Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  The lightning came again, and there was Miz, standing on the outside of his balcony, holding on to its railing with one hand while reaching out toward her with the other. She had time to see the expression on his face; eager, happy and mischievous, then as the blue light disappeared she heard his breath and felt the draft of air as he leaped over to her balcony. She reached out and grabbed him, fastening her arms round him.

  “Madman!” she hissed into his ear.

  He chuckled, swung over the railing and hugged her.

  “Isn’t this romantic?” He sighed happily. He smelled of sweet male sweat and smoke and—faintly—of scent.

  “Get back to your room!” she told him, squirming in his embrace. “And use the doors!”

  He moved sensuously against her, working her back against the bark-clad wall; he nuzzled her neck, smoothed his hands down her flanks and to her thighs and behind. “Mmm, you feel good.”

  “Miz!” she said, pushing his arms down and away from her, taking his wrists in her hands. He made a plaintive noise and licked at her neck.

  Then he just broke her grip on his wrists and took her face in his hands, kissing her.

  She let him for a while, and let his tongue explore her mouth, but then (seeing again, without wishing to, the billowing curtains and the stone balustrade of another hotel bedroom, light-minutes and eight years away from here, and his face above her, beautiful and ecstatic and lit by the stuttering spasms of annihilation light swamping the dawn above Lip City) gradually she calmed the tempo of the kiss down, and guided his hands behind her shoulders and put her arms around him, and moved her head to one side of his, and rested her cheek on his shoulder and patted his back.

  She felt him heave a deep sigh.

  “What’s a chap got to do to get to you these days, Sha—Ysul?” he said, sounding sad and a little bewildered.

  She hugged him tighter and shrugged, shook her head, knowing he could feel each movement.

  The Entraxrln sky above them lit up again as the lightning moved closer.

  “Hey,” he said, raising his head. “Remember that time in the inn in Malishu, in the top story, with the fireworks and all that stuff?”

  She nodded her head.

  “That was fun, eh?” he said softly.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, it was.”

  She kept hold of him and he kept hold of her, and she looked out to where the lightning played, and saw another couple of flashes, and even heard a little distant rumbling, and then eventually he shivered in her arms and kissed her forehead and let go of her. “I’d better get back and make sure Dloan’s still snoring,” he whispered.

  “Come by the door, then,” she said, taking his arm and trying to pull him toward the open windows. He resisted, staying where he was.

  “Can’t,” he said. “Our door’s locked. Either I go back the way I came or I sleep with you.”

  “Or on the floor,” she told him.

  “Or with Zef,” he whispered brightly. “Hey, or both of you!”

  “You have my bed,” she said. “I’ll sleep with Zef.”

  “You did that once before,” he said, sounding unconvincingly hurt, “and I was very upset.”

  “Only because we wouldn’t let you watch.”

  “True,” he agreed. “Is that supposed to make it better?”

  “Are you going in through this window or not?”

  “Not. I’m going back the way I came; Dloan’s snoring needs me.”

  “Miz—” But he had already slung one leg over the balcony; she felt the wind on her cheek as he swung the other one over too. “Maniac!” she whispered. “Be care—”

  The lightning came and he made his leap; he gasped, then she heard the skin-on-railing noise again, and he whispered triumphantly, “There. Almost too easy.”

  “You’re insane, Kuma.”

  “Never denied it. But I’m so graceful. Good-night, my lady.”

  “ Good-night, madman.”

  She heard him blow a kiss, then move away. She waited. A moment later there was a muffled thud and she heard him say, “Ouch!”

  She smiled into the darkness, quite sure that he had bumped into something deliberately just for a laugh, just for her.

  The lightning swept above, flooding the enclosed landscape with a quick, sharp, monochrome light that seemed to be over before it had fully begun, and—in providing such vanishingly brief instants of contrast—somehow only intensified the darkness.

  12

  Snow Fall

  They had been lovers for a few months. It was only the second time they had been back to Miykenns since the perfume festival and their ride in the little canal-boat through the long, dark, scented vein of the canal. They delighted in their luck; Malishu was celebrating again when they returned, just entering a huge retro binge of ancient costumes and sporadically cheap food and drugs as people celebrated the 7021st Founding Week.

  They had dined and danced and drunk; they had taken a short ride in a canal-boat and watched vivid holos flicker and pulse in the air above the city, depicting the arrival of the first explorers, scientists and settlers seven millennia earlier. The holos went on to display a brief history of Miykenns which they both watched as they strolled hand in hand down the narrow streets back to their inn beneath the bare hill near the city Signaling Museum.

  The last part of the holo display was made up of edited highlights of the current war. They stood on the threshold of the inn, watching. Above the city they saw darkly shining fleets of liberated excise clippers flying in formation; the bombardment of the laser pits on the Phrastesis-Nachtel asteroid bases; rioting miners on Nachtel’s Ghost; and a Tax cruiser blowing up. “Hey,” Miz said, as the blossoming light of the cruiser’s death faded slowly above Malishu. “Wasn’t that the one we got, out past the Ghost?”

  She watched the secondary detonations burst like sparkling flowers within the sphere of glowing wreckage that had been the Tax cruiser. “Yes,” she said, cuddling closer to him, fitting herself around him. “One of ours, indeed.” She rubbed one hand over the chest of his uniform jacket. “Anyway, let’s get back to the room, eh?” She turned away, taking a grip of his shoulder and trying to pull him in through the door.

  “Hell,” he said, allowing himself to be pulled. “We took those pix; shouldn’t we get royalties or something?”

  Their room was on the top floor, a tall, wide space roofed with translucent woven Entraxrln membrane, bowed like a loose tent over the supporting poles and beams.

  They made love sitting on the end of the bed, facing a wall of mirrors; he beneath her and she on his lap, facing the same way so that they could see themselves in the dim city-light filtering down through the translucent roof as he put his arms up underneath hers, gripping her shoulders, holding her breasts, rubbing her flat belly, sliding down to the tight curls of hair and moist cleft beneath while her head kept turning to one side then the other, kissing him as her hands moved up and down his sides and thighs, holding his balls as he flexed slowly under her and she moved, clenching and loosening, up and down on him.

  They were panting, straining, watching each other, gaze fastened to the same place on the surface of the mirror, watching with a kind of eager, ravenous solemnity as they concentrated, wrapped up in the approaching moment, conscious only of themselves and each other; the whole world, the entire system and universe shrunk to this pulsed, focused joining with nothing else, nowhere else, no-when and no one else mattering, when the fireworks burst overhead.

  The light was furious, shocking. They both stopped moving to gaze open-mouthed at the membrane fabric above. Then, as the noise cracked and thundered down into the room, they looked back into the mirror together and started laughing. They fell back onto the bed, giggling under the multi-colored lights inundating the soft roof above them.

  “What lousy timing,” she said, laughing so hard she laughed him out of her. “Shit.”

  “ Corn-screen would have had it happen just as we came,” he agreed.
He shifted underneath her and she rolled off.

  She lay on the bed beside him, gently bit one of his nipples. “You’re not giving up now are you?”

  “Hell, no, I don’t want to!” he said, gesturing at the roof, where red and green lights strobed and noise like gunfire rattled. “But this is fucking distracting!”

  She was still for a second, then bounced off the bed.

  “I’ve had an idea,” she told him.

  She stopped his ears with little bits of tissue she soaked with her own spittle, and then she did the same to her own ears. The noise of the fireworks was lessened, deadened.

  Then she picked up her knickers, lying on the floor at the side of the bed, held them with both hands, and ripped them.

  “Hey,” she heard him protest, voice booming dully. “I bought you those…”

  She put a finger to her mouth and shook her head.

  She tore the delicate, perfumed material into two strips. She put one black band over his eyes, tying it behind his head so that he was made quite blind, and then she did the same to herself, so that in that shared but separate, self-created darkness, and surrounded by that distanced, heavy, undersea sound, they made love with only touch as their guide.

  * * *

  She was blind. Blind and surrounded by mushy, roaring noises and she knew there were lights exploding all around. Some part of her wanted to find this funny because she’d been in just this situation before not all that long ago, but she couldn’t laugh.

  Anyway she couldn’t indulge herself, she had the others to worry about. Worrying for all of them; that was her job.

  Somebody was calling to her, quietly screaming her name.

  Iron taste in mouth. Smell of burning. She felt another part of herself start bawling at her to wake up; burning! Fire! Run! The roaring noise filled her head. Run!

  But there wasn’t anywhere to run to. She knew that.

  There was something else to worry about, too, but apart from knowing it was important, she couldn’t remember what it was.

  The voice in her ears shouted her name. Why couldn’t they leave her in peace? Her head tipped forward; it felt terribly heavy and large. Still a smell of burning, acrid and sharp.

  Her nose itched. She reached to scratch it and her left arm suddenly turned into a pipe full of acid, gushing pain into her. She tried to cry out but somehow she couldn’t. She was choking.

  She struggled to put her head back. Her helmet clunked hard against something that shouldn’t have been there. Of course; she was wearing a helmet. But it didn’t feel right.

  “Sharrow!” screamed a tiny voice through the roaring.

  “Yes, yes,” she muttered, coughing and spitting. She accidentally tried to make a be quiet motion with her left arm, and the pain tore through her. This time she was able to shout.

  She spat again. Noises tinkled and whined in her ears above the continual roaring and the voices shouting her name. At least she thought it was her name.

  “Sharrow?” she heard herself say.

  “Sharrow! Come in!—Was that her? Keep—! Miz!—debris!—from this range!—only water!—Are you crazy?”

  What a lot of babbling, she said to herself, and could feel her brow furrowing as she thought, Miz? Didn’t she have something she was supposed to tell him, some secret?

  She tried to open her eyes. But she shouldn’t even need to do that, should she?

  She was exhausted. Her left arm wouldn’t move, she felt incredibly heavy and cold and there were lots of other pains and discomforts clamouring for her attention now, too.

  “Sharrow! Fate, Shar; please answer; wake up!”

  Shut up, she told them. Can’t get any peace these days…

  . . . They sailed through a tunnel. It was dark, but a little paper lantern glowed above them and the air was sweet. He had joined her on the pillows, lean and hard and eager and gentle. They had lain together for a long time later, listening to the warm water gurgle beneath them and the tiny hum of the ship…

  The ship! Where was the ship? It should be here, all around her. She tried to shift in the hard, uncomfortable seat but the pain in her arm came back. She heard herself cry out.

  “Sharrow!” a voice said quite distinctly in her ears.

  “Miz?” she said. It was his voice. She wondered why she was blind and the ship wasn’t talking to her.

  “Sharrow? Can you hear me?”

  “Miz?” she said louder. Her mouth felt funny. The roaring in her ears pulsated away, heavy and insistent, like some too-quick surf pounding into her ears.

  “Sharrow; talk to me!”

  “All right!” she shouted angrily. Was the man deaf?

  “Thank Fate! Listen, kid; what’s your status?”

  “Status?” she said, confused. “Don’t know; what do you—?”

  “Shit. Okay; you’re spinning. First we’ve got to stop that. You’ve got to keep awake and stop the spin.”

  “Spin,” she said. Spin? Was that something to do with the secret she’d been keeping from him? She made a determined effort to open her eyes. She thought they were open but she still couldn’t see anything.

  She brought her right arm up; it was incredibly heavy. She tried to bring it to her face, but the arm wouldn’t move very far. It fell back, crashing into something and hurting her.

  She started to cry.

  “Sharrow!” the voice said. “Keep it together, girl!”

  “Don’t call me girl!”

  “I’ll call you anything I fucking want until you get that ship leveled.”

  “Prick,” she muttered. She pushed her head as far forward as she could and rammed her right arm up. Heavily gloved fingers thumped into her face-plate. It felt wrong; wrong shape, wrong place. Her nose hurt. Her arm was quivering with the effort of keeping it there against her helmet. She felt down to the helmet rim, took a deep breath, then pushed up.

  Snap. She cried out with the pain. Her nose burned; blood filled her mouth. Her arm crashed down into her lap.

  But the ship was back; it was there around her. The lid-screens swam into focus while the ship’s systems whispered and tingled and swarmed through her, filtering down through her awareness as the transceiver in her helmet spoke to the wafer-unit buried in the back of her skull. She felt around, looked at the lid-screens and listened to the music of systems status, the roaring in her ears reduced to dull background.

  She was a force at the core of sensation. It was like floating in the center of a huge sphere of color and movement and displayed symbols; a sphere made of in-holo’d screens, like windows to other dimensions, each one giving a summary of its state and singing a single note of song. She only had to look at one of those windows and will shift to be there, looking down onto the details of that landscape—itself often composed of more sub-windows—all the rest of the screens reduced to a smear of color on the outskirts of her vision, where a flash of movement or an associated change in their harmonics would signal something needing her attention.

  She floated in the middle of it all, taking stock.

  “Fucking hell,” she said. “What a mess.”

  “What?” Miz said in her ears.

  “Got status,” she said, looking round. The ship was a wreck. “Good fucking grief.” What to do first?

  “Reduce spin or you’ll black out again,” Miz said urgently.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. The spin was insane; she looked to the main tanks, but they were empty. The bow thrusts had some water left. She woke the motor up, swung it to operating temperature and pushed the fuel through. Nothing happened.

  Why wasn’t the burn working?

  Spinning too much. Wrong route. She closed off one valve, opened another; water hit the reaction chamber and plasma went bursting out from the ship’s nose. Miz was shouting something but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. The weight got worse and the roaring came back and became a noise like darkness.

  She felt something snap.

  Wrong way! she thought, vecto
ring the thrust right round.

  The worst of the weight lifted slowly; the roaring went back to what it had been before and then gradually faded. Her body started to lift in the seat, pulling out of the squashed, crumpled attitude it had taken up. Give it ten more seconds. She opened her eyes. The inside of the face plate was smeared with blood. She closed her eyes, sought out the suit-view in the lid-screen display and shifted down into it.

  The emergency controls gleamed in the back-up lighting. No holos. The flattie status screens were blown or pulsing red.

  She turned her head to the left.

  The port instrument bulkhead had come to pay her couch a visit. It felt like the port-rear ceiling had had the same idea. That was what was stopping her head from going right back; probably what had nearly ripped her helmet off, too. Her seat had been half-torn from its mountings by the impact, which had caught her left arm between the bulkhead and the armrest.

  She stared. Could that really be her arm disappearing into all that mangled-up shit? She ignored the memory of the pain and pulled hard.

  It was as though she’d slammed an axe into herself. Her head jerked around inside the helmet; she fought the scream but it forced its way out of her throat anyway.

  She blinked tears away. Her arm remained pinned.

  So much for that idea.

  She moved her head. Looked like her right arm wasn’t in terribly good shape anymore, either. She tried to move it but it wouldn’t cooperate. Numb. “Be like that, then,” she muttered, trying to sound unconcerned.

  Physically brave, she told herself. Physically brave. That was the one accurate phrase she remembered from when she’d hacked into her service file (though it had been embedded amongst a load of nonsense about her being impatient and arrogant; how dare they?). Physically brave. Remember that.

  She shifted out of helmet-view. The ship’s bow tank drained, the pipes emptied and the motor cut out. She reached to the main tanks, but of course there was nothing there. The back-up tanks were dry too. The ship was still spinning, but only once every eight seconds.

  “You did it!” Miz shouted. Broadcasting on radio; the comm laser was dead.