Consider Phlebas (52 page)

‘OK if I go up to the control deck?’ Wubslin said. Horza looked into the engineer’s broad, open face.

‘Yeah, why not? Don’t try to get it to move just yet, though.’

‘OK,’ Wubslin said, looking happy.

‘Changer?’ said Xoxarle, as Horza walked down the access ramp. ‘What?’

‘These wires: they are too tight. They are cutting into me.’

Horza looked carefully at the wires round the Idiran’s arms. ‘Too bad,’ he said.

‘They cut into my shoulders, my legs and my wrists. If the pressure goes on they will cut through to my blood vessels; I should hate to die in such an inelegant manner. By all means blow my head off, but this slow slicing is undignified. I only tell you because I am starting to believe you do intend to take me back to the fleet.’

Horza went behind the Idiran to look at where the wires crossed over Xoxarle’s wrists. He was telling the truth; the wires had cut into him like fence wire into tree bark. The Changer frowned. ‘I’ve never seen that happen,’ he said to the motionless rear of the Idiran’s head. ‘What are you up to? Your skin’s harder than that.’

‘I am up to nothing, human,’ Xoxarle said wearily, sighing heavily. ‘My body is injured; it tries to rebuild itself. Of necessity it becomes more pliable, less hardy, as it tries to rebuild the damaged parts. Oh, if you don’t believe me, never mind. But don’t forget that I did warn you.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Horza said. ‘If it gets too bad, shout out.’ He stepped out through the girders back onto the station floor, and walked towards the others.

‘I shall have to think about that,’ Xoxarle said quietly. ‘Warriors are not given to “shouting out” because they are in pain.’

‘So,’ Yalson said to the Changer, ‘is Wubslin happy?’

‘Worried he won’t get to drive the train,’ Horza told her. ‘What’s the drone doing?’

‘Taking its time looking through the other train.’

‘Well, we’ll leave it there,’ Horza said. ‘You and I can search the station. Aviger?’ He looked at the old man, who was using a small piece of plastic to prise bits of food from between his teeth.

‘What?’ Aviger said, looking up suspiciously at the Changer. ‘Watch the Idiran. We’re going to take a look around the station.’ Aviger shrugged. ‘All right. I suppose so. Not too many places I can go for the moment.’ He inspected the end of the piece of plastic.

He reached out, took hold of the end of the ramp, and pulled. He moved forward on a wave of pain. He gripped the edge of the train door, and hauled again. He slid and scraped from the ramp and onto the interior floor of the train itself.

When he was fully inside, he rested.

Blood made a steady roar inside his head.

His hand was becoming tired now and sore. It was not the aching, grinding pain from his wounds, but it worried him more. He was afraid that his hand would soon seize up, that it would grow too weak to grip, and he would be unable to haul himself along.

At least now the way was level. He had a carriage and a half to drag himself, but there was no slope. He tried to look back, behind and down to the place he had lain, but could manage only a brief glimpse before he had to let his head fall back. There was a scraped and bloody trail on the ramp, as though a broom laced with purple paint had been dragged through the dust and debris of the metal surface.

There was no point in looking back. His only way was forward; he had only a little while left. In a half hour or less he would be dead. He would have had longer just lying on the ramp, but moving had shortened his life, quickened the sapping forces steadily draining him of strength and vitality.

He hauled himself towards the longitudinal corridor.

His two useless, shattered legs slithered after him, on a thin slick of blood.

‘Changer!’

Horza frowned. He and Yalson were setting out to look over the station. The Idiran called Horza when he was only a few steps away from the pallet where Aviger now sat, looking fed up and pointing his gun in roughly the same direction as Balveda while the Culture agent continued pacing up and down.

‘Yes, Xoxarle?’ Horza said.

‘These wires. They will slice me up soon. I only mention it because you have so studiously avoided destroying me so far; it would be a pity to die accidentally, due to an oversight. Please - go on your way if you cannot be bothered.’

‘You want the wires loosened?’

‘The merest fraction. They have no give in them, you see, and it would be nice to breathe without dissecting myself.’

‘If you try anything this time,’ Horza told the Idiran, coming close to him, gun pointed at his face, ‘I’ll blow both your arms and all three legs off and slide you home on the pallet.’

‘Your threatened cruelty has convinced me, human. You obviously know the shame we attach to prosthetics, even if they are the result of battle wounds. I shall behave. Just loosen the wires a little, like a good ally.’

Horza loosened the wires slightly where they were cutting into Xoxarle’s body. The section leader flexed and made a loud sighing sound with his mouth.

‘Much better, little one. Much better. Now I shall live to face whatever retribution you may imagine is mine.’

‘Depend on it,’ Horza said. ‘If he breathes belligerently,’ he told Aviger, ’shoot his legs off.’

‘Oh yes, sir,’ Aviger said, saluting.

‘Hoping to trip over the Mind, Horza?’ Balveda asked him. She had stopped pacing and stood facing him and Yalson, her hands in her pockets.

‘One never knows, Balveda,’ Horza said.

‘Tomb robber,’ Balveda said through a lazy smile.

Horza turned to Yalson. ‘Tell Wubslin we’re leaving. Ask him to keep an eye on the platform; make sure Aviger doesn’t fall asleep.’

Yalson raised Wubslin on the communicator.

‘You’d better come with us,’ Horza told Balveda. ‘I don’t like leaving you here with all this equipment switched on.’

‘Oh, Horza,’ Balveda smiled, ‘don’t you trust me?’

‘Just walk in front and shut up,’ Horza said in a tired voice, and pointed to indicate the direction he wanted to go in. Balveda shrugged and started walking.

‘Does she have to come?’ Yalson said as she fell into step beside Horza.

‘We could always lock her up,’ Horza said. He looked at Yalson, who shrugged.

‘Oh, what the hell,’ she said.

Unaha-Closp floated through the train. Outside, it could see the repair and maintenance cavern, all its machinery - lathes and forges, welding rigs, articulated arms, spare units, huge hanging cradles, a single suspended gantry like a narrow bridge - glinting in the bright overhead lights.

The train was interesting enough; the old technology provided things to look at and bits and pieces to touch and investigate, but Unaha-Closp was mostly just glad to be by itself for a while. It had found the company of the humans wearing after a few days, and the Changer’s attitude distressed it most of all. The man was a speciesist! Me, just a machine, thought Unaha-Closp, how dare he!

It had felt good when it had been able to react first in the tunnels, perhaps saving some of the others - perhaps even saving that ungrateful Changer - by knocking Xoxarle out. Much as it disliked admitting it, the drone had felt proud when Horza had thanked it. But it hadn’t really altered the man’s view; he would probably forget what had happened, or try to tell himself it was just a momentary aberration by a confused machine: a freak. Only Unaha-Closp knew what it felt, only it knew why it had risked injury to protect the humans. Or it should know, it told itself ruefully. Maybe it shouldn’t have bothered; maybe it should just have let the Idiran shoot them. It just hadn’t seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Mug, Unaha-Closp told itself.

It drifted through the bright, humming spaces of the train, like a detached part of the mechanism itself.

Wubslin scratched his head. He had stopped at the reactor car on his way to the control deck. Some of the reactor carriage doors wouldn’t open. They had to be on some sort of security lock, probably controlled from the bridge, or flight deck, or footplate, or whatever they called the bit at the nose the train was controlled from. He looked out of a window, remembering what Horza had ordered.

Aviger sat on the pallet, his gun pointing at the Idiran, who stood stock still against the girders. Wubslin looked away, tested the door through to the reactor area again, then shook his head.

The hand, the arm, was weakening. Above him, rows of seats faced blank screens. He pulled himself along by the stems of the chairs; he was almost at the corridor which led through to the front car.

He wasn’t sure how he would get through the corridor. What was there to hold onto? No point in worrying about it now. He grabbed at another chair stem, hauled at it.

From the terrace which looked over the repair area, they could see the front train, the one the drone was in. Poised over the sunken floor of the maintenance area, the glittering length of the train, nestling in the scooped half-tunnel which ran along the far wall, looked like a long thin spaceship, and the dark rock around it like starless space.

Yalson watched the Culture agent’s back, frowning. ‘She’s too damn docile, Horza,’ she said, just loud enough for the man to hear.

‘That’s fine by me,’ Horza said. ‘The more docile the better.’

Yalson shook her head slightly, not taking her eyes off the woman in front. ‘No, she’s stringing us along. She hasn’t cared up till now; she’s known she can afford to let things happen. She’s got another card she can play and she’s just relaxing until she has to use it.’

‘You’re imagining things,’ Horza told her. ‘Your hormones are getting the better of you, developing suspicions and second sight.’

She looked at him, transferring the frown from Balveda to the Changer. Her eyes narrowed. ‘What?’

Horza held up his free hand. ‘A joke.’ He smiled.

Yalson looked unconvinced. ‘She’s up to something. I can tell,’ she said. She nodded to herself. ‘I can feel it.’

Quayanorl dragged himself through the connecting corridor. He pushed open the door to the carriage, crawled slowly across the floor. He was starting to forget why he was doing this. He knew he had to press on, go forward, keep crawling, but he could no longer recall exactly what it was all for. The train was a torture maze, designed to pain him.

I am dragging myself to my death. Somehow even when I get to the end, where I can crawl no more, I keep going. I remember thinking that earlier, but what was I thinking of? Do I die when I get to the train’s control area, and continue my journey on the other side, in death? Is that what I was thinking of?

I am like a tiny child, crawling over the floor . . . . Come to me, little fellow, says the train.

We were looking for something, but I can’t recall . . . exactly . . . what . . . it . . .

They looked through the great cavern, searching, then climbed steps to the gallery giving access to the station’s accommodation and storage sections.

Balveda stood at the edge of the broad terrace which ran round the cavern, midway between floor and roof. Yalson watched the Culture agent while Horza opened the doors to the accommodation section. Balveda looked out over the broad cavern, slender hands resting on the guard rail. The topmost rail was level with Balveda’s shoulders; waist level on the people who had built the Command System.

Near where Balveda stood, a long gantry led out over the cavern, suspended on wires from the roof and leading to the terrace on the other side, where a narrow, brightly lit tunnel led into the rock. Balveda looked down the length of the narrow gantry at the distant tunnel mouth.

Yalson wondered if the Culture woman was thinking of making a run for it, but knew she wasn’t, and wondered then whether perhaps she only wanted Balveda to try, so she could shoot her, just to be rid of her.

Balveda looked away from the narrow gantry, and Horza swung open the doors to the accommodation section.

Xoxarle flexed his shoulders. The wires moved a little, sliding and bunching.

The human they had left to guard him looked tired, perhaps even sleepy, but Xoxarle couldn’t believe the others would stay away for very long. He couldn’t afford to do too much now, in case the Changer came back and noticed how the wires had moved. Anyway, though it was far from being the most interesting way things could fall, there was apparently a good chance that the humans would be unable to find the supposedly sentient computing device they were all looking for. In that case perhaps the best course of action would be no action. He would let the little ones take him back to their ship. Probably the one called Horza intended to ransom him; this had struck Xoxarle as the most likely explanation for being kept alive.

The fleet might pay for the return of a warrior, though Xoxarle’s family were officially barred from doing so, and anyway were not rich. He could not decide whether he wanted to live, and perhaps redeem the shame of being caught and paid for by future exploits, or to do all he could either to escape or to die. Action appealed to him most; it was the warriors’ creed. When in doubt, do.

The old human got up from the pallet and walked around. He came close enough to Xoxarle to be able to inspect the wires, but gave them only a perfunctory glance. Xoxarle looked at the laser gun the human carried. His great hands, tied together behind his back, opened and closed slowly, without him thinking about it.

Wubslin came to the control deck in the nose of the train. He took his helmet off and put it on the console. He made sure it wasn’t touching any controls, just covering a few small unlit panels. He stood in the middle of the deck, looking round with wide, fascinated eyes.

The train hummed under his feet. Dials and meters, screens and panels indicated the train’s readiness. He cast his eyes over the controls, set in front of two huge seats which faced over the front console towards the armoured glass which formed part of the train’s steeply sloping nose. The tunnel in front was dark, only a few small lights burning on its side walls.

Fifty metres in front, a complex assembly of points led the tracks into two tunnels. One route went dead ahead, where Wubslin could see the rear of the train in front; the other tunnel curved, avoiding the repair and maintenance cavern and giving a through route to the next station.