Iain Banks - Against a Dark Background

(And she was there again; distracted-from that sweetly succulent pummelling-to gaze at the line of desert hills beyond the softly billowing white curtains and the stone balustrade of the hotel-room balcony. She watched the faint crease of dawn-light above as it was suddenly swamped by the stuttering pulses of silent fire from beyond the horizon. She looked-dazed and dazzled and wondering, still in her shaken instant of ignorance and cresting bliss-from that distant eruption of light to Miz’s face as he reared above her, eyes tightly closed, his mouth stretched open in a silent shout, the sheen of sweat on his hollowed cheek lit by the flickering light of annihilation, and as release came flooding-with knowledge, with realisation, so that her squeezed, convulsing cry became a scream of terror-she experienced a grain of vanishing, collapsing ecstasy, immediately swept away and lost in a storm of guilt and self-disgust.)

The Lazy Guns had not had a happy history; they had turned up during the Interregnum following the Second War, seemingly products of Halo; the vast Thrial-polar Machine Intelligence artifact/habitat destroyed by whatever mysterious weapon had been fired from-and which appeared to have obliterated-the moons of the gas giant planet Phrasresis. The Guns had floated like soap bubbles through the spasming chaos of the war-ravaged system in their drifting, otherwise empty lifeboats, and one by one they had been captured, stolen, used, abused, hidden, lost, rediscovered and used and abused again.

And one by one they had met their ends: one had been turned on Thrial by the insane theocrat into whose hands it had fallen; the weapon had refused, or been unable, to destroy the sun, and Gun and theocrat had simply vanished. Two Guns had annihilated themselves when people had tried to take them apart, one had taken a lucky hit during an air-strike, another was believed to have been deliberately attacked by a suicidal assassin while in the armoury of the noble family which had discovered it, and one-its lenses staring down a pair of electron microscopes-had created a series of nano-bang matricial holes in the World Court’s Anifrast Institute of Technology before whatever bizarre event had occurred which led to the Institute, all it had contained (except for the twenty-three gently-radiating holes) and a precise circle of land approximately thirteen hundred metres in diameter disappearing to be replaced by an attractive, perfectly hemispherical salt-water lake stocked with a variety of polar-oceanic plankton, fish and mammals.

Perhaps it was simply bad luck, but despite the fact the sheer capability of the Guns ought to have ensured their owner could effectively become ruler of the entire system, the weapons had invariably been the downfall of whoever had come into possession of them.

The Guns even had their own small, schismed cult; the Fellowship of the Gun believed the devices were the ambiguous, testing gifts from a superior alien civilisation, and that when the final Gun was found and venerated-worshipped rather than used-the aliens would finally appear amongst the people of the system and lead them to paradise, while the Free Fellowship of the Gun believed simply that the Guns were gods, and (now) that the one remaining Gun was the God.

The Huhsz faith regarded both these cults as idolatry in nature; as far as they were concerned the Gun stolen from them by Sharrow’s ancestor had simply been a temple treasure, albeit the principal one. They wanted it back because they regarded it as their property and because it had become an article of faith that unless it was recovered-or the Dascen female line wiped out-their messiah could not be born on time, on or before the advent of the decamillenium.

She opened her eyes groggily, to focus on a man sitting less than a metre away. He was dressed in a uniform that hurt her eyes; bright violet and shining yellow. His face was round and dark and very serious. “Who are you?” she whispered.

“I am God,” he said, nodding politely.

She looked at him for a while, listening to the hum that was all around her. The place they were in lurched.

“God?” she said.

The man nodded. “God,” he said.

“I see,” she said, drifting away again.

The hum became a lullaby.

She woke slowly, turning over in the narrow cot. There were voices talking somewhere beyond the wall. An antiseptic, hospital smell came off the sheets. She remembered being a bubble, blown through the system on the blast-fronts of the war’s erupting energies. She was one of the team now. She could remember what the doctor had told them, before they became infected with it; every word…

“You won’t notice it most of the time,” the doc told her/them. “It’s not telepathy and it’s not some doze-head feeling of mystical oneness with your fellows; it’s just the ability to know how somebody’ll react in a given situation. It’s a short-cut; a way of building up instant rapport without having to wait for a few years-probably longer than the war-and still never get there because the attrition rate’s so high you never achieve a stable combat unit.

“You want to know the truth? It’s an anti-fuck-up agent. Ever watched dumb-screen, where ops always go according to plan and nobody ever shoots their own people by mistake? That’s what SNB helps make come true. It makes war a little bit more like it’s supposed to be; less entropic, less chaotic; more tidy. I trust some of you are mature enough to realise that this makes it a top-brass wet-dream…”

“That’s me,” she whispered to herself. “I’m one of the team now. Eight of us.”

She woke up into a white space with no walls but a low ceiling; there was a Lazy Gun there. She couldn’t tell which one.

Nothing but trouble, sang the Gun, dancing round her on its skinny, wobbly legs. Nothing but death and destruction and trouble. She grabbed at the Gun; it tried to dance away from her, giggling, but she caught it and held it and strapped it to her. A wall which was a mirror appeared as soon as she touched the weapon. The Lazy Gun’s controls were as she remembered them; delicate, somehow, and beautiful. Its sides and top surface were covered in fabulously complicated scrollwork, incised into the silver casing. It was-she realised as she turned with it-a hunting gun. She pointed it at the mirror and smiled at herself as she pushed the trigger.

She woke up and looked round the small cabin; it was a cube barely two metres square. There was another bunk above hers, a light-metal drawer-unit with her clothes folded neatly inside, a plastic chair, a locked door with a single plastic hook on it and an air vent. That was all; no window.

Whatever sort of vehicle she was in, it was still moving. She could hear what sounded like combustion engines, and something about the way the deck beneath her vibrated and the whole cabin moved now and again suggested that she was on an Air Cushion Vehicle. Her stomach growled.

She considered trying to go back to sleep, but she’d slept enough. She took out her clothes and looked in the pockets; they held nothing. Her satchel was nowhere to be seen, either.

She got out of the small bed, feeling stiff and hungry. She checked herself over; there were faint bruises on her knees and she could feel a tiny ulcer on her tongue where she’d bit herself, but there were no other signs of damage. She dressed, then hammered on the door until somebody came.

“God?” she said to the man with the dark, round face she’d seen earlier in what she had assumed to be a dream. He shifted awkwardly on the small plastic seat and brushed imaginary dust from the thigh of his violently clashing yellow and violet uniform trousers. “Well,” he said. “Technically, yes.” A pained expression passed over his face.

“Right,” she said. “I see.”