Consider Phlebas

by Iain M. Banks

  She opened her eyes, and the world had changed. The far hills were forever rolling brown and green waves with a crest of breaking white foam. The plain fumed with light; the pattern of pastureland and copses in the foothills looked like camouflage, moving but not moving, like a tall building seen against quick clouds. The forested ridges were buckled divisions in some huge busy tree-brain, and the snow- and ice-covered peaks about her had become vibrating sources of a light that was sound and smell as well. She experienced a dizzying sense of concentricity, as though she was the nucleus of the landscape.

  Here in an inside-out world, an inverted hollowness.

  Part of it. Born here.

  All she was, each bone and organ, cell and chemical and molecule and atom and electron, proton and nucleus, every elementary particle, each wave-front of energy, from here . . . not just the Orbital (dizzy again, touching snow with gloved hands), but the Culture, the galaxy, the universe . . .

  This is our place and our time and our life, and we should be enjoying it. But are we? Look in from outside; ask yourself . . . Just what are we doing?

  Killing the immortal, changing to preserve, warring for peace . . . and so embracing utterly what we claimed to have renounced completely, for our own good reasons.

  Well, it was done. Those people in the Culture who had really objected to the war were gone; they were no longer Culture, they were not part of the effort. They had become neutrals, formed their own groupings and taken new names (or claimed to be the real true Culture; yet another shading of confusion along the Culture’s inchoate boundaries). But for once the names did not matter; what did matter was the disagreement, and the ill feeling produced by the split.

  Ah, the contempt of it. The glut of contempt we seem to have achieved. Our own disguised contempt for ‘primitives’, the contempt of those who left the Culture when war was declared for those who chose to fight the Idirans; the contempt so many of our own people feel for Special Circumstances . . . the contempt we all guess the Minds must feel for us . . . and elsewhere; the Idirans’ contempt for us, all of us humans; and human contempt for Changers. A federated disgust, a galaxy of scorn. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.

  And what the Idirans must feel towards us. Consider: near-immortal, singular and unchanged. Forty-five thousand years of history, on one planet, with one all-embracing religion/philosophy; whole steady aeons of contented study, a calm age of devotion on that one worshipped place, uninterested in anything outside. Then, millennia ago in another ancient war, invasion; suddenly finding themselves pawns in somebody else’s squalid imperialism. From introverted peacefulness, through ages of torment and repression – a forging force indeed – to extroverted militancy, determined zeal.

  Who could blame them? They had tried to keep themselves apart, and been shattered, almost made extinct, by forces greater than those they could muster. No surprise that they decided the only way to protect themselves was to attack first, expand, become stronger and stronger, push their boundaries as far from the treasured planet of Idir as possible.

  And there is even a genetic template for that catastrophe change from meek to fierce, in the step from breeder to warrior . . . Oh, a savage and noble species, justifiably proud of themselves, and refusing to alter their genetic code, not far wrong in claiming perfection already. What they must feel for the swarming biped tribes of humankind!

  Repetition. Matter and life, and the materials that could take change – that could evolve – forever repeating: life’s food talking back to it.

  And us? Just another belch in the darkness. Sound but not a word, noise without meaning.

  We are nothing to them: mere biotomatons, and the most terrible example of the type. The Culture must seem like some fiendish amalgam of everything the Idirans have ever found repugnant.

  We are a mongrel race, our past a history of tangles, our sources obscure, our rowdy upbringing full of greedy, short-sighted empires and cruel, wasteful diasporas. Our ancestors were the lost-and-found of the galaxy, continually breeding and breeding and milling and killing, their societies and civilisations forever falling apart and reforming . . . There had to be something wrong with us, something mutant in the system, something too quick and nervous and frantic for our own good or anybody else’s. We are such pathetic, fleshy things, so short lived, swarming and confused. And dull, just so stupid, to an Idiran.

  Physical repugnance, then, but worse to come. We are self-altering, we meddle with the code of life itself, re-spelling the Word which is the Way, the incantation of being. Interfering with our own inheritance, and interfering in the development of other peoples (ha! an interest we share) . . . And worse still, worst of all, not just producing, but embracing and giving ourselves over totally to the ultimate anathema: the Minds, the sentient machines; the very image and essence of life itself, desecrated. Idolatry incarnate.

  No wonder that they despise us. Poor sick mutations that we are, petty and obscene, servants of the machine-devils that we worship. Not even sure of our own identity: just who is Culture? Where exactly does it begin and end. Who is and who isn’t. The Idirans know exactly who they are: pure-bred, the one race, or nothing. Do we? Contact is Contact, the core, but after that? The level of genofixing varies; despite the ideal, not everybody can mate successfully with everybody else. The Minds? No real standards; individuals, too, and not fully predictable – precocious, independent. Living on a Culture-made Orbital, or in a Rock, another sort of hollowed world, small wanderer? No; too many claiming some kind of independence. No clear boundaries to the Culture, then; it just fades away at the edges, both fraying and spreading. So who are we?

  The buzz of meaning and matter about her, the mountains’ song of light, seemed to rise around her like a cauldron tide, drenching and engulfing. She felt herself as the speck she was: a mote, a tiny struggling imperfect chip of life, lost in the surrounding waste of light and space.

  She sensed the frozen force of the ice and snow around her, and felt consumed by the skin-burning chill of it. She felt the sun beat, and knew the crystals’ fracturing and melting, knew the water as it dripped and slithered and became dark bubbles under ice and dewdrops on the icicles. She saw the fronded trickles, the tumbling streams and the cataracted rivers; she sensed the winding and unwinding loops as the river slowed and ox-bowed, calm, esturial . . . into lake, and sea, where vapour rose once more.

  And she felt lost within it, dissolved within it, and for the first time in her young life was truly afraid, more frightened there and then than she had been when she’d fallen and broken her leg, during either the brief moments of falling, the stunning instant of impact and pain, or the long cold hours afterwards, crumpled in the snow and rocks, sheltering and shivering and trying not to cry. That was something she had long before prepared herself for; she knew what was happening, she had worked out the effects it might have and the ways she might react. It was a risk you took, something you understood. This was not, because now there was nothing to understand, and maybe nothing – including her – to understand it.

  Help! Something wailed inside her. She listened, and could do nothing.

  We are ice and snow, we are that trapped state.

  We are water falling, itinerant and vague, ever seeking the lowest level, trying to collect and connect.

  We are vapour, raised against our own devices, made nebulous, blown on whatever wind arises. To start again, glacial or not.

  (She could come out, she felt the sweat bead on her brow, sensed her hands create their own moulds in the crisp crunching snow, and knew there was a way out, knew she could come down . . . but with nothing, having found nothing, done nothing, understood nothing. She would stay, then, she would fight it out.)

  The cycle began again, her thoughts looping, and she saw the water as it flowed down gorges and valleys, or collected lower in trees, or fell straight back to lakes and the sea. She saw it fall on meadowland and on the high ma
rshes and the moors, and she fell with it, terrace to terrace, over small lips of rock, foaming and circling (she felt the moisture on her forehead start to freeze, chilling her, and knew the danger, wondered again whether to come out of the trance, wondered how long she had sat here, whether they were watching over her or not). She felt dizzy again, and grabbed deeper at the snow around her, her gloves pressuring the frozen flakes; and as she did that, she remembered.

  She saw the pattern of frozen foam once more; she stood again beside that ledge on the moor’s cold surface, by the tiny waterfall and the pool where she had found the lens of frothed ice. She remembered holding it in her hands, and recalled that it did not ring when she flicked it with her finger, that it tasted of water, no more, when she touched it with her tongue . . . and that her breath blew across it in a cloud, another swirling image in the air. And that was her.

  That was what it meant. Something to hold onto.

  Who are we?

  Who we are. Just what we’re taken as being. What we know and what we do. No less or more.

  Information being passed on. Patterns, galaxies, stellar systems, planets, all evolve; matter in the raw changes, progresses in a way. Life is a faster force, reordering, finding new niches, starting to shape; intelligence consciousness – an order quicker, another new plane. Beyond was unknown, too vague to be understood (ask a Dra’Azon, perhaps, and wait for the answer) . . . all just refining, a process of getting it more right (if right itself was right) . . .

  And if we tamper with our inheritance, so what? What is more ours to tamper with? What makes nature more right than us? If we get it wrong, that’s because we are stupid, not because the idea was bad. And if we are no longer on the breaking edge of the wave, well, too bad. Hand on the baton; best wishes; have fun.

  Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?

  Who are you?

  What are you?

  A weapon. A thing made to deceive and kill, by the long-dead. The whole subspecies that is the Changers is the remnant of some ancient war, a war so long gone that no one willing to tell recalls who fought it, or when, or over what. Nobody even knows whether the Changers were on the winning side or not.

  But in any event, you were fashioned, Horza. You did not evolve in a way you would call ‘natural’; you are the product of careful thought and genetic tinkering and military planning and deliberate design . . . and war; your very creation depended on it, you are the child of it, you are its legacy.

  Changer change yourself . . . but you cannot, you will not. All you can do is try not to think about it. And yet the knowledge is there, the information implanted, somewhere deep inside. You could – you should live easy with it, all the same, but I don’t think you do . . .

  And I’m sorry for you, because I think I know now who you really hate.

  She came out of it quickly, as the supply of chemicals from glands in her neck and brainstem shut off. The compounds already in the girl’s brain cells began to break down, releasing her.

  Reality blew around her, the breeze freshening cold against her skin. She wiped the sweat from her brow. There were tears in her eyes, and she wiped them, too, sniffing, and rubbing her reddened nose.

  Another failure, she thought bitterly. But it was a young, unstable sort of bitterness, a kind of fake, something she assumed for a while, like a child trying on adult clothes. She luxuriated in the feeling of being old and disillusioned for a moment, then let it drop. The mood did not fit. Time enough for the genuine version when she was old, she thought wryly, smiling at the line of hills on the far side of the plain.

  But it was a failure nevertheless. She had hoped for something to occur to her, something about the Idirans or Balveda or the Changer or the war or . . . anything . . .

  Instead, old territory mostly, accepted facts, the already known.

  A certain self-disgust at being human, an understanding of the Idirans’ proud disdain for her kind, a reaffirmation that at least one thing was its own meaning, and a probably wrong, probably over-sympathetic glimpse into the character of a man she had never met and never would meet, who was separated from her by most of a galaxy and all of a morality.

  Little enough to bring down from the frozen peak.

  She sighed. The wind blew, and she watched clouds mass far along the high range. She would have to start down now if she was going to beat the storm. It would seem like cheating not to get back down under her own steam, and Jase would scold her if conditions got so bad she had to send for a flyer to pick her up.

  Fal ’Ngeestra stood. The pain in her leg came back, signals from her weak point. She paused for a moment, reassessing the state of that mending bone, and then – deciding it would hold up – started the descent towards the unfrozen world below.

  11.

  The Command System: Stations

  He was being shaken gently.

  ‘Wake up, now. Come on, wake up. Come on, now, up you get . . .’

  He recognised the voice as Xoralundra’s. The old Idiran was trying to get him to wake up. He pretended to stay asleep.

  ‘I know you’re awake. Come on, now, it’s time to get up.’

  He opened his eyes with a false weariness. Xoralundra was there, in a bright blue circular room with lots of large couches set into alcoves in the blue material. Above hung a white sky with black clouds. It was very bright in the room. He shielded his eyes and looked at the Idiran.

  ‘What happened to the Command System?’ he said, looking around the circular blue room.

  ‘That dream is over now. You did well, passed with flying colours. The Academy and I are very pleased with you.’

  He couldn’t help but feel pleased. A warm glow seemed to envelop him, and he couldn’t stop a smile appearing on his face.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. The Querl nodded.

  ‘You did very well as Bora Horza Gobuchul,’ Xoralundra said in his rumbling great voice. ‘Now you should take some time off; go and play with Gierashell.’

  He was swinging his feet off the bed, getting ready to jump down to the floor, when Xoralundra said that. He smiled at the old Querl.

  ‘Who?’ he laughed.

  ‘Your friend; Gierashell,’ the Idiran said.

  ‘You mean Kierachell,’ he laughed, shaking his head; Xoralundra must be getting old!

  ‘I mean Gierashell,’ the Idiran insisted coldly, stepping back and looking at him strangely. ‘Who is Kierachell?’

  ‘You mean you don’t know? But how could you get her name wrong?’ he said, shaking his head again at the Querl’s foolishness. Or was this still part of some test?

  ‘Just a moment,’ Xoralundra said. He looked at something in his hand which threw coloured lights across his broad, gleaming face. Then he slapped his other hand to his mouth, an expression of astonished surprise on his face as he turned to him and said, ‘Oh! Sorry!’ and suddenly reached over and shoved him back into the—

  He sat upright. Something whined in his ear.

  He sat back down again slowly, looking round in the grainy darkness to see if any of the others had noticed, but they were all still. He told the remote sensor alarm to switch off. The whine in his ear faded. Unaha-Closp’s casing could be seen high on the far gantry.

  Horza opened his visor and wiped some sweat from his nose and brows. The drone had no doubt seen him each time he woke up. He wondered what it was thinking now, what it thought of him. Could it see well enough to know that he was having nightmares? Could it see through his visor to his face, or sense the small twitches his body made while his brain constructed its own images fr
om the debris of all his days? He could blank the visor out; he could set the suit to expand and lock rigid.

  He thought about how he must look to it: a small, soft naked thing writhing in a hard cocoon, convulsed with illusions in its coma.

  He decided to stay awake until the others started to rise.

  The night passed, and the Free Company awoke to darkness and the labyrinth. The drone said nothing about seeing him wake up during the night, and he didn’t ask it. He was falsely jolly and hearty, going round the others, laughing and slapping backs, telling them they’d get to station seven today and there they could turn on the lights and get the transit tubes working.

  ‘Tell you what, Wubslin,’ he said, grinning at the engineer as he rubbed his eyes, ‘we’ll see if we can’t get one of those big trains working, just for the hell of it.’

  ‘Well,’ Wubslin yawned, ‘if that’s all right . . .’

  ‘Why not?’ Horza said, spreading his arms out. ‘I think Mr Adequate’s leaving us to it; he’s turning a blind eye to this whole thing. We’ll get one of those super-trains running, eh?’

  Wubslin stretched, smiling and nodding. ‘Well, yeah, sounds like a good idea to me.’ Horza smiled widely, winked at Wubslin and went to release Balveda. It was like going to release a wild animal, he thought, as he shifted the empty cable drum he had used to block the door. He half expected to find Balveda gone, miraculously escaped from her bonds and disappeared from the room without opening the door; but when he looked in, there she was, lying calmly in her warm clothes, the harness making troughs in the fur of the jacket and still attached to the wall Horza had fixed it to.

  ‘Good morning, Perosteck!’ he said breezily.

  ‘Horza,’ the woman said grumpily, sitting slowly upright, flexing her shoulders and arching her neck, ‘twenty years at my mother’s side, more than I care to think of as a gay and dashing young blade indulging in all the pleasures the Culture has ever produced, one or two of maturity, seventeen in Contact and four in Special Circumstances have not made me pleasant to know or quick to wake in the mornings. You wouldn’t have some water to drink, would you? I’ve slept too long, I wasn’t comfortable, it’s cold and dark, I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was like at the moment, and . . . I mentioned water a moment or two ago; did you hear? Or aren’t I allowed any?’