Iain M Banks - Feersum Endjinn

[T] links to a translation of that chapter

Then, it was as though everything was stripped away: sensation, memory,self, even the notion of existence that underlies realityall seemed tohave vanished utterly, their passing marked only by the realisation that theyhad disappeared, before that too ceased to have any meaning, and for anindefinite, infinite instant, there was only the awareness of something;something that possessed no mind, no purpose and no thought, except theknowledge that it was.

After that came a rebuilding, a surfacing through layers of thought anddevelopment, learning and shape-taking, until something that was an individual,possessing a shape and capable of being named, woke.

Buzz. Buzzing noise. Lying on something soft. Dark. Try to open eyes. Something sticking. Try again. Light flashshaped 00. Eyes feel open, un-ark. Smells; at once vital anddecadent, lush with death-life, stirring some memory, recent and forever-far atthe same time. Light comes; a small searching for the name of thecolour a small redness hanging in air. Move arm, handcoming up; right arm; noise of skin on skin, feeling coming with it.

Arm, hand, finger: rising, positioning, eyes focusing. Red patch ofsoft light disappears. Press on it. Arm shaking, feeling weak;falls back to side. Skin on skin.

Click.

Noise of buzzing, something sliding again but not skin on skin;harder. Then light from behind/above. The small red light hasdisappeared. Then movement; darkness above/around sliding back, face neckshoulders chest/arms trunk/hands in light now; eyes blinking in light. Light grey-pink, shining down; blue-brightness through hole in curved cliffabove/around.

Wait. Rest. Let eyes adjust. Songs around, wallaround/above (not cliff; wall), curving round, curving over (ceiling;roof). Hole in wall where the brightness is called a window.

Lie there, turning head to one side; another hole, glimpsed over shoulder;goes down to ground, and called doorway. Daylight there beyond, and thegreen of trees and grass. Floor beneath where lying; pressed earth, lightbrown with a few small stones set in it. The song is birdsong.

Get up slowly, arms back, resting on elbows, looking down towards feet;woman, naked, colour of the ground.

Ground is quite near; might as well stand up. Sit up further, swivel(dizzy for a moment, then steady), then feet/legs over side of oftray thing that has appeared out of hole in wall of building, tray thing lyingon, and then stand.

Hold onto tray, legs feeling funny, then stand properly, unaided, andstretch. Stretch feels good. Tray slides back into wall; watch itgo, and watch part of wall slide down to cover hole that was there, hole cameout of. Feel sadness, but feel good, too. Deepbreath.

Breath makes noise, then cough makes noise, and voice isthere. Clear throat, then say:

'Speak.'

Slight startle. Voice makes a feeling in throat and face. Touchface, feel smile. 'Smile.' Feel something building up inside. 'Face.'Still building. 'Face smile.' And still. 'Face smile good alive hole red wallme look door doorway sun garden, ME!'

Then the laughter comes, bursting out, filling the little stone rotunda andspilling out into the garden; a small bird hurtles into the air in a commotionof leaves and flies away upon a wake of song.

Laughter stops. Sit on floor in the building. Feeling emptyinside; hunger. 'Laughter. Hunger. Me hungry. I amhungry. I laugh; I was laughing, I am hungry.' Get up. 'Up.' Giggle.'Giggle. Get up and giggle, me. I learn. I go now.'

But turn and look at inside of building; the curved walls, stamped-earthfloor, the polished rectangular stones with lettering on them which are setinto the walls, some of them with little cups/baskets/holders. Not surewhich one was the one with the tray and the little red light now; not surewhich one came from, now. Sadness, a little.

Turn again and go to door and look out over shallow valley; trees and shrubsand grass, a few flowers, stream in bottom of valley.

'Water. I thirst. I have thirst, I am thirsty; I willdrink. Go for drink now. Good.'

Leave the birth-place vault.

'Sky. Blue. Clouds. Walk. Path. Trees. Bush. Path. Other path. Sky again. Hills. Oh! Oh; shadow. Fright. Laugh! Bigger bush. Flatgrass. Thirsty; mouth dry; think stop talk now. Ha-ha!'

On the morning of the one hundred and forty-third day of the year which bythe new reckoning was called second-last, Hortis Gadfium III, the chiefscientist to the pan-alignment clan Accounts/Privileges, sat on a steel girderand looked up at the almost-finished bulk of the new Great Hall oxygen plantnumber-two liquifier unit, and shook her head.

She watched a crane swing a palleted load of steel-plate towards the workerswaiting on the summit of the structure, while above the crane's delicateweb-work the ponderous mass of a lufter drifted, engines droning, delivering anew batch of supplies. She looked around at the swarm of human-scale toilthat was the new oxygen works, where engines laboured and variously puffed,grumbled and hummed, where machines crawled, floated, rolled or just sat, wherechimerics sweated, strained, lifted and pulled, and where humans too laboured,shouted or simply stood scratching their heads.

Gadfium drew one finger through the layer of dust on the girder beneath her,then held the begrimed finger up to her face and wondered if in that smudgethere lay a nano-machine capable of creating within the day machines whichwould create machines which would create machines that would give them all theoxygen they would ever need, and by the end of the season, not by the end ofnext year. She wiped her finger on her tunic and looked up again at thenumber-two liquifier unit, worrying whether it would ever work properly, and,if it did, whether there would be any workable rockets for it to supply.

She gazed towards the Hall's three vast windows, wherebeneath high,rainless ceiling-cloudsunlight shone slanting down in great broad bandsof dust-struck radiance, illuminating a swathe of landscape a few kilometresaway and sparkling on the towers and domes of Hall City, two thousand metresbeneath the pendulously extravagant architecture of the Lantern Palace.

It was bright outside, and on such days you could deceive yourself that allwas still well with the world, that there was no threat, no shadow on the faceof the night, no remorseless, system-wide, approaching catastrophe. Onsuch days one might persuade oneself that it was all a huge mistake or masshallucination, and that the view last night, when she had stood outside theobservatory dome above the darkened Palace, had been a figment of herimagination, a dream that had not vanished or been properly sorted by herwaking mind, and so which lived on, as nightmare.

She stood up and walked back to where her junior aide and research assistantwere waiting, conversing quietly in the midst of the oxygen works' constructivechaos and looking about occasionally with a kind of disparaging indulgence atthe undignified physical clamour such mere technology required. And,Gadfium didn't wonder, probably amusing themselves discussing what the old girlwas doing, not wanting to linger any longer than absolutely necessary at thisbuilding site.

There probably had been no need for her to attend the site conference atall; the science in this project had long been settled and the burden of effortpassed to Technology and Engineering; still, she was invited to such meetingsout of politeness (and her rank at court), and she attended when she couldbecause she worried that, in the rush to recreate technologies and processeswhich had been obsolete for thousands of years, they might have missedsomething, forgotten some simple fact, overlooked some obvious danger. Such an oversight might be quickly dealt with, but they had anyway so littletime that any interruption at all to the programme might prove disastrous, andwhile in her lowest moments she sometimes suspected such an interruption wasalmost inevitable, she was determined to do all in her power to ensure that ifit did befall them it would not be for want of any diligence on her part.