Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  Sharrow glimpsed movement in the distance behind the other woman, and heard a quick jingling noise.

  “Brey—” she said, making a calming, sit-down motion with one hand.

  “Can’t you see? The nebulae should be ours but we are left with the dust! Sweep it away!” Breyguhn screamed. “Sweep it all away! The slate is full; wipe it out and start again! The decamillennium approaches! Burn the chaff!”

  Sharrow stood up as two burly monks dressed in grubby white habits appeared behind her half-sister; the first monk took one end of Breyguhn’s chain and with a practiced flick looped it over her head and round her arms, encircling her; he pulled tight, jerking her away from the great stone seat—her eyes closed, an expression of sudden joy on her pallid face—while the second monk threw a glittering bag over her head; there was a noise like a sigh, the bag ballooned then collapsed, then was pulled from Breyguhn’s head just as she too collapsed, limp and slack into the arms of the first brother. They zipped her into a straitcoat the shape of a thin, much bestrapped sleeping bag, then dragged her away along the floor, chains rattling.

  The whole operation had taken place in less than a dozen heartbeats, and without the pair of monks even glancing at Sharrow.

  She watched them go, feeling numb.

  The trio disappeared into the shadows and the rattling of their chains faded until all she could hear was a faint moaning noise of the wind in some flue, high above. She shivered, picked up her satchel and started back across the empty breadth of the dark hall.

  Seigneur Jalistre smiled brightly from the holo screen in the dullness of the gatekeeper’s office. “Hmm; the Universal Principles for your reasonable expenses, and the freedom of your sister…”

  “ Half-sister.”

  “Indeed, indeed,” the Seigneur said, slowly stroking his smoothly fat chin. “Well, I shall put your proposal to my brethren, Lady Sharrow.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Of course, you must understand that it is anything but a foregone conclusion that we shall accept your suggestion—we are not normally given to financing Antiquities contracts, and what with the upkeep of this magnificent but ancient building, we are far from being a rich order, as I’m sure you appreciate. But I feel certain your proposition will be treated seriously. Doubtless we shall be in touch.”

  “It might be better if I call you,” she told the holo image.

  “As you wish. Might I suggest you give us a few days to consider your proposal?”

  “I’ll call in three or four days. Will that be all right?”

  “That will be perfect, Lady Sharrow. I am only sorry your need for haste precluded a personal meeting.”

  “Some other time, perhaps.”

  “Indeed, indeed.” The Seigneur nodded slowly. “Hmm. Well, good-day then, Lady Sharrow. Pray tell brother gatekeeper he may resume possession of his office.”

  “Certainly. Good-bye.”

  She opened the door; the small gatekeeper stood outside by the postern in the main gate, scowling, the HandCannon held by the barrel in one grimy hand. The office holo-screen grayed as she descended the steps to where the small monk waited. She handed him the small plastic slip he’d given her earlier.

  “Receipt,” she said.

  “Gun,” replied the gatekeeper. “Take it and get out.”

  The little monk swung open the postern and gestured to the outside world; a gust of rain and wind blew in, making his habit flap. “Hurry up, woman; get your filthy cloven body out of here!”

  She took a step toward the door, then stopped and looked at the little monk. “You know,” she said, “for a greeter your attitude is somewhat suspect; I shall be sending a stiff note to the Udesten Hotel Guide.”

  “Stuff your smart remarks where only a woman can, trollop.”

  “And there really isn’t any need for that sort of language.”

  “Out, menstruator!”

  She stood on the threshold of the door. She shook her head. “I’m not menstruating.” She smiled brightly. “Are you a castrato?”

  The gatekeeper’s eyes went wide. “No!” he barked.

  She swung one foot, kicking him in the crotch through the weight of the thick black cassock; he doubled up and fell to the courtyard flagstones, wheezing, his chain clattering around him.

  “No,” she said, stepping out through the small door to the cold and the rain. “I didn’t think so, somehow.”

  She walked away down the broad gray curve of the causeway, the rain spattering her face while the evil-smelling wind whipped her hair, and realized with some surprise that, after nearly eight years of peaceful banality, that made two men she’d hit in less than twenty hours.

  Life was becoming interesting again.

  3

  Echo Street

  Roughly ten percent of the land area of Golter was autonomous state; countries in the accepted sense. The rest was technically Free Land in the form of city states, beltland, commercial and industrial parks, farming collectives, ecclesiastical dependencies, bank franchises, sept reservations, leased and freeheld familial estates, Antiquarian societies’ digs, contract diplomatic services’ ambassadorial domains, pressure-group protectorates, charity parklands, union sanatoria, time-share zones, canal, rail and road corridors and protected drove-ways; United World enclaves of a score of different persuasions; hospital, school and college grounds, private and public army training counties, and land-parcels—usually squatted on—the subject of centuries-old legal disputes which were effectively owned by the courts concerned.

  The inhabitants of these multifarious territories owed their allegiance not to any geographically defined authority or administration, but to the guilds, orders, scientific disciplines, linguistic groups, Corporations, clans and other organizations which administered them.

  The result was that while a physical map of Golter was a relatively simple depiction of the planet’s varied but unremarkable geography, political maps tended to resemble something plucked from the wreckage after an explosion in a paint factory.

  So, although Udeste was a recognized area and the city of the same name was the province’s effective service capital, there was no necessary proprietorial, administrative or jurisdictional link between the city and the surrounding countryside. Similarly, the province of Udeste owed no tribute to any bodies representing the continent of Caltasp Minor or even Entire, save that of the Continental Turnpike Authority.

  The CTA maintained an impressive, if expensive, network of toll roads extending from the Security Franchise in the south to Pole City in the north. On her way back from the Sea House, Sharrow used the turbiner’s head-up display to check on the bid prices for seats on the afternoon and evening strats from Udeste Transcontinental to Capitaller, six thousand kilometers to the northeast, and decided to hang on to the hired car.

  Roundly cursing a heinously complex legal dispute that had grounded all charter aircraft in southern Caltasp for the past month, the CTA for having won the battle against the railroads two millennia earlier, junketeers in general and lawyers heading for conferences in particular, Sharrow took Route Five out of Udeste City.

  The turnpike skirted the edge of the Seproh plateau for eighteen hundred kilometers, lanes increasing in number as road trains, buses and private cars joined from the cities on Caltasp’s eastern seaboard and the curtain-wall cliffs to the north decreased in height from nine kilometers to two.

  She left the car on automatic and used its terminal to tap into databases all over the system, catching up on news and searching out all she could on the fortunes of the Huhsz and the whereabouts of the scattered remnants of Gorko’s legacy. She dozed for an hour to some quiet music, and watched screen for a while.

  She rendezvoused with a rest-mobile, ramping up into the echoing parking hold of the Air Cushion Vehicle and leaving the car for refueling while she stretched her legs. She stood on a glassed-in walkway high in the side of the ACV, watching the distant countryside move slowly past and the northbo
und traffic overtaking; road trains slowly, private vehicles as though the towering hovercraft was standing still.

  Back on the road, she put the automobile on manual every now and again, taking the controls and spinning the engine up to maximum while the car boomed and the cloud shadows on the road flashed underneath the turbiner’s wheels.

  It was late afternoon when the turnpike bunched and swung into the Seproh Tunnel. The two-hour journey was midday bright; when the road exited to the Waist rainforests it was already dark. She signaled ahead to another rest-mobile to book a cabin and caught up with the ACV an hour later, maneuvering the car toward it up the canyon formed by two of the parked road trains it was towing.

  Just a little too tired to accept the attentions of a prettily handsome road train driver she met in the bar, she slept soundly and alone in a small, quietly humming outside cabin.

  She watched desert roll past while she breakfasted. Linear cloud disappeared into the blue distance above the turnpike’s route, like sections of vapor trail.

  Beyond the desert and the Callis Range came scrub, then irrigated farms; by the Big Bight the land was lush again. Late afternoon brought her to the colorful, tire-scuffed roadsigns welcoming her to Regioner.

  * * *

  Regioner—like its capital, Capitaller—owed its stunningly unimaginative name to a particularly bloody interlingual dispute which had taken place so long ago one language had changed out of all recognition and the other had died entirely, outside of university language department databases.

  She left the turnpike at sunset and took a laser-straight two-laner through prairies now ripe for their second harvest, sweeping through the warm darkness of the head-heavy crops with the radio loud, singing along at the top of her lungs while the foothills of the Coastal Range rose above the plain ahead.

  An hour of hill-climbing on intestinally convoluted roads, through dark tunnels and across narrow bridges, past laden orchards and around numerous towns and smaller settlements brought her to a small, prettily color-washed, but otherwise nondescript, hill village a couple of valleys away from Capitaller.

  Zefla Franck, once described by Miz Gattse Kuma as nearly two meters of utter voluptuousness with a brain, strolled from the coach stop along the lane between the low white-painted houses near the summit of the hill, her long golden hair undone and straggling to the waist of her slinky dress, her shoes off and held over one shoulder. Her head was tipped back, her long neck curved.

  The night was warm. The faint breeze rising from the orchards in the valley below smelled sweet.

  She whistled, and watched the sparkling sky, where Maid-servant—Golter’s second moon—shone blue-gray and bounteous near the horizon; a great stone and silver ship escorted and surrounded by a school of flickering, glittering lights; habitats and factories, satellites and mirrors, and departing and arriving ships.

  The ships were quick, sharp points, sometimes leaving trails; the close-orbit satellites and habitats moved smoothly, some moderately quickly, some very slowly, giving the impression that they were flecks of brightness fixed to a concentric set of clear revolving spheres; the great mirrors and most far-flung industrial and settlement orbiters hung stationary, fixed lights against the darkness.

  It was, thought Zefla, really quite beautiful, and the light cast by all the various satellites, both natural and human-made, seemed soft, seductive and even—despite its icy, polar-blue pallor—somehow warm. Moonlight and junklight. Junklight. Such a callous, mean-spirited name for something so beautiful, and not even accurate. No single piece of junk was big enough to be seen from the ground, and there was little enough real junk left, anyway; it had been tidied away, swept up, captured, slowed down and dropped in and burnt off.

  She watched a winking satellite move with a perfect, steady stateliness across the vault. She followed its progress as it crossed above her to vanish behind the eaves of a house on the west side of the lane, where soft lights glowed behind pastel shades and music played quietly. She recognized the tune and whistled along as she climbed some steps to a higher level of the lane. She kept her head down to make sure she didn’t trip.

  She hiccuped suddenly. “Shit!” she said.

  Maybe it was looking downward that did it. She looked back up at the sky and hiccuped again. “Shit shit shit!”

  She found another slowly moving satellite, and determined to ignore the stupid hiccups and concentrate on tracking the little light across the sky. Another hiccup. “Shit!”

  She was nearly home and she hated going into the house with the hiccups; Dloan always made fun of her.

  Another hiccup. She growled and fixed all her attention on the satellite.

  Her shin hit something hard. “Aow, fuck!”

  Zefla hopped around on one foot, clutching her shin. “Ow ow ow!” she said. She glared at what she’d bumped into; the moonlight, the junklight, and the warm glow from the leaves of the luminous shrubs at the door of the house revealed a huge pale car almost filling the narrow lane outside the house. Zefla glared at the insect-spattered snout of the auto and muttered.

  The shoes she’d been carrying dropped from her fingers to the cobblestones; she hopped on top of the shoes, lost her footing and fell with a yelp into the luminous bushes.

  She lay in the shrubbery, cradled on her back by the creaking branches and surrounded by gently glowing leaves. Disturbed insects buzzed around her head and tickled her bare legs and forearms.

  “Oh, bugger,” Zefla sighed, as the door opened and her brother looked out. Another head poked out of the door, swiveling; the gaze glanced her way, then away, then back.

  “Zef?” said a female voice.

  “Hell’s caries,” Zefla groaned. “I might have known. I suppose this is your car?”

  “Good to see you too, Zefla,” Sharrow said, smiling, as Dloan Franck came out of the doorway and offered his sister a hand. Zefla took hold and was pulled upright to stand, swaying hardly at all in front of Sharrow, who folded her arms and grinned at her.

  Zefla felt Dloan dust her down and pull a few luminous leaves out of her tangled blond hair.

  “Nice car,” she said to Sharrow, as Dloan fussed and tutted, pulling a twig from the sleeve of her dress. She stood one-legged, leaning on her brother and rubbing at her bruised shin. “Thought they had collision-avoidance radar.”

  “It’s switched off,” Sharrow said, stooping to retrieve Zefla’s shoes from the cobbles.

  Zefla sighed. “Mine too.”

  Sharrow offered her the shoes, but she knocked them gently aside and took the other woman in her arms.

  “Sorry about your leg,” Sharrow told Zefla, hugging her.

  “Never mind; it cured my—hic!—aw, shit…”

  Showered, dried, powdered and perfumed, Zefla Franck lounged magnificently on a relaxer, her red-brown skin gleaming where her bath sheet didn’t cover; another towel kept her hair piled high over her head. She drank a restorative from a long glass and looked out over the junklit valley and the lights of distant villages and houses; the glass of the old conservatory reflected her image and those of Sharrow and Dloan.

  Sharrow stood by the glass wall, a drink in her hand, looking out.

  Dloan sat in a hanging-chair, his hands deep in the neck fur of a sarflet, ruffling the animal’s tawny pelt while it sat there with an expression of sleepy bliss on its broad, black-snouted face.

  Zefla shook her head. “I don’t think so, Shar; they could start trying to trash Geis with the Passports, but it’d eat time; your cuz has lawyers the way other people have freckles, and he can afford wizards; grade one legal slicks with minds like writ-grenades. Toss a few of those boys into the fray and they could stall the Huhsz for decades; get them so entangled they won’t be able to take a piss without applying for a court order…” Zefla hiccuped. “Damn!” She gulped. “Excuse me; more sober juice.”

  She drank deeply from the tall glass again. “. . . Shit,” she continued, “even if they got blanket discovery Geis could ke
ep ahead of them just generating new companies; dance their grubby little asses through the taxloop Labyrinth of No Return, shuffling liability, using anonymous proxies, cascading ownership…It would take them months to sort out what he’s already got, never mind what he could create if he wanted to put up a smokescreen. The point to remember is, they’ve only got a year; with that sort of cast-iron limitation, even Geis’s public exposure won’t suffer more than a—hic! shit—blip when the shareholders realize it’s just a glorified nuisance action that’s going to evaporate like a fart in a hurricane when the clock stops.”

  Zefla drank again, then said, “What are you grinning at?”

  Sharrow had turned away from the view while Zefla had been talking. She stood, smiling down at the other woman, “I’ve missed you, Zef.”

  “Thank you very much,” Zefla said, holding one long leg out in front of her and looking at the bruise. “Wish I could say the same for your car.”

  Sharrow looked down and ran her finger round the top of her glass. “So are you saying I should just go to Geis?”

  “Hell, no; I’m just saying that if you ever did have to—especially as a last resort after you’ve run the Huhsz round in circles for a few months and aren’t getting any closer to the Gun—you needn’t worry about hurting him legally.”

  “Even so,” Sharrow said, frowning at her drink. “But just because of that…maybe I should take him up on his offer now.”

  “You—hic!—want to?” Zefla said, her eyebrows rising.

  “No,” Sharrow admitted, glancing at her.

  “Then,” said a deep, rumbling, reasonable voice from the other side of the conservatory, “don’t.”

  Sharrow looked at Dloan. He was even taller than Zefla, and much broader. He had precise, short-cropped blond hair which merged smoothly into an equally carefully trimmed blond beard; he lounged in a crumpled sweatsuit, exuding fitness. He kept on tickling the sarflet, and looked up only momentarily at Sharrow, smiling as though shyly, then looking away again.