Consider Phlebas

by Iain M. Banks

  A square kilometre of these cramped cells might contain as many as one hundred thousand rooms; a thousand such floors would produce a building two thousand metres tall with a hundred million rooms. If you kept building those squat towers, squeezed hard up against each other until they entirely covered the surface of a largish standard-G world – maybe a billion square kilometres – you would have a planet with one trillion square kilometres of floor space, one hundred quadrillion paper-stuffed rooms, thirty light-years of corridors and a number of potential stored characters sufficiently large to boggle just about anybody’s mind.

  In base 10 that number would be a 1 followed by twenty-seven zeros, and even that vast figure was only a fraction of the capacity of the Mind. To match it you would need a thousand such worlds; systems of them, a clusterful of information-packed globes . . . and that vast capacity was physically contained within a space smaller than a single one of those tiny rooms, inside the Mind . . .

  In darkness the Mind waited.

  It had counted how long it had waited so far; it had tried to estimate how long it would have to wait in the future. It knew to the smallest imaginable fraction of a second how long it had been in the tunnels of the Command System, and more often than it needed to it thought about that number, watched it grow inside itself. It was a form of security, it supposed; a small fetish; something to cling to.

  It had explored the Command System tunnels, scanning and surveying. It was weak, damaged, almost totally helpless, but it had been worthwhile taking a look around the maze-like complex of tunnels and caverns just to take its attention off the fact that it was there as a refugee. The places it could not get to itself it sent its one remaining remote drone into, so that it could have a look, and see what there was to be seen.

  And all of it was at once boring and frighteningly depressing. The level of technology possessed by the builders of the Command System was very limited indeed; everything in the tunnels worked either mechanically or electronically. Gears and wheels, electric wires, superconductors and light-fibres; very crude indeed, the Mind thought, and nothing it could possibly interest itself in. A glance through any of the machines and devices in the tunnel was sufficient to know them exactly – what they were made of, how they had been made, even what they were made for. No mystery, nothing to employ the mind.

  There was something too about the inexactitude of it all that the Mind found almost frightening. It could look at some carefully machined piece of metal or some delicately moulded bit of plastic, and know that to the people who had built the Command System – to their eyes – these things were exact and precise, constructed to fine tolerances with dead straight lines, perfect edges, smooth surfaces, immaculate right angles . . . and so on. But the Mind, even with its damaged sensors, could see the rough edges, the crudity of the parts and the components involved. They had been good enough for the people at the time, and no doubt they had fulfilled the most important criterion of all; they worked . . .

  But they were crude, clumsy, imperfectly designed and manufactured. For some reason the Mind found this worrying.

  And it would have to use this ancient, crude, shop-soiled technology. It would have to connect with it.

  It had thought it through as best it could, and decided to formulate plans for what to do if the Idirans did get somebody through the Quiet Barrier and threatened it with discovery.

  It would arm, and it would make a place to hide in. Both actions implied damage to the Command System, so it would not act until it knew it was definitely threatened. Once it knew it was, it would be forced to risk the Dra’Azon’s displeasure.

  But it might not come to that. It hoped it wouldn’t; planning was one thing, execution was another. It was unlikely to have very much time either to hide or to arm. Both plans might perforce be rather crudely implemented, especially as it had only one remote drone and its own badly crippled fields with which to manipulate the engineering facilities of the System.

  Better than nothing, though. Better still to have problems than to let death eradicate them all . . .

  There was, however, another less immediately relevant, but more intrinsically worrying, problem it had discovered, and it was implied in the question: who was it?

  Its higher functions had had to close down when it had transferred from four- to three-dimensional space. The Mind’s information was held in binary form, in spirals composed of protons and neutrons; and neutrons – outside a nucleus, and also outside hyperspace – decayed (into protons, ha-ha; not too long after entering the Command System, the vast majority of its memory would have consisted of the stunningly illuminating message: ‘0000000 . . .’). So it had effectively frozen its primary memory and cognitive functions, wrapping them in fields which prevented both decay and use. It was working instead on back-up picocircuitry, in real space, and using real-space light to think with (how humiliating).

  In fact, it could still access all that stored memory (though the process was complicated, and so slow), so all was not lost there . . . But as for thinking, as for being itself – another matter entirely. It wasn’t its real self. It was a crude, abstracted copy of itself, the mere ground plan for the full labyrinthine complexity of its true personality. It was the truest possible copy its limited scale was theoretically capable of providing, and it was still sentient; conscious by even the most rigorous of standards. Yet an index was not the text, a street plan was not the city, a map not the land.

  So who was it?

  Not the entity it thought it was, that was the answer, and it was a disconcerting one. Because it knew that the self it was now could never think of all the things its old self would have thought of. It felt unworthy. It felt fallible and limited and . . . dull.

  But think positively. Patterns, images, the telling analogy . . . make the ill work to good. Just think . . .

  If it was not itself, then it would be not itself.

  As it was now to what it had been before, so the remote drone was to it now (nice connection).

  The remote drone would be more than just its eyes and ears on the surface, in or near the Changers’ base, keeping look-out; more than just its assistant in the doubtless frantic preparations to equip and secrete which would ensue if the drone did raise the alarm; more. And less.

  Look on the happy side, think of the good things. Hadn’t it been clever? Yes, it had.

  Its escape from the spare-parts warship had been, though it thought it itself, quite breathtakingly masterful and brilliant. Its courageous use of warp so deep into a gravity well would have been foolhardy in the extreme in anything else but the dire circumstances it had found itself in, but was anyway superbly skilled . . . And its stunning cross-realm transfer, from hyper- to real space, was not simply even more brilliant and even braver than anything else it had done, it was almost certainly a first; there was nothing anywhere in its vast store of information to indicate that anybody had ever done that before. It was proud.

  But after all that, here it was, trapped; an intellectual cripple, a philosophical shadow of its former self.

  Now all it could do was wait, hoping that whoever came to find it would be friendly. The Culture must know; the Mind was certain its signal had worked and that it would be picked up somewhere. But the Idirans knew as well. It didn’t think they would just try to storm in, because they knew as well as it did that antagonising the Dra’Azon was a bad idea. But what if the Idirans found a way in and the Culture couldn’t? What if the whole region of space around the Sullen Gulf was now Idiran held? The Mind knew there was only one thing it could do if it fell into Idiran hands, but not only did it not want to destruct for purely personal reasons, it didn’t want to destruct anywhere near Schar’s World anyway, for the same reason that the Idirans wouldn’t come charging in. But if it was captured in the planet, that might be the last time it would have a chance to destroy itself. By the time it was taken off the planet the Idirans might have found a way of stopping it from destructing.

  Perhaps
it had made a mistake in escaping at all. Perhaps it should have just destructed along with the rest of the ship and saved all this complication and worry. But it had seemed like an almost heaven-sent opportunity to escape – finding itself so close to a Planet of the Dead when it had been attacked. It wanted to live anyway, but it would have been . . . wasteful to throwaway such a great chance even if it had been perfectly sanguine about its own survival or destruction.

  Well, there was nothing to be done about it now. It was here and it just had to wait. Wait and think. Consider all the options (few) and possibilities (many). Rack those memories as best it could for anything that might be relevant, that might help. For example (and the one really interesting bit would be a bad one), it had discovered that the Idirans had probably employed one of the Changers who had actually served with the caretaker staff on Schar’s World. Of course perhaps the man was dead, or busy on something else, or too far away, or the information had been incorrect in the first place and the intelligence-gathering section of the Culture had got it wrong . . . But if not, then that man would be the one obvious person to send after something hiding in the Command System tunnels.

  It was part of the Mind’s very construction – at every level – to believe that there was no such thing as bad knowledge except in very relative terms, but it really did wish that it hadn’t had that bit of information in its memory banks; it would just as soon not have known anything about this man, this Changer who knew Schar’s World and probably worked for the Idirans. (Perversely, it found itself wishing it knew this man’s name.)

  But with any luck he would be irrelevant, or the Culture would get here first. Or the Dra’Azon being would recognise a fellow Mind in trouble and help, or . . . anything.

  In darkness the Mind waited.

  . . . Hundreds of those planets were empty; the hundred million room towers were there; the little rooms, the cabinets and the trays and the cards and the spaces for the numbers and letters were there; but nothing was written, nothing held, on any of the cards . . . (Sometimes the Mind liked to imagine travelling down the narrow spaces between the cabinets, one of its remote drones floating between the banked files of memory in the thin corridors, from room to room, for floor after floor, kilometre after kilometre, over buried continents of rooms, filled-in oceans of rooms, levelled ranges, felled forests, covered deserts of rooms.) . . . These whole systems of dark planets, those trillions of square kilometres of blank paper, represented the Mind’s future; the spaces it would fill in its life to come.

  If it had one.

  7.

  A Game of Damage

  ‘Damage – the game banned everywhere. Tonight, in that unprepossessing building across the square under the dome, they’ll gather: the Players of the Eve of Destruction . . . the most select group of rich psychotics in the human galaxy, here to play the game that is to real life what soap opera is to high tragedy.

  ‘This is the bi-port city of Evanauth, Vavatch Orbital, the very same Vavatch Orbital that in about eleven standard hours from now is due to be blasted into its component atoms as the Idiran–Culture war in this part of the galaxy, near the Glittercliff and Sullen Gulf, reaches a new high in standing-by-your-principles-regardless and a new low in common sense. It’s that imminent destruction that’s attracted these scatological vultures here, not the famous Megaships or the azure-blue technological miracles of the Circlesea. No, these people are here because the whole Orbital is doomed to be blown away shortly, and they think it’s kind of amusing to play Damage – an ordinary card game with a few embellishments to make it attractive to the mentally disturbed – in places on the verge of annihilation.

  ‘They’ve played on worlds about to suffer massive comet or meteorite strikes, in volcanic calderas about to blow, in cities due for nuclear bombardment in ritualistic wars, in asteroids heading for the centre of stars, in front of moving cliffs of ice or lava, inside mysterious alien spacecraft discovered empty and deserted and set on courses aiming them into black holes, in vast palaces about to be sacked by android mobs, and just about everywhere you can think of you’d rather not want to be immediately after the Players leave. It might seem like a strange sort of way to get your kicks, but it takes all sorts to make a galaxy, I guess.

  ‘So here they’ve come, these hyper-rich deadbeats, in their rented ships or their own cruisers. Right now they’re sobering up and coming down, going through plastic surgery or behaviour therapy – or both – to make them acceptable in what passes for normal society, even in these rarefied circles, after months spent in whatever expensive and unlikely debauchery or perversion particularly appeals to them or happens to be in fashion at the moment. At the same time, they or their minions are scraping together their Aoish credits – all actual; no notes – and scouting hospitals, asylums and freeze-stores for new Lives.

  ‘Here, too, have come the hangers-on – the Damage groupies, the fortune seekers, the past failures at the game desperate for another try if they can only raise the money and the Lives . . . and Damage’s very own special sort of human debris: the moties, victims of the game’s emotional fall-out; mind-junkies who only exist to lap at the crumbs of ecstasy and anguish falling from the lips of their heroes, the Players of the Game.

  ‘Nobody knows exactly how all these different groups hear about the game or even how they all get here in time, but the word goes out to those who really need to or want to hear about it, and like ghouls they come, ready for the game and the destruction.

  ‘Originally Damage was played on such occasions because only during the breakdown of law and morality, and the confusion and chaos normally surrounding Final Events, could the game be carried out in anything remotely resembling part of the civilised galaxy; which, believe it or not, the Players like to think they’re part of. Now the subsequent nova, world-busting or other cataclysm is seen as some sort of metaphysical symbol for the mortality of all things, and as the Lives involved in a Full Game are all volunteers, a lot of places – like good old pleasure-oriented, permissive Vavatch – let the game take place with official blessing from the authorities. Some people say it’s not the game it used to be, even that it’s become something of a media event, but I say it’s still a game for the mad and the bad; the rich and the uncaring, but not the careless; the unhinged . . . but well connected. People still die in Damage, and not just the Lives, either, or the Players.

  ‘It’s been called the most decadent game in history. About all you can say in the game’s defence is that it, rather than reality, occupies the warped minds of some of the galaxy’s more twisted people; gods know what they would get up to if it wasn’t there. And if the game does any good apart from reminding us – as if we needed reminding – how crazy the bipedal, oxygen-breathing carboniform can become, it does occasionally remove one of the Players and frighten the rest for a while. In these arguably insane times, any lessening or attenuation of madness is maybe something to be grateful for.

  ‘I’ll be filing another report again some time during the course of the game, from within the auditorium if I can get in there. But in the meantime, goodbye and take care. This is Sarble the Eye, Evanauth City, Vavatch.’

  The image on the wrist screen of a man standing in sunlight on a plaza faded; the half-masked, youngish face disappearing.

  Horza put his terminal screen back onto his cuff. The time display winked slowly with the countdown to Vavatch’s destruction.

  Sarble the Eye, one of the most famous of the humanoid galaxy’s freelance reporters, and also one of the most successful at getting into places he wasn’t supposed to, would now probably be trying to enter the games hall – if he hadn’t got in already; the broadcast Horza had just watched had been recorded that afternoon. Doubtless Sarble would be in disguise, so Horza was glad he’d bribed his way in before the reporter’s broadcast went out and the security guards round the hall got even more wary; it had been hard enough as it was.

  Horza, in his new guise as Kraiklyn, had posed as a motie – one o
f the emotional junkies who followed the erratic, secretive progress of the major game series round the more tawdry fringes of civilisation, having discovered that all but the most expensive reserved places had been sold out the day before. The five Aoish credit Tenths he had started out with that morning were now reduced to three; though he also had some money keyed into a couple of credit cards he’d bought. That currency would shrink in real value, though, as the destruction time drew nearer.

  Horza took a deep, satisfying breath and looked around the big arena. He had climbed as high as he could up the banked steps, slopes and platforms, using the interval before the game began to get an overview of the whole thing.

  The dome of the arena was transparent, showing stars and the bright shining line that was the Orbital’s far side, now in daylight. The lights of shuttles coming and going – mostly going – traced lines across the still points. Beneath the dome cover hung a smoky haze, lit with the popping lights of a small firework display. The air was filled, too, with the chanting of massed voices; a choir of scalecones stood banked on the far side of the auditorium. The humanoids forming the choir appeared identical in all but stature and in the tones they produced from their puffed-out chests and long necks. They seemed to be making the ambient racket, but as he looked around the arena Horza could make out the faint purple edges in the air where other, more localised sound fields held command, over smaller stages where dancers danced, singers sang, strippers stripped, boxers boxed, or people just stood around talking.

  Banked all around, the paraphernalia of the game seethed like a vast storm. Maybe ten or even twenty thousand people, mostly humanoid but some utterly different, including not a few machines and drones, they sat or lay or walked or stood, watching magicians, jugglers, fighters, immolators, hypnotics, couplers, actors, orators and a hundred other types of entertainers all doing their turns. Tents had been pitched on some of the larger terraces; rows of seats and couches remained on others. Many small stages frazzled with lights, smoke and glittering holograms and soligrams. Horza saw a 3-D maze spread out over several terraces, full of tubes and angles, some clear, some opaque, some moving, some staying still. Shadows and forms moved inside.