Consider Phlebas

by Iain M. Banks

  ‘I’ll get you some,’ he said, going back to the door. He stopped there. ‘You’re right, by the way. You are pretty off-putting in the morning.’

  Balveda shook her head in the darkness. She put one finger in her mouth and rubbed it around on one side, as though massaging her gums or cleaning her teeth, then she just sat with her head between her knees, staring at the jet-black nothing of the cold rock floor beneath her, wondering if this was the day she died.

  They stood in a huge semi-circular alcove carved out of the rock and looking out over the dark space of station four’s repair and maintenance area. The cavern was three hundred metres or more square, and from the bottom of the scooped gallery they stood on to the floor of the vast cave – littered with machinery and equipment – was a thirty-metre drop.

  Great cradle-arms capable of lifting and holding an entire Command System train were suspended from the roof above, another thirty metres up in the gloom. In the mid-distance a suspended gantry lanced out over the cave, from a gallery on one side to the other, bisecting the cavern’s dark bulk.

  They were ready to move; Horza gave the order.

  Wubslin and Neisin each headed down small side tubes towards the main Command System tunnel and the transit tubeway respectively, using AG. Once in the tunnels they would keep level with the main group. Horza switched on his own AG, rose about a metre from the floor and floated down a branch tunnel of the foot gallery, then started slowly forward, down into the darkness, towards station five, thirty kilometres away. The rest would follow him, also floating. Balveda shared the pallet with the equipment.

  He smiled when Balveda sat down on the pallet; she suddenly reminded him of Fwi-Song sitting on his heavy-duty litter, in the space and sunlight of a place now gone. The comparison struck him as wonderfully absurd.

  Horza floated along the foot tunnel, stopping to check the side tubes as they appeared and contacting the others whenever he did so. His suit senses were turned as high as they would go; any light, the slightest noise, an alteration in the air flow, even vibrations in the rock around him: all were catered for. Unusual smells would register, too, as would power flowing through the cables buried in the tunnel walls and any sort of broadcast communication.

  He’d thought about signalling the Idirans as they went along, but decided not to. He had sent one short signal from station four, without receiving a reply, but to send more on the way would be to give too much away if (as he suspected) the Idirans were not in a mood to listen.

  He moved through the darkness as though sitting on an invisible seat, the CREWS cradled in his arms. He heard his heartbeat, his breathing and the quiet slipstreaming of the cold, half-stale air around his suit. The suit registered vague background radiation from the surrounding granite, punctuated by intermittent cosmic rays. On the faceplate of the suit’s helmet, he watched a ghostly radar image of the tunnels as they unwound through the rock.

  In places the tunnel ran straight. If he turned he could see the main group following half a kilometre behind him. In other places the tunnel described a series of shallow curves, cutting down the view provided by the scanning radar to a couple of hundred metres or less, so that he seemed to float alone in the chill blackness.

  At station five they found a battleground.

  His suit had picked up odd scents; that had been the first sign, organic molecules in the air, carbonised and burnt. He’d told the others to stop, gone on ahead cautiously.

  Four dead medjel were laid out near one wall of the dark, deserted cavern, their burned and dismembered bodies echoing the formation of frozen Changer corpses at the surface base. Idiran religious symbols had been burned onto the wall over the fallen.

  There had been a fire-fight. The station walls were pocked with small craters and long laser scars. Horza found the remains of one laser rifle, smashed, a small piece of metal embedded in it. The medjel bodies had been torn apart by hundreds more of the same tiny projectiles.

  At the far end of the station, behind the half-demolished remains of one set of access ramps, he found the scattered components of some crudely manufactured machine, a kind of gun on wheels, like a miniature armoured car. Its mangled turret still contained some of the projectile ammunition, and more bullets were scattered like wind-seeds about the flame-seared wreck. Horza smiled slightly at the debris, weighing a handful of the unused projectiles in his hand.

  ‘The Mind?’ Wubslin said, looking down at what was left of the small vehicle. ‘It made this thing?’ He scratched his head.

  ‘Must have,’ Horza said, watching Yalson poke warily at the torn metal of the wreck’s hull with one booted foot, gun ready. ‘There was nothing like this down here, but you could manufacture it, in one of the workshops; a few of the old machines still work. It’d be difficult, but if the Mind still had some of its fields working, and maybe a drone or two, it could do it. It had the time.’

  ‘Pretty crude,’ Wubslin said, turning over a piece of the gun mechanism in his hand. He turned and looked back at the distant corpses of the medjel and added, ‘Worked well enough, though.’

  ‘No more medjel, by my count,’ Horza said.

  ‘Still two Idirans left,’ Yalson said sourly, kicking at a small rubber wheel. It rolled a couple of metres across the debris and flopped over again, near Neisin, who was celebrating the discovery of the demised medjel with a drink from his flask.

  ‘You sure these Idirans aren’t still here?’ Aviger asked, looking round anxiously. Dorolow peered into the darkness, too, and made the sign of the Circle of Flame.

  ‘Positive,’ Horza said. ‘I checked.’ Station five hadn’t been difficult to search; it was an ordinary station, just a set of points, a chicane in the Command System’s double loop and a place for the trains to stop and connect themselves with the communication links to the planet’s surface. There were a few rooms and storage areas off the main cavern, but no power-switching gear, no barracks or control rooms, and no vast repair and maintenance area. Marks in the dust showed where the Idirans had walked away from the station after the battle with the Mind’s crude automaton, heading for station six.

  ‘You think there’ll be a train at the next station?’ Wubslin said.

  Horza nodded. ‘Should be.’ The engineer nodded, too, staring vacantly at the double sets of steel rails gleaming on the station floor.

  Balveda swung herself off the pallet, stretching her legs. Horza still had the suit’s infra-red sensor on, and saw the warmth of the Culture agent’s breath waft from her mouth in a dimly glowing cloud. She clapped her hands and stamped her feet.

  ‘Still not too warm, is it?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ grumbled the drone from underneath the pallet. ‘I may start to overheat soon; that ought to keep you cosy until I seize up completely.’

  Balveda smiled a little and sat back on the pallet, looking at Horza. ‘Still thinking of trying to convince your tripedal pals you’re all on the same side?’ she said.

  ‘Huh!’ said the drone.

  ‘We’ll see,’ was all Horza would say.

  Again his breathing, his heartbeat, the slow wash of stale air.

  The tunnels led on into the deep night of the ancient rock like an insidious, circular maze.

  ‘The war won’t end,’ Aviger said. ‘It’ll just die away.’ Horza floated along the tunnel, half listening to the others talk over the open channel as they followed behind him. He’d switched his suit’s external mikes from the helmet speakers to a small screen near his cheek; the trace showed silence. Aviger continued, ‘I don’t think the Culture will give in like everybody thinks it will. I think they’ll keep fighting because they believe in it. The Idirans won’t give in, either; they’ll keep fighting to the last, and they and the Culture will just keep going at each other all the time, all over the galaxy eventually, and their weapons and bombs and rays and things will just keep getting better and better, and in the end the whole galaxy will become a battleground until they’ve blown up all the stars
and planets and Orbitals and everything else big enough to stand on, and then they’ll destroy all of each other’s big ships and then the little ships, too, until everybody’ll be living in single suits, blowing each other up with weapons that could destroy a planet . . . and that’s how it’ll end; probably they’ll invent guns or drones that are even smaller, and there’ll only be a few smaller and smaller machines fighting over whatever’s left of the galaxy, and there’ll be nobody left to know how it all started in the first place.’

  ‘Well,’ said Unaha-Closp’s voice, ‘that sounds like a lot of fun. And what if things go badly?’

  ‘That’s too negative an attitude to battle, Aviger.’ Dorolow’s high-pitched voice broke in, ‘You have to be positive. Contest is formative; battle is a testing, war a part of life and the evolutionary process. In its extremity, we find ourselves.’

  ‘. . . Usually in the shit,’ Yalson said. Horza grinned.

  ‘Yalson,’ Dorolow began, ‘even if you don’t be—’

  ‘Hold it,’ Horza said suddenly. The screen near his cheek had flickered. ‘Wait there. I’m picking up some sound from ahead.’ He stopped, sat still in mid-air and put the sound from outside through the helmet speakers.

  A low noise, deep and boomy, like heavy surf from a long way off, or a thunderstorm in distant mountains.

  ‘Well, there’s something making a noise up there,’ Horza said.

  ‘How far to the next station?’ Yalson said.

  ‘About two kilometres.’

  ‘Think it’s them?’ Neisin sounded nervous.

  ‘Probably,’ Horza said. ‘OK. I’m going ahead. Yalson, put Balveda in the restrainer harness. Everybody check weapons. No noise. Wubslin, Neisin, go forward slowly. Stop as soon as you can see the station. I’m going to try talking to these guys.’

  The noise boomed vaguely on, making him think of a rockslide, heard from a mine deep inside a mountain.

  He approached the station. A blast door came into view round a corner. The station would be only another hundred metres beyond. He heard some heavy clunking noises; they came down the dark tunnel, deep and resonant, hardly muffled by the distance, sounding like huge switches being closed, massive chains being fastened. The suit registered organic molecules in the air – Idiran scent. He passed the edge of the blast door and saw the station.

  There was light in station six, dim and yellow, as though from a weak torch. He waited for Wubslin and Neisin to tell him they could see the station from their tunnels, then he went closer.

  A Command System train stood in station six, its rotund bulk three storeys tall and three hundred metres long, half filling the cylindrical cavern. The light came from the train’s far end, high at the front, where the control deck was. The sounds came from the train, too. He moved across the foot tunnel so he could see the rest of the station.

  At the far end of the platform floated the Mind.

  He stared at it for a moment, then magnified the image to make sure. It looked genuine; an ellipsoid, maybe fifteen metres long and three in diameter, silvery yellow in the weak light spilling from the train’s control cabin, and floating in the stale air like a dead fish on the surface of a still pond. He checked the suit’s mass sensor. It registered the fuzzy signal of the train’s reactor, but nothing else.

  ‘Yalson,’ he said, whispering even though he knew it was unnecessary, ‘anything on that mass sensor?’

  ‘Just a weak trace; a reactor, I guess.’

  ‘Wubslin,’ Horza said, ‘I can see what looks like the Mind in the station, floating at the far end. But it’s not showing on either sensor. Would its AG make it invisible to the sensors?’

  ‘Shouldn’t,’ Wubslin’s puzzled voice came back. ‘Might fool a passive gravity sensor, but not—’

  A loud, metallic breaking noise came from the train. Horza’s suit registered an abrupt increase in local radiation. ‘Holy shit!’ he said.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Yalson said. More clicking, snapping noises echoed through the station, and another weak, yellow light appeared, from beneath the reactor car in the middle of the train.

  ‘They’re fucking about with the reactor carriage, that’s what’s happening,’ Horza said.

  ‘God,’ Wubslin said. ‘Don’t they know how old all this stuff is?’

  ‘What are they doing that for?’ Aviger said.

  ‘Could be trying to get the train to run under its own power,’ Horza said. ‘Crazy bastards.’

  ‘Maybe they’re too lazy to push their prize back to the surface,’ the drone suggested.

  ‘These . . . nuclear reactors, they can’t explode, can they?’ Aviger said, just as a blinding blue light burst from under the centre of the train. Horza flinched, his eyes closed. He heard Wubslin shout something. He waited for the blast, the noise, death.

  He looked up. The light still flashed and sparkled, under the reactor car. He heard an erratic hissing noise, like static.

  ‘Horza!’ Yalson shouted.

  ‘God’s balls!’ Wubslin said. ‘I nearly filled my pants.’

  ‘Its OK,’ Horza said. ‘I thought they’d blown the damn thing up. What is that, Wubslin?’

  ‘Welding, I think,’ Wubslin said. ‘Electric arc.’

  ‘Right,’ Horza said. ‘Let’s stop these crazies before they blow us all away. Yalson, join me. Dorolow, meet up with Wubslin. Aviger, stay with Balveda.’

  It took a few minutes for the others to arrange themselves. Horza watched the bright, flickering blue light as it sizzled away under the centre of the train. Then it stopped. The station was lit only by the two weak lights from the control deck and reactor car. Yalson floated down the foot tunnel and landed gently at Horza’s side.

  ‘Ready,’ Dorolow said over the intercom. Then a screen in Horza’s helmet flashed; a speaker beeped in his ear. Something had transmitted a signal near by; not one of their suits, or the drone.

  ‘What was that?’ Wubslin said. Then: ‘Look, there. On the ground. Looks like a communicator.’ Horza and Yalson looked at each other. ‘Horza,’ Wubslin said, ‘there’s a communicator on the floor of the tunnel here; I think it’s on. It must have picked up the noise of Dorolow setting down beside me. That was what transmitted; they’re using it as a bug.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Dorolow said.

  ‘Well, don’t touch the thing,’ Yalson said quickly. ‘Could be boobied.’

  ‘So. Now they know we’re here,’ Aviger said.

  ‘They were going to know soon anyway,’ Horza said. ‘I’ll try hailing them; everybody ready, in case they don’t want to talk.’

  Horza cut his AG and walked to the end of the tunnel, almost onto the level platform of the station. Another communicator lying there transmitted its single pulse. Horza looked at the great, dark train and switched on his suit PA. He drew a breath, ready to speak in Idiran.

  Something flashed from a slit-like window near the rear of the train. His head was knocked back inside the helmet, and he fell, stunned, his ears ringing. The noise of the shot echoed through the station. The suit alarm beeped frantically at him. Horza rolled over against the tunnel wall; more shots slammed down on him, flaring against the suit helmet and body.

  Yalson ducked and ran. She skidded to the lip of the tunnel and raked fire over the window the shots were coming from, then swivelled, grabbed Horza by one arm and pulled him further into the tunnel. Plasma bolts crashed into the wall he’d been lying against. ‘Horza?’ she shouted, shaking him.

  ‘Command override, level zero,’ a small voice chirped in Horza’s buzzing ears. ‘This suit has sustained system-fatal damage automatically voiding all warranties from this point; immediate total overhaul required. Further use at wearer’s risk. Powering down.’

  Horza tried to tell Yalson he was all right, but the communicator was dead. He pointed to his head, to make her understand this. Then more shots, from the nose of the train, came bursting into the foot tunnel. Yalson dived to the floor and started firing back. ‘Fire!’ she yelle
d to the others. ‘Get those bastards!’

  Horza watched Yalson shooting at the far end of the train. Laser trails flicked out from the left side of their tunnel, tracer shells from the right, as the others joined in. The station filled with a spastic, blazing light; shadows leapt and danced across the walls and ceiling. He lay there, stunned, dull-headed, listening to the muffled cacophony of sound breaking against his suit like surf. He fumbled with his laser rifle, trying to remember how to fire it. He really had to help the others fight the Idirans. His head hurt.

  Yalson stopped shooting. The front of the train glowed red where she’d been firing at it. The explosive shells from Neisin’s gun crackled round the window the first shots had come from; short bursts of fire. Wubslin and Dorolow had come out of the main tunnel, past the slab of the train’s rear. The crouched near the wall, firing at the same window as Neisin.

  The plasma fire had stopped. The humans stopped shooting, too. The station went dark; the gunfire echoed, faded. Horza tried to stand up, but somebody seemed to have removed the bones from his legs.

  ‘Anybody—’ Yalson began.

  Fire cascaded around Wubslin and Dorolow, lancing out from the lower deck of the last carriage. Dorolow screamed and fell. Hand spasming, her gun blasted wildly over the cavern roof. Wubslin rolled along the ground, shooting back at the Idirans. Yalson and Neisin joined in. The carriage’s skin buckled and burst under the fusilade. Dorolow lay on the platform, moving spasmodically, moaning.

  More shots came from the front of the train, bursting around the tunnel entrances. Then something moved midway up the rear carriage, near the rear access gantry; an Idiran ran from a carriage door and along the middle ramp. He levelled a gun and fired down, first at Dorolow where she lay on the ground, then at Wubslin, lying near the side of the train.