Feersum Endjinn (16 page)
Authors: Iain M. Banks
He looked around, surveying the fifty or so cars and the barely controlled pandemonium of both the pits area and the stands beyond. Each of the mighty cars was fashioned after a particular model of steam railway engine from the Middle Ages; his was one of the first-marque machines, the largest and most powerful class in the race, created in the image of a 4-8-8-4 Mallet type used by the Union Pacific Railroad of North America, back in the twentieth century.
Sessine dropped into the Mallet’s cramped cockpit, offset to the left at the rear of the huge locomotive, above where the engineer’s cab would have been on the real thing. He strapped himself in, then ran through the instrument check. That done, he sat back for a while, breathing deeply and gazing round the stands and viewing towers, looking for where his wife would be sitting in the clan’s own tower and wondering if his latest lover was watching from one of the old airships. The voice pipe whistled; he uncorked it. ‘Ready, sir?’ said the muffled voice of the chief engineer.
‘Ready,’ he said.
‘All yours, sir. You have control.’
‘I have control,’ he confirmed, and recorked the voice pipe. His heart beat faster and he wiped sweat from his top lip with his shirt sleeve. He undid one glove and fished in a breast pocket for his ear plugs.
His hands were shaking, just a little.
The marshals’ airship hovered pregnantly over the tall, flag-bedecked archway leading to the starting grid. After what seemed like an eternity the flags hanging under the dirigible changed from red to yellow and the crowd cheered wildly.
Sessine slipped the brake, eased the regulator on and fed power to the Mallet’s wheels. The hydrogen engine shot a great detonating pulse of steam from its stack - easily twenty metres forward of where Sessine sat - hissed yet more clouds from the pistons below, and, with a great metallic groan and a crumping series of explosive steam-bursts within a cacophonous range of oiled clanking noises, the huge vehicle crept slowly forward, keeping station with the rest of the cars, all jetting steam and blasting whistles, spasmodically interspersing this symphonic din with the sudden racing solo of an engine briefly losing traction, sets of rubber-rimmed wheels slipping together on patches of oil, hydraulic fluid or water.
The race began half an hour later after various delays - every one of which seemed interminable - and much sweating and steaming and sweltering on the starting grid.
The huge cars started their charge round the wall-top roadway of Serehfa’s curtain-wall, a half-kilometre wide surface of smooth roadway behind the semi-cylindrical towers. Each lap was a hundred and eighty kilometres in length, a distance the leading vehicles would complete in an hour; each race was three laps. The cars were accompanied by the marshals’ airship and by a small cloud of camera platforms like swarming insects, feeding the spectacle to the implant and screen networks and the crowds watching from the viewing stands and towers.
Sessine took the lead when the clan Genetics’ Beyer-Garratt burst a series of tyres and skidded off into the outer parapet in a great long articulated explosion of steam, metal and stone (and Sessine thought coldly, Well, that’s old Werrieth out of the party tonight, and him onto his last life); debris spattered across the roadway in front of the Mallet but Sessine took the three hundred tonnes of car within metres of the flimsy inside wall, and missed the wreckage entirely.
He was in front! He screamed with delight, and was grateful that the noise was inaudible within the staggering racket of the racing car; the wide roadway spread out in a gentle curve before him, empty and welcoming and sublime. The marshals’ airship would be well behind the Mallet and the cloud of camera platforms just level with him. There were cameras and spectators on each of the towers, too, and more people - castlians and Xtremadurians - gathered in clumps on the outer walls, but they were blurs, irrelevant. He was alone; exulting and alone and free!
... He recognised the point, and was able to leave then, and so left his old self to drive, and slipped out of the seat, like a ghost, down through the hatch into the bellowing heart of the quivering machine where valves chattered and gases hissed and water gurgled and sweat popped from the skin in the oven-heat of the shrieking, vibrating engine.
And as he walked through the hammering din of the motor, he started to remember a little of what he had left here.
In a cramped corridor, on an open-work metal floor between great rods and levers darting back and forward like vast metallic tendons, he found his old first self, dressed in engineer’s overalls and squatting hunched over a small table on which sat a chess board set in mid-game.
He squatted down too. His younger self did not look up. He was staring at the white pieces, the tip of one thumb in his mouth.
‘Silician defence,’ the young man said after a while, nodding at the board.
Sessine nodded, outwardly calm but thinking furiously. He knew he was faced with some sort of test but he had no predetermined code to cover this meeting, only the fact that, once, he and this young man had been the same person.
Silician
? Not Sicilian?
? Not Sicilian?
Silician; Silicia; Cilicia. It meant something. Somebody he’d heard of had been Silician. An ancient.
He searched his memories, willing some connection. Tarzan? Tarsus? Then he remembered some lines from an ancient poem:
Me Tarsan, you Jesus.
And the Silician never really changed.
Ah, yes.
‘Professor Sauli played it often,’ he said. ‘While working on the exclusion principle.’
The young man looked up and smiled briefly. He rose and put out his hand. Sessine shook it.
‘Good to meet you, Alandre,’ the young man said.
‘And you,’ Sessine said, hesitating. ‘... Alandre?’
‘Oh, call me Alan,’ his younger self said. ‘I’m only an abbreviated version of who you are now, though I’ve developed on my own in here.’
‘Having recently been abbreviated myself, I sympathise, Alan.’
‘Hmm,’ the other man said. ‘Well, the first thing to do is to get you out of where you are now. Let’s see ...’ He looked down at the chess board and turned both the white castles upside down.
The board blossomed with a semi-transparent holo of Serehfa. Alan studied it for a moment, then reached into and beneath it - and Sessine saw the projection of the castle’s fabric bulge and swell around the young man’s hand as with an infinitesimal articulation of his fingers he plucked something out of the bowels of the model fastness - Sessine experienced a fleeting sense of vertigo - and deposited it at the side of the chequered surface. Then Alan folded up the chess board and the castle projection vanished.
‘Was that me?’ Sessine asked casually, leaning to glance at the board.
‘It was.’
‘So where am I now?’
‘Your construct now inhabits hardware situated within the curtain-walls.’
‘Is that good?’
Alan shrugged. ‘It’s safer.’
‘Well, thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ his younger self said. ‘So.’ He clapped his hands on his knees. ‘You’re my last incarnation.’
Sessine looked into his eyes. It was true; as the self aged, and grew to awareness, filtered and downloaded into a new version of the old body, a meta-aging took place over the lives: a serial, cumulative maturing that was visible in the face unless you strove by further tampering to eradicate it. How fresh and innocent this earlier face of his appeared, and yet this seeming youth had been forty years old when he’d recorded this construct and left it free - almost forgotten and just-short-of-unreachable-to flit between the interstices of his personal lives and his clan’s concerns: monitoring, collating, reviewing and evaluating.
‘Yes, I’m the very last,’ Sessine agreed. ‘And you are the ghost in the machine.’
He smiled, and wondered as he did so what possible point there was in the gesture. ‘So. What do you have to tell me?’
‘Well, for one thing, Count,’ Alan said, ‘I know who is trying to kill you.’
4
Av got a very good view ov thi fass-towr from heer. Am ½ lying & ½ sittin craidled by thi babil branchis & am lookin up fru a gap in thi foleyidje @ thi dirti grate hoojness ov thi cassils centril towr.
U forget thi towrs thare a lot ov thi time coz (a) itz usyuly bhind u if yoor lookin out thi way from thi cassil & (b) iss obskyurd by cloud moar than ½ thi time nway.
According 2 Mr Zoliparia thi fass-towr is whare thi spays elivaitr woz ankird 2 Erf.
Thass y iss cald a fassness, Mr Zoliparia sez; in Inglish fassness means a stronghold, & also bcoz when fings r tied hard agenst eech othir they r sed 2 b tyed fast 2 eech othir like thi spays elivaitr woz tyed fast 2 Erf, & in a sens tyed 2 thi Erfs surfis & spays togethir, 2 (I sed; + thi spays elivaitr woz a way ov gettin in2 spaice fast; but Mr Z sed no actuly it woz slower than a rokit or whotevir but mutch moar efishint). Mr Zoliparia thot thi spayce elivaitr woz a grate idear & it woz a shame weed got rid ov it & if we hadnt then we wooden b in thi pickl we r, i e about 2 get clobberd by thi enkroachment.
But I thot spaice woz juss ful ov nufink I sed 2 Mr Zoliparia. Whats thi point ov goan thare?
Bascule, he sed, u r so fik sumtimes.
He tole me thi fass towr led 2 thi planetz & thi starz; 1nce u were in spaice u had limitles enirgy & raw mateeryls & after that branepowir took u wharevir u wantid but weed throne ol that away.
Mr Zoliparia sez thi fass towr reprisentz sumfin ov a nigma, on account that we doan striktly speekin no whot’s actuly in thi top ov it; iss bin xploard up 2 about thi 10th or 11th levils but aftir that u cant get no hyer, so they say. Blokd on thi inside & nuthin 2 hold on2 on thi outside & 2 hi up 4 a balune or a aircraft 2 go. Thi nolidje ov whot’s up thare’s bin loss long ago in thi kaos ov thi kript, sez Mr Z.
U heer roomers that ther r peeple up thare in thi top ov thi towr but thas got 2 b nonsins; howd they breev?
Mr Zoliparia iznt thi onli persin 2½ feeries concernin thi big towr; Ergates thi ant told me ther used 2 b 3 spaice elevaitrs; 1 heer, 1 in Afrika neer a place calld Kilomenjaro & 1 in Kalimantan. According 2 hir, thayve ol been dismantled long sinse ov coarse but weev got thi biggist stump on acount ov hooever disined thi American Kontinent spays elivaitr had thi wizird idear ov makin thi terminus particularly spektaklier & so desined it 2 luke like a hooj cassil, viz thi vastniss ov thi fastniss (which she claymd used 2 b calld Acsets, which wos anuthir ov them nacronyms, aparrintly).
I thot this ol soundid a bit iffy & askd Mr Z if heed evir herd ov ther bin uthir fass towrs & he sed nope, not as far as he new, & shurenuf when I serchd thi kript 4 info ther woznt eny on no othir elevaters & when u actuly luke in2 it ther dozen seem 2 b enywhare whare it sez strate out ‘Thi fass-towr usd 2 b 1 end ov a spaice elivaitor,’ tho iss not a secret. Nway, Kilomenjaro is a lake & Kalimantan is a big island (itz got a Crater Lake 2) & I think Ergates imajinayshin wos runnin away wif hir a bit thare & bsides if her feery wos rite thi name ov this plaice wood bgin wif a K not a S or a A, stands 2 reesin.
Poor Ergates. I stil wundir whot happind 2 that deer litl ant, evin tho Ive got plenty ov othir things 2 wury about now.
I turn ovir in thi litl nest Ive made 4 myself in thi babil branchis & luke down thi curvd trunk 2 thi wall. Nobodi els aroun. Lukes like I gaiv thi bastirds thi slip.
My sholdir stil hurts. So do my rists & my nees.
O whot a sorry state weer in, yung Bascule, I sez 2 myself.
I juss no that soonir or later am goan 2½ 2 go bak in2 thi kript 2 find out what on erfs goan on, evin tho thi last fing thi big bat sed woz not 2. Doan think iss goan b much fun.
Am fritend.
U c, Ive bcome a outcast.
I ½ 2 say I had a very plesint lunch wif Mr Zoliparia & a good game ov Go which he 1 ov coarse (like he alwiz duz) in this travelin restront. Thi restront starts in a verticil vilij in thi babil neer thi top ov thi grate hol gaybil & sloely dessends 2 flore levil ovir thi next cupl ov ours. Good food & vews. Nway, I had a ver nice time & almost toady 4got abowt Dartlin & thi jiant brane in bird space & orribl skind heds & fings whot go gididibibibigididibigigi & so on.
Me & Mr Zoliparia tokd about loads ov stuf.
Eventuly tho it woz time 4 me 2 go bcoz I stil had evenin callz 2 do 4 thi Little Big Bruthirs & they like u 2 b thare in thi monastry 2 do them & Id alredy dun 1 lot on thi hoof as it wer that mornin in thi hydrovater so I thot 4 thi evenin Is I ot 2 actuly b thare wifin thi preesinkts.
Mr Z saw me 2 thi west wol toob trane.
U promis u woan go bak in2 that kript until u ½ 2? Until yor bak wit de bruders? Mr Z sed 2 me, & I sed, O ol rite then Mr Zoliparia.
Good boy, he sed.
Evrifin went as per normil til I got 2 thi othir end whare ther woz a long wait @ thi hydrovater. I thot ov a betir idear & took a travelater acros thi alure 2 a fewnikuler line up a flyin buttriss; Id get 2 thi monastry by dropin from abuv.
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