Feersum Endjinn
Chapters - Iain M. Banks
Part 1: One
The opening section introduces the novel's strands. A new-woken woman emerges from a stone vault in the wastes beyond the castle and walks out into an unfamiliar world, naming each thing she sees. Chief scientist Hortis Gadfium III is summoned to investigate something impossible on the Plain of Sliding Stones, where the great drifting stones have arranged themselves in a perfect circle. Count Alandre Sessine VII rides at the head of a relief column into the collapsed Southern Volcano Room and is killed in an ambush from within his own command - the last of his physical lives spent. And in a cliff-eyrie above the castle, the young teller Bascule is visiting his hero, the dissident astrologer Mr Zoliparia, when a lammergeier swoops down and carries off his friend Ergates - a tiny talking ant.
Chapter 1
Awareness rebuilds out of nothing. A naked woman the colour of pressed earth wakes on a tray that has slid from a niche in the wall of a small stone rotunda. A red light winks out as she presses it; the tray retreats and the wall closes. She names what she sees one word at a time - light, wall, window, doorway, garden - and laughs when her own voice surprises her. Hunger pulls her up. She leaves the birth-place vault into a shallow valley of trees, grass and a stream, talking herself through sky, clouds, bush and path with delighted, halting attention, learning herself into being as she walks.
POV: Asura
Chapter 2
Hortis Gadfium III, chief scientist to clan Accounts/Privileges, sits on a girder at the half-finished oxygen plant in the Great Hall, doubting it will save anyone from the Encroachment darkening the night horizon. The clan Engineers, holed up in the Chapel, are at war with the King's side, and the King has had parkland torn up to build this works under his eye. Her aide Rasfline brings a Palace summons: something odd at the Plain of Sliding Stones. A garbled report from a junior observer described the stones doing impossible things before contact was lost. The King's own clifter has been sent to fetch her up East Cliff with Rasfline and her assistant Goscil.
Chapter 3
Count Alandre Sessine VII rides in the turret of a command scree-car as his caisson-train of beasts, troops and armoured vehicles grinds across the wrecked floor of the collapsed Southern Volcano Room, supplying a beleaguered garrison in the fifth-floor solar. He gazes up at Serehfa's vast walls and the unreachable fast-tower, mulling whether the mission is brilliant or pointless. A signal-burst breaks the convoy's enforced silence. His comms lieutenant, ashen and shaking, reports an air attack, then shoots the captain and driver. Sessine returns through the hatch, sees the lieutenant's gun on him, hears an apology and a blast, and dies - finally, his last physical life spent.
POV: Count Alandre Sessine VII·On page: John Ilsdrun IV
Chapter 4
Bascule, a young teller in the Little Big Brothers of the Rich, takes a day off with his friend Ergates, a tiny talking ant he carries in a jacket pocket. After clearing it with mentor Scalopin and scrounging provisions, he rides a truck along the cliff road and a creaky wooden hydrovator up to visit his hero Mr Zoliparia, a dissident astrologer who lives in the right eyeball of the gargoyle Rosbrith. Over wine and tea on the iris balcony, Zoliparia laments that humanity has settled into the castle like a hospice, abandoned by the giants who built it and went to the stars. As Ergates nibbles a crust, a huge lammergeier crashes down, snatches the bread along with the ant, and bears her shrieking away.
POV: Bascule·On page: Ergates, Mr Zoliparia, Scalopin
Part 2: Two
Chapter 1
The new-woken woman drinks at a pool, names her reflection and walks on through ornamental gardens. She finds a topiary castle with a hedge moat, then an avenue of huge faces sculpted from shrubs. One of the heads begins to argue about the Encroachment in two voices, debating whether the world will freeze or roast. When she replies, a man called Gil Velteseri and a fair-haired woman, Lucia Chimbers, push out of the head, having been hidden inside it together. Embarrassed by her nakedness, Lucia tells Gil to lend her his jacket. She asks them her own name; Lucia, irritated, calls her simpleton, and Gil laughs uncomfortably.
POV: Asura·On page: Gil Velteseri, Lucia Chimbers
Chapter 2
Gadfium gasps on the airless white salt-flat of the Plain of Sliding Stones, four kilometres across beneath a dark purple sky, the fast-tower rearing nearby. The thirty-two granite stones, normally pucks drifting on melt-slicked salt, have arranged themselves in a perfect circle around the mobile spider-legged observatory, their motion violating every model. The chief observer, Clispeir, an old university friend of Gadfium, apologises that none of her Privileged junior staff has implants to record it. Overcome by the thin air, Gadfium is helped to Clispeir's cabin, where the two old friends drop the pretence. Clispeir confirms in a whisper that a long-prepared contact has finally been made with the tower.
Chapter 3
Reborn into the crypt for good, Sessine wakes in an ambient version of Serehfa he prepared as his afterlife. He cancels the usual indulgences and meets his clan's crypt-lawyer in a Bank of England vault to investigate his murder. The young lieutenant Ilsdrun who shot him acted on a coded gistics phrase, "Veritas odium parit". An audience with the King is brushed off by the private secretary, who is busy with the Chapel peace talks. Sessine asks for military High Command and is beheaded by the soldier who appears. He wakes and is killed again, and again - missile, strangle-wire, sniper, knife in the cradle - seven deaths in a heartbeat. The eighth time he wakes in a tawdry hotel room in the cistern port of Oubliette, finds an envelope addressed in his pre-promotion name, and reads the note he left himself.
Chapter 4
Bascule, devastated at losing Ergates, refuses to be talked out of going after her. Zoliparia reports the theft to the guard as a stolen antique box, but holds out no hope. Bascule explains that a teller can fish into the crypt for the dead, and that long-dead minds sometimes pass into animals - a bird's brain might still hold a personality reachable by a skilled teller. He sits on a chair with a pen in his mouth, asks Zoliparia to wake him when the pen drops, and dives down into the crypt as a hawk perched among iron birds. Asking after the lammergeier, he is challenged by a huge red-black raptor that snatches away his wake-up code ring and crushes him down through level after level into the chaotic depths.
POV: Bascule·On page: Mr Zoliparia·Mentioned: Ergates
Part 3: Three
The third section. The political situation in the real world - a feudal society living in a vast castle while the Encroachment erases the sky - becomes more urgent. The connections between the three strands begin to emerge.
Chapter 1
Brought to the Velteseri house Jenahbilys, the strange naked woman meets Gil's elderly uncle Pieter, who teaches her to sit on a chair and asks Lucia to find her proper clothes. Over lobster lunch she gorges open-mouthed, hurling shells across the floor for a cleaning servitor to chase. Pieter declares she is probably an asura - an old Hindi word for a demon opposed to the gods, used now for a wildness generated by the corpus or some external system to deliver a message it cannot deliver internally. Possibly, he suggests, it concerns the Encroachment. She has no implants; the message may lie in her irises, fingerprints or genes. She belches, farts, thumps her chest and proudly names herself: "Asura."
POV: Asura·On page: Pieter Velteseri, Gil Velteseri, Lucia Chimbers
Chapter 2
Curtains drawn in the cabin, Clispeir tells Gadfium that the signal came at noon the day before, written in shining letters cast across the salt by manipulated light. She hands over a copy on a strip of paper. The message identifies itself as a long-dormant standby system reactivated by the approaching dust cloud. It warns that the rocket evacuation will fail, that the lower-levels' competing space efforts will fail, and that workings in the fifth-level south-western solar threaten the fabric. It asks whether emergency meta-protocols and an external signal-carrier - an asura - have appeared, and urges reply only by helio semaphore or signal-lamp. Gadfium, shaken, forbids Clispeir to tell the King: the message hints the Palace has its own secret agenda. They have ten minutes to plan.
POV: Gadfium·On page: Clispeir, Rasfline·Mentioned: Sortileger Xemetrio
Chapter 3
King Adijine VI sits in the Palace solar atop the Great Hall's lantern, half listening to the polar-bear ambassador of the Chapel Engineers drone through peace negotiations he knows are a sham - the bomb workings in the fifth-level solar will soon make the talks irrelevant. Wearing his crown he hops through the minds of his bodyguard, his colonel-in-chief, his private secretary digesting news of Sessine's murder, his seneschal, courtesan and far-flung spyers, then settles on the Army colonel-to-the-court, who is daydreaming of his new mistress: Sessine's widow. Meanwhile, in the crypt's crustal basement, Sessine reads the warning he prepared years ago. He calls Security chief Nifel for help, then realises from the agent-construct's choice of motto that even Nifel is compromised. With nowhere safe in the real world to turn, gun vanishing as he crosses the threshold, he leaves the Salvation Hotel an outlaw with one careful life left.
POV: King Adijine VI·Mentioned: Colonel Flische, Count Alandre Sessine VII, Nifel
Chapter 4
Trapped a week of crypt-time as a hawk because Zoliparia fumbled the wake-up, Bascule shelters in a dark perch-box helped by Dartlin, a lisping sparrow who found him half-blind on the floor. Dartlin gossips that the birds are hunting a first-born signal-carrier loose between crypt and base world, with the chaotic depths stirred up at last by the Encroachment threatening even them, and anyone strange being rounded up. A crow peers in, names him, and a flayed human head held in unseen talons thrusts its long hooked tongue into the box, gabbling nonsense. Dartlin keels over dead of pure terror; the tongue tears at Bascule's wing, and as he is about to be taken the babble resolves into the long-awaited "Bascule fast awake". Back on Zoliparia's balcony, still half hawk, he keeps to himself that he means to go straight back in - to find Ergates, and to learn what is being hunted.
POV: Bascule·On page: Dartlin, Mr Zoliparia·Mentioned: Ergates
Part 4: Four
Chapter 1
Asura wakes in the blue bedroom of the Velteseri house to find a tunnel of impossible light pouring from the bed up through the ceiling. Walking into it, she is carried through shifting landscapes to a moon, where a small ape-man tries to tell her something important she cannot fully grasp. She then finds herself in an open carriage drawn by eight black cat-beasts, escorted by grey birds, rolling along a red-tiled road towards the distant blue castle. A smoky young man calling himself KIP (Knowledge Is Power) appears and warns her to turn back. The escort birds tear him apart; a skinned bat-version returns and she snaps its neck herself, surprising herself by naming a serotine. In the morning she announces she must leave.
POV: Asura·On page: Pieter Velteseri, Gil Velteseri, Lucia Chimbers
Chapter 2
King Adijine wakes between the Luge twins and dips into the crypt to play a revised, happy-ending Hamlet through his pillow's receptor net. Restless after glimpsing the Encroachment beyond the curtains, he prowls minds across Serehfa and settles on the Security agent shadowing Chief Scientist Gadfium. Through Rasfline's senses he watches Gadfium and her aide Goscil work late at the High Sortileger Xemetrio's yamen, brought there to investigate failing predictions including a missed assassination. After dismissing her staff, Gadfium slips along the darkened corridor to Xemetrio's room; Adijine, frustrated when Xemetrio leaves his receptor pillow, retreats to a ceiling camera and gives up. Under the sheets, the lovers exchange notes on a luminous pad: a signal has come from the fast-tower.
POV: King Adijine VI·On page: Gadfium, Sortileger Xemetrio, Rasfline, Goscil
Chapter 3
Sessine climbs the spill-sluice steps out of the underworld town to the Half-way House smoking-tavern, where a tall hopfgeist barmaid recognises his secret code Nosce teipsum and hands him a pre-charged clay pipe his earlier self had left in trust. Smoking it throws him into a vivid recollection of the curtain-wall road-race, driving a Mallet steam locomotive past a crashing rival to take the lead. He steps out of his old self, down into the engine's bellowing interior, and finds a young engineer-self bent over a chess board set in a Silician defence. After exchanging recognition codes he meets Alan, the construct of his forty-year-old self, who plucks Sessine out of the model fastness, relocates him into hardware within the curtain-walls, and promises to reveal who is trying to kill him.
POV: Count Alandre Sessine VII·On page: Alan
Chapter 4
Bascule lies in a babil nest staring up at the fast-tower, recalling Mr Zoliparia's claim that it once anchored a space elevator and Ergates' tale of three such towers. After a pleasant slow-descending lunch and a game of Go with Mr Zoliparia, he promised not to re-enter the crypt, then took a funicular up a flying buttress with two singing novice monks. A quick crypt-check showed traffic round the Little Big Brothers' monastery faked; he got off early. The monks turned out to be assassins; a feedback jolt failed to knock him out and they shot at him through a glider hangar. Trapped on a platform, he leapt onto a giant bat called a jericule, which flew him wounded through cloud and crashed him into the babil before falling away. He spends the night in the foliage, then freezes as a huge black green-streaked beast climbs the branch towards him.
POV: Bascule·On page: Mr Zoliparia·Mentioned: Ergates