Authors: Iain M. Banks
Feersum Endjinn (33 page)
The following winter lasted throughout the spring before finally delivering a summer hardly warmer than the autumn it quickly lapsed into, and after that there was nothing but winter; winter with the dim face of thee sun high in the sky, or a winter set within a winter when the sun dipped nearer the horizon.
The pack ice grew continually, permafrost buckled the ground and thrust blisters of ice through what had been temperate soils, the currents of the air and of the sea changed as lakes and rivers froze and the hearts of the continents and the upper levels of the oceans cooled.
Plants died back, creating new deserts where vegetation used to copious heat and light had withered and plants better suited to the colder conditions had not yet had time to colonise, while those plants themselves succumbed to the sudden, smothering weight of the advancing snow and ice.
Animals of all descriptions found themselves being concentrated in a smaller and smaller band around the waist of the world, raising the contest to survive to new levels of ferocity, while even in the comparative warmth of the oceans life became gradually less abundant as the white shutters of freezing sea irised slowly closed over the brash-ice waves, and the trickling streams of sunlight energising the top of the food chain were reduced almost to nothing.
As though in mocking compensation for the shaded sun, great storms of light played about the heavens at night, flickering like aurorae, cold and vast, inhuman and numbing.
Still in those dreams he saw people crouched round fires, struggling through snow drifts with packs and possessions, taking refuge in mines and tunnels as the snow piled and the glaciers advanced and the icebergs crunched aground off equatorial shores and the pack ice spread from either pole like crystals in some drying solution.
No spears of fire or engines of more sophisticated energies lifted exiles into space, but for all the corpses abandoned at roadsides, for all the men, women and children left to die or freezing together in cars, carriages, houses, villages, towns and cities, still people persevered; retreating, stocking up, burrowing down, sealing up.
The fastness that had been Serehfa fell slowly, surrendering to aggregated megatonnes of ice until only the fast-tower itself remained, a listing cenotaph to human hubris. Then the glaciers swept down from the mountains to north and south and scoured even that from the surface of the world; the fast-tower’s only memorial was a brief volcanic eruption wrenched from the earth by the thermonuclear-level energies its final fall created.
And so humanity left the surface of the world to the ice, wind and snow, and sheltered, reduced and impoverished, within the stony depths of the planet’s skin, finally coming to resemble nothing more than parasites in the cooling pelt of some huge dying animal.
With it it took all its knowledge of the universe and all the memories of its achievements and all the coded information defining the animals and plants that had survived the vicissitudes of time and evolution and - especially - the pressure of the human species’ own until then remorseless rise.
Those buried citadels became whole small worlds of refugee communities and spawned still smaller worlds as new machines took over the job of maintaining the levels of the crypt, until gradually more and more of what was in any sense humanity came to reside not simply in the created world of its tunnels, caverns and shafts but within those worlds in the generated realities produced by its computers.
Then the sun began to swell. The Earth shucked off its mummifying cocoon of ice, passed quickly through a feverish spring full of flood and storm, then wrapped itself in deeper and deeper cloud and more torrential rain. The atmosphere thickened and the heat and pressure built up while lightning played across the boiling clouds; the oceans shrank; the swollen bulk of the invisible sun poured energy into the deepening cauldron of gases around the planet, transforming it into a vast caustic foundry of chemical reactions and precipitating a welter of corrosive agents to pour upon the razed, enfumed surface of the Earth.
Earth turned into what Venus had once been, Venus began to resemble Mercury and Mercury ruptured, flowed and disintegrated to become a ring of molten slag spiralling in through the livid darkness towards the surface of the sun.
Still, what was left of humanity persisted, retreating further from the open oven of the surface until it became trapped between it and the heat of the planet’s own molten sub-surface. It was then that the species finally gave up the struggle to remain in macrohuman form, pulling back fully into a virtual environment and resorted to storing its ancient biochemical inheritance as information only, in the hope that one day such fragile concoctions of water and minerals could exist again upon the face of the Earth.
Its time from then was long as people reckoned it from that point, short as they would have before. The sun’s photosphere continued to expand until it swallowed Venus, and Earth did not survive much longer; the last humans on Earth perished together in a crumbling machine core as its cooling circuits failed, the half-finished life-boat spaceship they had been attempting to construct already melted to a hollow husk beside them.
... He suffered with each child abandoned to the snow; with every old man or woman left - too exhausted to shiver any more - under piles of ice-hard rags; with all the people swept away by the howling, fire-storm winds; with each consciousness extinguished — its ordered information reduced to random meaninglessness - by the increasing heat.
And he woke from such dreams sometimes wondering whether all that he was being shown could possibly be true, and on other occasions so convinced that it had been real that he would have faithfully believed what he had seen was the inescapable future, rather than some mere possibility, projection or warning.
He crawled ashore at dusk, collapsing onto the golden slope of the beach, the perfumes of the lush gardens beyond washing over his naked skin while his body shook and trembled with the after-effects of exertion.
He stared ahead, panting, while the surf washed at his feet, then rose unsteadily and staggered up the smooth stretch of beach towards a low white stone wall separating the strand from the gardens. Steps led up. He stood, then sat, shivering a little on the stone parapet, just looking.
Brightly coloured birds flitted through moss-hung trees, fountains played tinkling on shaded pools, paths meandered between plump lawns, and gaudy banks and beds of flowers offered up their bells and mouths to a lazy buzz of late-gathering insects.
The grey tower towards the apex of the gardens looked dark and deserted against the deep bruised hues of the sky.
He got his breath back and when he started to shiver again stood up and walked smartly towards the tower.
He walked out from under the sheltering trees.
The tower’s dark grey surface had the rough-smooth texture of eggshell. It stood on a plinth of veined porphyry surrounded by a shallow moat where lilies floated and over which bowed an ornamental bridge of red-painted wood.
As he watched, something caught the faint light in the sky at the top of the tower and flashed, and floating down towards him there came an angel.
He laughed out loud.
4
I get tired screemin. Evin moar I get tired ov gettin bashed on thi hed wif thi mask whot has cum off ma faice; itz stil atatched 2 thi air tank on my bak & itz slipt roun bhind ma nek & is goan fump fump fump on thi bak ov my bonce.
I feel bhind me & tare it away.
Ma eers r goan pop pop pop. Thi air iz blastin roun me so hard therz harly eny poynt in me screemin nway. Its olmost totily dark; Ive got a sorta gray sensation ov thi wols rushin past aroun me, & if I twist roun I can luke up & c a vaig impreshin ov a tiny patch ov dark gray on thi blakniss.
Downwirds, thers jus blakniss.
I try 2 kript but I cant; doan no if itz coz Im movin 2 fass or coz thi shaft is sheeldid or coz Im 2 terrifyd 2 consintrate proprly. I start screemin agen, then stop, gulpin 4 bref.
Id ½ shat my pants by now but itz been so long sins I 8 I cant.
Thi air is coald & am shiverin but its not freezin. I setil in2 a sorta floppi X-shape aftir a while, like Ive scene skydivirs do; I drift 2wards 1 wol, then manoovir myself away agen. I ½ 2 keep swaloin 2 keep my eers from burstin. I try 2 fink how far up I woz & how long itz goan 2 talk me 2 fol 2 thi botim, if its thi botim thats goan 2 brake ma fol. I reelize that ther mite b sumthin btween me & thi botim & I cude hit @ eny momint & I start screemin agen.
I stop aftir a while. Teers get whipt off ma faice but itz not me cryin itz juss thi feercniss ov thi wind tearin @ ma Is.
Ive nevir dyed b4. I doan no whot itz like. Ive herd from uthir peepil & Ive bin in thi minds ov bags whot ½ dyed & got ther impreshins but thay say itz difrint 4 evrybodi & I doan no whot itil b like 4 me & I woz hoapin not 2 find out 4 a while yet thanx very mutch but thare we go.
I start wunderin if thayl resusitate me @ oll. O fuk; whot if Im in sutch big trubil thayl juss looz my ident from thi kript? Whot if thay catch ma dyin fots & then juss interogate me, or doan bothir sayvin me @ oll?
I feel like am goan 2 b sik.
Thi roarin aroun me goze on forevir. My Is r dry & soar. My eers hurt 2.
O fuk I doan wan 2 dy.
I cant bleev how long this is takin. I feel like Im in kript-time. It okurs 2 me mayb I am, mayb I kriptid without noin about it. But I cant b. Im obveyisly not. I’m heer, follin down this shaft, damit. I try kriptin agen.
It wurx. Im on thi sekind basemint levil, praktikly @ c levil.
How mutch furthir down can this bleedin shaft go?
/ I port acros in2 thi kript; @ leest I can avoid thi momint ov impact. My implants will pool me bak when I dy, so ther woant b 2 ov me, but @ leest ... wait a bleedin minit.
Accordin 2 thi loakil hardware Im stil on thi saim levil. Thi kript finks Im staishinry. Wots goan on heer?
I dubil chek, trebil chek, kwadroopil chek. Yep; thi kriptosfeer finks Ive stopt.
I giv a sorta mentil gulp, then port bak acros 2 my bod.
/Thi air iz stil screemin up roun me. Itz stil totily blak but wif thi thermil bit ov my vizhin I can stil make out thi wols 2 ither side. Shurenuf, they do luke a bit difrint; no impreshin ov them hurtlin past no moar. I stare down.
I doan c nuthin but blakniss but now I fink about it thi sound is diffrint sumhow; evin moar ov a roar.
Then suddenli thers lites evriwhare, blindin me.
I cloas my Is. I fink; blimey, I nevir felt a fing. Thass me ded & this is thi long tunnil wif thi lite @ thi end whot evribody getz 2 c & I muss ½ hit thi botim & not evin felt it.
Xsept thi roarins stil thare & thi wind is stil pushin in2 ma face. I opin my Is agen.
Im stairin strate down @ a sorta a hexagonil grid ov wires or metil or sumfin, & beyond thi grid, a few metirs furvir down, thers ol these big propelir fings, 7 ov them, ol whirlin away & roarin & sendin thi air screemin up past me.
I luke 2 thi side.
Thers a doar in thi wol levil wif me & a cupil ov big black meen lookin birdz wif skaley nex perchd thare, lookin @ me, beedy-Id, ther fevirs rufflin in thi draft.
I cant fink whot else 2 do. So I wave 2 them.
That woz how we used 2 reech our hoam, 1 ov thi birdz tells me.
Am wokin along a brod britely lit tunnil. Thi 2 lammergeiers r keepin pace wif me by sorta ½ hoverin in thi air 1 on ither side ov me, ther wings goan whuf whuf, whuf whuf. I didn evin no they cude do this.
Am wokin kinda funy coz I think I did crap my pants juss a litil, but they doan seem 2 notis, or thayr 2 polite.
U meen u got blastid up thare by thoaz fans? I say, suriptishisly poolin @ thi seet ov ma pants.
Krect, sez thi bird (½in 2 shout abuv thi noise ov its wings goan whuf whuf).
So whyd u leev? I shout. & who woz that up thare pooshd me down?
We left bcoz it woz no longir safe, & we wer needid down heer, yelz thi bird. As 2 who pooshd u in2 thi shaft, I imajin it woz probly a state employee.
Whot, a Security geezir or sumfing? But—?
Pleez; I cant tel u eny moar. Our comandir may b abil 2 ansir eny uthir qwestions u ½. Luke; wude u mind runnin?
Runnin? I sez, Why, is ther sumbidy aftir us? I glans bhind expectin 2 c Security peepil pursooin us but thers juss thi long brite tunil stretchin way in2 thi distins.
No, shouts thi bird, itz juss this pace is very tyrin 4 us.
Sorry, I sez, & braik in2 a run. Dozent do my chafed bum no gude but it keeps thi 2 lammergeiers happy, beetin alongside.
& so that woz how I arrivd @ thi lammergeiers HQ; brefliss, on thi dubil & wif my pants spottid wif kak.
Thi hed lammergeier iz a feerce big bugir ov a burd; tolir than me when heez perchd & wings longir than Im tol. He iznt no ole gie neevir, heez in hiz prime wif sleek blak & wite fevvirs, steely lookin talins, a naykid nek that lukes oild & brite, & jet-blak Is. I doan no if heez got a naim; we ½nt bin propirly introdoosed.
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