Look to Windward c-7

by Iain M. Banks

  “So he went ahead, planting pylons, spinning cables and producing cars to his heart’s content. Lots of people helped; he had to form separate teams with a couple of airships each, and some went their own way, though they mostly worked under a general plan drawn up by Latry.

  “The only interruptions came during the Idiran War and—once I’d taken over—in the Shaladian Crisis, when I had to commandeer all the spare production capacity to be ready to build ships and military stuff. Even then he kept building pylons and spinning cables using home-made machinery some of his followers had built. By the time he’d finished, six hundred years after he’d started, he’d covered almost the whole of the Breaks in pylons. And that’s why it’s called Pylon Country.”

  “That’s three million square kilometres,” Ziller said. He had retrieved the chart and the magnifying glass and gone back to studying one through the other.

  “Near enough,” the avatar said, uncrossing then recrossing its legs. “I counted the number of pylons once and totted up the kilometrage of cable.”

  “And?” Kabe asked.

  The avatar shook its head. “They were both very big numbers, but otherwise uninteresting. I could search them out for you if you wanted, but…”

  “Please,” Kabe said. “Not on my account.”

  “So, did Mr Latry die with his life’s work completed?” Ziller asked. He was staring out of a side window now, and scratching his head. He held the map up and turned it one way, then the other.

  “No,” the avatar said. “Mr Latry was not one of life’s diers. He spent a few years travelling the cables in a car, all by himself, but eventually he grew bored with it. He did some deep space cruising then settled on an Orbital called Quyeela, sixty thousand years away from here. Hasn’t been here or even inquired about the cable-car system to my knowledge for over a century. Last I heard he was trying to persuade a pack of GSVs to take part in a scheme to induce patterns of sun spots on his local star so they’d spell out names and mottoes.”

  “Well,” Ziller said, staring at the chart again. “They say a man should have a hobby.”

  “At the moment yours seems to be keeping about two million kilometres between you and our Major Quilan,” the avatar observed.

  Ziller looked up. “Heavens. Are we really that far from home?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “And how is our emissary? Is he enjoying himself? Has he settled in to his billet? Has he sent any souvenir cards back home yet?”

  It was six days after Quilan had arrived on the Resistance Is Character-Forming. The Major had liked his quarters in Yorle City, on the Plate of the same name, well enough. Yorle was two Plates, two continents away from Aquime City, where Ziller lived. The Major had visited Aquime a couple of times since, once accompanied by Kabe, once alone. On each occasion he had announced his intention and asked Hub to tell Ziller what he was doing. Ziller wasn’t spending much time at home anyway; he was visiting parts of the Orbital he hadn’t seen before, or, as today, places he’d been to before and been taken with.

  “He has settled in very well,” Hub said through the avatar. “Shall I tell him you were asking after him?”

  “Better not. We don’t want him getting too excited.” Ziller gazed through the side windows as the swaying car tipped in a gust of wind and then, still creaking and rattling, picked up speed along the monofil cable. “Surprised you’re not with him, Kabe,” Ziller said, glancing at the Homomdan. “I thought the idea was you had to hold his hand while he’s here.”

  “The Major hopes that I might be able to persuade you to grant him an audience,” Kabe said. “Obviously I can’t do much persuading if I never leave his side.”

  Ziller inspected Kabe over the top of the chart. “Tell me, Kabe, is that him trying to be disarmingly honest through you, or just your usual naivete?”

  Kabe laughed. “A little of each, I think.”

  Ziller shook his head. He tapped at the chart with the magnifying glass. “What do all these cable lines cross-hatched in pink and red mean?” he asked.

  “The pink lines have been judged unsafe,” the avatar said. “The red ones are the stretches that have fallen down.”

  Ziller held up the chart towards the avatar. He indicated one area the size of his hand. “You mean you can’t use these bits at all?”

  “Not in a cable car,” the avatar agreed.

  “You just let them fall down?” Ziller said, staring at the chart again and sounding, Kabe thought, distinctly peeved.

  The avatar shrugged. “Like I said; they weren’t my responsibility in the first place. Nothing to do with me whether they stand or fall, unless I choose to adopt them as part of my infrastructure. And given that hardly anybody uses them these days, I’m not about to. Anyway, I kind of enjoy their gradual entropic decay.”

  “I thought you people built to last,” Kabe said.

  “Oh,” said the avatar brightly, “if I’d built the pylons I’d have anchored them into the base material. That’s the main reason the lines have collapsed or are unsafe; the pylons have been washed away in floods. They weren’t founded on the substrate, just the geo-layer, and not very far into that. A big flood comes along after a super-cyclone and—whumf—a bunch of them fall down. Plus the monofil’s so strong it can drag whole lines down once the first one or two pylons get washed into the flood streams; they didn’t put enough safety breaks into the cables. There have been four big storms since the system was finished. I’m surprised more of it hasn’t been compromised.”

  “Still, it does seem a shame to let it all fall into such disrepair,” Kabe said.

  The avatar looked up at him. “You really think so? I thought there was something rather romantic about it crumbling slowly away. For a work of such self-referential artifice to be attritionally sculpted by what passes for the forces of nature round here seemed appropriate to me.”

  Kabe thought about this.

  Ziller was studying the chart again. “What about these lines hatched in blue?” he asked.

  “Oh,” said the avatar, “those just might be unsafe.”

  Ziller’s face took on an expression of consternation. He held up the chart. “But we’re on a blue line!”

  “Yes,” the avatar said, looking up through the glass panels in the centre of the rustic painting, where the car’s guide and steering wheels could be seen sliding along the cable. “Hmm,” it said.

  Ziller put the chart down, crumpling it. “Hub,” he said. “Are we in any danger?”

  “No, not really. There are safety systems. Plus if there was a failure and we fell off the wire I could zap down an AG platform before we’d fallen more than a few metres. So as long as I’m all right, we all are.”

  Ziller looked suspiciously at the silver-skinned creature lying on the couch, then returned to his chart.

  “Have we settled on a venue for the first performance of my symphony yet?” he asked, not looking up.

  “I thought the Stullien Bowl, on Guerno,” the avatar said.

  Ziller looked up. Kabe thought he looked both surprised and pleased. “Really?”

  “I think I have little choice,” the avatar said. “Been a lot of interest. Need a maximum-capacity venue.”

  Ziller smiled broadly, and looked to be about to say something, then he smiled, almost bashfully, Kabe thought, and buried his head in the chart again.

  “Oh, Ziller,” the avatar said. “Major Quilan has asked me to ask you if you’d mind him moving to Aquime City.”

  Ziller put the chart down. “What?” he hissed.

  “Yorle is very nice but it’s quite different from Aquime,” the avatar said. “It’s warm, even at this time of year. He wants to experience the same conditions you do up there on the massif.”

  “Send him to the top of a Bulkhead Range,” Ziller muttered, taking up the magnifying glass again.

  “Would it concern you?” the avatar asked. “You’re hardly there these days anyway.”

  “It’s still where I pre
fer to lay my head most nights,” Ziller said. “So, yes, it would concern me.”

  “Then I should tell him you’d prefer he didn’t move there.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure? He wasn’t asking to move in next door. Just somewhere in the city centre.”

  “Still too close for comfort.”

  “Hub,” Kabe began.

  “Hmm,” the avatar said. “He said he’d be happy to let you know where he was so you wouldn’t bump into—”

  “Oh dear fucking god!” Ziller threw the chart down and shoved the magnifying glass into a waistcoat pocket. “Look! I don’t want the guy here, I don’t want him anywhere near me, I don’t want to meet him and I don’t like being told that even if I want to I can’t get away from the son of a bitch.”

  “My dear Ziller,” Kabe said, then stopped. I’m starting to sound like Tersono, he thought.

  The avatar brought its boots down off the top of the couch and swung itself into a sitting position. “Nobody’s forcing you to meet the fellow, Ziller.”

  “Yes, but nobody’s letting me get as far away from him as I’d like, either.”

  “You’re a long way from him now,” Kabe pointed out.

  “And how long did it take us to get from there to here?” Ziller asked. They had come by sub-Plate car that morning; the whole journey had taken just over an hour.

  “Hmm, well…”

  “I’m practically a prisoner!” Ziller said, spreading his arms.

  The avatar’s face contorted. “No, you’re not,” it said.

  “I might as well be! I haven’t been able to write a note since that bastard showed up!”

  The avatar sat up, looking alarmed. “But you have finished the-?”

  Ziller waved one hand exasperatedly. “It’s complete. But I usually wind down with shorter pieces after something this big, and this time I haven’t been able to. I feel constipated.”

  “Well,” Kabe said, “if you might as well be forced into contact with Quilan, why not see him and get it over with?”

  The avatar groaned and flopped back on the couch. It put its feet up again.

  Ziller was staring at Kabe. “Is that it?” he asked. “Is that you using your powers of argument to convince me I should see this piece of shit?”

  “From your tone,” Kabe said, voice rumbling, “I take it you are not persuaded.”

  Ziller shook his head. “Persuasion. What’s reasonable. Would I mind? Am I concerned? Would I be insulted? I may do as I please but then so may he.” Ziller pointed angrily at the avatar. “You people are polite to the point of it becoming worse than any direct insult. All this pussy-footing, mealy-mouthed bullshit, dancing round each other after-you-no-after-you-no-after-you!” He waved his arms around as his voice rose to a shout. “I hate this hopeless congealment of fucking good manners! Can’t anyone just do something?”

  Kabe thought about saying something, then decided not to. The avatar looked mildly surprised. It blinked a few times. “Such as what?” it inquired. “Would you prefer that the major called you out and challenged you to a duel? Or moved in next door?”

  “You could kick him out!”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because he’s annoying me!”

  The avatar smiled. “Ziller,” it said.

  “I feel hunted! We’re a predator species; we’re only used to hiding when we’re stalking. We’re not used to feeling like prey.”

  “You could move home,” Kabe suggested.

  “He’d follow me!”

  “You could keep moving.”

  “Why should I? I like my apartment. I like the silence and the views, I even like some of the people. There are three concert halls in Aquime with perfect acoustics. Why should I be driven from the place just because Chel sends this military bag-boy to do god-knows-what.”

  “What do you mean, god-knows-what?” asked the avatar.

  “Maybe he isn’t here just to talk me into going back with him; maybe he’s here to kidnap me! Or kill me!”

  “Oh, really,” Kabe said.

  “Kidnap’s impossible,” Hub said. “Unless he brought a fleet of warships I’ve missed.” The avatar shook its head. “Murder is almost impossible.” It frowned. “Attempted murder is always possible, I suppose, but, if you were worried, I could make sure that if and when you did meet there would be a few combat drones and knife missiles and that sort of thing around. And of course you could be backed-up.”

  “I am not,” Ziller said, deliberately, “going to need combat drones and knife missiles or backing-up. Because I am not going to meet him.”

  “But he’s obviously annoying you just by being here,” Kabe said.

  “Oh, does it show?” Ziller asked, snarling.

  “So, assuming that he’s not going to get bored and go away,” Kabe went on, “you’d almost be better off agreeing to see him and getting it over with.”

  “Will you just stop this ‘getting it over with’ nonsense?” Ziller shouted.

  “Talking of not being able to get away from people,” the avatar said heavily, “E. H. Tersono has discovered our whereabouts and would like to drop by.”

  “Ha!” Ziller said, whirling round to look out of the windscreen again. “I can’t get away from that damn machine either.”

  “It means well,” Kabe said.

  Ziller looked round, appearing genuinely mystified. “So?”

  Kabe sighed. “Is Tersono nearby?” he asked the avatar.

  It nodded. “It’s already on its way here. About ten minutes away. Flying in from the nearest tunnel port.”

  More than just the terrain made the Breaks wasteland; there were only a few sub-Plate access points and they were all on the outskirts of the area, so to get deep into the barrens at more than walking-trail pace you either had to use the cable-car system, or fly.

  “What does it want?” Ziller checked the wind gauge, then loosened two ropes and tightened another, to no appreciable effect.

  “Social visit, it says,” the avatar told him.

  Ziller tapped a gimballed horizontal dial. “You sure this compass works?”

  “Are you accusing me of not having a viable magnetic field?” the Hub asked.

  “I was asking you if this thing works.” Ziller tapped the instrument again.

  “Should do,” the avatar said, putting its clasped hands behind its head again. “Very inefficient way of determining your heading, though.”

  “I want to head into the wind on the next turn,” Ziller said, looking ahead to the hill they were approaching and the stubby pylon at its scrubby summit.

  “You’ll need to start the propeller.”

  “Oh,” Kabe said. “They have propellers?”

  “Big two-bladed thing stowed at the back,” the avatar said, nodding to the rear, where two curved windows cupped a broad panelled section. “Battery-powered. Should be charged up if the generator vanes are working.”

  “How do I determine that?” Ziller asked. He pulled his pipe from a waistcoat pocket.

  “See the big dial on the right just under the windscreen with a lightning flash symbol?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “Is the needle in the brown-black section or the bright blue section?”

  Ziller peered. He stuck his pipe in his mouth. “There is no needle.”

  The avatar looked thoughtful. “That could be a bad sign.” It sat up and looked about. The pylon was about fifty metres away; the ground was rising underneath them. “I’d ease off on that mizzen sheet.”

  “The what?”

  “Slacken the third rope from the left.”

  “Ah.” Ziller loosened the rope and tied it off again. He pulled on a couple of the levers, braking the car and readying the steering wheels above. He clicked a couple of large switches and looked hopefully towards the rear of the car.

  He caught the avatar’s gaze. “Oh, let the fucking emissary move to Aquime,” he said in an exasperated voice. “See if I care. Just
keep us apart.”

  “Certainly,” the avatar said, grinning. Then its expression changed. “Oh-oh,” it said. It was staring straight ahead.

  Kabe felt a spark of worry leap in his breast.

  “What?” Ziller said. “Is Tersono here already?” Then he was thrown off his feet as, with a crashing, tearing noise, the cable car decelerated rapidly and came to a shuddering, swaying stop. The avatar had slid along the couch. Kabe had been thrown forwards, only stopping himself from falling on his face by putting out one arm and bracing himself on the brass rail separating the passenger compartment from the crew’s area. The brass rail bent and came away from the bulkhead on one side with a creak and a bang. Ziller ended up sitting on the floor between two of the instrument binnacles. The car rocked to and fro.

  Ziller spat out a piece of his pipe. “What the fuck was that?”

  “I think we snagged a tree,” the avatar said, sitting upright. “Everybody all right?”

  “Fine,” said Kabe. “Sorry about this rail.”

  “I’ve bitten my pipe in half!” Ziller said. He picked one half of his severed pipe up from the floor.

  “It’ll repair,” the avatar said. It pulled back the carpet between the couches and lifted open a wooden door. Wind gusted in. The creature lay on the floor and stuck its head out. “Yes, it’s a tree,” it shouted. It levered itself back inside. “Must have grown a bit since the last time anybody used this line.”

  Ziller was picking himself up. “Of course it wouldn’t have happened if you’d been responsible for the system, would it?”

  “Of course not,” the avatar said breezily. “Shall I send a repair drone or shall we try and fix it ourselves?”

  “I have a better idea,” Ziller said, smiling as he looked out of a side window. Kabe looked too, and saw a mainly rose-coloured object flying through the air towards them. Ziller slid open a window on that side and turned to his two companions with a smile before hailing the approaching drone. “Tersono! Good to see you! Glad you’re here! See that mess down below?”