Consider Phlebas (53 page)

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 wandered 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 trough. 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.

The Command System: Terminus

‘One can read too much into one’s own circumstances. I am reminded of one race who set themselves against us - oh, long ago now, before I was even thought of. Their conceit was that the galaxy belonged to them, and they justified this heresy by a blasphemous belief concerning design. They were aquatic, their brain and major organs housed in a large central pod from which several large arms or tentacles protruded. These tentacles were thick at the body, thin at the tips and lined with suckers. Their water god was supposed to have made the galaxy in their image.

‘You see? They thought that because they bore a rough physical resemblance to the great lens that is the home of all of us - even taking the analogy as far as comparing their tentacle suckers to globular clusters - it therefore belonged to them. For all the idiocy of this heathen belief, they had prospered and were powerful: quite respectable adversaries, in fact.’

‘Hmm,’ Aviger said. Without looking up, he asked, ‘What were they called?’

‘Hmm,’ Xoxarle rumbled. ‘Their name . . . ‘ The Idiran pondered. ‘ . . . I believe they were called the . . . the Fanch.’

‘Never heard of them,’ Aviger said.

‘No, you wouldn’t have,’ Xoxarle purred. ‘We annihilated them.’

Yalson saw Horza staring at something on the floor near the doors leading back to the station. She kept watching Balveda, but said, ‘What have you found?’

Horza shook his head, reached to pick something from the floor, then stopped. ‘I think it’s an insect,’ he said incredulously.

‘Wow,’ Yalson said, unimpressed. Balveda moved over to have a look, Yalson’s gun still trained on her. Horza shook his head, watching the insect crawl over the tunnel floor.

‘What the hell’s that doing down here?’ he said. Yalson frowned when he said that, worried at a note of near panic in the man’s voice.

‘Probably brought it down ourselves,’ Balveda said, rising. ‘Hitched a ride on the pallet, or somebody’s suit, I’ll bet.’

Horza brought his fist down on the tiny creature, squashing it, grinding it into the dark rock. Balveda looked surprised. Yalson’s frown deepened. Horza stared at the mark left on the tunnel floor, wiped his glove, then looked up, apologetic.

‘Sorry,’ he told Balveda, as though embarrassed. ‘ . . . Couldn’t help thinking about that fly in The Ends of Invention . . . Turned out to be one of your pets, remember?’ He got up and walked quickly into the station. Balveda nodded, looking down at the small stain on the floor.

‘Well,’ she said, arching one eyebrow, ‘that was one way of proving its innocence.’

Xoxarle watched the male and the two females come back into the station. ‘Nothing, little one?’ he asked.

‘Lots of things, Section Leader,’ Horza replied, going up to Xoxarle and checking the wires holding him.

Xoxarle grunted. ‘They’re still somewhat tight, ally.’

‘What a shame,’ Horza said. ‘Try breathing out.’

‘Ha!’ Xoxarle laughed and thought the man might have guessed. But the human turned away and said to the old man who had been guarding him:

‘Aviger, we’re going onto the train. Keep our friend company; try not to fall asleep.’

‘Fat chance, with him gibbering all the time,’ the old man grumbled.

The other three humans entered the train. Xoxarle went on talking.

In one section of the train there were lit map screens which showed how Schar’s World had looked at the time the Command System had been built, the cities and the states shown on the continents, the targets on one state on one continent, the missile grounds, air bases and naval ports belonging to the System’s designers shown on another state, on another continent.

Two small icecaps were shown, but the rest of the planet was steppe, savannah, desert, forest and jungle. Balveda wanted to stay and look at the maps, but Horza pulled her away and through another door, going forward to the nose of the train. He switched off the lights behind the map screens as he went, and the bright surface of blue oceans, green, yellow, brown and orange land, blue rivers and red cities and communication lines faded slowly into grey darkness.

Oh-oh.

There are more on the train. Three, I think. Walking from the rear. Now what?

Xoxarle breathed in, breathed out. He flexed his muscles, and the wires slipped over his keratin plates. He stopped, when the old man wandered over to look at him.

‘You are Aviger, aren’t you?’

‘That’s what they call me,’ the old man said. He stood looking at the Idiran, gazing from Xoxarle’s three feet with their three slab toes and round ankle collars, over his padded-looking knees, the massive girdle of pelvic plates and the flat chest, up to the section leader’s great saddle-head, the broad face tipped and looking down at the human beneath.

‘Frightened I’ll escape?’ Xoxarle rumbled.

Aviger shrugged and gripped his gun a little tighter. ‘What do I care?’ he said. ‘I’m a prisoner, too. That madman’s got us all trapped down here. I just want to go back. This isn’t my war.’

‘A very sensible attitude,’ Xoxarle said. ‘I wish more humans would realise what is and what is not theirs. Especially regarding wars.’

‘Huh, I don’t suppose your lot are any better.’

‘Let us say different, then.’

‘Say what you like.’ Aviger looked over the Idiran’s body again, addressing Xoxarle’s chest. ‘I just wish everybody would mind their own business. I see no change, though; it’ll all end in tears.’

‘I don’t think you really belong here, Aviger.’ Xoxarle nodded wisely, slowly.

Aviger shrugged, and did not raise his eyes. ‘I don’t think any of us do.’

‘The brave belong where they decide.’ Some harshness entered the Idiran’s voice.

Aviger looked at the broad, dark face above him. ‘Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you?’ He turned away and walked back towards the pallet. Xoxarle watched, and vibrated his chest quickly, tensing his muscles, then releasing. The wires on him slipped a little further. Behind his back, he felt the bonds around one wrist slacken fractionally.

The train gathered speed. The controls and screens looked dim to him, so he watched the lights on the tunnel walls outside. They had slid by gently at first, passing the side windows of the broad control deck more slowly than the quiet tide of his breathing.

Now there were two or three lights running by for each time he breathed. The train was pushing him gently in the back, drawing him towards the rear of the seat and anchoring him there. Blood - a little of it, not much - had dried under him, sticking him there. His course, he felt, was set. There was only one thing left to do. He searched the console, cursing the darkness gathering behind his eye.

Before he found the circuit breaker on the collision brake, he found the lights. It was like a little present from God; the tunnel ahead flashed with bright reflections as the train’s nose headlights clicked on. The double set of rails glinted, and in the distance he could see more shadows and reflections in the tunnel walls, where access tubes slanted in from the foot tunnels, and blast doors ribbed the black rock walls.

His sight was still going, but he felt a little better for being able to see outside. At first he worried, in a distant, theoretical way, that the lights might give too much warning, should he be lucky enough to catch the humans still in the station. But it made little difference. The air pushed in front of the train would warn them soon enough. He raised a panel near the power-control lever and peered at it.

His head was light; he felt very cold. He looked at the circuit breaker and then bent down, jamming himself between the rear of the seat - cracking the blood seal beneath him and starting to bleed again - and the edge of the console. He shoved his face against the edge of the power-control lever, then took his hand away and gripped the collision brake fail-safe. He moved his hand so that it would not slip out, then just lay there.

His one eye was high enough off the console to see the tunnel ahead. The lights were coming faster now. The train rocked gently, lulling him. The roaring was fading from his ears, like the sight dimming, like the station behind slipping away and vanishing, like the seemingly steady, slow-quickening stream of lights flowing by on either side.

He could not estimate how far he had to go. He had started it off; he had done his best. No more - finally - could be asked of him.

He closed his eye, just to rest.

The train rocked him.

‘It’s great,’ Wubslin grinned when Horza, Yalson and Balveda walked onto the control deck. ‘It’s all ready to roll. All systems go!’

‘Well, don’t wet your pants,’ Yalson told him, watching Balveda sit down in a seat, then sitting in another herself. ‘We might have to use the transit tubes to get around.’

Horza pressed a few buttons, watching the readouts on the train’s systems. It all looked as Wubslin had said: ready to go.

‘Where’s that damn drone?’ Horza said to Yalson.

‘Drone? Unaha-Closp?’ Yalson said into her helmet mike.

‘What is it now?’ Unaha-Closp said.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m taking a good look through this antiquated collection of rolling stock. I do believe these trains may actually be older than your ship.’

‘Tell it to get back here,’ Horza said. He looked at Wubslin. ‘Did you check this whole train?’

Yalson ordered the drone back as Wubslin nodded and said, ‘All of it except the reactor car; couldn’t get into bits of it. Which are the door controls?’

Horza looked around for a moment, recalling the layout of the train controls. ‘That lot.’ He pointed at one of the banks of buttons and light panels to one side of Wubslin. The engineer studied them.

Ordered back. Told to return. Like it was a slave, one of the Idirans’ medjel; as though it was a machine. Let them wait a little.

Unaha-Closp had also found the map screens, in the train just down the tunnel. It floated in the air in front of the coloured expanses of back-lit plastic. It used its manipulating fields to work the controls, turning on small sets of lights which indicated the targets on both sides, the major cities and military installations.

All of it dust now, all of their precious humanoid civilisation ground to junk under glaciers or weathered away by wind and spray and rain and frozen in ice - all of it. Only this pathetic maze-tomb left.

So much for their humanity, or whatever they chose to call it, thought Unaha-Closp. Only their machines remained. But would any of the others learn? Would they see this for what it was, this frozen rock-ball? Would they, indeed!

Unaha-Closp left the screens glowing, and floated out of the train, back through the tunnel towards the station itself. The tunnels were bright now, but no warmer, and to Unaha-Closp it seemed as though there was a sort of revealed heartlessness about the harsh yellow-white light which streamed from ceilings and walls; it was operating-theatre light, dissection-table light.

The machine floated through the tunnels, thinking that the cathedral of darkness had become a glazed arena, a crucible.

Xoxarle was on the platform, still trussed against the access ramp girders. Unaha-Closp didn’t like the way the Idiran looked at it when it appeared from the tunnels; it was almost impossible to read the creature’s expression, if he could be said to have one, but there was something about Xoxarle that Unaha-Closp didn’t like. It got the impression the Idiran had just stopped moving, or doing something he didn’t want to be seen doing.

From the tunnel mouth, the drone saw Aviger look up from the pallet where he was sitting, then look away again, without even bothering to wave.

The Changer and the two females were in the train control area with the engineer Wubslin. Unaha-Closp saw them, and went forward to the access ramps and the nearest door. As it got there it paused. Air moved gently; hardly anything, but it was there; it could feel it. Obviously with the power on, some automatic systems were circulating more fresh air from the surface or through atmospheric scrubbing units.

Unaha-Closp went into the train.

‘Unpleasant little machine, that,’ Xoxarle said to Aviger. The old man nodded vaguely. Xoxarle had noticed that the man looked at him less when he was speaking to him. It was as though the sound of his voice reassured the human that he was still tied there, safe and sound, not moving. On the other hand, talking - moving his head to look at the human, making the occasional shrugging motion, laughing a little - gave him excuses to move and so to slip the wires a little further. So he talked; with luck the others would be on the train for a while now, and he might have a chance to escape.

He would lead them a merry dance if he got away into the tunnels, with a gun!

‘Well, they should be open,’ Horza was saying. According to the console in front of him and Wubslin, the doors in the reactor car had never been locked in the first place. ‘Are you sure you were trying to open them properly?’ He was looking at the engineer.

‘Of course,’ Wubslin said, sounding hurt. ‘I know how different types of locks work. I tried to turn the recessed wheel; catches off . . . OK, this arm of mine isn’t perfect, but, well . . . it should have opened.’

‘Probably a malfunction,’ Horza said. He straightened, looking back down the train, as though trying to see through the hundred metres of metal and plastic between him and the reactor car. ‘Hmm. There’s not enough room there for the Mind to hide, is there?’

Wubslin looked up from the panel. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

‘Well, here I am,’ Unaha-Closp said testily, floating through the door to the control deck. ‘What do you want me to do now?’

‘You took your time searching that other train,’ Horza said, looking at the machine.

‘I was being thorough. More thorough than you, unless I misheard what you were saying before I came in. Where might there be enough room for the Mind to hide?’

‘The reactor car,’ Wubslin said. ‘I couldn’t get through some of the doors. Horza says according to the controls they ought to be open.’

‘Shall I go back and have a look, then?’ Unaha-Closp turned to face Horza.

The Changer nodded. ‘If it isn’t asking too much,’ he said levelly.