Consider Phlebas

Book 0: Culture

by Iain M. Banks

Genres: Fantasy; Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The war raged across the galaxy. Billions had died, billions more were doomed. Moons, planets, the very stars themselves, faced destruction—cold-blooded, brutal, and worse, random. The Idirans fought for their Faith; the Culture for its moral right to exist. Principles were at stake. There could be no surrender.

Within the cosmic conflict, an individual crusade. Deep within a fabled labyrinth on a barren world, a Planet of the Dead proscribed to mortals, lay a fugitive Mind. Both the Culture and the Idirans sought it. It was the fate of Horza, the Changer, and his motley crew of unpredictable mercenaries, human and machine, actually to find it, and with it their own destruction.

Release date: December 1, 2009

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 544

Sample

The ship didn’t even have a name. It had no human crew because the factory craft which constructed it had been evacuated long
ago. It had no life-support or accommodation units for the same reason. It had no class number or fleet designation because
it was a mongrel made from bits and pieces of different types of warcraft; and it didn’t have a name because the factory craft
had no time left for such niceties.


The dockyard threw the ship together as best it could from its depleted stock of components, even though most of the weapon,
power and sensory systems were either faulty, superseded or due for overhaul. The factory vessel knew that its own destruction
was inevitable, but there was just a chance that its last creation might have the speed and the luck to escape.


The one perfect, priceless component the factory craft did have was the vastly powerful—though still raw and untrained—Mind
around which it had constructed the rest of the ship. If it could get the Mind to safety, the factory vessel thought it would
have done well. Nevertheless, there was another reason—the real reason—the dockyard mother didn’t give its warship child a
name; it thought there was something else it lacked: hope.


The ship left the construction bay of the factory craft with most of its fitting-out still to be done. Accelerating hard,
its course a four dimensional spiral through a blizzard of stars where it knew that only danger waited, it powered into hyperspace
on spent engines from an overhauled craft of one class, watched its birthplace disappear astern with battle-damaged sensors
from a second, and tested outdated weapon units cannibalized from yet another. Inside its warship body, in narrow, unlit,
unheated, hard-vacuum spaces, constructor drones struggled to install or complete sensors, displacers, field generators, shield
disruptors, laserfields, plasma chambers, warhead magazines, maneuvering units, repair systems and the thousands of other
major and minor components required to make a functional warship.


Gradually, as it swept through the vast open reaches between the star systems, the vessel’s internal structure changed, and
it became less chaotic, more ordered, as the factory drones completed their tasks.


Several tens of hours out on its first journey, while it was testing its track scanner by focusing back along the route it
had taken, the ship registered a single massive annihilation explosion deep behind it, where the factory craft had been. It
watched the blossoming shell of radiation expand for a while, then switched the scanner field to dead ahead and pushed yet
more power through its already overloaded engines.


The ship did all it could to avoid combat; it kept well away from the routes enemy craft would probably use; it treated every
hint of any craft as a confirmed hostile sighting. At the same time, as it zigzagged and ducked and weaved and rose and fell,
it was corkscrewing as fast as it could, as directly as it dared, down and across the strand of the galactic arm in which
it had been born, heading for the edge of that great isthmus and the comparatively empty space beyond. On the far side, on
the edge of the next limb, it might find safety.


Just as it arrived at that first border, where the stars rose like a glittering cliff alongside emptiness, it was caught.

A fleet of hostile craft, whose course by chance came close enough to that of the fleeing ship, detected its ragged, noisy
emission shell, and intercepted it. The ship ran straight into their attack and was overwhelmed. Out-armed, slow, vulnerable,
it knew almost instantly that it had no chance even of inflicting any damage on the opposing fleet.


So it destroyed itself, detonating the stock of warheads it carried in a sudden release of energy which for a second, in hyperspace
alone, outshone the yellow dwarf star of a nearby system.


Scattered in a pattern around it, an instant before the ship itself was blown into plasma, most of the thousands of exploding
warheads formed an outrushing sphere of radiation through which any escape seemed impossible. In the fraction of a second
the entire engagement lasted, there were at the end some millionths when the battlecomputers of the enemy fleet briefly analyzed
the four-dimensional maze of expanding radiation and saw that there was one bewilderingly complicated and unlikely way out
of the concentric shells of erupting energies now opening like the petals of some immense flower between the star systems.
It was not, however, a route the Mind of a small, archaic warship could plan for, create and follow.


By the time it was noticed that the ship’s Mind had taken exactly that path through its screen of annihilation, it was too
late to stop it from falling away through hyperspace toward the small, cold planet fourth out from the single yellow sun of
the nearby system.


It was also too late to do anything about the light from the ship’s exploding warheads, which had been arranged in a crude
code, describing the vessel’s fate and the escaped Mind’s status and position, and legible to anybody catching the unreal
light as it sped through the galaxy. Perhaps worst of all—and had their design permitted such a thing, those electronic brains
would now have felt dismay—the planet the Mind had made for through its shield of explosions was not one they could simply
attack, destroy or even land on; it was Schar’s World, near the region of barren space between two galactic strands called
the Sullen Gulf, and it was one of the forbidden Planets of the Dead.


The level was at his top lip now. Even with his head pressed hard back against the stones of the cell wall his nose was only
just above the surface. He wasn’t going to get his hands free in time; he was going to drown.


In the darkness of the cell, in its stink and warmth, while the sweat ran over his brows and tightly closed eyes and his trance
went on and on, one part of his mind tried to accustom him to the idea of his own death. But, like an unseen insect buzzing
in a quiet room, there was something else, something that would not go away, was of no use, and only annoyed. It was a sentence,
irrelevant and pointless and so old he’d forgotten where he had heard or read it, and it went round and round the inside of
his head like a marble spun round the inside of a jug:


The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual assassins of the new Yearking’s immediate family by drowning them in
the tears of the Continental Empathaur in its Sadness Season.

At one point, shortly after his ordeal had begun and he was only partway into his trance, he had wondered what would happen
if he threw up. It had been when the palace kitchens—about fifteen or sixteen floors above, if his calculations were correct—had
sent their waste down the sinuous network of plumbing that led to the sewercell. The gurgling, watery mess had dislodged some
rotten food from the last time some poor wretch had drowned in filth and garbage, and that was when he felt he might vomit.
It had been almost comforting to work out that it would make no difference to the time of his death.


Then he had wondered—in that state of nervous frivolity which sometimes afflicts those who can do nothing but wait in a situation
of mortal threat—whether crying would speed his death. In theory it would, though in practical terms it was irrelevant; but
that was when the sentence started to roll round in his head.


The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual…

The liquid, which he could hear and feel and smell all too clearly—and could probably have seen with his far from ordinary
eyes had they been open—washed briefly up to touch the bottom of his nose. He felt it block his nostrils, filling them with
a stench that made his stomach heave. But he shook his head, tried to force his skull even further back against the stones,
and the foul broth fell away. He blew down and could breathe again.


There wasn’t long now. He checked his wrists again, but it was no good. It would take another hour or more, and he had only
minutes, if he was lucky.


The trance was breaking anyway. He was returning to almost total consciousness, as though his brain wanted fully to appreciate
his own death, its own extinction. He tried to think of something profound, or to see his life flash in front of him, or suddenly
to remember some old love, a long-forgotten prophecy or premonition, but there was nothing, just an empty sentence, and the
sensations of drowning in other people’s dirt and waste.


You old bastards, he thought. One of their few strokes of humor or originality had been devising an elegant, ironic way of death. How fitting
it must feel to them, dragging their decrepit frames to the banquet-hall privies, literally to defecate all over their enemies,
and thereby kill them.


The air pressure built up, and a distant, groaning rumble of liquid signaled another flushing from above. You old bastards. Well, I hope at least you kept your promise, Balveda.

The Jinmoti of Bozlen Two kill the hereditary ritual… thought one part of his brain, as the pipes in the ceiling spluttered and the waste splashed into the warm mass of liquid
which almost filled the cell. The wave passed over his face, then fell back to leave his nose free for a second and give him
time to gulp a lungful of air. Then the liquid rose gently to touch the bottom of his nose again, and stayed there.


He held his breath.

It had hurt at first, when they had hung him up. His hands, tied inside tight leather pouches, were directly above his head,
manacled inside thick loops of iron bolted to the cell walls, which took all his weight. His feet were tied together and left
to dangle inside an iron tube, also attached to the wall, which stopped him from taking any weight on his feet and knees and
at the same time prevented him from moving his legs more than a hand’s breadth out from the wall or to either side. The tube
ended just above his knees; above it there was only a thin and dirty loincloth to hide his ancient and grubby nakedness.


He had shut off the pain from his wrists and shoulders even while the four burly guards, two of them perched on ladders, had
secured him in place. Even so he could feel that niggling sensation at the back of his skull which told him that he ought to be hurting. That had lessened gradually as the level of waste in the small sewercell had risen and buoyed up his body.


He had started to go into a trance then, as soon as the guards left, though he knew it was probably hopeless. It hadn’t lasted
long; the cell door opened again within minutes, a metal walkway was lowered by a guard onto the damp flagstones of the cell
floor, and light from the corridor washed into the darkness. He had stopped the Changing trance and craned his neck to see
who his visitor might be.


Into the cell, holding a short staff glowing cool blue, stepped the stooped, grizzled figure of Amahain-Frolk, security minister
for the Gerontocracy of Sorpen. The old man smiled at him and nodded approvingly, then turned to the corridor and, with a
thin, discolored hand, beckoned somebody standing outside the cell to step onto the short walkway and enter. He guessed it
would be the Culture agent Balveda, and it was. She came lightly onto the metal boarding, looked round slowly, and fastened
her gaze on him. He smiled and tried to nod in greeting, his ears rubbing on his naked arms.


“Balveda! I thought I might see you again. Come to see the host of the party?” He forced a grin. Officially it was his banquet;
he was the host. Another of the Gerontocracy’s little jokes. He hoped his voice had shown no signs of fear.


Perosteck Balveda, agent of the Culture, a full head taller than the old man by her side and still strikingly handsome even
in the pallid glow of the blue torch, shook her thin, finely made head slowly. Her short, black hair lay like a shadow on
her skull.


“No,” she said, “I didn’t want to see you, or say goodbye.”

“You put me here, Balveda,” he said quietly.

“Yes, and there you belong,” Amahain-Frolk said, stepping as far forward on the platform as he could without overbalancing
and having to step onto the damp floor. “I wanted you tortured first, but Miss Balveda here”—the minister’s high, scratchy
voice echoed in the cell as he turned his head back to the woman—“pleaded for you, though God knows why. But that’s where
you belong all right; murderer.” He shook the staff at the almost naked man hanging on the dirty wall of the cell.


Balveda looked at her feet, just visible under the hem of the long, plain gray gown she wore. A circular pendant on a chain
around her neck glinted in the light from the corridor outside. Amahain-Frolk had stepped back beside her, holding the shining
staff up and squinting at the captive.


“You know, even now I could almost swear that was Egratin hanging there. I can…” He shook his gaunt, bony head. “… I can hardly
believe it isn’t, not until he opens his mouth, anyway. My God, these Changers are dangerous frightening things!” He turned
to Balveda. She smoothed her hair at the nape of her neck and looked down at the old man.


“They are also an ancient and proud people, Minister, and there are very few of them left. May I ask you one more time? Please?
Let him live. He might be—”


The Gerontocrat waved a thin and twisted hand at her, his face distorting in a grimace. “No! You would do well, Miss Balveda,
not to keep asking for this… this assassin, this murderous, treacherous… spy, to be spared. Do you think we take the cowardly murder and impersonation of one of our outworld ministers lightly? What damage
this… thing could have caused! Why, when we arrested it two of our guards died just from being scratched! Another is blind for life after this monster spat in his eye! However,” Amahain-Frolk sneered at the man chained to the wall,
“we took those teeth out. And his hands are tied so that he can’t even scratch himself.” He turned to Balveda again. “You
say they are few? I say good; there will soon be one less.” The old man narrowed his eyes as he looked at the woman. “We are
grateful to you and your people for exposing this fraud and murderer, but do not think that gives you the right to tell us
what to do. There are some in the Gerontocracy who want nothing to do with any outside influence, and their voices grow in volume by the day as the war comes closer. You would do well not to antagonize
those of us who do support your cause.”


Balveda pursed her lips and looked down at her feet again, clasping her slender hands behind her back. Amahain-Frolk had turned
back to the man hanging on the wall, wagging the staff in his direction as he spoke. “You will soon be dead, impostor, and
with you die your masters’ plans for the domination of our peaceful system! The same fate awaits them if they try to invade
us. We and the Culture are—”


He shook his head as best he could and roared back, “Frolk, you’re an idiot!” The old man shrank away as though hit. The Changer
went on, “Can’t you see you’re going to be taken over anyway? Probably by the Idirans, but if not by them then by the Culture.
You don’t control your own destinies anymore; the war’s stopped all that. Soon this whole sector will be part of the front,
unless you make it part of the Idiran sphere. I was only sent in to tell you what you should have known anyway—not to cheat you into something
you’d regret later. For God’s sake, man, the Idirans won’t eat you—”


“Ha! They look as though they could! Monsters with three feet; invaders, killers, infidels… You want us to link with them?
With three-strides-tall-monsters? To be ground under their hooves? To have to worship their false gods?”


“At least they have a God, Frolk. The Culture doesn’t.” The ache in his arms was coming back as he concentrated on talking.
He shifted as best he could and looked down at the minister. “They at least think the same way you do. The Culture doesn’t.”


“Oh no, my friend, oh no.” Amahain-Frolk held one hand up flat to him and shook his head. “You won’t sow seeds of discord
like that.”


“My God, you stupid old man,” he laughed. “You want to know who the real representative of the Culture is on this planet?
It’s not her,” he nodded at the woman, “it’s that powered flesh-slicer she has following her everywhere, her knife missile.
She might make the decisions, it might do what she tells it, but it’s the real emissary. That’s what the Culture’s about:
machines. You think because Balveda’s got two legs and soft skin you should be on her side, but it’s the Idirans who are on
the side of life in this war—”


“Well, you will shortly be on the other side of that.” The Gerontocrat snorted and glanced at Balveda, who was looking from under lowered brows at the man chained to the wall.
“Let us go, Miss Balveda,” Amahain-Frolk said as he turned and took the woman’s arm to guide her from the cell. “This… thing’s presence smells more than the cell.”


Balveda looked up at him then, ignoring the dwarfed minister as he tried to pull her to the door. She gazed right at the prisoner
with her clear, black-irised eyes and held her hands out from her sides. “I’m sorry,” she said to him.


“Believe it or not, that’s rather how I feel,” he replied, nodding. “Just promise me you’ll eat and drink very little tonight,
Balveda. I’d like to think there was one person up there on my side, and it might as well be my worst enemy.” He had meant
it to be defiant and funny, but it sounded only bitter; he looked away from the woman’s face.


“I promise,” Balveda said. She let herself be led to the door, and the blue light waned in the dank cell. She stopped right
at the door. By sticking his head painfully far out he could just see her. The knife missile was there, too, he noticed, just
inside the room; probably there all the time, but he hadn’t noticed its sleek, sharp little body hovering there in the darkness.
He looked into Balveda’s dark eyes as the knife missile moved.


For a second he thought Balveda had instructed the tiny machine to kill him now—quietly and quickly while she blocked Amahain-Frolk’s
view—and his heart thudded. But the small device simply floated past Balveda’s face and out into the corridor. Balveda raised
one hand in a gesture of farewell.


“Bora Horza Gobuchul,” she said, “goodbye.” She turned quickly, stepped from the platform and out of the cell. The walkway
was hoisted out and the door slammed, scraping rubber flanges over the grimy floor and hissing once as the internal seals
made it watertight. He hung there, looking down at an invisible floor for a moment before going back into the trance that
would Change his wrists, thin them down so that he could escape. But something about the solemn, final way Balveda had spoken
his name had crushed him inside, and he knew then, if not before, that there was no escape.


… by drowning them in the tears…


His lungs were bursting! His mouth quivered, his throat was gagging, the filth was in his ears but he could hear a great roaring,
see lights though it was black dark. His stomach muscles started to go in and out, and he had to clamp his jaw to stop his
mouth opening for air that wasn’t there. Now. No… now he had to give in. Not yet… surely now. Now, now, now, any second; surrender to this awful black vacuum inside him… he had
to breathe… now!

Before he had time to open his mouth he was smashed against the wall—punched against the stones as though some immense iron
fist had slammed into him. He blew out the stale air from his lungs in one convulsive breath. His body was suddenly cold,
and every part of it next to the wall throbbed with pain. Death, it seemed, was weight, pain, cold… and too much light…


He brought his head up. He moaned at the light. He tried to see, tried to hear. What was happening? Why was he breathing?
Why was he so damn heavy again? His body was tearing his arms from their sockets; his wrists were cut almost to the bone. Who had done this to him?


Where the wall had been facing him there was a very large and ragged hole which extended beneath the level of the cell floor.
All the ordure and garbage had burst out of that. The last few trickles hissed against the hot sides of the breach, producing
steam which curled around the figure standing blocking most of the brilliant light from outside, in the open air of Sorpen.
The figure was three meters tall and looked vaguely like a small armored spaceship sitting on a tripod of thick legs. Its
helmet looked big enough to contain three human heads, side by side. Held almost casually in one gigantic hand was a plasma
cannon which Horza would have needed both arms just to lift; the creature’s other fist gripped a slightly larger gun. Behind
it, nosing in toward the hole, came an Idiran gun-platform, lit vividly by the light of explosions which Horza could now feel
through the iron and stones he was attached to. He raised his head to the giant standing in the breach and tried to smile.


“Well,” he croaked, then spluttered and spat, “you lot certainly took your time.”

Outside the palace, in the sharp cold of a winter’s afternoon, the clear sky was full of what looked like glittering snow.

Horza paused on the warshuttle’s ramp and looked up and around. The sheer walls and slim towers of the prison-palace echoed
and reflected with the booms and flashes of continuing firefights, while Idiran gun-platforms cruised back and forth, firing
occasionally. Around them on the stiffening breeze blew great clouds of chaff from anti-laser mortars on the palace roof.
A gust sent some of the fluttering, flickering foil toward the stationary shuttle, and Horza found one side of his wet and
sticky body suddenly coated with reflecting plumage.


“Please. The battle is not over yet,” thundered the Idiran soldier behind him, in what was probably meant to be a quiet whisper.
Horza turned round to the armored bulk and stared up at the visor of the giant’s helmet, where he could see his own, old man’s
face reflected. He breathed deeply, then nodded, turned and walked, slightly shakily, into the shuttle. A flash of light threw
his shadow diagonally in front of him, and the craft bucked in the shock wave of a big explosion somewhere inside the palace
as the ramp closed.


By their names you could know them, Horza thought as he showered. The Culture’s General Contact Units, which until now had
borne the brunt of the first four years of the war in space, had always chosen jokey, facetious names. Even the new warships
they were starting to produce, as their factory craft completed gearing up their war production, favored either jocular, somber
or downright unpleasant names, as though the Culture could not take entirely seriously the vast conflict in which it had embroiled
itself.


The Idirans looked at things differently. To them a ship name ought to reflect the serious nature of its purpose, duties and
resolute use. In the huge Idiran navy there were hundreds of craft named after the same heroes, planets, battles, religious
concepts and impressive adjectives. The light cruiser which had rescued Horza was the 137th vessel to be called The Hand of God, and it existed concurrently with over a hundred other craft in the navy using the same title, so its full name was The Hand of God 137.

Horza dried in the airstream with some difficulty. Like everything else in the spaceship it was built on a monumental scale
befitting the size of the Idirans, and the hurricane of air it produced nearly blew him out of the shower cabinet.


The Querl Xoralundra, spy-father and warrior priest of the Four Souls tributory sect of Farn-Idir, clasped two hands on the
surface of the table. It looked to Horza rather like a pair of continental plates colliding.


“So, Bora Horza,” boomed the old Idiran, “you are recovered.”

“Just about,” nodded Horza, rubbing his wrists. He sat in Xoralundra’s cabin in The Hand of God 137, clothed in a bulky but comfortable spacesuit apparently brought along just for him. Xoralundra, who was also suited up, had
insisted the man wear it because the warship was still at battle stations as it swept a fast and lowpowered orbit around the
planet of Sorpen. A Culture GCU of the Mountain class had been confirmed in the system by Naval Intelligence; the Hand was in on its own, and they couldn’t find any trace of the Culture ship, so they had to be careful.


Xoralundra leaned toward Horza, casting a shadow over the table. His huge head, saddle-shaped when seen from directly in front,
with the two front eyes clear and unblinking near the edges, loomed over the Changer. “You were lucky, Horza. We did not come
in to rescue you out of compassion. Failure is its own reward.”


“Thank you, Xora. That’s actually the nicest thing anybody’s said to me all day.” Horza sat back in his seat and put one of
his old-looking hands through his thin, yellowing hair. It would take a few days for the aged appearance he had assumed to
disappear, though already he could feel it starting to slip away from him. In a Changer’s mind there was a self-image constantly
held and reviewed on a semi-subconscious level, keeping the body in the appearance willed. Horza’s need to look like a Gerontocrat
was gone now, so the mental picture of the minister he had impersonated for the Idirans was fragmenting and dissolving, and
his body was going back to its normal, neutral state.


Xoralundra’s head went slowly from side to side between the edges of the suit collar. It was a gesture Horza had never fully
translated, although he had worked for the Idirans and known Xoralundra well since before the war.


“Anyway. You are alive,” Xoralundra said. Horza nodded and drummed his fingers on the table to show he agreed. He wished the
Idiran chair he was perched on didn’t make him feel so much like a child; his feet weren’t even touching the deck.


“Just. Thanks, anyway. I’m sorry I dragged you all the way in here to rescue a failure.”

“Orders are orders. I personally am glad we were able to. Now I must tell you why we received those orders.”

Horza smiled and looked away from the old Idiran, who had just given him something of a compliment; a rare thing. He looked
back and watched the other being’s wide mouth—big enough, thought Horza, to bite off both your hands at once—as it boomed
out the precise, short words of the Idiran language.


“You were once with a caretaker mission on Schar’s World, one of the Dra’Azon Planets of the Dead,” Xoralundra stated. Horza
nodded. “We need you to go back there.”


“Now?” Horza said to the broad, dark face of the Idiran. “There are only Changers there. I’ve told you I won’t impersonate
another Changer. I certainly won’t kill one.”


“We are not asking you to do that. Listen while I explain.” Xoralundra leaned on his backrest in a way almost any vertebrate—or
even anything like a vertebrate—would have called tired. “Four standard days ago,” the Idiran began—then his suit helmet,
which was lying on the floor near his feet, let out a piercing whine. He picked up the helmet and set it on the table. “Yes?” he said, and Horza knew enough about the Idiran voice to realize that whoever was bothering the Querl had better have a
good reason for doing so.


“We have the Culture female,” a voice said from the helmet. “Ahh…” Xoralundra said quietly, sitting back. The Idiran equ