“Yalson,” Horza said, “I wouldn’t take you with me anyway, even if I decided not to come back down alone.” He grinned at her. Yalson frowned.
“Why not?” she said.
“Because I’d need you on the ship, making sure Balveda here and our section leader didn’t misbehave.”
Yalson’s eyes narrowed. “That had better be all,” she growled. Horza’s grin widened and he looked away, as though he wanted to say more, but couldn’t for some reason.
Balveda sat, swinging her legs from the edge of the too-big seat, and wondered what was going on between the Changer and the dark, down-skinned woman. She thought she had detected a change in their relationship, a change which seemed to come mostly from the way Horza treated Yalson. An extra element had been added; there was something else determining his reactions to her, but Balveda couldn’t pin it down. It was all quite interesting, but it didn’t help her. She had her own problems anyway. Balveda knew her own weaknesses, and one of them was troubling her now.
She really was starting to feel like one of the team. She watched Horza and Yalson arguing about who should accompany the Changer if he came back down into the Command System after a return to the Clear Air Turbulence, and she could not help but smile, unseen, at them. She liked the determined, no-nonsense woman, even if her regard was not returned, and she could not find it in her heart to think of Horza as implacably as she ought.
It was the Culture’s fault. It considered itself too civilised and sophisticated to hate its enemies; instead it tried to understand them and their motives, so that it could out-think them and so that, when it won, it would treat them in a way which ensured they would not become enemies again. The idea was fine as long as you didn’t get too close, but once you had spent some time with your opponents, such empathy could turn against you. There was a sort of detached, non-human aggression required to go along with such mobilised compassion, and Balveda could feel it slipping away from her.
Perhaps she felt too safe, she thought. Perhaps it was because now there was no significant threat. The battle for the Command System was over; the quest was petering out, the tension of the past few days disappearing.
Xoxarle worked quickly. The laser’s thin, attenuated beam buzzed and fussed at each wire, turning each strand red, yellow and white, then — as he strained against them — parted each one with a snap. The old man at the Idiran’s feet stirred, moaned.
The faint breeze had become a strong one. Dust was blowing under the train and starting to swirl around Xoxarle’s feet. He moved the laser to another set of wires. Only a few to go. He glanced towards the nose of the train. There was still no sign of the humans or the machine. He glanced back the other way, over his shoulder, towards the train’s last carriage and the gap between it and the tunnel mouth where the wind was whistling through. He could see no light, still hear no noise. The current of air made his eye feel cold.
He turned back and pointed the laser rifle at another set of wires. The sparks were caught in the breeze and scattered over the station floor and across the back of Aviger’s suit.
Typicaclass="underline" me doing all the work as usual, thought Unaha-Closp. It hauled another bunch of cables out of the conduit. The wire run behind it was starting to fill up with cut lengths of wire, blocking the route the drone had taken to get to the small pipe it was now working in.
It’s beneath me. I can feel it. I can hear it. I don’t know what it’s doing, but I can feel, I can hear.
And there’s something else… another noise…
The train was a long, articulated shell in some gigantic gun; a metal scream in a vast throat. It rammed through the tunnel like a piston in the biggest engine ever made, sweeping round the curves and into the straights, lights flooding the way ahead for an instant, air pushed ahead of it — like its howling, roaring voice — for kilometres.
Dust lifted from the platform, made clouds in the air. An empty drink container rolled off the pallet where Aviger had been sitting and clattered to the floor; it started rolling along the platform, towards the nose of the train, hitting off the wall a couple of times. Xoxarle saw it. The wind tugged at him, the wires parted. He got one leg free, then another. His other arm was out, and the last wires fell away.
A piece of plastic sheeting lifted from the pallet like some black, flat bird and flopped onto the platform, sliding after the metal container, now halfway down the station. Xoxarle stooped quickly, caught Aviger round the waist and, with the man held easily in one arm and the laser in his other hand, ran back, down the platform, towards the wall beside the blocked tunnel mouth where the wind made a moaning noise past the sloped rear of the train.
“…or lock them both away down here instead. You know we can…” Yalson said.
We’re close, Horza thought, nodding absently at Yalson, not listening as she told him why he needed her to help him look for the Mind. We’re close, I’m sure we are; I can feel it; we’re almost there. Somehow we’ve — I’ve — held it all together. But it’s not over yet, and it only takes one tiny error, one oversight, a single mistake, and that’s it: fuck-up, failure, death. So far we’ve done it, despite the mistakes, but it’s so easy to miss something, to fail to spot some tiny detail in the mass of data which later — when you’ve forgotten all about it, when your back is turned — creeps up and clobbers you. The secret was to think of everything, or — because maybe the Culture was right, and only a machine could literally do that — just to be so in tune with what was going on that you thought automatically of all the important and potentially important things, and ignored the rest.
With something of a shock, Horza realised that his own obsessive drive never to make a mistake, always to think of everything, was not so unlike the fetishistic urge which he so despised in the Culture: that need to make everything fair and equal, to take the chance out of life. He smiled to himself at the irony and glanced over at Balveda, sitting watching Wubslin experimenting with some controls.
Coming to resemble your enemies, Horza thought; maybe there’s something in it, after all—
“…Horza, are you listening to me?” Yalson said.
“Hmm? Yes, of course,” he smiled.
Balveda frowned, while Horza and Yalson talked on, and Wubslin poked and prodded at the train’s controls. For some reason, she was starting to feel uneasy.
Outside the front carriage, beyond Balveda’s field of view, a small container rolled along the platform and into the wall alongside the tunnel mouth.
Xoxarle ran to the rear of the station. By the entrance to the foot tunnel, leading off at right angles into the rock behind the station’s platform, was the tunnel which the Changer and the two women had emerged from when they had returned from their search of the station. It provided the ideal place from which to watch; Xoxarle thought he would escape the effects of the collision, and would have the best opportunity for a clear field of fire, right down the station to the nose of the train, in the meantime. He could stay there right up until the train hit. If they tried to get off, he would have them. He checked the gun, turning its power up to maximum.
Balveda got down from the seat, folding her arms, and walked slowly across the control deck towards the side windows, staring intently at the floor, wondering why she felt uneasy.
The wind howled through the gap between the tunnel edge and the train; it became a gale. Twenty metres away from where Xoxarle waited in the foot tunnel, kneeling there with one foot on the back of the unconscious Aviger, the train’s rear carriage started to rock and sway.