Against a Dark Background

by Iain M. Banks

  “If they get us they get the Gun too, and everybody gets to go with a bang.” She pushed the Lazy Gun forward into the footwell and sat in the seat, hauling on the harness. “To tell the truth, Feril,” she said, “I really don’t care anymore.” She glanced up at the android. “You don’t have to come, though; just point me in the right direction. I’ll let you off wherever. You can say you were abducted; you’ll get home.”

  Feril was silent for a second, then said, “No, I’ll accompany you, if you don’t mind. Given that you are prepared to risk your life, it would be lacking in grace of me not to gamble the loss of a week’s memories.”

  She shrugged again, then looked toward the sunset, to the pass in the mountains.

  The riders had gone. Before she looked away a single, large aircraft powered into the skies beyond and headed northwest, angling across the sunset and dispatching another distantly diving arrowhead shape above as though it was an afterthought.

  The monowheel vehicle turned and rolled away down the far side of the ridge, picking up speed as it descended toward a dry valley, then accelerated smoothly away in a trail of chill, falling dust.

  24

  Fall Into The Sea

  The evening light deepened as the monowheel spun quickly down a succession of shallow clinker valleys devoid of snow, vegetation or significant obstructions toward a range of mountains, then came out into a broad gulf between jagged peaks whose summits still held a snow-pink trace of sunset. They found a wide shelf of sand and gravel that traced a barren contour on that great valley and drove along it; after a few kilometers its surface bore a dusting of snow that thickened gradually as they drove. The tree line was fifty meters lower down.

  “Is this a road?” she said, puzzled, as they headed into and out of a long narrow side-valley she’d have thought it easier to bridge at the mouth.

  “I believe it is what is called a parallel road,” Feril said. “Caused by the waters of a temporary lake, probably formed when a glacier block—”

  Feril went silent, then said, “Electromagnetic pulse.”

  “What?”

  The mountain-tops on the other side of the broad valley were suddenly blazing white.

  She stopped the monowheel.

  They turned and looked behind them, but the snow-caped shoulders of the mountain at their back cut out much of the sky.

  “I believe the Keep has been destroyed by a thermonuclear device,” Feril said.

  She watched for a moment as high, feathery clouds above the mountains slowly faded yellow-white, then started the monowheel again and powered on along the sand and gravel road.

  The ground-shock arrived a little later. The monowheel absorbed the pulse without a murmur but they saw the snow-smothered ground nearby shake and ripple.

  Sharrow and Feril looked up the white mountain slopes on their right, to see them covered with hazy white clouds, gradually spreading and enlarging.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “I believe those are avalanches.”

  “So do I. Hang on.”

  They raced along the white shelf of the ancient beach to the shelter of an outcrop of rock. The avalanches were a smoothly building roar of noise that terminated in a blast of icy air and a sudden dimming of the late-evening light; the sky above the summit of the outcrop disappeared. A tearing dim grayness flowed all around the sheltering rock-face and a whistling noise came through the throaty bellow of the avalanche. They were suddenly surrounded by their own heavy, swirling snowfall.

  A noise like thunder sounded downslope as the tsunami of snow and ice hit the forest.

  When the roaring stopped and the last few flakes had fallen around them, they brushed themselves down and went slowly on through a dim white haze across the ice-rubbled mounds of settling snow. She found the cockpit heater control and turned it up.

  Feril leaned over the side of the vehicle and peered underneath as they traversed one of the house-high pillows of snow.

  “Impressive,” she heard the android say. She glanced round. “The wheel beneath has ballooned to this width,” Feril said, spreading its hands over half a meter apart, “and appears to grow spikes where it contacts the surface.” The section of angled wheel protruding behind Feril was thin as a knife.

  “Yes,” she said, turning to the front again. “Well, don’t lean back.”

  The parallel road had all but disappeared under the icy debris and scattered falls of rock. Downhill, through a haze of settling snow, much of the forest had disappeared under the white flows, the shattered trunks of the trees sticking jumbled from the snow like broken bones.

  She kept the monowheel on what felt like the right level until they saw a huge flute of ice and snow like a scree slope leading down through the wrecked forest to the flat valley floor. She swung the vehicle onto it and down while the last of the day’s light leached from the sky.

  They followed the frozen river for an hour through the moonlit darkness, then stopped.

  She parked the machine off the white highway of river in the shelter of a C-shaped bay of rocks topped by snow-dusted trees. Feril studied the lock on the Lazy Gun while she stretched her legs and inspected as much of the monowheel as she could by moonlight.

  The single wheel was angled at about thirty degrees off the vertical; it looked solid but couldn’t be. She remembered the bike back in the warehouse in Vembyr, but even flex-metal couldn’t do what this material seemed to be able to. She got Feril to move the vehicle forward a little. The single wheel seemed to flow rather than merely revolve. It was the color of dulled mercury; its chevron-corrugated tread looked like a giant gear-wheel.

  The cannon muzzle was scooped into the chin of the vehicle on the center-line. The shining tubes sticking from the rear, which she had mistaken for engine exhausts, were the recoilless weapon’s gas-ports. Feril checked the weapon-state screen and reported that they had another thirty-one shells left of various types.

  “I’m afraid the cannon will remain our most powerful weapon,” Feril said sorrowfully, putting the Lazy Gun down and tapping the trigger-lock. “This is a cryptogenetic code-lock. It is impossible to open without the correct base-sequence key.”

  “Well, never mind,” she said. “It was always a long shot.”

  “I am sorry,” Feril said. “However, I believe I have worked out the link between your interest in the mark on the wrist of the man you looked at earlier and the reason you wish to go to the province of Udeste.”

  She hauled herself back into the vehicle. “Took you a while,” she said, yawning.

  “Yes,” Feril said contemplatively. “I am a little disappointed myself.”

  “Well,” she said, “you can redeem yourself by taking the night-shift. I’m tired.”

  “I shall drive with all due care and attention.”

  “Yes,” she said, sliding down into the footwell, yawning. “Lantskaar welcomes careful drivers.”

  They put the Lazy Gun in the compartment behind the cockpit; Feril sat on the Gun with its legs either side of the driving seat. After a little experimentation, she found a comfortable way of snuggling down into the footwell while the android leaned over to the controls in a position that would have been tortuously uncomfortable for a human but with which it assured her it was perfectly happy.

  She slept while Feril drove through the night.

  So far, so good.

  Eh? What?

  I said, So far, so good.

  The man who was really the Lazy Gun was sitting in the monowheel cockpit alongside her. There wasn’t room for him, but he was there.

  What do you want now? she asked the Gun. I want to sleep.

  I beg your pardon. I just wanted to say, well done. Sorry I can’t do any destroying yet, but like I said, we’ll see what we can do…

  Yes, yes, she said. Now go away, I’m tired.

  All right. Good night, Lady Sharrow.

  Good—Fate, I don’t believe this; I’m saying good night to my own subconscious.

  Of c
ourse you are, the Gun said.

  Now sleep.

  The air was warm around her as she spun through it, safe in the midst of the surrounding cold. The android was at the controls. The antique machine hummed beneath her, transporting her among reflections.

  In her dream she hugged the broad neck of the trafe bird.

  The sky was an insane blue; an endless curve of land died before the wheel, forever reeling away toward an expanding horizon. The mountains became snow-dusted hills, which became tundra. They rolled across the plains of frozen lakes among the mountains, found old tracks through the hills and skirted the marshy tundra until they found an old turnpike, its metaling cracked like the surface of an ancient painting and dotted with the erupted blisters of ice hummocks.

  They avoided settlements and once swung off a better-maintained length of the tundra road to let a military supply road train pass, but otherwise saw no sign of people. Feril’s internal knowledge of Golter’s geography didn’t cover northern Lantskaar and the Embargoed Areas in great detail, and the monowheel seemed to have no strategic navigational systems whatsoever, but the android was what it described as cautiously certain they were now around the center of the Areas, near the Farvel coast, a thousand kilometers due west of the fjord where they had found the Gun. They had traveled approximately seven hundred kilometers from the Keep.

  They saw many aircraft contrails, and on one occasion heard but did not see low-flying jets while speeding through a low forest by the side of a long lake.

  The monowheel absorbed the shock of potholes and boulders, leaped larger depressions, and turned its wheel into a tall ellipse to ford rivers. Once, when she was driving quickly up a shallow slope on a hillside toward a long bridge that had fallen into a ravine, the vehicle slammed to a stop as she was still squinting at the revealed rim of broken concrete and thinking about braking.

  She turned round to Feril.

  “Did you do that?”

  “No,” the android said. “The vehicle would appear to be what is sometimes called ‘smart.’ ” Feril sounded slightly condescending. “Though not sentient, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “I myself was just about to suggest braking.”

  “Right,” she said. She looked for a way down into the ravine, then whirled the monowheel around toward a hairpinning side-road descending into the forest.

  She walked, windmilling her stiff arms, by the side of a waterfall in low hills they thought must be near the northwestern limits of the Areas. The android stood in the pool at the foot of the waterfall, waves lapping round its thighs. She was determined not to ask it why it was doing this.

  “Hey,” she said, peering under the rear of the vehicle. “There’s a mark, a gouge or something here.” She looked at the android. “What happened to the due care and attention?”

  “Oh,” Feril said quietly, staring into the water. “That will be a bullet mark.”

  “A bullet mark?” she said.

  Feril nodded slowly, still staring at the water. “We picked that up last night at the Lantskaarian border.” It looked at her briefly, head turning smoothly to and fro. “It all happened very quickly,” it said reassuringly. “By the time I had an opportunity to waken you, we were out of danger. I thought it best to let you sleep.” Its voice was soft.

  She was not sure what to say.

  Feril stooped, dipping suddenly, one hand flicking into the water, then it straightened and walked toward her, a half-meter-long fish flapping powerfully in its hand.

  She looked at it.

  “You said you were hungry,” Feril explained. “I suggest we grill the fish with the laser.”

  She nodded, wondering why they had not thought to ask the android’s help when they had all been starving at the fjord.

  “Thank you, Feril,” she said. She no longer felt hungry, but she supposed she had better eat. “I’ll get the gun.”

  They reached the Security Franchise strip that afternoon, traversing several military roads in the forested hills while Feril monitored leakages of comm and sensory wavelengths. It guided them away from the roads and the areas where the electromagnetic clutter was thickest; they took to tracks, then paths, then the forest floor, thick with rotting leaf-scales and moss-covered boulders.

  They crossed what they guessed was the border into Caltasp by wading the monowheel through a rushing stream beneath a ramshackle, electrified fence; the vehicle reduced the portion of the wheel under its body almost to nothing at one point, and at another was actually afloat, in a dark pool under the everleafed trees. Even then, it remained perfectly stable and level in the water, gyros whining distantly. A light flashed on the instruments and Feril suggested pressing the glowing area; when she did the monowheel surged forward through the water, leaving a foamy wake.

  The machine purred out of the water, rose smoothly up the muddy bank and entered the forest again.

  “Great toy,” she said.

  “Quite.”

  They returned through the concentric layers of surface-traveling civilization to forest paths, then tracks, then winding metaled roads in the foothills, then a narrow turnpike, heading arrow-straight through the plantations of low crop-forests. Vapor trails wove a net through the clear blue sky, and twice again they heard low-flying jets.

  A third group of jets went right over them; this time there was no warning build-up of noise, just an impression of their shadows—a single flicker across the road—followed by a stunning, titanic slap of sound and the scream of their engines fading in both directions at once while the trees on either side of the road whipped back and forth in the sudden storm, losing scales, twigs and whole branches. The monowheel reacted to the gust by squatting slightly, but otherwise remained level.

  They rolled on.

  She had never seen a turnpike in Caltasp so deserted.

  “Where is everybody?”

  “It’s a little worrying,” Feril said above the slipstream noise. “I’ve been monitoring the public broadcast channels, and several of them appear to consist only of a soundtrack of what I believe is called martial music. Other channels have been showing nothing but old entertainments. There have been a couple of weak EMPs in the last hour, too.”

  She looked round at it. “You mean nukes?” she asked.

  “Perhaps not; they may have been caused by charged-particle weapons.”

  She turned back, watching the trees stream past on either side. “Either way,” she said.

  They sidestepped two military convoys by taking once to the forest and once to the hummocked tundra. The turnpike avoided towns and other settlements as a matter of course.

  The tundra became huge prairies of grain.

  They plowed a course through one vast field to avoid a road block, then on an ordinary but straight road accelerated to outpace a helicopter that seemed to be trying to follow them.

  She switched roads several times immediately after that, always heading north or west through the dying light of the cold afternoon.

  Finally the military traffic became too thick, and they left the metaled ways altogether. They took to tracks and forest fire-breaks, old drove-ways and canal towpaths. They passed hill villages and dark-looking towns, old orchards and walled compounds; the monowheel rose and fell and banked and paced through the gloaming.

  She thought she smelled something in the air as they rolled down the bed of a half-dried river, over water-meadows and sand banks and through clear shallows between hills bright and clear in the winter dusk. The river splayed out, deepening to become a tree-studded estuary; they took to the bank, then summited a sand dune.

  They were facing the sea.

  Feril drove through the depths of the night, once she had gone to sleep. They had made good time along the cold beaches of the coast and watched the skies to the south and east flicker and pulse with different-colored lights. Feril picked up officially sanctioned broadcast reports of limited engagements taking place between Security Franchise units—backed by W
orld Court licensed forces—and the armed services of Lantskaar, following acts of aggression and an invasion by the latter; the situation was being contained and there was no need to worry. The broadcast ended abruptly in another, strong, electromagnetic pulse.

  Stretched forward over the cockpit, Feril only glanced at the monowheel’s nightsight display now and again to check on its sensitivity. Sea, surf, beach and dunes were bright in the moonlight. The strand was flat and smooth in places, strewn with braided streams and shallow pools in others; the monowheel thrummed across it all as though over glass.

  She was on a station platform, in the middle of a snowy plain. An old steam train huffed behind the crowd of people. The Gun was there again, but it wasn’t saying anything this time; it stayed in the background while she said good-bye to Miz and Dloan and Zefla and Cenuij. They were whole and fit and well, as she’d have liked to remember them. She tried not to cry as she hugged them and said good-bye. She kept thinking there was somebody else there, too; somebody she could only see from the corner of her eye, a faceless figure in a wheelchair, but whenever she turned to look at the figure, she disappeared.

  Then she saw Froterin and Cara and Vleit standing behind the others, and they looked great and hadn’t aged at all, and she laughed and cried and hugged them too, and they were all talking at once and everybody was hugging everybody else, all so glad to see one another after all this time, but soon it was time for them all to go, and her eyes filled with so many tears she couldn’t see properly as they all boarded the train, waving and smiling sadly as the old engine went huff, huff, and gradually pulled the dark carriages away from the little station in the snow.

  She and the Gun watched the train disappear into the white distance. Then she looked at the Gun and It smiled.

  The sleeping woman stirred beneath the android, sighing and turning over in her sleep. Feril pushed the speed up as they flashed past a town, burning in the darkness. More lights flared in the sky to the south, and the broad band of junklight sparkled intermittently.