Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  The android entered the embassy. Its client was waiting in the courtyard garden.

  She sat on a small stone bench by a tinkling fountain. She was artificially bald, a little over average height, and sat more erect than most humans did. She wore heavy boots, a thick, dark-green pleated skirt, a pale hide riding-jacket and a white shirt. A fur hat lay on the stone bench at her side with a pair of hide gloves on top of it.

  She rose to meet it when it entered the courtyard.

  “Lady Sharrow,” it said. It caught the hint of movement in her arm and duly extended its own, to shake hands with her. “My name is Feril,” it said. “I am to represent you. Pleased to meet you.”

  “How do you do,” she said, nodding. They sat on the stone bench. The fountain played with a quiet, pattering noise. In the misty light the small garden seemed to glow around them; they sat surrounded by a precise profusion of tiny, brightly colored flowers.

  “I have news of your friends,” Feril told her. “Their court hearing seems to be going well.”

  She smiled. Her face showed traces of having been altered recently; there were hints of inflammation in the corner of her eyes, where the skin had been stuck down, and her blond eyebrows showed a fraction of a millimeter of dark growth at their roots. The android had seen a picture of her on the city news service when she had arrived a week earlier, and it thought her nose looked different, too.

  “Is it?” she said. “Good.”

  “Yes. Ms. Franck is an able advocate, and Mister Kuma was allowed to use his extensive personal wealth to employ some fine legal brains. The nature of the witnesses will be their greatest asset, I believe, as courts are not often inclined to trust the evidence of hired security personnel. The trial has been fixed for Bihelion next year.”

  The woman looked surprised. “Taking their time, aren’t they?”

  “I believe that is because you are also indicted, but cannot be brought to trial until the Huhsz Passports have run out.”

  She laughed lightly, putting her head back and looking up past the gleaming slates of the embassy roof to the gauzy bright sky above. “That’s very sporting of them.” She looked back at it. “Will the trial be in the Jam, or Yada?”

  “Ms. Franck is attempting to have the venue moved to Yadayeypon.”

  She smiled. “Judges named?”

  “A number have been suggested.”

  “All male and elderly?”

  “I believe so.”

  She made a clicking noise with the side of her mouth and winked. “Good old Zef,” she said.

  “There will doubtless be wrangling over the venue, but your friends ought to be able to return within the next four or five days.”

  “Good.” She sighed and put her clasped hands onto her lap. “And what of the Passports?”

  “They have been impounded in the quarantine terminal at Ikueshleng, and are themselves the subject of a complex legal dispute concerning radioactive contamination, but they are still operative.” It paused to give her time to say something, then it volunteered, “I should say that it would be a fortnight or so before the city of Vembyr would have to release you to the Huhsz.”

  “But in the meantime I’m free to go?” she said. She looked from one of its eyes to the other the way humans often did, as though searching for something.

  It nodded. “Yes. I have left the release papers with the embassy here. The terms of your visa require that you inform me of your movements within the city boundary, but you may leave those at any time.”

  “Hmm. May I pay a visit to some of the Court-impounded material stored here?” she asked. The android was silent. When it didn’t react she went on, “My grandfather, Gorko; there’s some of his stuff stored here, I think. May I see it?”

  “Oh, yes,” the android said, and nodded. “We have charge of some goods that used to belong to your family; once certain legal complications have been resolved the material which the Court has established jurisdiction over will be auctioned. I believe I can arrange for you to inspect the trove, if you wish.”

  “Yes, thank you.” She nodded, looking away.

  “It may take a few days to gain permission. Might I ask how long you intend to stay in Vembyr?”

  “A few days,” she said with a faint smile. “It might be convenient to meet my friends here. Would that be all right?”

  “Well, as I trust you have been made aware, humans are advised to stay no longer than forty days in Vembyr, anyway, to avoid too great an exposure to radioactive contamination, but I have been asked to inform you that while every reasonable precaution will be taken, the city administration feels unable to guarantee your safety should you desire to stay here for any length of time. As well as the Hunting Passports themselves, there is a substantial bounty on your life, and while it is unlikely any android would wish such remuneration, it is possible some outside agency could attempt to kidnap or attack you here.”

  “Well, no change there.”

  “I should also point out in that regard that in four days’ time we shall have the monthly auction, which always brings an influx of people. As this month’s sale is of mainly military and gray-tech goods, the parties we may expect to play host to could well include the sort of person who might wish you harm.”

  “Are you saying I ought to leave before then?” the woman asked.

  Feril thought she sounded tired. “Not necessarily. There are secure apartments within the old Jeraight fortress in Chine District,” it told her. “You might wish to stay there.”

  She rose and walked slowly to the fountain. She looked down at the splashing pool, then stooped and dipped her hand into the water and held some of the fluid in her palm. She shook her head.

  “I know,” she said. She moved her head to indicate the embassy building behind her. “They showed me.” She stood up. “Too much like a prison,” she said, brushing water from her hand. “Is there a hotel? Apartments?”

  “The City Hotel has politely declined to house you, I regret to say.”

  She gave a small, snorting laugh. “Can’t say I blame them,” she said.

  “But if security is not your absolute priority, there are many vacant apartments,” it told her. “There is one in my own building; as your legal representative and custodian, it might be convenient for you to live there.”

  She smiled oddly, a hint of a frown on her upper face. “You don’t mind?” she asked. “As you say, I tend to attract a deal of unwelcome attention these days.”

  “I do not mind. Your past life intrigues and interests me, as does the character it reveals.” It paused. She was looking even more amused. It continued. “We seem to get on well enough, from this initial impression.” It made a shrug. “It would be pleasant.”

  “Pleasant,” she repeated, smiling. “Very well then, Feril.”

  The Solo had charged down the valley through the darkness, over walls and roads, demolishing farm outbuildings, wrecking a barn, causing several car crashes and terrifying hundreds of animals, especially the ones it rolled right over. It had taken an hour to get to the Yallam river, where it crashed onto the waves from a bank three or four meters high, only its speed saving it from tipping over into the swirling black water. It roared away downstream. Its radar indicated several aircraft following it, but none approached nearer than ten kilometers.

  Dloan had shaken his head when Elson Roa admitted he had thrown away whatever fabulous weapon had brought down two planes and their already-launched ordnance in one discharge. The Solipsist leader had attempted to use the weapon against the ground troops on the other side of the valley, and determined when it didn’t work that the weapon had had only a limited number of shots in it to start with, and he had used them all up.

  Dloan bit his tongue on the subject of ancient weaponry occasionally being more intelligent than the people who came to use it. Cenuij, Dloan thought, would not have been so tactful, and the realization was more painful than the trifling wound in his leg.

  Zefla couldn’t st
op shivering, though it was not cold inside the big ACV. There were only about twenty Solipsists left on board. Nobody else had made it back to the Solo from the attack on the Land Car, though some of the others were believed to have been captured rather than killed. Zefla could not understand how Roa could be so phlegmatic, either about the loss of most of his force and the inevitable loss of the Solo too, or the fact that—by using the embargoed anti-aircraft weapon as well as attacking the Court-protected Land Car—he had done not one but two things for either of which the World Court would pursue him to the ends of the system, and imprison him for life, at least.

  Miz sat in the ACV’s medic cabin, watching Sharrow treat the wound in his hand. The bullet had gone right through the muscle at the base of his thumb; he still had about fifty percent of its use, and it would be a hundred percent in a month or so. It was the sort of million-Thrial wound conscripts in unpopular wars dreamed about. He tried to joke with Sharrow about it, but later in the heads he found some blood in his hair that was probably Cenuij’s and promptly threw up.

  Sharrow felt Cenuij fall against her and watched his body tumble from the door and bounce on the hovercraft’s skirt a hundred times that night, as the big ACV rumbled down the Yallam.

  Disaster came at Eph, where the river flowed past and round the city in a narrow gorge. Heavy rains upstream a few days earlier meant the river had risen a couple of meters since the Solipsists had come upstream, and the Solo lost all four of its propellers under the first railway bridge.

  They drifted downriver, engines still roaring as Roa’s helmsman tried to use the stumps of the shattered propeller blades to keep some way on the craft. It didn’t work; the Solo bumped into barges, bridge-supports and wharves all the way round the city, watched by townspeople and tracked by a small flotilla of brightly lit pleasure craft held back by a couple of police boats.

  “Why?” Sharrow asked Roa when he came staggering down the steps into the ACV’s echoing garage space.

  “Why what?” he shouted above the noise of the screaming engines, looking tired and confused.

  “Why did you attack the Land Car?” she yelled, steadying herself against the bulkhead as the hovercraft lurched. “What was the point?”

  “We were hired to,” Roa shouted, frowning, as though it should have been obvious.

  “By whom?”

  “I don’t know,” Roa said quietly, so that she saw rather than heard the words. The Solipsist leader closed his eyes and started to hum. The ACV lurched again and he was thrown against the bulkhead. Roa braced himself with one arm, then said, “Excuse me,” and disappeared back up the stairs to the flight deck.

  Roa didn’t object when they proposed buying one of a couple of assault inflatables they’d found in the hovercraft’s garage.

  He took a check.

  They took to the waves as they were passing the lagoon of the Stramph-Veddick Circus Lands and made it into the enclave despite a black-bodied, almost silent and armed-looking heli-drone coming down to take a long, hard look at them as they bounced over the chopping dark waters toward the fabulous lights of the Circus.

  The Solo sailed forlornly on into the night. The Solipsists had switched its lights back on and the last they saw of it the old hovercraft was scraping under some trees on its way downriver, losing what remained of its propellers against the overhanging branches in a distant, explosive clattering.

  Miz had business contacts in the Circus; he talked them out of some money and the team onto a tourist charter flight out of the theme-park that morning. He picked up money from one of his office managers when they landed in Bo-Chen in southern Jonolrey and hired an auto car. They slept fitfully most of the way to Vembyr, and when Zefla woke it was with the opinion that having slept on it, with the exception of Sharrow, probably the best thing they could do was go to Yadayeypon voluntarily and answer their indictments after all.

  Miz had taken a few days to be convinced.

  “I am sorry you lost your friend,” Feril said.

  “Friend,” she repeated, frowning a little. “I’m not sure Cenuij was ever a friend,” she said. “ But—” she gave a strange, small laugh “—we were very close.”

  She stood on an old tarpaulin spattered with tiny flecks of dried plaster. A single, naked electric-bulb burned brightly in the middle of the room, shedding a fierce yellow-white light throughout the room and casting a deep shadow across the floor behind her. She was thinking about going for a walk. There was something inexplicably soothing about watching the android work, but there was also something about the harshness of the light that made her uncomfortable.

  The tall, wide windows looked out onto darkness.

  “Have you many happy memories of him?” Feril asked. The android was perched on a step-ladder holding a small bucket in one hand and a trowel in the other.

  “Not many,” she said, trying to remember. “Well, yes; some.” She sounded exasperated as she said, “We argued a lot…but I’ve never objected to a good argument.”

  “You said he was your team classicist. Will you have to get another?”

  She shook her head. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “Oh,” Feril said. It scooped a glistening lump of plaster from the bucket onto the trowel-blade, then set the bucket down on the top step of the ladder.

  “May I ask a favor of you?” she said.

  “Yes,” Feril said. An ornate plaster frieze shaped like a long, flower-filled trellis filled the angle between the wall and the ceiling of half the room, starting in the corner by the door and ending where the android stood on the ladder. It carefully applied the plaster to the end of the frieze.

  “I’d like to find out if there have been any androids who’ve suddenly left Vembyr and disappeared recently; especially pairs of androids. Androids who could pass for human at very close range.”

  The android was silent for a couple of seconds, patiently using the trowel to keep the drooping lump of plaster in place. Then it said, “No, none have been reported leaving the city for the last nine years.”

  “Hmm. Before that?”

  The machine paused only briefly. “The city records go back five millennia,” the machine said, sounding regretful. “During that time the android population of Vembyr has remained roughly static at twenty-three thousand, with perhaps a tenth of that number at large in the rest of the system. Only a few hundred androids have ever been constructed who might pass for human. None live in the city, and some—about forty or so—are officially missing, untraced. Indeed the majority of missing androids are human simulacra. They are believed to have been taken unwillingly, probably by rich individuals, and used for…a variety of acts, all of which are illegal when perpetrated against humans.”

  “I’ll bet,” she said. She put one hand under her armpit and the other to her mouth, tapping her teeth with her fingers. “Does anyone still make androids?”

  “Oh, no,” the machine said, turning to look at her. “That has been prohibited for the last twelve hundred years. Even we may only repair existing examples, though we believe the World Court will grant us permission to manufacture a hundred or so androids from currently available spare parts sometime before the end of the next century.”

  It turned back to the plaster and—over the next few minutes, as the plaster began to set—it gradually worked the still soft folds of the material into the shape of a delicate white flower, backed by a section of trellis.

  Sometime before the end of the next century, she thought. Certainly that was only a hundred and one years away, but it was still strange to realize the scales the androids thought on. It was as though, with their ability to think a thousand thoughts in the time it would take a human to think one, and yet to exist effectively indefinitely, the androids had abandoned what humanity thought of as the normal calibrations of time, to exist on at what was—again, to the human mind, unless one was a scientist used to working in nanoseconds or billions of years—the extremities of temporality.

  Feril p
aused, inspecting its handiwork. It glanced down at her for a moment, then took another scoop of plaster from the bucket it held and applied that to the frieze.

  “Do you actually enjoy doing this, Feril?” she asked.

  “This?” it said, dabbing at the plaster with its hands. “Restoring the plaster-work?”

  “Restoring everything.”

  “Yes,” it said, “it is pleasant. I do literally what humans talk about figuratively; I switch parts of my mind off. Sometimes, rather than do that, I think about something else: often when plastering I replay old human adventure yarns, re-experiencing them in old books, or ancient flat-screen works, or more modern pieces.”

  “Adventure yarns?” She grinned.

  “Indeed,” the android said, patting the drying plaster in such a way as to produce a stipple effect on the surface of a rough-skinned, globular fruit it had just sculpted. “It is satisfying in the extreme to have done plastering work, or inlaying, or wood-carving; it is hugely enjoyable to drive a vehicle one has rebuilt, or to walk around or just look at a building one has brought from a shell to habitability, but the processes involved are rarely directly rewarding at the time, and to divert oneself with adventures of derring-do is a nice counterpoint, I believe.” It turned and looked back at her. “Your own life will be an adventure story one day, I don’t doubt, Lady Sharrow. I—” It broke off, turning smoothly and resuming its task.

  She frowned, then gave a small smile and looked at the floorboards for a moment.

  “Not all humans grudge androids their longevity just because we’ve found we cannot afford to grant ourselves that gift, Feril,” she said. “I am flattered you think my life might ever be worth your perusal, when I am long dead and you are still alive.”