Consider Phlebas c-1

by Iain M. Banks

  "How are you going to find a temple on Vavatch?" Neisin said. He was slightly drunk, talking more than he normally did when with the others. Lamm turned his face towards the smaller man a few seats away and on the other side of the table.

  "You'd better just sober up, friend," he said.

  "Seaships," Neisin told him, taking the nippled cylinder from the table in front of him. "Nothing but big goddamned seaships on that place. No temples." He closed his eyes, put his head back and drank.

  "There might'. Jandraligeli said, "be temples on the ships."

  "There might be a fucking drunk on this spaceship." Lamm said, watching Neisin. Neisin looked at him. "You'd better sober up fast, Neisin," Lamm continued, pointing with one finger at the smaller man.

  "Think I'll head for the hangar," Wubslin said, standing and walking out of the mess.

  "I'm going to see if Kraiklyn wants a hand," Mipp said, leaving in the opposite direction, through another door.

  "Think we could see any of those Megaships yet?" Aviger was looking back at the screen. Dorolow looked up at it, too.

  "Don't be fucking stupid," Lamm told him. "They aren't that big."

  "They're big," Neisin said, nodding to himself and the small cylinder. Lamm looked at him, then at the others, and shook his head. "Yeah," Neisin said, "they're pretty big."

  "They're actually no more than a few kilometres long," sighed Jandraligeli, sitting back in his chair and looking thoughtful, emphasising the scar marks still further. "So you won't see them from this far out. But they certainly are large."

  "And they just go round and round the whole Orbital?" Yalson said. She already knew, but she would rather have the Mondlidician talking than Lamm and Neisin arguing. Horza smiled to himself. Jandraligeli nodded.

  "For ever and ever. It takes them about forty years to go right round in a circle."

  "Don't they ever stop?" Yalson asked. Jandraligeli looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

  "It takes them several years just to get to full speed, young lady. They weigh about a billion tonnes. They never stop; they just keep going round in circles. Full-size liners go on excursions and act as tenders, and they use aircraft, too."

  "Did you know," Aviger said, looking round those still seated at the table and leaning forward with his elbows tightly folded, "you actually weigh less on a Megaship? It's because they go round in the opposite direction from the way the Orbital spins." Aviger paused and frowned. "Or is it the other way round?"

  "Oh fuck," Lamm said, shaking his head violently, then getting up and leaving.

  Jandraligeli frowned. "Fascinating," he said.

  Dorolow smiled at Aviger, and the old man looked round the others nodding. "Well, whatever; it's a fact," Aviger declared.

  "Right." Kraiklyn placed one foot up on the shuttle's rear ramp and put his hands on his hips. He wore a pair of shorts; his suit stood ready to be put on, opened down the chest front like a discarded insect skin, just behind him. "I told you we've got a job. This is what it is." Kraiklyn paused, looked at the Company, standing or sitting or leaning on guns and rifles throughout the hangar. "We're going to hit one of the Megaships." He paused, apparently waiting for a reaction. Only Aviger looked surprised and in any way excited; the rest, with only Mipp and the recently woken Lenipobra absent, seemed unimpressed. Mipp was on the bridge; Lenipobra was still struggling to get ready in his cabin.

  "Well," Kraiklyn said, annoyed, "you all know that Vavatch is going to get blown away by the Culture in a few days. People have been getting everything they can off the place, and the Megaships are all abandoned now apart from a few wrecking and salvage teams. I guess all the valuables are off them. But there is one ship called the Olmedreca, where a couple of the teams had a little argument. Some careless person let off a little nuke, and now the Olmedreca's got a damn great hole in one side. It's still afloat and it's still scrubbing off speed, but, because the nuke went off on one side and that hole hasn't done a lot for the ship's streamlining, it's started going round in a big curve, and it's getting closer to the outside Edgewall all the time. The last transmission I picked up, nobody was sure whether it would hit before the Culture starts blasting or not, but they don't seem happy to take the chance, so it looks like there isn't anybody on board."

  "You want us to go onto it," Yalson said.

  "Yeah, because I've been on the Olmedreca, and I think I know something people will have forgotten in the rush to get off: bow lasers."

  A few of the Company looked sceptically from one to another. "Yeah, Megaships have bow lasers — especially the Olmedreca. It used to sail through stretches of the Circlesea a lot of the other ships didn't go through, places where there was a lot of floating weeds or icebergs; it couldn't exactly manoeuvre out of the way so it had to be able to destroy anything in its path, and have the firepower to do it. The Olmedreca's front armament would put a few fleet battleships to shame. That thing could frazzle its way through an iceberg bigger than it was itself, and blast islands of floatweed out of the water so big that people used to think it was attacking the Edgeland. My guess — and it's an educated one because I've been reading between the lines of the outcoming signals — is that nobody's remembered about all that weaponry, and so we're going to go for it."

  "What if this ship hits the wall while we're on board?" Dorolow said. Kraiklyn smiled at her.

  "We're not blind, are we? We know where the wall is and we know where… we'll be able to see where the Olmedreca is. We'll go down, take a look, and then if we decide we have the time, we'll remove a few of the smaller lasers… Hell, just one would do. I'm going to be down there, too, you know, and I'm not going to risk my own neck if I can see the Edge wall looming up, am I?"

  "We taking the CAT?" Lamm said.

  "Not over the top. The Orbital's got just enough mass to make the warp a tricky proposition, and the fusions would get zapped by the Hub auto-defences; they'd think our motors were meteorites or something. No — we'll leave the CAT here unmanned. I can always control it remotely from my suit if there's an emergency. We'll use the shuttle's FFD; force fields work fine on an Orbital. Oh, that's one thing I shouldn't really have to remind you about; don't try to use your AG on the place, OK? Anti-gravity works against mass, not spin, so you'd end up taking an unexpected bath if you jumped over the side expecting to fly round to the bows."

  "What do we do after we get this laser, if we get it?" Yalson said. Kraiklyn frowned briefly. He shrugged.

  "Probably the best thing is to head for the capital. Its called Evanauth… a port where they used to build the Megaships. It's on the land, of course…" He smiled, looking at some of the others.

  "Yeah," Yalson said. "But what do we do once we get there?"

  "Well…" Kraiklyn looked hard at the woman. Horza kicked her heel with his toe. Yalson glared round at the Changer while Kraiklyn spoke. "We might be able to use the port facilities — in space, that is, on the underside of Evanauth — to mount the laser. But anyway, I'm sure the Culture will be prompt, so we might even just go to sample the last days of one of the most interesting combined ports of call in the galaxy. And its last nights, I might add." Kraiklyn looked at several of the others, and there was some laughter and a few remarks. He stopped smiling and looked at Yalson again. "So it could be quite interesting, don't you think?"

  "Yeah. All right. You're the boss, Kraiklyn." Yalson grinned, then put her head down. Under her breath, to Horza, she hissed, "Guess where the Damage game is?"

  "Won't this big seaship go right through the wall and wreck the Orbital anyway, before the Culture does anything?" Aviger was saying. Kraiklyn smiled condescendingly and shook his head.

  "I think you'll find the Edgewalls are up to it."

  "Ho! I hope so!" Aviger laughed.

  "Well, don't worry about it," Kraiklyn reassured him. "Now, somebody give Wubslin a hand to run a final check on the shuttle. I'm going up to the bridge to make sure Mipp knows what to do. We'll be setting off in about ten minutes." Kraikly
n stepped back and into his suit, gathering it up and putting his arms into the sleeves. He fastened the main chest latches, picked up his helmet and nodded to the Company as he walked by them and up the steps out of the hangar.

  "Were you trying to annoy him?" Horza asked Yalson. She turned to the Changer.

  "Ah, I just wanted to give him a hint that I could see through him; he doesn't fool me."

  Wubslin and Aviger were checking the shuttle. Lamm was fiddling with his laser. Jandraligeli stood with arms crossed, his back resting against the hangar bulkhead near the door, eyes raised to the ceiling lights, a bored expression on his face. Neisin was talking quietly to Dorolow, who saw the small man as a possible convert to the Circle of Flame.

  "You reckon Evanauth is where this Damage game's going to be?" Horza asked. He was smiling. Yalson's face looked very small inside the big, still open neck of her suit, and very serious.

  "Yes I do. That devious bastard probably invented the whole goddamn op on this Megaboat thing. He's never told me he'd been to Vavatch before. Lying bastard." She looked at Horza, punched him in the suit belly, making him laugh and dance back. "What are you smiling at?"

  "You," Horza laughed. "So what if he wants to go and playa game of Damage? You keep saying it's his ship and he's the boss and all that crap, but you won't let the poor guy have a bit of fun."

  "So why doesn't he admit it?" Yalson nodded sharply at Horza. "Because he doesn't want to share any of his winnings, that's why. The rule is we divide everything we make, sharing it out according to-"

  "Well, I can see his point if that's what it is," Horza said reasonably. "If he wins in a Damage game it's all his own work; nothing to do with us."

  "That's not the point!" Yalson yelled. Her mouth was set in a tight line, her hands were on her hips; she stamped her feet.

  "OK," Horza said, grinning. "So when you bet on me to win my fight with Zallin, why didn't you give all your winnings right back again?"

  "That's different-" Yalson said in exasperation. But she was interrupted.

  "Hey, hey!" Lenipobra came bounding down the steps into the hangar as Horza was about to say something. Both he and Yalson turned to the younger man as he skipped up to them, fastening his suit gloves to the cuffs. "D-d-did you see that message earlier?" He looked excited and didn't seem to be able to keep still; he kept rubbing his gloved hands together and shuffling his feet. "Novagrade g-gridfire! Wow! What a spectacle! I love the C–Culture! And a C–C-CAM dusting — hoo-wee!" He laughed, doubled at the waist, slapped both hands on the hangar deck, bounced up and smiled at everybody. Dorolow scratched her ears and looked puzzled. Lamm glared at the youth over the barrel of his rifle, while Yalson and Horza looked at each other, shaking their heads. Lenipobra went dancing and shadow-boxing up to Jandraligeli, who raised one eyebrow and watched the gangly young man prancing about in front of him.

  "The weaponry of the end of the universe, and this young idiot is practically coming in his pants."

  "Aw, you're just a spoilsport, Ligeli," Lenipobra said to the Mondlidician, stopping dancing and dropping his punching arms to turn away and slouch off towards the shuttle. As he passed Yalson and Horza he muttered, "Yalson, what the hell is C–CAM anyway?"

  "Collapsed Anti-Matter, kid." Yalson smiled as Lenipobra kept on walking. Horza laughed soundlessly as the young man's head nodded inside the open neck of his suit. He walked into the open rear of the shuttle.

  The Clear Air Turbulence rolled. The shuttle left the hangar and flew along the underside of the Vavatch Orbital, leaving the spacecraft flying underneath like a tiny silver fish under the hull of some great dark ship.

  On a small screen, fitted at one end of the shuttle's main compartment since its last outing, the suited figures could watch the seemingly endless curve of ultradense base material stretching off into the dark distance, lit by starlight. It was like flying upside-down over a planet made of metal; and of all the sights the galaxy held which were the result of conscious effort, it was one bested for what the Culture would call gawp value only by a big Ring, or a Sphere.

  The shuttle crossed a thousand kilometres of the smooth undersurface. Then suddenly above it there was a wedge of darkness, a slant of something which looked even smoother than the base material, but which was clear, transparent and angling out from the base itself and slicing into space like the edge of a crystal knife for two thousand kilometres: the Edgewall. This was the wall bordered by sea, on the far side of the Orbital from the thread of land they had seen on their approach in the CAT. The first ten kilometres of the flat curve were dark as space; their mirror surface showed only when stars reflected on them, and looking at that perfect image the mind could spin, seeing for what looked like light-years when in fact the surface was only a few thousand metres away.

  "God, that thing's big," Neisin whispered. The shuttle continued to rise, and above it there appeared through the wall a glow of light, a shining expanse of blue.

  Into sunlight, hardly filtered through the transparent wall, the shuttle climbed in empty space beside the Edgewall. Two kilometres away there was air, even if it was thin air, but the shuttle climbed in nothing, angling out along with the wall as it sloped towards its line of summit. The shuttle crossed that knife-edge, two thousand kilometres up from the base of the Orbital, then started to follow the slope of wall back down on the inside; it passed through the Orbital's magnetic field, a region where small magnetised particles of artificial dust blocked out some of the sun's rays, so making the sea below it cooler than elsewhere on the world, producing Vavatch's different climates. The shuttle continued to fall: through ions, then thin gases, finally into thin and cloudless air, shuddering in a coriolis jetstream. The sky above turned from black to blue. The Orbital of Vavatch, a fourteen million kilometre hoop of water seemingly hung naked in space, spread out before the falling craft like some vast circular painting.

  "Well, at least we're in daylight," Yalson said. "Let's just hope our captain's information about exactly where this wonderful ship is turns out to be accurate." The screen showed clouds. As the shuttle fell and flew, it was coming down onto a false landscape of water vapour. The clouds seemed to stretch for ever, along the curved inside surface of the Orbital, which even from that height looked flat, then sweeping up into the black sky above. Only much further away could they see the blue expanse of real ocean, though there were hints of smaller patches closer to hand.

  "Don't worry about the cloud," Kraiklyn said over the cabin speaker. "That'll shift as the morning wears on."

  The shuttle was still dropping, still flying forward through the thickening atmosphere. After a while they started going through the first few very high altitude clouds. Horza shifted slightly in his suit; ever since the CAT had matched velocities and curve with the big Orbital, and turned off its own AG, the craft and the Company had been under the same fake gravity of the construction's spin — slightly more, in fact, because they were stationary relative to the base but further out from it. Vavatch, whose original builders had come from a higher-G planet, was spun to produce about twenty per cent more «gravity» than the accepted human average which the CAT's generator was set for. So Horza, like the rest of the Company, felt heavier than he was used to. His suit was chafing already.

  Clouds filled the cabin screen with grey.

  "There it is!" Kraiklyn shouted, not trying to keep the excitement from his voice. He had been quiet for almost a quarter of an hour, and people had started to get restless. The shuttle had banked a few times, this way and that, apparently searching for the Olmedreca. Sometimes the screen had been clear, showing layers of cloud beneath; sometimes it hazed over with grey again as they entered another bank or pillar of vapour. Once it had iced over. "I can see the topmost towers!"

  The Company crowded forward in the cabin, getting out of their seats and coming closer to the screen. Only Lamm and Jandraligeli stayed sitting down.

  "About fucking time," Lamm said. "How the hell do you have to look all this time
for something four K long?"

  "It's easy when you've no radar," Jandraligeli said. "I'm just thankful we didn't hit the damn thing while we were flying through those awful clouds."

  "Shit," Lamm said, and inspected his rifle again.

  "… Look at that," Neisin said.

  In a wasteland of clouds, like some vast canyon torn in a planet made of vapour, through kilometres of levels and in a space so long and wide that even in the clear air between the piled clouds the view simply faded rather than ended, the Olmedreca moved.

  Its lower levels of superstructure were quite hidden, invisible in the ocean-hugging bank of mist, but from its unseen decks rose immense towers and structures of glass and light metal, rearing hundreds of metres into the clear air. Seemingly unconnected, they moved slowly and smoothly over the flat surface of the low bank of cloud like pieces on an endless game board, casting dim and watery shadows on the opaque top of the mist as the sun of Vavatch's system shone through layers of cloud ten kilometres above.

  As those huge towers moved through the air, they left behind them wisps and strands of vapour, ruffled from the mist's smooth top by the passage of the great ship beneath. In the small, clear spaces that the towers and higher levels of superstructure left in the mist, lower levels could be seen: walkways and promenades, the linked arches of a monorail system, pools and small parks with trees, even a few pieces of equipment like small flyers and bits of tiny, doll's-house-like furniture. As the eye and brain grasped the scene, they could, from that height, make out the overall bulge in the surface of the cloud that the ship made — an area of slight uplift in the mist four kilometres long and nearly three wide, and shaped like a stubby pointed leaf or an arrowhead.

  The shuttle came lower. The towers, with their glinting windows, their suspended bridges, flyer pads, ariels, railings, decks and flapping awnings, sailed by alongside, silent and dark.

  "Well," Kraiklyn's voice said in a businesslike way, "looks like we'll have a bit of a walk to the bows, team. I can't take us under this lot. Still, we're a good hundred kilometres away from the Edgewall, so we've got plenty of time. The ship isn't heading straight for it anyway. I'll put us down as close as I can."