Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  Zefla strolled toward a huge, intricately carved wooden cupboard and opened a door. “Whee!” she said, and pulled out a bottle. “A stand-up wine cellar.” She sat up on the sideboard with Miz.

  “Look what I found,” she said.

  “Amazing,” Miz said, shaking his head and looking closely at Zefla. “Is there anywhere you can’t find a drink, Zef?”

  “I sincerely hope not.” Zefla waved the dusty bottle at Sharrow. “Fancy depleting the inventory?”

  “Is it legal?” Sharrow asked.

  Zefla shook her head emphatically. “Not even arguably.”

  “All right then,” Sharrow said, as Zefla took a knife from her pocket and started opening the bottle.

  “Let them sue us,” Miz said.

  “I know a good lawyer,” Zefla told him.

  They drank the wine from the bottle. Dloan inspected a presentation set of hunting rifles. Miz calculated the break-up value of the sideboard he was sitting on. Zefla donned the fur cloak, dragging its meter-long hem across the dusty warehouse floor.

  “Fate, it’s heavy,” she said, shucking the cloak and hoisting it back on top of the ceremonial bowl. “They actually wear stuff like that?” She shook her head. “The weight of tradition.”

  Sharrow sat side-saddle on the unwrapped motor-bike, looking glum.

  “Hey,” Zefla said. “Any more news about Breyguhn?”

  “Still staying where she is,” Sharrow said.

  “Crazy,” Miz said.

  Sharrow nodded. “I tried to call her; the Brothers said she’s there now as a willing guest. They said she wouldn’t talk to me.”

  Zefla shook her head. “You think that’s the truth?”

  Sharrow shrugged. “I don’t know. They might be lying, or Breyguhn might really want to stay; the way she was when I saw her last, it’s just about believable.”

  “Think hearing about Cenuij could have flipped her over the edge?” Zefla asked.

  “If she wasn’t long gone already,” Sharrow said. She got off the bike and walked toward the black cube of the tomb, squinting up at it. “Dloan,” she said. “Think you could give me a punt up there?”

  “Surely.” Dloan put one of the hunting rifles back in its case, stepped to the side of the tomb and made a stirrup with his hands. Sharrow was lifted toward the top of the sarcophagus and pulled herself up.

  “You be careful up there,” Miz called.

  “Yes, of course,” Sharrow said, gazing at the top surface of the black granite cube. “I wonder if we can get this thing ope…” Her voice trailed off as she looked down at the bike she had been sitting on.

  “Shar?” Zefla frowned.

  Sharrow glanced around the warehouse. She sat on the edge of the black cube, turned and lowered herself on her hands, then let herself drop to the warehouse floor.

  She walked over to the bike, a strange expression on her face. The others looked baffled. Sharrow put her hand on the bike’s front fairing and stared at the machine.

  The bike was long and low-slung and had a single deeply contoured seat aft off a bulging gas tank and above a shiny V4 hydrogen engine. Its two wheels were dark tori of flexmetal, trenched by cross-cut grip-curves.

  Above the sweep of the front wheel’s splash-guard, what appeared to be the bike’s light cluster and instrument binnacle was a solid, bulky mass covered with a thin aerodynamic fairing. Two stubby cylinders protruded from the matt-silver of the main casing, ending in a pair of darkly bulbous lenses. A couple of oddly impractical stalks protruded from the casing, a strap with no apparent purpose lay draped across the gas tank, and the two main instrument dials at the rear of the binnacle looked tacked-on.

  Sharrow knelt down by the tipped front wheel, patting the roughened silver surface over the two dark lenses.

  Miz shrugged. Dloan continued to look puzzled. Zefla took another swig from the bottle. Then her expression changed suddenly from incomprehension to amazement. She sputtered wine and pointed. “Is that the Lazy Gu—?” She coughed, then patted her chest.

  “What?” Miz said loudly, then looked around guiltily.

  Dloan looked puzzled for a moment longer, then smiled and nodded slowly.

  Sharrow shook her head, rising and inspecting the point where the two instrument dials disappeared into holes cut in the binnacle. “No,” she said, inserting a fingernail into the gap and sliding it back and forth. “The real thing wouldn’t let you cut these holes in it.” She stepped back and folded her arms, looking the bike up and down. “But somebody’s gone to some trouble to make it look like one.”

  The others crowded round the bike.

  Miz peered closely at the instruments. “Maybe you get on, fire it up and it takes you to where the real thing’s stashed,” he said.

  “Like a pair of magic shoes in a fairy tale.” Zefla nodded.

  “Maybe,” Sharrow said.

  Dloan leaned closer, inspecting the instruments. He frowned, then tapped both main read-outs. They were old-fashioned electromechanical dials with slim, plastic needles pointing to numbers printed round the edges of the instrument faces.

  “Hmm,” Dloan said, gripping the dials and shaking them; they moved in the binnacle.

  “What?” Zefla said.

  “According to these instruments,” Dloan said, straightening, “this thing’s doing fifty klicks an hour and it’s revving at sixty a second.”

  “Never trust a Lazy Gun,” Zefla muttered.

  “Really?” Sharrow said. “Let’s see…” She put a hand on each of the two dials and pulled.

  “Hey, careful—” Zefla said, stepping back.

  The dials clicked out of the binnacle, coming cleanly away. There were no wires trailing from them. Sharrow turned them over; the instruments had no obvious connections anywhere on their stainless steel surface.

  “One needle’s moving,” Dloan said quietly.

  Sharrow held the instruments in front of her. The speed ometer needle swung a little, then steadied. The tachometer needle stayed steady. Dloan reached out, altered the orientation of the instrument cluster so that it was lying flat, then while Sharrow still held them turned the dials around ninety degrees and back. The speedometer needle shifted round the dial, but kept pointing in the same direction, toward one wall of the warehouse.

  Sharrow nodded in the direction the needle was indicating. “Then let’s walk that way, shall we?”

  They bumped into Feril while they were walking down the aisle, intent on the two instruments. Sharrow smiled awkwardly and turned the dials’ faces to her chest. The android just stood there.

  “May I help?” it said.

  Sharrow smiled. “May we borrow your car for a while?”

  “The vehicle is a little temperamental,” Feril told them, sounding apologetic. “Might I suggest I drive you wherever you wish to go?”

  Sharrow and the others exchanged looks. Feril looked up at the ceiling and said, “I know it wouldn’t even cross your mind, but just supposing you were thinking of taking something from the trove, it would be wise not to let the caretaker observe you doing so. I myself am quite neutral in the matter.”

  Sharrow opened her jacket and concealed the bulky dials inside as best she could. “We’ll accept your offer of the lift, Feril, thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” the android said.

  Gray waves dashed themselves against black boulders; spray flew up, sunset lit, to blow across the tumble of stones in quick veils of gray-pink mist, dropping and whirling into the crannies between the rocks.

  The wind blew into her face, strong and cool and damp. The sunset was a wide stain of red at the ocean’s edge. She turned and looked up the grassy slope to the road, where the car sat hissing quietly. Strands of steam leaked from beneath the vehicle and were torn away on the curling wind. There was a light on in the automobile’s rear compartment, and through the open door she could see Miz and Dloan peering at a screen they’d unfurled over the floor of the car.

  Feril and Zefla sat o
n a couple of boulders at the side of the road about fifty meters away, looking out to sea, talking.

  Miz got out of the car and walked down to her. He stood by her side, making a show of breathing in the brine-laced air.

  “Well?” Sharrow asked him.

  “I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me how the book led to the tomb,” Miz said, smiling faintly.

  Sharrow shrugged. “The message in the casing,” she said.

  Miz frowned for a moment. “What? ‘Things Will Change’?”

  Sharrow nodded. “That’s the inscription on Gorko’s tomb.”

  “But the tomb’s only…what?”

  “Thirty years old,” she said. “And the book was missing for twelve centuries.” She smiled thinly at the sunset. “Gorko must have found out what was in the casing, even if he never got to the book itself. Maybe it was just good Antiquities research; maybe one of his agents was able to inspect the book, or remote-scan it while it was in Pharpech. But somehow he found out what the inscription was and had it duplicated on his tomb.”

  Miz looked vaguely disappointed. “Huh,” he said.

  She looked up at Miz, who was nodding slowly. “So,” she said, “where do the dials point?”

  Miz pursed his lips and nodded out across the ocean.

  “Over the sea and far away,” he said.

  “Caltasp?” she asked.

  “Sort of,” he said. He glanced at her. “The Areas,” he added.

  She closed her eyes for a moment. “Are you sure?”

  “Come and see.”

  They walked back to the car. She stood at the opened door, one hand resting on the car’s slatted wooden roof.

  The flex-screen lying on the floor displayed a flat map of Golter’s southern hemisphere, distorted to show true direction. They both watched as Dloan traced a line from a compass-rosed point in southern Jonolrey across the Phirar to the region between Caltasp and Lantskaar.

  “Depends how accurate these gauges are,” Dloan said, tapping numbers into the calculator display at the side of the map. “And on whether the direction display is working on the GPS or magnetic. But if the speedo shows true direction and the rev counter is kilometers times one hundred, then it’s the Embargoed Areas.”

  “Oh, shit,” Sharrow breathed.

  They had driven eighty kilometers out of Vembyr along the pitted surface of the deserted coastal highway, heading south and west. They had passed the entombed ruins of the ancient reactor a couple of kilometers back, just before the cut-off for the point. They were about fifty kilometers further west than they had been in the city, and the needle on the bike’s fake tachometer had moved one half of a division on its scale, indicating fifty-nine and a half revolutions per second rather than the sixty it had shown in the warehouse.

  “We can get a more accurate fix with a better map,” Dloan said, laying the static-stiffened screen over the dials, then turning it briefly transparent. “And maybe triangulate if we can get a reading from a good way north of the city.”

  “I’ll get the copter back,” Miz told Sharrow, nodding.

  “That should narrow it down pretty well,” Dloan said, tapping out more figures and studying the result. “But just going on this, if it isn’t under the ocean it’s somewhere in the fjords, in the Areas.”

  Sharrow looked up the road at Zefla and Feril. The two were standing now; Zefla was pointing out to sea, her long, blond hair blown cloud-ragged by the wind. Red light reflected from the polished surfaces of the android’s head and body.

  A gust rocked Sharrow on her feet. Her skirt whipped at her boots and she stuck her hands in her jacket pockets, feeling the cold weight of the gun against her left hand.

  She saw Zefla glance toward the car, and waved at her. The woman and the android began walking back to the car.

  That night she did not dream of Cenuij, but instead dreamed that her arm died; her left arm became paralyzed and numb, then began to wither and shrink but somehow remained the same size it had always been, but was still dead, and so she had to find somebody who would bury it for her, and wandered round a city that seemed to be crowded but where she could only find people who looked just like her but weren’t, and nobody would bury the arm for her.

  Eventually she tried to make a box, a coffin, for the arm, to carry it around in, but it was difficult to make with just one arm.

  She woke in the middle of the night, in the wide, white bed in the shadows of the tall, white room in the apartment block Feril was renovating. She was lying on her left arm, which had gone to sleep. She got up and sat in a seat by the side of the bed for a while, drinking a glass of water and massaging her tingling arm as blood and feeling returned to it.

  She thought she would be awake for the rest of the night, but then fell asleep there, to wake up stiff and sore in the morning, her right hand still clutching the other arm as though comforting it.

  The monthly auction started the next day. Aircraft arrived from all over Golter, filling the City Hotel with mercenary chiefs, arms dealers, militaria collectors, weapon-fund managers, contract army reps and a scattering of specialist media people. The auction hall itself was an old conference center three blocks from the warehouse where the Tzant trove was stored.

  Sharrow had refused to hide away while the auction was held, and she and Zefla, both wearing veiled hats and dull, loose-fitting suits, sat in a small drinks lounge attached to the conference facility, watching the people come and go.

  Miz and Dloan had left the city to travel up the coast in one of Miz’s company helicopters, getting another fix on the position the bike dials were indicating. If the triangulation confirmed the dials were pointing where they seemed to be, Dloan would attend the auction’s second and final day so he could buy the sort of gear they’d need if they were to mount an expedition to the Areas.

  “You’re mad,” Zefla said quietly, lifting her veil to drink from her glass as she leaned closer to Sharrow. “You should be hiding.” She sipped her drink, finishing it. “I’m mad, too, for letting you talk me into this. I should have told Dloan, or Miz, or just locked you up. You talk me into the most insane things.”

  “Oh, stop whining and go and get us another drink,” Sharrow whispered. Zefla sat back sharply, then made a grunting noise and started to get up.

  “Good grief,” Sharrow said, taking Zefla’s arm. “Look who’s here.”

  Elson Roa stood at the bar. He was dressed in a sober business robe and carried a sensible hat. A similarly garbed young woman they didn’t recognize stood at Roa’s side, toting a briefcase.

  “Wonder what he’s come for,” Zefla said.

  “Yes,” Sharrow said, slipping her glass under her veil to sip at her drink. “I wonder.”

  They watched the auction through the afternoon, strolling from the lounge to the main hall and back again, keeping track of the events on the center’s closed-circuit screens.

  The multifarious items came up for sale and were knocked down; all the items easily made their reserve price, which meant—according to a media person they overheard filing a report—that the pessimistic large-scale conflict forecasts various analysts had been making recently were being confirmed by the traders. Weapons futures rose another point that afternoon.

  Elson Roa didn’t appear to buy anything, but he and his assistant seemed to be watching everybody just as carefully as were Sharrow and Zefla.

  The first day’s selling ended late in the evening. Sharrow and Zefla strolled past the docks and then sat on a pair of bollards as though soaking up the late evening sun, watching the people who had come for the auction as they departed in their various craft for yachts offshore, or hotels in nearby regions where the radiation level was what Golter considered normal.

  They watched Elson Roa and his assistant approach a chartered VTOL jet, then Sharrow shook her head.

  “What is he doing?” she said, then turned to Zefla. “Cover,” she said. She stood up, ignoring Zefla’s protests and walked over to intercept the Solipsi
st leader.

  “Politeness,” she said, putting her veil back.

  Elson Roa looked at her strangely as though not recognizing her at first, then bowed slightly and said, “Yes, hello.”

  “Congratulations on your bail,” she said, searching his expression. He looked mildly surprised. “I believe you’ve set a new record. You must have rich friends.”

  Roa shook his head emphatically. “A strong will,” he said, raising his voice to counter the noise of a jet taking off. “I think I am beginning to alter reality.”

  “I think you must be,” she agreed. “Does your alteration to reality have a name?”

  “I do not believe it needs one,” the tall Solipsist said coolly.

  “Perhaps not,” she said. She smiled. “So, what brings you to the auction?”

  Roa looked puzzled and pointed to the VTOL. “That,” he said.

  Sharrow looked levelly at him. She had the depressing feeling that Roa didn’t realize it was a joke most people got out of their system in junior high.

  She shook her head. “Never mind.” She glanced at the female assistant at Roa’s side, not sure if she recognized the woman. “How is Keteo? I don’t see him here.”

  Roa’s brows furrowed. “He is gone from me; he proved to be only a temporary apparance.”

  “Oh? What appeared to happen to him?”

  “He appeared to become religious and join some deca-millennialist faith. A section of my personality I am best rid of, I think.”

  “ Ah-hah,” she said.

  Roa looked at his assistant, then at the waiting jet. “I must go now. Good-bye.” He bowed.

  She raised one hand. “Pleasant journey. Watch out for low bridges.”

  Roa ignored this as he walked for the plane.

  She rejoined Zefla.

  “Anything?” Zefla said.

  “Nothing,” Sharrow told her.

  Roa’s plane rolled toward the take-off pad and was gone a few minutes later.

  They met up with Miz and Dloan at the hotel and had dinner in their suite. The men had worked out the position the bike dials were indicating to a ten-kilometer circle near the head of a ninety-kilometer-long fjord deep in the Embargoed Areas. They discussed the options for getting safely into and out of the Areas.