Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  “Why don’t you do the same?”

  The man needed no more prompting; he was out of the door in an instant. Miz turned to the other two. “Chaps, you and I are going to go out the back way.”

  The two men looked at each other.

  Miz frowned mightily. “There must be a back way.”

  “Yes, sire,” one of the men said, “but it’s through the tannery.”

  Miz sniffed the air. “Is that what it is?” he said. “I thought the beer was off.”

  “You stink.”

  “Blame the tannery,” Miz said as Zefla dried his hair.

  Sharrow poked at one of Miz’s locally made boots with the toe of her own. “These are falling apart,” she said. “I thought you only bought them two days ago.”

  Miz shrugged beneath his towel as Dloan handed him a glass of wine. “Yeah; don’t know what the hell I stepped in.”

  “So,” Sharrow said, “the local ruffians don’t want to play.” She sat down in the one comfortable easy chair in Miz and Dloan’s room.

  “Apart from playing Let’s Perforate Miz’s Head, correct,” Miz agreed. He looked at Sharrow as Zefla finished drying his hair. “I’m worried. Cenuij talked about the King having spies and informers; what if word of this gets back to the castle?”

  Sharrow shrugged. “What can we do?”

  Miz nodded at Dloan. “Why don’t we all go with Dlo tomorrow? We can call it a safari; get out of town for a few days, camp somewhere near deep country, let Dlo—maybe me too—head in, try and contact these revolutionaries.”

  “Cenuij doesn’t think much of the idea,” Zefla said, tossing Miz a scent spray.

  “Thanks,” Miz said. “Yeah, well, he wouldn’t, would he? I think it’s worth doing just to get away for a while.”

  “You really think we might be in danger after tonight?” Sharrow asked.

  “It’s possible,” Miz said, spraying under his arms.

  “What about Cenuij?” Dloan said.

  “He’s not in trouble.” Sharrow waved one hand. “We can leave a message for him with the innkeeper; it’s not worth the risk of using the comm gear.” Sharrow nodded, looking thoughtful. “Okay, we’ll go.”

  “Camping out in the bush for a few nights,” Zefla said, crossing her eyes. “Oh, the utter joy of it.”

  The airship drifted over the sunlit jungle, a blue-white bubble against the blue-white skies of tropical Caltasp after the rainy season. The canopy slid slowly by underneath, the tops of the highest trees only five meters or so beneath the keel of the open gondola, where she, Geis, Breyguhn and Geis’s martialer knelt, their long guns poking over the gunwales of the boat-shaped basket.

  The smells and sounds of the jungle wrapped up around them, mysterious and exciting and a little frightening.

  “We’re on a perfect heading,” Geis said, talking very quietly to her and Breyguhn. “The wind’s taking us over one of the best areas, and our shadow’s trailing us.” He looked at the martialer, a small, rotund, perpetually smiling man from Speyr who looked more like a comedy actor than a combat tutor. “Is that not so, martialer?”

  “Indeed, sire,” the martialer smiled. “A perfect heading.”

  When Geis had first introduced the martialer to her and Breyguhn, in the arbor of the Autumn Palace, he had asked him to prove his skills as he saw fit. The fat little fellow had smiled even more broadly, and—suddenly flourishing a stillete—whirled and thrown. A white-wing, fluttering past a trellis ten meters away, was suddenly pinned to the wood. Sharrow had been impressed and Geis delighted. Breyguhn had been shocked. “What did you do that for?” she’d said, almost in tears, but the little man had held up one finger, padded to the trellis and removed the knife with barely any effort. The white-wing, which had only just been held by one wing, had flown away…

  “There!” Sharrow said, pointing to the forest floor.

  They looked down as they passed slowly to one side of a clearing. There was a water hole, and on the dusty ground near it a large animal with smooth green skin lay dead, its guts spilled onto the ground. Another animal—smaller, but powerful-looking—stood in the pool of intestines, biting and tugging at something inside the fallen herbivore’s belly cavity. The predator raised its head to look at the balloon, its golden-red snout covered in green blood.

  “A rox!” Geis whispered. “Wonderful!”

  “Ugh,” Breyguhn said, watching from the other side of the gondola.

  The martialer took the airship’s control box from his pocket and flicked a switch. The drifting vessel hummed almost inaudibly above them, coming to a stop. The rox, its broad jaws still working as it chewed on its kill, looked up at them, unworried. It put its head to one side, still chewing.

  “Cousin?” Geis said to her.

  Sharrow shook her head. “No,” she said. “You.”

  Geis looked delighted. He turned and sighted along the long powder gun.

  Sharrow watched Breyguhn grimace, looking over the edge of the gondola but not really enjoying what she was seeing. Sharrow turned to look too.

  “You become one with the gun and the line and the target,” Geis whispered, aiming (the martialer sat nodding wisely). “Damn; he’s gone back inside the guts of the thing.”

  “Yeaurk,” Breyguhn said, sitting down on the other side of the gondola.

  “Don’t rock us!” Geis whispered urgently.

  The martialer put the airship controls down, raised both hands above his head and clapped them loudly together. Sharrow laughed; the rox’s head came up, freshly green, and looked at them again.

  “Got you,” whispered Geis. The gun roared. Geis bumped backward in the gondola; a cloud of smoke drifted down the wind. The rox had stopped chewing. It collapsed to the ground, front knees thumping into the dust; dark-red blood pumped from its head as it fell over, kicked once and was still.

  “Yes!”

  “Well done.”

  “Fine shot, sire.”

  “Ugh. Is it over? Have you done it? Is there a lot of blood?”

  “Take us over there, martialer; I want to get down and cut a couple of trophies.”

  “Sire.”

  “Poor animal; what chance did it have?” Breyguhn said, peeking over the gondola at the two corpses lying side by side.

  “The chance of not being seen,” Geis said happily, and shrugged.

  “It was quick,” Sharrow told Breyguhn, trying to ally herself with Geis’s maturity rather than with her half-sister’s youth, even though she was closer in age to Brey, who was only twelve.

  “Yes,” Geis said, preparing the rope ladder as the martialer guided the airship through the warm air toward the clearing. “It wouldn’t know what hit it.”

  “It still seems cruel to me,” Breyguhn said, crossing her arms.

  “Not at all,” Geis said. “It killed that heuskyn down there; I killed it.”

  “It’s the law of the jungle,” Sharrow told Breyguhn.

  Geis laughed. “Literally,” he said. “And it didn’t suffer the way the heuskyn must have.” A puzzled, exasperated look appeared on his face. “I’ve often thought, you know, that that’s what matters; suffering. Not death, not actually killing. If you die instantly—really instantly, with no warning whatsoever—what are you missing? Your life might be terrible from then on until when you were going to die anyway. Of course, it might have been great fun instead, but the point is that at any given moment you just don’t know which. I don’t think there should be any penalty for killing somebody instantaneously.”

  “But what about the people left behind, their family and friends?” Breyguhn protested.

  Geis shrugged again, glancing over the side of the gondola as they drew slowly to a stop. “The law doesn’t pretend we prosecute murderers because of the effect on the murdered person’s nearest and dearest.”

  He and the martialer hauled the rope ladder to the gunwale.

  “But then,” Sharrow said, “if people knew they could be killed at any time, and their
murderer would get away with it, everybody would be frightened all the time. No matter who you killed, they’d always have suffered.” She spread her hands.

  Geis looked at her, face creased in a frown. “Hmm,” he said, his lips taut. “Yes, that’s a point. I hadn’t thought of that.” He looked at the martialer, who smiled at him. Geis shrugged, handed the martialer his gun and said, “Oh, well. Back to the drawing board on that idea.”

  He took his knife from its sheath, held it between his teeth, then lowered himself over the side of the gondola and down the rope ladder.

  Sharrow watched him descend. He climbed down out of the shadow of the airship; the sunlight glinted on the blade of the knife in his mouth. She leaned out further, aiming her gun down at the crown of his head as it nodded its way down the ladder toward the ground.

  “Excuse me, lady.” The martialer took the gun from her with a regretful smile.

  She sat back in the seat. Breyguhn smirked. She tried not to blush. “I wasn’t actually going to fire it, martialer.”

  “I know, Lady Sharrow.” He nodded, taking a round from the breech and handing her the gun back, “but it is dangerous to point guns at people.”

  “I know,” she said. “But the safety catch was on and I’m very sorry. You won’t tell Geis, will you?” She smiled her most winning smile.

  “I doubt that will be required, lady,” the martialer said.

  “He might not…” Breyguhn said, smirking at Sharrow.

  “Oh, he doesn’t believe anything you tell him anyway, Brey,” Sharrow said, dismissing the girl with a wave. She smiled again at the martialer, who smiled back. Breyguhn scowled.

  “Hey, girls!” shouted a faint, taunting voice from below. “Any particular part of this beast you’d like?”

  They camped on a low rise at the edge of what was probably a range of small jagged hills the Entraxrln had grown over long before, leaving clogged canyons and deep, dark caves leading up steep V-sided ravines; tall spires, splayed and spread over the landscape in a way that looked geological rather than vegetable, were probably rocky pinnacles, wrapped in the Entraxrln’s intimate embrace and now acting as anchor-points for membrane cables. The landscape in the hills and beyond them was even more dark and choked than it had been in the three days since they’d left the town. They had passed a few little towns and villages, and seen a couple of small castles in the distance, homes of lesser nobles, but had encountered few other travelers.

  Leeskever, their guide—a lean, garrulously knowledgeable and spectacularly ugly hide-trapper they’d met in the Broken Neck and who sported an eye-patch Zefla thought most dashing—said that if the gentlemen wanted to see any savages or outlaws, they’d be in there somewhere, but he wasn’t going to lead them any further. This was bandit country.

  Miz decided that his place was looking after the ladies. Dloan went in alone, on foot.

  They left the jemer mounts to graze and passed the next two days walking near the camp and climbing the more gently sloped cables with loop-guides, while Leeskever talked about the thousands of animals he’d killed and the half-dozen or so buddies he’d lost; to stom, tangle-teeth, other assorted wild animals, and the effects of gravity when people fell off cables; all of them in country much like this.

  Sharrow slipped out of the camp a couple of times when Leeskever wouldn’t notice, tramping half a klick into the Entraxrln undergrowth to do some target practice. She used the silencer on the HandCannon and set up some blister-fruits ten, twenty and forty meters away.

  On her second visit to her private shooting gallery, she heard something move above and behind her just as she was changing from one magazine to another; she slammed the clip home, stepped to one side and turned. She had the impression of something diving toward her, and fired.

  The clip she’d just loaded was wire-flechette. She checked the magazine later; four rounds fired.

  She wasn’t sure how many hit whatever it was trying to jump her, but it disappeared in an exploding cloud of purple blood she had to jump away to avoid. When she went back to stir the warm, gently steaming debris with her boot, she couldn’t tell what it had been, except that it had had fur rather than skin or feathers. The biggest bit of chewed-looking bone left was smaller than her little finger.

  She decided she didn’t need any more target practice.

  They sat, secured by ropes to hard-bark spikes stuck into the three-meter broad cable above them. They ate lunch, feeling a warm, sappy-smelling tunnel-wind blow about them, looking down the hundred meters or so to the ground. The rise holding their camp was visible a kilometer away across the grotesquely deformed landscape of the Entraxrln.

  Leeskever shoved the tap-spike into a vein-like bulge on the surface of the cable. Clear water seeped through the membrane over the end of the hollow spike and started to fill a little cup hanging under its handle. He sniffed the wind. “That’ll bring the King’s stom, that wind,” he said.

  They all looked at him.

  “ Glide-monkeys,” he said. “Stom come for the annual migration; there’s one male troupe that’s half-tamed; they roost in the trunk north of the town.”

  “They don’t actually ride them, do they?” Zefla said.

  Leeskever laughed. “Na! And never did, neither. Don’t you believe what people tell you. Stom’d sooner eat you than smell you. Just legend, all that stuff about flying them.” He sipped water from the small cup, then passed it to Zefla. “The King and his court go up to one of the male roosts in the trunk and stand looking at the beasts, choose one as their own, tippy-toe up to it, waft some sleepy-gas at it and spray a mark on it. Coward courtiers and ministers have their aides do it; the rest pretend they’re brave.” Leeskever accepted the cup back from Zefla and hung it under the dripping tap-spike. “Then the dignitaries sit in their viewing-gallery, watch the stom take monkeys and cheer on their particular beast. Highly civilized spectacle.”

  “Sounds it,” Miz said.

  “What’s that?” Zefla said, pointing down.

  “Eh?” said Leeskever. “Ah; now that is one of those tangle-teeth I was telling you about.”

  “This the beast that has a taste for your companions?” Zefla asked him.

  “Might even be the same one, for all I know,” Leeskever said.

  They watched the long, striped back of the tangle-tooth as the quadruped padded slowly through the jungled confusion of roots, stalks and long tatters of fallen membrane on the level below.

  Sharrow remembered the airship, and the animal Geis had killed. When he’d returned, blooded, to the gondola, he’d presented her and Breyguhn with nothing more nocuous and shocking than the animal’s ears.

  She had accepted her still-warm gift gracefully. Breyguhn couldn’t bear to touch the blood-matted thing. Still, while Sharrow had thrown hers away the day they left the Autumn Palace estates to return to their respective schools, Breyguhn had kept her trophy for years.

  Dloan came out of the deep country the following morning, morose and unsuccessful. He’d had to shoot two inept bandits, but apart from that he hadn’t seen anybody. There might well be rebels and the like in the deep country, but they’d kept well out of his way.

  They set off back to the town that afternoon with the wind soft behind them. Several troupes of stom flew over them a kilometer up, heading in the same direction. Leeskever nodded wisely.

  They paid him at the same inn on the outskirts of the town they’d eaten at the day after they’d first arrived. Miz went into town alone, disguised. Their rooms were still being kept for them; a beggar had asked after them and the innkeeper had given him the note they’d left for him. Nobody else had inquired about them.

  “A decent bed and hot water!” Zefla said, marching into her and Sharrow’s room. “Fucking luxury!”

  She slept well at first, then woke during the depths of the night wondering what was happening, and thought there was something long and cold crawling over her skin at her throat.

  She sat up, whimpering and p
ulling at her nightdress, then felt to the skin at the top of her chest, and with her hands there, looking into the utter darkness, hearing Zefla stir and make a fading, still-asleep huh-ing noise, she realized what was happening.

  It was their way of saying they were still in touch, even here. So much for being off-net.

  The feeling was like a cold finger drawn across her skin, right round the base of her neck, like an executioner sketching where the axe will fall. Then another line, then another and another, each one further out than the last.

  The shape of the Crownstar Addendum was traced out on her skin, to the last strand, the last planet of the system.

  The long looping orbit of Prensteleraf was drawn around her neck and down over the tops of her breasts. After a while, when no more happened, she lay down in the soft, sagging bed again.

  The final signal, a few moments later, was a surprise: a single heavy but not painful line drawn around her scalp, about where would sit the rim of a hat, or a crown.

  This was not a dream, she told herself before she fell asleep again.

  But still, in the morning, she was not sure.

  14

  Vegetable Plot

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Miz whispered.

  Dloan shrugged. He scratched his head, looking down at the great broad tail lying on the dust of the reeking cage. He lifted the tail, then put it back down again. “I need something to hold it up,” he whispered.

  “Well don’t look at me!” Miz hissed, crouching at the stom’s snout with a tank of gas. He pumped the handle a few times and pulled the trigger again, squirting the gas toward the beast’s nostrils. Miz put his kerchief up over his mouth and coughed.

  Dloan looked round.

  “Hurry up!” Miz said. “This stuff is making me sleepy!”

  Dloan took his knife and went to the stom’s side; he reached up and started cutting the ropes holding the animal’s left wing into its body.