Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

The sky was full of darkness. There were planets and moons and the tiny feathery whorls of the dim nebulae, and they had themselves filled it with junk and traffic and emblems of a thousand different languages, but they could not create the skies of a planet within a galaxy, and they could not ever hope, within any frame of likelihood they could envisage existing, to travel to anywhere beyond their own system, or the everywhere-meaningless gulf of space surrounding their isolated and freakish star.

For a distance that was never less than a million light years in any direction around it, Thrial-for all its flamboyant dispersion of vivifying power and its richly fertile crop of children planets-was an orphan.

There was this wall. She was coming slowly up to this flat wall. The wall was white and grey and studded with little round stones; to one side there was a larger boulder shaped like a giant door handle. She wondered if the wall was really a door. Somehow, she was sure that Cenuij was on the other side. She could see ice and frost on it. The wall was coming closer all the time and seemed to be very tall; she didn’t think she’d be able to see the top. It kept advancing towards her even though she was sure she had stopped walking. Walking had been everything for longer than she could remember; it had been her universe, her existence, her whole reason for being, but then she had stopped and yet here was this wall coming towards her. Very close now; she could see frozen trickles of water between the small stones, and what might have been small, frosted plants. She looked for Cenuij’s eye, peeking through at her from the other side. Somebody else must have noticed the wall because she thought she heard a shout from somewhere far away.

The wall slammed into her. There seemed to be a safety rail. Her head hit the wall anyway, and everything went dark.

The android saw her falling and rushed forward as Miz shouted out. It couldn’t hope to save her properly, but it was just close enough to stretch out a leg and get a foot under her upper chest, slowing her descent just a little before her falling weight took her down and she fell to the stony beach and lay there, face down and still.

Feril hopped once, unbalanced, then knelt with the others as they gathered quickly around her.

“Is she hurt?” Miz said, as Zefla and Dloan gently rolled her over. There was a small graze on her cheek and another on her forehead. Her face looked old and puffed. Her mouth opened slackly. Miz took her right glove off and rubbed her hand. Feril touched her left glove.

“She’s lying in this water,” Zefla said. “Let’s get her to the trees.”

They took her into the forest and laid her down. Feril ran its fingers over the taut left glove again. “There appears to be something wrong with her hand,” it said.

The others looked at the glove. “She did cut her hand a couple of days ago,” Zefla said. Dloan tried to undo the glove.

They had to cut it eventually. Her hand was bloated and discoloured; the original wound oozed from beneath a small, sopping plaster. Miz made a face.

Zefla drew her breath in. “Oh, oh,” she said. “Oh, you silly thing…” She touched the swollen skin. Sharrow moaned.

Dloan drew his laser, opened the grip and adjusted the controls.

“What’s that for?” Miz asked, staring at the weapon.

Dloan closed the grip again, turned and fired the gun into the needle litter at his feet; a tiny, continuous red ember burned. Dloan seemed satisfied and clicked the beam off.

“Poison,” Dloan said, gently taking Sharrow’s wounded hand and laying it as flat as possible on the ground. “Antiseptic? Dressing?” he said.

Zefla was rummaging in Sharrow’s satchel. “Here,” she said.

“Might wake her up,” Dloan said, kneeling so that he could hold Sharrow’s hand securely. “Want to hold her down?”

“Shit,” Miz said, and took her feet. Feril held her other hand and pinned her shoulders; Zefla smoothed her hand over Sharrow’s forehead.

Dloan pointed the laser pistol at Sharrow’s wounded hand and pressed the trigger. The flesh spotted, blackened and split, parting like the skin of rotten fruit. Sharrow moaned and stirred as the liquid inside spilled out, sputtering and steaming under the laser’s power. Miz looked away.

Zefla rocked back and forth, stroking Sharrow’s forehead and cheeks; Dloan grimaced and screwed his eyes up as the fumes bubbling from the wound reached him; but kept the laser pointed at her hand, lengthening the incision. The android looked on, fascinated, while the moaning woman moved weakly beneath him.

They built a fire. Zefla had a last lump of foodslab left she’d been saving; they warmed it with the laser and tried to get Sharrow to eat it. They used a laser to heat some water in the hollow of a stone, soaked a bandana in it and got her to suck at it. Her face seemed to grow less puffy, and her breathing became slower and deeper. She passed from unconsciousness to something more like sleep. The smell of antiseptic spread around the hollow.

They had travelled only ten kilometres from their last camp; they still had thirty left to travel to the tower at the head of the fjord. Feril thought that given the state of the ground on the far side of the fjord the Solipsists might be significantly delayed; but it would be close-run thing, and while it could carry Sharrow until the next camp it would have to leave soon after darkness if it was to get back to the mouth of the fjord in time to attempt to make contact with the submarine.

“We don’t really have much choice, I guess,” Miz said. He still felt ill after watching what they’d done to Sharrow’s infected hand. His feet ached and his stomach felt like it was eating itself; he was light-headed and shivery with hun-ger. He couldn’t stop thinking about food. But at least the pain of walking helped take his mind off his empty belly.

“You’re sure you can carry her safely?” Zefla asked Feril.

“Yes.”

“I could kiss you,” Dloan said.

The android paused. “Thank you,” it said.

“Okay,” Zefla said. She lifted the satchel. “Let’s go.”

The small group of people walked along the cold, grey shore under a dark, lowering sky. The tall leading figure walked lightly, even gracefully, but the one following looked too slight to carry the burden in its arms as easily as it appeared to, and the last two in the group were limping.

Above them, a sky the colour of gun-metal shook free the first few tiny flakes of snow.

Elson Roa watched from the top of a bluff through a pair of high-power binoculars. He saw the leading figure of the group on the far side of the fjord take an object from a satchel and stop briefly while they examined it. Then they replaced the object in the bag.

Roa switched the field-glasses’ stabilisers off and listened to their slowly dying whine as the air above the waters of the fjord began to fill with snow, wiping the view out in a swirling grey turmoil of silence. The sniper at his side checked the range read-out on her rifle again and shook her head, tutting.

Roa looked behind him to where his comrades stood, healthy and alert and waiting. A little snow drifted out of the dull expanse of cloud hanging between the mountains and settled gently on their dirtied but still gaudy uniforms.

They moved through a limited world; the falling snow obliterated everything save for a circle perhaps ten metres in diameter consisting of forest-edge, rocky shore and flat water. The patch of the fjord’s black surface they could see specked continually with white flakes that vanished the instant they touched that darkness. No waves beat. Where the snow-flakes touched the ground, they sat amongst the rocks and pebbles for a brief moment, then melted. The sky was gone, brought down to an indeterminate low ceiling where the mass of grey-white flakes became a single cloud of chaotic, cluttering movement.