Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  “No; I’d have switched off the instant I knew it was you.”

  “And if I’d written?”

  “Same. Switched the screen off or torn the letter up, accordingly.” He nodded quickly. “And if you’d approached me in the street I’d have walked away; run away; hailed a cab; jumped on a trolley; told a policeman who you were; anything. In fact, all the things I intend to do right now, or at least as soon as my legs feel like they’ll work again.”

  “So what was I supposed to do, you awkward bastard?” Sharrow shouted, leaning forward at him.

  “Leave me a-fucking-lone, that’s what!” he roared back into her face.

  They glowered at each other, nose to nose. Then she sat back in the seat, looking out at the darkness on the other side of the car. He sat back too.

  “The Huhsz are after me,” she said quietly, not looking at him. “Or they will be, very soon. With a Hunting Passport. A legal execution warrant—”

  “I know what a Hunting Passport is,” he snapped.

  “They might try using you to get to me, Cenuij.”

  “Sharrow; can’t you get it through those artfully wanton black curls that I want nothing to do with you? I won’t indulge in some pathetic, nostalgic attempt to get us all back together again and be pals and pretend nothing bad ever happened—just in case that’s what’s on your mind—but equally I assure you I have no interest whatsoever trying to help the Huhsz second-guess your every action; that would be almost as bad as actually being in your company.”

  Sharrow looked like she was trying to control herself, then suddenly sat forward again. “Nothing to do with me? So why are you fucking the only whore in Lip City who could pass for my clone?”

  “I don’t fuck her, Sharrow,” Cenuij said, looking genuinely surprised. “I just enjoy humiliating her!” He laughed. “And anyway, she’s rather better looking than you are.” He smiled. “Apart from that unfortunate eight-year-old radiation burn. I wonder how the poor girl got that?”

  “Cenuij—”

  “And where’s she? The real girl? What have you done with her?”

  Sharrow waved one hand. “Teel’s fine; she’s spaced on Zonk watching screen from the whirlbath in a hotel suite. She’s having a great night.”

  “She’d better be,” Cenuij said.

  “Oh! You enjoy humiliating her but now you’re all concerned for her well-being.” She sneered back. “Make sense, Cenuij.”

  He smiled. “I am. But you wouldn’t understand.”

  “And what sort of weird kick do you get from humiliating her anyway?”

  Cenuij shrugged languidly. “Call it revenge.”

  Sharrow sat back again, shaking her head. “Shit, you’re sick.”

  “I’m sick?” Cenuiji laughed. He crossed his arms and gazed up at the car’s ceiling lining. “She murders four hundred and sixty-eight thousand people and she calls me sick!”

  “Oh, for the last fucking time,” she shouted. “I didn’t know they were going to start hacking the Gun to bits in the goddamn city!”

  “You should have known!” he shouted back. “That’s where their labs were! That’s where they announced they were going to dismantle the damn thing!”

  “I thought they meant the lab in the desert! I didn’t know they’d do it in the city!”

  “You should have guessed!”

  “I couldn’t believe anybody would be that stupid!”

  “When have they ever been anything else?” Cenuij roared. “You should have guessed!”

  “Well, I just fucking didn’t!” Sharrow yelled. She sat back, sniffing mightily.

  Cenuij sat silently, massaging his legs.

  Eventually Sharrow said, “That was probably some contract hunter with the net-gun tonight. If they’d succeeded you’d be in a Huhsz satrapy by dawn, all wired and juiced up so you’d have no fucking choice but to tell them what I was going to do next.”

  “So I’ll stop talking to strangers,” Cenuij said. He tested one leg, flexing it. He sat forward suddenly. “Where are my shoes?” he demanded.

  Sharrow dug under her seat, threw them over to him. He slipped them on and fastened them.

  “Have you heard from Breyguhn recently?” she asked.

  He stopped tightening a heel strap and glanced at her. “No. The good Brothers have what one might call a playful attitude to mail. I expect I’ll get another letter in a month or so.”

  “I saw her four days ago.”

  Cenuij looked wary. “ Mm-hmm,” he said, sitting back. “And how…how is she?”

  Sharrow looked away. “Not too good. I mean, surviving physically, but…”

  “She didn’t give you…a letter or anything for me?” Cenuij asked.

  “No.” Sharrow shook her head. “Look,” she said. “If we find the Universal Principles we can get her out. I only need the message in it; we can give the Brothers the book itself.”

  Cenuij looked troubled, then sat back, sneering. “You say,” he said. His cloak lay on the seat beside him; he put it over his shoulders and fastened it, laughing. “Some piece of utterly unattributable Dascen family folklore has it that your grandpa somehow left a message in a book nobody’s set eyes on for a millennium and which there is no indication he even started to look for, and you believe it?” He shook his head.

  “Dammit, Cenuij, it’s the best we’ve got to go on.”

  “And what if this rumor is—by some miracle—only half wrong and you do need the book itself?” Cenuij asked.

  “We’ll do all we can,” Sharrow said, sighing. “I promised.”

  “You promised.” Cenuij sat still for a while. He flexed both legs. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll think about it.” He put one hand to the door of the vehicle.

  Sharrow put her hand over his. He looked into her eyes but she wouldn’t take her hand away. “Cenuij,” she said. “Please, come now. They’ll take you if you try to stay. I’m telling the truth, I swear.”

  He looked at her hand. She took it away. He opened the door and climbed down out of the All-Terrain. He stood holding the door for a moment, checking that his legs were going to hold him when he tried to walk.

  “Sharrow,” he said, looking up at her. “I’m only just starting to think that maybe you really are telling the truth about what happened to the Lazy Gun and Lip City.” He gave a sort of half-laugh. “But that’s taken eight years; let’s not rush things, shall we?”

  She leaned forward, imploring. “Cenuij; we need you; please…in the name of…” Her voice died away.

  “Yes, Sharrow.” He smiled. “In the name of what?” She just stared at him. He shook his head. “There’s not really anything you respect or care about enough to use as an oath, is there?” He smiled. “Except perhaps yourself, and that wouldn’t sound right, would it?” He took a step backward, letting go of the door. “Like I said, I’ll think about it.” He pulled his cloak closed. “Where can I contact you?”

  She closed her eyes with a look of despair. “The Log-Jam, with Miz,” she said.

  “Ah, of course.” He turned to go, facing the giant open-cast mine on the dark hillside. Then he stopped and turned back, the rain blowing about him. He nodded behind him at the mine. “See that, Sharrow? The open-cast? Mining an ancient spoil heap; sifting the already discarded, looking for treasure in what was rubbish…maybe not even for the first time, either. We live in the dust of our forebears; insects crawling in their dung. Splendid, isn’t it?”

  He turned and walked away along the bank of an old tailings pond. He’d gone another few paces when he turned once more and called out, “By the way; you were very convincing about one thing…until you took the radiation scar off.”

  He laughed and strode off toward the half-consumed spoil heap.

  4

  Log-Jam

  Like a lot of Golterian oddities, the Log-Jam was basically a tax dodge.

  Jonolrey, Golter’s second largest continent, lay across Phirar from Caltasp. The same root word in a long-lost language t
hat had provided the name for the ocean of Phirar had also given the region of Piphram its name. Once Piphram had been a powerful state, the greatest trading nation on the planet, practically running the world’s entire merchant marine. But that had been long ago; now it was just another entangledly autonomous patchwork Free Area, no less prosperous or gaudy than any other part of the world.

  The administrative capital of Piphram, which by sheer coincidence happened actually to lie within the area its contract covered, was the Log-Jam.

  Sunlit land slid under the small jet, flowing green and brown beneath its forward-veed wings as it throttled back and adjusted its position in the center of the conical glide-path.

  Sharrow watched Dloan at the plane’s controls; he sat in the pilot’s seat of the hired aircraft, studying its instrument screens. He’d flown the plane manually for take-off and ascent from Regioner, and had wanted to land it too, but the Log-Jam had had too many bad experiences with people trying to land on Carrier Field, and insisted on autolandings. Dloan was going to make sure it went all right.

  Zefla, in a seat across from Sharrow, was fiddling with the small cabin’s screen controls; channel-hopping to produce a confused succession of images and background sound bursts.

  Sharrow looked out of the window at the cloud-dappled land moving smoothly underneath.

  “—alked to Doctor Fretis Braäst, moderator of the Huhsz college at Yadayeypon Ecclesiastical School.”

  “Well, yes,” Zefla said, turning up the sound. Sharrow glanced up at the screen to see a well-groomed male presenter talking to the camera; behind him, on the studio wall, was a gigantic, slightly grainy hologram of her own face. “You’re a star, kid,” Zefla said, smiling dazzlingly. Dloan turned round to watch.

  Sharrow scowled at the screen. “Is that the best photo they could get? Must be ten years old; look at my hair. Ugh.”

  The blow-up of Sharrow’s face was replaced by a live holo of a trim-looking elderly man with white hair and a white beard. He had twinkly eyes and an understanding smile. He was dressed in a light-gray academic gown with discreet but numerous qualification ribbons decorating one side of the collar.

  “Doctor Braäst,” said the presenter. “This is a terrible thing, isn’t it? Here we are, about to start the second decamillennium, and your faith wants to hunt down and kill—preferably put to death ceremonially, in fact—a woman who has never been convicted of anything and whose only crime appears to be having been born, and being born female.”

  Doctor Braäst smiled briefly. “Well, Keldon, I think you’ll find that the Lady Sharrow does have a string of convictions for a variety of crimes in Malishu, Miykenns, dating—”

  “Doctor Braäst.” The presenter gave a pained smile and glanced down at a screenboard balanced on his knee. “Those were minor public order offenses; I don’t think you can use fifteen-year-old fines for brawling and insulting a police officer as an excuse for—”

  “I beg your pardon, Keldon.” The white-haired man smiled. “I was just trying to keep things totally accurate.”

  “Well, fine, but to return to—”

  “And I’d remind you that the whole issue of the use of such Passports is not a Huhsz tenet; this is a civil process with a pedigree over two millennia old; what we are told—and what we have to accept—is that this is a civilized response to the problem of assassination and the potential for disruption it implies.”

  “Well, I believe a lot of people would say that all assassination ought to be illegal—”

  “Perhaps so, but it was found that its codification caused less disruption than extra-legal actions.”

  “Well, well; we aren’t here to discuss the history of legal…legal history, Doctor; we’re talking about the fate of one woman you seem determined to persecute and hound to death with all the influence and resources your—extremely wealthy—faith can muster.”

  “Well, I agree that on the face of it this might seem terribly unfortunate for the lady—”

  “I suspect most people would put it rather stronger than that—”

  “Although this is a lady associated with the Incident in Lip City eight years—”

  “This is all rumor, though, isn’t it, Doctor Braäst? Smear tactics. She hasn’t been convicted of anything…In fact, she successfully sued two screen services which implicated her in the Lip City Incident—”

  “I can understand you’re frightened of her doing the same to you…”

  “But none of this alters the fact that you want this woman dead, Doctor Braäst. Why?”

  (“That’s more like it,” Zefla said, nodding.)

  “Keldon, this is an unfortunate matter going back many generations, to an act of desecration, violence and rape carried out by one of the lady’s ancestors—”

  “A version of events which has always been vigorously denied by—”

  “Of course it’s been denied, Keldon,” the small doctor said, looking exasperated. “If you’ll just let me finish…”

  “I beg your pardon; go on.”

  “In which a young temple virgin was abducted, several of our order were seriously injured and numerous acts of violently destructive desecration, some of them of an obscene and depraved nature I can’t repeat here, were committed by troops of the Dascen clan—”

  “Again, this is all denied—”

  “Please let me finish; this unfortunate child was then raped, despoiled by Duke Chlea, forced to marry him and to bear children. When this poor, defiled and frightened creature attempted to return herself and her twins to the safety and security of the temple she had known since she was an infant—”

  “Now, really, Doctor Braäst; history is quite clear on this; the Huhsz…Huhsz supporters, I should say; simply attacked—”

  “History is people and records and the human memory and therefore not infallible, Keldon; we have divine guidance in this, which is.”

  “But, Doctor Braäst, surely no matter whose version of this tragic story you believe, there is no reason to carry this blood-feud on into the present.”

  “But we did not,” the white-haired man said reasonably. “This confused and unfortunate woman swore eternal antipathy to our faith; swore, indeed, that she would murder the next Prophet Incarnate, should He appear in her lifetime, and furthermore bound all her line to the same oath; that she had been raped, and then indoctrinated by the Dascen tribe in an atmosphere of hatred and atheist lies might help to explain such an abomination, but it cannot excuse it.

  “Our Patriarch was at first determined to ignore this outrage, but God himself, in a visitation of a kind that occurs less than once in a generation, spoke to him and told the blessed Patriarch that he had but one course of action; blood had to be met with blood. By all means meet tolerance with tolerance, but equally one must meet intolerance with intolerance.

  “The Messiah can not be born until the threat has been lifted or the desecration ameliorated. The oath has been made, the vendetta instituted, and all by the Dascen female line. They might think that they can rescind their rash and sacrilegious curse—indeed I perfectly understand that they want to do so now—but I’m afraid God’s word is not to be so trifled with. What must be done must be done. Even if we don’t get the Passports—though I am confident we shall—this is not a matter for compromise.”

  “Of course, Doctor Braäst, cynics might say that the real object of all this is to secure the return of what is now the very last Lazy Gun, which was the chief treasure taken from—”

  “The exact nature of the treasure is irrelevant, Keldon, but it was as an act of mercy that God, through the Patriarch, allowed that the return of this device—never at any time used by the Huhsz, I might point out, and of purely ceremonial value—would signal an end to this tragic feud, from our side at least.”

  “But, Doctor, what it all boils down to is this; can any amount of this sort of reasoning, historical or otherwise, really justify this sort of barbaric practice in this day and age? Briefly, please.”


  “Barbarism is always with us, Keldon. Lip City suffered an act of unparalleled barbarity eight years ago. What we have been forced to do is not barbaric; it is the will and the mercy of God. We can no more ignore this duty than we can neglect the adoration of Him. The Lady Sharrow—though we may feel sorry for her on a human level—represents a living insult for all those of the True and Blessed Belief. Her fate is not a matter for debate. She is the last of her line; a sad, barren and disabled figure whose misery has gone on too long. Her spirit, when it is finally released, will sing for joy that we were the ones who rescued her from her torment. I look forward to the eternal instant when her voice joins those of the Blessed whose conversion occurs after death; hers will be a muted exaltation, but it will be exaltation nevertheless, and eternal. Surely we should all wish her that.”

  “Doctor Braäst, we’re out of time. Thank you for those words.”

  “Thank you, Keldon.”

  “Well,” the presenter said, turning to face the camera again with his eyebrows raised and just the suggestion of a shake of his head. “The war in Imthaid, now—”

  Zefla switched the screen off. Dloan turned back to the jet’s controls. The Log-Jam was a vast metallic ice crystal, glittering in the distance at the margin of the land and sea.

  Zefla turned to Sharrow, slinging one long leg over her seat. “Buncha religious fuckwits.” She shook her head, blond hair swinging. “You’re going to be a fucking heroine at the end of this, Shar, and they’re going to look like the humorless hysterical dickshits they are.”

  Sharrow looked disconsolately at the darkened screen, nodding. “Only if they don’t get me,” she said, turning away and looking out of the window, where the outlying sections of the Log-Jam rose toward the dropping plane like a set of enormous, gleaming fingers.

  The plane landed without incident on Carrier Field.

  When the state of Piphram had been on the way downhill after its era of grandeur and wealth, centuries earlier, many of the seaships that had comprised its merchant fleet had been sold, many more had been scrapped, and hundreds had been mothballed. The mothballed ships—everything from megaton bulk carriers to the most delicate and exquisite repossessed private yacht—had mostly been brought home, to lie in a broad lagoon on the coast of Piphram’s Phirarian province and await better trading conditions.