Consider Phlebas (10 page)

Against the morning glow, framed in a slanting doorway, a suited form lay on the mossy floor, gun extended at the end of one hand so that it pointed down the passageway towards Horza. A heavy door lay at an angle behind, just hanging by one twisted hinge. It’s Gow, Horza thought. Then he looked at the door again, thinking it looked wrong somehow. The door and the walls leading to it were scarred with laser burns.

He went up the corridor to the fallen figure and rolled it over so that he could see the face. His head swam for a second as he looked. It wasn’t Gow; it was her friend, kee-Alsorofus, who had died here. Her blackened, cracked face stared out, dry-eyed, through the still clear visor of her helmet. He looked at the door and at the corridor. Of course: he was in another part of the temple. Same situation, but a different set of passageways, and a different person . . .

The woman’s suit was holed, centimetres deep, in a few places; the smell of burned flesh leaked into Horza’s ill-fitting suit, making him gag. He stood up, took kee-Alsorofus’s laser, stepped over the slanted door and went out onto the wall-walk. He ran along it, round a corner, ducking once as a Microhowitzer shell landed too close to the temple’s sloping walls and sent up a shower of flashing crystal fragments and ruddy chunks of sandstone. The plasma cannons were still firing from the forest, too, but Horza couldn’t see any flying figures. He was looking for them when he suddenly sensed the suit to one side of him, standing in the angle of the wall. He stopped, recognising Gow’s suit, and stood about three metres from her while she looked at him. She pushed the visor on her helmet up slowly. Her grey face and black, pit-like eyes fixed on the laser rifle he was carrying. The look on her face made him wish he had checked the gun was still switched on. He looked down at the gun in his hand, then at the woman, who was still staring at it.

‘I - ‘ He was going to explain.

‘She killed, yeah?’ The woman’s voice sounded flat. She seemed to sigh. Horza drew in a breath, was about to start talking again, but Gow spoke in the same monotone. ‘I thought I hear she.’

Suddenly she brought her gun hand up, flashing in the blue and pink of the morning sky. Horza saw what she was doing and started forward, reaching out instantly with one hand even though he knew he was too far away and too late to do anything.

‘Don’t!’ he had time to shout, but the gun was already in the woman’s mouth and an instant later, as Horza started to duck and his eyes closed instinctively, the back of Gow’s helmet blew out in a single pulse of unseen light, throwing a sudden red cloud over the mossy wall behind.

Horza sat down on his haunches, hands closed round the gun barrel in front of him, eyes staring out at the distant jungle. What a mess, he thought, what a fucking, obscene, stupid mess. He hadn’t been thinking of what Gow had just done to herself, but he looked round at the red stain on the angled wall and the collapsed shape of Gow’s suit, and thought it again.

He was about to start back down the outer wall of the temple when something moved in the air above him. He turned and saw Yalson landing on the wall-walk. She looked at Gow’s body once, then they exchanged what they both knew of the situation - what she had heard over the open communicator channel, what Horza had seen in the hall - and decided they would stay put until some of the others came out, or they gave up hope. According to Yalson only Rava Gamdol and Tzbalik Odraye were definitely dead after the fire-fight in the hall, but all three Bratsilakins had been there too, and nobody had heard anything from them after the open channel had become intelligible again and most of the screaming had stopped.

Kraiklyn was alive and well but lost; Dorolow lost too, sitting crying, maybe blinded; and Lenipobra, against all advice and Kraiklyn’s orders, had entered the temple through a roof door and was heading down to try to rescue anybody he could, using only a small projectile pistol he’d been carrying.

Yalson and Horza sat back to back on the wall-walk, Yalson keeping the Changer informed on how things were going in the temple. Lamm flew overhead, heading for the jungle where he took one of the plasma cannons from the protesting Wubslin. He had just landed near by when Lenipobra announced proudly he had found Dorolow, and Kraiklyn reported he could see daylight. There was still no sound from the Bratsilakins. Kraiklyn appeared round a corner of the wall-walk; Lenipobra leapt into view, clutching Dorolow to his suit and bounding down over the walls in a series of great slow jumps as his AG struggled to lift both him and the woman.

They set off back to the shuttle. Jandraligeli could see movement on the road beyond the temple, and there was sniper fire coming from the jungle on either side. Lamm wanted to tear into the temple with the plasma cannon and vaporise a few monks, but Kraiklyn ordered the retreat. Lamm threw the plasma gun down and sailed off towards the shuttle alone, swearing loudly over the open channel on which Yalson was still trying to call the Bratsilakins.

They waded through the tall cane grass and bushes under the whooshing trails of plasma bolts, as Jandraligeli gave them cover. They had to duck occasionally as small-bore projectile fire tore through the greenery around them.

They sprawled in the hangar of the Clear Air Turbulence, beside the still warm shuttle as it clicked and creaked, cooling down again after its high-speed climb through the atmosphere.

Nobody wanted to talk. They just sat or lay on the deck, some with their backs against the side of the warm shuttle. Those who had been inside the temple were the most obviously affected, but even the others, who had only heard the mayhem over their suit communicators, seemed in a state of mild shock. Helmets and guns lay scattered about them.

‘”Temple of Light”,’ Jandraligeli said eventually, and gave what sounded like a mixture of laugh and snort.

‘Temple of fucking Light,’ Lamm agreed.

‘Mipp,’ Kraiklyn said in a tired voice to his helmet, ‘any signals from the Bratsilakins?’

Mipp, still on the CAT’s small bridge, reported that there was nothing.

‘We ought to bomb that place to fuck,’ Lamm said. ‘Nuke the bastards.’ Nobody replied. Yalson got up slowly and left the hangar, walking tiredly up the steps to the upper deck, helmet dangling from one arm, gun from the other, her head down.

‘I’m afraid we’ve lost that radar.’ Wubslin closed an inspection hatch and rolled out from underneath the nose of the shuttle. ‘That first bit of hostile fire . . . ‘ His voice trailed off.

‘Least nobody’s injured,’ Neisin said. He looked at Dorolow. ‘Your eyes better?’ The woman nodded but kept her eyes closed. Neisin nodded, too. ‘Actually worse, when people are injured. We were lucky.’ He dug into a small pack on the front of his suit and produced a little metal container. He sucked at a nipple at the top and grimaced, shaking his head. ‘Yeah, we were lucky. And it was fairly quick for them, too.’ He nodded to himself, not looking at anybody, not caring that nobody seemed to be listening to him. ‘See how everybody we’ve lost all shared the same . . . I mean they went in pairs . . . or threes . . . huh?’ He took another slug and shook his head. Dorolow was near by; she reached over and held out her hand. Neisin looked at her in surprise, then handed the small flask to her. She took a swig and passed it back. Neisin looked around, but no one else wanted any.

Horza sat and said nothing. He was staring at the cold lights of the hangar, trying not to see the scene he had witnessed in the hall of the dark temple.

The Clear Air Turbulence broke orbit on fusion drive and headed for the outer edge of Marjoin’s gravity well, where it could engage its warp motors. It didn’t pick up any signals from the Bratsilakins and it didn’t bomb the Temple of Light. It set a course for the Vavatch Orbital.

From radio transmissions they had picked up from the planet they worked out what had happened to the place, what had caused the monks and priests in the temple to be so well armed. Two nation states on the world of Marjoin were at war, and the temple was near the frontier between the two countries, constantly ready for attack. One of the states was vaguely socialist; the other was religiously inspired, the priests in the Temple of Light representing one sect of that militant faith. The war was partly caused by the greater, galactic conflict taking place around it, as well as being a tiny and approximate image of it. It was that reflection, Horza realised, which had killed the members of the Company, as much as any bounced laserflash.

Horza wasn’t sure how he would sleep that night. He lay awake for a few hours, listening to Wubslin having quiet nightmares. Then the cabin door was tapped lightly. Yalson came in and sat on Horza’s bunk. She put her head on his shoulder and they held each other. After a while she took his hand and led him quietly down the companionway, away from the mess - where a splash of light and distant music witnessed that the unsleeping Kraiklyn was unwinding with a drug flask and a holosound tape - down to the cabin which had been Gow’s and kee-Alsorofus’s.

In the darkness of the cabin, on a small bed full of strange scents and new textures, they performed the same old act, theirs - they both knew - an almost inevitably barren cross-matching of species and cultures thousands of light-years apart. Then they slept.

State of play: one

Fal ‘Ngeestra watched the shadows of the clouds move on the distant plain, ten kilometres away horizontally and one vertically, and then, with a sigh, lifted her gaze to the line of snow-capped mountains on the far side of the open grassland. The mountain range was fully thirty kilometres from her eyes, but the peaks were sharp and distinct in the thin air which they invaded with their rock and brilliant icy whiteness. Even at that distance, through that much atmosphere, their glare startled the eye.

She turned away, walking along the broad flagstones of the lodge terrace with a stiff-legged gait unsuited to her lack of years. The trelliswork above her head was covered in bright red and white flowers and cast a regular pattern of shadows over the terrace beneath; she walked through light and shade, her hair dim then shining gold in turn as each halting step moved her from shadow to sunlight.

The gun-metal bulk of the drone called Jase appeared at the far end of the terrace, out of the lodge itself. Fal smiled when she saw it and sat down on a stone bench jutting out from the low wall which separated terrace from view. They were high up, but it was a hot and windless day; she wiped a little sweat from her forehead as the old drone floated along the terrace towards her, the slanting lines of sunlight passing over its body in a steady rhythm. The drone settled on the stones beside the bench, its broad, flat top about level with the crown of the girl’s head.

‘Isn’t it a lovely day, Jase?’ Fal said, looking back at the distant mountains again.

‘It is,’ Jase said. The drone had an unusually deep and full-toned voice, and made the most of it. For a thousand years or more Culture drones had had aura fields which coloured according to their mood - their equivalent of facial expression and body language - but Jase was old, made long before aura fields were thought of, and had refused to be refitted to accommodate them. It preferred either to rely on its voice to express what it felt, or to remain inscrutable.

‘Damn.’ Fal shook her head, looking at the far-away snow. ‘I wish I was climbing.’ She made a clicking noise with her mouth and looked down at her right leg, which stuck straight out in front of her. She had broken the leg eight days before, while climbing in the mountains on the other side of the plain. Now it was splinted up with a fine tracery of field-strands, concealed beneath fashionably tight trousers.

Jase ought, she thought, to have taken this as an excuse to lecture her again on the advisability of only climbing with a floater harness, or with a rescue drone near by, or at the very least on not climbing alone, but the old machine said nothing. She looked at it, her tanned face shining in the light. ‘So, Jase, what have you got for me? Business?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

Fal settled herself as comfortably as she could on the stone bench and crossed her arms. Jase stretched out a short force field from its casing to support the awkward-looking outstretched leg, though it knew that the splint’s own fields were taking all the strain.

‘Spit it out,’ Fal said.

‘You may recall an item from the daily synopsis eighteen days ago about one of our spacecraft which was cobbled together by a factory vessel in the volume of space Inside from the Sullen Gulf; the factory craft had to destruct, and later so did the ship it made.’

‘I remember,’ said Fal, who forgot little about anything, and nothing at all from a daily synopsis. ‘It was a mongrel because the factory was trying to get a GSV Mind out of the way.’

‘Well,’ Jase said, its voice a little weary, ‘we have a problem with that.’

Fal smiled.

The Culture, there could be no doubt, relied profoundly on its machines for both its strategy and tactics in the war it was now engaged in. Indeed, a case could be made for holding that the Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a more fundamental level than did any single human or group of humans within the society. The Minds that the Culture’s factory craft, safe Orbitals and larger GSVs were now producing were some of the most sophisticated collections of matter in the galaxy. They were so intelligent that no human was capable of understanding just how smart they were (and the machines themselves were incapable of describing it to such a limited form of life).

From those mental colossi, down through the more ordinary but still sentient machines and the smart but ultimately mechanistic and predictable computers, right down to the smallest circuit in a micromissile hardly more intelligent than a fly, the Culture had placed its bets - long before the Idiran war had been envisaged - on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture.