Consider Phlebas (34 page)

‘It’ll take a while to explain it all, but what it boils down to is there’s something on Schar’s World which both the Culture and the Idirans want. I have . . . a contract, a commission from the Idirans, to get there and find this thing.’

‘You really are a paranoid,’ the drone said incredulously. It rose off the table and turned round to look at the others. ‘He really is a lunatic!’

‘The Idirans are hiring us - you - to go after something?’ Yalson’s voice was full of disbelief. Horza looked at her and smiled.

‘You mean this woman’, Dorolow said, pointing at Balveda, ‘was sent by the Culture to join us, infiltrate . . . Are you serious?’

‘I’m serious. Balveda was looking for me. Also for Horza Gobuchul. She wanted to get to Schar’s World, or to stop us from getting there.’ Horza looked at Aviger. ‘There was a bomb in amongst her gear, by the way; it went off just after I rotated it out the tubes. It blew the police ships away. We all got a blast of radiation, but nothing lethal.’

‘And what about Horza?’ Yalson said, looking grimly at him. ‘Was that just some trick, or did you really meet him?’

‘He is alive, Yalson, and as safe as any of us.’

Wubslin appeared through the door from the bridge, still with an apologetic look on his face. He nodded at Horza and sat down near by. ‘All looking fine, Kraiklyn.’

‘Good,’ Horza said. ‘I was just explaining to everybody else about our journey to Schar’s World.’

‘Oh,’ Wubslin said. ‘Yeah.’ He shrugged at the others.

‘Kraiklyn,’ Yalson said, leaning forward on the table and looking intently at Horza, ‘you just about got us all killed fuck knows how many times back there. You probably did kill quite a few people during those . . . in-door aerobatics. You’ve saddled us with some secret agent from the Culture. You’re practically kidnapping us to take us towards a planet in the middle of a war zone where nobody’s even allowed in, to look for something both sides want enough to . . . Well, if the Idirans are hiring a decimated bunch of second-rate mercenaries, they must be pretty desperate; and if the Culture really was behind the attempt to keep us in that bay, they must be scared stiff to risk violating the neutrality of the Ends and breaking some of their precious rules of war.

‘You may think you know what’s going on and think the risk is worth it, but I don’t, and I don’t like this feeling of being kept in the dark at all, either. Your track record recently’s been crap; let’s face it. Risk your own life if you want to, but you don’t have any right to risk ours, too. Not any more. Maybe we don’t all want to side with the Idirans, but even if we did prefer them to the Culture, none of us signed up to start fighting in the middle of the war. Shit, Kraiklyn, we’re neither . . . equipped nor trained well enough to go up against those guys.’

‘I know all that,’ Horza said. ‘But we shouldn’t be encountering any battle forces. The Quiet Barrier round Schar’s World extends far enough out so that it’s impossible to watch it all. We go in from a randomly picked direction, and by the time we’re spotted, there’s nothing anybody could do about it, no matter what sort of ship they have. A Main Battle Fleet couldn’t keep us out. When we leave it’ll be the same.’

‘What you’re trying to say is,’ Yalson said, sitting back in her seat, ‘ “Easy in, easy out”.’

‘Maybe I am,’ laughed Horza.

‘Hey,’ Wubslin said suddenly, looking at his terminal screen, which he had just taken from his pocket. ‘It’s nearly time!’ He got up and disappeared through the doors leading to the bridge. In a few seconds the screen in the mess changed, the view swivelling round until it showed Vavatch. The great Orbital hung in space, dark and brilliant, full of night and day, blue and white and black. They all looked up at the screen.

Wubslin came back in and sat in his seat again. Horza felt tired. His body wanted rest, and lots of it. His brain was still buzzing from the concentration and the amount of adrenalin it had required to pilot the CAT through and out of The Ends of Invention, but he couldn’t rest yet. He couldn’t decide what was the best thing to do. Should he tell them who he was, tell them the truth, that he was a Changer, that he had killed Kraiklyn? How loyal were any of them to the leader they didn’t yet know was dead? Yalson the most, perhaps; but surely she would be glad to know that he was alive . . . Yet she was the one who had said that perhaps they weren’t all on the Idirans’ side . . . She had never shown any sympathy for the Culture before when he had known her, but perhaps she had changed her mind.

He could even Change back; there was a fairly long journey now during which it shouldn’t be beyond him, perhaps with the help of Wubslin, to change the fidelities in the CAT’s computer. But should he tell them - should he let them know? And Balveda: what was he going to do with her? He had had some idea of using her to bargain with the Culture, but it looked as though they had escaped now, and next stop was Schar’s World, where she would at best be a liability. He ought to kill her now, but he knew, first of all, that that might not go down well with the others, especially Yalson. He also knew, although he didn’t like to admit it, that he would find it personally painful to kill the Culture agent. They were enemies, they had both been very close to death and the other had done little or nothing to intervene, but actually to kill her would be very difficult.

Or maybe he only wanted to pretend that he would find it very difficult; maybe it would be no bother at all, and the sort of bogus camaraderie of doing the same job, though on different sides, was just that: a fake. He opened his mouth to ask Yalson to stun the Culture agent again.

‘Now,’ Wubslin said.

With that, Vavatch Orbital started to disintegrate.

The view of it on the mess-room screen was a compensated hyperspace version, so that, although they were already outside the Vavatch system, they were watching it virtually in real time. Right at the appointed hour the unseen, unnamed, very much still militarised General Systems Vehicle which was somewhere in the vicinity of the Vavatch planetary system started its bombardment. It was almost certainly an Ocean class GSV, the same one which had sent the message that they had all watched some days ago on the mess screen, heading in towards Vavatch. That would make the warcraft very much smaller than the behemoth of The Ends of Invention, which was - for war purposes - obsolete. One Ocean class could fit inside either of the Ends’ General bays, but while the larger craft - by that time an hour out from the Orbital - was full of people, the Ocean class would be packed with other warships, and weaponry.

Gridfire struck the Orbital. Horza paused and watched the screen as it lit up suddenly, flashing once over its whole surface until the sensors coped with the sudden increase in brilliance and compensated. For some reason Horza had thought the Culture would just splash the gridfire all over the massive Orbital and then spatter the remains with CAM, but they didn’t do that; instead a single narrow line of blinding white light appeared right across the breadth of the day side of the Orbital, a thin fiery blade of silent destruction which was instantly surrounded by the duller but still perfectly white cover of clouds. That line of light was part of the grid itself, the fabric of pure energy which lay underneath the entire universe, separating this one from the slightly younger, slightly smaller antimatter universe beneath. The Culture, like the Idirans, could now partially control that awesome power, at least sufficiently to use it for the purposes of destruction. A line of that energy, plucked from nowhere and sliced across the face of the three-dimensional universe, was down there: on and inside the Orbital, boiling the Circlesea, melting the two thousand kilometres of transparent wall, annihilating the base material itself, straight across its thirty-five-thousand-kilometre breadth.

Vavatch, that fourteen million kilometre hoop, was starting to uncoil. A chain, it had been cut.

There was nothing left now to hold it together; its own spin, the source of both its day-night cycle and its artificial gravity, was now the very force tearing it all apart. At about one hundred and thirty kilometres per second, Vavatch was throwing itself into outer space, unwinding like a released spring.

The livid line of fire appeared again, and again, and again, working its way methodically round the Orbital from where the original burst had struck, neatly parcelling the entire Orbital into squares, thirty-five thousand kilometres to a side, each containing a sandwich of trillions upon trillions of tonnes of ultradense base material, water, land and air.

Vavatch was turning white. First the gridfire seared the water into a border of clouds; then the outrushing air, spilling from each immense flat square like heavy fumes off a table, turned its load of water vapour to ice. The ocean itself, no longer held by the spin force, was shifting, spilling with infinite slowness over one edge of every plate of ruptured base material, becoming ice and swirling away into space.

The precise, brilliant line of fire marched on, going back in reverse-spin direction, neatly dissecting the still curved, still spinning sections of the Orbital with its sudden, lethal flashes of light - light from outside the normal fabric of reality.

Horza remembered what Jandraligeli had called it, back when Lenipobra had been enthusing about the destruction.

‘The weaponry of the end of the universe,’ the Mondlidician had said. Horza watched the screen and knew what the man had meant.

It was all going. All of it. The wreck of the Olmedreca, the tabular berg it had collided with, the wreck of the CAT’s shuttle, Mipp’s body, Lenipobra’s, whatever was left of Fwi-Song’s corpse, Mr First’s . . . the living bodies of the other Eaters - if they hadn’t been rescued, or had still refused . . . the Damage game arena, the docks and Kraiklyn’s dead body, the hovercraft . . . animals and fishes, birds, germs, all of it: everything flash-burned or flash-frozen, suddenly weightless, spinning into space, going, dying.

The relentless line of fire completed its circuit of the Orbital, back almost to where it had started. The Orbital was now a rosette of white flat squares backing slowly away from each other towards the stars: four hundred separate slabs of quickly freezing water, silt, land and base material, angling out above or underneath the plane of the system’s planets like flat square worlds themselves.

There was a moment of grace then, as Vavatch died in solitary, blazing splendour. Then at its dark centre, another blazing star patch rose, bursting white as the Hub was struck with the same terrible energy which had smashed the world itself.

Like a target, then, Vavatch blazed.

Just as Horza thought that the Culture would be content with that, the screen lit up once more. Everyone of those flat cards, and the Hub, of the exploded Orbital blazed once with an icy, sparkling brilliance as though a million tiny white stars were shining through each shattered piece.

The light faded, and those four hundred expanses of flat worlds with their centre Hub were gone, replaced by a grid of diced shapes, each exploding away from the others as well as from the rest of the disintegrating Orbital.

Those pieces flashed, too, bursting slowly with a billion pinpricks of light which, when they faded, left debris almost too small to make out.

Vavatch was now a swollen and spiralled disc of flashing, glittering splinters, expanding very slowly against the distant stars like a ring of bright dust. The glinting, sparkling centre made it look like some huge, lidless and unblinking eye.

The screen flashed one final time. No single points of light could be made out this time. It was as though the whole now vague but bloated image of the shattered circular world glowed with some internal heat, making a torus-shaped cloud out of it, a halo of white light with a fading iris at its centre. Then the show was over, and only the sun lit up the slowly blooming nimbus of the annihilated world.

On other wavelengths there would probably be a lot still to see, but the mess-room screen was on normal light. Only the Minds, only the starships, would see the whole destruction perfectly; only they would be able to appreciate it for all that it had to offer. Of the entire range of the electromagnetic spectrum, the unaided human eye could see little more than one per cent: a single octave of radiation out of an immense long keyboard of tones. The sensors on a starship would see everything, right across that spectrum, in far greater detail and at a much slower apparent speed. The whole display that was the Orbital’s destruction was, for all its humanly perceivable grandeur, quite wasted on the animal eye. A spectacle for the machines, thought Horza; that was all it was. A sideshow for the damn machines.

‘Chicel . . . ‘ Dorolow said. Wubslin exhaled loudly and shook his head. Yalson turned and looked at Horza. Aviger stayed with his head turned to the screen.

‘Amazing what one can accomplish when one puts one’s mind to it, eh . . . Horza?’

At first, stupidly, he thought that Yalson had said it, but of course it was Balveda.

She brought her head up slowly. Her deep, dark eyes were open; she looked groggy, and her body still sagged against the webbing of the seat straps. The voice had been clear and steady, though.

Horza saw Yalson reaching for the stun gun on the table. She reached out and brought the gun closer to her but left it lying on the table. She was looking suspiciously at the Culture agent. Aviger and Dorolow and Wubslin were staring at her, too.

‘Are the batteries on that stun gun running down?’ Wubslin said. Yalson was still looking at Balveda, her eyes narrowed.

‘You’re a little confused, Gravant, or whoever you are,’ Yalson said. ‘That’s Kraiklyn.’

Balveda smiled at Horza. He left his face blank. He didn’t know what to do. He was exhausted, worn out. It was too much of an effort. Let what was going to happen, happen. He’d had enough of deciding. ‘Well,’ Balveda said to him, ‘are you going to tell them, or shall I?’

He said nothing. He watched Balveda’s face. The woman drew a deep breath and said, ‘Oh all right, I’ll tell them.’ She turned to Yalson. ‘His name is Bora Horza Gobuchul, and he’s impersonating Kraiklyn. Horza’s a Changer from Heibohre and he works for the Idirans. Has done for the last six years. He’s Changed to become Kraiklyn. I imagine your real leader is dead. Horza probably killed him, or at least left him somewhere in or around Evanauth.