Consider Phlebas (36 page)

She stopped and said, ‘I killed the guard and then sat and waited, Horza. The GCU managed to take the cruiser intact. Eventually some nice soldier drones came and rescued me.’ She shrugged.

‘Unarmed, you killed an Idiran in full battle armour and toting a laser?’ Horza said sceptically. Balveda shrugged again.

‘Horza, I didn’t say it was easy.’

‘What about Xoralundra?’ Horza asked through a grin.

‘Your old Idiran friend? Must have escaped. A few of them did. At any rate, he wasn’t among the dead or captured.’

Horza nodded and waved her by. Followed by Yalson and Dorolow, Perosteck Balveda went down the corridor to Yalson’s cabin. Horza looked at the drone sitting on the table.

‘Think you can make yourself useful, machine?’

‘I suppose, as you obviously intend to keep us all here and take us to this unattractive-sounding rockball on the edge of nowhere, I might as well do what I can to make the journey as safe as possible. I’ll help with the vessel’s maintenance, if you like. I would prefer, though, if you called me by my name, and not just by that word you manage to make sound like an expletive: “machine”. I am called Unaha-Closp. Is it asking too much for you to address me as such?’

‘Why, certainly not, Unaha-Closp,’ Horza said, trying to look and sound sufficiently bogus in his abjection. ‘I shall most assuredly ensure that I call you that in future.’

‘It might,’ the drone said, rising from the table to the level of Horza’s eyes, ’seem amusing to you, but it matters to me. I am not just a computer, I am a drone. I am conscious and I have an individual identity. Therefore I have a name.’

‘I told you I’d use it,’ Horza said.

‘Thank you. I shall go and see if your engineer needs any help inspecting the laser housing.’ It floated to the door. Horza watched it go.

He was alone. He sat down and looked at the screen, down at the far end of the mess. The debris that had been Vavatch glowed with a barren glare; that vast cloud of matter was still visible. But it was cooling, dead and spinning away; becoming less real, more ghostly, less substantial all the time.

He sat back and closed his eyes. He would wait a while before going to sleep. He wanted to give the others time to think about what they had found out. They would be easier to read then; he would know if he was safe for the moment or whether he would have to watch them all. He also wanted to wait until Yalson and Dorolow had finished with Balveda. The Culture agent might be biding her time, now she thought she had longer to live, but she might still try something. He wanted to be awake in case she did. He still hadn’t decided whether to kill her now or not, but at least he, too, now had time to think.

The Clear Air Turbulence completed its last programmed course correction, swinging its nose towards the Glittercliff face; not in the precise direction of the Schar’s World star, but onto the general bearing.

Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out towards the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world’s destruction.

Horza sat alone in the mess room a little longer, watching the remnants dissipate.

Light against the darkness, a fat torus of nothing, just debris. An entire world just wiped out. Not merely destroyed - the very first cut of the Grid energies would have been enough to do that - but obliterated, taken carefully, precisely, artistically apart; annihilation made into an aesthetic experience. The arrogant grace of it, the absolute-zero coldness of that sophisticated viciousness . . . it impressed almost as much as it appalled. Even he would admit to a certain reluctant admiration.

The Culture had not wasted its lesson to the Idirans and the rest of the galactic community. It had turned even that ghastly waste of effort and skill into a thing of beauty . . . But it was a message it would regret, Horza thought, as the hyper-light sped and the ordinary light crawled through the galaxy.

This was what the Culture offered, this was its signal, its advertisement, its legacy: chaos from order, destruction from construction, death from life.

Vavatch would be more than its own monument; it would commemorate, too, the final, grisly manifestation of the Culture’s lethal idealism, the overdue acknowledgement that not only was it no better than any other society, it was much, much worse.

They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement (a memory of darkness swept through him, and he shivered) . . . But theirs was the ultimate mistake, the final error, and it would be their undoing.

Horza considered going to the bridge to switch the view on the screen to real space, and so see the Orbital intact again, as it had been a few weeks before when the real light the CAT was now travelling through had left the place. But he shook his head slowly, though there was nobody there to see, and watched the quiet screen at the far end of the disordered and deserted room instead.

State of play: two

The yacht dropped anchor within a wooded bay. The water was clear, and ten metres beneath the sparkling waves the sandy floor of the anchorage was visible. Tall everblues were spread in a rough crescent around the small inlet, their dusty-looking roots sometimes visible on the ochre sandstone they clung to. There were some small cliffs of the same rock, sprinkled with bright flowers and overlooking golden beaches. The white yacht, its long reflection flickering on the water like a silent flame, feathered its tall sails and swung slowly into the faint breeze coming through one arm of the woods and over the cupped bay.

People took small canoes or dinghies to the shore, or jumped into the warm water and swam. Some of the ceerevells, which had escorted the yacht on its voyage from its home port, stayed to play in the bay; their long red bodies slipped through the water under and around the vessel’s hull, and their snorting breath echoed from the low cliffs facing the water. Sometimes they nudged the boats heading for the shore, and a few of the swimmers played with the sleek animals, diving to swim with them, touch them, hold onto them.

The shouts of the people in the boats drew gradually further away. They beached the small craft and disappeared into the woods, going to explore the uninhabited island. The small waves of the inland sea lapped at the disturbed sand.

Fal ‘Ngeestra sighed and, after walking once around the yacht, sat down near the stem on a padded seat. She played absently with one of the ropes tied between the stanchions, rubbing it with her hand. The boy who had been talking to her during the morning, when the yacht was sailing slowly out from the mainland towards the islands, saw her sitting there, and came to talk to her.

‘Aren’t you going to look at the island?’ he said. He was very thin and light looking. His skin was a deep, almost golden yellow. There was a sheen about it which made Fal think of a hologram because it looked somehow deeper than his skinny arms and legs were thick.

‘I don’t feel like it,’ Pal said. She hadn’t wanted the boy to talk to her earlier and she didn’t want to talk to him now. She was sorry she’d agreed to come on the cruise.

‘Why not?’ the boy said. She couldn’t remember his name. She hadn’t been paying attention when he started talking to her, and she wasn’t even sure he had told her his name, though she assumed he had.

‘I just don’t.’ She shrugged. She wasn’t looking at him.

‘Oh,’ he said. He was silent for a while. She was aware of the sunlight reflecting from his body, but she still didn’t turn to look at him. She watched the distant trees, the waves, the ruddy bodies of the ceerevells hump-backing on the surface of the water as they rose to vent and then dive again. The boy said, ‘I know how you feel.’

‘Do you?’ she said, and turned to look at him. He looked a little surprised. He nodded.

‘You’re fed up, aren’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ she said, looking away again. ‘A little bit.’

‘Why does that old drone follow you about everywhere?’

She darted a glance at the boy. Jase was below decks just then, getting a drink for her. It had come aboard at the port with her and had stayed not too far away all the time - the hovering, protective way it usually did. She shrugged again and watched a flock of birds rise from the interior of the island. They called and dipped and wheeled in the air. ‘It looks after me,’ she said. She stared at her hands, watching the sunlight reflect from her nails.

‘Do you need looking after?’

‘No.’

‘Then why does it look after you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re very mysterious, you know,’ he said. She wasn’t looking, but she thought she heard a smile in his voice. She shrugged soundlessly. ‘You’re like that island,’ he said. ‘You’re strange and mysterious like it is.’

Fal snorted and tried to look scathing; then she saw Jase appearing from a doorway, carrying a glass. She got up quickly, followed by the boy, walked down the deck, and met the old drone, taking the glass from it and smiling at it gratefully. She buried her face in the container and sipped at the drink, looking out through the glass at the boy.

‘Well, hello, young man,’ Jase said. ‘Aren’t you going to have a look at the island?’ Fal wanted to kick the machine because of its hearty voice and the way it had said almost what the boy had said to her.

‘I might,’ the boy said, looking at her.

‘You should,’ Jase said, starting to float towards the stern. The old machine extended a curved field, like a shadow without something to cast it, out from its casing and round the boy’s shoulders. ‘By the way, I couldn’t help overhearing you when you were talking earlier,’ it said, gently guiding the boy down the deck. His golden head turned over his shoulder to look at Fal, who was still drinking her drink very slowly, and just starting to follow Jase and the boy, a couple of paces behind. The boy looked away from her and towards the drone at his side, which was saying, ‘You were talking about not getting into Contact . . . ‘

‘That’s right.’ The boy’s voice was suddenly defensive. ‘I was talking about that, so?’ Fal continued to walk behind the drone and the boy. She smacked her lips. Ice in the glass clinked.

‘You sounded bitter,’ Jase said.

‘I’m not bitter,’ the boy said quickly. ‘I just think it isn’t fair, that’s all.’

‘That you weren’t picked?’ Jase asked. They were approaching the seats round the stern where Fal had sat a few minutes earlier.

‘Well, yes. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, and I think they made a mistake. I know I’d be good. I thought with the war and all that they would need more people.’

‘Well, yes. But Contact has far more applicants than it can use.’

‘But I thought one of the things that they considered was how much you wanted to get in, and I know nobody could have wanted to get in as much as I do. Ever since I can remember I’ve wanted . . . ‘ The boy’s voice trailed off as they came to the seats. Fal sat down; so did the boy. Fal was looking at him now but not listening. She was thinking.

‘Perhaps they don’t think you’re mature enough yet.’

‘I am mature!’

‘Hmm. They very rarely take people so young, you know. For all I know they’re looking for a special sort of immaturity when they do take people your age.’

‘Well, that’s silly. I mean, how do you know what to do if they don’t tell you what they want? How can you prepare? I think it’s all really unfair.’

‘In a way I think it’s meant to be,’ Jase replied. ‘They get so many people applying, they can’t take them all or even just take the best because there are so many of them, so they choose at random from them. You can always reapply.’

‘I don’t know,’ the boy said, sitting forward and putting his elbows on his knees and his head into his hands, staring at the polished wood of the deck. ‘Sometimes I think they just tell you that so you won’t feel bad when they reject you. I think they do maybe take the very best. But I think they’ve made a mistake. But because they won’t tell you why you’ve failed, what can you do about it?’

. . . She was thinking about failure too.

Jase had congratulated her on her idea about finding the Changer. Only that morning, when they were on the ancient steam funicular down from the lodge, they had heard about the events at Vavatch, when the Changer called Bora Horza Gobuchul had appeared and escaped on the pirate ship, taking their agent Perosteck Balveda with him. Her hunch had been right, and Jase was effusive in its praise, making the point that it wasn’t her fault the man had got away. But she was depressed. Sometimes being right, thinking the correct thing, predicting accurately, depressed her.

It had all seemed so obvious to her. It hadn’t been a supernatural omen or anything silly like that when Perosteck Balveda suddenly turned up (on the battle-damaged but victorious GCU Nervous Energy, which was towing most of a captured Idiran cruiser), but it had seemed so . . . so natural that Balveda ought to be the one to go in search of the missing Changer. By that time they’d had more information about what had been going on in that volume of space when that particular duel had been going on; and the reported, possible and probable movements of various ships had pointed (again, she thought, fairly obviously) to the privateer craft called the Clear Air Turbulence. There were other possibilities, and they were followed up, too, as far as the already stretched resources of Contact’s Special Circumstances section would allow, but she was always certain that if any of the branching possibilities was going to bear fruit it would be the Vavatch connection. The captain of the Clear Air Turbulence was called Kraiklyn; he played Damage. Vavatch was the most obvious site for a full Damage game in years. Therefore the most likely place to intercept the vessel - apart from Schar’s World if the Changer already had control - was Vavatch. She had stuck her neck out by insisting that Vavatch was the most likely place, and that the woman agent Balveda should be one of those to go there, and now it had all come true and she realised it wasn’t really her neck she had stuck out at all. It was Balveda’s.