Consider Phlebas

6. The Eaters

Horza was weightless for a second. He felt himself caught by the eddying wind swirling through the rear doors, drawing him towards them. He grabbed at the channel in the wall he had held onto earlier. The shuttle dipped its nose, and the roar of the wind increased. Horza floated, his eyes closed, his fingers jammed into the wall slot, waiting for the crash; but instead the shuttle levelled out again, and he was back on his feet.

“Mipp!” he shouted, staggering forward to the door. He felt the craft turning and glanced out through the rear doors. They were still falling.

“It’s gone, Horza,” Mipp said faintly. “I’ve lost it.” He sounded weak, calmly despairing. “I’m turning back for the island. We won’t get there, but… we’re going to hit in a few moments… You’d best get down by this bulkhead and brace yourself. I’ll try to put her down as soft as I can…”

“Mipp,” Horza said, sitting down on the floor with his back to the bulkhead, “is there anything I can do?”

“Nothing,” Mipp said. “Here we go. Sorry, Horza. Brace yourself.”

Horza did exactly the opposite, letting himself go limp. The air roaring through the rear doors howled in his ears; the shuttle shook underneath him. The sky was blue. He caught a glimpse of waves… He kept just enough tension in his back to keep his head against the bulkhead surface. Then he heard Mipp shout; not words — just a shout of fear, an animal noise.

The shuttle crashed, slamming into something, forcing Horza hard back against the wall, then releasing him. The craft raised its nose slightly. Horza felt light for a moment, saw waves and white spray through the open rear doors, then the waves went, he saw sky, and closed his eyes as the shuttle’s nose dipped again.

The craft smashed into the waves, crashing to a stop in the water. Horza felt himself squashed into the bulkhead as though by the foot of some gigantic animal. The wind was forced out of him, blood roared, the suit bit at him. He was shaken and flattened, and then, just as the impact seemed to be over, another shock sledge-hammered into his back and neck and head, and suddenly he was blind.

The next thing he knew there was water everywhere about him. He was gasping and spluttering, striking out in the darkness and hitting his hands off hard, sharp, broken surfaces. He could hear water gurgling, and his own choked breath frothing. He blew water out of his mouth and coughed.

He was floating in a bubble of air, in darkness, in warm water. Most of his body seemed to be aching, each limb and part clamouring with its own special message of pain.

He felt gingerly round the small space he was trapped in. The bulkhead had collapsed; he was — at last — in the flight-deck area with Mipp. He found the other man’s body, crushed between seat and instrument panel, trapped and still, half a metre under the surface of the water. His head, which Horza could feel by reaching down between the seat head-rest and what felt like the innards of the main monitor screen, moved too easily in the neck of the suit, and the forehead had been crushed.

The water was rising higher. The air was escaping through the smashed nose of the shuttle, floating and bobbing bow-up in the sea. Horza knew he would have to swim down and back through the shuttle’s rear section and out through the rear doors, otherwise he’d be trapped.

He breathed as deeply as he could, despite the pain, for about a minute, while the rising water level gradually forced his head into the angle between the top of the craft’s instrument panel and the flight-deck ceiling. He dived.

He forced his way down, past the wreckage of the crushed seat Mipp had died in, and past the twisted panels of light metal which had made up the bulkhead. He could see light, vaguely green-grey, forming a rectangle beneath him. Air trapped in his suit bubbled round him, along his legs, upwards to his feet. He was slowed for a moment, buoyed up by the air in his boots, and for a second he thought he wasn’t going to make it, that he was going to hang there upside-down and drown. Then the air bubbled out through the holes in his boots punched there by Lamm’s laser, and Horza sank.

He struggled down through the water to the rectangle of light, then swam through the open rear doors and into the shimmering green depths of the water under the shuttle; he kicked and went up, breaking out into the waves with a gasp, sucking warm, fresh air into his lungs. He felt his eyes adjust to the slanted but still bright sunlight of late afternoon.

He grabbed hold of the shuttle’s dented, punctured nose — sticking above the water by about two metres — and looked around, trying to see the island, but without success. Still just treading water and letting his battered body and brain recover, Horza watched the up-tilted nose of the craft sink lower in the water and tip slowly forward so that the shuttle gradually floated almost level in the waves, its top surface just awash. The Changer, his arm muscles straining and hurting, eventually hauled himself onto the top of the shuttle, and lay there like a beached fish.

He started to shut off the pain signals, like a weary servant picking up the litter of breakables after an employer’s destructive rage.

It was only lying there, with small waves washing over the top surface of the shuttle’s fuselage, that he realised that all the water he had been coughing up and swallowing was fresh. It hadn’t occurred to him that the Circlesea would be anything other than salt, like most planetary oceans, but in fact there was not even the slightest tang of it, and he congratulated himself that at least he would not die of thirst.

He stood up carefully, in the centre of the shuttle roof, waves breaking round his feet. He looked around, and could see the island — just. It looked very small and far away in the early evening light, and, while there was a faint warm breeze blowing more or less towards the island, he had no idea which way any currents might be taking him. He sat down, then lay back, letting the waters of the Circlesea wash over the flat surface beneath him and break in small lines of surf against his much-damaged suit. After a while he just fell asleep, not really meaning to, but not stopping himself when he realised that he was, telling himself to sleep for only an hour or so.

He woke up to see the sun, though still high in the sky, looking dark red as it shone through the layers of dust above the distant Edgewall. He got to his feet again; the shuttle didn’t seem to have sunk any lower in the water. The island was still far away, but it looked a little nearer than it had earlier; the currents, or the winds, such as they were, seemed to be carrying him in roughly the right direction. He sat down again.

The air was still warm. He thought of taking the suit off but decided against it; it was uncomfortable but perhaps he would get too cold without it. He lay back again.

He wondered where Yalson was now. Had she survived Lamm’s bomb, and the wreck? He hoped so. He thought she probably had; he couldn’t imagine her dead, or dying. It was little enough to go on, and he refused to believe he was superstitious, but not being able to imagine her dead was somehow comforting. She’d survive. Take more than a tactical nuke and a billion-tonne ship impacting a berg the size of a small continent to polish that girl off… He found himself smiling, remembering her.

He would have spent more time thinking about Yalson, but there was something else he had to think about as well.

Tonight he would Change.

It was all he could do. Probably by now it was irrelevant. Kraiklyn was either dead or — if surviving — unlikely ever to meet Horza again, but the Changer had prepared for the transformation; his body was waiting for it, and he could think of nothing better to do.

The situation, he told himself, was far from hopeless. He wasn’t badly injured, he seemed to be heading for the island, where the shuttle might still be, and if he could make it in time there was always Evanauth, and that Damage game. Anyway, the Culture might be looking for him by now, so it wouldn’t do to keep the same identity for too long. What the hell, he thought; he would Change. He would go to sleep as the Horza the others knew him as, and he would wake up as a copy of the captain of the Clear Air Turbulence.

He prepared his bruised and aching body for the alteration as best he could: relaxing muscles and readying glands and groups of cells; sending deliberate signals from brain to body and face through nerves that only Changers possessed.

He watched the sun, dimming through red stages somewhere low over the ocean.

Now he would sleep; sleep, and become Kraiklyn; take on yet another identity, another shape to add to the many he had assumed already during his life…

Maybe there was no point, maybe he was only taking this new shape on to die in. But, he thought, What have I got to lose?

Horza watched the falling, darkening red eye of the sun until he entered the sleep of Changing, and in that Changing trance, though his eyes were closed, and beneath their lids also altering, he seemed to see that dying glare still…

Animal eyes. Predator’s eyes. Caged behind them, looking out. Never sleeping, being three people. Ownership; rifle and ship and Company. Not much yet maybe, but one day… with just a little, little luck, no more than everybody else had a right to… one day he would show them. He knew how good he was, he knew what he was fit for, and who was fit for him. The rest were just tokens; they were his because they were under his command; it was his ship, after all. The women especially — just game pieces. They could come and go and he didn’t care. All you had to do with any of them was share their danger and they thought you were wonderful. They couldn’t see that for him there was no danger; he had a lot left to do in life, he knew he wasn’t going to die some stupid, squalid little combat death. The galaxy, one day, would know his name, and either mourn him or curse him, when eventually he did have to die… He hadn’t decided yet whether it would be mourn or curse… maybe it depended on how the galaxy treated him in the meantime… All he needed was the tiniest break, just the sort of thing the others had had, the leaders of the bigger, more successful, better known, more feared and respected Free Companies. They must have had them… They might seem greater than he was now, but one day they would look up to him; everybody would. All would know his name: Kraiklyn!

Horza woke in the dawn light, still lying on the wave-washed shuttle roof, like something washed up and spread upon a table. He was half awake, half asleep. It was colder, the light was thinner and more blue, but nothing else had changed. He started to drift back to sleep again, away from pain and lost hopes.

Nothing else had changed… only him…

He had to swim for the island.

He had woken for the second time the same morning, feeling different, better, rested. The sun was angling up and out of the overhead haze.

The island was closer, but he was going past it. The currents were taking him and the shuttle away now, having swept no closer than two kilometres to the group of reefs and sandbanks round the isle. He cursed himself for sleeping so long. He got out of the suit — it was useless now and deserved to be ditched — and left it lying on the still just-awash shuttle roof. He was hungry, his stomach rumbled, but he felt fit and ready for the swim. He estimated it was about three kilometres. He dived in and struck out powerfully. His right leg hurt where he’d been hit by Lamm’s laser and his body still ached in places, but he could do it; he knew he could.

He looked back once, after he’d swum for a few minutes. He could see the suit but not the shuttle. The empty suit was like the abandoned cocoon of some metamorphosed animal, riding opened and empty, seeming just above the surface of the waves behind. He turned away and kept swimming.

The island came closer, but very slowly. The water was warm at first, but it seemed to get colder, and the aches in his body increased. He ignored them, switching them off, but he could feel himself slowing, and he knew that he’d started off too fast. He paused, treading water for a moment; then, after drinking a little of the warm fresh water, set off again, stroking more deliberately and steadily for the grey tower of the distant island.

He told himself how lucky he’d been. The shuttle crash hadn’t injured him badly — though the aches still plagued him, like noisy relatives locked in a distant room, disturbing his concentration. The warm water, though apparently getting colder, was fresh, so that he could drink from it and wouldn’t dehydrate; yet it crossed his mind that he would have been more buoyant had it been salty.

He kept going. It ought to have been easy but it was getting more difficult all the time. He stopped thinking about it; he concentrated on moving; the slow, steady, rhythmic beat of arms and legs forcing him through the water; up waves, over, down; up, over, down.

Under my own power, he told himself, under my own power.

The mountain on the island grew larger very slowly. He felt as though he was building it, as though the effort required to make it appear larger in his sight was the same as if he was toiling to construct that peak; heap it up rock by rock, with his own hands…

Two kilometres. Then one.

The sun angled, rose.

Eventually, the outer reefs and shallows; he passed them in a daze, into shallower water.

A sea of aching. An ocean of exhaustion.

He swam towards the beach, through a fan of waves and surf radiating from the reef-gap he’d swum through…

… and felt as though he’d never taken the suit off, as though he wore it still, and it was stiff with rust or age, or filled with heavy water or wet sand; dragging, stiffening, pulling him back.

He could hear waves breaking on the beach, and when he looked up he could see people on it: thin dark people, dressed in rags, gathered round tents and fires or walking between them. Some were in the water ahead of him, carrying baskets, large open-work baskets which they held on their waists, gathering things from the sea as they waded through it, putting what they collected in their baskets.

They hadn’t seen him, so he swam on, making a slow, crawling motion with his arms and kicking feebly with his legs.

The people harvesting the sea didn’t appear to notice him; they kept on wading through the surf, stooping occasionally to pick from the sands underneath, their eyes sweeping and probing, scanning and searching, but too close in; not seeing him. His stroke slowed to a gasping, dying crawl. He could not lift his hands free of the water, and his legs stayed paralysed…

Then through the surf noise, like something from a dream, he heard several people shouting nearby, and splashes coming close. He was still swimming weakly when another wave lifted him, and he saw several of the skinny people clad in loincloths and tattered tunics, wading through the water towards him.

They helped Horza in through the breaking waves, over sun-streaked shallows and onto the golden sands. He lay there while the thin and haggard people crowded round. They talked quietly to each other in a language he hadn’t heard before. He tried to move but couldn’t. His muscles felt like lengths of limp rag.

“Hello,” he croaked. He tried it in all the languages he knew, but none seemed to work. He looked into the faces of the people around him. They were human, but that word covered so many different species throughout the galaxy it was a continuing subject for debate who was and who wasn’t human. As in all too many matters, the consensus of opinion was starting to resemble what the Culture had to say on the subject. The Culture would lay down the law (except, of course, that the Culture didn’t have any real laws) about what being human was, or how intelligent a particular species was (while at the same time making clear that pure intelligence didn’t really mean much on its own), or on how long people should live (though only as a rough guide, naturally), and people would accept these things without question, because everybody believed the Culture’s own propaganda, that it was fair, unbiased, disinterested, concerned only with absolute truth… and so on.

So were these people around him really human? They were about Horza’s height, they seemed to have roughly the same bone structure, bilateral symmetry and respiratory system; and their faces — though each was different — all had eyes, mouth, nose and ears.

But they all looked thinner than they ought to have been, and their skin, regardless of hue or shade, looked somehow diseased.

Horza lay still. He felt very heavy again, but at least he was on dry land. On the other hand, it didn’t look as though there was much food on the island, judging by the state of the bodies around him. He assumed that was why they were so thin. He raised his head weakly and tried to see through the clumps of thin legs towards the shuttle craft he had seen earlier. He could just see the top of the machine, sticking up above one of the large canoes beached on the sands. Its rear doors were open.

A smell wafted under Horza’s nose and made him feel sick. He put his head down onto the sand again, exhausted.

The talking stopped and the people turned, their thin, tanned or anyway dark bodies shuffling round to face up the beach. A space opened in their ranks just above Horza’s head, and try as he might he couldn’t get up on one elbow or swivel his head to see what or who was coming. He lay and waited, then the people to his right all drew back and a line of eight men appeared on that side, holding a long pole together in their left hands, their other arms stuck out for balance. It was the litter he had seen being carried into the jungle the day before, when the shuttle had overflown the island. He watched to see what it held. Two lines of men turned the litter so that it faced Horza and set it down. Then all sixteen sat down, looking exhausted. Horza stared.

On the litter sat the most enormous, obscenely fat human Horza had ever seen.

He had mistaken the giant for a pyramid of golden sand the previous day, when he had seen the litter and its huge burden from the CAT’s shuttle. Now he could see that his first impression had been close in shape if not in substance. Whether the vast cone of human flesh belonged to a male or a female Horza couldn’t tell; great mammary-like folds of naked flesh spilled from the creature’s upper and middle chest, but they drooped over even more enormous waves of nude, hairless torso-fat, which lay partly cradled in the vast beefs of the giant’s akimboed legs and partly overflowing those to droop into the canvas surface of the litter. Horza could see no stitch of clothing on the monster, but no trace of genitals either; whatever they were, they were quite buried under rolls of golden-brown flesh.

Horza looked up to the head. Rising from a thick cone of neck, gazing out over concentric ramparts of chins, a bald dome of puffy flesh contained a limp and rambling length of pale lips, a small button nose, and slits where eyes must be. The head sat on its layers of neck, shoulder and chest fat like a great golden bell on top of a many-decked temple. The sweat-glistened giant suddenly moved its hands, rolling them round on the end of the bloated fat-bound balloons of its arms, until the merely chubby fingers met and clasped as tightly as their size would allow. As the mouth opened to speak, another one of the skinny humans, his rags slightly less tattered than those of the others, moved into Horza’s field of vision, just behind and to the side of the giant.

The bell of head moved a few centimetres to one side and swivelled round, saying something to the man behind that Horza couldn’t catch. Then the giant raised his or her arms with obvious effort and gazed round the skinny humans gathered around Horza. The voice sounded like congealing fat being poured into a jug; it was a drowning voice, Horza thought, like something from a nightmare. He listened, but couldn’t understand the language being used. He looked round to see what effect the giant’s words were having on the famished-looking crowd. His head spun for a moment, as though his brain had shifted while his skull stayed still; he was suddenly back in the hangar of the Clear Air Turbulence, when the Company had been looking at him, and he had felt as naked and vulnerable as he did now.

“Oh, not again,” he moaned in Marain.

“Oh-hoo!” said the golden rolls of flesh, the voice tumbling over the slopes of fat in a faltering series of tones. “Gracious! Our bounty from the sea speaks!” The hairless dome of head turned further round to the man standing by its side. “Mr First, isn’t this wonderful?” the giant burbled.

“Fate is kind to us, Prophet,” the man said gruffly.

“Fate favours the beloved, yes, Mr First. It sends our enemies away and brings us bounty — bounty from the sea! Fate be praised!” The great pyramid of flesh shook as the arms went higher, trailing folds of paler flesh as the turret-like head went back, the mouth opening to exposé a dark space where only a few small fangs glinted like steel. When the bubbling voice spoke again it was in the language Horza couldn’t make out, but it was the same phrase repeated over and over again. The giant was quickly joined by the rest of the crowd, who shook their hands in the air and chanted hoarsely. Horza closed his eyes, trying to wake from what he knew was not a dream.

When he opened his eyes the skinny humans were still chanting, but they were crowded around him again, blocking out his view of the golden-brown monster. Their faces eager, their teeth bared, their hands stretched out like claws, the crowd of starving, chanting humans fell on him.

They stripped off his shorts. He tried to struggle, but they held him down. In his exhaustion he was probably no stronger than anyone of them, and they had no difficulty pinning him; they rolled him over, pulled his hands behind him and tied them there. Then they tied his feet together and pulled his legs back until his feet were almost touching his hands, and bound them to his wrists by a short length of rope. Naked, trussed like an animal ready for the slaughter, Horza was dragged across the hot sand, past a weakly burning fire, then hauled upright and lowered over a short pole stuck into the beach, so that it ran up between his back and his tied limbs. His knees sank into the sand, taking most of his weight. The fire burned in front of him, sending acrid wood-smoke into his eyes, and the awful smell returned; it seemed to come from various pots and bowls spread around the fire. Other fires and collections of pans were littered across the beach.

The huge pile of flesh the man named Mr First had called “prophet” was set down near the fire. Mr First stood at the obese human’s side, staring at Horza through deep-set eyes contained within a pale and grubby face. The golden giant on the litter clapped chubby hands together and said, “Stranger, gift of the sea, welcome. I… am the great prophet Fwi-Song.”

The vast creature spoke a crude form of Marain. Horza opened his mouth to tell them his name, but Fwi-Song continued. “You have been sent to us in our time of testing, a morsel of human flesh on the tide of nothingness, a harvest-thing plucked from the tasteless wash of life, a sweetmeat to share and be shared in our victory over the poisonous bile of disbelief! You are a sign from Fate, for which we give thanks!” Fwi-Song’s huge arms lifted up; rolls of shoulder fat wobbled on either side of the turret-like head, nearly covering the ears. Fwi-Song shouted out in a language Horza didn’t know, and the crowd echoed the phrase, chanting it several times.

The fat-smothered arms were lowered again. “You are the salt of the sea, ocean-gift.” Fwi-Song’s syrupy voice changed back into Marain once more. “You are a sign, a blessing from Fate; you are the one to become many, the single to be shared; yours will be the gaining gift, the blessed beauty of transubstantiation!”

Horza stared, horrified, at the golden giant, unable to think of anything to say. What could you say to people like this? Horza cleared his throat, still hoping to say something, but Fwi-Song went on.

“Be told then, gift of the sea, that we are the Eaters; the Eaters of ashes, the Eaters of filth, the Eaters of sand and tree and grass; the most basic, the most loved, the most real. We have laboured to prepare ourselves for our day of testing, and now that day is gloriously near!” The golden-skinned prophet’s voice grew shrill; folds of fat shook as Fwi-Song’s arms opened out. “Behold us then, as we await the time of our ascension from this mortal plane, with empty bellies and voided bowels and hungry minds!” Fwi-Song’s pudgy hands met in a slap; the fingers interweaved like huge, fattened maggots.

“If I can—” croaked Horza, but the giant was talking to the crowd of grubby people again, the voice bubbling out over the golden sands and the cooking fires and the dull, malnourished people.

Horza shook his head a little and looked out over the expanse of beach to the open-doored shuttle in the distance. The more he looked at the craft, the more certain he became it was a Culture machine.

It was nothing he could pin down, but he grew more certain with every moment spent looking at the machine. He guessed it was a forty- or fifty-seater; just about big enough to take all the people he had seen on the island. It didn’t look particularly new or fast, and it didn’t look armed at all, but something about the whole way its simple, utilitarian form had been put together spoke of the Culture. If the Culture designed an animal-drawn cart or an automobile, they would still share something in common with the device at the far end of the beach, for all the gulf of time between the epochs each represented. It would have helped if the Culture had used some sort of emblem or logo; but, pointlessly unhelpful and unrealistic to the last, the Culture refused to place its trust in symbols. It maintained that it was what it was and had no need for such outward representation. The Culture was every single individual human and machine in it, not one thing. Just as it could not imprison itself with laws, impoverish itself with money or misguide itself with leaders, so it would not misrepresent itself with signs.

All the same, the Culture did have one set of symbols it was very proud of, and Horza didn’t doubt that if the machine he was looking at was a Culture craft, it would have some Marain writing on or in it somewhere.

Was it in some way connected with the mass of flesh still talking to the scrawny humans around the fire? Horza doubted it. Fwi-Song’s Marain was shaky and ill tutored. Horza’s own grasp of the language was far from perfect, but he knew enough about the tongue to realise Fwi-Song did it some violence when he or she used it. Anyway, the Culture was not in the habit of loaning out its vehicles to religious nutcases. Was it here to evacuate them, then? Lift them to safety when the Culture’s high-technology shit hit the rotating fan that was the Vavatch Orbital? With a sinking feeling, Horza realised this was probably the answer. So there was no escape. Either these crazies sacrificed him or did whatever it was they were set on doing to him, or it was a ride into captivity, courtesy of the Culture.

He told himself not to assume the worst. After all, he now looked like Kraiklyn, and it wasn’t that likely the Culture’s Minds had made all the correct connections between him, the CAT and Kraiklyn. Even the Culture didn’t think of everything. But… they probably did know he’d been on The Hand of God 137; they probably did know he’d escaped from it; they probably did know that the CAT was in that volume at the time. (He recalled the statistics Xoralundra had quoted to the Hand’s captain; yes, the GCU must have won the battle… He remembered the CAT’s rough-running warp motors; probably producing a wake any self-respecting GCU could track from centuries away)… Damn it; he wouldn’t put it past them. Maybe they were testing everybody they were picking up from Vavatch. They would know in seconds, from just a single sample cell; a skin flake, a hair; for all he knew he’d been sampled already, a micromissile sent from the nearby shuttle picking up some tiny piece of tissue… He dropped his head, his neck muscles aching with all the others in his battered, bruised, exhausted body.

Stop it, he told himself. Thinking like a failure. Too damn sorry for yourself. Get yourself out of this. Still got your teeth and your nails… and your brain. Just bide your time…

“For lo,” Fwi-Song warbled, “the godless ones, the most hated, the despised-by-the-despised, the Atheists, the Anathematics, have sent us this instrument of the Nothingness, the Vacuum, to us…” As the giant said those words Horza looked up and saw Fwi-Song point along the beach to the shuttle. “But we shall not waver in our faith! We shall resist the lure of the Nothingness between the stars where the godless ones, the Anathematised of the Vacuum exist! We shall stay part of what is a part of us! We shall not treat with the great Blasphemy of the Material. We shall stand as the rocks and trees stand — firm, rooted, secure, staunch, unyielding!” Fwi-Song’s arms went out again, and the voice bellowed out. The gruff-voiced man with the dirty pale skin shouted something at the seated crowd, and they shouted back. The prophet smiled at Horza from across the fire. Fwi-Song’s mouth was a dark hole, with four small fangs protruding when the lips formed a smile. They shone in the sunlight.

“This the way you treat all your guests?” Horza said, trying not to cough until the end of his sentence. He cleared his throat. Fwi-Song’s smile vanished.

“Guest you are not, sea-wanton, salt-gift. Prize: ours to keep, mine to use. Bounty from the sea and the sun and the wind, brought to us by Fate. Hee-hee.” Fwi-Song’s smile returned with a girlish giggle, and one of the huge hands went to cover the pale lips, “Fate recognises its prophet, sends him tasty treats! Just when some of my flock were having second thoughts, too! Eh, Mr First?” The turret-head turned to the thin figure of the paler man, standing with arms folded, by the giant’s side. Mr First nodded:

“Fate is our gardener, and our wolf. It weeds out the weak to honour the strong. So the prophet has spoken.”

“And the word which dies in the mouth lives in the ear,” Fwi-Song said, turning the huge head back to look at Horza. At least, Horza thought, now I know it’s a male. For whatever that’s worth.

“Mighty Prophet,” Mr First said. Fwi-Song smiled wider but continued looking at Horza. Mr First went on, “The sea-gift should see the fate that awaits him. Perhaps the treacherous coward Twenty-seventh—”

“Oh, yes!” Fwi-Song clapped his huge hands together and a smile lit up his whole face. For a second Horza thought he saw small white eyes beyond the slits staring at him. “Oh let’s, yes! Bring the coward, let us do what must be done.”

Mr First spoke in ringing tones to the emaciated humans gathered around the fire. A few stood up and walked off behind Horza, towards the forest. The rest started singing and chanting.

After a few minutes Horza heard a scream, then a series of yells and screams, gradually coming closer. At last the people who had left came back, carrying a short, thick log, much like the one Horza was held by. Swinging on the pole was a young man, screaming, shouting in the language Horza didn’t understand, and struggling. Horza saw drops of sweat and saliva fall from the young man’s face and spot the sand. The log was sharpened at one end; that point was driven into the sand on the opposite side of the fire from Horza, so that the young man faced the Changer.

“This, my libation from the seas,” Fwi-Song said to Horza, pointing at the young man, who was quivering and moaning, his eyes rolling about in their sockets and his lips dribbling, “this is my naughty boy; called Twenty-seventh, since his rebirth. This was one of our respected, much loved sons, one of our anointed, one of our fellow morsels, one of our brotherly taste buds on the great tongue of life.” Fwi-Song’s voice chortled with laughter as he spoke, as though he knew the absurdity of the part he was playing and couldn’t resist hamming it up. “This splinter from our tree, this grain from our beach, this reprobate dared to run towards the seven-times-cursed vehicle of the Vacuum. He spurned the gift of burden with which we honoured him; he chose to abandon us and flee across the sands when the alien enemy passed over us yesterday. He did not trust our salving grace, but turned instead to an instrument of darkness and nothingness, towards the soaking shade of the soulless ones, the Anathematics.” Fwi-Song looked at the man, still shaking on the post across the fire from Horza. The prophet’s face went stern with reproach. “By the workings of Fate the traitor who ran from our side and put his prophet’s life at risk was caught — so that he might learn his sad mistake, and make good his terrible crime.” Fwi-Song’s arm dropped. The vast head shook.

Mr First shouted to the people round the fire. They faced the young man called Twenty-seventh and chanted. The ghastly smells Horza had sensed earlier came back, making his eyes mist and his nose tingle.

While the people chanted and Fwi-Song watched, Mr First and two of the women followers dug up small sacks from the sand. Out of them they brought some thin lengths of cloth which they proceeded to wrap round their bodies. As Mr First put his vestments on, Horza saw a large, cumbersome-looking projectile pistol, held in a string holster beneath the man’s grubby tunic. Horza presumed that was the gun fired at the shuttle the day before, when he and Mipp had overflown the island.

The young man opened his eyes, saw the three people in their cloths and started screaming.

“Hear how the stricken soul cries out for its lesson, pleads for its bounty of regret, its solace of refreshing suffering,” Fwi-Song smiled, looking at Horza. “Our child Twenty-seventh knows what awaits him, and while his body, already proved so weak, breaks before the storm, his soul cries out, ‘Yes! Yes! Mighty Prophet! Succour me! Make me part of you! Give me your strength! Come to me!’ Is it not a sweet and uplifting sound?”

Horza looked into the prophet’s eyes and said nothing. The young man went on screaming and trying to tear himself away from the stump. Mr First was crouched before him, on his knees, his head bowed, muttering to himself. The two women dressed in the dull cloth were preparing bowls of steaming liquid from the vats and pots around the fire, warming some over the flames. The smells came to Horza, turning his stomach.

Fwi-Song switched to the other language and spoke to the two women. They looked at Horza, then came up to him with the bowls. Horza drew his head away as they shoved the containers under his nose. He wrinkled his face up in disgust at what looked and smelled like fish entrails in a sauce of excrement. The women took the awful stuff away; it left a stink in his nose. He tried breathing through his mouth.

The young man’s mouth had been wedged open with blocks of wood, and his choking screams altered in pitch. While Mr First held him, the women ladled the liquids from the bowls into his mouth. The young man spluttered and wailed, choked and tried to spit. He moaned, then threw up.

“Let me show you my armoury, my benefaction,” Fwi-Song said to Horza, and reached behind his vast body. He brought back a large bundle of rags, which he started to unfold. Glittering in the sunlight, metal devices like tiny man-traps were revealed. Fwi-Song put one finger to his lips while he surveyed the collection, then picked up one of the small metal contraptions. He put it into his mouth, fitting both parts over the pins Horza had seen earlier. “Zhare,” Fwi-Song said, raising his mouth in a broad smile towards the Changer. “What’oo you shink of zhat?” The artificial teeth sparkled in his mouth; rows of sharp, serrated points. “Or zhese?” Fwi-Song swapped them for another set, full of tiny fangs like needles, then another, with angled teeth like hooks with barbs, then another, with holes set in them. “Goo’, eh?” He smiled at Horza, leaving the last pair in. He turned to Mr First. “Wha’ you shink, Nishtur Shursht? Ehs? Or…” Fwi-Song took out the set with the holes, put in another set, like long, blade-like spades. “Zheze? A ’ink eeg a rar ah nishe. Esh, rert ush zhtart wish eez. Ret’s punish zhoze naughty tootsiesh.”

Twenty-seventh’s voice was becoming hoarse. One of his legs was lifted out in front of him and held by four kneeling men. Fwi-Song was lifted and carried on the litter to just in front of the young man; he bared the blade-teeth, then leaned forward and with a quick; nodding motion, bit off one of Twenty-seventh’s toes.

Horza looked away.

In the next half-hour or so of leisurely paced eating, the enormous prophet nibbled at various bits of Twenty-seventh’s body, attacking the extremities and the few remaining fat deposits with his various sets of teeth. The young man gained fresh breath with each new site of butchery.

Horza watched and didn’t watch, sometimes trying to think himself into a kind of defiance that would let him work out a way to get back at this grotesque distortion of a human being, at other times just wanting the whole awful business to be over and done with. Fwi-Song left his ex-disciple’s fingers until last, then used the teeth with the holes in them like wire-strippers. “’Ery ’asty,” he said, wiping his blood-stained face with one gigantic forearm.

Twenty-seventh was cut down, moaning, covered in streaks of blood, and only semi-conscious. He was gagged with a length of rag, then pinned down flat, face up, on the sand, wooden spikes through the palms of his mangled hands and a huge boulder crushing his feet. He started screaming weakly again through the gag when he saw the prophet Fwi-Song on his litter being carried over towards him. Fwi-Song was lowered almost on top of the moaning form, then he struggled with some cords at the side of his litter until a small flap under his great bulk flopped open, over the face of the gagged, blood-spattered human on the sand beneath. The prophet gave a sign, and he was lowered on top of the man, quieting the sound of moaning. The prophet smiled, and settled himself with little movements of his huge body, like a bird nestling down over its eggs. His vast bulk obliterating all trace or shape of the human under him, Fwi-Song hummed to himself while the emaciated crowd looked on, singing very slowly and quietly, swaying together as they stood. Fwi-Song started to rock backwards and forwards softly, very slowly at first, then faster as sweat appeared in beads on the golden dome of his face. He panted, and made a rough gesture towards the crowd; the two women dressed in the lengths of cloth came forward and started to lick at the trickles of blood which had spilled from the prophet’s mouth, over the folds of his chins and down the expanse of his chest and breasts like red milk. Fwi-Song gasped, seemed to sag and stay still for a moment, and then, with a surprisingly fast and fierce motion, clouted both the lapping women across the head with his mighty arms. The women scurried off, rejoining the crowd. Mr First started a louder chant, which the others took up.

At last Fwi-Song ordered himself to be lifted again. The litter bearers hauled his massive frame into the air, to reveal the crushed body of Twenty-seventh, his moaning silenced for ever.

They lifted him out, beheaded the corpse and removed the top of the skull. They ate his brains, and it was only then that Horza threw up.

“And now we are become each other,” Fwi-Song intoned solemnly to the youth’s hollow head, then threw its bloody bowl over his shoulder into the fire. The rest of the body was taken down to the sea and thrown in.

“Only ceremony and the love of Fate distinguish us from the beasts, o mark of Fate’s devotion,” Fwi-Song warbled to Horza as the prophet’s vast body was cleaned and perfumed by the attendant women. Tied to his post, stuck in the ground, his mouth fouled, Horza breathed carefully and deliberately, and did not try to reply.

Twenty-seventh’s body floated slowly out to sea. Fwi-Song was towelled down. The skinny humans sat about listlessly, or tended the awful-smelling liquid in the bubbling vats. Mr First and his two women helpers took off their lengths of cloth, leaving the man in his grimy but whole tunic and the women in their tattered rags. Fwi-Song had his litter placed on the sand in front of Horza.

“See, bounty from the waves, harvest from the rolling ocean, my people prepare to break their fast.” The prophet swept one fat-wobbling arm about to indicate the people tending the fires and cauldrons. The smell of rotting food filled the air.

“They eat what others leave, what others will not touch, because they want to be closer to the fabric of Fate. They eat the bark from the trees and the grass from the ground and the moss from the rocks; they eat the sand and the leaves and the roots and the earth; they eat the shells and the entrails of sea-animals and the carrion of the land and the ocean; they eat their bodily products and share mine. I am the fount. I am the well-spring, the taste on their tongues.

“You, bubble of froth on the ocean of life, are a sign. Crop of the ocean, you will come to see, before the time of your unmaking, that you are all you have eaten, and that food is merely undigested excrement. This I have seen; this you will see.”

One of the attendant women came back from the sea with Fwi-Song’s freshly cleaned sets of teeth. He took them from her and put them in the rags somewhere behind him. “All shall fall but we, all go to their deaths, their unmakings. We alone will be made in our unmaking, brought into the glory of our ultimate consummation.”

The prophet sat smiling at Horza, while around him — as the long afternoon’s shadows drew out across the sands — the emaciated, ill-looking people sat down to their foul meals. Horza watched them try to eat. Some did, encouraged by Mr First, but most could keep nothing down. They gasped for breath and gulped at the liquids, but often as not they vomited up what they had just forced down. Fwi-Song looked on them sadly, shaking his head.

“You see, even my closest children are not ready yet. We must pray and entreat that they are ready when the time comes, as it must, in a few days’ time. We must hope that their bodies’ lack of grasp, of sympathy with all things, will not make them despised in the eyes and mouth of God.”

You fat bastard. You’re within range, if you only knew. I could blind you from here; spit in your little eyes and maybe…

But, Horza thought, maybe not. The giant’s eyes were set so deep within the flabby skin of his brows and cheeks that even the venomous spittle with which Horza could have hit the golden monster might not find its way to the membranes of the eye. But it was all Horza could find to give him solace in his situation. He could spit at the prophet, and that was it. Perhaps there would come a point when it might make some difference, but to do it now would be stupid. A blind, enraged Fwi-Song struck Horza as something to try to avoid even more than a sighted, tittering one.

Fwi-Song talked on to Horza, never questioning, never really stopping, repeating himself more and more often. He told him about his revelations and his past life; as a circus freak, then as a palace pet for some alien satrap on a Megaship, then as a convert to a fashionable religion on another Megaship, his revelation occurring there, when he persuaded a few converts to join him on an island to await the End of All Things. More followers had arrived when the Culture announced what the fate of the Vavatch Orbital was going to be. Horza was only half listening, his mind racing as he tried to think of a way out.

“…We await the end of all things, the last day. We prepare ourselves for our final consummation by mixing the fruits of earth and sea and death with our fragile bodies of flesh and blood and bone. You are our sign, our aperitif, our scent. You must feel honoured.”

“Mighty Prophet,” Horza said, swallowing hard and doing his best to keep his voice calm. Fwi-Song stopped talking, the eyes narrowing still further and a frown forming. Horza went on, “I am indeed your sign. I bring you myself; I am the follower… the disciple numbered Last. I come to rid you of the machine from the Vacuum.” Horza looked over at the Culture shuttle, sitting with its rear doors open at the far end of the beach. “I know how to remove this source of temptation. Let me prove to you my devotion by performing this small service for your great and majestic self. Then you will know I am your last and most faithful servant: the one numbered Last, the one come before the unmaking, to… to steel your followers for the test to come and remove the Anathematics’ temptation device. I have mixed with the stars and the air and ocean, and I bring you this message, this deliverance.” Horza stopped there, his throat and lips dry, his eyes running as the highly spiced stench of the Eaters’ food drifted on a light breeze around him. Fwi-Song sat quite still on his litter, looking into Horza’s face with his slit-eyes narrowed and his bulbous brows creased.

“Mr First!” Fwi-Song said, turning to where the pale-skinned man in the tunic was massaging one of the Eaters’ bellies while the unfortunate follower lay moaning on the ground. Mr First rose and came over to the giant prophet, who nodded at Horza and spoke in the language the Changer couldn’t understand. Mr First bowed slightly, then went behind Horza, taking something from under his tunic as he went out of the Changer’s field of view. Horza’s heart thudded. He looked desperately back at Fwi-Song. What had the prophet said? What was Mr First going to do? Hands appeared over Horza’s head, gripping something. The Changer closed his eyes.

A rag was tied tightly over his mouth. It smelled of the foul food. His head was forced back against the stake. Then Mr First went back to the prone, groaning Eater. Horza stared at Fwi-Song, who said:

“There. Now, as I was saying…”

Horza didn’t listen. The fat prophet’s cruel faith was little different from a million others; only the degree of its barbarity made it unusual in these supposedly civilised times. Another side effect of the war, maybe; blame the Culture. Fwi-Song talked, but there was no point in listening.

Horza recalled that the Culture’s attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no more notice of the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the Universe. The nature of the belief wasn’t totally irrelevant — along with the person’s background and upbringing, it might tell you something about what had gone wrong with them — but you didn’t take their views seriously.

That was the way Horza felt about Fwi-Song. He had to treat him as the maniac he obviously was. The fact that his insanity was dressed in religious trappings meant nothing.

No doubt the Culture would disagree, claiming that there was ample common ground between insanity and religious belief, but then what else could you expect from the Culture? The Idirans knew better, and Horza, while not agreeing with everything the Idirans stood for, respected their beliefs. Their whole way of life, almost their every thought, was illuminated, guided and governed by their single religion/philosophy: a belief in order, place and a kind of holy rationality.

They believed in order because they had seen so much of its opposite, first in their own planetary background, taking part in the extraordinarily fierce evolutionary contest on Idir, and then — when they finally entered into the society of their local stellar cluster — around them, between and amongst other species. They had suffered because of that lack of order; they had died by the millions in stupid, greed-inspired wars in which they became involved through no fault of their own. They had been naïve and innocent, over-dependent on others thinking in the same calm, rational way they always did.

They believed in the destiny of place. Certain individuals would always belong in certain places — the high ground, the fertile lands, the temperate isles — whether they had been born there or not; and the same applied to tribes, clans and races (and even to species; most of the ancient holy texts had proved sufficiently flexible and vague to cope with the discovery that the Idirans were not alone in the universe. The texts which had claimed otherwise were promptly ditched, and their authors were first ritually cursed and then thoroughly forgotten). At its most mundane, the belief could be expressed as the certainty that there was a place for everything, and everything ought to be in its place. Once everything was in its place, God would be happy with the universe, and eternal peace and joy would replace the current chaos.

The Idirans saw themselves as agents in this great reordering. They were the chosen — at first allowed the peace to understand what God desired, and then goaded into action rather than contemplation by the very forces of disorder they gradually understood they had to fight. God had a purpose beyond study for them. They had to find their own place, in the whole galaxy at least; perhaps even outside that, as well. The more mature species could look to their own salvation; they had to make their own rules and find their own peace with God (and it was a sign of His generosity that He was happy with their achievements even when they denied Him). But the others — the swarming, chaotic, struggling peoples — they needed guidance.

The time had come to do away with the toys of self-interested striving. That the Idirans had realised this was the sign of it. In them, and in the Word that was their inheritance from the divine, the Spell within their genetic inheritance, a new message was abroad: Grow up. Behave. Prepare.

Horza didn’t believe in the Idirans’ religion any more than Balveda had, and indeed he could see in its over-deliberate, too-planned ideals exactly the sort of life-constricting forces he so despised in the Culture’s initially more benign ethos. But the Idirans relied on themselves, not on their machines, and so they were still part of life. To him, that made all the difference.

Horza knew the Idirans would never subdue all the less-developed civilisations in the galaxy; their dreamed-of day of judgement would never come. But the very certainty of that ultimate defeat made the Idirans safe, made them normal, made them part of the general life of the galaxy; just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrived at, settle down. In ten thousand years the Idirans would be just another civilisation, getting on with their own lives. The current era of conquests might be fondly remembered, but it would be irrelevant by then, explained away by some creative theology. They had been quiet and introspective before; so they would be again.

In the end, they were rational. They listened to common sense before their own emotions. The only thing they believed without proof was that there was a purpose to life, that there was something which was translated in most languages as “God”, and that that God wanted a better existence for His creations. At the moment they pursued this goal themselves, believed themselves to be the arms and hands and fingers of God. But when the time came they would be able to assimilate the realisation that they’d got it wrong, that it was not up to them to bring about the final order. They would themselves become calm; they would find their own place. The galaxy and its many and varied civilisations would assimilate them.

The Culture was different. Horza could see no end to its policy of continual and escalating interference. It could easily grow for ever, because it was not governed by natural limitations. Like a rogue cell, a cancer with no “off” switch in its genetic composition, the Culture would go on expanding for as long as it was allowed to. It would not stop of its own accord, so it had to be stopped.

This was a cause he had long ago decided to devote himself to, Horza told himself, listening to Fwi-Song droning on. Also, a cause he would serve no more, if he didn’t get away from the Eaters.

Fwi-Song talked for a little longer, then — after a word from Mr First — had his litter turned round so that he could address his followers. Most of them were either being very ill or looking it. Fwi-Song switched to the local language Horza didn’t understand, and gave what was evidently a sermon. He ignored the occasional bout of vomiting from his flock.

The sun dipped lower over the ocean, and the day cooled.

The sermon over, Fwi-Song sat silently on his litter as, one by one, the Eaters came up to him, bowed and spoke earnestly to him. The prophet’s dome-like head wore a large smile, and every now and again it would nod with what looked like agreement.

Later, the Eaters sang and chanted while Fwi-Song was washed and oiled by the two women who had helped officiate at Twenty-seventh’s death. Then, his vast body gleaming in the rays of the falling sun, Fwi-Song was carried, waving cheerfully, off the beach and into the small forest beneath the island’s single stunted mountain.

Fires were stoked and wood was brought. The Eaters dispersed to their tents and camp fires, or set off in small groups with crudely made baskets, apparently to gather fresh debris they would later try to eat.

At about sunset, Mr First joined the five quiet Eaters who sat around the fire Horza was by now tired of facing. The emaciated humans had taken little or no notice of the Changer, but Mr First came and sat near the man tied to the post. In one hand he held a small stone, in the other some of the artificial teeth Fwi-Song had used on Twenty-seventh earlier that day. Mr First sat grinding and polishing the teeth while he talked to the other Eaters. After a couple of them had gone to their tents, Mr First went behind Horza and undid the gag. Horza breathed through his mouth to get rid of the stale taste, and exercised his jaw. He shifted, trying to ease the accumulating aches in his arms and legs.

“Comfortable?” Mr First said, squatting down again. He continued to sharpen the metal fangs; they flickered in the firelight.

“I’ve felt better,” Horza said.

“You’ll feel worse, too… friend.” Mr First made the last word sound like a curse.

“My name’s Horza.”

“I don’t care what your name is.” Mr First shook his head. “Your name doesn’t matter. You don’t matter.”

“I had started to form that impression,” Horza admitted.

“Oh, had you?” Mr First said. He got up and came closer to the Changer. “Had you really?” He lashed out with the steel teeth he held in his hand, catching Horza across the left cheek. “Think you’re clever, eh? Think you’re going to get out of this, do you?” He kicked Horza in the belly. Horza gasped and choked. “See — you don’t matter. You’re just a hunk of meat. That’s all anybody is. Just meat. And anyway,” he kicked Horza again, “pain isn’t real. Just chemicals and electrics and that sort of thing, right?”

“Oh,” Horza croaked, his wounds aching briefly, “yes. Right.”

“OK,” Mr First grinned. “You remember this tomorrow, OK. You’re just a piece of meat, and the prophet’s a bigger one.”

“You… ah, don’t believe in souls, then?” Horza said diffidently, hoping this wouldn’t lead to another kick.

“Fuck your soul, stranger,” Mr First laughed. “You’d better hope there’s no such thing. There’s people that are natural eaters and there’s those that are always going to get eaten, and I can’t see that their souls are going to be any different, so as you’re obviously one of those that are always going to get eaten, you’d better hope there isn’t any such thing. That’s your best bet, believe me.” Mr First brought out the rag he had taken from Horza’s mouth. He tied it back there, saying, “No — no soul at all would be the best thing for you, friend. But if it turns out you have got one, you come back and tell me, so I can have a good laugh, right?” Mr First pulled the knotted rag tight, hauling Horza’s head against the wooden stake.

Fwi-Song’s lieutenant finished sharpening the sets of gleaming metal teeth, then rose and spoke to the other Eaters sitting around the fire. After a while they went to some of the small tents, and soon they were all off the beach, leaving only Horza to watch the few dying fires. The waves crashed softly on the distant surf-line, stars arced slowly above, and the dayside of the Orbital was a bright line of light overhead. Shining in the starlight and the O-light, the silent, waiting bulk of the Culture shuttle sat, its rear doors open like a cave of safe darkness.

Horza had already tested the knots restraining his hands and feet. Shrinking his wrists wouldn’t work; the rope, twine or whatever they had used was tightening very slightly all the time; it would just take up the slack as quickly as he could produce it. Perhaps it shrank when drying and they had wet it before tying him. He couldn’t tell. He could intensify the acid content in his sweat glands where the rope touched his skin, and that was always worth a try, but even the long night of Vavatch probably wouldn’t give enough time for the process to work.

Pain isn’t real, he told himself. Crap.

He awoke at dawn, along with several of the Eaters, who walked slowly down to the water to wash in the surf. Horza was cold. He started shivering as soon as he woke, and he could tell that his body temperature had dropped a long way during the night in the light trance required for altering the skin cells on his wrists. He strained at the ropes, testing for some give, the slightest tearing of fibres or strands. There was nothing, just more pain from the palms of his hands where some sweat had run down onto skin unchanged and therefore unprotected from the acid his sweat glands had been producing. He worried about that for about a second, recalling that if he was ever to impersonate Kraiklyn properly he would need to lift the man’s finger and palm prints and so would need his skin in perfect Changing condition. Then he laughed at himself for worrying about that when he wasn’t even likely to see the day out.

He vaguely considered killing himself. It was possible; with only a little internal preparation, he could use one of his own teeth to poison himself. But, while there was still any chance, he could not bring himself to think of it seriously. He wondered how Culture people faced the war; they were supposed to be able to decide to die, too, though it was said to be more complicated than simple poison. But how did they resist it, those soft, peace-pampered souls? He imagined them in combat, auto-euthenising almost the instant the first shots landed, the first wounds started to appear. The thought made him smile.

The Idirans had a death trance, but it was only for use in cases of extreme shame and disgrace, or when a life’s work was completed, or a crippling disease threatened. And unlike the Culture — or the Changers — they felt their pain to the full, undampened by genofixed inhibitors. The Changers regarded pain as a semi-redundant hangover from their animal evolution; the Culture was simply frightened of it: but the Idirans treated it with a sort of proud contempt.

Horza looked across the beach, over the two big canoes towards the open rear doors of the shuttle. A pair of brightly coloured birds were strutting around on its top, making little ritualised movements. Horza watched them for a while, as the Eaters’ camp gradually woke up and the morning sun brightened. Mist rose from the thin forest and there were a few clouds, high up in the sky. Mr First came yawning and stretching out of his tent, then took the heavy projectile pistol out from under his tunic and fired it in the air. This seemed to be a signal for all the Eaters to wake and set about their daily business if they hadn’t already done so.

The noise of the crude weapon frightened the two birds on the roof of the Culture shuttle; they took to the air and flew away over the trees and shrubs, around the island. Horza watched them go, then let his eyes drop, staring at the golden sand and breathing slow and deep.

“Your big day, stranger,” Mr First said with a grin, coming up to the Changer. He put the pistol into the string holster under his tunic. Horza looked at the man, but said nothing. Another feast in my honour, he thought.

Mr First walked around Horza, looking down at him. Horza followed him with his eyes where he could and waited for the man to spot whatever damage the acid-sweat had succeeded in inflicting on the rope round his wrists, but Mr First didn’t notice anything, and when he reappeared in Horza’s view he was still smiling slightly, nodding his head a little, seemingly satisfied that the man tied to the stake was still well enough restrained. Horza did his best to stretch, straining at the bonds at his wrists. There was not even a hint of give. It hadn’t worked. Mr First left, to supervise the launching of a fishing canoe.

Fwi-Song was brought out of the forest on his litter not long before noon, as the fishing canoe was returning.

“Gift of the seas and air! Tribute of the great Circlesea’s vast wealth! See what a wondrous day awaits you now!” Fwi-Song had himself brought up to Horza, and was put down to one side of the fire. He smiled at the Changer. “All the night you have had time to think of what the day now holds; for all the darkness you have been able to look into the fruits of the Vacuum. You have seen the spaces between the stars, seen how much there is of nothing, how little there is of anything. Now you can appreciate what an honour lies in store for you; how lucky you are to be my sign, my offering!” Fwi-Song clapped his hands with delight, and his enormous body shook up and down. The chubby hands went to his mouth as he spoke, and the folds of flesh over his eyes lifted momentarily to reveal the whites within. “Ho-hoo! What fun we all shall have!” The prophet made a sign, and his litter carriers took him down to the sea to be washed and anointed.

Horza watched the Eaters prepare their food; they gutted the fish, throwing away the meat and keeping the offal and skins, heads and spikes. They removed the shells from the animals inside and threw the animals away. They ground up the shells with the weeds and some brightly coloured sea slugs. Horza watched all this happen in front of him, and saw just how run-down the Eaters really were; the scabs and sores, the deficiency diseases and general weakness. The colds and coughs, peeling skin and partly deformed limbs all spoke of a very gradually fatal diet. The dead meat and animals from the sea were returned to the waves via great blood-soaked baskets. Horza watched as closely as his gag and the distance would allow, but none of the Eaters seemed to take a surreptitious bite of the raw meat as they threw it from the baskets into the waves.

Fwi-Song, being dried on the sand just up the beach from the line of breakers, watched the food being thrown into the sea and nodded with approval, speaking quiet words of encouragement to his flock. Then he clapped his hands, and the litter was slowly carried along the beach to the fire and the Changer.

“Offertory thing! Benefaction! Prepare yourself!” Fwi-Song warbled, settling down in his litter with little movements which sent ripples all over the great folds and sweeps of his massive body. Horza started to breathe harder, felt his heart pound. He swallowed, and strained again at the rope holding his hands. Mr First and the two women were digging at the sand for the thin robes in their buried sacks.

All the Eaters gathered round the fire, facing Horza. Their eyes looked blank or vaguely interested, nothing more. There was a listlessness about their actions and expressions which Horza found even more depressing than outright hatred or sadistic glee would have been.

The Eaters began to chant and sing. Mr First and the two women were twisting the dull lengths of cloth around their bodies. Mr First looked at Horza and grinned.

“Oh happy moment in the ending days!” Fwi-Song said, raising his voice and hands, his choked tones ringing out towards the centre of the island. The smells of the Eaters’ foul cooking drifted past the Changer again. “Let this one’s unmaking and making be a symbol for us!” Fwi-Song continued, letting his arms drop back in enormous rolls of white flesh. The golden-brown surfaces gleamed in the sunlight as the prophet clasped his fat fingers together. “Let his pain be our delight, as our unmaking shall be our joining; let his flaying and consummation be our satisfaction and delectation!” Fwi-Song raised his head and spoke loudly in the language the others understood. Their chanting altered and grew louder. Mr First and the two women approached Horza.

Horza felt Mr First take the gag from his mouth. The pale-skinned man spoke to the two women, who went to the bubbling vats of stinking liquid. Horza’s head was feeling very light; there was a taste he knew too well at the back of his throat, as though some of the acid from his wrists had somehow found its way to his tongue. He strained again at his bonds behind him, feeling the muscles shake. The chanting went on; the women were ladling the foul broth into bowls. His empty stomach was churning already.

There are two main ways to escape bonds apart from those open to non-Changers [the Academy’s lecture notes said]: by acid-sweat pulse on a sustained level where the binding material is susceptible to such an attack, and by malleable preferential tapering of the limb-point involved.

Horza tried to coax a little more strength from his tired muscles.

Excessive acid-sweating can damage not only the adjacent skin surfaces, but also the body as a whole through dangerously altered chemical imbalances. Over-much tapering poses the risk of the muscles being so wasted and the bone so weakened that their subsequent use may be severely restricted in the short- and long-term escape attempt.

Mr First was approaching with the wooden blocks he would fit into Horza’s mouth. A couple of the larger Eaters had stood up near the front of the crowd and advanced slightly, ready to assist Mr First. Fwi-Song was reaching behind his back. The women started forward from the bubbling vats.

“Open wide, stranger,” Mr First said, holding out the two wooden blocks. “Or do we use a crowbar?” Mr First smiled.

Horza’s arms strained. His upper arm moved. Mr First saw the movement and halted momentarily. One of Horza’s hands jerked free. It shot round in an instant, nails ready to rake Mr First’s face. The pale-skinned man drew back, not quickly enough.

Horza’s nails caught Mr First’s robe and tunic as they flapped out from his dodging body. Already straining as far out from the stake as he could, Horza felt his clawed hand rip through the two layers of material without connecting with the flesh underneath. Mr First staggered back, bumping into one of the women carrying the bowls of stinking gruel, knocking it from her hands. One of the wooden wedges sailed from Mr First’s hand and landed in the fire. Horza’s arm completed its swing just as the two Eaters in the front of the crowd came forward quickly and caught the Changer by the head and arm.

“Sacrilege!” Fwi-Song screamed. Mr First looked at the woman he had bumped into, at the fire, at the prophet, then back with a furious look at the Changer. He lifted one arm to look at the tears in his robe and tunic. “The gift-filth desecrates our vestments!” Fwi-Song shouted. The two Eaters held Horza, pinning his arm back where it had been and his head to the stake. Mr First started towards Horza, taking the gun out from under his tunic and holding it by the barrel, like a club. “Mr First!” Fwi-Song snapped, stopping the pale-skinned man in his tracks. “Shtand gack! Hold gat arn out; ee’ll show gish naught goy how we geel wish hish short!”

Horza’s free arm was straightened out in front of him. One of the Eaters holding him put his leg round the back of the post, bracing himself there and trapping Horza’s other hand where it was. Fwi-Song had a set of gleaming steel teeth in his mouth, the holed ones. He glared at the Changer while Mr First stepped back, still holding the projectile pistol. The prophet nodded to another two Eaters in the crowd; they took Horza’s hand and prised the fingers apart, tying that wrist to a pole. Horza felt his whole body shake. He cut off all feeling in that hand.

“Naughty, naughty gisht ’rom the shee!” Fwi-Song said. He leant forward, buried Horza’s index finger in his mouth, closed the stripper teeth over them, cutting into the flesh, and then pulled quickly back.

The prophet chewed and swallowed, watching the Changer’s face as he did so, and frowning. “Not gery tashty, genegiction ’rom the oceansh currentsh!” The prophet licked his lips. “An’ not shore enush ’or you, eisher, sho it wood sheen? Letch shee ’ot elsh nee can…” Fwi-Song was frowning again. Horza looked past the Eaters holding him to the hand stretched out over the pole, one finger stripped bare, the bones limp, blood dripping from the thin tip.

Beyond that, Fwi-Song sat frowning on his litter on the sand, Mr First near his side, still glaring at Horza and holding the gun barrel. As Fwi-Song’s silence continued, Mr First looked at the prophet. Fwi-Song said, “…not elsh nee can… nee can…” Fwi-Song reached up and took the stripper teeth with some difficulty from his mouth. He laid them in front of him with the rest on their rag, and put one pudgy hand to his throat, the other onto the vast hemisphere of his belly. Mr First looked on, then back at Horza, who did his best to smile. The Changer opened his teeth glands and sucked poison.

“Mr First…” Fwi-Song began, then put out the hand on his belly towards the other man. Mr First seemed uncertain what to do. He transferred the gun from one hand to the other, and took the prophet’s offered hand with his free one. “I think I… I…” Fwi-Song said, as his eyes started to open from slits to small ovals. Horza could see his face changing colour already. Soon the voice, as the vocal cords react. “Help me, Mr First!” Fwi-Song took hold of a lump of fat round his throat as though trying to undo a scarf tied too tightly; he stuck his fingers into his mouth, down his throat, but Horza knew that wouldn’t work; the prophet’s stomach muscles were already paralysed — he couldn’t vomit the poison up. Fwi-Song’s eyes were wide now, glaring white; his face was going grey-blue. Mr First was goggling at the prophet and still holding his huge hand; his own was buried somewhere inside the great golden fist of Fwi-Song’s. “He-ll-p!” squeaked the prophet. Then nothing but choking noises. The white eyes bulged, the vast frame shook, the dome-head went blue.

Somebody in the crowd started screaming. Mr First looked at Horza, and brought up the big pistol. Horza tensed, then spat with all his might.

The spittle splashed across Mr First’s face, from mouth to one ear in a sickle shape which just took in one eye. Mr First staggered back. Horza breathed in, sucked more poison, then spat and blew at the same time, landing a second burst of spittle right across Mr First’s eyes. Mr First clutched at his face, dropping the gun. His other hand was still caught in Fwi-Song’s grip as the obese prophet shook and quivered, his eyes wide but seeing nothing. The people holding Horza wavered; he could feel it in them. More people in the crowd were crying out. Horza jerked his body and snarled, spitting again, at one of the men holding the pole his hand was tied to. The man screamed shrilly and fell back; the others let go of him or the pole and ran. Fwi-Song was going blue from the neck down, still quivering and clutching his throat with one hand and Mr First with the other. Mr First was on his knees, his face lowered, moaning as he tried to wipe the spittle from his face and remove the unbearable burning from his eyes.

Horza looked round quickly; the Eaters were watching either their prophet and his chief disciple, or him, but they weren’t doing anything either to aid them or to stop him. Not all of them were crying or screaming; some were still chanting, quickly and fearfully as though something they could say would stop whatever terrible things were happening. Gradually, though, they were backing off, away both from the prophet and Mr First, and from the Changer. Horza pulled and jerked his hand tied to the pole; it started to come free.

“Aah!” Mr First suddenly raised his head, hand clutching at one eye, and screamed for all his worth; his hand, still caught in that of the prophet, jerked out straight as he tried to pull free. Fwi-Song still held him in his grip, though, even as he quaked and stared and turned blue. Horza’s hand came free; he tugged at the bonds behind him and did his best with the crippled free hand to untie the knots. The Eaters were moaning now, some still chanting, but they were moving away. Horza roared — partly at them, partly at the stubborn knots behind him. Several in the crowd ran. One of the women dressed in the ragged vestment clothes screamed, threw her bowl of gruel at him, missing him, then fell sobbing to the sand.

Horza felt the ropes behind him give. He got the other arm free, then one foot. He stood shakily, watching Fwi-Song gargle and choke, while Mr First howled, shaking his head this way and that and pulling and swinging his gripped hand as though in some monstrous travesty of a handshake. Eaters were running for the canoes or the shuttle, or throwing themselves onto the sand. Horza struggled free at last, and staggered towards the grossly imbalanced duo of men linked by the hand. He plunged forward and grabbed the fallen pistol from the sands. As he knelt and then stood, Fwi-Song, as though suddenly seeing Horza again, gave one last gurgling, gagging splutter of noise, and tipped slowly towards the side Mr First was pulling and tugging from. Mr First fell to his knees again, still screaming as the venom seared the membranes of his eyes and attacked the nerves beyond. As Fwi-Song toppled and his arm and hand went slack, Mr First looked up and round, in time to see through his pain the vast bulk of the prophet falling towards him. He howled once, on an indrawn breath as he pulled his hand free at last from the now blue clump of chubby fingers; he started to rise to his feet, but Fwi-Song rolled over and crashed into him, knocking him to the sand. Before Mr First could utter another sound, the immense prophet had fallen over his disciple, flattening him into the sand from head to buttocks.

Fwi-Song’s eyes closed slowly. The hand at his throat flopped across the sand and into the outer edge of the fire, where it started to sizzle.

Mr First’s legs beat a tattoo on the sand just as the last of the Eaters ran away, jumping tents and fires and racing for the canoes or shuttle or forest. Then the two skinny legs sticking out from under the prophet’s body were reduced to spasms, and after a while they stopped moving altogether. None of their movements had succeeded in shifting Fwi-Song’s huge body a centimetre.

Horza blew some sand off the clumsy feeling pistol and moved upwind from the smell of the prophet’s hand burning in the fire. He checked the gun, looking round the deserted stretch of beach around the fires and tents. The canoes were being launched. Eaters were crowding into the Culture shuttle.

Horza stretched his aching limbs, looked at his bare-boned finger, then shrugged, put the gun under one armpit, put his good hand round the set of bones, pulled and twisted. His useless bones snapped from their sockets and he threw them onto the fire.

Pain isn’t real anyway, he told himself shakily, and started for the Culture shuttle at a slow run.

The Eaters in the shuttle saw him coming straight towards them, and started screaming again. They piled out. Some of them ran down the beach to wade out after the escaping canoes; others scattered into the forest. Horza slowed down to let them go, then looked warily at the open doors of the Culture craft. He could see seats inside, up the short ramp, and lights and a far bulkhead. He took a deep breath and walked up the gentle slope of ramp, into the shuttle.

“Hello,” said a crudely synthesised voice. Horza looked around. The shuttle looked pretty well used and old. It was Culture, he was fairly certain of that, but it wasn’t as neat and spanking-new as the Culture liked its products to look. “Why were those people so frightened of you?”

Horza was still looking round, wondering where and what to address.

“I’m not sure,” he said shrugging. He was naked and still holding the gun, with only a couple of strips of flesh on one finger, though the bleeding had quickly stopped. He thought he must look a threatening figure anyway, but maybe the shuttle couldn’t tell that. “Where are you? What are you?” he said, deciding to feign ignorance. He looked around in a very obvious manner, hamming up a display of looking forward, through a door in the bulkhead, to a control area forward.

“I’m the shuttle. Its brain. How do you do?”

“Fine,” Horza said, “just fine. How are you?”

“Very well, considering, thank you. I haven’t been bored at all, but it is nice to have somebody to talk to at last. You speak very good Marain; where did you learn?”

“Ah… I did a course in it,” Horza said. He did some more looking around. “Look, I don’t know where to look when I talk to you. Where should I look, huh?”

“Ha ha,” the shuttle laughed. “I suppose you’d best look up here; forward towards the bulkhead.” Horza did so. “See that little round thing right in the middle, near the ceiling? That’s one of my eyes.”

“Oh,” Horza said. He waved and smiled. “Hi. My name’s… Orab.”

“Hello, Orab. I’m called Tsealsir. Actually that’s only part of my name designation, but you can call me that. What was happening out there? I haven’t been watching the people I’m here to rescue; I was told not to, in case I got upset, but I did hear people screaming when they came near and they seemed frightened when they came inside me. Then they saw you and ran away. What is that you’re holding? Is it a gun? I’ll have to ask you to put that away for safe keeping. I’m here to rescue people who want to be rescued when the Orbital is destructed, and we can’t have dangerous weapons on board, in case somebody gets hurt, can we? Is that finger hurt? I have a very good medkit on board. Would you like to use it, Orab?”

“Yes, that might be an idea.”

“Good. It’s on the inward side of the doorway through to my front compartment on the left.”

Horza started walking past the rows of seats towards the front of the shuttle. For all its age, the shuttle smelled of… he wasn’t quite sure. All the synthetic materials it was made from, he supposed. After the natural but god-awful odours of the last day, Horza found the shuttle much more pleasant, even if it was Culture and therefore belonged to the enemy. Horza touched the gun he was carrying as though doing something to it.

“Just putting the safety catch on,” he told the eye in the ceiling. “Don’t want it to go off, but those people out there were trying to kill me earlier, and I feel safer with it in my hand, know what I mean?”

“Well, not exactly, Orab,” the shuttle said, “but I think I can understand. But you’ll have to give the gun to me before we take off.”

“Oh sure. As soon as you close those rear doors.” Horza was in the doorway between the main compartment and the smaller control area now. It was in fact a very short corridor, less than two metres long, with opened doors to each compartment. Horza looked round quickly, but he couldn’t see another eye. He watched a large flap open at about hip level to reveal a comprehensive medical kit.

“Well, Orab, I’d close those doors to make you feel a bit safer if I could, but you see I’m here to rescue people who want to be rescued when the time comes to destruct the Orbital, and I can’t close those doors until just before I leave, so that everybody who wants to can get on board. Actually I can’t really understand why anybody wouldn’t want to escape, but they told me not to get worried if some people stayed behind. But I must say I think that would be kind of silly, don’t you, Orab?”

Horza was rummaging through the medkit but looking above it at other outlines of doors set in the wall of the short corridor. He said, “Hmm? Oh, yeah, that would be. When is the place due to blow, anyway?” He poked his head round the corner, into the control compartment or flight deck, looking up at another eye set in the corresponding position to the one in the main compartment, but looking forward from the other side of the thick wall between the two. Horza grinned and gave a little wave, then ducked back.

“Hi,” the shuttle laughed. “Well, Orab, I’m afraid that we’re going to be forced to destruct the Orbital in forty-three standard hours. Unless, of course, the Idirans see sense and are reasonable and withdraw their threat to use Vavatch as a war base.”

“Oh,” Horza said. He was looking at one of the door outlines above the opened one the medkit was protruding from. As far as he could guess, those two eyes were back to back, separated by the thickness of the wall between the two compartments. Unless there was a mirror he couldn’t see, he was invisible to the shuttle while he remained in the short corridor.

He looked back, out through the open rear doors; the only movement came from the tops of some distant trees and the smoke from the fires. He checked the gun. The projectiles seemed to be hidden in some sort of magazine, but a little circular indicator with a sweep hand indicated either one bullet left or one expended out of twelve.

“Yes,” the shuttle said. “It’s very sad, of course, but these things are necessary in wartime I suppose. Not that I pretend to understand it all. I’m just a humble shuttle, after all. I’d actually been given away as a present to one of the Megaships because I was too old-fashioned and crude for the Culture, you know. I thought they could have upgraded me but they didn’t; they just gave me away. Anyway, they need me now, I’m happy to say. We have quite a job on our hands, you know, getting everybody who wants to get off away from Vavatch. I’ll be sorry to see it go; I’ve had some happy times here, believe me… But that’s just the way things go, I suppose. How’s that finger going, by the way? Want me to have a look at it? Bring the medkit stuff round into one of the two compartments so I can take a look. I might be able to help, you know? Oh! Are you touching one of the other lockers in that corridor?”

Horza was trying to lever open the door nearest the roof by using the barrel of the gun. “No,” he said, heaving away at it. “I’m nowhere near it.”

“That’s odd. I’m sure I can feel something. Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Horza said, putting all his weight behind the gun. The door gave way, revealing tubes, fibre-runs, metal bottles and various other unrecognisable bits of machinery, electrics, optics and field units.

“Ouch!” said the shuttle.

“Hey!” Horza shouted. “It just blew open! There’s something on fire in there!” He raised the gun, holding it in both hands. He sighted carefully; about there.

“Fire!” yelped the shuttle. “But that’s not possible!”

“You think I can’t tell smoke when I see it, you crazy goddamned machine?” Horza yelled. He pulled the trigger.

The gun exploded, throwing his hands up and him back. The noise of the shuttle’s exclamation was covered by the crack and bang of the bullet hitting inside and exploding. Horza covered his face with his arm.

“I’m blind!” wailed the shuttle. Now smoke really was pouring from the compartment Horza had opened. He staggered into the control compartment.

“You’re on fire in here, too!” he yelled. “There’s smoke coming out everywhere!”

“What? But that can’t be—”

“You’re on fire! I don’t know how you can’t feel it or smell it! You’re burning!”

“I don’t trust you!” the machine yelled. “Put that gun away or—”

“You’ve got to trust me!” Horza yelled, looking all over the control area for where the shuttle’s brain might be located. He could see screens and seats, readout screens and even the place where manual controls might be hidden; but no indication of where the brain was. “Smoke’s pouring out everywhere!” he repeated, trying to sound hysterical.

“Here! Here’s an extinguisher! I’m turning mine on!” the machine shouted. A wall unit spun round, and Horza grabbed the bulky cylinder attached to the inside of the flap. He wrapped his four good fingers on his injured hand round the pistol grip. A hissing noise and a light vapour-like steam was appearing from various places in the compartment.

“Nothing’s happening!” Horza screamed. “There’s loads of black smoke and its — arrch!” He pretended to cough. “…Aargh! It’s getting thicker!”

“Where is it coming from? Quickly!”

“Everywhere!” Horza yelled, glancing all round the control area. “From near your eye… under the seats, over the screens, under the screens… I can’t see…!”

“Go on! I can smell smoke, too, now!”

Horza looked at the slight smudge of grey filtering into the control area from the spluttering fire in the short corridor where he had shot the craft. “It’s… coming from those places, and those info screens on either side of the end seats, and… just above the seats, on the side walls where that bit juts out—”

“What?” screamed the shuttle brain. “On the left facing forward?”

“Yes!”

“Put that one out first!” the shuttle screeched.

Horza dropped the extinguisher and gripped the gun in both hands again, aiming it at the bulge in the wall over the left-hand seat. He pulled the trigger: once, twice, three times. The gun blasted, shaking his whole body; sparks and bits of flying debris flew from the holes the bullets were smashing in the casing of the machine.

“EEEeee…” said the shuttle, then there was silence.

Some smoke rose from the bulge and it joined with that coming from the corridor to form a thin layer under the ceiling. Horza let the gun down slowly, looking around and listening.

“Mug,” he said.

He used the hand-held extinguisher to put out the small fires in the wall of the corridor and where the shuttle’s brain had been, then he went out into the passenger area to sit near the open doors while the smoke and the fumes cleared. He couldn’t see any Eaters on the sand or in the forest, and the canoes were out of sight, too. He looked for some door controls and found them; the doors closed with a hiss, and Horza grinned.

He went back to the control area and started punching buttons and opening sections of panelling until he got some life from the screens. They all suddenly blinked on while he was fiddling with some buttons on the arm of one of the couch-like seats. The noise of surf in the flight deck made him think the doors had opened again, but it was only some external microphones relaying the noise from outside. Screens flickered and lit up with figures and lines, and flaps opened in front of the seats; control wheels and levers sighed out smoothly and clicked into place, just ready to be held and used. Feeling happier than he had been in many days, Horza started an eventually successful but longer and more frustrating search for some food; he was very hungry.

Some small insects were running in orderly lines over the huge body collapsed on the sands, one hand of which was sticking, charred and blackened, into the dying flames of a fire.

The little insects started by eating the deep-set eyes, which were open. They hardly noticed as the shuttle rose, wobbling, into the air, picked up speed and turned inelegantly above the mountain, then roared off, through the early evening air, away from the island.