Consider Phlebas (23 page)

Fwi-Song’s eyes closed slowly. The hand at his throat flopped across the sand and into the outer edge of the fire, where it started to sizzle.

Mr First’s legs beat a tattoo on the sand just as the last of the Eaters ran away, jumping tents and fires and racing for the canoes or shuttle or forest. Then the two skinny legs sticking out from under the prophet’s body were reduced to spasms, and after a while they stopped moving altogether. None of their movements had succeeded in shifting Fwi-Song’s huge body a centimetre.

Horza blew some sand off the clumsy feeling pistol and moved upwind from the smell of the prophet’s hand burning in the fire. He checked the gun, looking round the deserted stretch of beach around the fires and tents. The canoes were being launched. Eaters were crowding into the Culture shuttle.

Horza stretched his aching limbs, looked at his bare-boned finger, then shrugged, put the gun under one armpit, put his good hand round the set of bones, pulled and twisted. His useless bones snapped from their sockets and he threw them onto the fire.

Pain isn’t real anyway, he told himself shakily, and started for the Culture shuttle at a slow run.

The Eaters in the shuttle saw him coming straight towards them, and started screaming again. They piled out. Some of them ran down the beach to wade out after the escaping canoes; others scattered into the forest. Horza slowed down to let them go, then looked warily at the open doors of the Culture craft. He could see seats inside, up the short ramp, and lights and a far bulkhead. He took a deep breath and walked up the gentle slope of ramp, into the shuttle.

‘Hello,’ said a crudely synthesised voice. Horza looked around. The shuttle looked pretty well used and old. It was Culture, he was fairly certain of that, but it wasn’t as neat and spanking-new as the Culture liked its products to look. ‘Why were those people so frightened of you?’

Horza was still looking round, wondering where and what to address.

‘I’m not sure,’ he said shrugging. He was naked and still holding the gun, with only a couple of strips of flesh on one finger, though the bleeding had quickly stopped. He thought he must look a threatening figure anyway, but maybe the shuttle couldn’t tell that. ‘Where are you? What are you?’ he said, deciding to feign ignorance. He looked around in a very obvious manner, hamming up a display of looking forward, through a door in the bulkhead, to a control area forward.

‘I’m the shuttle. Its brain. How do you do?’

‘Fine,’ Horza said, ‘just fine. How are you?’

‘Very well, considering, thank you. I haven’t been bored at all, but it is nice to have somebody to talk to at last. You speak very good Marain; where did you learn?’

‘Ah . . . I did a course in it,’ Horza said. He did some more looking around. ‘Look, I don’t know where to look when I talk to you. Where should I look, huh?’

‘Ha ha,’ the shuttle laughed. ‘I suppose you’d best look up here; forward towards the bulkhead.’ Horza did so. ‘See that little round thing right in the middle, near the ceiling? That’s one of my eyes.’

‘Oh,’ Horza said. He waved and smiled. ‘Hi. My name’s . . . Orab.’

‘Hello, Orab. I’m called Tsealsir. Actually that’s only part of my name designation, but you can call me that. What was happening out there? I haven’t been watching the people I’m here to rescue; I was told not to, in case I got upset, but I did hear people screaming when they came near and they seemed frightened when they came inside me. Then they saw you and ran away. What is that you’re holding? Is it a gun? I’ll have to ask you to put that away for safe keeping. I’m here to rescue people who want to be rescued when the Orbital is destructed, and we can’t have dangerous weapons on board, in case somebody gets hurt, can we? Is that finger hurt? I have a very good medkit on board. Would you like to use it, Orab?’

‘Yes, that might be an idea.’

‘Good. It’s on the inward side of the doorway through to my front compartment on the left.’

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 doors 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.