the Oct to behave like this are still being investigated. Informed speculation on the matter is unusually diverse, indicating that no one really has a clue at all. However, I must make clear: my species is supposed to mentor those who mentor those who mentor your people. I am layers and levels away from being jurisdictionally allowed to have any direct influence.

“You find yourself the unintended victim of a system set up specifically to benefit people like the Sarl, prince; a system which has evolved over the centieons to ensure that peoples less technologically advanced than others are able to progress as naturally as possible within a generally controlled galactic environment, allowing societies at profoundly different civilisational stages to rub up against each other without this leading to the accidental destruction or demoralisation of the less developed participants. It is a system that has worked well for a long time; however, that does not mean that it never produces anomalies or seeming injustices. I am most sorry.”

The stage is small but the audience is great, as his father had always said, Ferbin thought as he listened to this. But the audience was just the audience, and so was forbidden from running up on to the stage and taking part, and — aside from a few jeers and calls and the occasional “Behind you!” — they could do little to intervene without risking being flung out of the theatre altogether.

“These are rules that you cannot bend?” he asked.

“Oh, I can, prince. We are talking here, in one of my own craft, so that I can guarantee our privacy and we may speak freely. That is already bending one rule regarding legitimate interaction between what one might term our official selves. I can intervene, but ought I to? I do not mean, present me with further reason, I mean, would it be right for me to do so? These rules, regulations, terms and laws are not invoked arbitrarily; they exist for good reason. Would I be right in breaking them?”

“You may guess my view on the matter, ma’am. I would have thought that the brutal and disgraceful murder of an honourable man — a king to whom all in his realm save a few jealous, treacherous, murderous wretches paid grateful, loving homage — would seize at the heart of any creature, no matter how many layers and levels distant from such humble beings as ourselves they might be. We are all united, I would hope, in our love of justice and the desire to see evil punished and good rewarded.”

“It is as you say, of course,” Shoum said smoothly. “It is simply that, from a further perspective, one cannot but recognise that these very rules I allude to are set out so with precisely such an idea of justice at their core. We seek to be just to the peoples in our charge and those that we mentor by, usually, declining the always obvious option of facile intervention. One might intervene and interfere at every available opportunity and at every single instant when things did not turn out as any decent and reasonable creature would like. However, with every intervention, every interference — no matter how individually well-meant and seemingly right and proper judged purely on its own immediate merits — one would, subtly, incrementally but most certainly remove all freedom and dignity from the very people one sought only to help.”

“Justice is justice, ma’am. Foulness and treachery remain what they are. You may pull so far away you lose sight of them, but only draw back in and as soon as you see them at all you see their corruption, by the very colour and shape of them. When a common man is murdered it means the end for him and a catastrophe for his family; beyond that, and our sentimentality, it affects only as far as his own importance reaches. When a king is murdered and the whole direction of a country’s fate is diverted from its rightful course, it is another thing entirely; how such a crime is reacted to speaks loud for the worth of all who know of it and have the means to punish those responsible or, by tolerating, seem to authorise. Such a reaction beacons out its lesson for every subject, forming a large part of their life’s moral template. It affects the fate of nations, of whole philosophies, ma’am, and may not be dismissed as a passing commotion in the kennels.”

The director general made a dry, spindly noise, like a sigh. “Perhaps it is different for humans, dear prince,” she said, sounding sad, “but we have found that the underdisciplined child will bump up against life eventually and learn their lessons that way — albeit all the harder for their parents’ earlier lack of courage and concern. The overdisciplined child lives all its life in a self-made cage, or bursts from it so wild and profligate with untutored energy they harm all about them, and always themselves. We prefer to underdiscipline, reckoning it better in the long drift, though it may seem harsher at the time.”

“To do nothing is always easy.” Ferbin did not try to keep the bitterness out of his voice.

“To do nothing when you are so tempted to do something, and entirely have the means to do so, is harder. It grows easier only when you know you do nothing for the active betterment of others.”

Ferbin took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. He looked down through the nearest transparent circle in the floor. It showed another Crater sliding by beneath them like a lividly shining yellow-brown bruise of life on Sursamen’s darkly barren Surface. It was gradually disappearing as they travelled over it, leaving only that dark absence of Sursamen’s unadorned face implied below them.

“If you will not help me in getting a message to my brother warning him he is in mortal danger, ma’am, can you help me otherwise?”

“Assuredly. We can direct you to the ex-Culture human and ex-Special Circumstances agent Xide Hyrlis, and facilitate your conveyance towards him.”

“So it is true; Xide Hyrlis is now ex-Culture?”

“We believe he is. With SC, sometimes it is hard to be sure.”

“Is he still in a position to help us?”

“Possibly. I do not know. All I can solve with any certainty is your first problem, which is finding him; this would be a problem otherwise because the Nariscene guard him jealously. He works, in effect, for them now. Even when Hyrlis was here on Sursamen his purpose was moot; his presence was requested by the Nariscene and disapproved of by ourselves, though we drew the line at requesting his removal. A Nariscene experiment, perhaps, possibly at the behest of the Oct, testing the rules regarding the transfer of technology to less-developed peoples; he gave you a great deal, prince, though he was careful to do so only in the form of ideas and advice, never anything material. Your second problem will be persuading Hyrlis to talk to you; that you must do yourselves. Your third problem, obviously, is securing his services. Yours again, I’m afraid.”

“Well,” Ferbin said, “my good fortune arrives in small change these days, ma’am. Nevertheless, I hope I count my gratitude in larger coin. Even if that is all you can offer me, I am beholden. We have recently come to expect that every hand will be turned against us; to find mere indifference caused us joy. Any active help, however circumscribed, now seems like far more than we deserve.”

“I wish you well in your quest, prince.”

“Thank you.”

“Ah; an open Tower end, do you see?”

Ferbin looked down to see a small black spot on the dark brown expanse of the Surface. It only showed because the rest of the view was so dark; situated anywhere near a shining Crater, the dark dot would have been invisible beneath the wash of light. “That dark spot?”

“Yes. Do you know of those? It is the end of a Tower which leads all the way down to the Machine Core, where your god resides.”

“It is?” Ferbin had never heard of such a thing. The spot looked too small, for one thing. The Towers were known to taper, but they were still one and a half kilometres across when they reached the Surface. On the other hand, they were quite high up, here in the director general’s spacecraft.

“They are rare,” she told him. “No more than six out of a million Towers on any Shellworld are fashioned so.”

“That I did not know,” Ferbin said. He watched the tiny dot of darkness slide beneath them.

“Of course, there are defence mechanisms on the Surface and all the way down — no freak piece of random space debris or maliciously directed ordnance would make it far down there, and various doors and lock systems exist at the level of the Core itself — however, essentially, when you stare straight down that shaft, you are looking across twenty-one thousand kilometres of vacuum to the lair of the Xinthian itself.”

“The WorldGod,” Ferbin said. Even as one who had never been especially religious, it felt strange to hear its existence confirmed by an alien of the Optimae, even if she did use its common, dismissive name.

“Anyway. I think now we’ll return you to your quarters. There is a ship leaving in half a day that will take you in the direction of Xide Hyrlis. I shall arrange your passage.”

Ferbin lost sight of the tiny black dot. He returned his attention to the Morthanveld. “You are kind, ma’am.”

The view from the craft tipped all around them as it flipped over, banking steeply. Holse closed his eyes and swayed, even though he was seated. Beside Ferbin, the surface of the wine in his glass barely trembled.

“Your sibling,” the director general said as Ferbin watched the whole world tilt about them.

“My sibling,” Ferbin said.

“She is Seriy Anaplian.”

“That sounds like the name.”

“She, too, is of Special Circumstances, dear prince.”

“Apparently. What of it, ma’am?”

“That is a great deal of good connection for one family, let alone one person.”

“I shan’t refuse any portion, if good it is.”

“Hmm. It does occur to me that, no matter how distant, she may have heard about your father and the other recent events from your home level, which of course includes the news of your supposed death.”

“May she?”

“As I say, news osmoses. And where news is concerned, the Culture is of a very low pressure.”

“I fail to understand you, ma’am.”

“They tend to hear everything.”

The Nariscene ship The Hundredth Idiot and the orbiting transit facility parted company as gently as lovers’ hands, Holse thought. He watched the process happen on a big circular screen inside one of the vessel’s human-public areas. He was the only person there. He’d wanted to watch from a proper porthole but there weren’t any.

Tubes and gantries and stretchy corridors all sort of just kissed goodbye to each other and retracted like hands inside sleeves on a cold day. Then the transit facility was shrinking, and you could see the whole spindly, knobbly shape of it, and the start of the absurdly long cords that tethered it to the Surface of Sursamen.

It all happened in silence, if you didn’t count the accompanying screechings which were allegedly Nariscene music.

He watched Sursamen bulge darkly out across the great circle of screen as the transit facility shrank quickly to too-small-to-see. How vast and dark it was. How spotted and speckled with those shining circles of Craters. In the roughly quarter of the globe that Holse could see right now he guessed there were perhaps a score of such environments, glowing all sorts of different colours according to the type of atmosphere they held. And how quickly it was all shrinking, gathering itself in, concentrating, like something boiling down.

The ship drew further away. The transit facility was quite gone. Now he could see all of Sursamen; every bit was there on the screen, the whole globe encircled shown. He found it hard to believe that the place where he had lived his entire life was appreciable now in one glimpse. Look; he glanced from one pole to another, and felt his eyes jerk only a millimetre or less in their sockets. Further away still now, their rate of progress increasing. Now he could hold all mighty Sursamen in a single static stare, extinguish it with a blink…

He thought of his wife and children, wondering if he would ever see them again. It was odd that while he and Ferbin had still been on the Eighth and so exposed to the continual and sharp danger of being killed, or travelling up from their home level and still arguably at some risk, he had nevertheless been sure he would see his family again. Now that they were — you’d hope — safe for the moment, on this fancy ship-of-space, he watched his home shrink to quick nothing with a less than certain feeling that he’d be safely back.

He hadn’t even asked to get a message back to them. If the aliens were disinclined to grant the request of a prince, they’d surely ignore a more humble man’s petition. All the same, maybe he ought to have asked. There was even a possibility that his own request would be granted just because he was only a servant and so didn’t signify; news of his living might not matter enough to affect greater events the way knowledge of Ferbin’s continuing existence might. But then if his wife knew he was still alive and people in power heard of this, they would undoubtably treat this as part-way proof that Ferbin did indeed live, and that would be deemed important. They’d want to know how she’d come to know and that might prove uncomfortable for her. So he owed it to her not to get in touch. That was a relief.

He’d be in the wrong whatever he did. If they ever did get back he’d certainly be blamed for turning up alive after being dependably dead.

Senble, bless her, was a passably handsome woman and a good mother, but she had never been the most sentimental of people, certainly not where her husband was concerned. Holse always had the impression he somehow cluttered the place up when he was in their apartment in the palace servants’ barracks. They only had two rooms, which was not a lot when you had four children, and he rarely found a place to sit and smoke a pipe or read a news sheet in tranquillity. Always being moved on, he was, for the purposes of cleaning, or to let the children fight in peace.

When he went out, to sit somewhere else and smoke his pipe and read his paper undisturbed, he was usually welcomed back with a scolding for having wasted the family’s meagre resources in the betting house or drinking shop, whether he’d actually been there or not. Though he had, admittedly, used the earlier unjust accusations as cause to excuse the subsequent commitment of precisely such contrabandly activities.

Did that make him a bad man? He didn’t think so. He’d provided, he’d given Senble six children, holding her to him when she’d wept, mourning the two they’d lost, and doing all he could to help her care for the four who’d survived. Where he’d grown up, the proportions of live to dead would have been reversed.

He’d never hit her, which made him unusual within his circle of friends. He’d never hit a woman at all, which by his count made him unique amongst his peers. He told people he reckoned his father had used up the family’s allowance of woman-hitting, mostly on Holse’s poor long-suffering mother. He’d wished his father dead every single day for many years, waiting until he grew big enough to hit him back and protect his mother, but in the end it had been his mother who’d gone; suddenly, one day, just dropping dead in the field during the harvest.

At least, he’d thought at the time, she’d been released from her torment. His father was never the same man again, almost as though he missed her, just possibly because he felt in some way responsible. At the time Holse had nearly felt himself big enough to stand up to his father, but his mother’s death had reduced his father so, and so quickly, that he’d never needed to. He’d walked away from home one day and never gone back, leaving his father sitting in his cold cottage, staring into a dying fire. He’d gone to the city and become a palace servant. Somebody from his village who’d made the same journey a long-year later had told him his father had hanged himself just a month earlier, after another bad harvest. Holse had felt no sympathy or sorrow at the news at all, only a kind of vindicated contempt.

And if he and Ferbin were gone so long he was declared officially dead, Senble might remarry, or just take up with another man. It would be possible. She might mourn him — he hoped she would, though frankly he wouldn’t have put his own money on it — but he couldn’t imagine her tearing her hair out in an apoplexy of grief or swearing on his cold unge pipe she’d never let another man touch her. She might be forced to find another husband if she was thrown out of the servants’ quarters. How would he feel then, coming back to find his place taken so, his children calling another man Daddy?

The truth was that he would almost welcome the opportunity to start again. He respected Senble and loved his children, but if they were being looked after by a decent sort of fellow then he wouldn’t throw a fit of jealousy. Just accept and walk on might be the best idea; wish all concerned well and make a fresh start, still young enough to enjoy a new life but old enough to have banked the lessons he’d learned from the first one.

Did that make him a bad man? Perhaps, though if so then arguably all men were bad. A proposition his wife would probably agree with, as would most of the women Holse had known, from his poor mother onwards. That was not his fault either, though. Most men — most women, too, no doubt — lived and died under the general weight of the drives and needs, expectations and demands they experienced from within and without, beaten this way and that by longings for sex, love, admiration, comfort, importance and wealth and whatever else was their particular fancy, as well as being at the same time channelled into whatever furrows were deemed appropriate for them by those on high.

In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it.

He was still staring at the screen, though he hadn’t really been seeing it for some time, lost in this reverie of decidedly unromantic speculation. He looked for Sursamen, looked for the place — vast, multi-layered, containing over a dozen different multitudes — where he had lived all his life and left all he’d ever known quite entirely behind, but he couldn’t find it.

Gone; shrunk away to nothing.

He had already asked the Nariscene ship why it bore the name it did.

“The source of my name,” the vessel had replied, “The Hundredth Idiot, is a quotation: ‘One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.’ It is an old proverb.”

Holse had made sure Ferbin was not within earshot and muttered, “I think I’ve known a few hundredths in my time.”

The ship powered away in the midst of faraway stars, an infinitesimal speck lost in the vast swallowing emptiness between these gargantuan cousins of the Rollstars and Fixstars of home.

16. Seed Drill

Quitrilis Yurke saw the giant Oct ship immediately ahead and knew he was about to die.

Quitrilis was piloting his ship by hand, the way you were very much not supposed to, not in the presence of a relatively close-packed mass of other ships — in this case, a whole fleet of Oct Primarian Craft. Primarians were the biggest class of regular ships the Oct possessed. A skeletal frame around a central core, they were a couple of klicks long and usually employed more as a sort of long-distance travel aid for smaller ships than as fully fledged spacecraft in their own right. There was at least a suggestion that the Oct had ships of this size and nature because they felt they ought to rather than because they really needed them; they were a vanity project, something they seemed to think they were required to have to be taken seriously as a species, as a civilisation.

The Primarian fleet was twenty-two strong and stationed in close orbit directly above the city-cluster of Jhouheyre on the Oct planet of Zaranche in the Inner Caferlitician Tendril. They had arrived there in ones and twos over the course of the last twenty days or so, joining a single Primarian that had arrived over forty days before.

Quitrilis Yurke, a dedicated Culture traveller and adventurer, away from home for a good five hundred and twenty-six days now and veteran of easily a dozen major alien star systems, was on Zaranche to find out whatever he could about whatever there was to be found out there. So far he’d discovered that Zaranche was a boring planet of real interest only to the Oct and devoid of any humanoid life. That last bit had been bad news. It had seemed like really good news at first, but it wasn’t. He’d never been anywhere before where he was the only human. Only human on the planet; that was travelling. That was Wandering. That was exclusive. He’d like to see his fellow travellers beat that. He’d felt aloof for about a minute.

After that it was just boring and made him feel alone, but he’d told people — and especially his class- and village mates from back home (not that they were actually at home; they were mostly travelling too) — that he intended to stay on Zaranche for a hundred days or so, doing some proper studying and investigating that would lead to genuine peer-reviewable publishable kind of stuff and it would feel like defeat to squilch out now.

Of all his group, he was the luckiest; everybody agreed, including Quitrilis Yurke. He’d looked for and found an old ship that was up for a bit of vaguely eccentric adventure late in life, and so — rather than just bumming around, hitching, cadging lifts off GSVs and smaller ships the way everybody else was going to — he’d basically got his own ship to play with; estimable!

The Now We Try It My Way had been an ancient Interstellar-class General Transport Craft, built so long ago it could remember — directly; like, living memory — when the Culture had been, by civilisational standards, scrawny, jejune; positively callow. The ship’s AI (not a Mind — way too old and primitive and limited to be called a Mind, but most definitely still fully conscious and with a frighteningly sharp personality) had long since been transferred into a little one-off kind of runabout thing, the sort of ship that people referred to as Erratic-class, even though there wasn’t really any such class. (Only there sort of was now, because even Minds used the term.) Anyway. In its remodelled form it had been designed to serve as a sort of glorified shuttle (but faster than any ordinary shuttle), shifting people and things around the kind of mature system with more than one Orbital.

That had been semi-retirement. Before it could get too weird or eccentric it had properly retired itself and drifted into a sort of slow sleep state inside a hollow mountain store for ships and other biggish stuff on Quitrilis’ home Orbital of Foerlinteul. He’d done proper asking-around-old-ships research to find a craft just like that, following a private theory. And it had worked! He’d lucked! It had been so grade, just so apropos!

The old ship had woken itself up after a tickle-message from its old home MSV and, after only a little thought, agreed to act as personal transport for this youth, him!

Naturally all his classmates had immediately tried doing the same thing, but they were too late. Quitrilis had already found the only likely contender and won the prize and even if there had been other retired ships of a similar disposition anywhere nearby they’d likely have refused such follow-on requests just because it would look like setting a pattern rather than expressing ship individuality and rewarding human initiative, etc. etc.

So far, the relationship had been a pretty good one. The old AI seemed to find it amusing to indulge a young, enthusiastic human and it positively enjoyed travelling for the sake of it, with no real logic to the journeying, going wherever Quitrilis wanted to go for whatever reason he wanted to go there (often he cheerfully confessed he had no idea himself). Obviously they were constrained by the ship’s speed to a relatively limited volume — they’d hitched on a GSV to get here to the Inner Caferlitician Tendril — but that still left them with thousands of potential star systems to visit, even if there was, by general agreement, nothing especially undiscovered in the fairly well-travelled, beaten-track neighbourhood they had access to.

And sometimes the ship let him pilot it by hand, the AI switching itself off or at least retreating inside itself and leaving Quitrilis to take the controls. He had always imagined that even though it claimed he was in complete control it was secretly still keeping an eye on him and making sure he wasn’t doing anything too crazy, anything that might end up killing them both, but now — right now, as the Primarian craft that should not have been there suddenly filled the star-specked darkness of the sky ahead, spreading entirely across his field of vision — he realised the old ship had been true to its word. It had left him alone. He really had been in full hands-on charge of it the whole time. He really had been risking his life, and he was about to lose it now.

Twenty-two ships. There had been twenty-two ships; they’d agreed. Arranged in a pair of sort of staggered lines, slightly curved in tune with the planet’s gravity well. Quitrilis had gone up to have a look at them all but they were boring, just hanging there, only the one that had been there from the start even showed any sign of traffic with a few smaller craft buzzing about. The Oct Movement Monitoring and Control people had sort of shouted at him, he’d got the impression, but an Oct shouting was still a pretty involved, incomprehensible experience and he hadn’t taken much notice.

He’d got the ship to let him have control and gone swooping and zooming and wheening about the fleet, carving round them and then deciding he’d have a blast right through the middle, so heading some way off — well off, like a good half a million klicks on the far side of the planet — and setting everything to Very Quiet, what the ship called Ssh mode, before turning back and coming bazonging back in before they had time to shout at him again and dipping and weaving and hurtling between the parked Primarians (he’d been bouncing up and down in the couch in the control room, whooping), and he thought he’d done it no problem; got to the end of the mass of ships and slung out from under that twenty-second ship on the way back into empty space again (he’d probably go visit one of the system’s gas giants for a day or two to let any fuss die down), when suddenly, as he came out from under that last Primarian — or what should have been the last Primarian — there, dead ahead, bang in front of him, filling the view so tall and wide and deep and fucking big he knew there was no chance he could avoid it, there was another ship! A twenty-third ship!

What?

Something flashed on the spread of retro control panel in front of him (he’d specced that himself). “Quitrilis,” the ship’s voice said. “What—?”

“Sorry,” Quitrilis had time to say as the gantried, openwork innards of the Oct ship expanded in front of him, filling the ahead-view utterly now, getting down to detail.

Maybe they could fly through, he thought, but knew they couldn’t. The internal components of the Primarian were too big, the spaces were too small. Maybe they could crash-stop, but they were just too damn close. The Now We Try It My Way had taken over control. The hand controls had gone limp. Indicator overlays flashed up engine-damage levels of braking and dump-turning, but it was all much too little much too late. They’d hit side on and barely ten per cent slower.

Quitrilis closed his eyes. He didn’t know what else to do. The Now We Try It My Way made some noises he hadn’t known it could make. He waited for death. He’d been backed up before he left home, obviously, but he’d been away over five hundred days and changed immensely in that time. He was profoundly and maturely a different person compared to the brash young lad who’d sailed off in his persuadable accomplice ship. This would be a very real death. Wow; proper sinking feeling here. This would be no-shit, serious, never-again extinction. At least it’d be quick; there was that.

Maybe the Oct had close-range defences against this sort of thing. Maybe they’d be blasted out of the skies before they hit the Primarian. Or they’d be beamed out of the way or something, nudge-fielded, fended off with something truly, stupendously skilful. Except the Oct didn’t have any of that sort of stuff. The Oct ships were relatively primitive. Oh! He’d just realised: he was probably just about to kill lots of Oct people. He got a sinking feeling that outdid the earlier, selfish sinking feeling. Oh fuck. Fucking major diplomatic incident. The C would have to apologise and… He was just starting to think that, Hey, you really could squeeze a lot of thoughts into a second or two when you knew you were about to die when the ship said, quite calmly, “Quitrilis?”

He opened his eyes. Not dead.

And nothing but the old star-specked depths of space ahead. Eh?

He looked back. Stacked ships: twenty-plus Primarians, one ultra close behind, receding fast, like they’d just exited from it, travelling very fast indeed.

“Did we dodge that thing?” he said, gulping.

“No,” the ship said. “We went right through it because it’s not a real ship; it’s little better than a hologram.”

“What?” Quitrilis said, shaking his head. “How? Why?”

“Good question,” the ship said. “I wonder how many of the others are just pretend too.”

“I’m fucking alive,” Quitrilis breathed. He clicked out of the command virtuality so he was sat in the couch properly with the physical controls in front of him and the wraparound display showing in slightly less detail what he’d been looking at seemingly directly. “We’re fucking alive, ship!” he yelled.

“Yes, we are. How odd.” The Now We Try It My Way sounded puzzled. “I’m sending a burst to my old Systems Vehicle about this. Something’s not right here.”

Quitrilis waved his arms around and waggled his toes. “But we’re alive!” he yelled, ecstatic. “We’re alive!”

“I am not disagreeing, Quitrilis. However… Wait. We’re being target—!”

The beam from the original, first-arrived Primarian ship burst all around them, turning the little craft and the single human inside it entirely into plasma within a few hundred milliseconds.

This time, Quitrilis Yurke didn’t have time to think anything at all.

Djan Seriy Anaplian, agent of the Culture’s renowned/notorious (delete to taste) Special Circumstances section, had her first dream of Prasadal while aboard the Seed Drill, an Ocean-class GSV. The details of the dream itself were not important; what exercised her on waking was that it was the kind of dream she had always associated with home. She had had dreams like that about the royal palace in Pourl and the estate at Moiliou, about the Eighth in general and even — if you counted the dreams of the Hyeng-zhar — about Sursamen as a whole for the first few years after she’d come to the Culture, and always woken from them with a pang of homesickness, sometimes in tears.

Those had slowly disappeared to be replaced by dreams of other places where she’d lived, like the city of Klusse, on Gadampth Orbital, where she had begun her long introduction to, induction into and acceptance of the Culture. These were, sometimes, profound, affecting dreams in their own way, but they were never imbued with that feeling of loss and longing that indicated the place being dreamt about was home.

She blinked awake in the grey darkness of her latest cabin — a perfectly standard ration of space in a perfectly standard Ocean-class — and realised with a tiny amount of horror, a degree of grim humour and a modicum of ironic appreciation that just as she had started to realise that she might finally be happy to be away from and free of Sursamen and all that it had meant to her, she had been called back.

She nearly caught the ball. She didn’t, and it hit her on the right temple hard enough to cause a spike of pain. It would, she was sure, have floored anybody human-basic. With all her SC stuff still wired in she’d have dodged it or caught it one-handed easily. In fact, with her SC stuff still on line she could have jumped and caught it in her teeth. Instead, Whack!

She’d heard the ball coming, caught the most fleeting glimpse of it arcing towards her, but hadn’t been quite quick enough. The ball bounced off her head. She shook her head once, spread her feet wide and flexed her knees to make her more stable in case she might be about to topple, but she didn’t. The pain flicked off, cancelled. She rubbed her head and stooped to pick up the hard little ball — a crackball, so just a solid bit of wood, basically — and looked for who had thrown it. A guy sailed out of the group of people by the small bar she’d been passing on one of the outer balcony decks.

“You all right?” he asked.

She threw the ball to him on a soft, high trajectory. “Yes,” she told him.

He was a small, round, almost ball-like man himself, very dark and with extravagant hair. He caught the ball and stood weighing it in his hand. He smiled. “Somebody said you were SC, that’s all. I thought, well, let’s see, so I threw this at you. Thought you’d catch it, or duck or something.”

“Perhaps asking would have been more effective,” Djan Seriy suggested. Some of the people at the bar were looking at them.

“Sorry,” the man said, nodding at the side of her head.

“Accepted. Good-day.” She made to walk on.

“Will you let me make you a drink?”

“That won’t be necessary. Thank you, all the same.”

“Seriously. It would make me feel better.”

“Quite. No, thank you.”

“I make a very good Za’s Revenge. I’m something of an expert.”

“Really. What is a Za’s Revenge?”

“It’s a cocktail. Please, stay; have one with us.”

“Very well.”

She had a Za’s Revenge. It was very alcoholic. She let it affect her. The round man and his friends were Peace Faction people, from the part of the Culture that had split away at the start of the Idiran War, hundreds of years earlier, renouncing conflict altogether.

She stayed for more Za’s Revenges. Eventually the man admitted that, although he liked her and found her highly personable, he just didn’t like SC, which he referred to — rather sneeringly, Anaplian thought — as “the good ship We Know What’s Good For You”.

“It’s still violence,” he told her. “It’s still what we ought to be above.”

“It can be violent,” Anaplian acknowledged, nodding slowly. Most of the man’s friends had drifted off. Beyond the balcony deck, in the open air surrounding the GSV’s hull, a regatta for human-powered aircraft was taking place. It was all very gay and gaudy and seemed to involve a lot of fireworks.

“We should be above that. Do you see?”

“I see.”

“We’re strong enough as it is. Too strong. We can defend ourselves, be an example. No need to go interfering.”

“It is a compelling moral case you make,” Anaplian told the man solemnly.

“You’re taking the piss now.”

“No, I agree.”

“But you’re in SC. You interfere, you do all the dirty tricks stuff. You do, don’t you?”

“We do, I do.”

“So don’t fucking tell me it’s a compelling moral case then; don’t insult me.” The Peace Faction guy was quite aggressive. This amused her.

“That was not my intention,” she told him. “I was telling you — excuse me.” Anaplian took another sip of her drink. “I was telling you I agree with what you say but not to the point of acting differently. One of the first things they teach you in SC, or…” She belched delicately. “Excuse me. Or get you to teach yourself, is not to be too sure, always to be prepared to acknowledge that there is an argument for not doing the things that we do.”

“But you still do them.”

“But we still do them.”

“It shames us all.”

“You are entitled to your view.”

“And you to yours, but your actions contaminate me in a way that mine do not contaminate you.”

“You are right, but then you are of the Peace Faction, and so not really the same.”

“We’re all still Culture. We’re the real Culture, and you’re the cancerous offspring, grown bigger than the host and more dangerous than when we split, but you resemble us well enough to make us all look the same to others. They see one entity, not different factions. You make us look bad.”

“I see your point. We guilt you. I apologise.”

“You ‘guilt’ us? This some new SC-speak?”

“No, old Sarl-speak. My people sometimes use odds wordly. Words oddly.” Anaplian put her hand to her mouth, giggling.

“You should be ashamed,” the man said sadly. “Really we’re no better — you’re no better — than the savages. They always find excuses to justify their crimes, too. The point is not to commit them in the first place.”

“I do see your point. I really do.”

“So be ashamed then. Tell me you’re ashamed.”

“We are,” Anaplian assured him. “Constantly. Still, we can prove that it works. The interfering and the dirty-tricking; it works. Salvation is in statistics.”

“I wondered when we’d get to that,” the man said, smiling sourly and nodding. “The unquestioned catechism of Contact, of SC. That old nonsense, that irrelevance.”

“Is not nonsense. Nor… It is truth.”

The man got down from his bar stool. He was shaking his head. This made his wild fawn hair go in all directions, floatily. Most distracting. “There’s just nothing we can do,” he said sadly, or maybe angrily, “is there? Nothing that’ll change you. You’ll just keep doing all that shit until it collapses down around you, around us, or until enough of everybody sees the real truth, not fucking statistics. Till then, there’s just nothing we can do.”

“You can’t fight us,” Anaplian said, and laughed.

“Hilarious.”

“Sorry. That was cheap. I apologise. Profusely.”

The man shook his head again. “However much,” he said, “it’ll never be enough. Good-day.” He walked off.

Anaplian watched him go.

She wanted to tell him that it was all okay, that there was nothing really to worry about, that the universe was a terrible, utterly uncaring place and then people came along and added suffering and injustice to the mix as well and it was all so much worse than he could imagine and she knew because she had studied it and lived it, even if just a little. You could make it better but it was a messy process and then you just had to try — you were obliged, duty-bound to try — to be sure that you did the right thing. Sometimes that meant using SC, and, well, there you were. She scratched her head.

Anyway, of course they worried they were doing the wrong thing. Everybody she’d ever met in SC entertained such thoughts. And of course they satisfied themselves they were doing the right thing. Obviously they must, or they wouldn’t be in SC doing what they were doing in the first place, would they?

Maybe he knew all this anyway. Part of her suspected that the guy was an SC agent too, or something similar; part of Contact, perhaps, or somebody sent by the ship, or by one of the Minds overseeing the Morthanveld situation, just to be on the safe side. Nearly cracking her skull with a solid wooden ball was one crude way of checking she had been properly disarmed.

She left the final Za’s Revenge sitting on the bar, undrunk. “We’re all the fucking Peace Faction, you prick,” she muttered as she staggered away.

Before she left the Seed Drill she researched what was known about recent events on the Eighth, Sursamen. She did some of the investigating herself and sent agents — crude, temporary personality constructs — into the dataverse to search for more.

She was looking for detailed news but also for any hint that the Sarl might be more closely observed. Too many sophisticated civilisations seemed to believe that the very primitiveness of less developed cultures — and the high levels of violence usually associated with such societies — somehow automatically gave them the right to spy on them. Even for societies some way down the civilisational tech-order, cascade-production of machines to make machines that made other machines meant it was effectively a materially cost-free decision. The resulting cloud of devices could each be as small as a grain of dust and yet together they could, with the back-up of a few larger units in space, blanket-surveille an entire planet and transmit in excruciating detail almost anything that went on almost anywhere.

There were treaties and agreements to limit this sort of behaviour, but these usually only covered the galaxy’s more mature and settled societies, as well as those directly under their control or in their thrall; the relevant tech was like a new toy for those recently arrived at the great Involved table of the galactic meta-civilisation and tended to get used with enthusiasm for a while.

Societies which had only recently renounced the chronic use of force and resort to war — often reluctantly — were usually the most keen to watch those for whom such behaviour was still routine. One of the last-resort methods of dealing with those displaying such voyeurism was to turn their own devices against them, scooping the surveillance machines up from wherever they had been scattered, fiddling with their software and then infesting the worlds of their creators with them, concentrating on the homes and favoured recreational facilities of the powerful. This usually did the trick.

The peoples living within Sursamen, especially those like the Sarl, who would have been both unsuspecting of and defenceless against such conceited oversight, were amongst those supposedly protected against its depredations. But just because something wasn’t public didn’t mean it wasn’t happening. The Culture had one of the most open and inclusive dataverse structures in the galaxy but even it didn’t see or know everything. There were still plenty of private, hidden things going on. As a rule you got to hear of them eventually, but by then the damage had usually been done.

From the Eighth, though, so far; nothing. Either nobody was spying, or if they were they were keeping very quiet about it. The Morthanveld were easily capable, but too proud, law-abiding and anyway disdainful (much like the Culture, then); the Nariscene probably thought themselves above such behaviour too, and the Oct, well, the Oct didn’t really seem to care about anything other than pushing their claim to be the true Inheritors of the Veil legacy.

Even routine accessing of the Oct parts of the dataverse meant having to suffer a recorded lecture on the history of the galaxy according to the Oct, the whole point of which was to highlight the similarities between the Veil and the Oct and emphasise what a good claim the Oct had on the Involucra’s estate. To the Oct this inheritance obviously included both the Shellworlds themselves and the respect they felt ought to come attached, respect they rightly felt they were not being accorded. The Culture’s interface software just as routinely filtered this nonsense out — the Oct claim was strong only according to themselves; the vast majority of trusted scholars, backed by some pretty unimpeachable evidence, held that the Oct were a relatively recent species, quite unrelated to the Veil — but it was always there.

The Oct did watch over the Sarl, but very patchily, infrequently and — by agreement — with centimetre-scale devices; things big enough for a human to see. Usually these were attached to machines manned by Oct: scendships, aircraft, ground vehicles and the environment suits they wore.

There wasn’t much material publicly available from the last few hundreds of days, but there was some. Djan Seriy watched recordings of the great battle which had decided the fate of the Deldeyn, on the land around the Xiliskine Tower. The commentary and accompanying data, such as they were, suggested that the Aultridia had taken over the relevant sections of the Tower and transported the Deldeyn forces into a position where they could carry out their sneak attack on the Sarl heartlands. An SC-flagged data-end appended to the recording suggested Aultridian involvement was a lie; the Oct had been in charge.

All the recordage was from the latter part of the battle, and taken from static positions well above the action, probably from the Tower itself. She wondered if somewhere in what she was looking at there was detail of her father being wounded, and of whatever fate had overtaken Ferbin. She tried to zoom in, thinking to instruct an agent to look for anything relevant, but the recording was too coarse and lost detail well before individuals on the battlefield could be recognised.

She watched — again as though from on high, though this time the cameras were mounted on something flying — as the Sarl forces, now under Mertis tyl Loesp, crossed a canal in the desert near the Hyeng-zhar, its tall mists in the hazy distance, and saw their final short siege and shorter attack on Rasselle, the Deldeyn capital city.

That seemed to be all; a proper news report or docu-feature would have included victory celebrations in Pourl, tyl Loesp accepting the surrender of the Deldeyn commander, piles of dead bodies consigned to pits, banners going up in flames or the tears of the inconsolable bereaved, but the Oct hadn’t thought to get even remotely artistic or judgemental.

Just the sort of enthrallingly primitive, barbaric but dashing war comfortably positioned people liked to hear about, Anaplian thought. It was almost a pity nobody had thought to record it in all its gory detail.

A rapidly expanding but almost entirely vapid cloud of comment, analysis, speculation and exploitation was attached to the Oct recording through the news and current affairs organisations which took an interest in such events. Many Shellworld and Sursamen scholars — there were even people who regarded themselves as Eighth scholars, Sarl scholars — bemoaned the lack of decent data, leaving so much to speculation. For others, this lack of detail seemed to be merely an opportunity; offers to play war games based on the recent events were appended. Entertainments inspired by the recent thrilling events were also in preparation, or indeed already available.

Djan Seriy shivered in her couch by a fragrant poolside (splashing, laughter, the warmth of light on her skin) as she lay there, eyes closed, watching, experiencing all of this. She felt suddenly as she had right at the start of her involvement with the Culture, back in the shockingly confusing early days when everything seemed like bedlam and clash. This was all just too much to take in; at once far too close to home and utterly, horribly, invasively alien compared to it.

She would leave her agents running within the dataverse, in case there was some more directly observed stuff, and it was just well hidden.

Welcome to the future, she thought, surveying all this wordage and tat. All our tragedies and triumphs, our lives and deaths, our shames and joys are just stuffing for your emptiness.

She was being melodramatic, she decided. She checked there was no more of use to watch, clicked out, stood up and went to join in a noisy game of pool tag.

One ship, another ship. From the Seed Drill she was passed on to the GCU You Naughty Monsters. Another baton-like transmissal took her to the Xenoglossicist, an Air-class Limited System Vehicle. On her last night aboard there was an all-crews dance party; she threw herself into the wild music and wilder dancing like one abandoned.

The last Culture ship to carry her before she entered the Morthanveld domain was called You’ll Clean That Up Before You Leave, a Gangster-class Very Fast Picket and ex-Rapid Offensive Unit.

She still hated the silly names.

17. Departures

Oramen woke to the sound of a thousand bells, blown temple horns, manufactury sirens, carriage hooters and just-audible mass cheering and knew immediately that the war must be over, and won. He looked about. He was in a gambling and whore house known as Botrey’s, in the city’s Schtip district. There was a shape in the bedclothes beside him which belonged to the girl whose name he would remember shortly.

Droffo, his new equerry, who was newly married and determinedly faithful, chose to turn a blind eye to Oramen’s whoring so long as it was carried out in gambling or drinking houses; an honest bordello he would not even contemplate entering. His new servant, Neguste Puibive, had, before he’d left the farm, promised his mother he would never pay for sex and was dutifully honouring this commitment to the letter, though not beyond; he had been modestly successful in persuading some of the more generous girls to extend their favours to him out of simple kindness, as well as sympathy for one who had made such a well-meant if hopelessly naïve promise.

Oramen’s absences from court had not gone unnoticed or unremarked. Just the morning before, at a formal late breakfast reception given by Harne, the lady Aelsh, to welcome her latest astrologer — Oramen had already successfully forgotten the fellow’s name — Renneque, accompanied by and arm-in-arm with Ramile, the pretty young thing Oramen remembered from Harne’s earlier party with the various actors and philosophisers, had scolded him.

“Why, it’s that young fellow!” she had exclaimed upon seeing him. “Look, Ramile! I recall that pretty face, if not the name after so long apart. How d’you do, sir? My name’s Renneque. Yours?”

He’d smiled. “Ladies Renneque, Ramile. How good to see you again. Have I been remiss?”

Renneque sniffed. “I’ll say. Most unfathomably. I declare there are those absent at the war who’re more often at court than you, Oramen. Are we so boring you avoid us, prince?”

“Absolutely not. On the contrary. I determined myself to be so ineffably tedious I thought to remove myself from our most quotidian conduct in the hope of making myself seem more contrastedly interesting to you when we do meet.”

Renneque was still thinking this through when Ramile smiled slyly at Oramen but to Renneque said, “I think the prince finds other ladies more to his liking, elsewhere.”

“Does he, now?” Renneque asked, feigning innocence.

Oramen smiled an empty smile.

“It may be we are not wanted,” Ramile suggested.

Renneque raised her delicate chin. “Indeed. Perhaps we are not good enough for the prince,” she said.

“Or it may be we are too good for him,” Ramile mused.

“How could that be?” Oramen asked, for want of anything better.

“It’s true,” Renneque agreed, taking a tighter hold of her companion’s arm. “Some prize availability over virtue, I’ve heard.”

“And a tongue loosened by money rather than moved by wit,” Ramile offered.

Oramen felt his face flush. “While some,” he said, “trust an honest harlot over the most apparently virtuous and courtly of women.”

“Some might, out of sheer perversity,” said Renneque, whose eyes had widened at the word ‘harlot’. “Though whether a man of judgement and honour would term one of those females ‘honest’ in the first place might give rise to some controversy.”

“One’s values, like so much else, might become infected in such company,” Ramile suggested, and tossed her pretty head and long flow of tight blonde curls.

“I meant, ladies,” Oramen said, “that a whore takes her reward there and then, and seeks no further advancement.” This time, as he said “whore”, both Renneque and Ramile looked startled. “She loves for money and makes no lie of it. That is honest. There are those, however, who’d offer any favour seemingly for nothing, but would later expect a very great deal of a young man with some prospect of advancement.”

Renneque stared at him as though he’d lost his mind. Her mouth opened, perhaps to say something. Ramile’s expression changed the most, altering quickly from something like anger back to that sly look, then taking on a small, knowing smile.

“Come away, Renneque,” she said, drawing the other woman back with her arm. “The prince mistakes us grievously, as though in a fever. We’d best withdraw to let the blush subside, and lest we catch it too.”

They turned away as one, noses in the air.

He regretted his rudeness almost immediately, but too late, he felt, to make amends. He supposed he was already a little upset; that morning’s mail had delivered a letter from his mother, all the way from far-distant Kheretesuhr, telling him that she was heavily pregnant by her new husband and had been advised by her doctors not to travel great distances. So to voyage all the way to court, to Pourl, was unthinkable. A new husband? he’d thought. Pregnant? Heavily pregnant, so that it was no recent thing? He’d heard nothing of this, nothing of either. She had not thought to tell him anything. The date on the letter was weeks past; it had suffered some serious delay in finding him, or had lain unposted.

He felt hurt, cheated somehow, as well as jealous and oddly spurned. He still was not sure how to respond. It had even crossed his mind that it might be best not to reply at all. Part of him wanted to do just that, so letting his mother wonder at not being kept informed, making her feel uncared-for, as she had made him feel.

Even while he was still lying there listening to the distant sounds of triumph, trying to work out exactly what he felt about the war’s victorious conclusion and puzzling over the fact that his immediate reaction was somehow not one of utter and untrammelled joy, Neguste Puibive, his servant, ran into the room and stopped, breathless, at the foot of the bed. Luzehl, the girl Oramen had spent the night with, was waking up too, rubbing her eyes and looking dubiously at Puibive, a tall, wide-eyed, buck-toothed boy fresh from the country. He was full of enthusiasm and good will and had the uncommon ability of looking gangly even while asleep.

“Sir!” he shouted. He noticed Luzehl and blushed. “Begging both your pardons, sir, young lady!” He gulped air. “Sir! Still begging your pardon, sir, but the war is finished, sir, and we are victorious! The news is just arrived! Tyl Loesp, great Werreber, they — all Sarl — are triumphant! What a great day! Sorry to have intruded, sir! I’ll extrude now, sir!”

“Neguste, hold,” Oramen said, as the youth — a year older than Oramen but often seeming younger — turned and made to go, tripping over his own feet as he did so and stumbling again as he turned back on Oramen’s command. He sorted himself out and stood, at attention, looking blinking at Oramen, who asked, “Is there any more detail, Neguste?”

“I heard the great news from a one-armed parliamentarian constable charged with shouting it to the rooftops, sir, and he wore a cocked hat. The lady from the infusions bar across the road near fainted when she heard and wished her sons a safely speedy return, sir!”

Oramen stifled a laugh. “Detail within the report of the victory itself, Neguste.”

“Nothing further, sir! Just we are victorious, the capital city of the Deldeyn is taken, their king is dead by his own hand and our brave boys have triumphed, sir! And tyl Loesp and mighty Werreber are safe! Casualties have been light. Oh! And the Deldeyn capital is to be renamed Hausk City, sir!” Neguste beamed with pleasure at this. “That’s a fine thing, eh, sir?”

“Fine indeed,” Oramen said and lay back smiling. As he’d listened to Neguste’s breathless delivery he’d felt his mood improve and gradually begin to resemble what he’d have hoped it would have been from the start. “Thank you, Neguste,” he told the lad. “You may go.”

“Pleasure do soing, sir!” Neguste said. He had yet to come up with a reliable and consistent phrase suitable for such moments. He turned without tripping, found the door successfully and closed it behind him. He barged back in a heartbeat later. “And!” he exclaimed. “A telegraphical letter, sir! Just delivered.” He took the sealed envelope from his apron, handed it to Oramen and retreated.

Luzehl yawned. “Is it really over then?” she asked as Oramen broke the seal and opened the folded sheet.

Oramen nodded slowly. “So it would seem.” He smiled at the girl and started swinging his legs out of the bed as he read. “I’d better get to the palace.”

Luzehl stretched out, tossed her long, black, entangledly curled hair and looked insulted. “Immediately, prince?”

The telegram brought news that he had a new half-brother. It had been written not by Aclyn herself but by her principal lady-in-waiting. The birth had been protracted and difficult — not surprising, it was stated, given the lady Blisk’s relatively mature age — but mother and child were recovering. That was all.

“Yes, immediately,” Oramen said, shrugging off the girl’s hand.

The heat around the Hyeng-zhar had grown oppressive; two suns — the Rollstars Clissens and Natherley — stood high in the sky and vied to squeeze the most sweat out of a man. Soon, in this water-purged extremity, if the star-watchers and weather sages were to be believed, the land would be plunged into near total darkness for nearly fifty short-days and a sudden winter would ensue, turning the river and the Falls into ice.

Tyl Loesp looked out over the vast tiered, segmented cataract of the Hyeng-zhar, blinking sweat out of his eyes, and wondered that such colossal, booming energy and such furious heat could be quieted, stilled and chilled so soon by the mere absence of passing stars. And yet the scientists said it was going to happen and indeed seemed quite excited about it, and the records talked of such happenings in the past, so it must be so. He wiped his brow. Such heat. He’d be glad to be under the water.

Rasselle, the Deldeyn capital city, had fallen easily in the end. After a lot of whining from Werreber and some of the other senior army people — and some evidence that the low-order troops were unaccountably coy on the matter of putting captured Deldeyn to death — tyl Loesp had rescinded the general order regarding the taking of prisoners and the sacking of cities.

In retrospect, he ought to have pressed Hausk to have demonised the Deldeyn more. Chasque had been enthusiastic and together they had tried to convince Hausk the attitude of the soldiery and the populace would be improved if they could be made to hate the Deldeyn with a visceral conviction, but the King had, typically, been overcautious. Hausk distinguished between the Deldeyn as a people on the one hand and their high command and corrupt nobility on the other, and even allowed that they might altogether constitute an honourable foe. He would, in any event, need to govern them once they had been defeated, and people nursing a justified grievance against a murderously inclined occupier made peaceful, productive rule impossible. On this purely practical issue he judged massacre wasteful and even contrary as a method of control. Fear lasted a week, anger a year and resentment a lifetime, he’d held. Not if you kept fuelling that fear with every passing day, tyl Loesp had countered, but had been overruled.

“Better grudging respect than terrified submission,” Hausk had told him, clapping him on the shoulder after the discussion that had finally decided the matter. Tyl Loesp had bitten back his reply.

Following Hausk’s death there had not been sufficient time to turn the Deldeyn into the hated, inhuman objects of fear and contempt tyl Loesp thought they ought to have been from the start, though he had done his best to begin the process.

In any event, he had subsequently been left with no choice but to step back from the adamantine harshness of his earlier decrees on the taking of prisoners and cities, but drew comfort from the thought that a good commander always stood ready to modify his tactics and strategy as circumstances changed, so long as each step along the way led towards his ultimate goal.

He had, anyway, turned the situation to his advantage, he reckoned, letting it be known that this new leniency was his gift to the soldiers of the Eighth and the people of the Ninth, graciously and mercifully countermanding the severity of action Hausk had demanded from his deathbed to avenge his killing.

Savidius Savide, who was the Oct Peripatetic Special Envoy of Extraordinary Objectives Among Useful Aboriginals, watched as the human called tyl Loesp swam and was guided to the place prepared for him in the roving scendship’s receiving chamber.

The scendship was one of a rare class capable of both flight in air and underwater travel as well as the more normal vertical journeys within the vacuum of Towers. It was holding station in the relatively deep water of Sulpitine’s main channel two kilometres above the lip of the Hyeng-zhar cataract. The human tyl Loesp had been brought out to the submerged craft in a small submarine cutter. He was dressed in an air suit and was obviously unused to such attire, and uncomfortable. He was floated into a bracket seat across the receiving chamber from where Savide floated and shown how to anchor himself against the bracket’s shoulder braces using buoyancy. Then the Oct guard withdrew. Savide caused a membrane-buffered air channel to form between him and the human so that they could speak with something approaching their own voices.

“Tyl Loesp. And, welcome.”

“Envoy Savide,” the human replied, tentatively opening his face mask into the air-tunnel rippling between them. He waited a few moments, then said, “You wished to see me.” Tyl Loesp smiled, though he’d always wondered if this expression actually meant anything to an Oct. He found the suit he had to wear strange and awkward; its air smelled of something vaguely unpleasant, burned. The odd, worm-like tube that had extended from the envoy’s mouth parts to his own face brought with it an additional scent of fish just starting to rot. At least it was pleasantly cool here inside the Oct ship.

He looked round the chamber while he waited for the Oct to answer. The space was spherical or very close to it, its single wall studded with silvery spiracles and ornate, tiered studs. The sort of upside-down shoulder-seat he was attached to was one of the chamber’s plainer pieces of ornamentation.

He still resented having to be here; summoned like a vassal, when he had just taken over an entire level. Savidius Savide might have come to see him, to pay tribute to his success, in the Great Palace at Rasselle (which was magnificent; it made the palace at Pourl look plain). Instead he had had to come to the Oct. Secrecy in such matters had been the order so far and Savidius Savide obviously had no intention of changing this in the short term, whatever his reasons were. The Oct, tyl Loesp had to own, knew more of what was really going on here than he did, and so had to be indulged.

He would like to think that he had been called here finally to learn what the last few years had all been about, but he was under no illusions regarding the Oct ability to obscure, prevaricate and confuse. He still had the very faint suspicion that the Oct had overseen this entire enterprise on a whim, or for some minor reason they had subsequently forgotten, though even they would surely hesitate to engineer the transferral of an entire Shellworld level from one group to another without outside permission and without having a good reason, would they not? But see, here; the envoy’s little blue mouth parts were working and a couple of his orange arm-legs were moving and so he was about to speak!

“The Deldeyn lands are controlled now,” Savidius Savide said, his voice expressed as a low gurgle.

“They are indeed. Rasselle is secure. Order barely broke down at all but to the extent that it did, it has been restored. Every other part of the Deldeyn kingdom, including the principalities, provinces, Curbed Lands and outlying imperial satrapies are under our control, through either physical occupation by our forces or — in the case of the furthest and least important colonies — the unconditional acquiescence of their most senior officials.”

“Then all may rejoice in said. The Sarl may join the Oct, Inheritors of the mantle of those who made the Shellworlds, in justified celebration.”

Tyl Loesp chose to assume he had just been congratulated. “Thank you,” he said.

“All are pleased.”

“I’m sure they are. And I would thank the Oct for your help in this. It has been invaluable. Inscrutable, too, but invaluable, beyond doubt. Even dear, late King Hausk was known to concede that we might have struggled to overcome the Deldeyn without you being, in effect, on our side.” Tyl Loesp paused. “I have often asked myself what the reason might be that you have been so forthcoming with your advice and aid. So far I have been unable to come to any satisfactory conclusion.”

“In celebration is found that of explicatory nature, only rarely. The nature of celebration is ecstatic, mysteriously ebullient, detaching full reason, hence betokening some confusion.” The Oct drew breath, or whatever liquidic equivalent it was that Oct drew. “Explication must not become obstruction, deflection,” Savidius Savide added. “Final understanding remaining incentive is most fruitful use available.”

Some small amount of time passed during which the long silvery-looking tube of air joining them gently bobbed and slowly writhed, some lazy little bubbles wobbled their way upwards from the base of the spherical chamber, a sequence of dull, deep and distant whirring noises sounded through the enveloping water and tyl Loesp worked out what the Peripatetic Special Envoy had meant.

“I’m sure it is just as you say, Savide,” he agreed eventually.

“And, see!” the Envoy said, gesturing with two legs at a bunched semi-sphere of screens glittering into being, each projected by one of the shining spires protruding from the chamber’s wall. The scenes displayed on the screens — as far as tyl Loesp could discern them through the intervening water — showed various important and famous parts of the Deldeyn kingdom. Tyl Loesp thought he could make out Sarl soldiers patrolling the edge of the Hyeng-zhar cataract and Sarl banners fluttering above the Great Towers of Rasselle. There were more flags shown at the side of the crater caused by the fallstar Heurimo and silhouetted against the vast white pillar of steam cloud rising forever above the Boiling Sea of Yakid. “It is as you say!” Savidius Savide sounded happy. “Rejoice in such trust! All are pleased!” the Oct envoy repeated.

“How splendid,” tyl Loesp said, as the screens blinked out.

“Agreement is agreeable, agreed,” Savide informed him. He had risen slightly above the station he had been keeping until now. A tiny belch or fart from somewhere behind his mid-torso sent a shoal of tiny silver bubbles trembling upwards, and helped re-establish the envoy’s position in the waters of the chamber.

Tyl Loesp took a deep, tentative breath. “May we speak plainly?”

“No better form is known. Severally, specifically.”

“Quite,” tyl Loesp said. “Envoy; why did you help us?”

“Help you, the Sarl, to defeat they, the Deldeyn?”

“Yes. And why the emphasis on the Falls?”

There was silence for a few moments. Then the Oct said, “For reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“Most excellent ones.”

Tyl Loesp nearly smiled. “Which you will not tell me.”

“Will not, indeed. Equally, cannot. In time, such restrictions change, as with all things changing. Power over others is the least and most of powers, betruth. To balance such great success with transient lack of same is fit. Fitness may not be beheld by subject, but, as object, needs be trust’s invoked. In this: trust to wait.”

Tyl Loesp regarded the Oct hanging in the water a few metres in front of him for a while. So much done, yet always so much still to do. He had that day received a coded report from Vollird telling of the valiant and daring attempt he and Baerth had made on the life of “Our Fugitive” while on the Surface, only to be frustrated at the last moment by alien devil-machinery. They had had to reconcile to second-best, ensuring said person left most expeditiously, sailing away into the night between the eternal stars, terrified and lucky to be alive.

Tyl Loesp didn’t doubt Vollird exaggerated the worth of his and Baerth’s actions; however, killing Ferbin amongst the Optimae, or even the Optimae’s immediate inferiors, had always been a tall order and he would not overly censure the two knights. He’d have preferred Ferbin dead, but absent would do. Still, what mischief might he stir out among the alien races? Would he loudly declaim himself the wronged and rightful heir to all who’d listen, or sneak to his allegedly influential sister?

Things were never settled, it seemed to tyl Loesp. No matter how decisively one acted, no matter how ruthless one was, loose ends remained and even the most conclusive of actions left a welter of ramifications, any of which — it seemed, sometimes, especially when one woke, fretful, in the middle of the night and such potential troubles appeared magnified — might harbinge disaster. He sighed, then said, “I intend to rid us of the Mission monks. They get in the way and restrict more than they aid and enable. I shall follow an opposite course in the capital. We need the remains of the army and militia; however, I think it best they are balanced with some other faction and propose the Heavenly Host sect as that counterweight. They have a self-lacerating quality about their teachings which ought to chime with the current Deldeyn mood of self-blame following their defeat. Some heads will roll, obviously.”

“To that which must be attended, so devote. Is meet, and like.”

“So long as you know. I intend to go back to Pourl, for a triumph, and to return treasure and hostages. In time I may remain in Rasselle. And there are those I’d have near. I shall need a reliable and continually available line of supply and communication between here and the Eighth. May I count on that?”

“The scendships and autoscenders so devoted remain so. As in the recent past, so in the near future and — with all appropriate contextualisationing — foreseeable beyond.”

“I have the scendships already allocated? They are mine to command?”

“To request. The all flatters their likely or possible use. As needs be, so shall their presence.”

“As long as I can get up and down that Tower, back to the Eighth, back to here, at any time, quickly.”

“This is not within dispute. I determine no less, personally. Thus asked, so give, allowed and with pleasure is beinged.”

Tyl Loesp thought about all this for a while. “Yes,” he said. “Well, I’m glad that’s clear.”

Steam tugs towing barges took the whole contingent of monks — the entirety of the Hyeng-zharia Mission, from most lowly latrine boy to the Archipontine himself — away from their life’s work. Tyl Loesp, fresh returned from his frustrating audience with the envoy, watched the loading and went with the lead tug, which was towing the three barges containing the Archipontine and all the higher ranks of the order. They were crossing the Sulpitine, a kilometre or so upriver from the nearest part of the vast semicircle of the Falls. The monks had been relieved of their duty; they were all being taken across the river to the small town of Far Landing, a movable port always kept some four or five kilometres upstream from the cataract.

Tyl Loesp stayed under the shade of the lead tug’s stern awning, and still had to use a kerchief to wipe at his brow and temples now and again. The suns hung in the sky, an anvil and a hammer of heat, striking together, inescapable. The area of real shade, hidden from both Rollstars, was minimal, even under the broad awning. Around him, the men of his Regent’s Guard watched the swirling brown waters of the river and sometimes raised their glistening heads to look up at the gauzy froth of off-white clouds that piled into the sky beyond the lip of the Falls. The sound of the cataract was dull, and so ever-present that it was easy not to notice it was there at all most of the time, filling the languid, heat-flattened air with a strange, underwater-sounding rumble heard with the guts and lungs and bones as much as through the ears.

The six tugs and twenty barges tracked across the quick current, making a couple of kilometres towards the distant shore though only increasing their distance from the Falls by two hundred metres or so as they fought against the river’s fast-flowing mid-section. The tugs’ engines chuffed and growled. Smoke and steam belched from their tall stacks, drifting over the dun river in faded-looking double shadows barely darker than the sandy-coloured river itself. The vessels smelled of steam and roasoaril oil. Their engineers came up on to deck whenever they could, to escape the furnace heat below for the cooler furnace of the river breeze.

The water roiled and burst and tumbled about the boats like something alive, like whole shoals of living things, forever surfacing and diving and surfacing again with a kind of lazy insolence. On the barges, a hundred strides behind, under makeshift awnings and shades, the monks sat and lay and stood, the sight of their massed white robes hurting the eye.

When the small fleet of boats was in the very middle of the stream and each shore looked as far away as the other — they were barely visible at all in the heat haze, just a horizoned sensation of something darker than the river and a few tall trees and shimmering spires — tyl Loesp himself took a two-hand hammer to the pin securing the towing rope to the tug’s main running shackle. The pin fell, clattering loudly across the thick wooden deck. The loop of rope slithered drily over the deck — quite slowly at first but gathering a little speed as it went — before the loop itself flipped up over the transom and disappeared with hardly a sound into the busy brown bulges of the river.

The tug surged ahead appreciably and altered course to go directly upstream. Tyl Loesp looked out to the other tugs, to make sure their tow ropes were also being unhitched. He watched the ropes flip over the sterns of all the tugs until every one was powering away upstream, released, waves surging and splashing round bluff bows.

It was some time before the monks on the barges realised what was happening. Tyl Loesp was never really sure if he actually heard them start to wail and cry and scream, or whether he had imagined it.

They should be glad, he thought. The Falls had been their lives; let them be their deaths. What more had the obstructive wretches ever really wanted?

He had trusted men stationed downstream from the cataract’s main plunge pools. They would also take care of any monks who survived the plunge, though going on the historical record, even if you sent a thousand monks over the Falls it was unlikely one would survive.

All but one of the barges just vanished in the haze, falling out of sight, disappointing. One, however, must have struck a rock or outcrop right at the lip of the Falls, its stem tipping high into the air in a most dramatic and satisfying manner before it slid and dropped away.

On the way back to port, one of the tugs broke down, its engine giving up in a tall burst of steam from its chimney; two of its fellows put ropes to it and rescued vessel and surviving crew before they too fell victim to the Falls.

Tyl Loesp stood on a gantry like a half-finished bridge levered out over the edge of the nearpole cliff looking across the Hyeng-zhar, most of which was, frustratingly, obscured by mist and cloud. A man called Jerfin Poatas — elderly, hunched, dark-dressed and leaning on a stick — stood by his side. Poatas was a Sarl scholar and archaeologist who had devoted his life to the study of the Falls and had lived here — in the great, eternally temporary, forever shuffling-forward city of Hyeng-zhar Settlement — for twenty of his thirty long-years. It had long been acknowledged that he owed his loyalty to study and knowledge rather than any country or state, though that had not prevented him being briefly interned by the Deldeyn at the height of their war against the Sarl. With the monks of the Hyeng-zharia Mission gone he was now, by tyl Loesp’s decree, in full charge of the excavations.

“The brethren were cautious, conservative, as any good archaeologist is at an excavation,” Poatas told tyl Loesp. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the thunderous roar of the Falls. Spray swirled up now and again in great spiralling veils and deposited water droplets on their faces. “But they took such caution too far. A normal dig waits; one can afford to be careful. One proceeds with all due deliberation, noting all, investigating all, preserving and recording the place-in-sequence of all discovered finds. This is not a normal dig, and waits for nothing and no one. It will freeze soon and make life easier, if colder, for a while, but even then the brethren were determined to do as they had in the past and suspend all excavations while the Falls were frozen, due to some surfeit of piety. Even the King refused to intervene.” Poatas laughed. “Can you imagine? The one time in the solar-meteorological cycle — in a lifetime — when the Falls are at their most amenable to exploration and excavation and they intended to halt it all!” Poatas shook his head. “Cretins.”

“Just so,” tyl Loesp said. “Well, they rule here no more. I expect great things from this place, Poatas,” he told the other man, turning briefly to him. “By your own reports this is a treasure house whose potential the monks consistently downplayed and underexploited.”

“A treasure house which they resolutely refused to explore properly,” Poatas said, nodding. “A treasure house most of whose doors were left unopened, or were left to the privateers, little more than licensed brigands, to open. With sufficient men, that can all be changed. There’s many a Falls Merchant Explorer who’ll howl with rage to be denied the continuance of their easy stipend, but that is to the good. Even they grew arrogant and lazy, and lately, in my lifetime, more concerned with keeping others out of their concessions than fully exploiting them themselves.” Poatas looked sharply at tyl Loesp as the wind began to change. “There’s no guarantee of finding the sort of treasure you might be thinking of here, tyl Loesp. Wonder weapons from the past that will command the future are a myth. Quell that thought if it’s what exercises you.” He paused. Tyl Loesp said nothing. The veered wind was blowing a hot, desert-dry stream of air across them now, and the clouds and mists were beginning to shift and part before them in the great, still mostly unglimpsed gorge. “But whatever’s here to be found, we’ll find, and if it needs ripping out of some building the brethren of the Mission would have left intact, then so be it. All this can be done. If I have enough men.”

“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 though just thinking of something. “And can you get a message to a fellow named Oramen, house of Hausk, city of Pourl, the Eighth, Sursamen—”

“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 across the desk towards the two Sarl men. “These are your papers,” the Nariscene said. “You will carry them at all times.”

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.

Chilgitheri had not been forthcoming regarding what would happen after they were delivered here. This was where Xide Hyrlis ought to be and their request to see him had been forwarded to the relevant authorities, but whether they would be allowed to see him, and how — and even if — they would leave this world, she had confessed she did not know.

Ferbin closed his eyes, wishing he was almost anywhere else.

“Why are you here?” the Nariscene translated. The creature talking to them might have been the one who’d shown them to their cramped quarters; they had no idea. Introductions might have been in order, Ferbin thought, but obviously things were done differently here. He and Holse were dressed in the uniforms they had been given — the uniforms were both too short and too wide for the Sarl men, making them look ridiculous — and they were in another small chamber facing another small stump of a man behind another metal desk, though at least this time they had chairs to sit in.

“We are here to see a man called Xide Hyrlis,” Ferbin told the Nariscene and the small pale man-thing.

“There is no one of that name here.”

“What?”

“There is no one of that name here.”

“That cannot be true!” Ferbin protested. “The Morthanveld who brought us here assured us this is where Hyrlis is!”

“They could be mistaken,” the Nariscene suggested, without waiting for the man to speak.

“I suspect they are not,” Ferbin said icily. “Kindly be so good as to tell Mr Hyrlis that a prince of the Sarl, the surviving son of his old good friend, the late King Nerieth Hausk of the Eighth, Sursamen, wishes to see him, having travelled amongst the stars all the way from that great world at the express favour, with emphasis, of our friends the Morthanveld with the specific mission of meeting with him, as affirmed by Director General Shoum herself. See to it, if you would.”

The Nariscene appeared to translate at least some of this. The man spoke, followed by the Nariscene. “State full name of the person you wish to see.”

Full name. Ferbin had had time to think of this on many occasions since he’d formed this plan back on the Eighth. Xide Hyrlis’ Full Name had been a chant amongst some of the children at court, almost a mantra for them. He hadn’t forgotten. “Stafl-Lepoortsa Xide Ozoal Hyrlis dam Pappens,” he said.

The stunted man grunted, then studied a screen set into his desk. Its dull green glow lit his face. He said something and the Nariscene said, “Your request will be transmitted through the appropriate channels. You will return to your quarters to wait.”

“I shall report your lack of proper respect and urgency to Mr Hyrlis when I see him,” Ferbin told the Nariscene firmly as he got, painfully, to his feet. He felt absurd in his ill-fitting uniform but tried to summon what dignity he could. “Tell me your name.”

“No. There is no Mr Hyrlis. You will return to your quarters to wait.”

“No Mr Hyrlis? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Could be an issue of rank, sir,” Holse said, also rising and grimacing.

“You will return to your quarters to wait.”

“Very well; I shall inform General Hyrlis.”

“You will return to your quarters to wait.”

“Or Field Marshal Hyrlis, or whatever rank he may have attained.”

“You will return to your quarters to wait.”

They were awoken in the middle of the night, both of them from dreams of weight and crushing and burial. They’d been fed through a hatch in the door not long before the light in their room had dimmed; the soup had been almost inedible.

“You will come with us,” the Nariscene said. Two of the squat, pale, uniformed men stood behind it holding rifles. Ferbin and Holse dressed in their preposterous uniforms. “Bring possessions,” the Nariscene told them. Holse picked up both bags.

A small wheeled vehicle took them a short way up another spiral ramp. More doors and dimly lit tunnels brought them to a greater space, still dark, where people and machines moved and a train sat humming, poised between two dark holes at either end of the chamber.

Before they could board, the floor beneath their feet shook and a shudder ran throughout the huge chamber, causing people to look up at the dark ceiling. Lights swayed and dust drifted down. Ferbin wondered what sort of cataclysmic explosion would be felt so far beneath this much rock.

“Embark here,” the Nariscene told them, pointing at a shuttered entrance into one of the train’s cylindrical carriages. They heaved themselves up a ramp into a cramped, windowless compartment; the Nariscene floated inside with them and the door rolled back down. There was just enough room for them to sit on the floor between tall boxes and crates. A single round ball in the ceiling, guarded by a little metal cage, gave out a weak, steady yellow light. The Nariscene hovered over one of the crates.

“Where are we going?” Ferbin asked. “Are we going to see Xide Hyrlis?”

“We do not know,” the Nariscene said.

They sat breathing the stale, lifeless air for a while. Then there was a lurch and some muffled clanking as the train moved off.

“How long will this take?” Ferbin asked the Nariscene.

“We do not know,” it repeated.

The train rattled and buzzed around them and they both soon fell asleep again, to be woken from the depths once more, confused and disoriented, and hustled out — knees and backs aching — down a ramp and into another squat vehicle which took them and the accompanying Nariscene along yet more tunnels and down another spiral to a large chamber where a hundred or more tanks of liquid, each twice their height, glowed blue and green in the general darkness.

Each tank held the bodies of a half-dozen or so of the short, stubby-looking men, all quite naked. They looked asleep, a mask over each face, hoses snaking up to the surface of the tanks. Their bodies were quite hairless and many had been badly injured; some were missing limbs, some had obvious puncture wounds and others displayed extensive areas of burned skin.

Ferbin and Holse were so fascinated looking at this unnerving, ghoulish display that it was some time before they realised they appeared to be alone; the little wheeled vehicle had disappeared and seemingly taken the Nariscene with it.

Ferbin walked over to the nearest of the tanks. Close up, it was possible to see that there was a gentle current in the pale, slightly cloudy liquid; tiny bubbles rose from the floor of the tank and headed to the sealed caps of the cylinders.

“D’you think they’re dead?” Ferbin breathed.

“Not wearing those masks,” Holse replied. “They look a bit like you did, sir, when the Oct were healing you.”

“Perhaps they are being preserved for something,” Ferbin said.

“Or medicined,” Holse suggested. “There’s not one without an injury I’ve seen yet, though many seem to be healing.”

“You could say we’re healing them,” someone said behind them.

They both turned. Ferbin recognised Xide Hyrlis immediately; he had barely changed at all. Given that nearly a dozen long-years had passed, this ought to have seemed strange, though it was only later Ferbin realised this.

Xide Hyrlis was a tall man by the standards of the dwarfish people hereabouts, though he was still shorter than Ferbin or Holse. He was dense-seeming somehow, and dark, with a broad face, a large mouth with teeth that were both too few and too wide, and bright, piercingly blue-purple eyes. His eyes had always fascinated Ferbin as a child; they had an extra, transparent membrane that swept across them, meaning that he never had to blink, never needed to stop seeing the world, however briefly, from the moment he woke to the moment he slept (and he did little enough of that). His hair was black and long and kept in a tidy ponytail. He had a lot of facial hair, neatly trimmed. He wore a better-cut version of the grey uniform worn by most of the people they’d seen so far.

“Xide Hyrlis,” Ferbin said, nodding. “It is good to see you again. I am Prince Ferbin, son of King Hausk.”

“Good to see you again, prince,” Hyrlis said. He looked to one side and seemed to address somebody they could not see. “The son of my old friend King Hausk of the Sarl, of the Eighth, Sursamen.” Hyrlis returned his attention to Ferbin and said, “You are much grown, prince. How are things on the Eighth?” Holse glanced at Ferbin, who was staring straight at Hyrlis. “Ferbin was a hip-high child, last time I saw him,” Hyrlis added to whatever imaginary being was at his side. There really was nobody else anywhere near them, and nothing obvious that he could be addressing.

“I have much to tell you, Hyrlis,” Ferbin said, “little of it good. But first, tell me how I ought to address you. What rank do you hold?”

Hyrlis smiled. He glanced to one side. “A good question, don’t you think?” He looked at Ferbin. “Adviser, you might say. Or Supreme Commander. It’s so hard to know.”

“Choose one, sir,” Holse suggested. “There’s a good gent.”

“Allow me,” Ferbin said coldly, as he looked at Holse, who was smiling innocently, “to present my servant, Choubris Holse.”

“Mr Holse,” Hyrlis said, nodding.

“Sir.”

“And sir will do,” Hyrlis said thoughtfully. “It’s what everybody else calls me.” He caught some sudden tension from Ferbin. “Prince, I know you’ll only ever have called your father ‘sir’ since your majority; however, humour me in this. I am a king of sorts in these parts and command more power than ever your father did.” He grinned. “Unless he’s taken over the whole Shellworld, eh?” He turned his head again, “For yes, such Sursamen is, those of you slow to reference,” he said to his unseen companion as Ferbin — still, Holse thought, looking a little glassy-eyed — said, “As I say, sir, I have much to relate.”

Hyrlis nodded at the bodies bobbing gently in the tanks behind them. “Captured enemy,” he said. “Being kept alive, partially repaired. We wash clear their minds and they become our spies, or assassins, or human bombs, or vectors of disease. Come. We’ll find you a place to flop. And better clothes. You look like twig insects in those.”

They followed him to one of the open-sided runabouts, and as they did, dark figures left various shadows all about them, dissociating from the darkness like parts of it; humans in some near-black dark camouflage suits and armed with ugly-looking guns. Ferbin and Holse both jerked to a stop as they saw the four shadowy figures closing swiftly, silently in on them but Hyrlis, without even looking round, just waved one hand as he took the driving seat of the little wheeled vehicle and said, “My guard. Don’t worry. Jump on.”

Once he knew the dark figures were no threat, Ferbin was quite pleased to see them. Hyrlis must have been talking to them for some reason. That was a relief.

Xide Hyrlis kept a very fine table beneath the kilometres of mountain rock. The chamber was dome-shaped, the servants — young men and girls — glided silently. The stone table they sat around was loaded with highly colourful and exotic foodstuffs and a bewildering variety of bottles. The food was entirely delicious, for all its alien nature, and the drink copious. Ferbin waited until they had finished eating before telling his story.

Hyrlis heard Ferbin out, asking one or two questions along the way. At the end he nodded. “You have my sincere sympathies, prince. I am even sorrier at the manner of your father’s passing than at the fact of it. Nerieth was a warrior and both expected and deserved a warrior’s death. What you’ve described is a murder both cowardly and cruel.”

“Thank you, Hyrlis,” Ferbin said. He looked down, sniffing loudly.

Hyrlis did not seem to notice. He was staring at his wine glass. “I remember tyl Loesp,” he said. He was silent for some moments, then shook his head. “If he harboured such treachery then, he fooled me too.” He looked to one side again. “And do you watch there?” he asked quietly. This time there was definitely nobody present for him to be talking to; the four darkly camouflaged guards had been dismissed when they’d entered Hyrlis’ private quarters and the servants had, just minutes earlier, been told to stay outside the dining chamber until summoned. “Is that part of the entertainment?” Hyrlis said in the same quiet voice. “Is the King’s murder recorded?” He looked back to Ferbin and Holse. Choubris tried to exchange looks with Ferbin, but the other man was staring glassy-eyed at their host again.

Holse wasn’t having it. “Excuse me, sir,” he said to Hyrlis.

From the corner of his eye he could see Ferbin trying to attract his attention. Well, the hell with it. “Might I ask who you’re talking to when you do that?”

“Holse!” Ferbin hissed. He smiled insincerely at Hyrlis. “My servant is impertinent, sir.”

“No, he is inquisitive, prince,” Hyrlis said with a small smile. “In a sense, Holse, I do not know,” he said gently. “And it is just possible that I am addressing nobody at all. However, I strongly suspect that I am talking to quite a number of people.”

Holse frowned. He looked hard in the direction Hyrlis had directed his latest aside.

Hyrlis smiled and waved one hand through the air, as though dispelling smoke. “They are not physically present, Holse. They are — or, I suppose I must allow — they might be watching at a very considerable remove, via spybots, edust, nanoware — whatever you want to call it.”

“I might call it any or all, sir, I’m none the wiser at those words.”

“Holse, if you can’t conduct yourself like a gentleman,” Ferbin said firmly, “you’ll eat with the other servants.” Ferbin looked at Hyrlis. “I may have been too indulgent with him, sir. I apologise on his behalf and my own.”

“No apology required, prince,” Hyrlis said smoothly. “And this is my table, not yours. I’d have Holse here for what you call his impertinence in any event. I am surrounded by too many people unwilling to call me on anything at all; a dissident voice is welcome.”

Ferbin sat back, insulted.

“I believe that I am watched, Holse,” Hyrlis said, “by devices too small to be seen with the human eye, even ones like mine, which are quite keen, if not as keen as they once were.”

“Enemy spies, sir?” Holse asked. He glanced at Ferbin, who looked away ostentatiously.

“No, Holse,” Hyrlis said. “Spies sent by my own people.”

Holse nodded, though with a deep frown.

Hyrlis looked at Ferbin. “Prince, your own matter is of course of far greater importance; however, I think I ought to digress a little here, to explain myself and my situation.”

Ferbin gave a curt nod.

“When I was… with you, amongst you, on the Eighth — advising your father, Ferbin…” Hyrlis said, glancing to the prince but generally addressing both men, “I was employed — at the behest of the Nariscene — by the Culture, the mongrel pan-human and machine civilisation which is one of what you term the Optimae, those civilisations in the first rank of the unSublimed, non-elder groupings. I was an agent for the part of the Culture called Contact, which deals with… foreign affairs, you might say. Contact is charged with discovering and interacting with other civilisations which are not yet part of the galactic community. I was not then with the more rarefied intelligence and espionage part of Contact coyly called Special Circumstances, though I know that SC thought at the time the specific part of Contact I represented was, arguably, encroaching on their territory.” Hyrlis smiled thinly. “Even galaxy-spanning anarchist Utopias of stupefying full-spectrum civilisational power have turf wars within their unacknowledged militaries.”

Hyrlis sighed. “I did, later, become part of Special Circumstances, a decision I look back on now with more regret than pride.” His smile did, indeed, look sad. “When you leave the Culture — and people do, all the time — you are made aware of certain responsibilities you are deemed to have, should you venture into the kind of civilisation that Contact might be interested in.

“I was missioned to do what I did by Contact, which had modelled the situation on the Eighth exhaustively, so that, when I passed on some strategic plan to King Hausk, or suggested sabots and rifling to the royal armourers, it was with a very good and highly reliable idea of what the effects would be. In theory, a reasonably well-read Culture citizen could do the same with no control, no back-up and no idea what they were really doing. Or, worse, with a very good idea; they might want to be king, or emperor, or whatever, and their knowledge would give them a chance of succeeding.” Hyrlis waved one hand. “It’s an exaggerated concern, in my opinion; knowledge in the Culture is cheap beyond measuring, however the ruthlessness required to use that knowledge proficiently in a less forgiving society is almost unheard of.

“Nevertheless, the result is that when you leave the Culture to come to a place like this, or the Eighth, you are watched. Devices are sent to spy on you and make sure you’re not getting up to any mischief.”

“And if a person does get up to mischief, sir?” Holse asked.

“Why, they stop you, Mr Holse. They use the devices they’ve sent to spy, or they send people or other devices to undo what you’ve done, and, as a last resort, they kidnap you and bring you back, to be told off.” Hyrlis shrugged. “When you leave SC, as I did, further precautions are taken: they take away some of the gifts they originally gave you. Certain abilities are reduced or removed altogether so that you have fewer advantages over the locals. And the surveillance is more intense, though even less noticeable.” Hyrlis looked to the side once more. “I trust my even-handedness is appreciated, here. I am generous to a fault.” He looked back at the two men. “I understand most people like to pretend that such oversight doesn’t exist, that it isn’t happening to them; I take a different view. I address those I know must be watching me. So, now you know. And, I hope, understand. Were you worried I was mad?”

“Not at all!” Ferbin protested immediately, as Holse said, “It did occur, sir, as you’d expect.”

Hyrlis smiled. He swirled some wine around in his glass and watched himself doing so. “Oh, I may well be mad; mad to be here, mad to be still involved with the business of war, but at least in this I am not mad; I know I am watched, and I will let those who watch me know that I know.”

“We do,” Ferbin said, glancing at Holse, “understand.”

“Good,” Hyrlis said casually. He leaned forward, putting his elbows on the table and clasping his hands under his chin. “Now, back to you. You have come a very long way, prince. I assume to see me?”

“Indeed, that I have.”

“And with more intended than simply bringing me the news that my old friend Nerieth has been murdered, honoured though I am to hear from a real person rather than a news service.”

“Indeed,” Ferbin said, and pulled himself up in his seat as best he could. “I seek your help, good Hyrlis.”

“I see.” Hyrlis nodded, looking thoughtful.

Ferbin said, “Can you, will you help?”

“In what way?”

“Will you return to the Eighth with me to help avenge my father’s murder?”

Hyrlis sat back. He shook his head. “I cannot, prince. I am needed here, committed here. I work for the Nariscene, and even if I wanted to I could not return to Sursamen in the near or medium future.”

“Are you saying you do not even want to?” Ferbin asked, not hiding his displeasure.

“Prince, I am sorry to hear your father is dead, sorrier still to hear of the manner of it.”

“You have said so, sir,” Ferbin told him.

“So I say it again. Your father was a friend of mine for a short while and I respected him greatly. However, it is not my business to right wrongs occurring deep inside a distant Shellworld.”

Ferbin stood up. “I see I misunderstood you, sir,” he said. “I was told you are a good and honourable man. I find I have been misinformed.”

Holse stood up too, though slowly, thinking that if Ferbin was to storm out — though God knew to where — he had best accompany him.

“Hear me out, prince,” Hyrlis said reasonably. “I wish you well and tyl Loesp and his co-conspirators an undignified end, but I am unable to help.”

“And unwilling,” Ferbin said, almost spitting.

“Yours is not my fight, prince.”

“It should be the fight of all who believe in justice!”

“Oh, really, prince,” Hyrlis said, amused. “Listen to yourself.”

“Better than listening to you and your insulting complacency!”

Hyrlis looked puzzled. “What exactly did you expect me to do?”

“Something! Anything! Not nothing; not just sit there and smirk!”

“And why aren’t you doing something, Ferbin?” Hyrlis asked, still reasonable. “Might you not have been more effective staying on the Eighth rather than coming all this way to see me?”

“I am no warrior, I know that,” Ferbin said bitterly. “I have not the skills or disposition. And I have not the guile to go back to the court and face tyl Loesp and pretend I did not see what I did, to plot and plan behind a smile. I’d have drawn my sword or put my hands on his throat the instant I saw him and I’d have come off the worse. I know that I need help and I came here to ask you for it. If you will not help me, kindly let us go from here and do whatever you might be able and willing to do to speed my journey to my sibling Djan Seriy. I can only pray that she has somehow escaped infection by this Cultural disease of uncaring.”

“Prince,” Hyrlis sighed, “will you please sit down? There is more to discuss; I might help you in other ways. Plus we should talk about your sister.” Hyrlis waved one hand at Ferbin’s seat. “Please.”

“I shall sit, sir,” Ferbin told him, doing so, “but I am grievously disappointed.”

Holse sat too. He was glad of this; the wine was very good and it would be a criminal shame to have to abandon it.

Hyrlis resumed his earlier pose, hands under chin. A small frown creased his brow. “Why would tyl Loesp do what he has done?”

“I care not!” Ferbin said angrily. “That he did it is all that matters!”

Hyrlis shook his head. “I must disagree, prince. If you are to have any chance of righting this wrong, you’d be well advised to know what motivates your enemy.”

“Power, of course!” Ferbin exclaimed. “He wanted the throne, and he’ll have it, the moment he’s had my young brother killed.”

“But why now?”

“Why not!” Ferbin said, clenched fists hammering at the unforgiving stone of the great table. “My father had done all the work, the battles were all won, or as good as. That’s when a coward strikes, when the glory might be stolen without the bravery that afforded it.”

“Still, it is often easier to be the second in command, prince,” Hyrlis said. “The throne is a lonely place, and the nearer you are to it the clearer you see that. There are advantages to having great power without ultimate responsibility. Especially when you know that even the king does not have ultimate power, that there are always powers above. You say tyl Loesp was trusted, rewarded, valued, respected… Why would he risk that for the last notch of a power he knows is still enchained with limitations?”

Ferbin sat boiling with frustration but had resolved not to say anything this time. This only gave occasion for Hyrlis to look to the side and say quietly, “Do you know? Do you look there? Are you allow—?”

Ferbin could stand it no longer. “Will you stop talking to these phantoms!” he shouted, springing up again, this time so quickly his chair toppled over. Holse, having taken the opportunity to sip from his glass at what had seemed a handily quiet moment, had to gulp and stand quickly too, wiping his mouth with his sleeve. “These imagined demons have stolen what wits you ever had, sir!”

Hyrlis shook his head. “Would that they were imaginary, prince. And if there are similar systems of observation within Sursamen, they might hold one key to your difficulty.”

“What in the world are you talking about?” Ferbin hissed through clenched teeth.

Hyrlis sighed again. “Please, prince, do sit down again… No, no, I’ll stand,” he said, changing his mind. “Let’s all stand. And let me show you something. Please come with me. There is more to explain.”

The airship was a giant dark blister riding the poisoned air above a still glowing battlefield. They had been brought here in Hyrlis’ own small, svelte air vehicle, which had lifted silently from the bottom of another giant crater and flown whispering through clouds and smoke then clearer weather, chasing a ruddy sunset into a night whose far horizon was edged with tiny sporadic flashes of yellow-white light. Below them, rings and circles of dull and fading red covered the dark, undulating land. The airship was bright, all strung with lights, lit from every side and covered in reflective markings. It hung above the livid-bruised land like an admonition.

The little aircraft docked in a broad deck slung underneath the giant ship’s main body. Various other craft were arriving and departing all the time, arriving full of injured soldiers accompanied by a few medical staff and departing empty save for returning medics. Quiet moans filled the warm, smoke-scented air. Hyrlis led them via some spiralled steps to a ward full of coffin-like beds each containing a pale, squat, unconscious figure. Holse looked at the lifeless-looking people and felt envious; at least they didn’t have to stand up, walk around and climb stairs in this awful gravity.

“You know there is a theory,” Hyrlis said quietly, walking amongst the gently glowing coffin-beds, Ferbin and Holse at his rear, the four dark-dressed guards somewhere nearby, unseen, “that all that we experience as reality is just a simulation, a kind of hallucination that has been imposed upon us.”

Ferbin said nothing.

Holse assumed that Hyrlis was addressing them rather than his demons or whatever they were, so said, “We have a sect back home with a roughly similar point of view, sir.”

“It’s a not uncommon position,” Hyrlis said. He nodded at the unconscious bodies all around them. “These sleep, and have dreams inflicted upon them, for various reasons. They will believe, while they dream, that the dream is reality. We know it is not, but how can we know that our own reality is the last, the final one? How do we know there is not a still greater reality external to our own into which we might awake?”

“Still,” Holse said. “What’s a chap to do, eh, sir? Life needs living, no matter what our station in it.”

“It does. But thinking of these things affects how we live that life. There are those who hold that, statistically, we must live in a simulation; the chances are too extreme for this not to be true.”

“There are always people who can convince themselves of near enough anything, seems to me, sir,” Holse said.

“I believe them to be wrong in any case,” Hyrlis said.

“You have been thinking on this, I take it then?” asked Ferbin. He meant to sound arch.

“I have, prince,” Hyrlis said, continuing to lead them through the host of sleeping injured. “And I base my argument on morality.”

“Do you now?” Ferbin said. He did not need to affect disdain.

Hyrlis nodded. “If we assume that all we have been told is as real as what we ourselves experience — in other words, that history, with all its torturings, massacres and genocides, is true — then, if it is all somehow under the control of somebody or some thing, must not those running that simulation be monsters? How utterly devoid of decency, pity and compassion would they have to be to allow this to happen, and keep on happening under their explicit control? Because so much of history is precisely this, gentlemen.”

They had approached the edge of the huge space, where slanted, down-looking windows allowed a view of the pocked landscape beneath. Hyrlis swept his arm to indicate both the bodies in their coffin-beds and the patchily glowing land below.

“War, famine, disease, genocide. Death, in a million different forms, often painful and protracted for the poor individual wretches involved. What god would so arrange the universe to predispose its creations to experience such suffering, or be the cause of it in others? What master of simulations or arbitrator of a game would set up the initial conditions to the same pitiless effect? God or programmer, the charge would be the same: that of near-infinitely sadistic cruelty; deliberate, premeditated barbarism on an unspeakably horrific scale.”

Hyrlis looked expectantly at them. “You see?” he said. “By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality — or at the most exalted, however one wishes to look at it. Just as reality can blithely exhibit the most absurd coincidences that no credible fiction could convince us of, so only reality — produced, ultimately, by matter in the raw — can be so unthinkingly cruel. Nothing able to think, nothing able to comprehend culpability, justice or morality could encompass such purposefully invoked savagery without representing the absolute definition of evil. It is that unthinkingness that saves us. And condemns us, too, of course; we are as a result our own moral agents, and there is no escape from that responsibility, no appeal to a higher power that might be said to have artificially constrained or directed us.”

Hyrlis rapped on the clear material separating them from the view of the dark battlefield. “We are information, gentlemen; all living things are. However, we are lucky enough to be encoded in matter itself, not running in some abstracted system as patterns of particles or standing waves of probability.”

Holse had been thinking about this. “Of course, sir, your god could just be a bastard,” he suggested. “Or these simulation-eers, if it’s them responsible.”

“That is possible,” Hyrlis said, a smile fading. “Those above and beyond us might indeed be evil personified. But it is a standpoint of some despair.”

“And all this pertains how, exactly?” Ferbin asked. His feet were sore and he was growing tired of what seemed to him like pointless speculation, not to mention something dangerously close to philosophy, a field of human endeavour he had encountered but fleetingly through various exasperated tutors, though long enough to have formed the unshakeable impression that its principal purpose was to prove that one equalled zero, black was white and educated men could speak through their bottoms.

“I am watched,” Hyrlis said. “Perhaps your home is watched, prince. It is possible that tiny machines similar to those that observe me spy upon your people too. The death of your father might have been overseen by more eyes than you thought were present. And if it was watched once, it can be watched again, because only base reality cannot be fully replayed; anything transmitted can be recorded and usually is.”

Ferbin stared at him. “Recorded?” he said, horrified. “My father’s murder?”

“It is possible; no more,” Hyrlis told him.

“By whom?”

“The Oct, the Nariscene, the Morthanveld?” Hyrlis suggested. “Perhaps the Culture. Perhaps anybody else with the means, which would include some dozens of Involved civilisations at least.”

“And this would be done,” Holse suggested, “by the same unseen agents that you address from time to time, sir?”

“By things most similar,” Hyrlis agreed.

“Unseen,” Ferbin said contemptuously. “Unheard, untouched, unsmelled, untasted, undetected. In a word, figmented.”

“Oh, we are often profoundly affected by unseeably small things, prince.” Hyrlis smiled wistfully. “I have advised rulers for whom the greatest military service I could perform had nothing to do with strategy, tactics or weapons technology; it was simply to inform them of and persuade them to accept the germ theory of disease and infection. Believing that we are surrounded by microscopic entities that profoundly and directly affect the fates of individuals and through them nations has been the first step in the ascendancy of many a great ruler. I’ve lost count of the wars I’ve seen won more by medics and engineers than mere soldiery. Such infective beings, too small to see, assuredly exist, prince, and believe me so do those designed, made and controlled by powers beyond your grasping.” Ferbin opened his mouth to say something but Hyrlis went on, “Your own faith holds the same idea centrally, prince. Do you not believe that the WorldGod sees everything? How do you think it does that?”

Ferbin felt baulked, tripped up. “It is a god!” he said, blustering.

“If you treat it as such then such it is,” Hyrlis said reasonably. “However, it is unarguably a member of a long-declining species with a clearly traceable galactic lineage and evolutionary line. It is another corporeal being, prince, and the fact that your people have chosen to call it a god does not mean that it is particularly powerful, all-seeing even within the limitations of Sursamen, or indeed sane.” Ferbin wanted to speak but Hyrlis held up one hand. “No one knows why Xinthians inhabit Shellworld Cores, prince. Theories include them being sent there by their own kind as a punishment, or to isolate them because they have become infectiously diseased, or mad. Some speculate they’re there because the individual Xinthians concerned are simply fascinated by Shellworlds. Another guess has it that each seeks somehow to defend its chosen Shellworld, though against what nobody knows, and the truth is that Tensile Aeronathaurs are not in themselves especially powerful creatures, and seem to scorn the kind of high-level weaponry that might compensate for that lack. All in all, not much of a God, prince.”

“We claim it as our God, sir,” Ferbin said frostily. “Not as some mythical Universal Creator.” He glanced at Holse, looking for support, or at least acknowledgement.

Holse wasn’t about to get involved in any theological arguments. He looked serious and nodded, hoping this would do.

Hyrlis just smiled.

“So you are saying we have no privacy?” Ferbin said, feeling angry and dismayed.

“Oh, you may have.” Hyrlis shrugged. “Perhaps nobody watches you, including your god. But if others do, and you can persuade them to share that recording, then you will have a weapon to use against tyl Loesp.”

“But sir,” Holse said, “given such fantastical apparatus, might not anything and everything be faked?”

“It might, but people can be quite good at spotting what has been faked. And the effect on people who do not know that anything can be faked is usually profound. Revealed at the right moment, such a recording, if it exists, may so visibly shake tyl Loesp or his co-conspirators that their immediate reaction leaves no doubt in the unprejudiced mind that they are guilty.”

“And how might we discover whether such a recording exists?” Ferbin asked. It still all sounded absurdly far-fetched to him, even in this entire hierarchical realm of far-fetched world beyond far-fetched world.

“It may be as simple as just asking the right people,” Hyrlis said. He was still standing beside the down-sloped windows. Something flashed white far away on the dark plain below, briefly illuminating one side of his face. Some part of the initial illumination remained, fading slowly to yellow. “Find someone sympathetic in the Culture and ask them. Your sister, prince, would seem an obvious choice, and, being in Special Circumstances, she would stand a good chance of being able to find out the truth, even if it is hidden, and even if it is not the Culture itself that is doing the observing. Look to your sister, prince. She may hold your answer.”

“Given your own refusal to help, I have little choice, sir.”

Hyrlis shrugged. “Well, family should stick together,” he said casually. Another flash lit up his face, and — away in the distance — a great rolling, rising glowing cloud of yellow surged with an unstoppable slowness into the night air. The orange-ruddy light from the huge climbing cloud lit up distant hills and mountains, rubbing them blood-coloured.

“You might have imparted this information in your own quarters,” Ferbin told the man. “Why bring us here, amongst these wretches and above this savagery, to tell us something you might have told over dinner?”

“So that we might, appropriately, observe, prince,” Hyrlis said. He nodded at the landscape below. “We look down upon all this, and perhaps are looked down on in turn. It is entirely possible that everything we see here is only taking place at all so that it may be observed.”

“Meaning what, sir?” Holse asked, when Ferbin didn’t. Also, their host looked as though he had no mind to add any more; he just gazed languidly out through the slanted windows over the red, under-lit clouds and the spark-infested darkness of the cratered landscape beneath.

Hyrlis turned to Holse. “Meaning that this whole conflict, this entire war here is manufactured. It is prosecuted for the viewing benefit of the Nariscene, who have always regarded waging war as one of the highest and most noble arts. Their place among the Involveds of the galactic community sadly precludes them from taking part in meaningful conflicts themselves any more, but they have the licence, the means and the will to cause other, mentored, client civilisations to war amongst themselves at their behest. The conflict we observe here, in which I am proud to play a part, is one such artificial dispute, instigated and maintained for and by the Nariscene for no other reason than that they might observe the proceedings and draw vicarious satisfaction from them.”

Ferbin made a snorting noise.

Holse looked sceptical. “That really true, sir?” he asked. “I mean, as acknowledged by all concerned?”

Hyrlis smiled. A great distant, rumbling, roaring sound seemed to make the airship shiver on the wind. “Oh, you will find many a superficially convincing excuse and casus belli and there are given and seemingly accepted justifications, everything modelled to provide pretexts and keep people like the Culture from intervening to stop the fun, but it is all dressing, disguise, a feint. The truth is as I have said. Depend on it.”

“And you are proud to take part in what you effectively describe as a travesty, a show-war, a dishonourable and cruel charade for decadent and unfeeling alien powers?” Ferbin said, trying to sound — and, to some degree, succeeding in sounding — contemptuous.

“Yes, prince,” Hyrlis said reasonably. “I do what I can to make this war as humane in its inhumanity as I can, and in any case, I always know that however bad it may be, its sheer unnecessary awfulness at least helps guarantee that we are profoundly not in some designed and overseen universe and so have escaped the demeaning and demoralising fate of existing solely within some simulation.”

Ferbin looked at him for a few moments. “That is absurd,” he said.

“Nevertheless,” Hyrlis said casually, then stretched his arms out and rolled his head as though tired. “Let’s go back, shall we?”

The Nariscene ship Hence the Fortress, a venerable Comet-class star cruiser, lifted from a deep ravine where a poisoned stream of black water moved like liquefied shadow. The craft rose above the rim of the fissure into light airs moving quietly across a landscape of livid sands beneath a soft-looking grey overcast. It accelerated into the darker skies above, finding space within minutes. The ship carried a cargo of several million human souls held petrified within a variety of nanoscale storage matrices, and two human males. The gravity was back to what the Nariscene regarded as normal, and so was much more acceptable to both men.

They had to share one small cabin extemporised for human occupation from some storage space, but were uncomplaining, being mostly just thankful to be away from the oppressive gravity of Bulthmaas and the unsettling presence of Xide Hyrlis.

They had stayed only two more days and nights — as far as such terms meant anything in the warren of deeply buried caverns and tunnels where they’d been kept. Hyrlis had appeared casually unbothered when they professed a desire to be away as soon as possible after he’d told Ferbin he was unable to help.

The morning after he’d taken them to the great airship full of the wounded, Hyrlis summoned them to a hemispherical chamber perhaps twenty metres in diameter where an enormous map of what looked like nearly half of the planet was displayed, showing what appeared to be a single vast continent punctuated by a dozen or so small seas fed by short rivers running from jagged mountain ranges. The map bulged towards the unseen ceiling like a vast balloon lit from inside by hundreds of colours and tens of thousands of tiny glittering symbols, some gathered together in groups large and small, others strung out in speckled lines and yet more scattered individually.

Hyrlis looked down on this vast display from a wide balcony halfway up the wall, talking quietly with a dozen or so uniformed human figures who responded in even more hushed tones. As they murmured away, the map itself changed, rotating and tipping to bring different parts of the landscape to the fore and moving various collections of the glittering symbols about, often developing quite different patterns and then halting while Hyrlis and the other men huddled and conferred, before returning to its earlier configuration.

“There’s a Nariscene vessel scheduled to call in a couple of days’ time,” he told Ferbin and Holse, though his gaze was still directed at the great bulge of the dully glowing display, where various numbers of the glittering symbols, which Ferbin assumed represented military units, were moving about. It was clear now that some of the units, coloured grey-blue and shown fuzzily and in less detail than the rest, must represent the enemy. “It’ll take you to Syaung-un,” Hyrlis said. “That’s a Morthanveld Nestworld, one of the main transfer ports between the Morthanveld and the Culture.” His gaze roamed the huge globe, never resting. “Should find a ship there’ll take you to the Culture.”

“I am grateful,” Ferbin said stiffly. He found it difficult to be anything other than formally polite with Hyrlis after being rejected by him, though Hyrlis himself seemed barely to notice or care.

The display halted, then flickered, showing various end-patterns in succession. Hyrlis shook his head and waved one arm. The great round map flicked back to its starting state again and there was much sighing and stretching amongst the uniformed advisers or generals clustered around him.

Holse nodded at the map. “All this, sir. Is it a game?”

Hyrlis smiled, still looking at the great glowing bubble of the display. “Yes,” he said. “It’s all a game.”

“Does it start from what you might call reality, though?” Holse asked, stepping close to the balcony’s edge, obviously fascinated, his face lit by the great glowing hemisphere. Ferbin said nothing. He had given up trying to get his servant to be more discreet.

“From what we call reality, as far as we know it, yes,” Hyrlis said. He turned to look at Holse. “Then we use it to try out possible dispositions, promising strategies and various tactics, looking for those that offer the best results, assuming the enemy acts and reacts as we predict.”

“And will they be doing the same thing as regards you?”

“Undoubtably.”

“Might you not simply play the game against each other then, sir?” Holse suggested cheerily. “Dispensing with all the actual slaughtering and maiming and destruction and desolating and such like? Like in the old days, when two great armies met and, counting themselves about equal, called up champions, one from each, their individual combat counting by earlier agreement as determining the whole result, so sending many a frightened soldier safely back to his farm and loved ones.”

Hyrlis laughed. The sound was obviously as startling and unusual to the generals and advisers on the balcony as it was to Ferbin and Holse. “I’d play if they would!” Hyrlis said. “And accept the verdict gladly regardless.” He smiled at Ferbin, then to Holse said, “But no matter whether we are all in a still greater game, this one here before us is at a cruder grain than that which it models. Entire battles, and sometimes therefore wars, can hinge on a jammed gun, a failed battery, a single shell being dud or an individual soldier suddenly turning and running, or throwing himself on a grenade.”

Hyrlis shook his head. “That cannot be fully modelled, not reliably, not consistently. That you need to play out in reality, or the most detailed simulation you have available, which is effectively the same thing.”

Holse smiled sadly. “Matter, eh, sir?”

“Matter.” Hyrlis nodded. “And anyway, where would be the fun in just playing a game? Our hosts could do that themselves. No. They need us to play out the greater result. Nothing else will do. We ought to feel privileged to be so valuable, so irreplaceable. We may all be mere particles, but we are each fundamental!”

Hyrlis sounded close to laughing again, then his tone and whole demeanour changed as he looked to one side, where no one was standing. “And don’t think yourselves any better,” he said quietly. Ferbin tsk-ed loudly and turned his head away as Hyrlis continued, “What is the sweet and easy continuance of all things Cultural, if not based on the cosy knowledge of good works done in one’s name, far away? Eh?” He nodded at nobody and nothing visible. “What do you say, my loyal viewers? Aye to that? Contact and SC; they play your own real games, and let the trillions of pampered sleepers inhabiting all those great rolling cradles we call Orbitals run smoothly through the otherly scary night, unvexed.”

“You’re obviously busy,” Ferbin said matter-of-factly to Hyrlis. “May we leave you now?”

Hyrlis smiled. “Yes, prince. Get to your own dreams, leave us with ours. By all means be gone.”

Ferbin and Holse turned to go.

“Holse!” Hyrlis called.

Choubris and Ferbin both turned to look back.

“Sir?” Holse said.

“Holse, if I offered you the chance to stay here and general for me, play this great game, would you take it? It would be for riches and for power, both here and now and elsewhere and elsewhen, in better, less blasted places than this sorry cinder. D’you take it, eh?”

Holse laughed. “Course not, sir! You fun me, sure you must!”

“Of course,” Hyrlis said, grinning. He looked at Ferbin, who was standing looking confused and angry at his servant’s side. “Your man is no fool, prince,” Hyrlis told him.

Ferbin stood up straight in the grinding, pulling gravity. “I did not think him so.”

Hyrlis nodded. “Naturally. Well, I too must travel very soon. If I don’t see you before you go, let me wish you both a good journey and a fair arrival.”

“Your wishes flatter us, sir,” Ferbin said, insincerely.

Hyrlis was indeed not there to see them off when they departed.

Over thirteen long days during which Ferbin and Holse were left to themselves by the ship and its crew and spent most of their time either sleeping or playing games, the star cruiser Hence the Fortress took them to the Nariscene Globular Transfer Facility of Sterut.

A Morthanveld tramp ship with no name, just a long serial number they both forgot, picked them up from there on one of its semi-regular, semicircular routes and took them onwards to the great Morthanveld Nestworld of Syaung-un.

19. Dispatches

Oramen was standing by the window looking out over the city from his chambers in the palace in Pourl. The morning was bright and misty and Neguste, singing noisily but tunelessly, was next door, running him a bath when Fanthile rapped at the door. Neguste, who patently believed that volume was the ideal compensation for being tone-deaf, didn’t hear the door, so Oramen answered it himself.

He and Fanthile stood out on the apartment balcony while Oramen read a note the palace secretary had brought.

“Rasselle?” he said. “The Deldeyn capital?”

Fanthile nodded. “Your mother’s husband has been ordered there, as mayor. They will arrive during the next few days.”

Oramen let out a deep breath and looked first at Fanthile and then out at the city; canals glinted in the distance and banners of steam and smoke rose from a scattered forest of factory chimneys. “You know that tyl Loesp suggests I go to the Falls of the Hyeng-zhar?” he said, not looking at the palace secretary.

“I have heard, sir. They are a few days from Rasselle, I’m told.”

“I would be in charge of the excavations.” Oramen sighed. “Tyl Loesp believes it would help the bringing together of the people and institutions of the Ninth and the Eighth, that my presence there would help the effort to recruit more Sarl to the great project of the investigation of the mysterious ruins there. Also, it would give me a serious and proper purpose in life, so improving my reputation with the people.”

“You are the Prince Regent, sir,” the palace secretary said. “That might be thought reputation enough by some.”

“By some, perhaps, but these are changed days, Fanthile. Perhaps they are even the New Age that my father talked about, when feats of practical business matter more than those of arms.”

“There are reports that certain far dependencies dispute with various of tyl Loesp’s decrees, sir. Werreber already wants to form a new army to help instil some provincial discipline. The gentleman we speak of would be wise not to disband all the forces.”

Tyl Loesp’s clamorous triumph had been held just a few days earlier; parts of the city were still recovering. It had been a celebration on a scale and of an intensity Pourl had never seen before, certainly not under the late king. Tyl Loesp had provided for banquets in every street, a week’s free drink from every public house and a bounty for every inhabitant within the walls. Games, sports, competitions and concerts of every sort, all freely open to all, had taken place and a patchwork of small riots had broken out in various sections of the city, requiring quelling by constables and militia.

An enormous parade had been staged consisting of the victorious army all bright and polished, smiling and whole under a sea of fluttering banners, complete with wildly caparisoned warbeasts and a host of captured Deldeyn soldiery, artillery pieces, military vehicles and war engines. Streets had been widened, buildings knocked down and rivers and gullies covered over to provide a thoroughfare long and wide enough to accommodate the great procession.

Tyl Loesp had ridden at the head, Werreber and his generals a little behind. In the Parade Field where the kilometres-long procession had ended up, the regent had announced a year without tax (this later turned out to mean a short-year without certain mostly rather obscure taxes), an amnesty for minor criminals, the disbandment of various ancillary regiments with the release — with pensions — of nearly one hundred thousand men, and an extended mission to the Ninth that would mean that both he and the Prince Regent would spend significant time in Rasselle and the Deldeyn provinces, bringing the benefits of Sarl rule and wisdom to that reduced but highly fruitful and promising land.

Oramen, sitting in the shade of the flag-fluttering parade stand with the rest of the nobility, had been warned of this last provision only an hour before, and so was able not to look surprised.

He had felt an initial burst of fury that he had been simply told this rather than consulted, or even asked, but that had gone quickly. He’d soon started to wonder if such a move, such a break with Pourl might not be a good idea. All the same, to be so instructed…

“You might refuse to go, sir,” Fanthile pointed out.

Oramen turned away from the view over the city. “I might, in theory, I suppose,” he said.

“That’s the bath ready, sir! Oh, hello, Mr Palace Secretary sir!” Neguste called, marching into the room behind them.

“Thank you, Neguste,” Oramen said, and his servant winked and retreated.

Fanthile nodded at the note in Oramen’s hand. “Does this make the decision for you, sir?”

“I had already decided I might go,” Oramen said. He smiled. “The very idea of the Hyeng-zhar fascinates me, Fanthile.” He laughed. “It would be something to control all that power, in any sense!”

Fanthile refused to be impressed. “May I speak bluntly, sir?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“Tyl Loesp might worry that leaving you here while he tightens his grip on Rasselle would allow you to build too independent a foundation of regard amongst the nobles, the people and even parliament here. Removing you to somewhere so out of the way, however impressive that place might be as an attraction, could appear to some almost like a form of exile. You could refuse to go, sir. You’d be within your rights. By some arguments your place is here, amongst the people who might love you all the better with greater acquaintance. I have heard who will be there around you. This General Foise, for one; he is entirely tyl Loesp’s man. They all are. All his men, I mean. They are loyal to him rather than to Sarl or your father’s memory, or you.”

Oramen felt relieved. He’d been expecting a scolding or something equally disagreeable. “That is your bluntest, dear Fanthile?” he asked, smiling.

“It is as I see things, sir.”

“Well, tyl Loesp may arrange me as he sees fit, for the moment. I’ll play along. Let him have his time. These men you mention may see their loyalty as lying with him, but as long as he is loyal in turn, which he most unquestionably is, then there’s neither difference nor harm. I shall be king in due course and — even allowing for all our New Age talk of parliamentary oversight — I’ll have my time then.”

“That gentleman might grow used to arranging things to his liking. He may wish to extend his time.”

“Perhaps so, but once I am king, his choices become limited, don’t you think?”

Fanthile frowned. “I certainly know I’d like to think that, sir. Whether I can in honest conscience allow myself to hold such a view’s another thing.” He nodded at the note which Oramen still held. “I think the fellow may be forcing your actions in this, sir, and I believe he may come to enjoy the habit of doing so, if he does not already.”

Oramen took a deep breath. The air smelled so good and fresh up here. Unlike the depths of the city, where, annoyingly, so much of the fun was to be found. He let the air out of his lungs. “Oh, let tyl Loesp enjoy his triumph, Fanthile. He’s continued my father’s purpose as he himself might have wished, and I’d be a churl — and look one, too, in the eyes of your precious people — if I tantrummed now while I am still, in so many eyes, an untried youth.” He smiled encouragingly at the troubled-looking face of the older man. “I’ll bend with tyl Loesp’s current while it’s at its strongest; it might be bruising not to. I’ll beat against its ebb when I see fit.” He waved the letter Fanthile had given him. “I’ll go, Fanthile. I think I need to. But I thank you for all your help and advice.” He handed the note back to the palace secretary. “Now, old friend, I really must go to my bath.”

“Open your eyes, prince,” Fanthile said, for a moment — astoundingly! — not standing aside to let the Prince Regent past. “I do not know what ill’s been done about us since your father’s death, sir, but there’s a smell that hangs over too much that’s happened. We need all take care not to be infected by its noxiousness; it might prove each one of us all too mortal.” He waited another moment, as though to see whether this had sunk in, then nodded a bow and, head still lowered, stood to one side.

Oramen didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t embarrass the fellow further following such an outburst, so he just walked past him on his way to his toilet.

A week later he was on his way to the Hyeng-zhar.

What with all the preparations and general fuss caused by the move, he hadn’t seen Fanthile again before leaving Pourl. The morning of the day he was due to go, shortly after he’d heard he was to have his very own personal guard of two stalwart knights, he’d received a note from Fanthile asking to see him, but there hadn’t been time.

Jerle Batra took the signal during a break in the peace negotiations. These were proving protracted. He wasn’t directly involved in the haggling, of course — it boggled one to think what the indigents would make of a cross between a talking bush and an expanding fence — but he was overseeing while some of the others in the mission did their best to keep people focused. In the end it had to be the natives themselves who made this work, but a bit of judicious prodding helped on occasion.

He rose a couple of kilometres into the air from the marquee in the middle of the great tent city on the grassy swell of plain where the negotiations were taking place. Up here the air smelled fresh and clean. It felt deliciously cool, too. You experienced changes in temperature so quickly in this form; you felt the wind blow through you. There was nothing quite like it.

My dear old friend, he communicated. The signal was passing from and to the excursion platform Quonber, currently almost directly overhead but on the fringes of space. To what, etc.?

Jerle Ruule Batra, said a familiar voice. Good-day.

The It’s My Party And I’ll Sing If I Want To was an Escarpment-class GCU which had been strongly associated with Special Circumstances for nearly as long as Jerle Batra himself. Batra had no idea where the ship actually was in a true, physical sense, but the old craft had gone to the trouble of sending a working-scale personality construct to talk to him here on Prasadal. This implied a matter of more than passing importance.

To you too, he sent, wherever.

Thank you. How goes your peace conference?

Slowly. Having exhausted the possibilities of every other form of mass-murder they could possibly employ against each other, the natives now appear intent on boring each other to death. They may finally have discovered their true calling.

Still, cause for optimism. My congratulations to all. And I’m told you have a child!

I most certainly do not have a child. I am looking after a child for a colleague. That is all.

Nevertheless, that is more than one might have expected of you.

She asked. I could hardly refuse.

How interesting. However, to business.

By all means.

Listen to this.

There followed a compressed version of the message sent by the Now We Try It My Way to its old home MSV, the Qualifier, describing its odd encounter with what had appeared to be an Oct ship above the planet Zaranche, but hadn’t been.

Very well. This was only mildly interesting and Batra did not see how it might involve him. And?

It is believed that the whole Oct fleet above Zaranche, save for one Primarian-class ship, probably the first arrived, was not really there. It was a ghost fleet.

The Oct are at that stage, though, aren’t they? Batra sent. They’re still trying to puff themselves up, still trying on parents’ shoes, making themselves look bigger.

Batra immediately knew somebody somewhere in SC was going to be reading all sorts of paranoid nonsense into something like this. Ghost ships; pretend fleets. Scary! Except it wasn’t, it couldn’t be. The Oct were an irrelevance. Better still, they were the Morthanveld’s irrelevance, or the Nariscene’s irrelevance, depending on where you chose to draw the line. An equiv-tech Involved getting up to this sort of misdirection might mean something significant. The Oct doing the same thing was profoundly so-whattish. They were probably just trying to impress their Nariscene mentors or had left a switch on they shouldn’t or something.

But SC took this sort of random dross terribly seriously. The finest Minds in the Culture had an almost chronic need for serious stuff to involve them, and this, patently, was their latest dose. We make our own problems, Batra thought. We’ve seeded the fucking galaxy with travellers, wanderers, students, reporters, practical ethnologists, peripatetic philosophers, hands-on ex-sociologists, footloose retirees, freelance ambassadors or whatever they’re called this season and a hundred other categories of far too easily amazed amateur and they’re all forever reporting back stuff that looks like deeply weird shit to them that wouldn’t pass the first filter of even the least experienced Contact Unit’s data intake systems.

We’ve filled the known universe with credulous idiots and we think we’ve sneakily contributed to our own safety by making it hard for anything untoward to creep in under our sensor coverage whereas in fact we’ve just made sure we harvest zillions of false positives and probably made the really serious shit harder to spot when it does eventually come flying.

No, the GCU’s construct sent. We don’t think the Oct are trying to look more impressive than they are, not in this case.

Wind moved through Batra’s bushy body like a sigh. What happened after the close encounter? he asked, dutifully.

We don’t know. Haven’t been able to contact the Erratic since. Could have been captured. Conceivably, even, destroyed. A ship — a warship, no less — has been sent to investigate, though it’s still eight days away.

Destroyed? Batra suppressed a laugh. Seriously? Are we within capabilities here?

The Oct Primarian-class has the weaponry and other systems to overwhelm a cobbled-together ex-GTC mongrel, yes.

But are we within likelihood? Batra asked. Are we even still within the realm of anything other than paranoid lunacy? What is imagined to be their motive in doing whatever might have been done to this Erratic?

To stop this getting out.

But why? To what end? What’s so important about this Zaranche place they’d even try to kidnap any Culture ship, hopeless old junkyard oddball or not?

Nothing about Zaranche; rather what this has led to.

Which would be what?

A subtle but thorough investigation into Oct ship movements and placements over the last fifty days or so. Which has involved quite a few Contact, SC and even VFP/warships dropping everything and hightailing off to a variety of obscure backwood destinations, many well within the Morthanveld sphere.

I am suitably impressed. It must be regarded as awfully important for us to risk annoying our so-sensitive co-Involveds at such an allegedly delicate time. And what was the result of all this high-speed, high-value-asset sleuthing?

There are lots of ghost fleets.

What? For the first time, Batra felt something other than a sort of amused, studied disdain. Some legacy of his human form, buried in the transcribed systems that held his personality, made him suddenly feel the coldness of the air up here. Just for an instant he was fully aware that a naked human exposed to this temperature would have hairs standing up on their skin now.

The ghost fleet above Zaranche is one of eleven, the ship continued. The others are here. A glyph of a portion of the galaxy perhaps three thousand light years in diameter displayed itself in Batra’s mind. He swam into the image, looked around, pulled back, played around with a few settings. That’s quite a large part of what one might call Oct Space, he sent.

Indeed. Approximately seventy-three per cent of the entire Oct Prime Fleet would seem not to be where it appears to be.

Why are they bunched like that? Why those places? All the locations, all the places where these ghost fleets had drawn up were out of the way: isolated planets, backwater habitats and seldom-frequented deep-space structures.

It is believed they are grouped where they are to avoid detection.

But they’re being open about it; they’re telling people where they are.

I mean detection of the fact they are ghosts. The cover story, as it were, is that a series of special convocations is taking place which will lead to some profound new departure for the Oct; some new civilisational goal, perhaps. Possibly one linked to their continuing attempts at betterment and advancement upon the galactic stage. We suspect, however, that this is only partially true. The convocations are a ruse to excuse the departure of so many front-line ships.

Had they better technology, the GCU’s personality construct continued, the Oct would, one imagines, have kept their ghost ships appearing to carry out normal duties while the real ones left for wherever it is they have in fact left for. Their ability so to deceive is limited, however. Any high-Involved ship — certainly one of ours or the Morthanveld, for example, and possibly most Nariscene craft — would be able to tell that what they were looking at was not a real Oct ship. So the genuine craft left the normal intercourse of galactic ship life and these rather crude representations were assembled in locations specifically chosen so that the ships’ lack of authenticity would most likely go unnoticed.

Had he still inhabited human form Batra would, at this point, have frowned and scratched his head. But why? To what end? Are these maniacs going to war?

We don’t know. They have outstanding disputes with a few species and there is a particular and recently inflamed gripe with the Aultridia, but the whole of Oct society does not appear to be presently configured for hostilities. It is configured for something unusual, certainly (Batra could hear puzzlement expressed in the ship’s voice), possibly including some sort of hostile or at least dynamic action, but not all-out war. The Aultridia are taken to be their most pressing potential adversaries but they would almost certainly defeat the Oct as matters stand at present. The models show ninety-plus per cent likelihood, very consistently.

So where are the real ships?

That, old chum, is very much the question.

Batra had been thinking. And why am I being included here?

More modelling. Using the pattern of affected snuck-away ships and a pre-existing profile of Oct interests, we have drawn up a list of likely destinations for the real craft.

Another layered diaglyph blossomed in Batra’s mind. Ah-ha, he thought.

The marginally most likely disposition is a distributed one, or rather one of two not dissimilar choices: in each, the Primarians and other strategic craft take up various different positions, either defensive or offensive, depending. The defensive model implies a more even spread of forces than the offensive one, which favours greater concentration. These represent options one and two respectively in the modelled plausibility grading. There is, however, a third option, shown here.

The other layers fell away but Batra had already spotted the pattern and the place within it that was its focus.

They could be gathering round Sursamen, he sent.

The General Contact Unit It’s My Party And I’ll Sing If I Want To still sounded puzzled: Well, quite.