Consider Phlebas

bench and stretching and yawning. 'It sounds interesting.' She shook her head. 'This is lap-of-the-gods stuff, though. Let me have… anything you think might be relevant. I'd like to concentrate on this bit of the war for a while; all the information we've got on the Sullen Gulf… all I can handle, anyway. OK?'

'OK,' Jase said.

'Hmm,' Fal murmured, nodding vaguely, her eyes unfocused. 'Yes… all we've got on that general area… I mean volume…' She waved her hand round in a circle, in her imagination encompassing several million cubic light- years.

'Very well,' Jase said, and retreated slowly from the girl's gaze. It floated back down the terrace in the shafts of sunlight and shade, towards the lodge, under the flowers.

The girl sat by herself, rocking backwards and forwards on her haunches and humming quietly, her hands at her mouth again and her elbows on her knees, one of which was bent, and one of which was straight.

Here we are, she thought, killing the immortal, only just stopping short of tangling with something most people would think of as a god, and here am I, eighty thousand light-years away if I'm a metre, supposed to think of a way out of this ridiculous situation. What a joke… Damn. I wish they'd let me be a Field Referer, out there where the action is, instead of sitting it out back here, so far away it takes two years just to get there. Oh well.

She shifted her weight and sat sideways on the seat so that her broken leg lay along the bench, then turned her face to the mountains glittering on the far side of the plain. She rested her elbow on the stone parapet, her hand supporting her head as her eyes drank in the view.

She wondered whether they really had kept their word about not watching her when she went climbing. She wouldn't put it past them to have kept a small drone or micromissile or something near by, just in case anything did happen, and then — after the accident, after she'd fallen — left her lying there, frightened, cold and in pain, just to convince her they were doing no such thing, and to see the effect it had on her, as long as she wasn't in any real danger of dying. She knew, after all, the way their Minds worked. It was the sort of thing she would consider doing, if she was in charge.

Maybe I should just pack it in; leave. Tell them to shove their war. Trouble is… I like all this…

She looked at one of her hands, golden brown in a beam of sunlight. She opened and closed it, looking at the fingers. Three… to seven… She thought of an Idiran hand. Depending…

She looked back, over the shadow-strewn plain towards the distant mountains, and sighed.

5. Megaship

Vavatch lay in space like a god's bracelet. The fourteen-million kilometre hoop glittered and sparkled, blue and gold against the jet-black gulf of space beyond. As the Clear Air Turbulence warped in towards the Orbital, most of the Company watched their goal approach on the main screen in the mess. The aquamarine sea, which covered most of the surface of the artefact's ultradense base material, was spattered with white puffs of cloud, collected in huge storm systems or vast banks, some of which seemed to stretch right across the full thirty-five-thousand-kilometre breadth of the slowly turning Orbital.

Only on one side of that looped band of water was there any land visible, hard up against one sloped retaining wall of pure crystal. Although, from the distance they were watching, the sliver of land looked like a tiny brown thread lying on the edge of a great rolled-out bolt of vivid blue, that thread was anything up to two thousand kilometres across; there was no shortage of land on Vavatch.

Its greatest attraction, however, was and had always been the Megaships.

'Don't you have a religion?' Dorolow asked Horza.

'Yes,' he replied, not taking his eyes away from the screen on the wall above the end of the main mess-room table. 'My survival.'

'So… your religion dies with you. How sad,' Dorolow said, looking back from Horza to the screen. The Changer let the remark pass.

The exchange had started when Dorolow, struck by the beauty of the great Orbital, expressed the belief that even though it was a work of base creatures, no better than humans, it was still a triumphant testimony to the power of God, as God had made Man, and all other souled creatures. Horza had disagreed, genuinely annoyed that the woman could use even something so obviously a testament to the power of intelligence and hard work as an argument for her own system of irrational belief.

Yalson, who was sitting beside Horza at the table, and whose foot was gently rubbing the Changer's ankle, put her elbows on the plastic surface beside the plates and beakers. 'And they're going to blow it away in four days' time. What a fucking waste.'

Whether or not this would have worked as a subject-changing parry, she did not get a chance to find out, because the mess PA crackled once and then came clear with the voice of Kraiklyn, who was on the bridge: 'Thought you might like to see this, people.'

The view of the distant Orbital was replaced by a blank screen onto which there then appeared a message in flashing letters.

WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING: ATTENTION ALL CRAFT! VAVATCH ORBITAL AND HUB WITH ALL ANCILLARY UNITS WILL BE DESTROYED REPEAT DESTROYED MARAINTIME A/4872.0001 EXACT (EQUIVALENT G-HUB TIME 00043.2909.401: EQUIVALENT LIMB THREE TIME 09.256.8: EQUIVALENT lDIRTIMERELATIVE QU'URIBALTA 359.0021: EQIVALENT VAVATCHTIME SEG 7TH.4010.5) BY NOVALEVEL HYPER-GRID INTRUSION AND SUBSEQUENT CAM BOMBARDMENT. SENT BY ESCHATOLOGIST (TEMPORARY NAME), CULTURE GENERAL SYSTEMS VEHICLE. TIMED AT A/4870.986: MARAINBASE ALLTRANS… SIGNAL SECTION END… SIGNAL REPETITION NUMBER ONE OF SEVEN FOLLOWS:…………………… WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING/SIGNAL/WARNING…

'We just ran through that message shell,' Kraiklyn added. 'See you later.' The PA crackled again, then was silent. The message faded from the screen and the Orbital filled it again.

'Hmm,' Jandraligeli said. 'Brief and to the point.'

'Like I said.' Yalson nodded at the screen.

'I remember…' Wubslin said slowly, staring at the band of brilliant blue and white on the screen, 'when I was very young one of my teachers floated a little toy metal boat on the surface of a bucketful of water. Then she lifted the bucket by the handle and held me up against her chest with her other arm, so that I was facing the same way she was. She started to go round and round, faster and faster, letting the spin send the bucket out away from her, and eventually the bucket was straight out, the surface of the water in it at ninety degrees to the floor, and I was held there with this great big adult hand across my belly and everything spinning around me and I was watching this little toy boat, which was still floating on the water, even though the water was straight up and down in front of my face, and my teacher said, 'You remember this if you're ever lucky enough to see the Megaships of Vavatch.'»

'Yeah?' Lamm said. 'Well, they're about to let the fucking handle go.'

'So let's just hope we're not still on the surface when they do,' Yalson said.

Jandraligeli turned to her, one eyebrow up: 'After that last fiasco, dear, nothing would surprise me.'

'Easy in, easy out,' Aviger said, and the old man laughed.

The haul from Marjoin to Vavatch had taken twenty-three days. The Company had gradually recovered from the effects of the abortive attack on the Temple of Light. There were a few small sprains and grazes; Dorolow had been blind in one eye for a couple of days, and everybody had been quiet and withdrawn, but by the time Vavatch came into sight they were all starting to get so bored with life on board ship, even with less of them on it, that they were looking forward to another operation.

Horza kept the laser rifle which kee-Alsorofus had used, and carried out what rudimentary repairs and improvements the CAT's limited engineering facilities would allow him to effect to his