Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  Eventually only the rock had been left, frayed and sculpted into spears and pinnacles of knife-sharp karst; a forest of pitted stone blades stretching from horizon to horizon, baked in the heat of the equatorial sun and dotted with collapsed caves where a few parched plants clung on in dark, sunken oases, and striated by tattered ribbons of seemingly level ground where the karst’s brittle corrugations were on a scale of centimeters rather than kilometers.

  There were always plans to revivify the dead heart of the continent, but they never came to anything; even the seemingly promising scheme to replace the main space port for Golter’s eastern hemisphere, Ikueshleng, with a new complex in the desert had failed. Apart from some ruins, a sprinkling of old waste silos, a few vast, automated solar energy farms, and the Trans-Continental Monorail—also sun-powered—the K’lel was empty.

  She squatted on her haunches in the shadow of the monorail support, holding her rifle butt down on the dusty ripples of stone, clenching the gun between her knees while she adjusted the scarf round her head, tucking one end into the collar of her light jacket.

  It was mid-morning; the high cirrus clouds were poised like feathery arches over the warming expanse of karst, and the still air sucked sweat from exposed skin with an enthusiasm bordering on kleptomania. She slipped the mask up over her mouth and nose and reseated the dark visor over her eyes, then sat back, holding the gun, her fingers tapping on the barrel. She took a drink from her water bottle and glanced at her watch. She looked over at Dloan, crouching at the other leg of the monorail, rifle slung over his back, wires from his head-scarf leading into an opened junction box in the support leg. He looked up at her and shook his head.

  Sharrow leaned back against the already uncomfortably warm support leg. She shifted her satchel so that it was between her back and the hot metal of the monorail support. She looked at the time again. She hated waiting.

  * * *

  They met up again in the Continental Hotel in Aïs, after Sharrow had bailed herself out of Aïs’s Vice Squad pound and bribed the desk sergeant to lose the record of her arrest.

  She finally arrived at the hotel—clothed again, and veiled, even if it did attract attention—but there was nobody there registered as Kuma or any other name she could imagine the others might be using.

  She stood, tapping her fingers on the cool surface of the reception desk while the smiling and quite naked clerk scratched delicately under one armpit with a pen. She wondered whether to ask if there were any messages for her; she was starting to worry about giving her location away to the Huhsz. She’d think about it. She bought a newssheet to see if the Huhsz had their Passports yet and headed for the bar.

  The first person she saw was a fully clothed Cenuij Mu.

  “My watch says the damn thing should be visible by now,” Miz said, tight-beaming from the top of the monorail line, two kilometers away round the shallow curve the twinned tracks took to avoid a region of collapsed caves.

  “Mine too,” Sharrow said into the mask. She squinted into the distance, trying to make out the tiny dot that was Miz, sitting on the baking top-surface of the monorail; the last time she’d looked she’d been able to see him and the lump on the ground beneath him, which was the camouflaged-netted All-Terrain, but the heat had increased sufficiently in just the last ten minutes for it to be impossible to see either now; with the naked eye the white line of the rail writhed and shimmered, smearing any detail. She tried adjusting the magnification and the polarization of the visor, but gave up after a while.

  “Nothing on the phones?” she asked.

  “Just expansion noises,” Miz replied.

  She looked at her watch again.

  “So what changed your mind?” she asked Cenuij, in the elevator to the floor where the others were waiting.

  He sighed and pulled back the left sleeve of his shirt.

  She bent forward, looking. “Nasty. Laser?”

  “I believe so,” he said, pulling down his sleeve again. “There were three this time. They wrecked my apartment. Last I heard—before I had to run away—my insurance company was refusing to pay out.” Cenuij made a sniffing noise and leaned back against the wall of the lift, arms crossed. “When all this is over I shall ask you to cover that loss.”

  “I promise,” Sharrow said, holding up one hand.

  “Hmm,” Cenuij said as the elevator slowed. “Meanwhile, Miz appears to think there’s some point in staging…” Cenuij looked round the elevator, then shrugged, “a train robbery.”

  Sharrow raised her eyebrows. The elevator stopped.

  “For…artifacts,” Cenuij said, as the doors opened and they left, “that are indestructible, can’t be hidden and it would be suicide to hold on to.” He shook his head as they walked down the wide corridor. “Does the Log-Jam turn everybody’s brains to mush?”

  “It does when you head-butt a hydrofoil from twenty meters up,” she told him.

  She pulled her mask down; the air was a hot blast at the back of her throat. She waved at Dloan. He took the plugs out of his ears, cocked his head.

  “Aren’t you getting anything?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Just the carrier signal; nothing about the train being late or being on this section of track yet.”

  She turned back, frowning. “Shit,” she said, and flicked a grain of dust off the muzzle of the hunting rifle. She put the mask back up.

  Miz stood looking out of the hotel-room window, glaring at Aïs’s dusty eastern suburbs. He glanced at Cenuij, who was taking the doll apart on the table, a magnifier clipped over his eyes.

  “I was set up,” Miz said incredulously. He flapped his arms as he turned back to look at the others. “Some bastard had me steal the fucking necklace and let Lebmellin think he was going to double-cross me, but they had it all worked out; fucking Mind Bomb shit and the guns it switched off. And the set-up in the tanker; it was all done that day; I checked that route myself during the morning…” His voice trailed off as he sat heavily on the couch beside Sharrow. “And look at this!” He reached out to the low table in front of the couch and snatched up the newssheet Sharrow had brought with her. “ Re-purloined Jewel wins the first race in Tile yesterday! Bastards!”

  “Hey,” Sharrow said, putting her arm on his shoulders.

  “Anyway,” he said, “enough. You had a worse time.” He squinted at her. “Two identical guys?” he said.

  “Completely identical.” Sharrow nodded, taking her arm away. “Clone identical.”

  “Or android identical,” Cenuij said from the table, putting down the magnifier.

  “You think so?” she asked.

  Cenuij stood, stretching. “Just a thought.”

  “I thought androids came kind of expensive,” Sharrow said, swirling her drink. “I mean, when the hell do you ever see an android these days?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think I’ve dated a few.” Zefla grunted, going to the room’s bar for a drink.

  “They tend to stay in Vembyr, certainly,” Cenuij agreed. “But they travel, occasionally, and like everybody else,” Cenuij smiled frostily at Sharrow, “they each have their price.”

  “Dloan was in Vembyr once,” Zefla said, turning from the flasks and bottles displayed in the cooler. “Weren’t you, Dlo?”

  Dloan nodded. “Arms auction.”

  “What’s it like?” Miz asked him.

  Dloan looked thoughtful, then nodded and said, “Quiet.”

  “Anyway,” Zefla said, taking a bottle from the cooler, “fuck the androids; what about that doll?”

  Cenuij looked at it lying spread out on the table. “Could have been made anywhere,” he told them. “PVC body with strain gauges and an optical wiring loom; battery pack and a chunk of mostly redundant circuitry foam, plus an electronic coder-transmitter working at the long-wave limit of normal net frequencies.” Cenuij looked at Dloan. “Could the doll have been linked to some form of nerve-gun to do what she’s described?”

  Dloan nodded. “Modified stunner
can produce those effects. Illegal, most places.”

  “I didn’t see any gun,” Sharrow said, trying to remember. “There were the two guys, the two chairs, the gas cylinder…”

  “Chlorine!” Miz said, slapping both knees and jumping up from the couch to go to the window again, running one hand through his hair. “Fucking chlorine! Sons of bitches.”

  “The gun could have been anywhere in the tank,” Cenuij said, glancing at Dloan, who nodded. “Possibly with the master unit controlling the androids, if that’s what they were. Or,” Cenuij added, nodding at Sharrow, “the doll could have been transmitting directly.”

  Nobody said anything.

  Sharrow cleared her throat. “You mean there might be something inside me picking up the signals from the doll?”

  “Possible,” Cenuij said, gathering the bits and pieces of the doll together. “This long-wave transmitter isn’t how you’d normally slave a gun to a remote. It’s…strange.”

  “But how could there be something in me?” Sharrow said. “Inside my head…?”

  Cenuij shoved the remains of the doll into a disposal bag. “Had any brain surgery recently?” he asked, smiling humorlessly.

  “No.” Sharrow shook her head. “I haven’t been near a doctor for…fourteen, fifteen years?”

  Cenuij scraped the last few bits of the doll into the bag. “Not since Nachtel’s Ghost, in fact, after the crash,” he said. He sealed the disposal bag. “So it was a nerve-gun.”

  “I hope so,” Sharrow said, staring toward the window where Miz was standing again, looking out over the dusty city.

  “You want this?” Cenuij asked her, holding up the bag with the doll’s remains in it.

  She shook her head and crossed her arms, as though cold.

  They booked a private compartment on the dawn-hour Aïs–Yadayeypon Limited. Three hours into the journey the train left the last vestiges of Outer Jonolrey’s prairies behind and decelerated across the first jagged outcrops of karst for its last stop before the eastern seaboard. They completed their breakfast and watched the pale-gray, intermittently spired landscape below start to dot with houses, solar arrays and fenced compounds.

  They were the only people who got off. The straggled town felt like frontier territory, lazy and open and half-finished. The local vehicle dealer had the six-wheel All-Terrain waiting in the station parking lot; Miz signed the papers, they collected a last few supplies from a general hardware store and then set off into the karst along a bumpy, dusty solar-farm road that roughly paralleled the widely spaced fence of inverted U’s supporting the thin white lines of the monorails.

  Sharrow looked up as something moved above her on the monorail. Cenuij looked down, his scarf-enfolded head showing over the edge of the rail eight meters above.

  “What exactly is going on?” he said.

  She shrugged. “No idea.” She looked at Dloan, still listening to the monorail’s circuits, then along to the next support leg, where Zefla was sitting in the shade, her head bowed.

  “Well, that’s fine,” Cenuij said tetchily. “I’ll just stay up here and get heatstroke, shall I?” He disappeared again.

  “What an excellent idea,” Sharrow muttered, then tight-beamed to the point on the rail two kilometers away where Miz was. “Miz?”

  “Yeah?” Miz’s voice said.

  “Still nothing?”

  “Still nothing.”

  “How long till the next one’s through in the other direction?”

  “Twenty minutes.”

  “Miz, you are absolutely sure—” she began.

  “Look, kid,” Miz said, sounding annoyed. “It’s the regular fucking express, the Passports were issued yesterday and my agent in Yada says a Huhsz front company hired a private carriage on this train, today, about five minutes after the Passports hearing broke up. How does it all sound to you?”

  “All right, all—” she began.

  “Whoa,” Miz said. There was silence for a few moments, then Miz’s voice returned, suddenly urgent. “Got something on the phones…definite vibration…should be it. All ready?”

  She glanced at Dloan, who was holding one hand to his ear. He looked up at her and nodded. “Here it comes,” he said.

  “Ready,” Sharrow told Miz. She whistled to Cenuij, who stuck his head over the top again. “It’s on its way,” she told him.

  “About time.”

  “Got the other foil ready?”

  “Of course; putting the gunge on now.” He shook his head. “Stopping a monorail with glue; how do I get into these situations?” His head disappeared.

  Sharrow looked at the squatting figure a hundred meters up the line. “Zef?”

  Zefla jerked. Her head came up; she looked round and waved. “Business?” her sleepy voice said in Sharrow’s ears.

  “Yes, business. Try to stay awake, Zef.”

  “Oh, all right then.”

  Dloan shut the junction box in the monorail leg and started climbing up the hand-holds toward the top of the rail.

  Sharrow felt her heart start to race. She checked the rifle again. She brought out the Hand-Cannon and checked it too. They were under-gunned for an operation like this, but they hadn’t had time to get all the gear they’d wanted together.

  The morning after she’d been dropped in Aïs by the Solipsists and met up with the others, they heard the Passports would be issued within the next twenty hours.

  Miz told them his plan; Cenuij told him he was crazy. Zefla’s considered opinion on its legal implications was that it was “cheeky.”

  They had just enough time to set up the All-Terrain purchase for the next day and storm through Aïs in a variety of taxis, buying up desert gear, bits of comm equipment and the heaviest automatic hunting rifles and ammunition the Aïs county laws would allow them to have. Just another day or so and Miz could have had heavier weaponry flown in and cleared through one of his front companies, but the Passports were issued on time that day and they had no choice but to make their move.

  Their final purchases had been three large discs of coated heavy-duty aluminium foil—spare parts for a portable solar furnace—and some glue. While Dloan and Miz had been buying those, Sharrow had been in the hotel, placing a call to a descendant of one of the Dascen family’s servants, a man rich enough himself to have a butler and a private secretary both of whom Sharrow had to go through before she got to Bencil Dornay, who cordially and graciously invited her to his mountain house, along with her friends.

  “—ast!” Sharrow heard Miz say.

  “What?” she sent back, rattled by the tone of his voice. There was no reply. She stared into the distance, where the white line of the monorail disappeared into the desert shimmer.

  “I can see it!” Cenuij shouted from above.

  An infinitesimal silent line appeared on the liquid horizon, barely visible through the trembling air. The tiny bright line lengthened; sun burst off it briefly, flickering, then blinked out again.

  Sharrow stood up and clicked the visor magnification to twenty. It was like looking at a toy-train set reflected in a pool of wobbling mercury. The train was still a couple of kilometers away from where Miz was lying on the top of the monorail. She watched the shadows of the support legs flicking across the train’s nose as it raced along under the rail, a tearing silver line curving through the heat.

  She counted.

  “Shit,” she heard herself say. The shadows were strobing across the train’s aircraft-sleek snout at almost three per second; the supports were spaced every hundred meters and the expresses normally ran at about two-twenty meters per second; that was the speed they’d based their calculations on. She drew a breath, to tell Miz to throw the foil over early, when she saw a flash under the monorail.

  “Foil’s down!” she heard Miz yell.

  If Miz’s plan was going to work, the train’s needle radar should now be picking up the echo of the foil screen and slamming the emergency brakes on.

  “It’s going too fast,” she
beamed to Zefla. “It’ll overshoot.”

  “On my way,” Zefla sent back, and started running toward Sharrow.

  A roaring, screaming noise came through the tight-beam; Miz was just audible above the racket, shouting, “Feels like it’s braking. Here it comes!”

  “Start running!” Cenuij called down to Sharrow.

  “I’m running, I’m running,” she muttered, sprinting across the corrugated karst toward the next support leg.

  Two kilometers away, Miz lay on the top of the monorail, his cheek held just off the burning surface. The vibration and the noise bored through him; the humming from beneath built into a teeth-aching buzz that seemed to threaten to jolt him right off the rail. He spread himself out, trying to clamp himself to the rail with his hands and feet. Beneath him, the circle of foil he’d dropped into the path of the train vibrated gently on its plastic stays, its coated surface reflecting the train’s radar. The noise and vibration rose to a crescendo as the furiously braking train screamed past underneath.

  “ Shi-i-i-i-t!” Miz said, his teeth chattering, every bone in his body seeming to judder. The vortex of air swept up and over him, lashing at his clothes.

  The bullet nose of the decelerating train hit the circle of foil, ripping through it instantly and sending the shredded pieces fluttering through the air like a flock of falling silver birds.

  The train roared away, still braking. Miz jumped up. “I’d put that second foil down now, kids!” he tight-beamed, then ran to the support leg and started climbing down toward the All-Terrain.

  Sharrow slowed, looking back down the curving line of support legs; light and shade flickered at their limit. She ran on through the parched air, still slowing, and waited for the second circle of foil to drop above her. She could hear the train now; a distant roar.

  “Going fast, eh?” Zefla grinned, dashing past.

  The second foil reflector dropped and spread ten meters ahead of Sharrow. She stopped, breathing hard, a furnace in the back of her throat. Zefla jogged on, fifty meters in front of her. Sharrow looked back; the train came on, still slowing; the noise stayed almost constant as the slipstream ebbed and the wail of protesting superconductors gradually faded as the train drew closer.