Consider Phlebas (54 page)

‘No, no,’ Unaha-Closp said airily, backing off through the door it had entered by, ‘I’m starting to enjoy being ordered about. Leave it to me.’ It floated away, back through the front carriage, towards the reactor car.

Balveda looked through the armoured glass, at the rear of the train in front, the one the drone had been looking through.

‘If the Mind was hiding in the reactor car, wouldn’t it show up on your mass sensor, or would it be confused with the trace from the pile?’ She turned her head slowly to look at the Changer.

‘Who knows?’ Horza said. ‘I’m not an expert on the workings of the suit, especially now it’s damaged.’

‘You’re getting very trusting, Horza,’ the Culture agent said, smiling faintly, ‘letting the drone do your hunting for you.’

‘Just letting it do some scouting, Balveda,’ Horza said, turning away and working at some more of the controls. He watched screens and dials and meters, changing displays and readout functions, trying to tell what was going on, if anything, in the reactor car. It all looked normal, as far as he could tell, though he knew less about the reactor systems than about most of the train’s other components from his time as a sentinel.

‘OK,’ Yalson said, turning her chair to one side, putting her feet upon the edge of one console and taking her helmet off. ‘So what do we do if there’s no Mind there, in the reactor car? Do we all start touring round in this thing, take the transit tube, or what?’

‘I don’t know that taking a mainline train is a good idea,’ Horza said, glancing at Wubslin. ‘I considered leaving everybody else here and taking a transit tube by myself on a circular journey right round the System, trying to spot the Mind on the suit mass sensor. It wouldn’t take too long, even doing it twice to cover both sets of tracks between stations. The transit tubes have no reactors, so it wouldn’t get any false echoes to interfere with the sensor’s readings.’

Wubslin, sitting in the seat which faced the train’s main controls, looked downcast.

‘Why not send the rest of us back to the ship, then?’ Balveda said. Horza looked at her. ‘Balveda, you are not here to make suggestions.’

‘Just trying to be helpful.’ The Culture agent shrugged.

‘What if you still can’t find anything?’ Yalson asked.

‘We go back to the ship,’ Horza said, shaking his head. ‘That’s about all we can do. Wubslin can check the suit mass sensor on board and, depending on what we find is wrong with it, we might come back down or we might not. Now the power’s on none of that should take very long or involve any hard slog.’

‘Pity,’ Wubslin said, fingering the controls. ‘We can’t even use this train to get back to station four, because of that train in station six blocking the way.’

‘It probably would still move,’ Horza told the engineer. ‘We’ll have to do some shunting whichever way we go, if we use the mainline trains.’

‘Oh, well, then,’ Wubslin said, a little dreamily, and looked over the controls again. He pointed at one of them. ‘Is that the speed control?’

Horza laughed, crossing his arms and grinning at the man, ‘Yes. We’ll see if we can arrange a little journey.’ He leaned over and pointed out a couple of other controls, showing Wubslin how the train was readied for running. They pointed and nodded and talked.

Yalson stirred restlessly in her seat. Finally she looked over at Balveda. The Culture woman was looking at Horza and Wubslin with a smile; she turned her head to Yalson, sensing her gaze, and smiled more widely, moving her head fractionally to indicate the two men and raising her eyebrows. Yalson, reluctantly, grinned back, and shifted the weight of her gun slightly.

The lights came quickly now. They streamed by, creating a flickering, strobing pattern of light in the dint cabin. He knew; he had opened his eye and had seen.

It had taken all his strength just to lift that eyelid. He had drifted off to sleep for a while. He was not sure for how long, he only knew he had been dozing. The pain was not so bad now. He had been still for some time, just lying here with his broken body slanted out of the strange, alien chair, his head on the control console, his hand wedged into the small flap by the power control, fingers jammed under the fail-safe lever inside.

It was restful; he could not have expressed how pleasant it all was after that awful crawl through both the train and the tunnel of his own pain.

The train’s motion had altered. It still rocked him, but a little faster now, and with a new rhythm added as well, a more rapid vibration which was like a heart beating fast. He thought he could hear it, too, now. The noise of the wind, blowing through these deep-buried holes far under the blizzard-swept wastes above. Or maybe he imagined it. He found it hard to tell.

He felt like a small child again, on a journey with his year fellows and their old Querlmentor, rocked to sleep, slipping in and out of a dozing, happy sleep.

He kept thinking: I have done all I could. Perhaps not enough, but it was all I had in my power to do. It was comforting.

Like the ebbing pain, it eased him; like the rocking of the train, it soothed him.

He closed his eye again. There was comfort in the darkness, too. He had no idea how far along he was, and was starting to think it did not matter. Things were beginning to drift away from him again; he was just beginning to forget why he was doing all this. But that didn’t matter, either. It was done; so long as he didn’t move, nothing mattered. Nothing.

Nothing at all.

The doors were jammed, all right; same as the other train. The drone became exasperated and slammed against one the reactor chamber doors with a force field, knocking itself back through the air with the reaction.

The door wasn’t even dented.

Oh-oh.

Back to the crawlways and cable-runs. Unaha-Closp turned and headed down a short corridor, then down a hole in the floor, heading for an inspection panel under the floor of the lower deck.

Of course I end up doing all the work. I might have known. Basically what I’m doing for that bastard is hunting down another machine. I ought to have my circuits tested. I’ve a good mind not to tell him even if I do find the Mind somewhere. That would teach him.

It threw back the inspection hatch and lowered itself into the dim, narrow space under the floor. The hatch hissed shut after it, blocking out the light. It thought about turning back and opening the hatch again, but knew it would just close automatically once more, and that it would lose its temper and damage the thing, and that was all a bit pointless and petty, so it didn’t; that sort of behaviour was for humans.

It started off along the crawlway, heading towards the rear of the train, underneath where the reactor ought to be.

The Idiran was talking. Aviger could hear it, but he wasn’t listening. He could see the monster out of the corner of his eye, too, but he wasn’t really looking at it. He was gazing absently at his gun, humming tunelessly and thinking about what he would do if - somehow - he could get hold of the Mind himself. Suppose the others were killed, and he was left with the device? He knew the Idirans would probably pay well for the Mind. So would the Culture; they had money, even if they weren’t supposed to use it in their own civilisation.

Just dreams, but anything could happen out of this lot. You never knew how the dust might fall. He would buy some land: an island on a nice safe planet somewhere. He’d have some retro-ageing done and raise some sort of expensive racing animals, and he’d get to know the better-off people through his connections. Or he’d get somebody else to do all the hard work; with money you could do that. You could do anything.

The Idiran went on talking.

His hand was almost free. That was all he could get free for now, but maybe he could twist his arm out later; it was getting easier all the time. The humans had been on the train for a while; how much longer would they stay? The small machine hadn’t been on for so long. He had only just seen it in time, appearing from the tunnel mouth; he knew its sight was better than his own, and for a moment he had been afraid it might have seen him moving the arm he was trying to get free, the one on the far side from the old human. But the machine had disappeared into the train, and nothing had happened. He kept looking over at the old man, checking. The human seemed lost in a day-dream. Xoxarle kept talking, telling the empty air about old Idiran victories.

His hand was almost out.

A little dust came off a girder above him, about a metre over his head, and floated down through the near still air, falling almost but not quite straight down, gradually drifting away from him. He looked at the old man again, and strained at the wires over his hand. Come free, damn you!

Unaha-Closp had to hammer a corner from a right angle to a curve to get into the small passage it wanted to use. It wasn’t even a crawlway; it was a cable conduit, but it led into the reactor compartment. It checked its senses; same amount of radiation here as in the other train.

It scraped through the small gap it had created in the cable-run, deeper into the metal and plastic guts of the silent carriage.

I can hear something. Something’s coming, underneath me . . .

The lights were a continuous line, flashing past the train too quickly for most eyes to have distinguished them individually. The lights ahead, down the track, appeared round curves or at the far end of straights, swelled and joined and tore past the windows, like shooting stars in the darkness.

The train had taken a long time to reach its maximum speed, fought for long minutes to overcome the inertia of its thousands of tonnes of mass. Now it had done so, and was pushing itself and the column of air in front of it as fast as it ever would, hurtling down the long tunnel with a roaring, tearing noise greater than any train had ever made in those dark passages, its damaged carriages breaking the air or scraping the blast-door edges to decrease its speed a little but increase the noise of its passage a great deal.

The scream of the train’s whirling motors and wheels, of its ruffled metal body tearing through the air and of that same air swirling through the open spaces of the punctured carriages, rang from the ceiling and the walls, the consoles and the floor and the slope of armoured glass.

Quayanorl’s eye was closed. Inside his ears, membranes pulsed to the noise outside, but no message was transmitted to his brain. His head bobbed up and down on the vibrating console, as though still alive. His hand shook on the collision brake override, as if the warrior was nervous, or afraid.

Wedged there, glued, soldered by his own blood, he was like a strange, damaged part of the train.

The blood was dried; outside Quayanorl’s body, as within, it had stopped flowing.

‘How goes it, Unaha-Closp?’ Yalson’s voice said.

‘I’m under the reactor and I’m busy. I’ll let you know if I find anything. Thank you.’ It switched its communicator off and looked at the black-sheathed entrails in front of it: wires and cables disappearing into a cable-run. More than there had been in the front train. Should it cut its way in, or try another route?

Decisions, decisions.

His hand was out. He paused. The old man was still sitting on the pallet, fiddling with his gun.

Xoxarle allowed himself a small sigh of relief, and flexed his hand, letting the fingers stretch then fist. A few motes of dust moved slowly past his cheek. He stopped flexing his hand.

He watched the dust move.

A breath, something less than a breeze, tickled at his arms and legs. Most odd, he thought.

‘All I’m saying,’ Yalson told Horza, shifting her feet on the console a little, ‘is that I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come down here yourself. Anything could happen.’

‘I’ll take a communicator; I’ll check in,’ Horza said. He stood with his arms crossed, his backside resting on the edge of a control panel; the same one Wubslin’s helmet lay on. The engineer was familiarising himself with the controls of the train. They were pretty simple really.

‘It’s basic, Horza,’ Yalson told him; ‘you never go alone. What stuff did they teach you at this goddamned Academy?’

‘If I’m allowed to say anything,’ Balveda put in, clasping her hands in front of her and looking at the Changer, ‘I would just like to say I think Yalson’s right.’

Horza stared at the Culture woman with a look of unhappy amazement. ‘No, you are not allowed to say anything,’ he told her. ‘Whose side do you think you’re on, Perosteck?’

‘Oh, Horza,’ Balveda grinned, crossing her arms, ‘I almost feel like one of the team after all this time.’

About half a metre away from the gently rocking, slowly cooling head of Subordinate-Captain Quayanorl Gidborux Stoghrle III, a small light began to flash very rapidly on the console. At the same time, the air in the control deck was pierced by a high-pitched ululating whine which filled the deck and the whole front carriage and was relayed to several other control centres throughout the speeding train. Quayanorl, his firmly wedged body tugged to one side by the force of the train roaring round a long curve, could have heard that noise, just, if he had been alive. Very few humans could have heard it.

Unaha-Closp thought the better of cutting off all communication with the outside world, and reopened its communicator channels. Nobody wanted to speak to it, however. It started to cut the cables leading into the conduit, snipping them one by one with a knife-edged force field. No point in worrying about damaging the thing after all that had happened to the train in station six, it told itself. If it hit anything vital to the normal running of the train, it was sure Horza would yell out soon enough. It could repair the cables without too much trouble anyway.

A draught?

Xoxarle thought he must be imagining it, then that it was the result of some air-circulation unit recently switched on. Perhaps the heat from the lights and the station’s systems, once it was powered up, required extra ventilation.

But it grew. Slowly, almost too slowly to discern, the faint, steady current increased in strength. Xoxarle racked his brains; what could it be? Not a train; surely not a train.

He listened carefully, but could hear nothing. He looked over at the old human, and found him staring back. Had he noticed?