Consider Phlebas c-1

by Iain M. Banks

  THERE IS DEATH HERE.

  Horza looked at the words written on the screen. He felt transfixed by them. There was silence on the bridge for a moment. Then he heard a couple of people moving awkwardly.

  "What does that mean?" the drone Unaha-Closp said.

  "There… there is?" Horza said. The words stayed on the screen, written in Marain. Wubslin tapped at a few buttons on his side of the console, buttons which would normally control the display on the screens in front of him, all of which now repeated the words on the main screen. The engineer was sitting in his seat, looking cramped and tense. Horza cleared his throat, then said, "There was a battle, a conflict near by. Just before we got here. It might still be going on. There may be death."

  THERE IS DEATH HERE.

  "Oh…" Dorolow said, and slumped into Neisin and Aviger's arms.

  "We'd better get her to the mess," Aviger said, looking at Neisin. "Let her lie down."

  "Oh, all right," Neisin said, glancing quickly at the woman's face. Dorolow appeared to be unconscious.

  "I may be able to…" Horza began, then gave a deep breath. "If there is death here I may be able to stop it. I may be able to prevent more death."

  BORA HORZA GOBUCHUL.

  "Yes?" Horza said, gulping. Aviger and Neisin manhandled Dorolow's limp body out through the doorway into the corridor leading into the mess. The screen changed:

  YOU ARE LOOKING FOR THE REFUGEE MACHINE.

  "Ho-ho," said Balveda, turning away with a smile on her face and putting one hand to her mouth.

  "Shit!" said Yalson.

  "Looks like our god isn't so stupid," Unaha-Closp observed.

  "Yes," Horza said sharply. There seemed little point in trying to pretend now. "Yes, I am. But I think-"

  YOU MAY ENTER.

  "What?" the drone said.

  "Well, ya-hoo!" Yalson said, crossing her arms and leaning back against the bulkhead. Neisin came back through the door. He stopped when he saw the screen.

  "That was quick," he said to Yalson. "What did he say?" Yalson just shook her head. Horza felt a wave of relief sweep through him. He looked at each word on the screen in turn, as though frightened that the short message could somehow conceal a hidden negation. He smiled and said:

  "Thank you. Shall I go down alone to the planet?"

  YOU MAY ENTER.

  THERE IS DEATH HERE.

  BE WARNED.

  "What death?" Horza said. The relief waned; the Dra'Azon's words about death chilled him. "Where is there death? Whose?"

  The screen changed again, the first two lines disappearing. Now it simply said:

  BE WARNED.

  "I do not," Unaha-Closp said slowly, "like the sound of that at all." Then the screens were clear. Wubslin sighed and relaxed. The sun of the Schar's World system shone brightly ahead of them, less than a standard light-year away. Horza checked the figures on the navigation computer as its screen Bickered back to normality along with the rest, displaying numbers and graphs and holographics. Then the Changer sat back in his seat. "We're through all right," he said. "We're through the Quiet Barrier."

  "So nothing can touch us now, huh?" Neisin said.

  Horza gazed at the screen, the single yellow dwarf star showing as a bright unwavering spot of light in the centre, planets still invisible. He nodded. "Nothing. Nothing outside, anyway."

  "Great. Think I'll have a drink to celebrate." Neisin nodded at Yalson, then swung his thin body out through the doorway.

  "Do you think it meant only you can go down, or all of us?" Yalson asked. Still staring at the screen, Horza shook his head.

  "I don't know. We'll go into orbit, then broadcast to the Changer base shortly before we try taking the CAT in. If Mr Adequate doesn't like it, he'll let us know."

  "You've decided it's male, then," said Balveda, just as Yalson said:

  "Why not contact them now?"

  "I didn't like that bit about there being death here." Horza turned towards Yalson. Balveda was at her side; the drone had floated down a little to eye level. Horza looked at Yalson. "Just as a precaution. I don't want to give anything away too soon." He turned his gaze to the Culture woman. "Last I heard, the regular transmission was due from the base on Schar's World a few days ago. I don't suppose you heard whether it had been received?" Horza grinned at Balveda in a way that was meant to show he didn't expect an answer, or at least not a truthful one. The tall Culture agent looked at the floor, seemed to shrug, then met Horza's eyes.

  "I heard," she said. "It was overdue."

  Horza stayed looking at her. Balveda didn't take her eyes away. Yalson glanced from one to another. Eventually the drone Unaha-Closp said, "Frankly, none of this inspires confidence. My advice would be to-" It stopped as Horza glared at it. "Hmm," it said, "well, never mind that for now." It floated sideways to the door and went out.

  "Seems to be OK," Wubslin said, not apparently addressing anybody in particular. He sat back from the console, nodding to himself. "Yes, ship's back to normal now." He turned round and smiled at the other three.

  They came for him. He was in a gamehall playing floatball. He thought he was safe there, surrounded by friends in every direction (they seemed to float like a cloud of flies in front of him for a second, but he laughed that off, caught the ball, threw it and scored a point). But they came for him there. He saw them coming, two of them, from a door set in a narrow chimney of the spherical, ribbed gamehall. They wore cloaks of no colour, and came straight towards him. He tried to float away, but his power harness was dead. He was stuck in mid-air, unable to make progress in any direction. He was trying to swim through the air and struggle out of his harness so that he could throw it at them — perhaps to hit, certainly to send himself off in the other direction — when they caught him.

  None of the people around him seemed to notice, and he realised suddenly they were not his friends, that in fact he didn't know any of them. They took his arms and, in an instant, without travelling past or through anything yet somehow making him feel they had turned an invisible corner to a place that was always there but out of sight, they were in an area of darkness. Their no-colour cloaks showed up in the darkness when he looked away. He was powerless, locked in stone, but he could see and breathe.

  "Help me!"

  "That is not what we are here for.

  "Who are you?"

  "You know.

  "I don't.

  "Then we can't tell you.

  "What do you want?"

  "We want you."

  "Why?"

  "Why not?"

  "But why me?"

  "You have no one.

  "What?"

  "You have no one.

  "What do you mean?"

  "No family. No friends …"

  "… no religion. No belief.

  "That's not true!"

  "How would you know?"

  "I believe in…"

  "What?"

  "Me!"

  "That is not enough.

  "Anyway, you'll never find it.

  "What? Find what?"

  "Enough. Let's do it now.

  "Do what?"

  "Take your name.

  "I-

  And they reached together into his skull and took his name.

  So he screamed.

  "Horza!" Yalson shook his head, bouncing it off the bulkhead at the top of the small bed. He spluttered awake, the whimper dying on his lips, his body tense for an instant, then soft.

  He put his hands out and touched the woman's furred skin. She put her hands behind his head and hugged him to her breast. He said nothing, but his heart slowed to the pace of hers. She rocked his body gently with her own, then pushed his head away, bent and kissed his lips.

  "I'm all right now," he told her. "Just a nightmare."

  "What was it?"

  "Nothing," he said. He put his head back to her chest, nestling it between her breasts like a huge, delicate egg.

  Horza had his suit on. Wubslin was in his usual seat.
Yalson occupied the co-pilot's chair. They were all suited up. Schar's World filled the screen in front of them, the belly sensors of the CAT staring straight down at the sphere of white and grey beneath and magnifying it.

  "One more time," Horza said. Wubslin transmitted the recorded message for the third time.

  "Maybe they don't use that code any more," Yalson said. She watched the screen with her sharp-browed eyes. She had cropped her hair back to about a centimetre over her skull, hardly thicker than the down which covered her body. The menacing effect jarred with the smallness of her head sticking out from the large neck of the suit.

  "It's traditional; more of a ceremonial language than a code," Horza said. "They'll know it if they hear it."

  "You're sure we're beaming it at the right place?"

  "Yes," Horza said, trying to remain calm. They had been in orbit for less than half an hour, stationary above the continent which held the buried tunnels of the Command System. Almost the whole of the planet was covered in snow. Ice locked the thousand-kilometre peninsula where the tunnel system lay fast into the sea itself. Schar's World had entered another of its periodic ice ages seven thousand years previously, and only in a relatively thin band around the equator — between the slightly wobbling planet's tropics — was there open ocean. It showed as a steely grey belt around the world, occasionally visible through whorls of storm clouds.

  They were twenty-five thousand kilometres out from the planet's snow-crusted surface, their communicator beaming down onto a circular area a few tens of kilometres in diameter at a point midway between the two frozen arms of sea which gave the peninsula a slight waist. That was where the entrance to the tunnels lay; that was where the Changers lived. Horza knew he hadn't made a mistake, but there was no answer.

  There is death here, he kept thinking. A little of the planet's chill seemed to creep along his bones.

  "Nothing," Wubslin said.

  "Right," Horza said, taking the manual controls into his gloved hands. "We're going in."

  The Clear Air Turbulence teased its warp fields out along the slight curve of the planet's gravity well, carefully edging itself down the slope. Horza cut the motors and let them return to their emergency-ready-only mode. They shouldn't need them now, and would soon be unable to use them as the gravity gradient increased.

  The CAT fell with gradually increasing speed towards the planet, fusion motors at the ready. Horza watched displays on the screens until he was satisfied they were on course; then, with the planet seeming to turn a little beneath the craft, he unstrapped and went back to the mess.

  Aviger, Neisin and Dorolow sat in their suits, strapped into the mess-room seats. Perosteck Balveda was also strapped in; she wore a thick jacket and matching trousers. Her head was exposed above the soft ruff of a white shirt. The bulky fabric jacket was fastened up to her throat. She had warm boots on, and a pair of hide gloves lay on the table in front of her. The jacket even had a little hood, which hung down her back. Horza wasn't sure whether Balveda had chosen this soft, useless image of a space suit to make a point to him, or unconsciously, out of fear and a need for security.

  Unaha-Closp sat in a chair, strapped against its back, pointing straight up at the ceiling. "I trust', it said, "we're not going to have the same sort of flying-circus job we had to endure the last time you flew this heap of debris." Horza ignored it.

  "We haven't had any word from Mr Adequate, so it looks like we're all going down," he said. "When we get there, I'll go in by myself to check things out. When I come back, we'll decide what we're going to do."

  "That is, you'll decide-" began the drone.

  "What if you don't come back?" Aviger said. The drone made a hissing noise but went quiet. Horza looked at the toy-like figure of the old man in his suit.

  "I'll come back, Aviger," he said. "I'm sure everybody at the base will be fine. I'll get them to heat up some food for us." He smiled, but knew it wasn't especially convincing. "Anyway," he went on, "in the unlikely event there is anything wrong, I'll come straight back."

  "Well, this ship's our only way off the planet; remember that, Horza," Aviger said. His eyes looked frightened. Dorolow touched him on the arm of his suit.

  "Trust in God," Dorolow said. "We'll be all right." She looked at Horza. "Won't we, Horza?"

  Horza nodded. "Yes. We'll be all right. We'll all be just fine." He turned and went back to the bridge.

  They stood in the high mountain snows, watching the midsummer sun sink in its own red seas of air and cloud. A cold wind blew her hair across her face, auburn over white, and he raised a hand, without thinking, to sweep it away again. She turned to him, her head nestling into his cupped hand, a small smile on her face.

  "So much for midsummer's day," she said. The day had been fair, still well below freezing, but mild enough for them to take their gloves off and push their hoods back. The nape of her neck was warm against his palm, and the lustrous, heavy hair brushed over the back of his hand as she looked up at him, skin white as snow, white as bone. "That look, again," she said softly.

  "What look?" he said, defensively, knowing.

  "The far-away one," she said, taking his hand and bringing it to her mouth, kissing it, stroking it as though it was a small, defenceless animal.

  "Well, that's just what you call it."

  She looked away from him, towards the livid red ball of the sun, lowering behind the distant range. "That's what I see," she told him. "I know your looks by now. I know them all, and what they mean."

  He felt a twinge of anger at being thought so obvious, but knew that she was right, at least partly. What she did not know about him was only what he did not know about himself (but that, he told himself, was quite a lot still). Perhaps she even knew him better than he did himself.

  "I'm not responsible for my looks," he said after a moment, to make a joke of it. "They surprise me, too, sometimes."

  "And what you do?" she said, the sunset's glow rubbing false colour into her pale, thin face. "Will you surprise yourself when you leave here?"

  "Why do you always assume I'm going to leave?" he said, annoyed, stuffing his hands into the thick jacket's pockets and staring at the hemisphere of disappearing star. "I keep telling you, I'm happy here."

  "Yes," she said. "You keep telling me."

  "Why should I want to leave?"

  She shrugged, slipped one arm through his, put her head to his shoulder. "Bright lights, big crowds, interesting times; other people."

  "I'm happy here with you," he told her, and put his arm round her shoulders. Even in the bulky quilting of the jacket, she seemed slim, almost fragile.

  She said nothing for a moment, then, in quite a different tone: "… And so you should be." She turned to face him, smiling. "Now kiss me."

  He kissed her, hugged her. Looking down over her shoulder, he saw something small and red move on the trampled snow near her feet.

  "Look!" he said, breaking away, stooping. She squatted beside him, and together they watched the tiny, stick-like insect crawl slowly, laboriously, over the surface of the snow: one more living, moving thing on the blank face of the world. "That's the first one I've seen," he told her.

  She shook her head, smiling. "You just don't look," she chided.

  He put out one hand and scooped the insect into his palm, before she could stop him. "Oh, Horza…" she said, her breath catching on a tiny hook of despair.

  He looked, uncomprehending, at her stricken expression, while the snow-creature died from the warmth of his hand.

  The Clear Air Turbulence dropped towards the planet, circling its ice-bright layers of atmosphere from day to night and back again, tipping over the equator and tropics as it spiralled in.

  Gradually it encountered that atmosphere — ions and gases, ozone and air. It swooped through the world's thin wrapping with a voice of fire, flashing like a large, steady meteorite across the night sky, then across the dawn terminator, over steel-grey seas, tabular bergs, ice tables, floes and shelves, frozen
coasts, glaciers, mountain ranges, permafrost tundra, more crushed pack ice and, finally, as it bellied down on its pillars of flame, land again: land on a thousand-kilometre peninsula sticking out into a frozen sea like some monstrous fractured limb set in plaster.

  "There it is," Wubslin said, watching the mass-sensor screen. A bright, winking light tracked slowly across the display. Horza looked over.

  "The Mind?" he asked. Wubslin nodded.

  "Right density. Five kilometres deep…" He punched some buttons and squinted at figures scrolling across the screen. "On the far side of the system from the entrance… and moving." The pinpoint of light on the screen disappeared. Wubslin adjusted the controls, then sat back, shaking his head. "Sensor needs an overhaul; its range is right down." The engineer scratched his chest and sighed. "Sorry about the engines, too, Horza." The Changer shrugged. Had the motors been working properly, or had the mass sensor's range been adequate, somebody could have remained on the CAT, flying it if necessary, and relaying the Mind's position to the others in the tunnels. Wubslin seemed to feel guilty that none of the repairs he'd tried to effect had significantly improved the performance of either motors or sensor.

  "Never mind," Horza said, watching the waste of ice and snow passing beneath them. "At least now we know the thing's in there."

  The ship guided them to the right area, though Horza recognised it anyway from the times he had flown the single small flyer the base was allowed. He looked for the flyer as they made their final approach, in case somebody happened to be using it.

  The snow-covered plain was ringed by mountains; the Clear Air Turbulence swept over a pass between two peaks, shattering the silence, tearing dusty snow from the jagged ridges and crags of the barren rocks on either side. It slowed further, coming in nose-up on its tripod of fusion fire. The snow on the plain beneath picked itself up and stirred as though uneasy at first. Then as the craft dropped lower and lower the snow was blown, then ripped, from the frozen ground beneath and thrown away in vast swirling rolls of heated air mixing snow and water, steam and plasma particles, in a howling blizzard which swept across the plain, gathering strength as the vessel dropped.