Consider Phlebas (40 page)

‘And what you do?’ she said, the sunset’s glow rubbing false colour into her pale, thin face. ‘Will you surprise yourself when you leave here?’

‘Why do you always assume I’m going to leave?’ he said, annoyed, stuffing his hands into the thick jacket’s pockets and staring at the hemisphere of disappearing star. ‘I keep telling you, I’m happy here.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You keep telling me.’

‘Why should I want to leave?’

She shrugged, slipped one arm through his, put her head to his shoulder. ‘Bright lights, big crowds, interesting times; other people.’

‘I’m happy here with you,’ he told her, and put his arm round her shoulders. Even in the bulky quilting of the jacket, she seemed slim, almost fragile.

She said nothing for a moment, then, in quite a different tone: ‘ . . . And so you should be.’ She turned to face him, smiling. ‘Now kiss me.’

He kissed her, hugged her. Looking down over her shoulder, he saw something small and red move on the trampled snow near her feet.

‘Look!’ he said, breaking away, stooping. She squatted beside him, and together they watched the tiny, stick-like insect crawl slowly, laboriously, over the surface of the snow: one more living, moving thing on the blank face of the world. ‘That’s the first one I’ve seen,’ he told her.

She shook her head, smiling. ‘You just don’t look,’ she chided.

He put out one hand and scooped the insect into his palm, before she could stop him. ‘Oh, Horza . . . ‘ she said, her breath catching on a tiny hook of despair.

He looked, uncomprehending, at her stricken expression, while the snow-creature died from the warmth of his hand.

The Clear Air Turbulence dropped towards the planet, circling its ice-bright layers of atmosphere from day to night and back again, tipping over the equator and tropics as it spiralled in.

Gradually it encountered that atmosphere - ions and gases, ozone and air. It swooped through the world’s thin wrapping with a voice of fire, flashing like a large, steady meteorite across the night sky, then across the dawn terminator, over steel-grey seas, tabular bergs, ice tables, floes and shelves, frozen coasts, glaciers, mountain ranges, permafrost tundra, more crushed pack ice and, finally, as it bellied down on its pillars of flame, land again: land on a thousand-kilometre peninsula sticking out into a frozen sea like some monstrous fractured limb set in plaster.

‘There it is,’ Wubslin said, watching the mass-sensor screen. A bright, winking light tracked slowly across the display. Horza looked over.

‘The Mind?’ he asked. Wubslin nodded.

‘Right density. Five kilometres deep . . . ‘ He punched some buttons and squinted at figures scrolling across the screen. ‘On the far side of the system from the entrance . . . and moving.’ The pinpoint of light on the screen disappeared. Wubslin adjusted the controls, then sat back, shaking his head. ‘Sensor needs an overhaul; its range is right down.’ The engineer scratched his chest and sighed. ‘Sorry about the engines, too, Horza.’ The Changer shrugged. Had the motors been working properly, or had the mass sensor’s range been adequate, somebody could have remained on the CAT, flying it if necessary, and relaying the Mind’s position to the others in the tunnels. Wubslin seemed to feel guilty that none of the repairs he’d tried to effect had significantly improved the performance of either motors or sensor.

‘Never mind,’ Horza said, watching the waste of ice and snow passing beneath them. ‘At least now we know the thing’s in there.’

The ship guided them to the right area, though Horza recognised it anyway from the times he had flown the single small flyer the base was allowed. He looked for the flyer as they made their final approach, in case somebody happened to be using it.

The snow-covered plain was ringed by mountains; the Clear Air Turbulence swept over a pass between two peaks, shattering the silence, tearing dusty snow from the jagged ridges and crags of the barren rocks on either side. It slowed further, coming in nose-up on its tripod of fusion fire. The snow on the plain beneath picked itself up and stirred as though uneasy at first. Then as the craft dropped lower and lower the snow was blown, then ripped, from the frozen ground beneath and thrown away in vast swirling rolls of heated air mixing snow and water, steam and plasma particles, in a howling blizzard which swept across the plain, gathering strength as the vessel dropped.

Horza had the CAT on manual. He watched the screen ahead, saw the false, created wind of stormy snow and steam in front, and beyond it, the entrance to the Command System.

It was a black hole set in a rugged promontory of rock which fluted down from the higher cliffs behind like a piece of solidified scree. The snowstorm broiled round the dark entrance like mist. The storm was turning brown as the fusion flame heated the frozen ground of the plain itself, melting it and plucking it out in an earthy spray.

With hardly a bump, and only a little settling as the legs sank into the now soggy surface of the swept plain, the CAT touched the surface of Schar’s World.

Horza looked straight ahead at the tunnel entrance. It was like a deep dark eye, staring back.

The motors died; the steam drifted. Disturbed snow fell back, and some new flakes formed as the suspended water in the air froze once more. The CAT clicked and creaked as it cooled from the heat produced by both the friction of re-entry and its own plasma jets. Water gurgled, turning to slush, over the scoured surface of the plain.

Horza switched the CAT’s bow laser to standby. There was no movement or sign from the tunnel. The view was clear now, the snow and steam gone. It was a bright, sunny, windless day.

‘Well, here we are,’ Horza said, and immediately felt foolish. Yalson nodded, still staring at the screen.

‘Yup,’ Wubslin said, checking screens, nodding. ‘Feet have sunk in half a metre or so. We’ll have to remember to run the motors for a while before we try to lift off, when we leave. They’ll freeze solid in half an hour.’

‘Hmm,’ Horza said. He watched the screen. Nothing moved. There were no clouds in the light blue sky, no wind to move the snows. The sun wasn’t warm enough to melt the ice and snow so there was no running water, not even any avalanches in the distant mountains.

With the exception of the seas - which still contained fish, but no longer any mammals - the only things which moved on Schar’s World were a few hundred species of small insects, slow spreading lichen on rocks near the equator, and the glaciers. The humanoids’ war, or the ice age, had wiped everything else out.

Horza tried the coded message once more. There was no reply.

‘Right,’ he said, getting up from his seat. ‘I’ll step out and take a look.’ Wubslin nodded. Horza turned to Yalson. ‘You’re very quiet,’ he said.

Yalson didn’t look at him. She was staring at the screen and the unblinking eye of the tunnel entrance. ‘Be careful,’ she said. She looked at him. ‘Just be careful, all right?’

Horza smiled at her, picked up Kraiklyn’s laser rifle from the floor, then went through to the mess.

‘We’re down,’ he said as he went through.

‘See?’ Dorolow said to Aviger. Neisin drank from his hip flask. Balveda gave the Changer a thin smile as he went from one door to the other. Unaha-Closp resisted the temptation to say anything, and wriggled out of the seat straps.

Horza descended to the hangar. He felt light as he walked; they had switched to ambient gravity on their way over the mountains, and Schar’s World produced less pull than the standard-G used on the CAT. Horza rode the hangar’s descending floor to the now refreezing marsh, where the breeze was fresh and sharp and clean.

‘Hope everything’s all right,’ Wubslin said as he and Yalson watched the small figure wade through the snow towards the rocky promontory ahead. Yalson said nothing but watched the screen with unblinking eyes. The figure stopped, touched its wrist, then rose in the air and floated slowly across the snows.

‘Ha,’ Wubslin said, laughing a little. ‘I’d forgotten we could use AG here. Too long on that damn O.’

‘Won’t be much use in those fucking tunnels,’ Yalson muttered.

Horza landed just to the side of the tunnel entrance. From the readings he had already taken while flying over the snow, he knew the tunnel door field was off. Normally it kept the tunnel within shielded from the snow and the cold air outside, but there was no field there, and he could see that a little snow had blown into the tunnel and now lay in a fan shape on its floor. The tunnel was cold inside, not warm as it should be, and its black, deep eye seemed more like a huge mouth, now that he was close to it.

He looked back at the CAT, facing him from two hundred metres away, a shining metal interruption on the white expanse, squatting in a blast-mark of brown.

‘I’m going inside,’ he told the ship, aiming a tight beam at it rather than broadcasting the signal.

‘OK,’ Wubslin said in his ear.

‘You don’t want somebody there to cover you?’ Yalson said.

‘No,’ Horza replied.

He walked down the tunnel, keeping close to the wall. In the first equipment bay were some ice sleds and rescue gear, tracking apparatus and signalling beacons. It was all much as he recalled it.

In the second bay, where the flyer should have been, there was nothing. He went on to the next one: more equipment. He was about forty metres inside the tunnel now, ten metres shy of the right-angled turn which led into the larger, segmented gallery where the living accommodation of the base lay.

The mouth of the tunnel was a white hole when he turned back to face it. He set the tight beam on wide aperture. ‘Nothing yet. I’m about to look into the accommodation section. Bleep but don’t reply otherwise.’ The helmet speakers bleeped.

Before going round the corner he detached the suit’s remote sensor from the side of the helmet and edged its small lens round the corner of sculpted rock. On an internal screen he saw the short length of tunnel, the flyer lying on the ground, and a few metres beyond it the wall of plastic planking which filled the tunnel and showed where the human accommodation section of the Changer base began.

By the side of the small flyer lay four bodies.

There was no movement.

Horza felt his throat closing up. He swallowed hard, then put the remote sensor back on the side of the helmet. He walked along the floor of fused rock to the bodies.

Two were dressed in light, unarmoured suits. They were both men, and he didn’t recognise them. One of them had been lasered, the suit flash-burned open so that the melted metals and plastics had mingled with the guts and flesh inside; the hole was half a metre in diameter. The other suited man had no head. His arms were stuck out stiffly in front of him as though to embrace something.

There was another man, dressed in light, loose clothes. His skull had been smashed in from behind, and at least one arm was broken. He lay on his side, as frozen and dead as the other two. Horza was aware that he knew the man’s name but he couldn’t think of it just then.

Kierachell must have been asleep. Her slim body was lying straight, inside a blue nightgown; her eyes were closed, her face peaceful.

Her neck had been broken.

Horza looked down at her for a while, then took one of his gloves off and bent down. There was frost on her eyelashes. He was aware of the wrist seal inside the suit gripping his forearm tightly, and of the thin cold air his hand was exposed to.

Her skin was hard. Her hair was still soft, and he let it run through his fingers. It was more red than he remembered, but that might just have been the effect of the helmet visor as it intensified the poor light of the darkened tunnel. Perhaps he should take his helmet off, too, to see her better, and use the helmet lights . . .

He shook his head, turning away.

He opened the door to the accommodation section - carefully, after listening for any noise coming through the wall.

In the open, vaulted area where the Changers had kept their outdoor clothes and suits and some smaller pieces of equipment, there was little to show that the place had been taken over. Further through the accommodation unit, he found traces of a fight: dried blood; laser burns; in the control room, where the base’s systems were monitored, there had been an explosion. It looked like a small grenade had gone off under the control panel. That accounted for the lack of heating, and the emergency light. It looked as though somebody had been trying to repair the damage, judging by some tools, spare pieces of equipment and wiring lying around.

In a couple of the cabins he found traces of Idiran occupation. The rooms had been stripped bare; religious symbols were burned onto the walls. In another room the floor had been covered with some sort of soft, deep covering like dry gelatin. There were six long indentations in the material, and the room smelt of medjel. In Kierachell’s room, only the bed was untidy. It had changed little otherwise.

He left it and went to the far end of the accommodation unit, where another wall of plastic boards marked the beginning of the tunnels. He opened the door cautiously.

A dead medjel lay just outside, its long body seemingly pointing the way down the tunnel to the waiting shafts. Horza looked at it for a while, monitored its body for a moment (dead still, frozen), then prodded it and finally shot it once through the head, just to be sure. It was in standard fleet-ground-force uniform, and it had been wounded some time ago, badly. It looked like it had suffered from frostbite earlier, too, before it had died of its wounds and frozen. It was a male, grizzled, its green-brown skin leathery with age, its long muzzle-face and small delicate-looking hands deeply lined.

He looked down the dark tunnel.

Smooth fused floor, smooth arched walls, the tunnel went on into the mountain side. Blast doors made ribs along the tunnel sides, their tracks and slots carved across the floor and roof. He could see the elevator-shaft doors, and the boarding point for the service-tube capsules. He walked along, past the sets of ancient blast door6, until he came to the access shafts. The elevators were all at the bottom; the transit tube was locked shut. No power seemed to be running through any of the systems. He turned and walked back to the accommodation section, through it and past the bodies and the flyer without giving them a glance, and eventually out into the open air.