Consider Phlebas

by Iain M. Banks

  ‘Oh shit!’ said Horza.

  He was dropped to the deck as Xoralundra let him go, turned quickly, and scooped a running medjel off the floor as it tried to get past him. ‘You!’ Xoralundra bellowed. ‘I am the spy-father Querl of the fleet,’ he shouted into its face and shook the six-limbed creature by the front of its suit. ‘You will go to my cabin immediately and bring the small space helmet lying there to the port-side stern emergency lock. As fast as possible. This order supersedes all others and cannot be countermanded. Go!’ He threw the medjel in the right direction. It landed running.

  Xoralundra flipped his own helmet over from its back-hinged position, then opened the visor. He looked as though he was about to say something to Horza, but the helmet speaker crackled and spoke, and the Querl’s expression changed. The small noise stopped and only the continuing wail of the cruiser’s alarm was left. ‘The Culture craft was hiding in the surface layers of the system sun,’ Xoralundra said bitterly, more to himself than to Horza.

  ‘In the sun?’ Horza was incredulous. He looked back at the cell door, as though somehow it was Balveda’s fault. ‘Those bastards are getting smarter all the time.’

  ‘Yes,’ snapped the Querl, then turned quickly on one foot. ‘Follow me, human.’ Horza obeyed, starting after the old Idiran at a run, then bumping into him as the huge figure stopped in its tracks. Horza watched the broad, dark, alien face as it swivelled round to look over his head at the Idiran trooper still standing stiffly at the cell door. An expression Horza could not read passed over Xoralundra’s face. ‘Guard,’ the Querl said, not loudly. The trooper with the laser carbine turned. ‘Kill the woman.’

  Xoralundra stamped off down the corridor. Horza stood for a moment, looking first at the rapidly receding Querl, then at the guard as he checked his carbine, ordered the cell door to open, and stepped inside. Then the man ran down the corridor after the old Idiran.

  ‘Querl!’ gasped the medjel as it skidded to a stop by the airlock, the suit helmet held in front of it. Xoralundra swept the helmet from its grasp and fitted it quickly over Horza’s head.

  ‘You will find a warp attachment in the lock,’ the Idiran told Horza. ‘Get as far away as possible. The fleet will be here in about nine standard hours. You shouldn’t have to do anything; the suit will summon help on a coded IFF response. I, too—’ Xoralundra broke off as the cruiser lurched. There was a loud bang and Horza was blown off his feet by a shock wave, while the Idiran on his tripod of legs hardly moved. The medjel which had gone for the helmet yelped as it was blown under Xoralundra’s legs. The Idiran swore and kicked at it; it ran off. The cruiser lurched again as other alarms started. Horza could smell burning. A confused medley of noises that might have been Idiran voices or muffled explosions came from somewhere overhead. ‘I too shall try to escape,’ Xoralundra continued. ‘God be with you, human.’

  Before Horza could say anything the Idiran had rammed his visor down and pushed him into the lock. It slammed shut. Horza was thrown against one bulkhead as the cruiser juddered mightily. He looked desperately round the small, spherical space for a warp unit, then saw it and after a short struggle unclamped it from its wall magnets. He clamped it to the rear of his suit.

  ‘Ready?’ a voice said in his ear.

  Horza jumped, then said, ‘Yes! Yes! Hit it!’

  The airlock didn’t open conventionally; it turned inside out and threw him into space, tumbling away from the flat disc of the cruiser in a tiny galaxy of ice particles. He looked for the Culture ship, then told himself not to be stupid; it was probably still several trillion kilometres away. That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off . . . and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.

  With one last thought for Balveda, Horza reached until he found the control handle for the bulky warp unit, fingered the correct buttons on it, and watched the stars twist and distort around him as the unit sent him and his suit lancing away from the stricken Idiran spacecraft.

  He played with the wrist-set for a while, trying to pick up signals from The Hand of God 137, but got nothing but static. The suit spoke to him once, saying ‘Warp/unit/charge/half/exhausted.’ Horza kept a watch on the warp unit via a small screen set inside the helmet.

  He recalled that the Idirans said some sort of prayer to their God before going into warp. Once when he had been with Xoralundra on a ship which was warping, the Querl had insisted that the Changer repeat the prayer, too. Horza had protested that it meant nothing to him; not only did the Idiran God clash with his own personal convictions, the prayer itself was in a dead Idiran language he didn’t understand. He had been told rather coldly that it was the gesture that mattered. For what the Idirans regarded as essentially an animal (their word for humanoids was best translated as ‘biotomaton’), only the behaviour of devotion was required; his heart and mind were of no consequence. When Horza had asked, what about his immortal soul? Xoralundra had laughed. It was the first and only time Horza had experienced such a thing from the old warrior. Whoever heard of a mortal body having an immortal soul?

  When the warp unit was almost exhausted, Horza shut it off. Stars swam into focus around him. He set the unit controls, then threw it away from him. They parted company, he moving slowly off in one direction, while the unit spun off in another; then it disappeared as the controls switched it back on again to use the last of its power leading anybody following its trace away in the wrong direction.

  He calmed his breathing down gradually; it had been very fast and hard for a while, but he slowed it and his heart deliberately. He accustomed himself to the suit, testing its functions and powers. It smelled and felt new, and looked like a Rairch-built device. Rairch suits were meant to be among the best. People said the Culture made better ones, but people said the Culture made better everything, and they were still losing the war. Horza checked out the lasers the suit had built in and searched for the concealed pistol he knew it ought to carry. He found it at last, disguised as part of the left forearm casing, a small plasma hand gun. He felt like shooting it at something, but there was nothing to aim at. He put it back.

  He folded his arms across his bulky chest and looked around. Stars were everywhere. He had no idea which one was Sorpen’s. So the Culture ships could hide in the photospheres of stars, could they? And a Mind – even if it was desperate and on the run – could jump through the bottom of a gravity-well, could it? Maybe the Idirans would have a tougher job than they expected. They were the natural warriors, they had the experience and the guts, and their whole society was geared for continual conflict. But the Culture, that seemingly disunited, anarchic, hedonistic, decadent mélange of more or less human species, forever hiving off or absorbing different groups of people, had fought for almost four years without showing any sign of giving up or even coming to a compromise.

  What everybody had expected to be at best a brief, limited stand, lasting just long enough to make a point, had developed into a wholehearted war effort. The early reverses and first few megadeaths had not, as the pundits and experts had predicted, shocked the Culture into retiring, horrified at the brutalities of war but proud to have put its collective life where usually only its collective mouth was. Instead it had just kept on retreating and retreating, preparing, gearing up and planning. Horza was convinced the Minds were behind it all.

  He could not believe the ordinary people in the Culture really wanted the war, no matter how they had voted. They had their communist Utopia. They were soft and pampered and indulged, and the Contact section’s evangelical materialism provided their conscience-salving good works. What more could they want? The war had to be the Minds’ idea; it was part of their clinical drive to clean up the galaxy, make it run on nice, efficient lines, without waste, injustice or suffering. The fools in the Culture couldn’t see that one day the Minds would start thinking ho
w wasteful and inefficient the humans in the Culture themselves were.

  Horza used the suit’s internal gyros to steer himself, letting him look at every part of the sky, wondering where, in that light-flecked emptiness, battles raged and billions died, where the Culture still held and the Idiran battle fleets pressed. The suit hummed and clicked and hissed very quietly around him: precise, obedient, reassuring.

  Suddenly it jolted, steadying him without warning and jarring his teeth. A noise uncomfortably like a collision alarm trilled violently in one ear, and out of the corner of his eye Horza could see a microscreen set inside the helmet near his left cheek light up with a holo red graph display.

  ‘Target/acquisition/radar,’ the suit said. ‘Incoming/increasing.’

  3.

  Clear Air Turbulence

  ‘What!’ roared Horza.

  ‘Target/acqui—’ the suit began again.

  ‘Oh shut up!’ Horza shouted, and started punching buttons on the suit’s wrist console, twisting this way and that, scanning the darkness around him. There ought to have been a way of getting a head-up display on the inside of the helmet visor to show him what direction the signals were coming from, but he hadn’t enough time to familiarise himself completely with the suit, and he couldn’t find the right button. Then he realised he could probably just ask. ‘Suit! Give me a head-up on the transmission source!’

  The top left edge of the visor flashed. He turned and tipped until a winking red dot positioned itself on the transparent surface. He hit the wrist buttons again, and the suit hissed as it evacuated gas from its sole-nozzles, sending him shooting away under about one gravity. Nothing appeared to change apart from his weight, but the red light went out briefly, then came back on. He swore. The suit said:

  ‘Target/acquisition—’

  ‘I know,’ Horza told it. He unslung the plasma pistol from his arm and readied the suit lasers. He cut the gas jets, too. Whatever it was coming after him, he doubted he’d be able to outrun it. He became weightless again. The small red light continued to flash on the visor. He watched the internal screens. The transmission source was closing on a curved course at about point zero-one lights, in real space. The radar was low frequency and not particularly powerful – all too low-tech to be either the Culture or the Idirans. He told the suit to cancel the head-up, brought the magnifiers down from the top of the visor and switched them on, aiming at where the radar source had been coming from. A doppler shift in the signal, still displayed on one of the helmet’s small internal screens, announced that whatever was producing the transmission was slowing down. Was he going to be picked up rather than blown apart?

  Something glinted hazily in the magnifiers’ field. The radar switched off. It was very close now. He felt his mouth go dry, and his hands shook inside the heavy gloves of the suit. The image in the magnifiers seemed to explode with darkness, then he swept them back to the top of the helmet and looked out into the starfields and the inky night. Something tore across his vision, pure black, racing across the backdrop of sky in utter silence. He jabbed at the button which switched on the suit’s needle radar and tried to follow the shape as it passed him, occluding stars; but he missed, so there was no way of telling how close it had come, or how big it was. He had lost track of it in the spaces between the stars when the darkness ahead of him flared. He guessed it was turning. Sure enough, back came the radar pulse.

  ‘Ta—’

  ‘Quiet,’ Horza said, checking the plasma gun. The dark shape expanded, almost directly ahead. The stars around it wobbled and brightened in the lens effect of an imperfectly adjusted warp motor in cancel mode. Horza watched the shape come closer. The radar switched off again. He switched his own back on, the needle beam scanning the craft ahead. He was looking at the resulting image on an internal screen when it flickered and went out, the suit’s hissings and hummings stopped, and the stars started to fade away.

  ‘Sapping/effector/fi . . . re . . .’ said the suit, as it and Horza went limp and unconscious.

  There was something hard under him. His head hurt. He couldn’t remember where he was or what he was supposed to be doing. He only just remembered his name. Bora Horza Gobuchul, Changer from the asteroid Heibohre, lately employed by the Idirans in their holy war against the Culture. How did that connect with the pain in his skull though, and the hard, cold metal under his cheek?

  He had been hit hard. While he still couldn’t see or hear or smell anything, he knew something severe had occurred, something almost fatal. He tried to remember what had happened. Where had he been last? What had he been doing?

  The Hand of God 137! His heart leapt as he remembered. He had to get off! Where was his helmet? Why had Xoralundra deserted him? Where was that stupid medjel with his helmet? Help!

  He found he couldn’t move.

  Anyway, it wasn’t The Hand of God 137, or any Idiran ship. The deck was hard and cold, if it was a deck, and the air smelled wrong. He could hear people talking now, too. But still no sight. He didn’t know if his eyes were open and he was blind, or if they were shut and he couldn’t open them. He tried to bring his hands up to his face to find out, but nothing would move.

  The voices were human. There were several. They were speaking the Culture’s language, Marain, but that didn’t mean much; it had grown increasingly common as a second language in the galaxy over the last few millennia. Horza could speak and understand it, though he hadn’t used it since . . . since he had talked to Balveda, in fact, but before that not for a long time. Poor Balveda. But these people were chattering, and he couldn’t make out the individual words. He tried to move his eyelids, and eventually felt something. He still couldn’t think where he might be.

  All this darkness . . . Then he remembered something about being in a suit, and a voice talking to him about targets or something. With a shock he realised he had been captured, or rescued. He forgot about trying to open his eyes and concentrated hard on understanding what the people near by were saying. He had used Marain just recently; he could do it. He had to. He had to know.

  ‘. . . goddamn system for two weeks and all we get is some old guy in a suit.’ That was one voice. Female, he thought.

  ‘What the hell did you expect, a Culture starship?’ Male.

  ‘Well, shit, a bit of one.’ The female voice again. Some laughter.

  ‘It’s a good suit. Riarch, by the look of it. Think I’ll have it.’ Another male voice. Tone of command; no mistaking it.

  ‘. . .’ No good. Too quiet.

  ‘They adjust, idiot.’ The Man again.

  ‘. . . bits of Idiran and Culture ships would be floating all over the place and we could . . . that bow laser . . . and it’s still fucked.’ Woman, different one.

  ‘Our effector won’t have damaged it, will it?’ Another male; young sounding, cutting across what the woman had said.

  ‘It was on suck, not blow,’ the captain said, or whatever he was. Who were these people?

  ‘. . . of a lot less than grandad over there,’ said one of the men. Him! They were talking about him! He tried not to show any sign of life. He only now realised that of course he was out of the suit, lying a few metres away from people probably standing around it, some with their backs to him. He was lying with one arm underneath his body, on his side, naked, facing them. His head still hurt and he could feel saliva dribbling from his half-open mouth.

  ‘. . . weapon of some sort with them. Can’t see it, though,’ said the Man, and his voice altered, as though he was changing position as he spoke. Sounded like they had lost the plasma gun. They were mercenaries. Had to be. Privateers.

  ‘Can I have your old suit, Kraiklyn?’ Young male.

  ‘Well, that’s that,’ the Man said, his voice sounding as though he was getting up from a squatting position, or turning round. It seemed he had ignored the previous speaker. ‘A bit of a disappointment maybe, but we did get this suit. Better get out now before the big boys show.’

  ‘What now?’ One of the fem
ales again. Horza liked her voice. He wished he could get his eyes open.

  ‘That temple. Should be easy in, easy out, even without the bow laser. Only about ten days from here. We’ll do a little bit more funding-up on some of their altar treasures and then buy some heavy weaponry on Vavatch. We can all spend our ill-gotten gains there.’ The Man – Krakeline or whatever his name was – paused. He laughed. ‘Doro, don’t look so frightened. This’ll be simple. You’ll be thankful I heard about this place, once we’re rich. The goddamn priests don’t even carry weapons. It’ll be easy—’

  ‘Easy in, easy out. Yeah, we know.’ A woman’s voice; the nice one. Horza was aware of light now. Pink in front of his eyes. His head was still sore but he was coming to. He checked out his body, consciously calling on the feedback nerves to gauge his own physical readiness. Below normal, and it wouldn’t be perfect until the last effects of his geriatric appearance had faded away, in a few days – if he lived that long. He suspected they thought he was already dead.

  ‘Zallin,’ the Man said, ‘dump that weed.’

  Horza opened his eyes with a start as footsteps approached. The Man had been talking about him!

  ‘Aah!’ somebody cried nearby. ‘He’s not dead. His eyes are moving!’ The footsteps suddenly halted. Horza sat up shakily, narrowing his eyes in the glare. He was breathing hard and his head swam as he raised it. His eyes focused.

  He was in a brightly lit but small hangar. An old, weather-beaten shuttle craft filled about half of it. He was sitting almost against one bulkhead; near the other stood the people who had been talking. Halfway between him and the group stood a large, ungainly youth with very long arms and silver hair. As Horza had guessed, the suit he had been wearing lay prone on the floor at the feet of the group of humans. He swallowed and blinked. The youth with the silver hair stared at him and scratched nervously at one ear. He wore a pair of shorts and a frayed T-shirt. He jumped when one of the taller men in the group, in the voice Horza had decided was that of the captain, said, ‘Wubslin,’ (he turned to one of the other men) ‘isn’t that effector working properly?’