Consider Phlebas c-1

by Iain M. Banks

  It drifted through the bright, humming spaces of the train, like a detached part of the mechanism itself.

  Wubslin scratched his head. He had stopped at the reactor car on his way to the control deck. Some of the reactor carriage doors wouldn't open. They had to be on some sort of security lock, probably controlled from the bridge, or flight deck, or footplate, or whatever they called the bit at the nose the train was controlled from. He looked out of a window, remembering what Horza had ordered.

  Aviger sat on the pallet, his gun pointing at the Idiran, who stood stock still against the girders. Wubslin looked away, tested the door through to the reactor area again, then shook his head.

  The hand, the arm, was weakening. Above him, rows of seats faced blank screens. He pulled himself along by the stems of the chairs; he was almost at the corridor which led through to the front car.

  He wasn't sure how he would get through the corridor. What was there to hold onto? No point in worrying about it now. He grabbed at another chair stem, hauled at it.

  From the terrace which looked over the repair area, they could see the front train, the one the drone was in. Poised over the sunken floor of the maintenance area, the glittering length of the train, nestling in the scooped half-tunnel which ran along the far wall, looked like a long thin spaceship, and the dark rock around it like starless space.

  Yalson watched the Culture agent's back, frowning. "She's too damn docile, Horza," she said, just loud enough for the man to hear.

  "That's fine by me," Horza said. "The more docile the better."

  Yalson shook her head slightly, not taking her eyes off the woman in front. "No, she's stringing us along. She hasn't cared up till now; she's known she can afford to let things happen. She's got another card she can play and she's just relaxing until she has to use it."

  "You're imagining things," Horza told her. "Your hormones are getting the better of you, developing suspicions and second sight."

  She looked at him, transferring the frown from Balveda to the Changer. Her eyes narrowed. "What?"

  Horza held up his free hand. "A joke." He smiled.

  Yalson looked unconvinced. "She's up to something. I can tell," she said. She nodded to herself. "I can feel it."

  Quayanorl dragged himself through the connecting corridor. He pushed open the door to the carriage, crawled slowly across the floor. He was starting to forget why he was doing this. He knew he had to press on, go forward, keep crawling, but he could no longer recall exactly what it was all for. The train was a torture maze, designed to pain him.

  I am dragging myself to my death. Somehow even when I get to the end, where I can crawl no more, I keep going. I remember thinking that earlier, but what was I thinking of? Do I die when I get to the train's control area, and continue my journey on the other side, in death? Is that what I was thinking of?

  I am like a tiny child, crawling over the floor… Come to me, little fellow, says the train.

  We were looking for something, but I can't recall… exactly… what… it…

  They looked through the great cavern, searching, then climbed steps to the gallery giving access to the station's accommodation and storage sections.

  Balveda stood at the edge of the broad terrace which ran round the cavern, midway between floor and roof. Yalson watched the Culture agent while Horza opened the doors to the accommodation section. Balveda looked out over the broad cavern, slender hands resting on the guard rail. The topmost rail was level with Balveda's shoulders; waist level on the people who had built the Command System.

  Near where Balveda stood, a long gantry led out over the cavern, suspended on wires from the roof and leading to the terrace on the other side, where a narrow, brightly lit tunnel led into the rock. Balveda looked down the length of the narrow gantry at the distant tunnel mouth.

  Yalson wondered if the Culture woman was thinking of making a run for it, but knew she wasn't, and wondered then whether perhaps she only wanted Balveda to try, so she could shoot her, just to be rid of her.

  Balveda looked away from the narrow gantry, and Horza swung open the doors to the accommodation section.

  Xoxarle flexed his shoulders. The wires moved a little, sliding and bunching.

  The human they had left to guard him looked tired, perhaps even sleepy, but Xoxarle couldn't believe the others would stay away for very long. He couldn't afford to do too much now, in case the Changer came back and noticed how the wires had moved. Anyway, though it was far from being the most interesting way things could fall, there was apparently a good chance that the humans would be unable to find the supposedly sentient computing device they were all looking for. In that case perhaps the best course of action would be no action. He would let the little ones take him back to their ship. Probably the one called Horza intended to ransom him; this had struck Xoxarle as the most likely explanation for being kept alive.

  The fleet might pay for the return of a warrior, though Xoxarle's family were officially barred from doing so, and anyway were not rich. He could not decide whether he wanted to live, and perhaps redeem the shame of being caught and paid for by future exploits, or to do all he could either to escape or to die. Action appealed to him most; it was the warriors" creed. When in doubt, do.

  The old human got up from the pallet and walked around. He came close enough to Xoxarle to be able to inspect the wires, but gave them only a perfunctory glance. Xoxarle looked at the laser gun the human carried. His great hands, tied together behind his back, opened and closed slowly, without him thinking about it.

  Wubslin came to the control deck in the nose of the train. He took his helmet off and put it on the console. He made sure it wasn't touching any controls, just covering a few small unlit panels. He stood in the middle of the deck, looking round with wide, fascinated eyes.

  The train hummed under his feet. Dials and meters, screens and panels indicated the train's readiness. He cast his eyes over the controls, set in front of two huge seats which faced over the front console towards the armoured glass which formed part of the train's steeply sloping nose. The tunnel in front was dark, only a few small lights burning on its side walls.

  Fifty metres in front, a complex assembly of points led the tracks into two tunnels. One route went dead ahead, where Wubslin could see the rear of the train in front; the other tunnel curved, avoiding the repair and maintenance cavern and giving a through route to the next station.

  Wubslin touched the glass, stretching his arm out over the control console to feel the cold, smooth surface. He grinned to himself. Glass: not a viewscreen. He preferred that. The designers had had holographic screens and superconductors and magnetic levitation — they had used all of them in the transit tubes — but for their main work they had not been ashamed to stick to the apparently cruder but more damage-tolerant technology. So the train had armoured glass, and it ran on metal tracks. Wubslin rubbed his hands together slowly and gazed round the many instruments and controls.

  "Nice," he breathed. He wondered if he could work out which controls opened the locked doors in the reactor car.

  Quayanorl reached the control deck.

  It was undamaged. From floor level, the deck was metal seat stems, overhanging control panels and bright ceiling lights. He hauled himself over the floor, racked with pain, muttering to himself, trying to remember why he had come all this way.

  He rested his face on the cold floor of the deck. The train hummed at him, vibrating beneath his face. It was still alive; it was damaged and like him it would never get any better, but it was still alive. He had intended to do something, he knew that, but it was all slipping away from him now. He wanted to cry with the frustration of it all, but it was as though he had no energy left even for tears.

  What was it? he asked himself (while the train hummed). I was… I was… what?

  Unaha-Closp looked through the reactor car. Much of it was inaccessible at first, but the drone found a way into it eventually, through a cable run.

  It wandere
d about the long carriage, noting how the system worked: the dropped absorber baffles preventing the pile from heating up, the wasted uranium shielding designed to protect the fragile humanoids" bodies, the heat-exchange pipes which took the reactor's heat to the batteries of small boilers where steam turned generators to produce the power which turned the train's wheels. All very crude, Unaha-Closp thought. Complicated and crude at the same time. So much to go wrong, even with all their safety systems.

  At least, if it and the humans did have to move around in these archaic nuclear-steam-electric locomotives, they would be using the power from the main system. The drone found itself agreeing with the Changer; the Idirans must have been mad to try to get all this ancient junk working.

  "They slept in those things?" Yalson looked at the suspended nets. Horza, Balveda and she stood at the end door of a large cavern which had been a dormitory for the long-dead people who had worked in the Command System. Balveda tested one of the nets. They were like open hammocks, strung between sets of poles which hung from the ceiling. Perhaps a hundred of them filled the room, like fishing nets hung out to dry.

  "They must have found them comfortable, I guess," Horza said. He looked round. There was nowhere the Mind could have hidden. "Let's go," he said. "Balveda, come on."

  Balveda left one of the net-beds swinging gently, and wondered if there were any working baths or showers in the place.

  He reached up to the console. He pulled with all his strength and got his head onto the seat. He used his neck muscles as well as his aching, feeble arm to lever himself up. He pushed round and swivelled his torso. He gasped as one of his legs caught on the underside of the seat and he almost fell back. At last, though, he was in the seat.

  He looked out over the massed controls, through the armoured glass and into the broad tunnel beyond the train's sloped nose; lights edged the black walls; steel rails snaked glittering into the distance.

  Quayanorl gazed into that still and silent space and experienced a small, grim feeling of victory; he had just remembered why he'd crawled there.

  "Is that it?" Yalson said. They were in the control room, where the station complex's own functions were monitored. Horza had turned on a few screens, checking figures, and now sat at a console, using the station's remote-control cameras to take a final look at the corridors and rooms, the tunnels and shafts and caverns. Balveda was perched on another huge seat, swinging her legs, looking like a child in an adult's chair.

  "That's it," Horza said. "The station checks out; unless it's on one of the trains, the Mind isn't here." He switched to cameras in the other stations, flicking through in ascending order. He paused at station five, looking down from the cavern roof at the bodies of the four medjel and the wreckage of the Mind's crude gun carrier, then tried the roof camera in station six…

  They haven't found me yet. I can't hear them properly. All I can hear is their tiny footsteps. I know they're here, but I can't tell what they're doing. Am I fooling them? I detected a mass sensor, but its signal vanished. There is another. They have it here with them but it can't be working properly; maybe fooled as I hoped, the train saving me. How ironic.

  They may have captured an Idiran. I heard another rhythm in their step. All walking, or some with AG? How did they get in here? Could they be the Changers from the surface?

  I would give half my memory capacity for another remote drone. I'm hidden but I'm trapped. I can't see and I can't hear properly. All I can do is feel. I hate it. I wish I knew what is going on.

  Quayanorl stared at the controls in front of him. They had worked out a lot of their functions earlier, before the humans had arrived. He had to try to remember it all now. What did he have to do first? He reached forward, rocking unsteadily on the alien-shaped seat. He flicked a set of switches. Lights blinked; he heard clicks.

  It was so hard to remember. He touched levers and switches and buttons. Meters and dials moved to new readings. Screens flickered; figures began blinking on the readouts. Small high noises bleeped and squeaked. He thought he was doing the right things, but couldn't be sure.

  Some of the controls were too far away, and he had to drag himself halfway on top of the console, being careful not to alter any of the controls he had already set, to reach them, then shove himself back into the seat again.

  The train was whirring now; he could feel it stir. Motors turned, air hissed, speakers bleeped and clicked. He was getting somewhere. The train wasn't moving but he was slowly bringing it closer to the moment when it might.

  His sight was fading, though.

  He blinked and shook his head, but his eye was giving out. The view was going grey before him; he had to stare at the controls and the screens. The lights on the tunnel wall in front, retreating into the black distance, seemed to be dimming. He could have believed that the power was failing, but he knew it wasn't. His head was hurting, deep inside. Probably it was sitting that was causing it, the blood draining.

  He was dying quickly enough anyway, but now there was even more urgency. He hit the buttons, moved some levers. The train should have moved, flexed; but it stayed motionless.

  What else was there left to do? He turned to his blind side; light panels flashed. Of course: the doors. He hit the appropriate sections of the console and heard rumbling, sliding noises; and most of the panels stopped flashing. Not all, though. Some of the doors must have been jammed. Another control overrode their fail-safes; the remaining panels went dim.

  He tried again.

  Slowly, like an animal stretching after hibernation, the Command System train, all three hundred metres of it, flexed; the carriages pulling a little tighter to each other, taking up slack, readying.

  Quayanorl felt the slight movement and wanted to laugh. It was working. Probably he had taken far too long, probably it was now too late, but at least he had done what he had set out to do, against all the odds, and the pain. He had taken command of the long silver beast, and with only a little more luck he would at least give the humans something to think about. And show the Beast of the Barrier what he thought of its precious monument.

  Nervously, fearing that it would still not work, after all his effort and agony, he took hold of the lever he and Xoxarle had decided governed the power fed to the main wheel motors, then pushed it until it was at its limit for the starting mode. The train shuddered, groaned and did not move.

  His one eye, containing the grey view, began to cry, drowning in tears.

  The train jerked, a noise of metal tearing came from behind. He was almost thrown from the seat. He had to grab the edge of the seat, then lean forward and take the power lever again as it flicked back to the off position. The roaring in his head grew and grew; he was shaking with exhaustion and excitement; he pushed the lever again.

  Wreckage blocked one door. Welding gear hung under the reactor car. Strips of metal torn from the train's hull were splayed out like stray hairs from a badly groomed coat. Lumps of debris littered the tracks by the sides of both access gantries, and one whole ramp, where Xoxarle had been buried for a while, had crashed through the side of a carriage when it had been cut free.

  Groaning and moaning as though its own attempts at movement were as painful as Quayanorl's had been, the train lurched forward again. It moved half a turn of its wheels, then stopped as the jammed ramp stuck against the access gantry. A whining noise came from the train motors. In the control deck, alarms sounded, almost too high for the injured Idiran to hear. Meters flashed, needles climbed into danger zones, screens filled with information.

  The ramp started to tear itself free from the train, crumpling a jagged-edge trench from the carriage surface as the train slowly forced its way forward.

  Quayanorl watched the lip of the tunnel mouth edge closer.

  More wreckage ground against the forward access gantry. The welding gear under the reactor car scraped along the smooth floor until it came to the lip of stone surrounding an inspection trough; it jammed, then broke, clattering to the bottom of the t
rough. The train rammed slowly forward.

  With a grinding crash, the ramp caught on the rear access assembly fell free, snapping aluminium ribs and steel tubes, flaying the aluminium and plastic skin of the carriage it had lodged in. One corner of the ramp was nudged under the train, covering a rail; the wheels hesitated at it, the linkages between the cars straining, until the slowly gathering onward pull overcame the ramp. It buckled, its structures compressing, and the wheels rolled over it, thumping down on the far side and continuing along the rail. The next wheels clattered over it with hardly a pause.

  Quayanorl sat back. The tunnel came to the train and seemed to swallow it; the view of the station slowly disappeared. Dark walls slid gently by on either side of the control deck. The train still shuddered, but it was slowly gathering speed. A series of bangs and crashes told Quayanorl of the carriages dragging their way after him, through the debris, over the shining rails, past the wrecked gantries, out of the damaged station.

  The first car left at a slow walking pace, the next a little faster, the reactor carriage at a fast walk, and the final car at a slow run.

  Smoke tugged after the departing train, then drifted back and rose to the roof again.

  … The camera in station six, where they had had the fire-fight, where Dorolow and Neisin had died and the other Idiran had been left for dead, was out of action. Horza tried the switch a couple of times, but the screen stayed dark. A damage indicator winked. Horza flicked quickly through the views from the other stations on the circuit, then switched the screen off.

  "Well, everything seems to be all right." He stood up. "Let's get back to the train."

  Yalson told Wubslin and the drone; Balveda slipped off the big seat, and with her in the lead, they walked out of the control room.

  Behind them, a power-monitoring screen — one of the first Horza had switched on — was registering a massive energy drain in the locomotive supply circuits, indicating that somewhere, in the tunnels of the Command System, a train was moving.