Matter

allies. Such diligence and precautionary care is your byword, and we have joyously made it ours! Our inexhaustible and perpetual thanks for providing such inspiration and shining example!

This minor and purely preclusionary resource location adjustment will, arguably, lose some of its efficacy if bruited unduly about our greater society of Involved Galactic co-partners and so I beg that you restrict disclosure of this to the absolute minimum of knowledgees. I also specifically request, most strongly, that you ensure that while the orders and arrangements required to ensure the smooth transition of our vessel and its accompanying units are of course made and carried out with all due correctness and the studied meticulousness for which the Nariscene are rightly famed, no subsequent record of these orders and arrangements remains in any part of your data system specific to Sursamen itself.

Formal notification of such matters will of course be shared, acknowledged and recorded by the Morthanveld and Nariscene respective Exemplary Council and High Command, entirely obviating, as I am sure you are bound to agree, any requirement that such minor and operationally non-critical details need be fixed within the informational matrices of the very fine and efficient Nariscene Operational Nexus Command on Sursamen itself.

That is all — no more!

I beseech you to allow me to share with you the indisputable fact that I am so blissfully happy that something so small and unimportant nevertheless confers upon me the elationary privilege of addressing you, my good and faithful friend!

Joy to you!

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Your ever sincere patron and most dutiful colleague,

(sigiled)

Shoum

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(Translated. Original in Morthanveld language.)

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(Added by Grand Zamerin Utaltifuhl:)

Distant under-nephew by marriage! There you have it. That’s us told. I shall on my return be fascinated to hear in some detail from you your version of the events which have compelled our civilisational Dominates to make this unprecedented intervention. Your having one less thing to explain to me will be ensured by doing just as Shoum demands. You personally will see to it that this is carried out.

In duty, Utaltifuhl.

Deputy Acting Zamerin Yariem Girgetioni (Deputy Acting Zamerin Of All Sursamen, The Esteemed Yariem Girgetioni, as he liked to be known; the added bit was not official Nariscene nomenclature, though Yariem was firmly of the opinion it ought to be) viewed the forwarded signal with some distaste and not a little nervousness, though he was careful to hide the latter emotion from the duty lieutenant who had delivered the flimsy bearing the signal.

He was in his personal cloudcraft, floating over the 8-shaped greenery and bluery of Sursamen’s Twinned Crater. He was lounging in a whole-body micro-massage cradle, watching erotic entertainments and being fed dainty sweetmeats by attractively identical pleasure-whelps. He flicked the offending flimsy back at the duty lieutenant. “Just so. See to it.”

“Ah, sir, it does say that you personally—”

“Precisely. We personally are ordering you to make sure that all that is detailed here is carried out to the very letter or we personally shall crack you from your exoskeleton and fling you into the hydrochloric lagoons. Is that personal enough for you?”

“Abundantly, sir.”

“How splendid. Now leave.”

* * *

The Nestworld of Syaung-un was located in the region of space known as the 34th Pendant Floret and seemed almost farcically enormous to Ferbin. He could understand something the size of a Shellworld; for all that his background was one of relative primitiveness compared to others within the greater galactic hierarchy, he was not a savage. He might not understand how the spaceships of the Optimae worked — he was not even privileged to know quite how the far more crude and limited scendships of the Oct operated — but he knew that they did and he accepted it.

He knew that there were levels of science and technology, and of understanding and wisdom, well above those he was privy to and he was not amongst those who chose simply to disbelieve in their existence. Nevertheless, the measure of the engineering behind Morthanveld Nestworlds — structures built on such a scale that engineering and physics started to become the same thing — quite defeated him.

The Nestworld was an ordered tangle of massive tubes within gigantic braids forming colossal ropes making up stupefyingly vast cables constituting loops almost beyond imagining, and — despite the fact that the transparent outer casing of each tubular component was metres thick — it all twisted, turned and revolved, easy as a length of thread.

The Nestworld’s principal components were giant tubes full of water; they varied in diameter between ten metres and many tens of kilometres and any individual tube might range over its length from the narrowest gauge to the greatest. They were bundled together without touching into larger braids which were contained within encompassingly greater pipes measuring a hundred kilometres or so across, also water-filled; these too revolved independently and were also bundled within yet greater cylinders — by now on a scale of tens of thousands of kilometres and more — and were frequently covered in engraved designs and patterns many scores of thousands of kilometres across.

The average Nestworld was a great gathered crown of tangled tubes within tubes within tubes within tubes; a halo world tens of thousands of years old, millions of kilometres across and set circumference-on to its local star, its every million-kilometre-long strand twisting and revolving to provide the tens of billions of Morthanveld within the vast construction with the faint, pleasant tug of gravity they were used to.

Syaung-un was not average; it was half a million years old, the greatest world in the Morthanveld Commonwealth and, amongst the metre-scale species of the Involveds, one of the most populous settlements in the entire galaxy. It was three hundred million kilometres in diameter, nowhere less than a million klicks thick, contained over forty trillion souls and the whole assemblage rotated round a small star at its centre.

Its final, open braid of cylinders altogether easily constituted sufficient matter to produce a gravity well within which a thin but significant opportunistic atmosphere had built up over the decieons of its existence, filling the open bracelet of twisted habitat-strands with a hazy fuzz of waste gas and debris-scatter. The Morthanveld could have cleaned all this up, of course, but chose not to; the consensus was that it led to agreeable lighting effects.

The Hence the Fortress dropped them into a Nariscene-run satellite facility the size of a small moon — a sand grain next to a globe-encircling sea — and a little shuttle vessel zipped them across to the openwork braid of the vast corded world itself, slipstream whispering against its hull, the star at the world’s centre glinting mistily through Syaung-un’s filigree of cables, each stout enough, it seemed, to anchor a planet.

This was, Ferbin thought, the equivalent of a whole civilisation, almost an entire galaxy, contained within what would, in a normal solar system, be the orbit of a single planet. What uncounted lives were lived within those dark, unending braids? How many souls were born, lived and died within those monstrous curling twists of tubing, never seeing — perhaps never feeling the need to see — any other worlds, transfixed for ever within the encompassing vastness of this unexplorably prodigious habitat? What lives, what fates, what stories must have taken place within this star-surrounding ring, forever twisting, folding, unfolding?

They were delivered into a chaotic-seeming port area full of transparent walls both concave and convex and curving caissons and tubing, the whole set like a gassy bubble within one huge water-filled cylinder and all arranged to suit air-breathing people like the Nariscene and themselves. A machine about the size of a human torso floated