Matter

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