Consider Phlebas

smashed the world itself.

Like a target, then, Vavatch blazed.

Just as Horza thought that the Culture would be content with that, the screen lit up once more. Everyone of those flat cards, and the Hub, of the exploded Orbital blazed once with an icy, sparkling brilliance as though a million tiny white stars were shining through each shattered piece.

The light faded, and those four hundred expanses of flat worlds with their centre Hub were gone, replaced by a grid of diced shapes, each exploding away from the others as well as from the rest of the disintegrating Orbital.

Those pieces flashed, too, bursting slowly with a billion pinpricks of light which, when they faded, left debris almost too small to make out.

Vavatch was now a swollen and spiralled disc of flashing, glittering splinters, expanding very slowly against the distant stars like a ring of bright dust. The glinting, sparkling centre made it look like some huge, lidless and unblinking eye.

The screen flashed one final time. No single points of light could be made out this time. It was as though the whole now vague but bloated image of the shattered circular world glowed with some internal heat, making a torus-shaped cloud out of it, a halo of white light with a fading iris at its centre. Then the show was over, and only the sun lit up the slowly blooming nimbus of the annihilated world.

On other wavelengths there would probably be a lot still to see, but the mess-room screen was on normal light. Only the Minds, only the starships, would see the whole destruction perfectly; only they would be able to appreciate it for all that it had to offer. Of the entire range of the electromagnetic spectrum, the unaided human eye could see little more than one per cent: a single octave of radiation out of an immense long keyboard of tones. The sensors on a starship would see everything, right across that spectrum, in far greater detail and at a much slower apparent speed. The whole display that was the Orbital's destruction was, for all its humanly perceivable grandeur, quite wasted on the animal eye. A spectacle for the machines, thought Horza; that was all it was. A sideshow for the damn machines.

'Chicel…' Dorolow said. Wubslin exhaled loudly and shook his head. Yalson turned and looked at Horza. Aviger stayed with his head turned to the screen.

'Amazing what one can accomplish when one puts one's mind to it, eh… Horza?'

At first, stupidly, he thought that Yalson had said it, but of course it was Balveda.

She brought her head up slowly. Her deep, dark eyes were open; she looked groggy, and her body still sagged against the webbing of the seat straps. The voice had been clear and steady, though.

Horza saw Yalson reaching for the stun gun on the table. She reached out and brought the gun closer to her but left it lying on the table. She was looking suspiciously at the Culture agent. Aviger and Dorolow and Wubslin were staring at her, too.

'Are the batteries on that stun gun running down?' Wubslin said. Yalson was still looking at Balveda, her eyes narrowed.

'You're a little confused, Gravant, or whoever you are,' Yalson said. 'That's Kraiklyn.'

Balveda smiled at Horza. He left his face blank. He didn't know what to do. He was exhausted, worn out. It was too much of an effort. Let what was going to happen, happen. He'd had enough of deciding. 'Well,' Balveda said to him, 'are you going to tell them, or shall I?'

He said nothing. He watched Balveda's face. The woman drew a deep breath and said, 'Oh all right, I'll tell them.' She turned to Yalson. 'His name is Bora Horza Gobuchul, and he's impersonating Kraiklyn. Horza's a Changer from Heibohre and he works for the Idirans. Has done for the last six years. He's Changed to become Kraiklyn. I imagine your real leader is dead. Horza probably killed him, or at least left him somewhere in or around Evanauth.

'I'm very sorry.' She looked around the others, including the small drone. 'But unless I'm much mistaken we're all taking a little trip to a place called Schar's World. Well, you are, anyway. I have a feeling my own journey might be a little shorter — and infinitely longer.' Balveda smiled ironically at Horza.

'Two?' the drone on the table said to nobody in particular. 'I'm stuck in a leaky museum-piece with two paranoid lunatics?'

'You're not,' Yalson was saying, ignoring the machine and gazing at Horza. 'You're not, are you? She's lying.'

Wubslin turned and looked at him. Aviger and Dorolow exchanged glances. Horza sighed and took his feet off the table, sitting a little straighter in his seat. He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table, his chin in his hands. He was watching, feeling, trying to gauge the mood of the various people in the room. He was aware of their distances, the tension in their bodies, and how much time he would need to get to the plasma pistol on his right hip. He raised his head and looked at all of them, settling his gaze on Yalson. 'Yes,' he said, 'I am.'

Silence filled the mess room. Horza waited for a reaction. Instead the sound of a door opening came from down the corridor through the accommodation section. They all looked at the doorway.

Neisin appeared, wearing only a pair of grubby, stained shorts. His hair was sticking out in every direction, his eyes were slits, his skin was patchy with dry and moist areas, and his face was very pale. A smell of drink gradually worked its way through the mess. He looked round the room, yawned, nodded at them, pointed vaguely at some of the still uncleared debris lying around and said, 'This place is nearly in as big a mess as my cabin. You'd think we'd been manoeuvring or something. Sorry. Thought it was time to eat. Think I'll go back to bed.' He yawned again and left. The door closed.

Balveda was laughing quietly. Horza could see some tears in her eyes. The others just looked confused. The drone said:

'Well, Mr Observant there is probably the only person on this mobile asylum with an untroubled mind at the moment.' The machine turned on the table, scratching the surface as it faced Horza. 'Are you really claiming to be one of these fabled human impersonators?' it asked with a sneer in its voice.

Horza looked down the table, then into Yalson's wary, frowning eyes. 'That's what I am.'

'They're extinct,' Aviger said, shaking his head.

'They're not extinct,' Balveda told him, her thin, finely moulded head turning briefly to the old man. 'But they're part of the Idiran sphere now; absorbed. Some of them always did support the Idirans, the rest either left or decided they might as well throw in their lot with them. Horza's one of the first lot. Can't stand the Culture. He's taking you all to Schar's World to kidnap a shipwrecked Mind for his Idiran masters. A Culture Mind. So that the galaxy will be free from human interference and the Idirans can have a free run at-'

'All right, Balveda,' Horza said. She shrugged.

'You're Horza,' Yalson said, pointing at him. He nodded. She shook her head. 'I don't believe it. I'm starting to come round to the drone's way of thinking; you're both crazy. You took a nasty blow to the head, Kraiklyn, and you, lady' — she looked at Balveda — 'have had your brains scrambled by this thing.' Yalson picked up the stun gun and then put it down again.

'I don't know,' Wubslin said, scratching his head and looking at Horza as though he was some sort of exhibit. 'I thought the captain seemed a bit strange. I couldn't imagine him doing what he just did in the GSV.'

'What did you do, Horza?' Balveda said. 'I seem to have missed something. How did you get away?'

'I flew out, Balveda. Used the fusion motors and the laser and blasted out.'

'Really?' Balveda laughed again, throwing her head back. She went on laughing, but her laughter was a little too loud, and the tears were coming too quickly to her eyes. 'Ho ho. Well, I am impressed. I thought we had you.'

'When did you find out?' he asked her quietly. She sniffed and tried to wipe her nose on her shoulder.

'What? That you weren't Kraiklyn?' She played her tongue along her top lip. 'Oh, just before you came aboard. We had a microdrone pretending to be a fly. It was programmed to land on anybody approaching the ship while it was in the Smallbay and take a skin cell or hair or something away with it. We identified you from your own chromosomes. There was another agent outside; he must have used his effector on the bay controls when he monitored you starting to get ready to leave. I was supposed to… do whatever I could if you appeared. Kill you, capture you, disable the ship: anything. But they didn't tell me until too late. They knew somebody might overhear if they warned me, but they must have started to get worried.'

'That was the noise you heard from her kitbag,' Horza told Yalson, 'just before I zapped her.' He looked back