Consider Phlebas

to Aviger. 'I think somebody should tell Neisin about all the excitement he's missed, don't you?' Aviger hesitated, then nodded.

'Yes, Kraik-' He stopped, spluttered, then said no more. He got up from his seat and went quickly down the corridor towards the cabins.

'I think I'll open up the forward compartments and have a look at the laser, Kraiklyn, if that's all right with you,' Wubslin said. 'Oh, I mean Horza.' The engineer stood, frowning and scratching his head. Horza nodded. Wubslin found a clean undamaged beaker and took a cold drink from the dispenser, then went down the corridor through the accommodation section.

Dorolow and Yalson had freed Balveda. The tall, pale-skinned Culture woman stretched, closing her eyes and arching her neck. She ran a hand through her short red hair. Dorolow watched warily. Yalson held the stun gun. Balveda flexed her shoulders, then indicated she was ready.

'Right,' Yalson said, waving Balveda forward with the gun. 'We'll do this in my cabin.'

Horza stood up to let the three women by. As Balveda passed, her long, easy stride unencumbered by the light suit, he said, 'How did you get off The Hand of God, Balveda?'

She stopped and said, 'I killed the guard and then sat and waited, Horza. The GCU managed to take the cruiser intact. Eventually some nice soldier drones came and rescued me.' She shrugged.

'Unarmed, you killed an Idiran in full battle armour and toting a laser?' Horza said sceptically. Balveda shrugged again.

'Horza, I didn't say it was easy.'

'What about Xoralundra?' Horza asked through a grin.

'Your old Idiran friend? Must have escaped. A few of them did. At any rate, he wasn't among the dead or captured.'

Horza nodded and waved her by. Followed by Yalson and Dorolow, Perosteck Balveda went down the corridor to Yalson's cabin. Horza looked at the drone sitting on the table.

'Think you can make yourself useful, machine?'

'I suppose, as you obviously intend to keep us all here and take us to this unattractive-sounding rockball on the edge of nowhere, I might as well do what I can to make the journey as safe as possible. I'll help with the vessel's maintenance, if you like. I would prefer, though, if you called me by my name, and not just by that word you manage to make sound like an expletive: «machine». I am called Unaha-Closp. Is it asking too much for you to address me as such?'

'Why, certainly not, Unaha-Closp,' Horza said, trying to look and sound sufficiently bogus in his abjection. 'I shall most assuredly ensure that I call you that in future.'

'It might,' the drone said, rising from the table to the level of Horza's eyes, 'seem amusing to you, but it matters to me. I am not just a computer, I am a drone. I am conscious and I have an individual identity. Therefore I have a name.'

'I told you I'd use it,' Horza said.

'Thank you. I shall go and see if your engineer needs any help inspecting the laser housing.' It floated to the door. Horza watched it go.

He was alone. He sat down and looked at the screen, down at the far end of the mess. The debris that had been Vavatch glowed with a barren glare; that vast cloud of matter was still visible. But it was cooling, dead and spinning away; becoming less real, more ghostly, less substantial all the time.

He sat back and closed his eyes. He would wait a while before going to sleep. He wanted to give the others time to think about what they had found out. They would be easier to read then; he would know if he was safe for the moment or whether he would have to watch them all. He also wanted to wait until Yalson and Dorolow had finished with Balveda. The Culture agent might be biding her time, now she thought she had longer to live, but she might still try something. He wanted to be awake in case she did. He still hadn't decided whether to kill her now or not, but at least he, too, now had time to think.

The Clear Air Turbulence completed its last programmed course correction, swinging its nose towards the Glittercliff face; not in the precise direction of the Schar's World star, but onto the general bearing.

Behind it, still expanding, still radiating, still slowly dissolving in the system to which it had given its name, the unnumbered twinkling fragments of the Orbital called Vavatch blew out towards the stars, drifting on a stellar wind that rang and swirled with the fury of the world's destruction.

Horza sat alone in the mess room a little longer, watching the remnants dissipate.

Light against the darkness, a fat torus of nothing, just debris. An entire world just wiped out. Not merely destroyed — the very first cut of the Grid energies would have been enough to do that — but obliterated, taken carefully, precisely, artistically apart; annihilation made into an aesthetic experience. The arrogant grace of it, the absolute-zero coldness of that sophisticated viciousness… it impressed almost as much as it appalled. Even he would admit to a certain reluctant admiration.

The Culture had not wasted its lesson to the Idirans and the rest of the galactic community. It had turned even that ghastly waste of effort and skill into a thing of beauty… But it was a message it would regret, Horza thought, as the hyper-light sped and the ordinary light crawled through the galaxy.

This was what the Culture offered, this was its signal, its advertisement, its legacy: chaos from order, destruction from construction, death from life.

Vavatch would be more than its own monument; it would commemorate, too, the final, grisly manifestation of the Culture's lethal idealism, the overdue acknowledgement that not only was it no better than any other society, it was much, much worse.

They sought to take the unfairness out of existence, to remove the mistakes in the transmitted message of life which gave it any point or advancement (a memory of darkness swept through him, and he shivered)… But theirs was the ultimate mistake, the final error, and it would be their undoing.

Horza considered going to the bridge to switch the view on the screen to real space, and so see the Orbital intact again, as it had been a few weeks before when the real light the CAT was now travelling through had left the place. But he shook his head slowly, though there was nobody there to see, and watched the quiet screen at the far end of the disordered and deserted room instead.

State of play: two

The yacht dropped anchor within a wooded bay. The water was clear, and ten metres beneath the sparkling waves the sandy floor of the anchorage was visible. Tall everblues were spread in a rough crescent around the small inlet, their dusty-looking roots sometimes visible on the ochre sandstone they clung to. There were some small cliffs of the same rock, sprinkled with bright flowers and overlooking golden beaches. The white yacht, its long reflection flickering on the water like a silent flame, feathered its tall sails and swung slowly into the faint breeze coming through one arm of the woods and over the cupped bay.

People took small canoes or dinghies to the shore, or jumped into the warm water and swam. Some of the ceerevells, which had escorted the yacht on its voyage from its home port, stayed to play in the bay; their long red bodies slipped through the water under and around the vessel's hull, and their snorting breath echoed from the low cliffs facing the water. Sometimes they nudged the boats heading for the shore, and a few of the swimmers played with the sleek animals, diving to swim with them, touch them, hold onto them.

The shouts of the people in the boats drew gradually further away. They beached the small craft and disappeared into the woods, going to explore the uninhabited island. The small waves of the inland sea lapped at the disturbed sand.

Fal 'Ngeestra sighed and, after walking once around the yacht, sat down near the stem on a padded seat. She played absently with one of the ropes tied between the stanchions, rubbing it with her hand. The boy who had been talking to her during the morning, when the yacht was sailing slowly out from the mainland towards the islands, saw her sitting there, and came to talk to her.