Consider Phlebas (35 page)

‘I’m very sorry.’ She looked around the others, including the small drone. ‘But unless I’m much mistaken we’re all taking a little trip to a place called Schar’s World. Well, you are, anyway. I have a feeling my own journey might be a little shorter - and infinitely longer.’ Balveda smiled ironically at Horza.

‘Two?’ the drone on the table said to nobody in particular. ‘I’m stuck in a leaky museum-piece with two paranoid lunatics?’

‘You’re not,’ Yalson was saying, ignoring the machine and gazing at Horza. ‘You’re not, are you? She’s lying.’

Wubslin turned and looked at him. Aviger and Dorolow exchanged glances. Horza sighed and took his feet off the table, sitting a little straighter in his seat. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands. He was watching, feeling, trying to gauge the mood of the various people in the room. He was aware of their distances, the tension in their bodies, and how much time he would need to get to the plasma pistol on his right hip. He raised his head and looked at all of them, settling his gaze on Yalson. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am.’

Silence filled the mess room. Horza waited for a reaction. Instead the sound of a door opening came from down the corridor through the accommodation section. They all looked at the doorway.

Neisin appeared, wearing only a pair of grubby, stained shorts. His hair was sticking out in every direction, his eyes were slits, his skin was patchy with dry and moist areas, and his face was very pale. A smell of drink gradually worked its way through the mess. He looked round the room, yawned, nodded at them, pointed vaguely at some of the still uncleared debris lying around and said, ‘This place is nearly in as big a mess as my cabin. You’d think we’d been manoeuvring or something. Sorry. Thought it was time to eat. Think I’ll go back to bed.’ He yawned again and left. The door closed.

Balveda was laughing quietly. Horza could see some tears in her eyes. The others just looked confused. The drone said:

‘Well, Mr Observant there is probably the only person on this mobile asylum with an untroubled mind at the moment.’ The machine turned on the table, scratching the surface as it faced Horza. ‘Are you really claiming to be one of these fabled human impersonators?’ it asked with a sneer in its voice.

Horza looked down the table, then into Yalson’s wary, frowning eyes. ‘That’s what I am.’

‘They’re extinct,’ Aviger said, shaking his head.

‘They’re not extinct,’ Balveda told him, her thin, finely moulded head turning briefly to the old man. ‘But they’re part of the Idiran sphere now; absorbed. Some of them always did support the Idirans, the rest either left or decided they might as well throw in their lot with them. Horza’s one of the first lot. Can’t stand the Culture. He’s taking you all to Schar’s World to kidnap a shipwrecked Mind for his Idiran masters. A Culture Mind. So that the galaxy will be free from human interference and the Idirans can have a free run at - ‘

‘All right, Balveda,’ Horza said. She shrugged.

‘You’re Horza,’ Yalson said, pointing at him. He nodded. She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe it. I’m starting to come round to the drone’s way of thinking; you’re both crazy. You took a nasty blow to the head, Kraiklyn, and you, lady’ - she looked at Balveda - ‘have had your brains scrambled by this thing.’ Yalson picked up the stun gun and then put it down again.

‘I don’t know,’ Wubslin said, scratching his head and looking at Horza as though he was some sort of exhibit. ‘I thought the captain seemed a bit strange. I couldn’t imagine him doing what he just did in the GSV.’

‘What did you do, Horza?’ Balveda said. ‘I seem to have missed something. How did you get away?’

‘I flew out, Balveda. Used the fusion motors and the laser and blasted out.’

‘Really?’ Balveda laughed again, throwing her head back. She went on laughing, but her laughter was a little too loud, and the tears were coming too quickly to her eyes. ‘Ho ho. Well, I am impressed. I thought we had you.’

‘When did you find out?’ he asked her quietly. She sniffed and tried to wipe her nose on her shoulder.

‘What? That you weren’t Kraiklyn?’ She played her tongue along her top lip. ‘Oh, just before you came aboard. We had a microdrone pretending to be a fly. It was programmed to land on anybody approaching the ship while it was in the Smallbay and take a skin cell or hair or something away with it. We identified you from your own chromosomes. There was another agent outside; he must have used his effector on the bay controls when he monitored you starting to get ready to leave. I was supposed to . . . do whatever I could if you appeared. Kill you, capture you, disable the ship: anything. But they didn’t tell me until too late. They knew somebody might overhear if they warned me, but they must have started to get worried.’

‘That was the noise you heard from her kitbag,’ Horza told Yalson, ‘just before I zapped her.’ He looked back at Balveda. ‘I got rid of the gear, by the way, Balveda. Dumped it all through the vactubes. Your bomb went off.’

Balveda seemed to sag a little further in her seat. He guessed that she had been hoping her gear was on board. At the very least she might have been hoping the bomb had still to be triggered and that, while she would die, she would not die in vain, or alone.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, looking down at the table, ‘the vactubes.’

‘What about Kraiklyn?’ Yalson asked.

‘He’s dead,’ Horza said. ‘I killed him.’

‘Oh well,’ Yalson tutted, and rapped her fingers on the table surface. ‘That’s that. I don’t know if you two really are mad or if you’re telling the truth; both possibilities are pretty awful.’ She looked from Balveda to Horza, raising her eyebrows at the man and saying, ‘By the way, if you really are Horza, it’s a lot less pleasant to see you back than I thought it was going to be.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he told her. She turned her head away from him.

‘I still think the best thing to do is to head back for The Ends of Invention and lay the whole thing before the authorities.’ The drone rose fractionally above the surface of the table and looked round at them all. Horza leant forward and tapped its casing. It faced him.

‘Machine,’ he said, ‘we’re going to Schar’s World. If you want to go back to the GSV I’ll gladly put you in a vactube and let you make your own way back. But you mention returning and getting a fair trial one more time and I’m going to blast your synthetic fucking brains out, understand?’

‘How dare you speak to me like that!’ the drone bellowed. ‘I’ll have you know I am an Accredited Free Construct, certified sentient under the Free Will Acts by the Greater Vavatch United Moral Standards Administration and with full citizenship of the Vavatch Heterocracy. I am near to paying off my Incurred Generation Debt, when I’ll be free to do exactly what I like, and have already been accepted for a degree course in applied paratheology at the University of - ‘

‘Will you shut your goddamn . . . speaker and listen?’ Horza shouted, breaking into the machine’s breathless monologue. ‘We’re not on Vavatch, and I don’t care how god-damn smart you are, or how many qualifications you’ve got. You’re on this ship and you do as I say. You want to get off? Get off now and float back to whatever’s left of your precious fucking Orbital. Stay, and you obey orders. Or get junked.’

‘Those are my choices?’

‘Yes. Use some of your accredited free will and decide right now.’

‘I . . . ‘ The drone rose from the table, then sank again. ‘Hmm,’ it said. ‘Very well. I shall stay.’

‘And obey all orders.’

‘And obey all orders . . . ‘

‘Good, at - ‘

‘ . . . within reason.’

‘Machine,’ Horza said, reaching for the plasma pistol.

‘Oh good grief, man!’ the drone exclaimed. ‘What do you want? A robot?’ Its voice sneered. ‘I don’t have an Off button on my reasoning functions; I can’t choose not to have free will. I could quite easily swear to obey all orders regardless of the consequences; I could vow to sacrifice my life for you if you asked me to; but I’d be lying, so that I could live.

‘I swear to be as obedient and faithful as any of your human crew . . . in fact as the most obedient and faithful of them. For pity’s sake, man, in the name of all reason, what more can you ask?’

Sneaky bastard. Horza thought. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose that will just have to do. Now, can - ‘

‘But I am obliged to serve immediate notice on you that under the terms of my Retrospective Construction Agreement, my Incurred Generation Debt Loan Agreement and my Employment Contract, your forcible removal of myself from my place of work makes you liable for the servicing of said debt until my return, as well as risking civil and criminal proceedings - ‘

‘Fucking hell, drone,’ Yalson interrupted. ‘Sure it wasn’t law you were going to study?’

‘I take full responsibility, machine,’ Horza told it. ‘Now, shut - ,’

‘Well, I hope you’re properly insured,’ the drone muttered.

‘ - up!’

‘Horza?’ Balveda said.

‘Yes, Perosteck?’ He turned to her with a sense of relief. Her eyes were glittering. She licked her top lip again, then looked back at the surface of the table, her head down. ‘What about me?’

‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘it did cross my mind to blow you out a vactube . . . ‘ He saw her tense. Yalson, too: she turned in her seat to face him, clenching her fists and opening her mouth. Horza went on, ‘ . . . But you may be of some use yet, and . . . oh, call it sentiment.’ He smiled. ‘You’ll have to behave, of course.’

Balveda looked up at him. There was hope in her eyes, but also the piteousness of those who don’t want to hope too soon. ‘You mean that, I hope,’ she said quietly. Horza nodded.

‘I mean it. I couldn’t possibly get rid of you anyway, before I find out how the hell you got off The Hand of God.’

Balveda relaxed, breathing deeply. When she laughed it was softly. Yalson was looking with a jaundiced expression at Horza and still rapping her fingers on the table. ‘Yalson,’ Horza said, ‘I’d like you and Dorolow to take Balveda and . . . strip her. Take her suit and everything else off.’ He was aware of them all looking at him. Balveda was arching her eyebrows with faked shock. He went on, ‘I want you to take the surgery equipment and run every sort of test you can on her once she’s naked to make sure she hasn’t got any skin pouches, implants or prosthetics; use the ultrasound and the X-ray gear and the NMR and anything else we’ve got. Once you’ve done that you can find something for her to wear. Put her suit in a vactube and dump it. Also any jewellery or other personal possessions of any sort or size, regardless of how innocent they may look.’

‘You want her washed and anointed, put in a white robe and placed on a stone altar, too?’ Yalson said acidly. Horza shook his head.

‘I want her clean of anything, anything at all that could be used as a weapon or that could turn into one. The Culture’s latest gadgetry for the Special Circumstancers includes things called memoryforms; they might looked like a badge, or a medallion . . . ‘ He smiled at Balveda, who nodded back wryly, ‘ . . . or anything else. But do a certain something to them - touch them in the right place, make them wet, speak a certain word - and they become a communicator, a gun or a bomb. I don’t want to risk there being anything more dangerous than Ms Balveda herself on board.’

‘What about when we get to Schar’s World?’ Balveda said.

‘We’ll give you some warm clothes. If you wrap up well, you’ll be all right. No suit, no weapons.’

‘And the rest of us?’ asked Aviger. ‘What are we supposed to do when you get to this place? Assuming they’ll let you in, which I doubt.’

‘I’m not sure yet,’ Horza said truthfully. ‘Maybe you’ll have to come with me. I’ll have to see what I can do about the ship’s fidelities. Possibly you’ll all be able to stay on board; perhaps you’ll all have to hit dirt with me. However, there are some other Changers there, people like myself but not working for the Idirans. They should be able to look after you if I’m to be gone for any amount of time. Of course,’ he said, looking at Yalson, ‘if any of you want to come along with me, I’m sure that we can treat this as a normal operation in terms of share-outs and so forth. Once I’m finished with the CAT, those of you who so desire may want to take it over for yourselves, run it any way you like; sell it if you want; it’s up to you. At any rate, you’ll all be free to do as you wish, once I’ve accomplished my mission on Schar’s World - or done my best to, at least.’

Yalson had been looking at him, but now she turned away, shaking her head. Wubslin was looking at the deck. Aviger and Dorolow stared at each other. The drone was silent.

‘Now,’ Horza said, rising stiffly, ‘Yalson and Dorolow, if you wouldn’t mind seeing to Ms Balveda . . . ‘ With a show of some reluctance, Yalson sighed and got up. Dorolow started to undo some of the restraining straps around the Culture agent’s body. ‘And do be very careful with her,’ Horza continued. ‘Keep one person well away from her with the gun pointed in her direction the whole time, while the other does the work.’

Yalson muttered something under her breath and leaned to pick up the stun gun from the table. Horza turned to Aviger. ‘I think somebody should tell Neisin about all the excitement he’s missed, don’t you?’ Aviger hesitated, then nodded.

‘Yes, Kraik - ‘ He stopped, spluttered, then said no more. He got up from his seat and went quickly down the corridor towards the cabins.

‘I think I’ll open up the forward compartments and have a look at the laser, Kraiklyn, if that’s all right with you,’ Wubslin said. ‘Oh, I mean Horza.’ The engineer stood, frowning and scratching his head. Horza nodded. Wubslin found a clean undamaged beaker and took a cold drink from the dispenser, then went down the corridor through the accommodation section.

Dorolow and Yalson had freed Balveda. The tall, pale-skinned Culture woman stretched, closing her eyes and arching her neck. She ran a hand through her short red hair. Dorolow watched warily. Yalson held the stun gun. Balveda flexed her shoulders, then indicated she was ready.

‘Right,’ Yalson said, waving Balveda forward with the gun. ‘We’ll do this in my cabin.’

Horza stood up to let the three women by. As Balveda passed, her long, easy stride unencumbered by the light suit, he said, ‘How did you get off The Hand of God, Balveda?’