Consider Phlebas

9. Schar’s World

Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth blanket of cloud above the ocean, a shell of black velvet suspended high above the water and also extending to the horizon, but keep the sparkle of the sea despite the lack of sun. Add to the cloud many sharp and tiny lights, scattered on the base of the inky overcast like glinting eyes: singly, in pairs, or in larger groups, each positioned far, far away from any other set.

That is the view a ship has in hyperspace as it flies like a microscopic insect, free between the energy grid and real space.

The small, sharp lights on the undersurface of the cloud cover are stars; the waves on the sea are the irregularities of the Grid on which a ship travelling in hyperspace finds traction with its engine fields, while that sparkle is its source of energy. The Grid and the plain of real space are curved, rather like the ocean and the cloud would be round a planet, but less so. Black holes show as thin and twisting waterspouts from clouds to sea; supernovae as long lightning flashes in the overcast. Rocks, moons, planets, Orbitals, even Rings and Spheres, hardly show at all…

The two “Killer” class Rapid Offensive Units Trade Surplus and Revisionist raced through the hyperspace, flashing underneath the web of real space like slim and glittering fish in a deep, still pond. They wove past systems and stars, keeping deep beneath the empty spaces where they were least likely to be traced.

Their engines were each a focus of energy almost beyond imagining, packing sufficient power within their two hundred metres to equal perhaps one per cent of the energy produced by a small sun, flinging the two vessels across the four-dimensional void at an equivalent speed in real space of rather less than ten light-years per hour. At the time, this was considered particularly fast.

They sensed the Glittercliff and Sullen Gulf ahead. They twisted their headlong rush to angle them deep inside the war zone, aiming themselves at the system which contained Schar’s World.

Far in the distance, they could see the group of black holes which had created the Gulf. Those flutes of plunging energy had passed through the area millennia before, clearing a space of consumed stars behind them, creating an artificial galactic arm as they headed in a long spiral closer towards the centre of the slowly spinning island of stars and nebulae that was the galaxy.

The group of black holes was commonly known as the Forest, so closely were they grouped, and the two speeding Culture craft had instructions to try to force their way between those twisted, lethal trunks, if they were seen and pursued. The Culture’s field management was considered superior to the Idirans’, so it was thought they would have a better chance of getting through, and any chasing craft might even break off rather than risk tangling with the Forest. It was a terrible risk even to contemplate, but the two ROUs were precious; the Culture had not yet built many, and everything possible had to be done to make sure that the craft got back safely or, if the worst came to the worst, were destroyed utterly.

They encountered no hostile ships. They flashed across the inward face of the Quiet Barrier in seconds and delivered their prescribed loads in two short bursts, then twisted once and tore away at maximum speed, out through the thinning stars and past the Glitter-cliff, into the empty skies of the Sullen Gulf.

They registered hostile craft stationed near the Schar’s World system starting off in pursuit, but they had been seen too late, and they quickly outdistanced the probing beams of track lasers. They set course for the far side of the Gulf, their strange mission completed. The Minds on board, and the small crew of humans each vessel carried (who were there more because they wanted to be than for their utility), hadn’t been told why they were blasting empty space with expensive warheads, shooting off CREWSs at each other’s target drones, dumping clouds of CAM and ordinary gas and releasing odd little unpowered signalling ships which were little more than unmanned shuttles packed with broadcasting equipment. The entire effect of this operation would be to produce a few spectacular flashes and flares and a scattering of radiation shells and wide-band signals before the Idirans cleared up the debris and blasted or captured the signal craft.

They had been asked to risk their lives on some damn-fool panic mission which seemed designed to convince nobody in particular that there had been a space battle in the middle of nowhere when there hadn’t. And they had done it!

What was the Culture coming to? The Idirans seemed to relish suicide missions. You could easily form the impression that they considered being asked to carry out any other sort something of an insult. But the Culture? Where even in the war forces “discipline” was regarded as a taboo word, where people always wanted to know why this and why that?

Things had come to a pretty pass indeed.

The two ships raced across the Gulf, arguing. On board, heated discussions were taking place between members of their crews.

It took twenty-one days for the Clear Air Turbulence to make the journey from Vavatch to Schar’s World.

Wubslin had spent the time carrying out what repairs he could to the craft, but what the ship needed was another thorough overhaul. While structurally it was still sound, and life support functioned nearly normally, it had suffered a general degradation of its systems, though no catastrophic failures. The warp units ran a little more raggedly than before, the fusion motors were not up to sustained use in an atmosphere — they would get them down to and up from Schar’s World, but not provide much more in-airflying time — and the vessel’s sensors had been reduced in numbers and efficiency to a level not far above operational minimum.

They had still escaped lightly, Horza thought.

With the CAT under his control, Horza was able to switch off the computer’s identity circuits. He didn’t have to fool the Free Company, either; so, as the days passed, he Changed slowly to resemble his old self a little more. That was for Yalson and the other members of the Free Company. He was really striking two thirds of a compromise between Kraiklyn and the self he had been on the CAT before it had reached Vavatch. There was another third in there which he let grow and show itself on his face for nobody on board, but for a red-haired Changer girl called Kierachell. He hoped she would recognise that part of his appearance when they met again, on Schar’s World.

“Why did you think we’d be angry?” Yalson asked him in the CAT’s hangar one day. They had set up a target screen at one end and put their lasers onto practice. The screen’s built-in projector flashed images for them to shoot at. Horza looked at the woman.

“He was your leader.”

Yalson laughed. “He was a manager; how many of them are liked by their staff? This is a business, Horza, and not even a successful one. Kraiklyn managed to get most of us retired prematurely. Shit! The only person you needed to fool was the ship.”

“There was that,” Horza said, aiming at a human figure darting across the distant screen. The laser spot was invisible, but the screen sensed it and flashed white light where it hit. The human figure, hit in the leg, stumbled but did not fall: half marks. “I did need to fool the ship. But I didn’t want to risk somebody being loyal to Kraiklyn.”

It was Yalson’s turn, but she was looking at Horza, not the screen.

The ship’s fidelities had been bypassed, and now all that was needed to command it was a numeric code, which only Horza knew, and the small ring he wore, which had been Kraiklyn’s. He had promised that when they got to Schar’s World, if there was no other way off the planet, he would set the CAT’s computer to free itself of all fidelity limitations after a given time, so that if he didn’t come back out of the tunnels of the Command System the Free Company would not be stranded. “You would have told us,” Yalson said, “wouldn’t you, Horza? I mean you would have let us know eventually.”

Horza knew she meant, would he have told her? He put his gun down and looked her in the eyes. “Once I was sure,” he said, “sure about the people, sure about the ship.”

It was the honest answer, but he wasn’t certain it was the best one. He wanted Yalson, wanted not just her warmth in the ship’s red night, but her trust, her care. But she was still distant.

Balveda lived; perhaps she wouldn’t still be alive if Horza hadn’t wanted Yalson’s regard. He knew that, and it was a bitter thought, making him feel cheap and cruel. Even knowing that it was a definite thing would have been better than being uncertain. He couldn’t say for sure whether the cold logic of this game dictated that the Culture woman should die or be left alive, or even if, the former being comfortably obvious, he could have killed her in cold blood. He had thought it through and still he didn’t know. He only hoped that neither woman had guessed that any of this had gone through his mind.

Kierachell was another worry. It was absurd, he knew, to be concerned about his own affairs at such a time, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the Changer woman; the closer they came to Schar’s World, the more he remembered of her, the more real his memories became. He tried not to build it up too much, tried to recall the boredom of the Changers’ lonely outpost on the planet and the restlessness he had felt there even with Kierachell’s company, but he dreamt about her slow smile and recalled her low voice in all its fluid grace with some of the heartache of a youth’s first love. Occasionally he thought Yalson might sense that, too, and something inside him seemed to shrink with shame.

Yalson shrugged, hoisted her gun to her shoulder and fired at a four-legged shadow on the practice screen. It stopped in its tracks and dropped, seeming to dissolve into the line of shady ground at the bottom of the screen.

Horza gave talks.

It made him feel like some visiting lecturer at a college, but that’s what he did. He felt he had to explain to the others why he was doing what he was, why the Changers supported the Idirans, why he believed in what they were fighting for. He called them briefings, and ostensibly they were about Schar’s World and the Command System, its history, geography and so on, but he always (quite intentionally) ended up talking about the war in general, or about totally different aspects of it unrelated to the planet they were approaching.

The briefing cover gave him a good excuse to keep Balveda confined to her cabin while he paced up and down on the deck of the mess talking to the members of the Free Company; he didn’t want his talks turning into a debate.

Perosteck Balveda had been no trouble. Her suit and a few items of harmless-looking jewellery and other bits and pieces had been jettisoned from a vactube. She had been scanned with every item the CAT’s limited sick-bay equipment could provide and had come up clean, and she seemed quite happy to be a well-behaved prisoner, confined to the ship as they all were and, apart from at night, locked in her cabin only occasionally. Horza didn’t let her near the bridge, just in case, but Balveda showed no signs of trying to get to know the ship especially well — the way he had done when he came on board. She didn’t even try to argue any of the mercenaries round to her way of thinking about the war and the Culture.

Horza wondered how secure she felt. Balveda was pleasant and seemed unworried; but he looked at her sometimes and thought he saw, briefly, a glimpse of inner tension, even despair. It relieved him in one way, but in another it gave him that same bad, cruel feeling he experienced when he thought about exactly why the Culture agent was still alive. Sometimes he was simply afraid of getting to Schar’s World, but increasingly as the voyage dragged on he came to relish the prospect of some action and an end to thought.

He called Balveda to his cabin one day, after they had all eaten in the mess. The woman came in and sat down on the same small seat he had sat in when Kraiklyn had summoned him just after he had joined the ship.

Balveda’s face was calm. She sat elegantly in the small seat, her long frame at once relaxed and poised. Her deep dark eyes gazed out at Horza from the thin, smoothly shaped head, and her red hair — now turning black — shone in the lights of the cabin.

“Captain Horza?” she smiled, crossing her long-fingered hands on her lap. She wore a long blue gown, the plainest thing she had been able to find on the ship: something that had once belonged to the woman Gow.

“Hello, Balveda,” Horza said. He sat back on the bed. He wore a loose gown. For the first couple of days he had stayed in his suit, but while it stayed commendably comfortable, it was bulky and awkward in the confines of the Clear Air Turbulence, so he had discarded it for the voyage.

He was about to offer Balveda something to drink, but somehow, because that was what Kraiklyn had done with him, it didn’t seem the right thing to do.

“What was it, Horza?” Balveda said.

“I just wanted to… see how you were,” he said. He had tried to rehearse what he would say; assure her she was in no danger, that he liked her and that he was sure that this time the worst that would happen to her really would be internment somewhere, and maybe a swap, but the words would not come.

“I’m fine,” she said, smoothing her hand over her hair, her eyes glancing around the cabin briefly. “I’m trying to be a model captive so you won’t have an excuse for ditching me.” She smiled, but again he thought he sensed an edge to the gesture. Yet he was relieved.

“No,” he laughed, letting his head rock back on his shoulders with the laugh. “I’ve no intention of doing that. You’re safe.”

“Until we get to Schar’s World?” she said calmly.

“After that, too,” he said.

Balveda blinked slowly, looking down. “Hmm, good.” She looked into his eyes.

He shrugged. “I’m sure you’d do the same for me.”

“I think I… probably would,” she said, and he couldn’t tell whether she was lying or not. “I just think it’s a pity we’re on different sides.”

“It’s a pity we’re all on different sides, Balveda.”

“Well,” she said, clasping her hands on her lap again, “there is a theory that the side we each think we’re on is the one that will triumph eventually anyway.”

“What’s that?” he grinned. “Truth and justice?”

“Not either, really,” she smiled, not looking at him. “Just…” She shrugged. “Just life. The evolution you talked about. You said the Culture was in a backwater, a dead end. If we are… maybe we’ll lose after all.”

“Damn, I’ll get you on the good guys’ side yet, Perosteck,” he said, with just a little too much heartiness. She smiled thinly.

She opened her mouth to say something, then thought the better of it and closed it again. She looked at her hands. Horza wondered what to say next.

One night, six days out from their destination — the system’s star was fairly bright in the sky ahead of the ship, even on normal sight — Yalson came to his cabin.

He hadn’t expected it, and the tap at the door brought him from a state between waking and sleep with a jarring coldness which left him disorientated for a few moments. He saw her on the door-screen and let her in. She came in quickly, closing the door after her and hugging him, holding him tight, soundless. He stood there, trying to wake up and work out how this had happened. There seemed to be no reason for it, no build-up of tension of any sort between them, no signs, no hints: nothing.

Yalson had spent that day in the hangar, wired up with small sensors and exercising. He had seen her there, working away, sweating, exhausting herself, peering at readouts and screens with her critical eyes, as though her body was a machine like the ship and she was testing it almost to destruction.

They slept together. But as though to confirm the exertions she had put herself through during the day, Yalson fell asleep almost as soon as they lay down; in his arms, while he was kissing and nuzzling her, breathing in the scent of her body again after what seemed like months. He lay awake and listened to her breathe, felt her move very slightly in his arms, and sensed her blood beat slower and slower as she fell into a deep sleep.

In the morning they made love, and afterwards he asked her, while he held her and their sweat dried, “Why?” as their hearts slowed. “What changed your mind?” The ship hummed distantly around them.

She gripped him, hugging tighter still, and shook her head.

“Nothing,” she said, “nothing in particular, nothing important.” He felt her shrug, and she turned her head away from his face, into his arm, towards the humming bulkhead. In a small voice she said, “Everything; Schar’s World.”

Three days out, in the hangar, he watched the members of the Free Company work out and practise firing their guns at the screen. Neisin couldn’t practise because he still refused to use lasers after what had happened in the Temple of Light. He had stocked up on magazines of micro projectiles during his few sober moments in Evanauth.

After firing practice, Horza had each of the mercenaries test their AG harnesses. Kraiklyn had purchased a cheap batch of them and insisted that the Free Company members who didn’t already have an anti-gravity unit in their suit buy a harness from him, at what he claimed was cost price. Horza had been dubious at first, but the AG units seemed serviceable enough, and certainly might be useful for searching the Command System’s deeper shafts.

Horza was satisfied that the mercenaries would follow him in if they had to, down into the Command System. The long delay since the excitement of Vavatch, and the boring routine of the life on the Clear Air Turbulence, had made them hanker after something more interesting. As Horza had — honestly — described it, Schar’s World didn’t sound too bad. At least it was unlikely they would find themselves in a fire-fight, and nobody, including the Mind they might end up helping Horza search for, was going to start blowing things up, not with a Dra’Azon to reckon with.

The sun of the Schar’s World system shone brightly ahead of them now, the brightest thing in the sky. The Glittercliff was not a visible feature of the sky ahead, because they were still inside the spiral limb and looking out, but it was noticeable that all the stars ahead were either quite close or very far away, with none in the gap between.

Horza had changed the CAT’s course several times, but kept it on a general heading which, unless they turned, wouldn’t take it closer than two light-years from the planet. He would turn the craft and head in the following day. So far the journey had been uneventful. They had flown through the scattered stars without encountering anything out of the ordinary: no messages or signals, no distant flashes from battles, no warp wakes. The area around them seemed calm and undisturbed, as though all that was happening was what always happened: just the stars being born and dying, the galaxy revolving, the holes twisting, the gases swirling. The war, in that hurried silence, in their false rhythm of day and night, seemed like something they had all imagined, an inexplicable nightmare they had somehow shared, even escaped.

Horza had the ship watching, though, ready to alarm at the first hint of trouble. They were unlikely to find out anything before they got to the Quiet Barrier, but if everything was as peaceful and serene as that name implied, he thought he might not go arrowing straight in. Ideally he would like to rendezvous with the Idiran fleet units which were supposed to be waiting near by. That would solve most of his problems. He would hand Balveda over, make sure Yalson and the rest of the mercenaries were safe — let them have the CAT — and pick up the specialised equipment Xoralundra had promised him.

That scenario would also let him meet Kierachell alone, without the distraction of the others being there. He would be able to be his old self without making any concessions to the self the Free Company and Yalson knew.

Two days out, the ship’s alarm went off. Horza was dozing in his bed; he raced out of the cabin and forward to the bridge.

In the volume of space before them, all hell seemed to have been let loose. Annihilation light washed over them; it was the radiation from weapon explosions, registering pure and mixed on the vessel’s sensors, indicating where warheads had gone off totally by themselves or in contact with something else. The fabric of three-dimensional space bucked and juddered with the blast from warp charges, forcing the CAT’s automatics to disengage its engines every few seconds to prevent them being damaged on the shock waves. Horza strapped in and brought all the subsidiary systems up. Wubslin came through the door from the mess.

“What is it?”

“Battle of some sort,” Horza said, watching the screens. The volume of affected space was more or less directly on the inward side of Schar’s World; the direct route from Vavatch passed that way. The CAT was one and a half light-years away from the disturbance, too far away to be spotted on anything except the narrow beam of a track scanner and therefore almost certainly safe; but Horza watched the distant blasts of radiation, and felt the CAT ride the ripples of disturbed space with a sensation of nausea, even defeat.

“Message shell,” Wubslin said, nodding at a screen. There, sorting itself out from the noise of radiation, a signal gradually appeared, the words forming a few letters at a time like a field of plants growing and flowering. After a few repetitions of the signal — and it was being jammed, not simple interfered with by the battle’s background noise — it was complete enough to read.

“Damn,” breathed Horza.

“What’s that mean?” Wubslin said. He punched the figures on the screen into the CAT’s navigational computer. “Oh,” the engineer said, sitting back, “it’s one of the stars near by. I guess they mean to rendezvous halfway between it and…” He looked at the main screen.

“Yes,” Horza said, looking unhappily at the signal. It had to be a fake. There was nothing to prove it was from the Idirans: no message number, code class, ship originator, signatory; nothing genuine at all.

“That from the guys with three legs?” Wubslin said. He brought a holo display onto another screen, showing stars surrounded by spherical grids of thin green lines. “Hey, we’re not all that far away from there.”

“Is that right?” Horza said. He watched the continuing blasts of battle-light. He entered some figures into the CAT’s control systems. The vessel brought its nose round, angling it further over towards the Schar’s World system. Wubslin looked at Horza.

“You don’t think it is from them?”

“I don’t,” Horza said. The radiation was fading. The engagement appeared to be over, or the action broken off. “I think we might turn up there and find a GCU waiting for us. Or a cloud of CAM.”

“CAM? What — that stuff they dusted Vavatch with?” Wubslin said, and whistled. “No thanks.”

Horza switched the screen with the message off.

Less than an hour later it all happened again: shells of radiation, warp disturbance, and this time two messages, one telling the CAT to ignore the first message, the other giving a new rendezvous point. Both seemed genuine; both were affixed with the word “Xoralundra”. Horza, still chewing the mouthful of food he’d been eating when the alarm went off for the second time, swore. A third message appeared, telling him personally to ignore those two signals and directing the CAT to yet another rendezvous area.

Horza shouted with anger, sending bits of soggy food arcing out to hit the message screen. He turned the wide-band communicator off completely, then went back to the mess.

“When do we reach the Quiet Barrier?”

“A few more hours. Half a day perhaps.”

“Are you nervous?”

“I’m not nervous. I’ve been there before. How about you?”

“If you say it’ll be all right, I believe you.”

“It should be.”

“Will you know any of the people there?”

“I don’t know. It’s been a few years. They don’t rotate personnel often, but people do leave. I don’t know. I’ll just have to wait and see.”

“You haven’t seen any of your own people for a long time, have you?”

“No. Not since I left there.”

“Aren’t you looking forward to it?”

“Maybe.”

“Horza… look, I know I told you we didn’t ask each other about… about everything before we came aboard the CAT, but that was… before a lot of things changed—”

“But it’s the way we’ve been, isn’t it?”

“You mean you don’t want to talk about it now?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. You want to ask me about—”

“No.” She put her hand to his lips. He felt them there in the darkness. “No, it’s OK. It’s all right; never mind.”

He sat in the centre seat. Wubslin was in the engineer’s chair to Horza’s right, Yalson to his left. The rest had crowded in behind them. He had let Balveda watch; there was little that could happen which she could affect now. The drone floated near the ceiling.

The Quiet Barrier was coming up. It showed as a mirrorfield directly in front of them, about a light-day in diameter. It had suddenly appeared on the screen when they were an hour out from the barrier. Wubslin had worried it was giving their position away, but Horza knew that the mirrorfield existed only in the CAT’s sensors. There was nothing there for anybody else to see.

Five minutes out, every screen went black. Horza had warned the rest about it, but even he felt anxious and blind when it happened.

“You’re sure this is meant to happen?” Aviger said.

“I’d be worried if it didn’t,” Horza told him. The old man moved somewhere behind him.

“I think this is incredible,” Dorolow said. “This creature is virtually a god. I’m sure it can sense our moods and thoughts. I can feel it already.”

“Actually, it’s just a collection of self-referencing—”

“Balveda,” Horza said, looking round at the Culture woman. She stopped talking and clapped a hand over her mouth, flashing her eyes. He turned back to the blank screen.

“When’s this thing—” Yalson began.

APPROACHING CRAFT, the screen said, in a variety of languages.

“Here we go,” Neisin said. He was shushed by Dorolow.

“I respond,” Horza said, in Marain, into the tight-beam communicator. The other languages disappeared from the screen.

YOU ARE APPROACHING THE PLANET CALLED SCHAR’S WORLD, DRA’AZON PLANET OF THE DEAD. PROGRESS BEYOND THIS POINT IS RESTRICTED.

“I know. My name is Bora Horza Gobuchul. I wish to return to Schar’s World for a short while. I ask this with all respect.”

“Smooth talker,” Balveda said. Horza glared briefly at her. The communicator would only transmit what he said, but he didn’t want the woman to forget she was a prisoner.

YOU HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE.

Horza couldn’t tell if this was a question or not. “I have been to Schar’s World before,” he confirmed. “I was one of the Changer sentinels.” There seemed little point in telling the creature when; the Dra’Azon called every time “now” even though their language used tenses. The screen went blank, then repeated:

YOU HAVE BEEN HERE BEFORE.

Horza frowned and wondered what to say. Balveda muttered, “Obviously hopelessly senile.”

“I have been here before,” Horza said. Did the Dra’Azon mean that because he had already been there he could not return?

“I can feel it, I can feel its presence,” Dorolow whispered.

THERE ARE OTHER HUMANS WITH YOU.

“Thanks a lot,” said the drone, Unaha-Closp, from somewhere near the ceiling.

“You see?” Dorolow said, her voice almost whimpering. Horza heard Balveda snort. Dorolow staggered slightly; Aviger and Neisin had to hold onto her to stop her from falling.

“I have not been able to set them down elsewhere,” Horza said. “I ask your indulgence. If need be, they will stay on board this vessel.”

THEY ARE NOT SENTINELS. THEY ARE OTHER HUMANOID SPECIES.

“I alone need alight on Schar’s World.”

ENTRY IS RESTRICTED.

Horza sighed. “I alone request permission to land.”

WHY HAVE YOU COME HERE?

Horza hesitated. He heard Balveda snort quietly. He said, “I seek one who is here.”

WHAT DO THE OTHERS SEEK?

“They seek nothing. They are with me.”

THEY ARE HERE.

“They…” Horza licked his lips. All his rehearsing, all his thoughts about what to say at this moment, seemed to be useless. “They are not all here by choice. But I had no alternative. I had to bring them. If you wish, they will stay on board this craft in orbit around Schar’s World, or further away inside the Quiet Barrier. I have a suit, I can—”

THEY ARE HERE AGAINST THEIR WILL.

Horza hadn’t known Dra’Azon to interrupt before. He couldn’t imagine it was a good sign. “The… circumstances are… complicated. Certain species in the galaxy are at war. Choices become limited. One does things one would not normally do.”

THERE IS DEATH HERE.

Horza looked at the words written on the screen. He felt transfixed by them. There was silence on the bridge for a moment. Then he heard a couple of people moving awkwardly.

“What does that mean?” the drone Unaha-Closp said.

“There… there is?” Horza said. The words stayed on the screen, written in Marain. Wubslin tapped at a few buttons on his side of the console, buttons which would normally control the display on the screens in front of him, all of which now repeated the words on the main screen. The engineer was sitting in his seat, looking cramped and tense. Horza cleared his throat, then said, “There was a battle, a conflict near by. Just before we got here. It might still be going on. There may be death.”

THERE IS DEATH HERE.

“Oh…” Dorolow said, and slumped into Neisin and Aviger’s arms.

“We’d better get her to the mess,” Aviger said, looking at Neisin. “Let her lie down.”

“Oh, all right,” Neisin said, glancing quickly at the woman’s face. Dorolow appeared to be unconscious.

“I may be able to…” Horza began, then gave a deep breath. “If there is death here I may be able to stop it. I may be able to prevent more death.”

BORA HORZA GOBUCHUL.

“Yes?” Horza said, gulping. Aviger and Neisin manhandled Dorolow’s limp body out through the doorway into the corridor leading into the mess. The screen changed:

YOU ARE LOOKING FOR THE REFUGEE MACHINE.

“Ho-ho,” said Balveda, turning away with a smile on her face and putting one hand to her mouth.

“Shit!” said Yalson.

“Looks like our god isn’t so stupid,” Unaha-Closp observed.

“Yes,” Horza said sharply. There seemed little point in trying to pretend now. “Yes, I am. But I think—”

YOU MAY ENTER.

“What?” the drone said.

“Well, ya-hoo!” Yalson said, crossing her arms and leaning back against the bulkhead. Neisin came back through the door. He stopped when he saw the screen.

“That was quick,” he said to Yalson. “What did he say?” Yalson just shook her head. Horza felt a wave of relief sweep through him. He looked at each word on the screen in turn, as though frightened that the short message could somehow conceal a hidden negation. He smiled and said:

“Thank you. Shall I go down alone to the planet?”

YOU MAY ENTER.

THERE IS DEATH HERE.

BE WARNED.

“What death?” Horza said. The relief waned; the Dra’Azon’s words about death chilled him. “Where is there death? Whose?”

The screen changed again, the first two lines disappearing. Now it simply said:

BE WARNED.

“I do not,” Unaha-Closp said slowly, “like the sound of that at all.”

Then the screens were clear. Wubslin sighed and relaxed. The sun of the Schar’s World system shone brightly ahead of them, less than a standard light-year away. Horza checked the figures on the navigation computer as its screen flickered back to normality along with the rest, displaying numbers and graphs and holographics. Then the Changer sat back in his seat. “We’re through all right,” he said. “We’re through the Quiet Barrier.”

“So nothing can touch us now, huh?” Neisin said.

Horza gazed at the screen, the single yellow dwarf star showing as a bright unwavering spot of light in the centre, planets still invisible. He nodded. “Nothing. Nothing outside, anyway.”

“Great. Think I’ll have a drink to celebrate.” Neisin nodded at Yalson, then swung his thin body out through the doorway.

“Do you think it meant only you can go down, or all of us?” Yalson asked. Still staring at the screen, Horza shook his head.

“I don’t know. We’ll go into orbit, then broadcast to the Changer base shortly before we try taking the CAT in. If Mr Adequate doesn’t like it, he’ll let us know.”

“You’ve decided it’s male, then,” said Balveda, just as Yalson said:

“Why not contact them now?”

“I didn’t like that bit about there being death here.” Horza turned towards Yalson. Balveda was at her side; the drone had floated down a little to eye level. Horza looked at Yalson. “Just as a precaution. I don’t want to give anything away too soon.” He turned his gaze to the Culture woman. “Last I heard, the regular transmission was due from the base on Schar’s World a few days ago. I don’t suppose you heard whether it had been received?” Horza grinned at Balveda in a way that was meant to show he didn’t expect an answer, or at least not a truthful one. The tall Culture agent looked at the floor, seemed to shrug, then met Horza’s eyes.

“I heard,” she said. “It was overdue.”

Horza stayed looking at her. Balveda didn’t take her eyes away. Yalson glanced from one to another. Eventually the drone Unaha-Closp said, “Frankly, none of this inspires confidence. My advice would be to—” It stopped as Horza glared at it. “Hmm,” it said, “well, never mind that for now.” It floated sideways to the door and went out.

“Seems to be OK,” Wubslin said, not apparently addressing anybody in particular. He sat back from the console, nodding to himself. “Yes, ship’s back to normal now.” He turned round and smiled at the other three.

They came for him. He was in a gamehall playing floatball. He thought he was safe there, surrounded by friends in every direction (they seemed to float like a cloud of flies in front of him for a second, but he laughed that off, caught the ball, threw it and scored a point). But they came for him there. He saw them coming, two of them, from a door set in a narrow chimney of the spherical, ribbed gamehall. They wore cloaks of no colour, and came straight towards him. He tried to float away, but his power harness was dead. He was stuck in mid-air, unable to make progress in any direction. He was trying to swim through the air and struggle out of his harness so that he could throw it at them — perhaps to hit, certainly to send himself off in the other direction — when they caught him.

None of the people around him seemed to notice, and he realised suddenly they were not his friends, that in fact he didn’t know any of them. They took his arms and, in an instant, without travelling past or through anything yet somehow making him feel they had turned an invisible corner to a place that was always there but out of sight, they were in an area of darkness. Their no-colour cloaks showed up in the darkness when he looked away. He was powerless, locked in stone, but he could see and breathe.

“Help me!”

“That is not what we are here for.”

“Who are you?”

“You know.”

“I don’t.”

“Then we can’t tell you.”

“What do you want?”

“We want you.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

“But why me?”

“You have no one.”

“What?”

“You have no one.”

“What do you mean?”

“No family. No friends…”

“…no religion. No belief.”

“That’s not true!”

“How would you know?”

“I believe in…”

“What?”

“Me!”

“That is not enough.”

“Anyway, you’ll never find it.”

“What? Find what?”

“Enough. Let’s do it now.”

“Do what?”

“Take your name.”

“I—”

And they reached together into his skull and took his name.

So he screamed.

“Horza!” Yalson shook his head, bouncing it off the bulkhead at the top of the small bed. He spluttered awake, the whimper dying on his lips, his body tense for an instant, then soft.

He put his hands out and touched the woman’s furred skin. She put her hands behind his head and hugged him to her breast. He said nothing, but his heart slowed to the pace of hers. She rocked his body gently with her own, then pushed his head away, bent and kissed his lips.

“I’m all right now,” he told her. “Just a nightmare.”

“What was it?”

“Nothing,” he said. He put his head back to her chest, nestling it between her breasts like a huge, delicate egg.

Horza had his suit on. Wubslin was in his usual seat. Yalson occupied the co-pilot’s chair. They were all suited up. Schar’s World filled the screen in front of them, the belly sensors of the CAT staring straight down at the sphere of white and grey beneath and magnifying it.

“One more time,” Horza said. Wubslin transmitted the recorded message for the third time.

“Maybe they don’t use that code any more,” Yalson said. She watched the screen with her sharp-browed eyes. She had cropped her hair back to about a centimetre over her skull, hardly thicker than the down which covered her body. The menacing effect jarred with the smallness of her head sticking out from the large neck of the suit.

“It’s traditional; more of a ceremonial language than a code,” Horza said. “They’ll know it if they hear it.”

“You’re sure we’re beaming it at the right place?”

“Yes,” Horza said, trying to remain calm. They had been in orbit for less than half an hour, stationary above the continent which held the buried tunnels of the Command System. Almost the whole of the planet was covered in snow. Ice locked the thousand-kilometre peninsula where the tunnel system lay fast into the sea itself. Schar’s World had entered another of its periodic ice ages seven thousand years previously, and only in a relatively thin band around the equator — between the slightly wobbling planet’s tropics — was there open ocean. It showed as a steely grey belt around the world, occasionally visible through whorls of storm clouds.

They were twenty-five thousand kilometres out from the planet’s snow-crusted surface, their communicator beaming down onto a circular area a few tens of kilometres in diameter at a point midway between the two frozen arms of sea which gave the peninsula a slight waist. That was where the entrance to the tunnels lay; that was where the Changers lived. Horza knew he hadn’t made a mistake, but there was no answer.

There is death here, he kept thinking. A little of the planet’s chill seemed to creep along his bones.

“Nothing,” Wubslin said.

“Right,” Horza said, taking the manual controls into his gloved hands. “We’re going in.”

The Clear Air Turbulence teased its warp fields out along the slight curve of the planet’s gravity well, carefully edging itself down the slope. Horza cut the motors and let them return to their emergency-ready-only mode. They shouldn’t need them now, and would soon be unable to use them as the gravity gradient increased.

The CAT fell with gradually increasing speed towards the planet, fusion motors at the ready. Horza watched displays on the screens until he was satisfied they were on course; then, with the planet seeming to turn a little beneath the craft, he unstrapped and went back to the mess.

Aviger, Neisin and Dorolow sat in their suits, strapped into the mess-room seats. Perosteck Balveda was also strapped in; she wore a thick jacket and matching trousers. Her head was exposed above the soft ruff of a white shirt. The bulky fabric jacket was fastened up to her throat. She had warm boots on, and a pair of hide gloves lay on the table in front of her. The jacket even had a little hood, which hung down her back. Horza wasn’t sure whether Balveda had chosen this soft, useless image of a space suit to make a point to him, or unconsciously, out of fear and a need for security.

Unaha-Closp sat in a chair, strapped against its back, pointing straight up at the ceiling. “I trust,” it said, “we’re not going to have the same sort of flying-circus job we had to endure the last time you flew this heap of debris.” Horza ignored it.

“We haven’t had any word from Mr Adequate, so it looks like we’re all going down,” he said. “When we get there, I’ll go in by myself to check things out. When I come back, we’ll decide what we’re going to do.”

“That is, you’ll decide—” began the drone.

“What if you don’t come back?” Aviger said. The drone made a hissing noise but went quiet. Horza looked at the toy-like figure of the old man in his suit.

“I’ll come back, Aviger,” he said. “I’m sure everybody at the base will be fine. I’ll get them to heat up some food for us.” He smiled, but knew it wasn’t especially convincing. “Anyway,” he went on, “in the unlikely event there is anything wrong, I’ll come straight back.”

“Well, this ship’s our only way off the planet; remember that, Horza,” Aviger said. His eyes looked frightened. Dorolow touched him on the arm of his suit.

“Trust in God,” Dorolow said. “We’ll be all right.” She looked at Horza. “Won’t we, Horza?”

Horza nodded. “Yes. We’ll be all right. We’ll all be just fine.” He turned and went back to the bridge.

They stood in the high mountain snows, watching the midsummer sun sink in its own red seas of air and cloud. A cold wind blew her hair across her face, auburn over white, and he raised a hand, without thinking, to sweep it away again. She turned to him, her head nestling into his cupped hand, a small smile on her face.

“So much for midsummer’s day,” she said. The day had been fair, still well below freezing, but mild enough for them to take their gloves off and push their hoods back. The nape of her neck was warm against his palm, and the lustrous, heavy hair brushed over the back of his hand as she looked up at him, skin white as snow, white as bone. “That look, again,” she said softly.

“What look?” he said, defensively, knowing.

“The far-away one,” she said, taking his hand and bringing it to her mouth, kissing it, stroking it as though it was a small, defenceless animal.

“Well, that’s just what you call it.”

She looked away from him, towards the livid red ball of the sun, lowering behind the distant range. “That’s what I see,” she told him. “I know your looks by now. I know them all, and what they mean.”

He felt a twinge of anger at being thought so obvious, but knew that she was right, at least partly. What she did not know about him was only what he did not know about himself (but that, he told himself, was quite a lot still). Perhaps she even knew him better than he did himself.

“I’m not responsible for my looks,” he said after a moment, to make a joke of it. “They surprise me, too, sometimes.”

“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 doors, 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.

He sat down at the side of the tunnel entrance, in the snow, his back to the rock. They saw him from the CAT, and Yalson said, “Horza! Are you all right?”

“No,” he said, turning the laser rifle off. “No, I’m not.”

“What’s wrong?” Yalson said quickly. Horza took the suit helmet off, putting it down on the snow beside him. The cold air sucked heat from his face, and he had to breathe hard in the thin atmosphere.

“There is death here,” he said to the cloudless sky.