Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  “You are very brave, Lady Sharrow,” Dornay said to her. They stood by one of the food-laden tables, watching a juggling troupe perform on a small stage raised in the middle of the reception hall’s dance floor. People had left a discreet clearing round the host and his guest.

  “Brave, Mister Dornay?” she said. He had dressed in pure white.

  “My lady,” Dornay said, looking into her eyes. “I have requested my guests say nothing about the unfortunate circumstances you find yourself in. Nor shall I, but let me say only that your composure would astonish me, had I not known the family you come from.”

  She smiled. “You think old Gorko would be proud of me?”

  “It was my misfortune only to meet that great man once,” Dornay said. “A bird cannot land once on a great tree and claim to know it. But I imagine that he would, yes.”

  She watched the spinning wands of the jugglers as they flashed to and fro beneath the spotlights. “We believe the Passports my…pursuers require are safe, for now.”

  “Thank the gods,” Dornay said. “They appear not to have been initiated but I feared a trick, and we are not so far from their scrofulous World Shrine. I have taken every precaution, of course, but…Well, perhaps I should have canceled this evening.”

  “Ah, now, Mister Dornay, I believe I forbade you…”

  “Indeed.” Bencil Dornay laughed lightly. “Indeed. What was I to do? My family no longer exists to serve yours, dear lady, but I am your servant nevertheless.”

  “You are too kind. As I say, I believe I am safe for now. And I’m grateful for your hospitality.”

  “My house is yours, dear lady; I am yours to command.”

  She looked at him then, as the jugglers drew gasps with their complicated closing routine.

  “Do you mean that, Mister Dornay?” she asked him, searching his eyes.

  “Oh, absolutely, dear lady,” he said, eyes shining. “I am not merely being polite; I mean these things literally. It would be my pleasure and an honor to serve you in any way I can.”

  She looked away for a moment. “Well,” she said, and smiled waveringly at him. The lights came up as the jugglers finished their display to decorously wild applause. “I…I do have a favor to ask you.” She had to raise her voice a little to make herself heard.

  Dornay looked delighted, but from the corner of her eye she could see guests—released from the spell of the juggling troupe—moving a little closer to her and Dornay and looking expectantly at the two of them. She let him see her gaze flick around the people. “Perhaps later,” she said, smiling.

  She stood on the terrace, a drink in her hand, the darkness at her back as she leaned against the shoulder-high parapet, the reception room like a giant bright screen in front of her. People were dancing inside. Clouds hid the junklight.

  Miz came out, wandering across the terrace, smoking something sweet-smelling from a little cup-kettle. He leaned back beside her and offered her the gently fuming cup, but she shook her head.

  “Haven’t seen you up dancing yet,” he said, breathing deeply.

  “That’s right.”

  “You used to dance so well,” he said, glancing at her. “We used to dance so well.”

  “I remember.”

  “Remember that dance competition in Malishu? The endurance one where the prize was to go to dinner with the brave and heroic pilots of the Clipper Squadrons?” He laughed at the memory.

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember.”

  “Hell,” he said, turning round to look out over the dark valley. “We’d have won, too, if the MPs hadn’t arrived looking for us.”

  “We were AWOL; taught me never to trust you with dates again.”

  “I got confused; we’d crossed the date-line during the party the night before.” Miz looked bewildered and squinted up at the dark clouds. “Several times, actually, I think.”

  “Hmm,” she said.

  “Anyway,” he said. “Want to try it again?” He nodded back at the hall and the dancing people. “This lot look feeble; give them a couple of hours and they’ll be falling like raindrops.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not right now.”

  He sighed and turned round, taking another snort from the cup-kettle. “Well, if it comes to the end of the night,” he said, pretending snootiness, “and you don’t get offered a lift home; don’t come crying to me.” He nodded once, primly emphatic, and headed back to the reception hall, practicing his dance steps on the way, drink held out in one hand, the fuming cup-kettle in the other. She watched him go.

  She had been remembering a ball in Geis’s father’s house, in Siynscen, when she’d been fifteen or sixteen. Breyguhn had fallen in love with Geis that summer—or thought she had, at least—when they had all stayed at the estate. Sharrow had told her she was silly, and far too young; Geis was almost twenty. What would he want with a child like her? And anyway, Geis was an altogether tiresome person; an awkward, over-eager fool with funny eyes and a plump behind. In fact she herself was quite fed up with him wanting to dance with her at these sorts of functions, and wanting to kiss her and give her stupid presents.

  Nevertheless, Breyguhn was determined she would declare her undying love for Geis at the ball, stubbornly maintaining that Geis was kind and dashing and poetic and clever. Sharrow had poured scorn on all this, but then, when she had stood in their dressing-room, all fussed around by servants (and enjoying the attention and the luxury of it, because their father had lost a lot of money that year, and had dismissed all their own staff save his android butler), and seen her half-sister in her first ball-gown (albeit borrowed, like her own, from a better-off second cousin), with her hair piled up like a woman’s, her budding breasts pushed by the bodice to form a cleavage, and her eyes, made-up, glowing with confidence and a kind of power, Sharrow had thought, with some amusement and only a hint of jealousy, that perhaps dear, tedious old Geis might just find Brey attractive after all.

  She’d watched Geis as he and some of his officer-cadet friends entered the party. They were in the uniform of the Alliance Navy; the ball itself was a fund-raising event for the Tax Alliance and Geis had been into space for a couple of months on an Alliance warship.

  She realized then that she hadn’t really looked at Geis for a year or two; not properly looked at him.

  She had never liked uniforms, but Geis looked almost handsome in his. He moved less awkwardly; he sported a dark, trimmed beard which quite suited him and made him look older, and he had lost the puppy fat he’d carried through his mid-teens. She had drifted close to him, unseen, early on in the evening before the ball properly started, hearing him laughing lustily with his friends and hearing them laughing at what he said, and—perhaps, she told herself later, in the spell of those gales of male laughter—had determined then not to treat Geis with her usual disdain, should he ask her for a dance. She would see what happened, she thought, walking away from the young men. She would do nothing so petty and low as try to entrap her cousin just to prove something to her foolish little half-sister, but if he really had improved so, and if he did, at some point, maybe, ask her for a dance…

  He asked her for the first dance. For the rest of the evening they hardly left each other’s side between dances, or each other’s arms during them.

  She watched, as she stepped and moved and was held and turned and displayed and admired on the dance floor: Breyguhn’s eyes took on a look of surprise at first; then that slowly became hurt, until that was replaced by scorn and what she must have thought was recognition; upon which her eyes filled with tears, and finally with hate.

  She danced on, exulting, not caring. Geis looked as dashing and handsome as Breyguhn had said. He had changed, he had more to talk about, had become more like a man than a boy. Even his remaining gaucheness seemed like enthusiasm; gusto, indeed. She listened to him and looked at him and danced with him and thought about him, and decided that had she not been exactly who she was, had she been just a little
more like everybody else and just a little less difficult to please, she could almost have fallen for her cousin.

  Breyguhn left the ball early with their father and his mistress, in a storm of tears. A duenna was left to wait for Sharrow. She and Geis danced until they were the last couple left on the dance floor and the band were making deliberate mistakes and taking long pauses between numbers. She even let Geis kiss her—though she didn’t respond—when they went out to the dawn-lit garden for some fresh air (her chaperone coughing delicately from a nearby bower), then she’d had herself taken home.

  She had seen Geis face-to-face only twice in the two years after that; she had been away at finishing school, then started at Yadayeypon University, in both places discovering the fresh, unexpected and surprising pleasures of sex, and the power her looks and her birthright (judiciously deployed) gave her over young—and not so young—men who were vastly more moodily interesting and intellectually stimulating than cousin Geis, the part-time Navy goon and geekishly successful businessman.

  The following year, at her father’s funeral, they’d exchanged a few words (though she’d overheard rather more), and when she did finally agree to meet him properly—at the launch of an airship (which he had named after her! The embarrassment!)—she had been rather curt with him, claiming she had been too busy to answer his letters, and just hated talking on the phone. He had looked hurt, and she’d felt a terrible, cruel urge to laugh.

  She’d seen him once more before the war, a few months later, at a New Year party he’d thrown in a villa in the Blue Hills, in Piphram.

  Then the Five Percent War had finally broken out, and she had joined the anti-Tax forces, partly because theirs seemed the more romantic cause, partly because she considered them the more politically progressive side, and partly as a kind of revenge.

  And if it had done nothing else—she thought, as she drained her glass and smiled ruefully at the great wide screen that was the window into Bencil Dornay’s party—the war had finally signaled the end of her wilfully extended and determinedly wanton girlhood.

  And more, she thought, smiling sadly at the dancing, happy people on the other side of the windows, remembering that last engagement, frantic and terrible and pitiless in the cold and the silence of the dark seconds of space between Nachtel and Nachtel’s Ghost.

  And more.

  She made to finish her drink, but the glass was already dry.

  A little later she returned to the party.

  “Your grandfather was a truly great man, my lady. The great are always seen as a threat by the lesser; they can’t help it. It’s not just jealousy, though there was much of that in your grandfather’s case. It is an instinctive reaction; they know (without knowing that they know) that there is something awesome in their midst, and they must make way for it. That is cause for resentment; an ignoble and small-minded emotion, like jealousy, and just as endemic. Your grandfather was brought down by a great mass of small people, dear lady. They were worms; he was a raptor. He had the vision to look out of our furrow, and the courage to do what had to be done, but the worms fear change; they think worm thoughts, ever burrowing and recycling, never raising their heads from the loam. You know, your grandfather could have lived the life of a great duke; he could have maintained the worth of the house and made it gradually greater still, he could have encouraged science, the arts, built great buildings, endowed foundations, become a World Counselor, helped control the Court; and no doubt have enjoyed what personal happiness was ever to be his. Instead he gambled it all; the way the truly great must if they are not to lie on their deathbed and know that they have wasted their talents, that the life they have lived has been one many a lesser man could have lived. We call what transpired failure, but I tell you it cannot fail to inspire those of us who keep his memory. He lives on, in our hearts, and he will receive the respect he deserves one day, when the world and the system have changed to become a temple fit for his memory to be venerated within.”

  Sharrow stood before the giant portrait of her grandfather in a private room of the overhang house. Bencil Dornay had offered to show her his personal shrine while a group of mime artists were performing in the reception room.

  Gorko was depicted in the painting as a giant of a man with a huge, carved face and great bristling whiskers; his body looked exaggeratedly muscled under a tight riding tunic and the bandamyion mount beside him looked out of scale. Something like fire shone from Gorko’s staring eyes. The portrait was at one end of the narrow room, draped in plush hangings. Apart from the painting, the room was empty.

  “Hmm,” Sharrow said. “Fate preserve us from greatness.”

  Dornay shook his head. “Dear lady, don’t let the mean-of-spirit infect you.” He glanced at the tall portrait. “Greatness is his legacy, and our hope.”

  “Do we really need greatness, Mister Dornay?” she asked him.

  He turned slowly and walked toward the doors at the far end of the room, and she followed him. “We must need it, my lady. It is all that leads us onward. With it we may dream. Without it, we merely subsist.”

  “But so often,” she said, “the people we call great seem to lead us to destruction.”

  “Their own, indeed,” Dornay said, opening the doors and ushering her into a small hallway. “And those around them, I dare say. But destruction can be a positive act, too; the clearing out of rot, the excising of diseased tissue, the brushing away of the old to make room for the new. We are all so loath to offend, to cause any pain. The great have the vision to see beyond such pettiness; do we curse the doctor for some small pain when it saves us a greater one? Does any worthwhile adult blame his parents for the occasional slap as a child?”

  They descended by elevator to the party. “Your rhetorical questions disarm me,” Sharrow told him.

  “You were to ask me something, I believe, good lady,” Dornay said, as they walked into the dimly lit rear of the hall. In the center, a complicated formal dance was in progress; people walked and skipped in knots that tied and untied across the floor. Sharrow thought the band looked bored.

  “Yes,” she said. She stopped and looked at him. His eyes twinkled and he blinked rapidly. There was nobody nearby. She took a breath. “My grandfather left some information with your father; he passed it on to you.”

  Dornay looked uncertain. “To me?” he asked.

  “By blood-fealty,” she said.

  He was silent for a few moments. Then his eyes widened. He took a deep breath. “In me!” he gasped. “In me, dear lady!” His eyes stared into hers. “How? What do I—? But, dear lady; this is a privilege! A singular honor! Tell me; tell me what I have to do!”

  She looked down for a second, wondering how to put it. All the lines she’d rehearsed for this moment sounded wrong.

  Then Dornay made a gulping noise. “Of course! Dear lady…”

  She looked up to see him biting his lower lip. Blood welled. He drew a white handkerchief from his robe, offered it to her. “If you will, my lady,” he nodded delicately, looking at her lips.

  She understood, and put the handkerchief in her mouth, wetting the end. When the end of the handkerchief was heavy with her saliva, she handed it back to him. He put it quickly to the cut. She wanted to look away, but found herself gritting her teeth instead. Dornay sucked on the handkerchief for a while, then dabbed at his lip with it until the blood stopped flowing.

  “Whatever I have to tell, I shall tell only you, dear lady,” he told her. He took a few deep breaths. “Now, shall we…?”

  The guests were stretched round the circular dance floor like the membrane of a bubble; she and Dornay were motioned forward so that they could see the dancers clearly.

  They watched the dance develop for a minute or so. Dornay looked around as though searching for something, seeming to grow increasingly agitated. Finally he said, “Dear lady, shall we dance?” and took her hand.

  “What?” she said. “But—”

  He pulled her out from the line of peop
le facing the groups of dancers; he drew her to him, taking hold of her waist. She put her hands to his neck almost automatically. There was a strange sheen about his face, and a look of emptiness in his eyes. She felt herself shudder.

  He stepped back, and began to move into and through the formal dancing groups; bumping into people, oblivious, drawing the start of protests from dancers whose backs he connected with, until they realized it was their host they were about to berate.

  He moved on, pulling and pushing and maneuvering her with him while she did her best to follow with her flawed, limp-hesitant step; they swept away across the wide floor, disrupting and destroying the carefully worked-out patterns of the ancient dance they had invaded.

  Pushed and pulled, twirled and swayed this way and that, and trying to keep her feet out from under his, Sharrow had little chance to notice anybody else’s reactions as together she and Dornay brought the rest of the dancers to a staring, bewildered, incredulous halt. The band faltered, the tune stopped. Bencil Dornay danced on, round this way; back that. The band leader watched them, trying to nod in time somehow, then she had the band attempt some suitable tune. A few of the watching people started to form pairs and began to dance as well.

  Sharrow looked into Bencil Dornay’s sweating, blank-eyed face, and felt a wave of revulsion course through her that almost made her gag.

  Their course became a spiral, tightening gradually as Dornay turned and turned and turned in a closing, whorling twist of motion. They reached the coiled center of their figure, and stopped. Then suddenly Dornay let go of her, spun round once, his white robe belling out, and dropped to the floor as though felled with an axe. His head hit the hardwood with a crack; she felt the impact through her feet and the bones of her legs. Somebody screamed.

  She stood there open-mouthed, pushed back as people flooded forward to the white body lying under the dance floor lights. She stared, shaking her head.