‘Seems to be OK,’ Wubslin said, not apparently addressing anybody in particular. He sat back from the console, nodding to himself. ‘Yes, ship’s back to normal now.’ He turned round and smiled at the other three.
They came for him. He was in a gamehall playing floatball. He thought he was safe there, surrounded by friends in every direction (they seemed to float like a cloud of flies in front of him for a second, but he laughed that off, caught the ball, threw it and scored a point). But they came for him there. He saw them coming, two of them, from a door set in a narrow chimney of the spherical, ribbed gamehall. They wore cloaks of no colour, and came straight towards him. He tried to float away, but his power harness was dead. He was stuck in mid-air, unable to make progress in any direction. He was trying to swim through the air and struggle out of his harness so that he could throw it at them – perhaps to hit, certainly to send himself off in the other direction – when they caught him.
None of the people around him seemed to notice, and he realised suddenly they were not his friends, that in fact he didn’t know any of them. They took his arms and, in an instant, without travelling past or through anything yet somehow making him feel they had turned an invisible corner to a place that was always there but out of sight, they were in an area of darkness. Their no-colour cloaks showed up in the darkness when he looked away. He was powerless, locked in stone, but he could see and breathe.
‘Help me!’
‘That is not what we are here for.’
‘Who are you?’
‘You know.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Then we can’t tell you.’
‘What do you want?’
‘We want you.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not?’
‘But why me?’
‘You have no one.’
‘What?’
‘You have no one.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘No family. No friends . . .’
‘. . . no religion. No belief.’
‘That’s not true!’
‘How would you know?’
‘I believe in . . .’
‘What?’
‘Me!’
‘That is not enough.’
‘Anyway, you’ll never find it.’
‘What? Find what?’
‘Enough. Let’s do it now.’
‘Do what?’
‘Take your name.’
‘I—’
And they reached together into his skull and took his name.
So he screamed.
‘Horza!’ Yalson shook his head, bouncing it off the bulkhead at the top of the small bed. He spluttered awake, the whimper dying on his lips, his body tense for an instant, then soft.
He put his hands out and touched the woman’s furred skin. She put her hands behind his head and hugged him to her breast. He said nothing, but his heart slowed to the pace of hers. She rocked his body gently with her own, then pushed his head away, bent and kissed his lips.
‘I’m all right now,’ he told her. ‘Just a nightmare.’
‘What was it?’
‘Nothing,’ he said. He put his head back to her chest, nestling it between her breasts like a huge, delicate egg.
Horza had his suit on. Wubslin was in his usual seat. Yalson occupied the co-pilot’s chair. They were all suited up. Schar’s World filled the screen in front of them, the belly sensors of the CAT staring straight down at the sphere of white and grey beneath and magnifying it.
‘One more time,’ Horza said. Wubslin transmitted the recorded message for the third time.
‘Maybe they don’t use that code any more,’ Yalson said. She watched the screen with her sharp-browed eyes. She had cropped her hair back to about a centimetre over her skull, hardly thicker than the down which covered her body. The menacing effect jarred with the smallness of her head sticking out from the large neck of the suit.
‘It’s traditional; more of a ceremonial language than a code,’ Horza said. ‘They’ll know it if they hear it.’
‘You’re sure we’re beaming it at the right place?’
‘Yes,’ Horza said, trying to remain calm. They had been in orbit for less than half an hour, stationary above the continent which held the buried tunnels of the Command System. Almost the whole of the planet was covered in snow. Ice locked the thousand-kilometre peninsula where the tunnel system lay fast into the sea itself. Schar’s World had entered another of its periodic ice ages seven thousand years previously, and only in a relatively thin band around the equator – between the slightly wobbling planet’s tropics – was there open ocean. It showed as a steely grey belt around the world, occasionally visible through whorls of storm clouds.
They were twenty-five thousand kilometres out from the planet’s snow-crusted surface, their communicator beaming down onto a circular area a few tens of kilometres in diameter at a point midway between the two frozen arms of sea which gave the peninsula a slight waist. That was where the entrance to the tunnels lay; that was where the Changers lived. Horza knew he hadn’t made a mistake, but there was no answer.
There is death here, he kept thinking. A little of the planet’s chill seemed to creep along his bones.
‘Nothing,’ Wubslin said.
‘Right,’ Horza said, taking the manual controls into his gloved hands. ‘We’re going in.’
The Clear Air Turbulence teased its warp fields out along the slight curve of the planet’s gravity well, carefully edging itself down the slope. Horza cut the motors and let them return to their emergency-ready-only mode. They shouldn’t need them now, and would soon be unable to use them as the gravity gradient increased.
The CAT fell with gradually increasing speed towards the planet, fusion motors at the ready. Horza watched displays on the screens until he was satisfied they were on course; then, with the planet seeming to turn a little beneath the craft, he unstrapped and went back to the mess.
Aviger, Neisin and Dorolow sat in their suits, strapped into the mess-room seats. Perosteck Balveda was also strapped in; she wore a thick jacket and matching trousers. Her head was exposed above the soft ruff of a white shirt. The bulky fabric jacket was fastened up to her throat. She had warm boots on, and a pair of hide gloves lay on the table in front of her. The jacket even had a little hood, which hung down her back. Horza wasn’t sure whether Balveda had chosen this soft, useless image of a space suit to make a point to him, or unconsciously, out of fear and a need for security.
Unaha-Closp sat in a chair, strapped against its back, pointing straight up at the ceiling. ‘I trust,’ it said, ‘we’re not going to have the same sort of flying-circus job we had to endure the last time you flew this heap of debris.’ Horza ignored it.
‘We haven’t had any word from Mr Adequate, so it looks like we’re all going down,’ he said. ‘When we get there, I’ll go in by myself to check things out. When I come back, we’ll decide what we’re going to do.’
‘That is, you’ll decide—’ began the drone.
‘What if you don’t come back?’ Aviger said. The drone made a hissing noise but went quiet. Horza looked at the toy-like figure of the old man in his suit.
‘I’ll come back, Aviger,’ he said. ‘I’m sure everybody at the base will be fine. I’ll get them to heat up some food for us.’ He smiled, but knew it wasn’t especially convincing. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘in the unlikely event there is anything wrong, I’ll come straight back.’
‘Well, this ship’s our only way off the planet; remember that, Horza,’ Aviger said. His eyes looked frightened. Dorolow touched him on the arm of his suit.
‘Trust in God,’ Dorolow said. ‘We’ll be all right.’ She looked at Horza. ‘Won’t we, Horza?’
Horza nodded. ‘Yes. We’ll be all right. We’ll all be just fine.’ He turned and went back to the bridge.
They stood in the high mountain snows, watching the midsummer sun sink in its own red seas of air and cloud. A cold wind blew her
hair across her face, auburn over white, and he raised a hand, without thinking, to sweep it away again. She turned to him, her head nestling into his cupped hand, a small smile on her face.
‘So much for midsummer’s day,’ she said. The day had been fair, still well below freezing, but mild enough for them to take their gloves off and push their hoods back. The nape of her neck was warm against his palm, and the lustrous, heavy hair brushed over the back of his hand as she looked up at him, skin white as snow, white as bone. ‘That look, again,’ she said softly.
‘What look?’ he said, defensively, knowing.
‘The far-away one,’ she said, taking his hand and bringing it to her mouth, kissing it, stroking it as though it was a small, defenceless animal.
‘Well, that’s just what you call it.’
She looked away from him, towards the livid red ball of the sun, lowering behind the distant range. ‘That’s what I see,’ she told him. ‘I know your looks by now. I know them all, and what they mean.’
He felt a twinge of anger at being thought so obvious, but knew that she was right, at least partly. What she did not know about him was only what he did not know about himself (but that, he told himself, was quite a lot still). Perhaps she even knew him better than he did himself.
‘I’m not responsible for my looks,’ he said after a moment, to make a joke of it. ‘They surprise me, too, sometimes.’
‘And what you do?’ she said, the sunset’s glow rubbing false colour into her pale, thin face. ‘Will you surprise yourself when you leave here?’
‘Why do you always assume I’m going to leave?’ he said, annoyed, stuffing his hands into the thick jacket’s pockets and staring at the hemisphere of disappearing star. ‘I keep telling you, I’m happy here.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You keep telling me.’
‘Why should I want to leave?’
She shrugged, slipped one arm through his, put her head to his shoulder. ‘Bright lights, big crowds, interesting times; other people.’
‘I’m happy here with you,’ he told her, and put his arm round her shoulders. Even in the bulky quilting of the jacket, she seemed slim, almost fragile.
She said nothing for a moment, then, in quite a different tone: ‘. . . And so you should be.’ She turned to face him, smiling. ‘Now kiss me.’
He kissed her, hugged her. Looking down over her shoulder, he saw something small and red move on the trampled snow near her feet.
‘Look!’ he said, breaking away, stooping. She squatted beside him, and together they watched the tiny, stick-like insect crawl slowly, laboriously, over the surface of the snow: one more living, moving thing on the blank face of the world. ‘That’s the first one I’ve seen,’ he told her.
She shook her head, smiling. ‘You just don’t look,’ she chided.
He put out one hand and scooped the insect into his palm, before she could stop him. ‘Oh, Horza . . .’ she said, her breath catching on a tiny hook of despair.
He looked, uncomprehending, at her stricken expression, while the snow-creature died from the warmth of his hand.
The Clear Air Turbulence dropped towards the planet, circling its ice-bright layers of atmosphere from day to night and back again, tipping over the equator and tropics as it spiralled in.
Gradually it encountered that atmosphere – ions and gases, ozone and air. It swooped through the world’s thin wrapping with a voice of fire, flashing like a large, steady meteorite across the night sky, then across the dawn terminator, over steel-grey seas, tabular bergs, ice tables, floes and shelves, frozen coasts, glaciers, mountain ranges, permafrost tundra, more crushed pack ice and, finally, as it bellied down on its pillars of flame, land again: land on a thousand-kilometre peninsula sticking out into a frozen sea like some monstrous fractured limb set in plaster.
‘There it is,’ Wubslin said, watching the mass-sensor screen. A bright, winking light tracked slowly across the display. Horza looked over.
‘The Mind?’ he asked. Wubslin nodded.
‘Right density. Five kilometres deep . . .’ He punched some buttons and squinted at figures scrolling across the screen. ‘On the far side of the system from the entrance . . . and moving.’ The pinpoint of light on the screen disappeared. Wubslin adjusted the controls, then sat back, shaking his head. ‘Sensor needs an overhaul; its range is right down.’ The engineer scratched his chest and sighed. ‘Sorry about the engines, too, Horza.’ The Changer shrugged. Had the motors been working properly, or had the mass sensor’s range been adequate, somebody could have remained on the CAT, flying it if necessary, and relaying the Mind’s position to the others in the tunnels. Wubslin seemed to feel guilty that none of the repairs he’d tried to effect had significantly improved the performance of either motors or sensor.
‘Never mind,’ Horza said, watching the waste of ice and snow passing beneath them. ‘At least now we know the thing’s in there.’
The ship guided them to the right area, though Horza recognised it anyway from the times he had flown the single small flyer the base was allowed. He looked for the flyer as they made their final approach, in case somebody happened to be using it.
The snow-covered plain was ringed by mountains; the Clear Air Turbulence swept over a pass between two peaks, shattering the silence, tearing dusty snow from the jagged ridges and crags of the barren rocks on either side. It slowed further, coming in nose-up on its tripod of fusion fire. The snow on the plain beneath picked itself up and stirred as though uneasy at first. Then as the craft dropped lower and lower the snow was blown, then ripped, from the frozen ground beneath and thrown away in vast swirling rolls of heated air mixing snow and water, steam and plasma particles, in a howling blizzard which swept across the plain, gathering strength as the vessel dropped.
Horza had the CAT on manual. He watched the screen ahead, saw the false, created wind of stormy snow and steam in front, and beyond it, the entrance to the Command System.
It was a black hole set in a rugged promontory of rock which fluted down from the higher cliffs behind like a piece of solidified scree. The snowstorm broiled round the dark entrance like mist. The storm was turning brown as the fusion flame heated the frozen ground of the plain itself, melting it and plucking it out in an earthy spray.
With hardly a bump, and only a little settling as the legs sank into the now soggy surface of the swept plain, the CAT touched the surface of Schar’s World.
Horza looked straight ahead at the tunnel entrance. It was like a deep dark eye, staring back.
The motors died; the steam drifted. Disturbed snow fell back, and some new flakes formed as the suspended water in the air froze once more. The CAT clicked and creaked as it cooled from the heat produced by both the friction of re-entry and its own plasma jets. Water gurgled, turning to slush, over the scoured surface of the plain.
Horza switched the CAT’s bow laser to standby. There was no movement or sign from the tunnel. The view was clear now, the snow and steam gone. It was a bright, sunny, windless day.
‘Well, here we are,’ Horza said, and immediately felt foolish. Yalson nodded, still staring at the screen.
‘Yup,’ Wubslin said, checking screens, nodding. ‘Feet have sunk in half a metre or so. We’ll have to remember to run the motors for a while before we try to lift off, when we leave. They’ll freeze solid in half an hour.’
‘Hmm,’ Horza said. He watched the screen. Nothing moved. There were no clouds in the light blue sky, no wind to move the snows. The sun wasn’t warm enough to melt the ice and snow so there was no running water, not even any avalanches in the distant mountains.
With the exception of the seas – which still contained fish, but no longer any mammals – the only things which moved on Schar’s World were a few hundred species of small insects, slow spreading lichen on rocks near the equator, and the glaciers. The humanoids’ war, or the ice age, had wiped everything else out.
Horza tried the coded message once more. There was no reply.
‘Right,’ he said, getting up from his seat. ‘I’ll step out and take a look.’ Wubslin nodded. Horza turned to Yalson. ‘You’re very quiet,’ he said.
Yalson didn’t look at him. She was staring at the screen and the unblinking eye of the tunnel entrance. ‘Be careful,’ she said. She looked at him. ‘Just be careful, all right?’
Horza smiled at her, picked up Kraiklyn’s laser rifle from the floor, then went through to the mess.
‘We’re down,’ he said as he went through.
‘See?’ Dorolow said to Aviger. Neisin drank from his hip flask. Balveda gave the Changer a thin smile as he went from one door to the other. Unaha-Closp resisted the temptation to say anything, and wriggled out of the seat straps.
Horza descended to the hangar. He felt light as he walked; they had switched to ambient gravity on their way over the mountains, and Schar’s World produced less pull than the standard-G used on the CAT. Horza rode the hangar’s descending floor to the now refreezing marsh, where the breeze was fresh and sharp and clean.
‘Hope everything’s all right,’ Wubslin said as he and Yalson watched the small figure wade through the snow towards the rocky promontory ahead. Yalson said nothing but watched the screen with unblinking eyes. The figure stopped, touched its wrist, then rose in the air and floated slowly across the snows.
‘Ha,’ Wubslin said, laughing a little. ‘I’d forgotten we could use AG here. Too long on that damn O.’
‘Won’t be much use in those fucking tunnels,’ Yalson muttered.
Horza landed just to the side of the tunnel entrance. From the readings he had already taken while flying over the snow, he knew the tunnel door field was off. Normally it kept the tunnel within shielded from the snow and the cold air outside, but there was no field there, and he could see that a little snow had blown into the tunnel and now lay in a fan shape on its floor. The tunnel was cold inside, not warm as it should be, and its black, deep eye seemed more like a huge mouth, now that he was close to it.
He looked back at the CAT, facing him from two hundred metres away, a shining metal interruption on the white expanse, squatting in a blast-mark of brown.
Consider Phlebas Page 35
