Consider Phlebas c-1

by Iain M. Banks

  Horza started walking past the rows of seats towards the front of the shuttle. For all its age, the shuttle smelled of… he wasn't quite sure. All the synthetic materials it was made from, he supposed. After the natural but god-awful odours of the last day, Horza found the shuttle much more pleasant, even if it was Culture and therefore belonged to the enemy. Horza touched the gun he was carrying as though doing something to it.

  "Just putting the safety catch on," he told the eye in the ceiling. "Don't want it to go off, but those people out there were trying to kill me earlier, and I feel safer with it in my hand, know what I mean?"

  "Well, not exactly, Orab," the shuttle said, "but I think I can understand. But you'll have to give the gun to me before we take off."

  "Oh sure. As soon as you close those rear doors." Horza was in the doorway between the main compartment and the smaller control area now. It was in fact a very short corridor, less than two metres long, with opened doors to each compartment. Horza looked round quickly, but he couldn't see another eye. He watched a large flap open at about hip level to reveal a comprehensive medical kit.

  "Well, Orab, I'd close those doors to make you feel a bit safer if I could, but you see I'm here to rescue people who want to be rescued when the time comes to destruct the Orbital, and I can't close those doors until just before I leave, so that everybody who wants to can get on board. Actually I can't really understand why anybody wouldn't want to escape, but they told me not to get worried if some people stayed behind. But I must say I think that would be kind of silly, don't you, Orab?"

  Horza was rummaging through the medkit but looking above it at other outlines of doors set in the wall of the short corridor. He said, "Hmm? Oh, yeah, that would be. When is the place due to blow, anyway?" He poked his head round the corner, into the control compartment or flight deck, looking up at another eye set in the corresponding position to the one in the main compartment, but looking forward from the other side of the thick wall between the two. Horza grinned and gave a little wave, then ducked back.

  "Hi," the shuttle laughed. "Well, Orab, I'm afraid that we're going to be forced to destruct the Orbital in forty-three standard hours. Unless, of course, the Idirans see sense and are reasonable and withdraw their threat to use Vavatch as a war base."

  "Oh," Horza said. He was looking at one of the door outlines above the opened one the medkit was protruding from. As far as he could guess, those two eyes were back to back, separated by the thickness of the wall between the two compartments. Unless there was a mirror he couldn't see, he was invisible to the shuttle while he remained in the short corridor.

  He looked back, out through the open rear doors; the only movement came from the tops of some distant trees and the smoke from the fires. He checked the gun. The projectiles seemed to be hidden in some sort of magazine, but a little circular indicator with a sweep hand indicated either one bullet left or one expended out of twelve.

  "Yes," the shuttle said. "It's very sad, of course, but these things are necessary in wartime I suppose. Not that I pretend to understand it all. I'm just a humble shuttle, after all. I'd actually been given away as a present to one of the Megaships because I was too old-fashioned and crude for the Culture, you know. I thought they could have upgraded me but they didn't; they just gave me away. Anyway, they need me now, I'm happy to say. We have quite a job on our hands, you know, getting everybody who wants to get off away from Vavatch. I'll be sorry to see it go; I've had some happy times here, believe me… But that's just the way things go, I suppose. How's that finger going, by the way? Want me to have a look at it? Bring the medkit stuff round into one of the two compartments so I can take a look. I might be able to help, you know? Oh! Are you touching one of the other lockers in that corridor?"

  Horza was trying to lever open the door nearest the roof by using the barrel of the gun. "No," he said, heaving away at it. "I'm nowhere near it."

  "That's odd. I'm sure I can feel something. Are you sure?"

  "Of course I'm sure," Horza said, putting all his weight behind the gun. The door gave way, revealing tubes, fibre-runs, metal bottles and various other unrecognisable bits of machinery, electrics, optics and field units.

  "Ouch!" said the shuttle.

  "Hey!" Horza shouted. "It just blew open! There's something on fire in there!" He raised the gun, holding it in both hands. He sighted carefully; about there.

  "Fire!" yelped the shuttle. "But that's not possible!"

  "You think I can't tell smoke when I see it, you crazy goddamned machine?" Horza yelled. He pulled the trigger.

  The gun exploded, throwing his hands up and him back. The noise of the shuttle's exclamation was covered by the crack and bang of the bullet hitting inside and exploding. Horza covered his face with his arm.

  "I'm blind!" wailed the shuttle. Now smoke really was pouring from the compartment Horza had opened. He staggered into the control compartment.

  "You're on fire in here, too!" he yelled. "There's smoke coming out everywhere!"

  "What? But that can't be-"

  "You're on fire! I don't know how you can't feel it or smell it! You're burning!"

  "I don't trust you!" the machine yelled. "Put that gun away or-"

  "You've got to trust me!" Horza yelled, looking all over the control area for where the shuttle's brain might be located. He could see screens and seats, readout screens and even the place where manual controls might be hidden; but no indication of where the brain was. "Smoke's pouring out everywhere!" he repeated, trying to sound hysterical.

  "Here! Here's an extinguisher! I'm turning mine on!" the machine shouted. A wall unit spun round, and Horza grabbed the bulky cylinder attached to the inside of the flap. He wrapped his four good fingers on his injured hand round the pistol grip. A hissing noise and a light vapour-like steam was appearing from various places in the compartment.

  "Nothing's happening!" Horza screamed. "There's loads of black smoke and its — arrch!" He pretended to cough."… Aargh! It's getting thicker!"

  "Where is it coming from? Quickly!"

  "Everywhere!" Horza yelled, glancing all round the control area. "From near your eye… under the seats, over the screens, under the screens… I can't see…!"

  "Go on! I can smell smoke, too, now!"

  Horza looked at the slight smudge of grey filtering into the control area from the spluttering fire in the short corridor where he had shot the craft. "It's… coming from those places, and those info screens on either side of the end seats, and… just above the seats, on the side walls where that bit juts out-"

  "What?" screamed the shuttle brain. "On the left facing forward?"

  "Yes!"

  "Put that one out first!" the shuttle screeched.

  Horza dropped the extinguisher and gripped the gun in both hands again, aiming it at the bulge in the wall over the left-hand seat. He pulled the trigger: once, twice, three times. The gun blasted, shaking his whole body; sparks and bits of flying debris flew from the holes the bullets were smashing in the casing of the machine.

  "EEEeee…" said the shuttle, then there was silence.

  Some smoke rose from the bulge and it joined with that coming from the corridor to form a thin layer under the ceiling. Horza let the gun down slowly, looking around and listening.

  "Mug," he said.

  He used the hand-held extinguisher to put out the small fires in the wall of the corridor and where the shuttle's brain had been, then he went out into the passenger area to sit near the open doors while the smoke and the fumes cleared. He couldn't see any Eaters on the sand or in the forest, and the canoes were out of sight, too. He looked for some door controls and found them; the doors closed with a hiss, and Horza grinned.

  He went back to the control area and started punching buttons and opening sections of panelling until he got some life from the screens. They all suddenly blinked on while he was fiddling with some buttons on the arm of one of the couch-like seats. The noise of surf in the flight deck made him think the door
s had opened again, but it was only some external microphones relaying the noise from outside. Screens flickered and lit up with figures and lines, and flaps opened in front of the seats; control wheels and levers sighed out smoothly and clicked into place, just ready to be held and used. Feeling happier than he had been in many days, Horza started an eventually successful but longer and more frustrating search for some food; he was very hungry.

  Some small insects were running in orderly lines over the huge body collapsed on the sands, one hand of which was sticking, charred and blackened, into the dying flames of a fire.

  The little insects started by eating the deep-set eyes, which were open. They hardly noticed as the shuttle rose, wobbling, into the air, picked up speed and turned inelegantly above the mountain, then roared off, through the early evening air, away from the island.

  Interlude in darkness

  The Mind had an image to illustrate its information capacity. It liked to imagine the contents of its memory store written out on cards; little slips of paper with tiny writing on them, big enough for a human to read. If the characters were a couple of millimetres tall and the paper about ten centimetres square and written on both sides, then ten thousand characters could be squeezed onto each card. In a metre long drawer of such cards maybe one thousand of them — ten million pieces of information — could be stored. In a small room a few metres square, with a corridor in the middle just wide enough to pull a tray out into, you could keep perhaps a thousand trays arranged in close-packed cabinets: ten billion characters in all.

  A square kilometre of these cramped cells might contain as many as one hundred thousand rooms; a thousand such floors would produce a building two thousand metres tall with a hundred million rooms. If you kept building those squat towers, squeezed hard up against each other until they entirely covered the surface of a largish standard-G world — maybe a billion square kilometres — you would have a planet with one trillion square kilometres of floor space, one hundred quadrillion paper-stuffed rooms, thirty light-years of corridors and a number of potential stored characters sufficiently large to boggle just about anybody's mind.

  In base 10 that number would be a 1 followed by twenty-seven zeros, and even that vast figure was only a fraction of the capacity of the Mind. To match it you would need a thousand such worlds; systems of them, a clusterful of information-packed globes… and that vast capacity was physically contained within a space smaller than a single one of those tiny rooms, inside the Mind…

  In darkness the Mind waited.

  It had counted how long it had waited so far; it had tried to estimate how long it would have to wait in the future. It knew to the smallest imaginable fraction of a second how long it had been in the tunnels of the Command System, and more often than it needed to it thought about that number, watched it grow inside itself. It was a form of security, it supposed; a small fetish; something to cling to.

  It had explored the Command System tunnels, scanning and surveying. It was weak, damaged, almost totally helpless, but it had been worthwhile taking a look around the maze-like complex of tunnels and caverns just to take its attention off the fact that it was there as a refugee. The places it could not get to itself it sent its one remaining remote drone into, so that it could have a look, and see what there was to be seen.

  And all of it was at once boring and frighteningly depressing. The level of technology possessed by the builders of the Command System was very limited indeed; everything in the tunnels worked either mechanically or electronically. Gears and wheels, electric wires, superconductors and light-fibres; very crude indeed, the Mind thought, and nothing it could possibly interest itself in. A glance through any of the machines and devices in the tunnel was sufficient to know them exactly — what they were made of, how they had been made, even what they were made for. No mystery, nothing to employ the mind.

  There was something too about the inexactitude of it all that the Mind found almost frightening. It could look at some carefully machined piece of metal or some delicately moulded bit of plastic, and know that to the people who had built the Command System — to their eyes — these things were exact and precise, constructed to fine tolerances with dead straight lines, perfect edges, smooth surfaces, immaculate right angles… and so on. But the Mind, even with its damaged sensors, could see the rough edges, the crudity of the parts and the components involved. They had been good enough for the people at the time, and no doubt they had fulfilled the most important criterion of all; they worked…

  But they were crude, clumsy, imperfectly designed and manufactured. For some reason the Mind found this worrying.

  And it would have to use this ancient, crude, shop-soiled technology. It would have to connect with it.

  It had thought it through as best it could, and decided to formulate plans for what to do if the Idirans did get somebody through the Quiet Barrier and threatened it with discovery.

  It would arm, and it would make a place to hide in. Both actions implied damage to the Command System, so it would not act until it knew it was definitely threatened. Once it knew it was, it would be forced to risk the Dra'Azon's displeasure.

  But it might not come to that. It hoped it wouldn't; planning was one thing, execution was another. It was unlikely to have very much time either to hide or to arm. Both plans might perforce be rather crudely implemented, especially as it had only one remote drone and its own badly crippled fields with which to manipulate the engineering facilities of the System.

  Better than nothing, though. Better still to have problems than to let death eradicate them all…

  There was, however, another less immediately relevant, but more intrinsically worrying, problem it had discovered, and it was implied in the question: who was it?

  Its higher functions had had to close down when it had transferred from four- to three-dimensional space. The Mind's information was held in binary form, in spirals composed of protons and neutrons; and neutrons — outside a nucleus, and also outside hyperspace — decayed (into protons, ha-ha; not too long after entering the Command System, the vast majority of its memory would have consisted of the stunningly illuminating message: "0000000… "). So it had effectively frozen its primary memory and cognitive functions, wrapping them in fields which prevented both decay and use. It was working instead on back-up picocircuitry, in real space, and using real-space light to think with (how humiliating).

  In fact, it could still access all that stored memory (though the process was complicated, and so slow), so all was not lost there… But as for thinking, as for being itself — another matter entirely. It wasn't its real self. It was a crude, abstracted copy of itself, the mere ground plan for the full labyrinthine complexity of its true personality. It was the truest possible copy its limited scale was theoretically capable of providing, and it was still sentient; conscious by even the most rigorous of standards. Yet an index was not the text, a street plan was not the city, a map not the land.

  So who was it?

  Not the entity it thought it was, that was the answer, and it was a disconcerting one. Because it knew that the self it was now could never think of all the things its old self would have thought of. It felt unworthy. It felt fallible and limited and… dull.

  But think positively. Patterns, images, the telling analogy … make the ill work to good. Just think…

  If it was not itself, then it would be not itself.

  As it was now to what it had been before, so the remote drone was to it now (nice connection).

  The remote drone would be more than just its eyes and ears on the surface, in or near the Changers" base, keeping look-out; more than just its assistant in the doubtless frantic preparations to equip and secrete which would ensue if the drone did raise the alarm; more. And less.

  Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn't it been clever? Yes, it had.

  Its escape from the spare-parts warship had been, though it thought it itself, quite breathtakingly masterful and brilliant. It
s courageous use of warp so deep into a gravity well would have been foolhardy in the extreme in anything else but the dire circumstances it had found itself in, but was anyway superbly skilled… And its stunning cross-realm transfer, from hyper- to real space, was not simply even more brilliant and even braver than anything else it had done, it was almost certainly a first; there was nothing anywhere in its vast store of information to indicate that anybody had ever done that before. It was proud.

  But after all that, here it was, trapped; an intellectual cripple, a philosophical shadow of its former self.

  Now all it could do was wait, hoping that whoever came to find it would be friendly. The Culture must know; the Mind was certain its signal had worked and that it would be picked up somewhere. But the Idirans knew as well. It didn't think they would just try to storm in, because they knew as well as it did that antagonising the Dra'Azon was a bad idea. But what if the Idirans found a way in and the Culture couldn't? What if the whole region of space around the Sullen Gulf was now Idiran held? The Mind knew there was only one thing it could do if it fell into Idiran hands, but not only did it not want to destruct for purely personal reasons, it didn't want to destruct anywhere near Schar's World anyway, for the same reason that the Idirans wouldn't come charging in. But if it was captured in the planet, that might be the last time it would have a chance to destroy itself. By the time it was taken off the planet the Idirans might have found a way of stopping it from destructing.

  Perhaps it had made a mistake in escaping at all. Perhaps it should have just destructed along with the rest of the ship and saved all this complication and worry. But it had seemed like an almost heaven-sent opportunity to escape — finding itself so close to a Planet of the Dead when it had been attacked. It wanted to live anyway, but it would have been… wasteful to throwaway such a great chance even if it had been perfectly sanguine about its own survival or destruction.

  Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. It was here and it just had to wait. Wait and think. Consider all the options (few) and possibilities (many). Rack those memories as best it could for anything that might be relevant, that might help. For example (and the one really interesting bit would be a bad one), it had discovered that the Idirans had probably employed one of the Changers who had actually served with the caretaker staff on Schar's World. Of course perhaps the man was dead, or busy on something else, or too far away, or the information had been incorrect in the first place and the intelligence-gathering section of the Culture had got it wrong… But if not, then that man would be the one obvious person to send after something hiding in the Command System tunnels.