Consider Phlebas (51 page)

‘What do you mean? Surely all you have to do is look at the screen; can you see the Mind on there or not?’ The drone came closer, dipping down to look at the controls and the small screen on Horza’s suit cuff. He swatted it away.

‘I’m getting some interference from the reactor.’ Horza glanced at Wubslin. ‘We’ll cope with it.’

‘Take a look round the repair area, check the place out,’ Yalson said to the machine. ‘Make yourself useful.’

‘It isn’t working, is it?’ Unaha-Closp said. It kept pace with Horza, still facing him and backing through the air in front of him. ‘That three-legged lunatic smashed the mass sensor on the pallet, and now we’re blind; we’re back to square one, aren’t we?’

‘No,’ Horza said impatiently, ‘we are not. We’ll repair it. Now, how about doing something useful for a change?’

‘For a change?’ Unaha-Closp said with what sounded like feeling. ‘For a change? You’re forgetting who it was saved all your skins back in the tunnels when our cute little Idiran liaison officer over there started running amuck.’

‘All right, drone,’ Horza said through clenched teeth. ‘I’ve said thank you. Now, why don’t you take a look around the station, just in case there’s anything to be seen.’

‘Like Minds you can’t spot on wasted suit mass sensors, for example? And what are you lot going to be doing while I’m doing that?’

‘Resting,’ Horza said. ‘And thinking.’ He stopped at Xoxarle and inspected the Idiran’s bonds.

‘Oh, great,’ Unaha-Closp sneered. ‘And a lot of good all your thinking has done - ‘

‘For fuck’s sake, Unaha-Closp,’ Yalson said, sighing heavily, ‘either go or stay, but shut up.’

‘I see! Right!’ Unaha-Closp drew away from them and rose in the air. ‘I’ll just go and lose myself, then! I should have - ‘

It was floating away as it spoke. Horza shouted over the drone’s voice, ‘Before you go, can you hear any alarms?’

‘What?’ Unaha-Closp came to a halt. Wubslin put a pained, studious expression on his face and looked around the station’s bright walls, as though making an effort to hear above the frequencies his ears could sense.

Unaha-Closp was silent for a moment, then said, ‘No. No alarms. I’m going now. I’ll check out the other train. When I think you might be in a more amenable mood I’ll come back.’ It turned and sped off.

‘Dorolow could have heard the alarms,’ Aviger muttered, but nobody heard.

Wubslin looked up at the train, gleaming in the station lights, and like it, seemed to glow from within.

. . . what is this? is it light? do i imagine it? am i dying? is this what happens? am i dying now, so soon? i thought i had a while left and i don’t deserve . . .

light! it is light!

I can see again!

Welded to the cold metal by his own dry blood, his body cracked and twisted, mutilated and dying, he opened his one good eye as far as he could. Mucus had dried on it, and he had to blink, trying to clear it.

His body was a dark and alien land of pain, a continent of torment.

. . . One eye left. One arm. A leg missing, just lopped off. One numb and paralysed, another broken (he tested to make sure, trying to move that limb; a pain like fire flashed through him, like a lightning flash over the shadowed country that was his body and his pain), and my face . . . my face . . .

He felt like a smashed insect, abandoned by some children after an afternoon’s cruel play. They had thought he was dead, but he was not built the way they were. A few holes were nothing; an amputated limb . . . well, his blood did not gush like theirs when a leg or arm was removed (he remembered a recording of a human dissection), and for the warrior there was no shock; not like their poor soft, flesh-flabby systems. He had been shot in the face, but the beam or bullet had not penetrated through the internal keratin brain cover, or severed his nerves. Similarly, his eyes had been smashed, but the other side of his face was intact, and he could still see.

It was so bright. His sight cleared and he looked, without moving, at the station roof.

He could feel himself dying slowly; an internal knowledge which, again, they might not have had. He could feel the slow leak of his blood inside his body, sense the pressure build-up in his torso, and the faint oozing through cracks in his keratin. The remains of the suit would help him but not save him. He could feel his internal organs slowly shutting down: too many holes from one system to another. His stomach would never digest his last meal, and his anterior lung-sack, which normally held a reserve of hyperoxygenated blood for use when his body needed its last reserves of strength, was emptying, its precious fuel being squandered in the losing battle his body fought against the falling pressure of his blood.

Dying . . . I am dying . . . . What difference whether it is in darkness or in light?

Great One, fallen comrades, children and mate . . . can you see me any better in this deeply buried, alien glare?

My name is Quayanorl, Great One, and -

The idea was brighter than the pain when he’d tried to move his shattered leg, brighter than the station’s silent, staring glow.

They had said they were going to station seven.

It was the last thing he remembered, apart from the sight of one of them floating through the air towards him. That one must have shot him in the face; he couldn’t remember it happening, but it made sense . . . Sent to make sure he was dead. But he was alive, and he had just had an idea. It was a long shot, even if he could get it to work, even if he could shift himself, even if it all worked . . . a long shot, in every sense . . . But it would be doing something; it would be a suitable end for a warrior, whatever happened. The pain would be worth it.

He moved quickly, before he could change his mind, knowing that there might be little time (if he wasn’t already too late . . . ). The pain seared through him like a sword.

From his broken, bloody mouth, a shout came.

Nobody heard. His shout echoed in the bright station. Then there was silence. His body throbbed with the aftershock of pain, but he could feel that he was free; the blood-weld was broken. He could move; in the light he could move.

Xoxarle, if you are still alive, I may soon have a little surprise for our friends . . .

‘Drone?’

‘What?’

‘Horza wants to know what you’re doing.’ Yalson spoke into her helmet communicator, looking at the Changer.

‘I’m searching this train; the one in the repair section. I would have said if I’d found anything, you know. Have you got that suit sensor working yet?’

Horza made a face at the helmet Yalson held on her knees; he reached over and switched off the communicator.

‘It’s right, though, isn’t it?’ Aviger said, sitting on the pallet. ‘That one in your suit isn’t working, is it?’

‘There’s some interference from the train’s reactor,’ Horza told the old man. ‘That’s all. We can deal with it.’ Aviger didn’t look convinced.

Horza opened a drink canister. He felt tired, drained. There was a sense of anti-climax now, having got the power on but not found the Mind. He cursed the broken mass sensor, and Xoxarle, and the Mind. He didn’t know where the damn thing was, but he’d find it. Right now, though, he just wanted to sit and relax. He needed to give his thoughts time to collect. He rubbed his head where it had been bruised in the fire-fight in station six; it hurt, distantly, naggingly, inside. Nothing serious, but it would have been distracting if he hadn’t been able to shut the pain off.

‘Don’t you think we should search this train now?’ Wubslin said, gazing up hungrily at the shining curved bulk of it in front of them.

Horza smiled at the engineer’s rapt expression. ‘Yes, why not?’ he said. ‘On you go; take a look.’ He nodded at the grinning Wubslin, who swallowed a last mouthful of food and grabbed his helmet.

‘Right. Yeah. Might as well start now,’ he said, and walked off quickly, past the motionless figure of Xoxarle, up the access ramp and into the train.

Balveda was standing with her back against the wall, her hands in her pockets. She smiled at Wubslin’s retreating back as he disappeared into the train’s interior.

‘Are you going to let him drive that thing, Horza?’ she asked.

‘Somebody may have to,’ Horza said. ‘We’ll need some sort of transport to take us round if we’re going to look for the Mind.’

‘What fun,’ Balveda said. ‘We could all just go riding round in circles for ever and ever.’

‘Not me,’ Aviger said, turning from Horza to look at the Culture agent. ‘I’m going back to the CAT. I’m not going round looking for this damn computer.’

‘Good idea,’ Yalson said, looking at the old man. ‘We could make you a sort of prisoner detail; send you back with Xoxarle; just the two of you.’

‘I’ll go alone,’ Aviger said in a low voice, avoiding Yalson’s gaze. ‘I’m not afraid.’

Xoxarle listened to them talk. Such squeaky, scratchy voices. He tested his bonds again. The wire had cut a couple of millimetres into his keratin, on his shoulders, thighs and wrists. It hurt a little, but it would be worthwhile, maybe. He was quietly cutting himself on the wire, rubbing with all the force he could muster against the places where the wire held him tightest; chafing the nail-like cover of his body deliberately. He had taken a deep breath and flexed all the muscles he could when he was tied up, and that had given him just enough room to move, but he would need a little more if he was to have any chance of working his way loose.

He had no plan, no time scale; he had no idea when he might have an opportunity, but what else could he do? Stand there like a stuffed dummy, like a good boy? While these squirming, soft-bodied worms scratched their pulpy skin and tried to work out where the Mind was? A warrior could do no such thing; he had come too far, seen too many die . . .

‘Hey!’ Wubslin opened a small window on the top storey of the train and leaned out, shouting to the others. ‘These elevators work! I just came up in one! Everything works!’

‘Yeah!’ Yalson waved. ‘Great, Wubslin.’

The engineer ducked back inside. He moved through the train, testing and touching, inspecting controls and machinery.

‘Quite impressive, though, isn’t it?’ Balveda said to the others. ‘For its time.’

Horza nodded, gazing slowly from one end of the train to the other. He finished the drink in the container and put it down on the pallet as he stood up. ‘Yes, it is. But much good it did them.’

Quayanorl dragged himself up the ramp.

A pall of smoke hung in the station air, hardly shifting in the slow circulation of air. Fans were working in the train, though, and what movement there was in the grey-blue cloud came mostly from the places where open doors and windows blew the acrid mist out from the carriages, replacing it with air scrubbed by the train’s conditioning and filter system.

He dragged himself through wreckage - bits and pieces of wall and train, even scraps and shards from his own suit. It was very hard and slow, and he was already afraid he would die before he even got to the train.

His legs were useless. He would probably be doing better if the other two had been blown off as well.

He crawled with his one good arm, grasping the edge of the ramp and pulling with all his might.

The effort was agonisingly painful. Every time he pulled he thought it would grow less, but it didn’t; it was as though for each of the too long seconds he hauled at that ramp edge, and his broken, bleeding body scraped further up the littered surface, his blood vessels ran with acid. He shook his head and mumbled to himself. He felt blood run from the cracks in his body, which had healed while he lay still and now were being ripped open again. He felt tears run from his one good eye; he sensed the slow weep of healing fluid welling where his other eye had been torn from his face.

The door ahead of him shone through the bright mist, a faint air current coming from it making curls in the smoke. His feet scraped behind him, and his suit chest ploughed a small bow wave of wreckage from the surface of the ramp as he moved. He gripped the ramp’s edge again and pulled.

He tried not to call out, not because he thought there was anyone to hear and be warned, but because all his life, from when he had first got to his feet by himself, he had been taught to suffer in silence. He did try; he could remember his nest-Querl and his mother-parent teaching him not to cry out, and it was shaming to disobey them, but sometimes it got too much. Sometimes the pain squeezed the noise from him.

On the station roof, some of the lights were out, hit by stray shots. He could see the holes and punctures in the train’s shining hull, and he had no idea what damage might have been done to it, but he couldn’t stop now. He had to go on.

He could hear the train. He could listen to it like a hunter listening to a wild animal. The train was alive; injured - some of its whirring motors sounded damaged - but it was alive. He was dying, but he would do his best to capture the beast.

‘What do you think?’ Horza asked Wubslin. He had tracked the engineer down under one of the Command System train carriages, hanging upside down looking at the wheel motors. Horza had asked Wubslin to take a look at the small device on his suit chest which was the main body of the mass sensor.

‘I don’t know,’ Wubslin said, shaking his head. He had his helmet on and visor down, using the screen to magnify the view of the sensor. ‘It’s so small. I’d need to take it back to the CAT to have a proper look at it. I didn’t bring all my tools with me.’ He made a tutting noise. ‘It looks all right; I can’t see any obvious damage. Maybe the reactors are putting it off.’

‘Damn. We’ll have to search, then,’ Horza said. He let Wubslin close the small inspection panel on the suit front.

The engineer leant back and shoved his visor up. ‘Only trouble is,’ he said glumly, ‘if the reactors are interfering, there isn’t much point in taking the train to look for the Mind. We’ll have to use the transit tube.’

‘We’ll search the station first,’ Horza said. He stood up. Through the window, across the station platform, he could see Yalson standing watching Balveda as the Culture woman paced slowly up and down the smooth rock floor. Aviger still sat on the pallet. Xoxarle stood strapped to the girders of the access ways.