Consider Phlebas

14. Consider Phlebas

Balveda faced the snowfield. It was night. The moon of Schar’s World shone brightly in a black, star-scattered sky. The air was still, sharp and cold, and the Clear Air Turbulence sat, partly submerged in its own snowdrift, across the white and moonlit plain.

The woman stood in the entrance to the darkened tunnels, looked out into the night, and shivered.

The unconscious Changer lay on a stretcher she had made from plastic sheets salvaged from the train wreck and supported with the floating, babbling drone. She had bandaged his head; that was all she could do. The medkits, like everything else on the pallet, had been swept away by the train crash and buried in the cold, foam-covered wreckage which filled station seven. The Mind could float; she had found it hanging in the air over the platform in the station. It was responding to requests, but could not speak, give a sign or propel itself. She had told it to stay weightless, then pulled and shoved it and the drone-stretcher with the man on it to the nearest transit tube.

Once in the small freight capsule the trip back took only half an hour. She had not stopped for the dead.

She had strapped her broken arm up and splinted it, trance-slept for a short while on the journey, then manhandled her charges from the service tubes through the wrecked accommodation section to the unlit tunnels’ entrance, where the dead Changers lay still in aspects of frozen death. She rested there a moment in the darkness before heading for the ship, sitting on the floor of the tunnel where the snow had drifted in.

Her back ached dully, her head throbbed, her arm was numb. She wore the ring she had taken from Horza’s hand, and hoped his suit, and perhaps the drone’s electrics, would identify them to the waiting ship as friends.

If not, quite simply, it would be the death of all of them.

She looked again at Horza.

The face of the man on the stretcher was white as the snow, and as blank. The features were there: eyes, nose, brows, mouth; but they seemed somehow unlinked and disconnected, giving a look of anonymity to a face lacking all character, animation and depth. It was as though all the people, all the characterisations, all the parts the man had played in his life had leaked out of him in his coma and taken their own little share of his real self with them, leaving him empty, wiped clean.

The drone supporting the floating stretcher babbled briefly in a tongue Balveda couldn’t recognise, its voice echoing down the tunnel; then it fell silent. The Mind floated, still and dull silver, its patchy, mirror-rainbow surface reflecting her, the dim light outside and the man and the drone from its ellipsoid shape.

She got to her feet and with one hand pushed the stretcher out over the moonlit snow towards the ship, her legs sinking into the whiteness up to her thighs. A steel-blue shadow of the struggling woman was thrown to one side in the silence, away from the moon and towards the dark and distant mountains, where a curtain of storm clouds hung like a deeper night. Behind the woman, her tracks led back, deep and scuffed, to the tunnels’ mouth. She cried quietly with the effort of it all and the numbing pain of her wounds.

A couple of times on her way, she raised her head to the dark form of the ship, a mixture of hope and fear on her face as she waited for the blast and splash of warning laser light which would tell her that the craft’s autoguard did not accept her; that the drone and Horza’s suit were both too damaged to be recognisable to the ship; that it was over, and she was doomed to die here, a hundred metres from safety and escape — but held from it by a set of faithful, automatic, unconscious circuits…

… The lift swung down when she applied the ring from Horza’s hand to the elevator controls. She put the drone and the man into the hold. The drone murmured; the man was quiet and motionless as a fallen statue.

She had intended to switch off the ship’s autoguard and go back immediately for the Mind, but the man’s icy stillness frightened her. She went for the emergency medical kit and turned up the heating in the hold, but when she got back to the stretcher, the cold, blank-faced Changer was dead.