Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  Miz made a tutting noise and took Zefla’s hand, to follow her following Dloan back to their camp.

  “Oh,” the android said, after the briefest of pauses. It glanced back out to the dark waters. “I was just thinking; given that there appeared to be eight or nine people in the inflatable, and only seven are swimming back to shore, and what could well be one or two bodies are floating where the boat went down…” It turned to face her again. “. . . I believe I have just been party to a murder; two murders, perhaps.”

  She was silent. The android looked back out to the water again, then back at her.

  “How do you feel about that?” she asked.

  It made a shrug. “I am not sure yet,” it said, sounding puzzled. “I shall have to think about it.”

  She inspected its image in the nightsight.

  This close up, people in a nightsight glowed vibrant and gaudy and obvious. The android was a vague light-sketch in comparison, its body only fractionally warmer than its surroundings.

  “I’m sorry,” she said eventually.

  “What for?” it asked her.

  “Involving you in all this.”

  “I was delighted to be asked,” it reminded her.

  “I know,” she said, “but still.”

  “Please, don’t be,” it told her. “This is all…extremely interesting for me. I am recording much of what has been happening recently at maximum saturation for later replay, enjoyment and analysis. I get to do that very rarely. It is novel. I am having fun.” It made a human gesture with its hands, lifting them briefly, palms up, from the sides of its body.

  “Fun,” she said, smiling slightly.

  “In a sense,” Feril said.

  She shook her head, looking down at the faint, seeping warmth of the forest floor.

  “Shall I make my reconnoitering expedition?” the android asked. “Shall I go to the head of the fjord?”

  “Not yet,” she said. She turned to look at the weak, almost transparent signature of their fire’s column of rising smoke, thirty meters away in the forest. “I’d like you to keep watch tonight, if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not,” it said. Feril turned to look back at the fjord again. “You are worried that they still have another boat and may try to repeat the apparent attack we have just thwarted.”

  “Exactly.” She smiled. “Spoken like one of the team.” She laughed lightly. “Well, sort of.”

  Feril drew itself back a little. “Thank you,” it said. It nodded up the slope. “I shall keep watch from there, where I can see the fjord and the immediate vicinity.”

  They walked that way. The android turned and sank down on its haunches at the point it determined gave it the best sight lines. “Ah ha,” it said.

  She looked too.

  There were two fires burning on the other side of the fjord; two tiny, hard-yellow specks vibrating in the granular darkness. She took the nightsights off and could still just see them from the side of her eyes.

  She put the sights back on. “They’ve made more distance than we have,” she said.

  “About three kilometers,” Feril said.

  “Hmm,” she said. “We still have one heat-seeking missile left. We could give them an unpleasant good-night present.”

  “Indeed,” Feril said. “Though the fires could be decoys.”

  She watched the distant fires. “How far have they got to walk to the end of the fjord?”

  “One hundred and nine kilometers,” Feril said. “There are two small fjords off the main one on their side.”

  “Though they probably still have an inflatable.”

  “Yes; they could use that to ferry themselves across the mouths of the side-fjords, though it might be vulnerable to attack with the machine gun.”

  “Hmm,” she said, and yawned. “Oh well. Speaking personally, it’s time for bed.” She looked down into the hollow where the small tent lay inflated. It was supposedly comfortably two-person and could take three at a pinch. It was fit for four only if everybody was on very friendly terms indeed.

  “Oh,” she said. “Would you like a gun while you’re on guard?”

  “I think not.” Feril watched her yawn again. “Good night, Lady Sharrow,” it said. It sounded very formal.

  “Good night,” she said.

  Cenuij sat in the burning truck, looking baleful and sighing a lot. The flames and the exploding ammunition didn’t seem to harm him. He was cradling something in his arms wrapped in a shawl. She recognized the shawl; it was one of the family’s birthing shawls. She had been wrapped in that when she’d been a baby, as had her own mother, and hers before her…She wondered where Cenuij had got it, and worried that the baby inside the shawl might be harmed by the flames of the burning truck.

  She shouted to Cenuij but he didn’t seem to hear her.

  When she tried to move round the burning truck to look into the shawl and see who the baby was, Cenuij moved as well, swiveling and hunching up so that his shoulder hid the infant.

  She threw something at him; it bounced off his head and he turned angrily; he threw the shawl and what it held straight at her and she put out her arms to catch it as the shawl unwrapped itself from the flying bundle and fell to the flames. It was the Lazy Gun she caught.

  The shawl burned brightly in the wreckage, then lifted and rose flagrantly into the sky like a lasered bird.

  She rocked the Gun in her arms, singing quietly.

  She awoke to the stale, half-repellent, half-comforting smell of human bodies. She sat up and the dream faded from her memory. She felt stiff and tired; the seemingly soft ground under the tent had concealed rocks or roots or something that had made lying down uncomfortable, no matter what position she had assumed. Every time she had rolled over she had woken up, and—packed in amongst the others, sleeping equally lightly—she had probably woken them up each time too, just as they had her. She was cold on the side facing the flank of the tent; the single blanket they had between them had disappeared from over her early on in the night. She made a mental note in future to accept the boys’ offer to take the two outside positions. The plaster-covered wound on her hand throbbed dully.

  She clambered over the others and opened the tent to a bitterly cold morning and the sound of wind roaring in the treetops. She stretched and grunted, feeling hungry and wondering what the hell they were going to use for toilet paper. Feril waved from its position at the top of the bank.

  She replaced the plaster on her hand and poured more antiseptic over it, aware she was using up the supplies in the medical kit faster than she’d have liked.

  It seemed to take a long time to get everybody up and moving and ready to set off; she had the dispiriting impression that the Solipsists, for all their martial eccentricity, would have been up at dawn and long since set out on their march; singing soldierly songs and beating drums, in her imagination.

  They struck camp at last and headed away through the forest beneath the swaying, roaring tops of the trees. Their bellies rumbled. Breakfast had been a quarter of a foodslab each; they had seven of the bland but filling bars left.

  The fjord was a wind-ruffled, sometimes white-flecked expanse of gray through the dark trunks to their right.

  They walked through the day. It rained once for an hour, spattering light, torn drops through breaks in the canopy above. Miz wanted to stop and shelter, but they kept on going. They took turns to walk near the edge of the trees, keeping watch on the far shore, but didn’t see anything. They had spied a few birds, glimpsed movements high in tree branches and heard plenty of quick, tiny rustles in the undergrowth, but encountered no large animals.

  Lunch was half a foodslab each, and all the icy stream water they could stomach. They had to drink from their cupped hands; Sharrow felt hers going numb after the second scoop. By the time she had finished drinking, the only thing she could feel was the cut in her left hand, still throbbing.

  The android sat patiently by the stream. Zefla was down at the shore; Dloan ha
d disappeared into the woods and Miz sat on an exposed root, re-tying his boots and grumbling.

  She sat beside the android. Her feet were aching. “How far have we traveled so far, Feril?”

  “Seventeen kilometers,” it replied.

  “ Seventy-two to go,” she said wearily. “Too slow. How long would it take you get to the end of the fjord and back now?”

  “I estimate about sixteen hours,” it said.

  She sat there, feeling hungry and dirty, itchy and footsore, her hand wound nagging at her like a toothache. The android looked just as it always had; at once delicate and powerful, smooth and hard. A few tree needles stuck to its lower legs, but otherwise its metal and plastic skin seemed unmarked.

  “If you go,” she said, “you’d best take a gun.”

  “If you think I ought to, I shall.”

  “I think you ought to.”

  “You will keep guard yourselves tonight?”

  “We’ll set up some sort of rota.”

  She talked to the others about Feril going on ahead. Miz was reluctant to part with a gun, and thought it risky giving the android the bike dials too, but it was agreed.

  “Do be careful,” she told the android, presenting it with the dials. “We don’t know what’s up there, but whatever it is it’ll probably be well guarded.”

  “Yeah,” said Miz. “Old automatics can end up getting pretty trigger-happy.”

  “I shall be careful, believe me,” the android said.

  Sharrow put her good hand on its shoulder. The plastic-covered metal was cold to the touch. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you,” it said. “I shall see you tomorrow.” It turned and set off, the dials and a small laser pistol clutched to its chest. It ran quickly and gracefully away between the tree trunks, the pale pads on its feet dully flashing in the forest gloom. It disappeared.

  “Hope we really can trust that thing,” Miz said.

  “It could have murdered us all in our sleep last night if it had wanted to,” Zefla told him.

  “It’s not that simple though, is it?” Miz said, looking at Sharrow, who shrugged.

  “It’s become simpler since the vehicles were destroyed,” she said. “We’ll see what Feril finds up there.”

  “If he comes back,” Miz said, hoisting the small backpack.

  “Oh, stop whining,” Sharrow said, turning to follow the android. “Come on.”

  She fell asleep during her watch that night, waking from a dream of fire and death in which she and Cenuij walked hand in hand through a terrible silent pitch-darkness to the noise of thunder and the flickering pulse of lightning amongst the clouds and summits on the far side of the fjord.

  Cold rain, that had been warm blood in her dream, spattered her face. The tree she was leaning against creaked and groaned in the wind, lusty and furious in the canopy above.

  She shivered and stood up, feeling stiff and sore. A headache pounded dully over her eyes. She looked around to check that all was well. The fjord was a rough, wind-whipped surface visible between the tree trunks. At least the weather made another waterborne attack by the Solipsists unlikely.

  The tent, behind her in a little dip in the ground, glowed with a soft, enveloping warmth. She looked at the time display in the nightsight. Still an hour before she could wake Miz and claim her place between the other two sleepers.

  She walked around a little, trying to keep awake and warm. Her swollen hand pulsed regular messages of pain up her arm. The rain tumbled through the branches in great gathered drops, plopping onto her cap and shoulders and wetting her face. The camouflaged fatigues were waterproof, but dribbles had snuck down her neck, perhaps while she’d been asleep; she could feel them insinuating their way down her back and between her breasts with a cold, unwelcome intimacy.

  She sat on a fallen trunk, looking out at the spray-shredded surface of the fjord and listening to the gusting wind charging out of the dark, thick-clouded night. The rain cleared for a while, revealing details on the far side of the fjord, so that she was able to look out to where the Solipsists’ fires had burned that night. That pair of fierce specks had glittered through the evening like baleful eyes from the depths of an ancient myth, and—despite the fact that the shore the Solipsists were traveling on had looked more rugged and indented than their own had been that day—they had burned still further ahead than they had the night before.

  A great gust of wind shook the trees above her, dislodging drops that struck her face. She wiped them from the nightsight lenses with the heel of her good hand.

  Where the Solipsists’ twin fires had blazed against the steep dark mat of forest there was only one faint image left now; a last dying memory of warmth in the loud surrounding night, like one of those eyes slowly closing, the life within it going out.

  She watched that hazy, uncertain image and—for all that it was the product and symbol of people who had for no good reason she could discern suddenly become her enemies—she willed that distant, ember memory to prevail against the leaching cold that made her teeth ache and her body shiver, and against the laws that ran the universe and the system and the world and every thing and body within it; the laws of decay, consumption, exhaustion and death.

  Then the rain came again, brushing its way up the fjord in tall sheets, and by that interposing sweep extinguished—if not the fading embers themselves—the projected image of that fire in her eyes.

  21

  A Short Walk

  “But what’s he like?”

  “Oh…Attractive, I suppose.”

  “What? Tallish, darkish, handsomish? Hunkish?”

  “All of the above. Well, maybe not hunkish…But that’s not it; it’s his…manner. When you hear him, it sounds like something between philosophy and politics, and even if you don’t agree with what he’s saying you can’t help being impressed by the way he says it. It’s as though he knows even more than he’s saying, knows everything, but still really needs your approval, your agreement for it to be true, and you just can’t help but give it. You feel flattered, privileged…seduced.

  “It looked like there was a big but vague organization there; something that had grown up organically around him. And even though most of the people I saw were young, there were plenty of older people there too, and I got the impression he was talking to the establishment on the Ghost; maybe beyond. But he was just an amazing person.”

  “Obviously,” Zefla said, smiling at her as they walked.

  It was cold. The weather had turned just before dawn, the heavy rain clouds blowing away before a chill, clear sky that had shed moonlight and sparse junklight on the forested mountains of the fjord, coating them in silent silver. Then Thrial had risen, casting a rich glow like pink gold down the fjord.

  After a miserably small breakfast which had left them all hungry, and with only a quarter of a foodslab left each, Miz and Dloan had decided to make a serious effort to kill something edible for lunch. The two men had set off uphill when they broke camp that morning, hoping to find game in the higher forest.

  Sharrow and Zefla walked through patches of frost and puddles skinned with brittle crusts of thin, glass-clear ice. Their breath smoked in the air.

  Sharrow felt spacey and vague and slightly numb; she kept shivering, even though she didn’t really feel cold. She put it down to lack of food. She felt ashamed at how pampered she had become; she hadn’t realized how much simple things like toilet paper and a toothbrush meant to her, and felt demeaned that their absence could assume such significance.

  Her hand throbbed dully inside her glove; she had taken some painkillers. She hadn’t changed the plaster that morning because the hand had swelled up during the night and it hurt too much when she’d tried taking the glove off. She’d decided just to let it be; perhaps it would get better of its own accord.

  “Probably end up as one of those sordid cult leaders,” Zefla said after a while as they plodded into a bare area of the forest where a fire had left thousands of tree trunks standin
g upright and bare, black posts already surrounded by slender young trees forcing their way toward the sky around them. “You know, pedaling some weird concoction of re-tread gibberish and living in a palace while their followers sleep shifts and work the streets and give you this big flatline smile when you tell them where to stuff their tracts.”

  “No,” Sharrow said, shaking her head (and felt dizzy when she did that, and stumbled on a blackened branch crusted with white). “No, I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen to this guy, not at all.”

  Zefla looked at Sharrow as they walked, an expression of concern on her face. “You all right?” she asked.

  “Hungry!” Sharrow laughed. She nodded to herself, breathing deeply in the chill air and staring up at the blue expanse above. “How about you?”

  “Never better,” Zefla said, scratching through her gathered-up hair to her itchy scalp. “Could use a shower, though.” She took another look at Sharrow as she stumbled again. “Maybe we’ll take another rest soon.”

  “Yes,” Sharrow said, shaking her head briefly as though trying to clear it. “Why not?”

  They tramped amongst the fresh young trees and the burned dead.

  Sharrow and Zefla stopped in a small clearing near the shore to eat the last of their food, then waited for Miz and Dloan to rejoin them. Sharrow continued to deny there was anything wrong with her, then fell fast asleep, propped against a tree trunk. Zefla was worried; she thought Sharrow looked ill. Her gray, drawn face twitched as Zefla watched, and her lips worked.

  Zefla looked up at the mountain slopes. She was surprised they hadn’t heard any shots. She left Sharrow to sleep and went down to the shingle beach. She left her little backpack there, so that Miz and Dloan wouldn’t walk past them. Then she went back to sit with Sharrow.

  The men arrived an hour later. They were both limping; Dloan from the bullet wound he’d received the night Cenuij had died, Miz from the combination of hard boots and soft feet.

  They were empty-handed. Zefla thought they had brought something, but it was only the backpack she’d left on the shingle. They had shot at a few birds with their laser pistols and killed one, but it had been crawling with parasites when they’d picked it up and they hadn’t thought it was worth eating. They still hadn’t seen any large animals, though they had heard impressive bellowing noises from still further upslope.