“If you don’t mind, gents,” the drone said casually.
“Be my guest,” Ferbin told it.
“Didn’t even know they were there,” Holse said.
The door rolled silently to one side, revealing utter darkness. The drone turned soot black and darted ahead, disappearing along with the four other smaller missiles.
The humans floated across a tube Hippinse said was only thirty metres wide; a scendship shaft. Beyond, a circular hatch had just completed irising open. They floated through to the main Tower interior.
As they started to drop, they moved away from each other until they were nearly half a kilometre apart.
I really never thought to be doing this, Holse thought. He was frankly terrified, but elated too. To be dropping towards the WorldGod, with mad aliens, to meet up with a talking, eccentric spaceship that could stride between stars like a man strode between stepping stones, to go in search of an even more insane Iln that wanted to blow up or crumple down the whole world; that was the kind of thing he’d not even started to dream of when he’d been back on the farm, mucking out stables and following his dad around the frost-rimed gelding pen carrying the gently steaming ball bucket, ear still smarting from the latest slap.
He had the worrying feeling that he and Ferbin were along as little more than decoys, but in a way he didn’t care. He was starting to change his mind about the old Warrior Code stuff knights and princes invoked, usually when they were drunk and in need of spilling their words, or trying to justify their poor behaviour in some other field.
Behave honourably and wish for a good death. He’d always dismissed it as self-serving bullshit, frankly; most of the people he’d been told were his betters were quite venally dishonourable, and the more they got the more the greedy bastards wanted, while those that weren’t like that were better behaved at least partly because they could afford to be.
Was it more honourable to starve than to steal? Many people would say yes, though rarely those who’d actually experienced an empty belly, or a child whimpering with its own hunger. Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. By choosing to starve you became your own oppressor, keeping yourself in line, harming yourself for having the temerity to be poor, when by rights that ought to be a constable’s job. Show any initiative or imagination and you were called lazy, shifty, crafty, incorrigible. So he’d dismissed talk of honour; it was just a way of making the rich and powerful feel better about themselves and the powerless and poverty-stricken feel worse.
But once you weren’t living hand-to-mouth, and had some ease, you had the leisure to contemplate what life was really all about and who you really were. And given that you had to die, it made sense to seek a good death.
Even these Culture people, bafflingly, mostly chose to die, when they didn’t have to.
With freedom from fear and wondering where your next meal was coming from or how many mouths you’d have to feed next year and whether you’d get sacked by your employer or thrown into jail for some minor indiscretion — with freedom from all that came choice, and you could choose a nice quiet, calm, peaceful, ordinary life and die with your nightshirt on and impatient relatives making lots of noise around you… Or you could end up doing something like this, and — however scared your body might feel — your brain rather appreciated the experience.
He thought of his wife and children, and felt a twinge of guilt that they had been so absent from his thoughts for so long recently. He’d had a lot to think about and so many new and utterly bizarre things to learn, but the truth was they seemed like beings from another world now, and while he wished them only well, and could imagine — if, by some miracle, they survived all this — going back to them and taking up his old duties again, somehow that felt like it was never going to happen, and he’d long since seen them for the final time.
A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?
They hovered above a gigantic door composed of great dark curved sections like scimitar blades all pressed together to make a pattern like the petals of a flower. The drop had taken nearly half an hour and in that time they had passed another five levels, where, according to the suit, things called Variolous Tendrils, Vesiculars, Gas Giant Swimmers, Tubers and Hydrals lived. The final level above the Machine space was empty of life, full of oceanic water under kilometres of ice. Now they were directly above the Machine space level where, according to both legend and convention, the workings of the world as it had originally been conceived still sat, lifeless but mighty.
“This is Secondary, isn’t it?” Anaplian asked, staring down at the vast shutter.
“Yes,” Hippinse said. “Openable.”
Hippinse floated over the very centre of the three-kilometre-diameter door, his outline in the visors of the others fuzzy, barely hinted at even by the astoundingly sensitive sensors of the suits. He detached something from his suit and left it lying right in the door’s centre, where the great blades met.
They followed Anaplian back up a kilometre to a huge oval hole in the side of the vast shaft, entered the hundred-metre-diameter tunnel which it led to and floated straight down. Behind, above them, something flashed. The suits registered tiny but ponderous long-wavelength vibrations in the fabric of the tube around them.
Anaplian beckoned them together and when they touched said, “The main door should have opened the one at the bottom of this too, so we can fall straight out. Xuss and the four suit missiles are going first.”
“Look,” Ferbin said, staring down. “Light.”
A flickering blue-grey circle widened quickly as they fell towards it. Beyond, beneath, dimly glimpsed far below, vast shapes loomed, all curved and swooping, sharp and bulbous, pocked and ribbed and serrated. It was like falling into a vast assemblage of blades the size of storm systems, all lit by lightning.
“Clear,” Turminder Xuss announced. “Suggest staying apart, though; signalling less a risk than a tight target.”
“Copy,” Anaplian said tersely.
They dropped beneath the ceiling of the Machine level and hung, hundreds of metres apart, over a drop of about fifty kilometres to the vast blade systems lying still in the gloom below. A few tens of kilometres off, a colossal vaned shape like an enormous toroidal gear wheel filled the view, its topmost edges ridging up to the level ceiling. It seemed to sit on top of and mesh with other titanic spheres and discs all linked to still further massive shapes, and far in the distance, hundreds of kilometres away — their lower reaches obscured by the relatively near horizon of spiralled bladed complexes like immense, open flowers — enormous wheels and globes the size of small moons bulked in the darkness, each seeming to touch the undersurface of the shell above.
Hell’s gearbox, Djan Seriy thought when she saw it, but did not choose to share the image with the others.
The flickering blue-grey light — sporadic, sharp, intense — came from two almost perfectly opposed bearings, partially obscured by intervening machinery in both directions.
“That’s battle light,” Hippinse said.
“Agree,” Anaplian said. “Any ship signals?”
There was a pause. “Yes, got it, but… Confused. Broken up. Must be the other side, getting reflections,” Hippinse said, sounding first relieved then worried.
“Our direction?” Anaplian asked.
“Follow me,” Hippinse said, heading off.
“Xuss; ahead, please,” Anaplian said.
“Already there,” the drone said.
The suits tipped them so that they raced across the ghostly landscape far below with their feet leading, though the view could be switched easily enough to make it look as though one was flying head-first. Holse asked about this. “Not streamlining,” the suit replied. “We are in vacuum, so not required. This orientation presents smaller target profile in direction of travel and prioritises human head for damage limitation.”
“Ah-ha. Oh, yes; also, what holds the world up?” Holse asked. “There’s no Towers.”
“The large machines present within this space retain the structural integrity of the ceiling above.”
“I see,” Holse said. “Righty-ho.”
