Consider Phlebas (45 page)

And if we tamper with our inheritance, so what? What is more ours to tamper with? What makes nature more right than us? If we get it wrong, that’s because we are stupid, not because the idea was bad. And if we are no longer on the breaking edge of the wave, well, too bad. Hand on the baton; best wishes; have fun.

Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that’s the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, the most enjoyable and good ones, in our own terms? Yes, we’re hedonists, Mr Bora Horza Gobuchul. We seek pleasure and have fashioned ourselves so that we can take more of it; admitted. We are what we are. But what about you? What does that make you?

Who are you?

What are you?

A weapon. A thing made to deceive and kill, by the long-dead. The whole subspecies that is the Changers is the remnant of some ancient war, a war so long gone that no one willing to tell recalls who fought it, or when, or over what. Nobody even knows whether the Changers were on the winning side or not.

But in any event, you were fashioned, Horza. You did not evolve in a way you would call ‘natural’; you are the product of careful thought and genetic tinkering and military planning and deliberate design . . . and war; your very creation depended on it, you are the child of it, you are its legacy.

Changer change yourself . . . but you cannot, you will not. All you can do is try not to think about it. And yet the knowledge is there, the information implanted, somewhere deep inside. You could - you should live easy with it, all the same, but I don’t think you do . . .

And I’m sorry for you, because I think I know now who you really hate.

She came out of it quickly, as the supply of chemicals from glands in her neck and brain stem shut off. The compounds already in the girl’s brain cells began to break down, releasing her.

Reality blew around her, the breeze freshening cold against her skin. She wiped the sweat from her brow. There were tears in her eyes, and she wiped them, too, sniffing, and rubbing her reddened nose.

Another failure, she thought bitterly. But it was a young, unstable sort of bitterness, a kind of fake, something she assumed for a while, like a child trying on adult clothes. She luxuriated in the feeling of being old and disillusioned for a moment, then let it drop. The mood did not fit. Time enough for the genuine version when she was old, she thought wryly, smiling at the line of hills on the far side of the plain. But it was a failure nevertheless. She had hoped for something to occur to her, something about the Idirans or Balveda or the Changer or the war or . . . anything . . .

Instead, old territory mostly, accepted facts, the already known.

A certain self-disgust at being human, an understanding of the Idirans’ proud disdain for her kind, a reaffirmation that at least one thing was its own meaning, and a probably wrong, probably over-sympathetic glimpse into the character of a man she had never met and never would meet, who was separated from her by most of a galaxy and all of a morality.

Little enough to bring down from the frozen peak.

She sighed. The wind blew, and she watched clouds mass far along the high range. She would have to start down now if she was going to beat the storm. It would seem like cheating not to get back down under her own steam, and Jase would scold her if conditions got so bad she had to send for a flyer to pick her up.

Fal ‘Ngeestra stood. The pain in her leg came back, signals from her weak point. She paused for a moment, reassessing the state of that mending bone, and then - deciding it would hold up - started the descent towards the unfrozen world below.

The Command System: Stations

He was being shaken gently.

‘Wake up, now. Come on, wake up. Come on, now, up you get . . . ‘

He recognised the voice as Xoralundra’s. The old Idiran was trying to get him to wake up. He pretended to stay asleep.

‘I know you’re awake. Come on, now, it’s time to get up.’

He opened his eyes with a false weariness. Xoralundra was there, in a bright blue circular room with lots of large couches set into alcoves in the blue material. Above hung a white sky with black clouds. It was very bright in the room. He shielded his eyes and looked at the Idiran.

‘What happened to the Command System?’ he said, looking around the circular blue room.

‘That dream is over now. You did well, passed with flying colours. The Academy and I are very pleased with you.’

He couldn’t help but feel pleased. A warm glow seemed to envelop him, and he couldn’t stop a smile appearing on his face.

‘Thanks,’ he said. The Querl nodded.

‘You did very well as Bora Horza Gobuchul,’ Xoralundra said in his rumbling great voice. ‘Now you should take some time off; go and play with Gierashell.’

He was swinging his feet off the bed, getting ready to jump down to the floor, when Xoralundra said that. He smiled at the old Querl.

‘Who?’ he laughed.

‘Your friend; Gierashell,’ the Idiran said.

‘You mean Kierachell,’ he laughed, shaking his head; Xoralundra must be getting old!

‘I mean Gierashell,’ the Idiran insisted coldly, stepping back and looking at him strangely. ‘Who is Kierachell?’

‘You mean you don’t know? But how could you get her name wrong?’ he said, shaking his head again at the Querl’s foolishness. Or was this still part of some test?

‘Just a moment,’ Xoralundra said. He looked at something in his hand which threw coloured lights across his broad, gleaming face. Then he slapped his other hand to his mouth, an expression of astonished surprise on his face as he turned to him and said, ‘Oh! Sorry!’ and suddenly reached over and shoved him back into the -

He sat upright. Something whined in his ear.

He sat back down again slowly, looking round in the grainy darkness to see if any of the others had noticed, but they were all still. He told the remote sensor alarm to switch off. The whine in his ear faded. Unaha-Closp’s casing could be seen high on the far gantry.

Horza opened his visor and wiped some sweat from his nose and brows. The drone had no doubt seen him each time he woke up. He wondered what it was thinking now, what it thought of him. Could it see well enough to know that he was having nightmares? Could it see through his visor to his face, or sense the small twitches his body made while his brain constructed its own images from the debris of an his days? He could blank the visor out; he could set the suit to expand and lock rigid.

He thought about how he must look to it: a small, soft naked thing writhing in a hard cocoon, convulsed with illusions in its coma.

He decided to stay awake until the others started to rise.

The night passed, and the Free Company awoke to darkness and the labyrinth. The drone said nothing about seeing him wake up during the night, and he didn’t ask it. He was falsely jolly and hearty, going round the others, laughing and slapping backs, telling them they’d get to station seven today and there they could turn on the lights and get the transit tubes working.

‘Tell you what, Wubslin,’ he said, grinning at the engineer as he rubbed his eyes, ‘we’ll see if we can’t get one of those big trains working, just for the hell of it.’

‘Well,’ Wubslin yawned, ‘if that’s all right . . . ‘

‘Why not?’ Horza said, spreading his arms out. ‘I think Mr Adequate’s leaving us to it; he’s turning a blind eye to this whole thing. We’ll get one of those super-trains running, eh?’

Wubslin stretched, smiling and nodding. ‘Well, yeah, sounds like a good idea to me.’ Horza smiled widely, winked at Wubslin and went to release Balveda. It was like going to release a wild animal, he thought, as he shifted the empty cable drum he had used to block the door. He half expected to find Balveda gone, miraculously escaped from her bonds and disappeared from the room without opening the door; but when he looked in, there she was, lying calmly in her warm clothes, the harness making troughs in the fur of the jacket and still attached to the wall Horza had fixed it to.

‘Good morning, Perosteck!’ he said breezily.

‘Horza,’ the woman said grumpily, sitting slowly upright, flexing her shoulders and arching her neck, ‘twenty years at my mother’s side, more than I care to think of as a gay and dashing young blade indulging in all the pleasures the Culture has ever produced, one or two of maturity, seventeen in Contact and four in Special Circumstances have not made me pleasant to know or quick to wake in the mornings. You wouldn’t have some water to drink, would you? I’ve slept too long, I wasn’t comfortable, it’s cold and dark, I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was like at the moment, and . . . I mentioned water a moment or two ago; did you hear? Or aren’t I allowed any?’

‘I’ll get you some,’ he said, going back to the door. He stopped there. ‘You’re right, by the way. You are pretty off-putting in the morning.’

Balveda shook her head in the darkness. She put one finger in her mouth and rubbed it around on one side, as though massaging her gums or cleaning her teeth, then she just sat with her head between her knees, staring at the jet-black nothing of the cold rock floor beneath her, wondering if this was the day she died.

They stood in a huge semi-circular alcove carved out of the rock and looking out over the dark space of station four’s repair and maintenance area. The cavern was three hundred metres or more square, and from the bottom of the scooped gallery they stood on to the floor of the vast cave - littered with machinery and equipment - was a thirty-metre drop.

Great cradle-arms capable of lifting and holding an entire Command System train were suspended from the roof above, another thirty metres up in the gloom. In the mid-distance a suspended gantry lanced out over the cave, from a gallery on one side to the other, bisecting the cavern’s dark bulk.

They were ready to move; Horza gave the order.

Wubslin and Neisin each headed down small side tubes towards the main Command System tunnel and the transit tubeway respectively, using AG. Once in the tunnels they would keep level with the main group. Horza switched on his own AG, rose about a metre from the floor and floated down a branch tunnel of the foot gallery, then started slowly forward, down into the darkness, towards station five, thirty kilometres away. The rest would follow him, also floating. Balveda shared the pallet with the equipment.

He smiled when Balveda sat down on the pallet; she suddenly reminded him of Fwi-Song sitting on his heavy-duty litter, in the space and sunlight of a place now gone. The comparison struck him as wonderfully absurd.

Horza floated along the foot tunnel, stopping to check the side tubes as they appeared and contacting the others whenever he did so. His suit senses were turned as high as they would go; any light, the slightest noise, an alteration in the air flow, even vibrations in the rock around him: all were catered for. Unusual smells would register, too, as would power flowing through the cables buried in the tunnel walls and any sort of broadcast communication.

He’d thought about signalling the Idirans as they went along, but decided not to. He had sent one short signal from station four, without receiving a reply, but to send more on the way would be to give too much away if (as he suspected) the Idirans were not in a mood to listen.

He moved through the darkness as though sitting on an invisible seat, the CREWS cradled in his arms. He heard his heartbeat, his breathing and the quiet slipstreaming of the cold, half-stale air around his suit. The suit registered vague background radiation from the surrounding granite, punctuated by intermittent cosmic rays. On the faceplate of the suit’s helmet, he watched a ghostly radar image of the tunnels as they unwound through the rock.

In places the tunnel ran straight. If he turned he could see the main group following half a kilometre behind him. In other places the tunnel described a series of shallow curves, cutting down the view provided by the scanning radar to a couple of hundred metres or less, so that he seemed to float alone in the chill blackness.

At station five they found a battleground.

His suit had picked up odd scents; that had been the first sign, organic molecules in the air, carbonised and burnt. He’d told the others to stop, gone on ahead cautiously.

Four dead medjel were laid out near one wall of the dark, deserted cavern, their burned and dismembered bodies echoing the formation of frozen Changer corpses at the surface base. Idiran religious symbols had been burned onto the wall over the fallen.

There had been a fire-fight. The station walls were pocked with small craters and long laser scars. Horza found the remains of one laser rifle, smashed, a small piece of metal embedded in it. The medjel bodies had been torn apart by hundreds more of the same tiny projectiles.

At the far end of the station, behind the half-demolished remains of one set of access ramps, he found the scattered components of some crudely manufactured machine, a kind of gun on wheels, like a miniature armoured car. Its mangled turret still contained some of the projectile ammunition, and more bullets were scattered like wind-seeds about the flame-seared wreck. Horza smiled slightly at the debris, weighing a handful of the unused projectiles in his hand.

‘The Mind?’ Wubslin said, looking down at what was left of the small vehicle. ‘It made this thing?’ He scratched his head.

‘Must have,’ Horza said, watching Yalson poke warily at the torn metal of the wreck’s hull with one booted foot, gun ready. ‘There was nothing like this down here, but you could manufacture it, in one of the workshops; a few of the old machines still work. It’d be difficult, but if the Mind still had some of its fields working, and maybe a drone or two, it could do it. It had the time.’

‘Pretty crude,’ Wubslin said, turning over a piece of the gun mechanism in his hand. He turned and looked back at the distant corpses of the medjel and added, ‘Worked well enough, though.’

‘No more medjel, by my count,’ Horza said.

‘Still two Idirans left,’ Yalson said sourly, kicking at a small rubber wheel. It rolled a couple of metres across the debris and flopped over again, near Neisin, who was celebrating the discovery of the demised medjel with a drink from his flask.

‘You sure these Idirans aren’t still here?’ Aviger asked, looking round anxiously. Dorolow peered into the darkness, too, and made the sign of the Circle of Flame.

‘Positive,’ Horza said. ‘I checked.’ Station five hadn’t been difficult to search; it was an ordinary station, just a set of points, a chicane in the Command System’s double loop and a place for the trains to stop and connect themselves with the communication links to the planet’s surface. There were a few rooms and storage areas off the main cavern, but no power-switching gear, no barracks or control rooms, and no vast repair and maintenance area. Marks in the dust showed where the Idirans had walked away from the station after the battle with the Mind’s crude automaton, heading for station six.

‘You think there’ll be a train at the next station?’ Wubslin said.

Horza nodded. ‘Should be.’ The engineer nodded, too, staring vacantly at the double sets of steel rails gleaming on the station floor.

Balveda swung herself off the pallet, stretching her legs. Horza still had the suit’s infra-red sensor on, and saw the warmth of the Culture agent’s breath waft from her mouth in a dimly glowing cloud. She clapped her hands and stamped her feet.

‘Still not too warm, is it?’ she said.

‘Don’t worry,’ grumbled the drone from underneath the pallet. ‘I may start to overheat soon; that ought to keep you cosy until I seize up completely.’

Balveda smiled a little and sat back on the pallet, looking at Horza. ‘Still thinking of trying to convince your tripedal pals you’re all on the same side?’ she said.

‘Huh!’ said the drone.

‘We’ll see,’ was all Horza would say.

Again his breathing, his heartbeat, the slow wash of stale air.

The tunnels led on into the deep night of the ancient rock like an insidious, circular maze.

‘The war won’t end,’ Aviger said. ‘It’ll just die away.’ Horza floated along the tunnel, half listening to the others talk over the open channel as they followed behind him. He’d switched his suit’s external mikes from the helmet speakers to a small screen near his cheek; the trace showed silence. Aviger continued, ‘I don’t think the Culture will give in like everybody thinks it will. I think they’ll keep fighting because they believe in it. The Idirans won’t give in, either; they’ll keep fighting to the last, and they and the Culture will just keep going at each other all the time, all over the galaxy eventually, and their weapons and bombs and rays and things will just keep getting better and better, and in the end the whole galaxy will become a battleground until they’ve blown up all the stars and planets and Orbitals and everything else big enough to stand on, and then they’ll destroy all of each other’s big ships and then the little ships, too, until everybody’ll be living in single suits, blowing each other up with weapons that could destroy a planet . . . and that’s how it’ll end; probably they’ll invent guns or drones that are even smaller, and there’ll only be a few smaller and smaller machines fighting over whatever’s left of the galaxy, and there’ll be nobody left to know how it all started in the first place.’

‘Well,’ said Unaha-Closp’s voice, ‘that sounds like a lot of fun. And what if things go badly?’

‘That’s too negative an attitude to battle, Aviger.’ Dorolow’s high-pitched voice broke in, ‘You have to be positive. Contest is formative; battle is a testing, war a part of life and the evolutionary process. In its extremity, we find ourselves.’

‘ . . . Usually in the shit,’ Yalson said. Horza grinned.

‘Yalson,’ Dorolow began, ‘even if you don’t be - ‘