Consider Phlebas

by Iain M. Banks

  Yalson stirred restlessly in her seat. Finally she looked over at Balveda. The Culture woman was looking at Horza and Wubslin with a smile; she turned her head to Yalson, sensing her gaze, and smiled more widely, moving her head fractionally to indicate the two men and raising her eyebrows. Yalson, reluctantly, grinned back, and shifted the weight of her gun slightly.

  The lights came quickly now. They streamed by, creating a flickering, strobing pattern of light in the dim cabin. He knew; he had opened his eye and had seen.

  It had taken all his strength just to lift that eyelid. He had drifted off to sleep for a while. He was not sure for how long, he only knew he had been dozing. The pain was not so bad now. He had been still for some time, just lying here with his broken body slanted out of the strange, alien chair, his head on the control console, his hand wedged into the small flap by the power control, fingers jammed under the fail-safe lever inside.

  It was restful; he could not have expressed how pleasant it all was after that awful crawl through both the train and the tunnel of his own pain.

  The train’s motion had altered. It still rocked him, but a little faster now, and with a new rhythm added as well, a more rapid vibration which was like a heart beating fast. He thought he could hear it, too, now. The noise of the wind, blowing through these deep-buried holes far under the blizzard-swept wastes above. Or maybe he imagined it. He found it hard to tell.

  He felt like a small child again, on a journey with his year fellows and their old Querlmentor, rocked to sleep, slipping in and out of a dozing, happy sleep.

  He kept thinking: I have done all I could. Perhaps not enough, but it was all I had in my power to do. It was comforting.

  Like the ebbing pain, it eased him; like the rocking of the train, it soothed him.

  He closed his eye again. There was comfort in the darkness, too. He had no idea how far along he was, and was starting to think it did not matter. Things were beginning to drift away from him again; he was just beginning to forget why he was doing all this. But that didn’t matter, either. It was done; so long as he didn’t move, nothing mattered. Nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  The doors were jammed, all right; same as the other train. The drone became exasperated and slammed against one the reactor chamber doors with a force field, knocking itself back through the air with the reaction.

  The door wasn’t even dented.

  Oh-oh.

  Back to the crawlways and cable-runs. Unaha-Closp turned and headed down a short corridor, then down a hole in the floor, heading for an inspection panel under the floor of the lower deck.

  Of course I end up doing all the work. I might have known. Basically what I’m doing for that bastard is hunting down another machine. I ought to have my circuits tested. I’ve a good mind not to tell him even if I do find the Mind somewhere. That would teach him.

  It threw back the inspection hatch and lowered itself into the dim, narrow space under the floor. The hatch hissed shut after it, blocking out the light. It thought about turning back and opening the hatch again, but knew it would just close automatically once more, and that it would lose its temper and damage the thing, and that was all a bit pointless and petty, so it didn’t; that sort of behaviour was for humans.

  It started off along the crawlway, heading towards the rear of the train, underneath where the reactor ought to be.

  The Idiran was talking. Aviger could hear it, but he wasn’t listening. He could see the monster out of the corner of his eye, too, but he wasn’t really looking at it. He was gazing absently at his gun, humming tunelessly and thinking about what he would do if – somehow – he could get hold of the Mind himself. Suppose the others were killed, and he was left with the device? He knew the Idirans would probably pay well for the Mind. So would the Culture; they had money, even if they weren’t supposed to use it in their own civilisation.

  Just dreams, but anything could happen out of this lot. You never knew how the dust might fall. He would buy some land: an island on a nice safe planet somewhere. He’d have some retro-ageing done and raise some sort of expensive racing animals, and he’d get to know the better-off people through his connections. Or he’d get somebody else to do all the hard work; with money you could do that. You could do anything.

  The Idiran went on talking.

  His hand was almost free. That was all he could get free for now, but maybe he could twist his arm out later; it was getting easier all the time. The humans had been on the train for a while; how much longer would they stay? The small machine hadn’t been on for so long. He had only just seen it in time, appearing from the tunnel mouth; he knew its sight was better than his own, and for a moment he had been afraid it might have seen him moving the arm he was trying to get free, the one on the far side from the old human. But the machine had disappeared into the train, and nothing had happened. He kept looking over at the old man, checking. The human seemed lost in a daydream. Xoxarle kept talking, telling the empty air about old Idiran victories.

  His hand was almost out.

  A little dust came off a girder above him, about a metre over his head, and floated down through the near still air, falling almost but not quite straight down, gradually drifting away from him. He looked at the old man again, and strained at the wires over his hand. Come free, damn you!

  Unaha-Closp had to hammer a corner from a right angle to a curve to get into the small passage it wanted to use. It wasn’t even a crawlway; it was a cable conduit, but it led into the reactor compartment. It checked its senses; same amount of radiation here as in the other train.

  It scraped through the small gap it had created in the cable-run, deeper into the metal and plastic guts of the silent carriage.

  I can hear something. Something’s coming, underneath me . . .

  The lights were a continuous line, flashing past the train too quickly for most eyes to have distinguished them individually. The lights ahead, down the track, appeared round curves or at the far end of straights, swelled and joined and tore past the windows, like shooting stars in the darkness.

  The train had taken a long time to reach its maximum speed, fought for long minutes to overcome the inertia of its thousands of tonnes of mass. Now it had done so, and was pushing itself and the column of air in front of it as fast as it ever would, hurtling down the long tunnel with a roaring, tearing noise greater than any train had ever made in those dark passages, its damaged carriages breaking the air or scraping the blast-door edges to decrease its speed a little but increase the noise of its passage a great deal.

  The scream of the train’s whirling motors and wheels, of its ruffled metal body tearing through the air and of that same air swirling through the open spaces of the punctured carriages, rang from the ceiling and the walls, the consoles and the floor and the slope of armoured glass.

  Quayanorl’s eye was closed. Inside his ears, membranes pulsed to the noise outside, but no message was transmitted to his brain. His head bobbed up and down on the vibrating console, as though still alive. His hand shook on the collision brake override, as if the warrior was nervous, or afraid.

  Wedged there, glued, soldered by his own blood, he was like a strange, damaged part of the train.

  The blood was dried; outside Quayanorl’s body, as within, it had stopped flowing.

  ‘How goes it, Unaha-Closp?’ Yalson’s voice said.

  ‘I’m under the reactor and I’m busy. I’ll let you know if I find anything. Thank you.’ It switched its communicator off and looked at the black-sheathed entrails in front of it: wires and cables disappearing into a cable-run. More than there had been in the front train. Should it cut its way in, or try another route?

  Decisions, decisions.

  His hand was out. He paused. The old man was still sitting on the pallet, fiddling with his gun.

  Xoxarle allowed himself a small sigh of relief, and flexed his hand, letting the fingers stretch then fist. A few motes of dust moved slowly past his cheek. He stopped flexing his h
and.

  He watched the dust move.

  A breath, something less than a breeze, tickled at his arms and legs. Most odd, he thought.

  ‘All I’m saying,’ Yalson told Horza, shifting her feet on the console a little, ‘is that I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come down here yourself. Anything could happen.’

  ‘I’ll take a communicator; I’ll check in,’ Horza said. He stood with his arms crossed, his backside resting on the edge of a control panel; the same one Wubslin’s helmet lay on. The engineer was familiarising himself with the controls of the train. They were pretty simple really.

  ‘It’s basic, Horza,’ Yalson told him; ‘you never go alone. What stuff did they teach you at this goddamned Academy?’

  ‘If I’m allowed to say anything,’ Balveda put in, clasping her hands in front of her and looking at the Changer, ‘I would just like to say I think Yalson’s right.’

  Horza stared at the Culture woman with a look of unhappy amazement. ‘No, you are not allowed to say anything,’ he told her. ‘Whose side do you think you’re on, Perosteck?’

  ‘Oh, Horza,’ Balveda grinned, crossing her arms, ‘I almost feel like one of the team after all this time.’

  About half a metre away from the gently rocking, slowly cooling head of Subordinate-Captain Quayanorl Gidborux Stoghrle III, a small light began to flash very rapidly on the console. At the same time, the air in the control deck was pierced by a high-pitched ululating whine which filled the deck and the whole front carriage and was relayed to several other control centres throughout the speeding train. Quayanorl, his firmly wedged body tugged to one side by the force of the train roaring round a long curve, could have heard that noise, just, if he had been alive. Very few humans could have heard it.

  Unaha-Closp thought the better of cutting off all communication with the outside world, and reopened its communicator channels. Nobody wanted to speak to it, however. It started to cut the cables leading into the conduit, snipping them one by one with a knife-edged force field. No point in worrying about damaging the thing after all that had happened to the train in station six, it told itself. If it hit anything vital to the normal running of the train, it was sure Horza would yell out soon enough. It could repair the cables without too much trouble anyway.

  A draught?

  Xoxarle thought he must be imagining it, then that it was the result of some air-circulation unit recently switched on. Perhaps the heat from the lights and the station’s systems, once it was powered up, required extra ventilation.

  But it grew. Slowly, almost too slowly to discern, the faint, steady current increased in strength. Xoxarle racked his brains; what could it be? Not a train; surely not a train.

  He listened carefully, but could hear nothing. He looked over at the old human, and found him staring back. Had he noticed?

  ‘Run out of battles and victories to tell me about?’ Aviger said, sounding tired. He looked the Idiran up and down. Xoxarle laughed – a little too loudly, even nervously, had Aviger been well enough versed in Idiran gestures and voice tones to tell.

  ‘Not at all!’ Xoxarle said. ‘I was just thinking . . .’ He launched into another tale of defeated enemies. It was one he had told to his family, in ship messes and in attack-shuttle holds; he could have told it in his sleep. While his voice filled the bright station, and the old human looked down at the gun he held in his hands, Xoxarle’s thoughts were elsewhere, trying to work out what was going on. He was still pulling and tugging at the wires on his arm; whatever was happening it was vital to be able to do more than just move his hand. The draught increased. Still he could hear nothing. A steady stream of dust was blowing off the girder above his head.

  It had to be a train. Could one have been left switched on somewhere? Impossible . . .

  Quayanorl! Did we set the controls to—? But they hadn’t tried to jam the controls on. They had only worked out what the various controls did and tested their action to make sure they all moved. They hadn’t tried to do anything else; and there had been no point, no time.

  It had to be Quayanorl himself. He had done it. He must still be alive. He had sent the train.

  For an instant – as he tugged desperately at the wires holding him, talking all the time and watching the old man – Xoxarle imagined his comrade still back in station six, but then he remembered how badly injured he had been. Xoxarle had earlier thought his comrade might still be alive, when he was still lying on the access ramp, but then the Changer had told the old man, this same Aviger, to go back and shoot Quayanorl in the head. That should have finished Quayanorl, but apparently it hadn’t.

  You failed, old one! Xoxarle exulted, as the draught became a breeze. A distant whining noise, almost too high pitched to hear, started up. It was muffled, coming from the train. The alarm.

  Xoxarle’s arm, held by one last wire just above his elbow, was almost free. He shrugged once, and the wire slipped up over his upper arm and spilled loose onto his shoulder.

  ‘Old one, Aviger, my friend,’ he said. Aviger looked up quickly as Xoxarle interrupted his own monologue.

  ‘What?’

  ‘This will sound silly, and I shall not blame you if you are afraid, but I have the most infernal itch in my right eye. Would you scratch it for me? I know it sounds silly, a warrior tormented half to death by a sore eye, but it has been driving me quite demented these past ten minutes. Would you scratch it? Use the barrel of your gun if you like; I shall be very careful not to move a muscle or do anything threatening if you use the muzzle of your gun. Or anything you like. Would you do that? I swear to you on my honour as a warrior I tell the truth.’

  Aviger stood up. He looked towards the nose of the train.

  He can’t hear the alarm. He is old. Can the other, younger ones hear? Is it too high-pitched for them? What of the machine? Oh come here, you old fool. Come here!

  Unaha-Closp pulled the cut cables apart. Now it could reach into the cable-run and try cutting further up, so it could get in.

  ‘Drone, drone can you hear me?’ It was the woman Yalson again.

  ‘Now what?’ it said.

  ‘Horza’s lost some readouts from the reactor car. He wants to know what you’re doing.’

  ‘Damn right I do,’ Horza muttered in the background.

  ‘I had to cut some cables. Seems to be the only way into the reactor area. I’ll repair them later, if you insist.’

  The communicator channel cut off for a second. In that moment, Unaha-Closp thought it could hear something high pitched. But it wasn’t sure. Fringes of sensation, it thought to itself. The channel opened again. Yalson said, ‘All right. But Horza says to tell him the next time you think about cutting anything, especially cables.’

  ‘All right, all right!’ the drone said. ‘Now, will you leave me alone?’ The channel closed again. It thought for a moment. It had crossed its mind that there might be an alarm sounding somewhere, but logically an alarm ought to have repeated on the control deck, and it had heard nothing in the background when Yalson spoke, apart from the Changer’s muttered interjection. Therefore, no alarm.

  It reached back into the conduit with a cutter field.

  ‘Which eye?’ Aviger said, from just too far away. A wisp of his thin, yellowish hair was blown across his forehead by the breeze. Xoxarle waited for the man to realise, but he didn’t. He just patted the hairs back and stared up quizzically at the Idiran’s head, gun ready, face uncertain.

  ‘This right one,’ Xoxarle said, turning his head slowly. Aviger looked round towards the nose of the train again, then back at Xoxarle.

  ‘Don’t tell you-know-who, all right?’

  ‘I swear. Now, please; I can’t stand it.’

  Aviger stepped forward. Still out of reach. ‘On your honour, you’re not playing a trick?’ he said.

  ‘As a warrior. On my mother-parent’s unsullied name. On my clan and folk! May the galaxy turn to dust if I lie!’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Aviger said, raising
his gun and holding it out high. ‘I just wanted to make sure.’ He poked the barrel toward Xoxarle’s eye. ‘Whereabouts does it itch?’

  ‘Here!’ hissed Xoxarle. His freed arm lashed out, grabbed the barrel of the gun and pulled. Aviger, still holding the gun, was dragged after it, slamming into the chest of the Idiran. Breath exploded out of him, then the gun sailed down and smashed into his skull. Xoxarle had averted his head when he’d grabbed the weapon in case it fired, but he needn’t have bothered; Aviger hadn’t left it switched on.

  In the stiffening breeze, Xoxarle let the unconscious human slide to the floor. He held the laser rifle in his mouth and used his hand to set the controls for a quiet burn. He snapped the trigger guard from the gun’s casing, to make room for his larger fingers.

  The wires should melt easily.

  Like a squirm of snakes appearing from a hole in the ground, the bunched cables, cut about a metre along their length, slid out of the conduit. Unaha-Closp went into the narrow tube and reached behind the bared ends of the next length of cables.

  ‘Yalson,’ Horza said, ‘I wouldn’t take you with me anyway, even if I decided not to come back down alone.’ He grinned at her. Yalson frowned.

  ‘Why not?’ she said.

  ‘Because I’d need you on the ship, making sure Balveda here and our section leader didn’t misbehave.’

  Yalson’s eyes narrowed. ‘That had better be all,’ she growled.

  Horza’s grin widened and he looked away, as though he wanted to say more, but couldn’t for some reason.

  Balveda sat, swinging her legs from the edge of the too-big seat, and wondered what was going on between the Changer and the dark, down-skinned woman. She thought she had detected a change in their relationship, a change which seemed to come mostly from the way Horza treated Yalson. An extra element had been added; there was something else determining his reactions to her, but Balveda couldn’t pin it down. It was all quite interesting, but it didn’t help her. She had her own problems anyway. Balveda knew her own weaknesses, and one of them was troubling her now.