Consider Phlebas (37 page)

But what else could be done? The war was accelerating throughout an immense volume; there were many other urgent missions for the few Special Circumstances agents, and anyway Balveda was the only really good one within range. There was one young man they’d sent in with her, but he was only promising, not experienced. Fal had known all along that if it came to it, Balveda would risk her own life, not the man’s, if infiltrating the mercenaries was the only chance of getting to the Changer and through him to the Mind. It was brave but, Fal suspected, it was mistaken. The Changer knew Balveda; he might well recognise her, no matter how much she’d altered her own appearance (and there hadn’t been time for Balveda to undergo radical physical change). If the Changer realised who she was (and Fal suspected he had), Balveda had far less chance of completing her mission than even the most callow and nervous but unsuspected rookie agent. Forgive me, lady, Fal thought to herself. I’d have done better by you if I could . . .

She had tried to hate the Changer all that day, tried to imagine him and hate him because he had probably killed Balveda, but apart from the fact that she found it hard to imagine somebody when she had no idea what he might look like (the ship’s captain, Kraiklyn?), for some reason the hatred would not materialise. The Changer did not seem real.

She liked the sound of Balveda; she was brave and daring, and Fal hoped against hope that Balveda would live, that somehow she would survive it all and that one day, maybe, they would meet, perhaps after the war . . .

But that didn’t seem real, either.

She couldn’t believe in it; she couldn’t imagine it the way she had imagined, say, Balveda finding the Changer. She had seen that in her mind, and had willed it to happen . . . In her version, of course, it was Balveda who won, not the Changer. But she couldn’t imagine meeting Balveda, and somehow that was frightening, as though she had started to believe in her own prescience so much that the inability to imagine something clearly enough meant that it would never happen. Either way, it was depressing.

What chance had the agent of living through the war? Not a good one at the moment, Fal knew that, but even supposing Balveda did somehow save herself this time, what were the chances she’d wind up dead anyway, later on? The longer the war went on, the more likely it was. Fal felt, and the general concensus of opinion among the more clued-up Minds was, that the war would last decades rather than years.

Plus or minus a few months, of course. Fal frowned and bit her lip. She couldn’t see them getting the Mind; the Changer was winning, and she had all but run out of ideas. All she had thought of recently was a way - perhaps, just maybe - of putting Gobuchul off: probably not a way of stopping him completely, but possibly a way of making his job harder. But she wasn’t optimistic, even if Contact’s War Command agreed to such a dangerous, equivocal and potentially expensive plan . . .

‘Fal?’ Jase said. She realised she was looking at the island without seeing it. The glass was growing warm in her hand, and Jase and the boy were both looking at her.

‘What?’ she said, and drank.

‘I was asking what you thought about the war,’ the boy said. He was frowning, looking at her with narrowed eyes, the sunlight sharp on his face. She looked at his broad, open face and wondered how old he was. Older than her? Younger? Did he feel like she did - wanting to be older, yearning to be treated as responsible?

‘I don’t understand. What do you mean? Think about it in what way?’

‘Well,’ the boy said, ‘who’s going to win?’ He looked annoyed. She suspected it had been very obvious that she hadn’t been listening. She looked at Jase, but the old machine didn’t say anything, and with no aura field there was no way of telling what it was thinking or how it was feeling. Was it amused? Worried? She drank, gulping down the last of the cool drink.

‘We are, of course,’ she said quickly, glancing from the boy to Jase. The boy shook his head.

‘I’m not so sure,’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘I’m not sure we have the will.’

‘The will?’ Fal said.

‘Yes. The desire to fight. I think the Idirans are natural fighters. We aren’t. I mean, look at us . . . ‘ He smiled, as though he was much older and thought himself much wiser than she, and he turned his head and waved his hand lazily towards the island, where the boats lay tilted against the sand.

Fifty or sixty metres away Fal saw what looked like a man and woman coupling, in the shallows under a small cliff; they were bobbing up and down, the woman’s dark hands clasped round the man’s lighter neck. Was that what the boy was being so urbane about?

Good grief, the fascination of sex.

No doubt it was great fun, but then how could people take it so seriously? Sometimes she felt a sneaking envy for the Idirans; they got over it; after a while it no longer mattered. They were dual hermaphrodites, each half of the couple impregnating the other, and each usually bearing twins. After one or occasionally two pregnancies - and weanings - they changed from their fertile breeder stage to become warriors. Opinion was divided on whether they increased in intelligence or just underwent a personality alteration. Certainly they became more cunning but less open-minded, more logical but less imaginative, more ruthless, less compassionate. They grew by another metre; their weight almost doubled; their keratinous covering became thicker and harder; their muscles increased in bulk and density; and their internal organs altered to accommodate these power-increasing changes. At the same time, their bodies absorbed their reproductive organs, and they became sexless. All very linear, symmetrical and tidy, compared to the Culture’s pick-your-own approach.

Yes, she could see why this gangly idiot sitting in front of her with his nervously superior smile would find the Idirans impressive. Young fool.

‘This is - ‘ Fal was annoyed, enough to be a little stuck for words. ‘This is just us now. We haven’t evolved . . . we’ve changed a lot, changed ourselves a lot, but we haven’t evolved at all since we were running around killing ourselves. I mean each other.’ She sucked her breath in, annoyed with herself now. The boy was smiling tolerantly at her. She felt herself blushing. ‘We are still animals,’ she insisted. ‘We’re natural fighters just as much as the Idirans.’

‘Then how come they’re winning?’ the boy smirked.

‘They had a head start. We didn’t begin properly preparing for war until the last moment. Warfare has become a way of life for them; we’re not all that good at it yet because it’s been hundreds of generations since we had to do it. Don’t worry,’ she told him, looking down at her empty glass and lowering her voice slightly, ‘we’re learning quite fast enough.’

‘Well, you wait and see,’ the boy said, nodding at her. ‘I think we’ll pull out of the war and let the Idirans get on with their expansion - or whatever you want to call it. The war’s been sort of exciting, and it’s made a change, but it’s been nearly four years now, and . . . ‘ He waved one hand again. ‘ . . . we haven’t even won anything much yet.’ He laughed. ‘All we keep doing is running away!’

Fal stood up quickly, turning away in case she started to cry.

‘Oh shit,’ the boy was saying to Jase. ‘I suppose I’ve gone and said something now . . . Did she have a friend or a relation . . . ?’

She walked down the deck, limping a little as the newly healed leg started to hurt again with a distant, nagging ache.

‘Don’t worry,’ Jase was saying to the boy. ‘Leave her alone and she’ll be all right . . . ‘

She put her glass inside one of the dark, empty cabins of the yacht, then kept going, heading for the forward superstructure.

She climbed up a ladder to the wheelhouse, then up another ladder to its roof, and sat there with her legs crossed (the recently broken leg hurt, but she ignored it) and looked out to sea.

Far away, almost on the haze-limit, a ridge of whiteness shimmered in the near-still air. Fal ‘Ngeestra let out a long, sad breath and wondered if the white shapes - probably only visible because they were high up, in clearer air - were snowy mountain tops. Maybe they were just clouds. She couldn’t remember the geography of the place well enough to work it out.

She sat there, thinking of those peaks. She remembered when once, high in the foothills where a small mountain stream levelled out onto a marshy plateau for a kilometre or so, arcing and swerving and bowing over the sodden, reed-covered land like an athlete stretching and flexing between games, she had found something which had made that winter day’s walk memorable.

Ice had been forming in clear, brittle sheets at the side of the flowing stream. She had spent some time happily marching through the shallows of the water, crunching the thin ice with her boots and watching it drift downstream. She wasn’t climbing that day, just walking; she had waterproofs on and carried little gear. Somehow the fact she wasn’t doing anything dangerous or physically demanding had made her feel like a young child again.

She came to a place where the stream flowed over a terrace of rock, from one level of moor down to another, and there a small pool had carved itself into the rock just beneath the rapids. The water fell less than a metre, and the stream was narrow enough to jump: but she remembered that stream and that pool because there in the circling water, caught beneath the splashing rapids, floated a frozen circle of foam.

The water was naturally soft and peaty, and a yellow-white foam sometimes formed in the mountain streams of that area, blown by the winds and caught in the reeds, but she had never seen it collected into a circle like that and frozen. She laughed when she saw it. She waded in and carefully picked it up. It was only a little greater in diameter than the distance between her outstretched thumb and little finger and a few centimetres thick, not as fragile as she had at first feared.

The frothy bubbles had frozen in the cold air and almost freezing water, making what looked like a tiny model of a galaxy: a fairly common spiral galaxy, like this one, like hers. She held the light confection of air and water and suspended chemicals and turned it over in her hands, sniffing it, sticking her tongue out and licking it, looking at the dim winter sun through it, flicking her finger to see if it would ring.

She watched her little rime galaxy start to melt, very slowly, and saw her own breath blow across it, a brief image of her warmth in the air.

Finally she put it back where she had found it, slowly revolving in the pool of water at the base of the small rapids.

The galaxy image had occurred to her then, and she thought at the time about the similarity of the forces which shaped both the little and the vast. She had thought, And which is really the most important? but then felt embarrassed to have thought such a thing.

Every now and again, though, she went back to that thought, and knew that each was exactly as important as the other. Then later she would go back to her second thoughts on the matter and feel embarrassed again.

Fal ‘Ngeestra took a deep breath and felt a little better. She smiled and raised her head, closing her eyes for a moment and watching the red sun-haze behind her eyelids. Then she ran a hand through her curly blonde hair and wondered again if the distant, wavering, unsure shapes over the shimmering water were clouds, or mountains.

Schar’s World

Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs, or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set.

That is the view a ship has in hyperspace as it flies like a microscopic insect, free between the energy grid and real space.

The small, sharp lights on the undersurface of the cloud cover are stars; the waves on the sea are the irregularities of the Grid on which a ship travelling in hyperspace finds traction with its engine fields, while that sparkle is its source of energy. The Grid and the plain of real space are curved, rather like the ocean and the cloud would be round a planet, but less so. Black holes show as thin and twisting waterspouts from clouds to sea; supernovae as long lightning flashes in the overcast. Rocks, moons, planets, Orbitals, even Rings and Spheres, hardly show at all . . .

The two ‘Killer’ class Rapid Offensive Units Trade Surplus and Revisionist raced through the hyperspace, flashing underneath the web of real space like slim and glittering fish in a deep, still pond. They wove past systems and stars, keeping deep beneath the empty spaces where they were least likely to be traced.

Their engines were each a focus of energy almost beyond imagining, packing sufficient power within their two hundred metres to equal perhaps one per cent of the energy produced by a small sun, flinging the two vessels across the four-dimensional void at an equivalent speed in real space of rather less than ten light-years per hour. At the time, this was considered particularly fast.

They sensed the Glittercliff and Sullen Gulf ahead. They twisted their headlong rush to angle them deep inside the war zone, aiming themselves at the system which contained Schar’s World.

Far in the distance, they could see the group of black holes which had created the Gulf. Those flutes of plunging energy had passed through the area millennia before, clearing a space of consumed stars behind them, creating an artificial galactic arm as they headed in a long spiral closer towards the centre of the slowly spinning island of stars and nebulae that was the galaxy.

The group of black holes was commonly known as the Forest, so closely were they grouped, and the two speeding Culture craft had instructions to try to force their way between those twisted, lethal trunks, if they were seen and pursued. The Culture’s field management was considered superior to the Idirans’, so it was thought they would have a better chance of getting through, and any chasing craft might even break off rather than risk tangling with the Forest. It was a terrible risk even to contemplate, but the two ROUs were precious; the Culture had not yet built many, and everything possible had to be done to make sure that the craft got back safely or, if the worst came to the worst, were destroyed utterly.

They encountered no hostile ships. They flashed across the inward face of the Quiet Barrier in seconds and delivered their prescribed loads in two short bursts, then twisted once and tore away at maximum speed, out through the thinning stars and past the Glitter-cliff, into the empty skies of the Sullen Gulf.

They registered hostile craft stationed near the Schar’s World system starting off in pursuit, but they had been seen too late, and they quickly outdistanced the probing beams of track lasers. They set course for the far side of the Gulf, their strange mission completed. The Minds on board, and the small crew of humans each vessel carried (who were there more because they wanted to be than for their utility), hadn’t been told why they were blasting empty space with expensive warheads, shooting off CREWSs at each other’s target drones, dumping clouds of CAM and ordinary gas and releasing odd little unpowered signalling ships which were little more than unmanned shuttles packed with broadcasting equipment. The entire effect of this operation would be to produce a few spectacular flashes and flares and a scattering of radiation shells and wide-band signals before the Idirans cleared up the debris and blasted or captured the signal craft.

They had been asked to risk their lives on some damn-fool panic mission which seemed designed to convince nobody in particular that there had been a space battle in the middle of nowhere when there hadn’t. And they had done it!

What was the Culture coming to? The Idirans seemed to relish suicide missions. You could easily form the impression that they considered being asked to carry out any other sort something of an insult. But the Culture? Where even in the war forces ‘discipline’ was regarded as a taboo word, where people always wanted to know why this and why that?

Things had come to a pretty pass indeed.

The two ships raced across the Gulf, arguing. On board, heated discussions were taking place between members of their crews.

It took twenty-one days for the Clear Air Turbulence to make the journey from Vavatch to Schar’s World.

Wubslin had spent the time carrying out what repairs he could to the craft, but what the ship needed was another thorough overhaul. While structurally it was still sound, and life support functioned nearly normally, it had suffered a general degradation of its systems, though no catastrophic failures. The warp units ran a little more raggedly than before, the fusion motors were not up to sustained use in an atmosphere - they would get them down to and up from Schar’s World, but not provide much more in-airflying time - and the vessel’s sensors had been reduced in numbers and efficiency to a level not far above operational minimum.

They had still escaped lightly, Horza thought.

With the CAT under his control, Horza was able to switch off the computer’s identity circuits. He didn’t have to fool the Free Company, either; so, as the days passed, he Changed slowly to resemble his old self a little more. That was for Yalson and the other members of the Free Company. He was really striking two thirds of a compromise between Kraiklyn and the self he had been on the CAT before it had reached Vavatch. There was another third in there which he let grow and show itself on his face for nobody on board, but for a red-haired Changer girl called Kierachell. He hoped she would recognise that part of his appearance when they met again, on Schar’s World.

‘Why did you think we’d be angry?’ Yalson asked him in the CAT’s hangar one day. They had set up a target screen at one end and put their lasers onto practice. The screen’s built-in projector flashed images for them to shoot at. Horza looked at the woman.

‘He was your leader.’

Yalson laughed. ‘He was a manager; how many of them are liked by their staff? This is a business, Horza, and not even a successful one. Kraiklyn managed to get most of us retired prematurely. Shit! The only person you needed to fool was the ship.’

‘There was that,’ Horza said, aiming at a human figure darting across the distant screen. The laser spot was invisible, but the screen sensed it and flashed white light where it hit. The human figure, hit in the leg, stumbled but did not fall: half marks. ‘I did need to fool the ship. But I didn’t want to risk somebody being loyal to Kraiklyn.’

It was Yalson’s turn, but she was looking at Horza, not the screen.

The ship’s fidelities had been bypassed, and now all that was needed to command it was a numeric code, which only Horza knew, and the small ring he wore, which had been Kraiklyn’s. He had promised that when they got to Schar’s World, if there was no other way off the planet, he would set the CAT’s computer to free itself of all fidelity limitations after a given time, so that if he didn’t come back out of the tunnels of the Command System the Free Company would not be stranded. ‘You would have told us,’ Yalson said, ‘wouldn’t you, Horza? I mean you would have let us know eventually.’

Horza knew she meant, would he have told her? He put his gun down and looked her in the eyes. ‘Once I was sure,’ he said, ’sure about the people, sure about the ship.’

It was the honest answer, but he wasn’t certain it was the best one. He wanted Yalson, wanted not just her warmth in the ship’s red night, but her trust, her care. But she was still distant.

Balveda lived; perhaps she wouldn’t still be alive if Horza hadn’t wanted Yalson’s regard. He knew that, and it was a bitter thought, making him feel cheap and cruel. Even knowing that it was a definite thing would have been better than being uncertain. He couldn’t say for sure whether the cold logic of this game dictated that the Culture woman should die or be left alive, or even if, the former being comfortably obvious, he could have killed her in cold blood. He had thought it through and still he didn’t know. He only hoped that neither woman had guessed that any of this had gone through his mind.

Kierachell was another worry. It was absurd, he knew, to be concerned about his own affairs at such a time, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the Changer woman; the closer they came to Schar’s World, the more he remembered of her, the more real his memories became. He tried not to build it up too much, tried to recall the boredom of the Changers’ lonely outpost on the planet and the restlessness he had felt there even with Kierachell’s company, but he dreamt about her slow smile and recalled her low voice in all its fluid grace with some of the heartache of a youth’s first love. Occasionally he thought Yalson might sense that, too, and something inside him seemed to shrink with shame.

Yalson shrugged, hoisted her gun to her shoulder and fired at a four-legged shadow on the practice screen. It stopped in its tracks and dropped, seeming to dissolve into the line of shady ground at the bottom of the screen.

Horza gave talks.

It made him feel like some visiting lecturer at a college, but that’s what he did. He felt he had to explain to the others why he was doing what he was, why the Changers supported the Idirans, why he believed in what they were fighting for. He called them briefings, and ostensibly they were about Schar’s World and the Command System, its history, geography and so on, but he always (quite intentionally) ended up talking about the war in general, or about totally different aspects of it unrelated to the planet they were approaching.

The briefing cover gave him a good excuse to keep Balveda confined to her cabin while he paced up and down on the deck of the mess talking to the members of the Free Company; he didn’t want his talks turning into a debate.

Perosteck Balveda had been no trouble. Her suit and a few items of harmless-looking jewellery and other bits and pieces had been jettisoned from a vactube. She had been scanned with every item the CAT’s limited sick-bay equipment could provide and had come up clean, and she seemed quite happy to be a well-behaved prisoner, confined to the ship as they all were and, apart from at night, locked in her cabin only occasionally. Horza didn’t let her near the bridge, just in case, but Balveda showed no signs of trying to get to know the ship especially well - the way he had done when he came on board. She didn’t even try to argue any of the mercenaries round to her way of thinking about the war and the Culture.

Horza wondered how secure she felt. Balveda was pleasant and seemed unworried; but he looked at her sometimes and thought he saw, briefly, a glimpse of inner tension, even despair. It relieved him in one way, but in another it gave him that same bad, cruel feeling he experienced when he thought about exactly why the Culture agent was still alive. Sometimes he was simply afraid of getting to Schar’s World, but increasingly as the voyage dragged on he came to relish the prospect of some action and an end to thought.

He called Balveda to his cabin one day, after they had all eaten in the mess. The woman came in and sat down on the same small seat he had sat in when Kraiklyn had summoned him just after he had joined the ship.

Balveda’s face was calm. She sat elegantly in the small seat, her long frame at once relaxed and poised. Her deep dark eyes gazed out at Horza from the thin, smoothly shaped head, and her red hair - now turning black - shone in the lights of the cabin.

‘Captain Horza?’ she smiled, crossing her long-fingered hands on her lap. She wore a long blue gown, the plainest thing she had been able to find on the ship: something that had once belonged to the woman Gow.

‘Hello, Balveda,’ Horza said. He sat back on the bed. He wore a loose gown. For the first couple of days he had stayed in his suit, but while it stayed commendably comfortable, it was bulky and awkward in the confines of the Clear Air Turbulence, so he had discarded it for the voyage.

He was about to offer Balveda something to drink, but somehow, because that was what Kraiklyn had done with him, it didn’t seem the right thing to do.

‘What was it,’ Horza?’ Balveda said.

‘I just wanted to . . . see how you were,’ he said. He had tried to rehearse what he would say; assure her she was in no danger, that he liked her and that he was sure that this time the worst that would happen to her really would be internment somewhere, and maybe a swap, but the words would not come.

‘I’m fine,’ she said, smoothing her hand over her hair, her eyes glancing around the cabin briefly. ‘I’m trying to be a model captive so you won’t have an excuse for ditching me.’ She smiled, but again he thought he sensed an edge to the gesture. Yet he was relieved.

‘No,’ he laughed, letting his head rock back on his shoulders with the laugh. ‘I’ve no intention of doing that. You’re safe.’

‘Until we get to Schar’s World?’ she said calmly.

‘After that, too,’ he said.

Balveda blinked slowly, looking down. ‘Hmm, good.’ She looked into his eyes.

He shrugged. ‘I’m sure you’d do the same for me.’

‘I think I . . . probably would,’ she said, and he couldn’t tell whether she was lying or not. ‘I just think it’s a pity we’re on different sides.’

‘It’s a pity we’re all on different sides, Balveda.’

‘Well,’ she said, clasping her hands on her lap again, ‘there is a theory that the side we each think we’re on is the one that will triumph eventually anyway.’