Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  “The faith responded in kind; a prophet had a vision and decided that the Messiah couldn’t be born until the faithful had their treasure back, or the female line of the family had died out; whichever came first. And however it worked, it had to happen by the time of the decamillennium.”

  She studied Jyr’s tearful, uncomprehending face for a moment, then shook her head. “Well,” she said, exasperated, “you did ask.”

  “Take me with you,” Jyr whispered.

  “What? No.”

  “Take me with you,” he repeated, taking one of her hands in his. “I’ll do anything for you. Please.”

  She pulled her hand away. “Jyr,” she said, looking levelly into his eyes. “It was a good summer and I had a lot of fun; I hope you did too. But now I’ve got to go. Stay in the house until the lease runs out, if you want.”

  He slapped her.

  She stared at him, her ears ringing, the impact of the slap like an echo on her face. He’d never hit her before. She didn’t know what she found more amazing; the fact he’d managed to surprise her, or that he’d even thought of trying to hit her in the first place.

  He stood in front of her, his eyes wide.

  She shook her head, smiled brightly and said, “Oh, boy,” then punched him hard in the jaw. Jyr’s head snapped back; he fell crashing into the dressing-table behind, scattering bottles, pots, jars and brushes. He slid to the floor; perfumes and lotions spilled from smashed bottles and made dark stains on the tiles around him.

  She turned, picked up her bag and slung it over her shoulder.

  She hoisted a small satchel from the side of the bed and put it over her other shoulder. Jyr moaned, lying face down on the floor. The room began to reek of expensive perfume.

  She inspected the knuckles on her left hand, frowning. “Get out of my house, now,” she said. “Phone?” she spoke to the room.

  “Ready,” chimed a voice.

  “Stand by,” she said.

  “Standing by.”

  She tapped Jyr on the backside with one boot. “You’ve got two minutes before I call the police and report an intruder.”

  “Oh gods, my jaw,” Jyr whimpered, getting to his knees and holding his chin. The back of his head was bleeding. Bits of broken glass fell from him as he stood, shakily. She took a couple of steps away from him, watching him carefully. He almost fell again, then put one hand out to the dressing-table to steady himself. “You’ve broken my jaw!”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not with an upper cut.” She glanced at the bedside clock. “That’s you down to about a minute and a half now, I’d say.”

  He looked at her. “You fucking heartless bitch.” His voice was quite steady.

  She shook her head. “No, Jyr, I never liked it when you talked dirty.” She looked away from him. “Phone?”

  “Standing by.”

  “Please call the local p—”

  “All right!” Jyr roared, then winced, and held his jaw as he stumbled for the door. “I’m going! I’m going! And I’m never coming back!” He hauled the bedroom door open and slammed it shut behind him; she listened to his feet hammering down the stairs, then heard the front door crash shut; the turret shook around her. A final slam was his car door, followed by the noise of the engine, whining away into the night.

  She stood very still for a while, then her shoulders dropped a little, and her eyes closed.

  She swayed slightly, swallowed, then breathed out as she opened her eyes again, sniffing. She wiped her eyes, took another deep breath and walked away from the bed. She stopped briefly at the dressing-table, setting a couple of bottles upright again.

  “Standing by,” said the room.

  She looked at her reflection in the table’s mirror. “Cancel,” she said, then drew one finger through a thick pool of perfume on the table’s wooden surface, and dabbed the scent behind her ears as she walked toward the door.

  She drove the bike back into town, helmet on, nightsight activated and all lights blazing.

  She arrived at the tall town house which was the home of the Bassidges, the couple who owned the other two thirds of the tropical fish business. Her lawyer was already there; she signed the necessary papers selling her share in the shop to them. She’d left her personal phone in the cliff house, knowing it would make her too easy to trace. After her lawyer had returned home and the Bassidges had gone to bed she sat down at the house’s antique desk-terminal and stayed there until dawn, taking a couple of zing-tabs to keep herself awake as she attempted to catch up on eight years of Antiquities news and data-gossip.

  There were numerous outstanding contracts for the Universal Principles: several from universities, several more from big Corps known to invest in high-value Antiquities, a few from wealthy individual collectors who specialized in lost Unique books, and one anonymous contract. The latter offered the best financial advance, though only for Antiquities investigators with acceptable track records. She was almost tempted to draft a tender and mail it to the anonymous box number, but there was too much to settle first.

  She suspected she’d end up looking for the book one way or the other. According to one of the more pervasive rumors that had circulated within the Dascen family and its attendant septs in the chaotic aftermath of her grandfather Gorko’s fall, the whereabouts of the last Lazy Gun—the one stolen from the Huhsz by the Duchess seven generations earlier and hidden after the Duke’s death—had been discovered by Gorko’s agents and its location somehow recorded in the Unique book named the Universal Principles, which itself had been missing for a lot longer.

  To Sharrow, the rumor had always seemed just mad enough to be true, though how you could leave a message in something which everybody agreed had vanished centuries earlier, she understood no better than anybody else.

  At appropriate times during the night, to allow for the time differences involved, she phoned the Francks in Regioner, left a message for Miz in the Log-Jam, failed to track down anybody by the name of Cenuij Mu in what passed for a city database in Lip City, and filed a visitation request with the Truth Dissemination Service of the Sad Brothers of the Kept Weight, in the Sea House, Udeste province, Caltasp.

  She checked on the last Lazy Gun’s official Antiquities status too, just for the hell of it. There was, of course, only the one contract extant, from the World Court, offering a graded reward schedule for information leading to the weapon’s safe apprehension and an equally impressive sliding scale of steep fines and grisly punishments for anybody harboring such information and not releasing it to the Court.

  Nine years earlier there had been tens of contracts; a unique one from the Huhsz which specifically wanted the Gun taken from them by Sharrow’s family over two hundred years earlier, and all the rest, which just wanted a Lazy Gun. She and the rest of the team had taken up one of the most lucrative anonymous contracts which required the capture or destruction of either Gun. They had fulfilled the contract but to this day none of them knew who it had been who’d paid them (or paid all but one of them; Cenuij Mu had refused his share after the Gun wiped a large part of Lip City off the map).

  Shortly after the Lip City explosion the World Court had legislated to forbid anybody else taking possession of the last remaining Gun, though of course every Antiquities specialist and team in the system knew damn well that the Huhsz—despite being prevented from saying so officially—would attempt to top any reward the World Court might offer for the fabled weapon.

  She scrolled through the irreversible mutilations the World Court threatened to inflict on anybody obstructing the lawful sequestration of the last Gun, then clicked out of Antiquities Contracts to try another way of tracking down Cenuij Mu in Lip City, once more without success.

  Tansil Bassidge rose early and made breakfast; the two women ate together in front of the kitchen screen, watching the all-hours news service, then Tansil took her to the airport for the dawn stratocruiser.

  She napped during the flight, landing at Udeste City Intercont
inental a couple of hours later, still just ahead of the dawn.

  The region of Udeste lay just inside Golter’s southern temperate zone, jutting east into Phirar and west into Farvel, Golter’s largest ocean; bounded to the north by the Seproh plateau, its southern boundary was the narrow strip of the Security Franchise, which guarded the forests and fjords of the Embargoed Areas and—beyond—the mountains, tundra and cold desert of the historically rebellious province of Lantskaar, which stretched all the way down to the pack ice.

  The Sea House lay at the very end of the final promontory of the Farvel Bight, a gulf which stretched in an almost unbroken curve nearly two thousand kilometers from the Areas to the House.

  She hired a car and took the autotoll past and around the city-states, bishoprics, Corpslands, enclaves and family estates of Inner Udeste, then joined an interroute through the villages and farmlands of Outer Udeste’s western marches, across the moors toward the coast. The weather deteriorated continually throughout the journey, increasing cloud compensating for the rising sun so that she seemed to drive forever in a gray-brown half-light. Rain came and went in squalls. At the House limits the great chain-mesh fence’s one entrance straddled the small road in a clutter of ramshackle guard buildings on one side and a motley profusion of old, sad-looking tents on the other. A thunderstorm played over the broken hills to the north, and low cloud blanketed the sandy bluffs rising beyond the gate.

  There was a short queue at the gate; the usual hopeful petitioners. She drove to the head of the column, sounding the car’s Klaxon to shift the gaunt, hollow-eyed men and women out of the way. A scowling contract guard in a dripping camouflage cape walked up and pointed a carbine at her.

  “Okay; what’s your name?” he said, sounding disgusted. He looked up and down the length of the rain-gleaming turbiner.

  “Sharrow,” she told him.

  “Full name,” he sneered.

  “Sharrow,” she repeated, smiling. “I believe I’m expected.”

  The guard looked uncertain. He took a step back.

  “Wait here,” he said, then added, “Ma’am.” He disappeared into the guard cabin.

  Moments later a captain appeared, fastening his tunic and settling a cap on his head; the guard she’d talked to held an umbrella over the captain, who wrung his hands as he bent to look in through the window at her. “My lady; we see so few nobles here…I’m so sorry…single names take us by surprise…all the riff-raff we have to deal with…Ah, might one ask for identification? Ah, of course; a Noble House Passport…thank you, thank you. Excellent; thank you, thank you. An honor, if I may say so…

  “Well, don’t just stand there, trooper. The gate!”

  Traversing the bluff and dropping back beneath the clouds to the downlands with their ruined and empty towns, and then to the canal-sectioned levels before the gravel beach and the great bay, took another half hour. The weather improved unaccountably when she reached the end of the road, where the creamy ribbon broadened out to become a spatulate apron whose seaward edge had disintegrated into rotten chunks of corroded concrete scattered like thick leaves across the sandy soil. Beyond lay Gravel Bay, a rough semicircle bisected by the shallow curve of the great stone causeway and half-filled by the vast bulk of the Sea House. The bay’s upper slopes were brown and cream on gray, where decaying seaweed and a scum of wind-blown surf-froth lay tattered and strewn like rags across the gray gravel.

  She got out of the car, carrying her satchel; a cold wind tugged at her hair and made her culottes flap. She buttoned the old riding-jacket and pulled on her long gloves.

  At the end of the causeway stood two tall granite obelisks stationed on either side of the House’s artificial isthmus; stretched between them was an enormous rusted iron chain which would have blocked further automotive progress anyway, even if the concrete apron had connected with the ancient, time-polished flagstones of the causeway. A cold gust of wind brought the stench of rotting seaweed and raw sewage to her, almost making her gag.

  She looked up. A little catchfire lightning played about the highest towers, turrets and aerials of the Sea House. The cloudbase, dark-gray and solid looking, hung immediately above. She had been here only twice before, and on neither occasion had the rain and mist permitted her to see more than the first fifty meters or so of the Sea House’s towering bulk. Today, all three hundred meters of it was visible, soaring dimly up toward the overcast.

  She pushed a nosegay-scarf up over her mouth and nose, hoisted her satchel onto her shoulder, picked her way though the stumps of decaying concrete, stepped over the great iron chain, and—limping slightly, but walking quickly nevertheless—started down the rutted, cambered surface of the causeway.

  At least, she told herself, the rain had stopped.

  The Sea House was probably as old as civilization on Golter; somewhere near its long-buried core it was claimed to rest on the remains of an ancient castle or temple predating even the zero-year of the First War. Over the millennia the building had grown, accreting about itself new walls, courtyards, turrets, parapets, halls, towers, hangars, barracks, docks and chimneys.

  The history of the planet, even of the system, was written on its tiered burden of ancient stones; here the age had demanded defense, leaving battlements and ramparts; here the emphasis was on the glory of gods, producing helical inscript columns, mutilated idols and a hundred other religious symbols fashioned in stone and wrought from metal, most of them meaningless for centuries; here the House’s occupants had thought fit to honor political benefactors, resulting in statues, relief columns and triumphal arches over walled-off roadways; elsewhere trade had been the order of the day, depositing cranes and jetties, graving docks, landing pads and launch gantries like flotsam round the outskirts of the House’s layered walls; on occasion information and communication had ruled, leaving a litter of rusting aerials, broken dishes and punctured shell domes crusting the scattered summits of the vast structure.

  The current incumbents of the Sea House—who claimed despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary that they had inhabited it from the beginning, but who had certainly ruled there for the last five hundred years or so—were the Sad Brothers of the Kept Weight, one of Golter’s multitudinous ancient and arcane religious orders. They were exclusively male and claimed to believe in abstinence, continence and acquiescence to the will of God.

  By Golter standards they were cooperative and outgoing, to the extent of permitting secular scholars to study in the many libraries, archives and depositories the House had accrued over the millennia. A veneer of ecumenicalism allowed visits by monks from other orders, and numerous prisoners from all over the system convicted under a variety of religious laws were held in the House. Other visitors were discouraged.

  Sharrow was accepted at the House because six years earlier her half-sister Breyguhn had smuggled herself into the structure in an attempt to find and steal the Universal Principles, one of the system’s many fabled lost Unique books. Breyguhn had failed in her quest; she had been caught and imprisoned in the Sea House, and it was because she was her closest relation that Sharrow was allowed in to visit her.

  With what was—arguably—a rare exhibition of an underlying sense of irony, the Sad Brothers had made the recovery of the Universal Principles the condition for Breyguhn’s release. Whether this implied they did not possess the book but wished to, or that they already did and so knew the task was impossible, was a matter for conjecture.

  At the far end of the causeway the stone-flagged road inclined upward to a huge, crumbling central gatehouse which was the only landward aperture in the House’s blank curtain wall of seaweed-hemmed granite. The gateway’s deeply machicolated summit hung like a set of gigantic discolored teeth over a throat blocked by a rusting, ten-meter-square door of solid iron. The massive door—and the whole gatehouse—leaned out over the causeway’s end in a manner which indicated either serious subsidence, or a desire to intimidate.

  Sharrow picked a rock up from the fractured
surface of the wheel-grooved causeway and slammed it several times as hard as she could against the ungiving iron of the door. The noise was flat and dull. Rock dust and rust flakes drifted away on the breeze. She dropped the stone, her arm sore from the series of impacts.

  After a minute or so she heard metallic sliding, scraping noises coming from the door. Then they faded. After another minute she hissed through her teeth in exasperation, picked up the stone again and slammed it against the door a few more times. She rubbed her arm and looked up into the dark arches of the stonework, searching for faces, cameras or windows. After a while, the clanking noises returned.

  Suddenly a grille opened in the door at chest height; more flakes of rust fell away. She bent down.

  “Yes?” said a high, scratchy voice.

  “Let me in,” she said to the darkness behind the iron-framed hole.

  “Ho! ‘Let me in,’ is it? What’s your name, woman?”

  She pushed her scarf down from her mouth. “Sharrow.”

  “Full na—”

  “That is my full name, I’m a fucking aristo. Now let me in, creep.”

  “What?” the voice screeched. She stood back, putting her hands in her pockets while the grille slammed shut and a grinding, creaking noise seemed to shake the whole door. Finally the outline of a much smaller entrance appeared under the flakes of rust, and with a crunch a door swung open, large enough for a human to enter bowed. A small man in a filthy cowled cassock glared out at her. She held her passport in her right hand and shook it in front of his gray, unhealthy-looking face before he could say anything. He stared at the document.

  “Cut the crap,” she said. “I went through it all last time. I want to speak to Seigneur Jalistre.”

  “Do you now? Well, you’ll just have to wait. He—” the small monk began, swinging the door shut with one manacled hand.

  She stepped forward, planting a boot in the doorway.