Consider Phlebas

by Iain M. Banks

  State of play: two

  The yacht dropped anchor within a wooded bay. The water was clear, and ten metres beneath the sparkling waves the sandy floor of the anchorage was visible. Tall everblues were spread in a rough crescent around the small inlet, their dusty-looking roots sometimes visible on the ochre sandstone they clung to. There were some small cliffs of the same rock, sprinkled with bright flowers and overlooking golden beaches. The white yacht, its long reflection flickering on the water like a silent flame, feathered its tall sails and swung slowly into the faint breeze coming through one arm of the woods and over the cupped bay.

  People took small canoes or dinghies to the shore, or jumped into the warm water and swam. Some of the ceerevells, which had escorted the yacht on its voyage from its home port, stayed to play in the bay; their long red bodies slipped through the water under and around the vessel’s hull, and their snorting breath echoed from the low cliffs facing the water. Sometimes they nudged the boats heading for the shore, and a few of the swimmers played with the sleek animals, diving to swim with them, touch them, hold onto them.

  The shouts of the people in the boats drew gradually further away. They beached the small craft and disappeared into the woods, going to explore the uninhabited island. The small waves of the inland sea lapped at the disturbed sand.

  Fal ’Ngeestra sighed and, after walking once around the yacht, sat down near the stem on a padded seat. She played absently with one of the ropes tied between the stanchions, rubbing it with her hand. The boy who had been talking to her during the morning, when the yacht was sailing slowly out from the mainland towards the islands, saw her sitting there, and came to talk to her.

  ‘Aren’t you going to look at the island?’ he said. He was very thin and light looking. His skin was a deep, almost golden yellow. There was a sheen about it which made Fal think of a hologram because it looked somehow deeper than his skinny arms and legs were thick.

  ‘I don’t feel like it,’ Fal said. She hadn’t wanted the boy to talk to her earlier and she didn’t want to talk to him now. She was sorry she’d agreed to come on the cruise.

  ‘Why not?’ the boy said. She couldn’t remember his name. She hadn’t been paying attention when he started talking to her, and she wasn’t even sure he had told her his name, though she assumed he had.

  ‘I just don’t.’ She shrugged. She wasn’t looking at him.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. He was silent for a while. She was aware of the sunlight reflecting from his body, but she still didn’t turn to look at him. She watched the distant trees, the waves, the ruddy bodies of the ceerevells hump-backing on the surface of the water as they rose to vent and then dive again. The boy said, ‘I know how you feel.’

  ‘Do you?’ she said, and turned to look at him. He looked a little surprised. He nodded.

  ‘You’re fed up, aren’t you?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said, looking away again. ‘A little bit.’

  ‘Why does that old drone follow you about everywhere?’

  She darted a glance at the boy. Jase was below decks just then, getting a drink for her. It had come aboard at the port with her and had stayed not too far away all the time – the hovering, protective way it usually did. She shrugged again and watched a flock of birds rise from the interior of the island. They called and dipped and wheeled in the air. ‘It looks after me,’ she said. She stared at her hands, watching the sunlight reflect from her nails.

  ‘Do you need looking after?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why does it look after you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re very mysterious, you know,’ he said. She wasn’t looking, but she thought she heard a smile in his voice. She shrugged soundlessly. ‘You’re like that island,’ he said. ‘You’re strange and mysterious like it is.’

  Fal snorted and tried to look scathing; then she saw Jase appearing from a doorway, carrying a glass. She got up quickly, followed by the boy, walked down the deck, and met the old drone, taking the glass from it and smiling at it gratefully. She buried her face in the container and sipped at the drink, looking out through the glass at the boy.

  ‘Well, hello, young man,’ Jase said. ‘Aren’t you going to have a look at the island?’ Fal wanted to kick the machine because of its hearty voice and the way it had said almost what the boy had said to her.

  ‘I might,’ the boy said, looking at her.

  ‘You should,’ Jase said, starting to float towards the stern. The old machine extended a curved field, like a shadow without something to cast it, out from its casing and round the boy’s shoulders. ‘By the way, I couldn’t help overhearing you when you were talking earlier,’ it said, gently guiding the boy down the deck. His golden head turned over his shoulder to look at Fal, who was still drinking her drink very slowly, and just starting to follow Jase and the boy, a couple of paces behind. The boy looked away from her and towards the drone at his side, which was saying, ‘You were talking about not getting into Contact . . .’

  ‘That’s right.’ The boy’s voice was suddenly defensive. ‘I was talking about that, so?’ Fal continued to walk behind the drone and the boy. She smacked her lips. Ice in the glass clinked.

  ‘You sounded bitter,’ Jase said.

  ‘I’m not bitter,’ the boy said quickly. ‘I just think it isn’t fair, that’s all.’

  ‘That you weren’t picked?’ Jase asked. They were approaching the seats round the stern where Fal had sat a few minutes earlier.

  ‘Well, yes. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, and I think they made a mistake. I know I’d be good. I thought with the war and all that they would need more people.’

  ‘Well, yes. But Contact has far more applicants than it can use.’

  ‘But I thought one of the things that they considered was how much you wanted to get in, and I know nobody could have wanted to get in as much as I do. Ever since I can remember I’ve wanted . . .’ The boy’s voice trailed off as they came to the seats. Fal sat down; so did the boy. Fal was looking at him now but not listening. She was thinking.

  ‘Perhaps they don’t think you’re mature enough yet.’

  ‘I am mature!’

  ‘Hmm. They very rarely take people so young, you know. For all I know they’re looking for a special sort of immaturity when they do take people your age.’

  ‘Well, that’s silly. I mean, how do you know what to do if they don’t tell you what they want? How can you prepare? I think it’s all really unfair.’

  ‘In a way I think it’s meant to be,’ Jase replied. ‘They get so many people applying, they can’t take them all or even just take the best because there are so many of them, so they choose at random from them. You can always reapply.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ the boy said, sitting forward and putting his elbows on his knees and his head into his hands, staring at the polished wood of the deck. ‘Sometimes I think they just tell you that so you won’t feel bad when they reject you. I think they do maybe take the very best. But I think they’ve made a mistake. But because they won’t tell you why you’ve failed, what can you do about it?’

  . . . She was thinking about failure too.

  Jase had congratulated her on her idea about finding the Changer. Only that morning, when they were on the ancient steam funicular down from the lodge, they had heard about the events at Vavatch, when the Changer called Bora Horza Gobuchul had appeared and escaped on the pirate ship, taking their agent Perosteck Balveda with him. Her hunch had been right, and Jase was effusive in its praise, making the point that it wasn’t her fault the man had got away. But she was depressed. Sometimes being right, thinking the correct thing, predicting accurately, depressed her.

  It had all seemed so obvious to her. It hadn’t been a supernatural omen or anything silly like that when Perosteck Balveda suddenly turned up (on the battle-damaged but victorious GCU Nervous Energy, which was towing most of a captured Idiran cruiser), but it had seemed so . . . so natural that Balveda ought to be the
one to go in search of the missing Changer. By that time they’d had more information about what had been going on in that volume of space when that particular duel had been going on; and the reported, possible and probable movements of various ships had pointed (again, she thought, fairly obviously) to the privateer craft called the Clear Air Turbulence. There were other possibilities, and they were followed up, too, as far as the already stretched resources of Contact’s Special Circumstances section would allow, but she was always certain that if any of the branching possibilities was going to bear fruit it would be the Vavatch connection. The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was called Kraiklyn; he played Damage. Vavatch was the most obvious site for a full Damage game in years. Therefore the most likely place to intercept the vessel – apart from Schar’s World if the Changer already had control – was Vavatch. She had stuck her neck out by insisting that Vavatch was the most likely place, and that the woman agent Balveda should be one of those to go there, and now it had all come true and she realised it wasn’t really her neck she had stuck out at all. It was Balveda’s.

  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.