Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  “Oh, come on now; you must be able to,” the young man chided. “I’ll give you a clue; you’ve already found one, it’s the last of its kind, and everybody but everybody who’s anybody wants one. Come on, it’s easy!”

  She lowered her head to the tank floor again, nodding.

  “It’s also,” the young man continued, “supposed to be the only weapon ever made with a semblance of a sense of humor.”

  She brought her head up. “The Lazy Gun,” she said, her voice weak.

  “That’s right!” the young man said brightly. “The Lazy Gun!” He sat forward in the deck-chair, smiling broadly. “Now of course we recognize that you have your own reasons for wanting to find this remarkable—and now unique—weapon, and will probably want to turn the Gun over to our friends the Huhsz, in the hope that they’ll stop trying to catch and kill you. An understandable desire on your part, of course, but one—sadly—that does somewhat conflict with the plans the interests that we represent have for the weapon.

  “In brief, we would far prefer that you give the Gun to us. Now we’ll be letting you know the details of this little scheme nearer the time, but that’s given you the general idea. You give the Gun to us, or we’ll be terribly upset, and we’ll let you know it, too, via one of these small but perfectly formed mannequins.” The young man waved one hand toward the doll. “Got that?”

  She nodded, swallowing and then coughing. “Yes,” she croaked.

  “Oh, and may we counsel you not to run to that ghastly cousin of yours? Even the resourceful Geis won’t be able to help you against the people we work for, or protect you well enough to prevent us getting in touch with you through the mannequin. Besides which, we do have plans for old Geisy as well, actually. So all in all we really do think you’d be best advised to stick with us. What do you say?”

  He paused, then put one hand to his ear. “Sorry?” he said. “Didn’t hear you there…”

  She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “All right.”

  “Super. We’ll be in touch again, Lady Sharrow,” he told her. “Every now and again we’ll make our presence felt. Just to keep you convinced this hasn’t been a dream, and we are quite serious.” He smiled and spread his arms wide. “I really would urge you to do your utmost to cooperate with us, Lady Sharrow. I mean, just think; supposing these started to fall into the hands of your enemies?” He looked at the doll lying in the hands of his twin, then gazed back into her eyes, shaking his head. “Life could become very unpleasant indeed, I’d imagine. You agree, I take it?”

  She nodded.

  “Jolly good!” The young man clapped his hands then pulled the sleeve of his gray jacket up and looked at a wrist-screen. He started to whistle as he watched the display for a while.

  After a minute or so, he nodded a few times, then crossed his arms and smiled up at her again.

  “There, my dear; that’s probably given all of the above time to sink into your memory.” He flashed his broad smile, then nodded to his image, who cradled the doll in both hands and carefully placed it on the metal deck between his booted feet.

  “Twin,” said the other young man, “the lights, please.”

  The one who hadn’t spoken raised the heel of his right boot over the doll.

  She had time to suck in air but not to scream before he brought his foot stamping down on the doll’s head.

  Something beyond pain detonated inside her skull.

  She woke to a dim glow. The doorways to the adjoining tanks were still closed off by the metal shutters. There was no sign of the two young men, their deck-chairs or the gas cylinder. The naked plastic doll with the squashed, shattered head lay by her gun on the deck.

  She drew herself up on her hands and stayed that way for a while, half lying, half supported by her arms.

  She picked up the gun and the doll. The gun was still loaded; she put it in her jacket, then tested the doll, pressing it gingerly. It seemed to have stopped working. Circuitry foam sparkled dully inside the broken head.

  She put the doll in her satchel and struggled to her feet, staggering. She reached into a pocket and pulled out the old heirloom timepiece. It had been smashed, the glass face broken. She shook it, then her head, then put the watch back in her pocket.

  She rinsed her mouth in a puddle of relatively clean-looking water.

  She couldn’t find any way to open the shutters over the doors, so she climbed the clanging metal stairway toward the tanker deck above, stopping to rest at each turn.

  She hauled herself out onto the deck as the dawn broke pink and sharp above. She walked unsteadily along the deck, heading toward the tanker’s distant superstructure where a few lights burned. She breathed deeply and tried not to sway too much as she walked.

  Then a man jumped out from behind a pipe cluster about ten meters in front of her. He was dressed like a refugee from the worst fancy-dress party in the history of the world, clad in a baggy suit of violently clashing red and green stripes. He lifted what looked like an artificial leg and pointed it at her, telling her to stop or he’d shoot.

  She stared at him for a moment, then laughed loudly and told him where to stick his third leg.

  He shot her.

  6

  Solo

  Continual noise and constant vibration. But something hushing, reassuring, comforting about these surrounding sensations, as though they were the acceptable successors of a womb-remembered external busy-ness, a comforting reminder that all was well and being attended to.

  She became gradually aware that she was warm and prone and—when she stirred her tired, tingling limbs—naked under some smooth cloth. She tried to open her eyes but could not. The drone of noise called her back to sleep; the shaking all around her became a rocking, like the arms of somebody she had never known.

  Her fingers and hands tingled.

  She had been playing in the snow in the grounds of Tzant; she and Geis had been throwing snowballs at Breyguhn and the Higres and the Frenstechow children, a running battle that had gone on round the great maze and down into the formal gardens. It had been a startlingly cold winter that year; there were days when if you spat you could hear the spittle crack and freeze before it hit the snow, and the huge house smelled of the tape the servants had sealed the window frames with, to keep out drafts.

  Geis was fifteen or sixteen then; she was eleven, Breyguhn nine. Geis and she end up in the gazebo, fending off the others as they close in. Geis looks into her eyes, his face glowing; a snowball whizzes over his head. To the death, cuz! he shouts, and she nods; and he tries to kiss her but she giggles and pushes him away and quickly gathers more snow together, while Breyguhn screams imprecations in the distance and snowballs thud into the wooden boards of the gazebo.

  She woke slowly, turning over in the narrow cot. There were voices talking somewhere beyond the wall. An antiseptic, hospital smell came off the sheets beneath her. She remembered something about a puddle and throwing up into it, but she felt all right now, just hungry and slightly queasy at the same time. There was a light behind her; that was what she had turned away from. Her hair, beneath her on the thin pillow, smelled washed. Her eyes insisted on closing again. She let them; the view had been hazy anyway. The voices outside her head went on.

  The Lazy Gun came and talked to her in her sleep.

  In her dream the Lazy Gun had legs and a little head, like a doll’s. (She started to wake again, remembering the doll; she wanted her doll. She didn’t try to open her eyes, but felt around her for the doll; under the pillow, down the sides of her naked body where the sheets were tucked in, against the vibrating metal wall to one side and the metal bars of the cot on the other…but there was no doll. She gave up.)

  The Gun was still there when she returned to the dream. It cocked its tiny doll-head to one side and asked her why she was going to look for it.

  I can’t remember, she told the Gun.

  It walked around for a while on its spindly legs making annoyed, clicking noises and then stopped and said
, You shouldn’t.

  I shouldn’t what? she said.

  You shouldn’t look for me, it told her. I bring nothing but trouble. Remember Lip City.

  She got very angry and shouted something at it and it disappeared.

  There had been eight Lazy Guns. A Lazy Gun was a little over half a meter in length, about thirty centimeters in width and twenty centimeters in height. Its front was made up of two stubby cylinders which protruded from the smooth, matt-silver main body. The cylinders ended in slightly bulged black-glass lenses. A couple of hand controls sitting on stalks, an eyesight curving up on another extension, and a broad, adjustable metal strap all indicated that the weapons had been designed to be fired from the waist.

  There were two controls, one on each hand grip; a zoom wheel and a trigger.

  You looked through the sight, zoomed in until the target you had selected just filled your vision, then you pressed the trigger. The Lazy Gun did the rest instantaneously.

  But you had no idea whatsoever exactly what was going to happen next.

  If you had aimed at a person, a spear might suddenly materialize and pierce them through the chest, or some snake’s spit fang might graze their neck, or a ship’s anchor might appear falling above them, crushing them, or two enormous switch-electrodes would leap briefly into being on either side of the hapless target and vaporize him or her.

  If you had aimed the gun at something larger, like a tank or a house, then it might implode, explode, collapse in a pile of dust, be struck by a section of a tidal wave or a lava flow, be turned inside out or just disappear entirely, with or without a bang.

  Increasing scale seemed to rob a Lazy Gun of its eccentric poesy; turn it on a city or a mountain and it tended simply to drop an appropriately sized nuclear or thermonuclear fireball onto it. The only known exception had been when what was believed to have been a comet nucleus had destroyed a city-sized berg-barge on the water world of Trontsephori.

  Rumor had it that some of the earlier Lazy Guns, at least, had shown what looked suspiciously like humor when they had been used; criminals saved from firing squads so that they could be the subjects of experiments had died under a hail of bullets, all hitting their hearts at the same time; an obsolete submarine had been straddled by depth charges; a mad king obsessed with metals had been smothered under a deluge of mercury.

  The braver physicists—those who didn’t try to deny the existence of Lazy Guns altogether—ventured that the weapons somehow accessed different dimensions; they monitored other continua and dipped into one to pluck out their chosen method of destruction and transfer it to this universe, where it carried out its destructive task then promptly disappeared, only its effects remaining. Or they created whatever they desired to create from the ground-state of quantum fluctuation that invested the fabric of space. Or they were time machines.

  Any one of these possibilities was so mind-boggling in its implications and ramifications—provided that one could understand or ever harness the technology involved—that the fact a Lazy Gun was light but massy, and weighed exactly three times as much turned upside down as it did the right way up, was almost trivial by comparison.

  Unfortunately—for the cause of scientific advancement—when a Lazy Gun felt it was being interfered with it destroyed itself; what appeared to be a matter/ anti-matter reaction took place, turning the parts of the gun not actually annihilated into plasma and causing a blast of the sort normally associated with a medium-yield fission device; it was this kind of explosion which had devastated Lip City, though most of the subsequent illnesses and deaths caused by radiation had resulted not directly from the initial detonation but from the scattering of fissile material from the cores of the City University Physics Department’s research reactors.

  (And she was there again; distracted—from that sweetly succulent pummeling—to gaze at the line of desert hills beyond the softly billowing white curtains and the stone balustrade of the hotel-room balcony. She watched the faint crease of dawn-light above as it was suddenly swamped by the stuttering pulses of silent fire from beyond the horizon. She looked—dazed and dazzled and wondering, still in her shaken instant of ignorance and cresting bliss—from that distant eruption of light to Miz’s face as he reared above her, eyes tightly closed, his mouth stretched open in a silent shout, the sheen of sweat on his hollowed cheek lit by the flickering light of annihilation, and as release came flooding—with knowledge, with realization, so that her squeezed, convulsing cry became a scream of terror—she experienced a grain of vanishing, collapsing ecstasy, immediately swept away and lost in a storm of guilt and self-disgust.)

  The Lazy Guns had not had a happy history; they had turned up during the Interregnum following the Second War, seemingly products of Halo; the vast Thrial-polar Machine Intelligence artifact/habitat destroyed by whatever mysterious weapon had been fired from—and which appeared to have obliterated—the moons of the gas giant planet Phrastesis. The Guns had floated like soap bubbles through the spasming chaos of the war-ravaged system in their drifting, otherwise empty lifeboats, and one by one they had been captured, stolen, used, abused, hidden, lost, rediscovered and used and abused again.

  And one by one they had met their ends: one had been turned on Thrial by the insane theocrat into whose hands it had fallen; the weapon had refused, or been unable, to destroy the sun, and Gun and theocrat had simply vanished. Two Guns had annihilated themselves when people had tried to take them apart, one had taken a lucky hit during an air-strike, another was believed to have been deliberately attacked by a suicidal assassin while in the armory of the noble family which had discovered it, and one—its lenses staring down a pair of electron microscopes—had created a series of nano-bang matricial holes in the World Court’s Anifrast Institute of Technology before whatever bizarre event had occurred which led to the Institute, all it had contained (except for the twenty-three gently radiating holes) and a precise circle of land approximately thirteen hundred meters in diameter disappearing to be replaced by an attractive, perfectly hemispherical saltwater lake stocked with a variety of polar-oceanic plankton, fish and mammals.

  Perhaps it was simply bad luck, but despite the fact the sheer capability of the Guns ought to have ensured their owner could effectively become ruler of the entire system, the weapons had invariably been the downfall of whoever had come into possession of them.

  The Guns even had their own small, schismed cult; the Fellowship of the Gun believed the devices were the ambiguous, testing gifts from a superior alien civilization, and that when the final Gun was found and venerated—worshipped rather than used—the aliens would finally appear amongst the people of the system and lead them to paradise, while the Free Fellowship of the Gun believed simply that the Guns were gods, and (now) that the one remaining Gun was the God.

  The Huhsz faith regarded both these cults as idolatry in nature; as far as they were concerned the Gun stolen from them by Sharrow’s ancestor had simply been a temple treasure, albeit the principal one. They wanted it back because they regarded it as their property and because it had become an article of faith that unless it was recovered—or the Dascen female line wiped out—their messiah could not be born on time, on or before the advent of the decamillennium.

  She opened her eyes groggily, to focus on a man sitting less than a meter away. He was dressed in a uniform that hurt her eyes; bright violet and shining yellow. His face was round and dark and very serious. “Who are you?” she whispered.

  “I am God,” he said, nodding politely.

  She looked at him for a while, listening to the hum that was all around her. The place they were in lurched.

  “God?” she said.

  The man nodded. “God,” he said.

  “I see,” she said, drifting away again.

  The hum became a lullaby.

  She woke slowly, turning over in the narrow cot. There were voices talking somewhere beyond the wall. An antiseptic, hospital smell came off the sheets. She remembered being a bubble,
blown through the system on the blast-fronts of the war’s erupting energies. She was one of the team now. She could remember what the doctor had told them, before they became infected with it; every word…

  “You won’t notice it most of the time,” the doc told her/them. “It’s not telepathy and it’s not some doze-head feeling of mystical oneness with your fellows; it’s just the ability to know how somebody’ll react in a given situation. It’s a shortcut; a way of building up instant rapport without having to wait for a few years—probably longer than the war—and still never get there because the attrition rate’s so high you never achieve a stable combat unit.

  “You want to know the truth? It’s an anti-fuck-up agent. Ever watched dumb-screen, where ops always go according to plan and nobody ever shoots their own people by mistake? That’s what SNB helps make come true. It makes war a little bit more like it’s supposed to be; less entropic, less chaotic; more tidy. I trust some of you are mature enough to realize that this makes it a top-brass wet-dream…”

  “That’s me,” she whispered to herself. “I’m one of the team now. Eight of us.”

  She woke up into a white space with no walls but a low ceiling; there was a Lazy Gun there. She couldn’t tell which one.

  Nothing but trouble, sang the Gun, dancing round her on its skinny, wobbly legs. Nothing but death and destruction and trouble. She grabbed at the Gun; it tried to dance away from her, giggling, but she caught it and held it and strapped it to her. A wall which was a mirror appeared as soon as she touched the weapon. The Lazy Gun’s controls were as she remembered them; delicate, somehow, and beautiful. Its sides and top surface were covered in fabulously complicated scrollwork, incised into the silver casing. It was—she realized as she turned with it—a hunting gun. She pointed it at the mirror and smiled at herself as she pushed the trigger.

  She woke up and looked round the small cabin; it was a cube barely two meters square. There was another bunk above hers, a light-metal drawer-unit with her clothes folded neatly inside, a plastic chair, a locked door with a single plastic hook on it and an air vent. That was all; no window.