Consider Phlebas

And they reached together into his skull and took his name.

So he screamed.

'Horza!' Yalson shook his head, bouncing it off the bulkhead at the top of the small bed. He spluttered awake, the whimper dying on his lips, his body tense for an instant, then soft.

He put his hands out and touched the woman's furred skin. She put her hands behind his head and hugged him to her breast. He said nothing, but his heart slowed to the pace of hers. She rocked his body gently with her own, then pushed his head away, bent and kissed his lips.

'I'm all right now,' he told her. 'Just a nightmare.'

'What was it?'

'Nothing,' he said. He put his head back to her chest, nestling it between her breasts like a huge, delicate egg.

Horza had his suit on. Wubslin was in his usual seat. Yalson occupied the co-pilot's chair. They were all suited up. Schar's World filled the screen in front of them, the belly sensors of the CAT staring straight down at the sphere of white and grey beneath and magnifying it.

'One more time,' Horza said. Wubslin transmitted the recorded message for the third time.

'Maybe they don't use that code any more,' Yalson said. She watched the screen with her sharp-browed eyes. She had cropped her hair back to about a centimetre over her skull, hardly thicker than the down which covered her body. The menacing effect jarred with the smallness of her head sticking out from the large neck of the suit.

'It's traditional; more of a ceremonial language than a code,' Horza said. 'They'll know it if they hear it.'

'You're sure we're beaming it at the right place?'

'Yes,' Horza said, trying to remain calm. They had been in orbit for less than half an hour, stationary above the continent which held the buried tunnels of the Command System. Almost the whole of the planet was covered in snow. Ice locked the thousand-kilometre peninsula where the tunnel system lay fast into the sea itself. Schar's World had entered another of its periodic ice ages seven thousand years previously, and only in a relatively thin band around the equator — between the slightly wobbling planet's tropics — was there open ocean. It showed as a steely grey belt around the world, occasionally visible through whorls of storm clouds.

They were twenty-five thousand kilometres out from the planet's snow-crusted surface, their communicator beaming down onto a circular area a few tens of kilometres in diameter at a point midway between the two frozen arms of sea which gave the peninsula a slight waist. That was where the entrance to the tunnels lay; that was where the Changers lived. Horza knew he hadn't made a mistake, but there was no answer.

There is death here, he kept thinking. A little of the planet's chill seemed to creep along his bones.

'Nothing,' Wubslin said.

'Right,' Horza said, taking the manual controls into his gloved hands. 'We're going in.'

The Clear Air Turbulence teased its warp fields out along the slight curve of the planet's gravity well, carefully edging itself down the slope. Horza cut the motors and let them return to their emergency-ready-only mode. They shouldn't need them now, and would soon be unable to use them as the gravity gradient increased.

The CAT fell with gradually increasing speed towards the planet, fusion motors at the ready. Horza watched displays on the screens until he was satisfied they were on course; then, with the planet seeming to turn a little beneath the craft, he unstrapped and went back to the mess.

Aviger, Neisin and Dorolow sat in their suits, strapped into the mess-room seats. Perosteck Balveda was also strapped in; she wore a thick jacket and matching trousers. Her head was exposed above the soft ruff of a white shirt. The bulky fabric jacket was fastened up to her throat. She had warm boots on, and a pair of hide gloves lay on the table in front of her. The jacket even had a little hood, which hung down her back. Horza wasn't sure whether Balveda had chosen this soft, useless image of a space suit to make a point to him, or unconsciously, out of fear and a need for security.

Unaha-Closp sat in a chair, strapped against its back, pointing straight up at the ceiling. 'I trust', it said, 'we're not going to have the same sort of flying-circus job we had to endure the last time you flew this heap of debris.' Horza ignored it.

'We haven't had any word from Mr Adequate, so it looks like we're all going down,' he said. 'When we get there, I'll go in by myself to check things out. When I come back, we'll decide what we're going to do.'

'That is, you'll decide-' began the drone.

'What if you don't come back?' Aviger said. The drone made a hissing noise but went quiet. Horza looked at the toy-like figure of the old man in his suit.

'I'll come back, Aviger,' he said. 'I'm sure everybody at the base will be fine. I'll get them to heat up some food for us.' He smiled, but knew it wasn't especially convincing. 'Anyway,' he went on, 'in the unlikely event there is anything wrong, I'll come straight back.'

'Well, this ship's our only way off the planet; remember that, Horza,' Aviger said. His eyes looked frightened. Dorolow touched him on the arm of his suit.

'Trust in God,' Dorolow said. 'We'll be all right.' She looked at Horza. 'Won't we, Horza?'

Horza nodded. 'Yes. We'll be all right. We'll all be just fine.' He turned and went back to the bridge.

They stood in the high mountain snows, watching the midsummer sun sink in its own red seas of air and cloud. A cold wind blew her hair across her face, auburn over white, and he raised a hand, without thinking, to sweep it away again. She turned to him, her head nestling into his cupped hand, a small smile on her face.

'So much for midsummer's day,' she said. The day had been fair, still well below freezing, but mild enough for them to take their gloves off and push their hoods back. The nape of her neck was warm against his palm, and the lustrous, heavy hair brushed over the back of his hand as she looked up at him, skin white as snow, white as bone. 'That look, again,' she said softly.

'What look?' he said, defensively, knowing.

'The far-away one,' she said, taking his hand and bringing it to her mouth, kissing it, stroking it as though it was a small, defenceless animal.

'Well, that's just what you call it.'

She looked away from him, towards the livid red ball of the sun, lowering behind the distant range. 'That's what I see,' she told him. 'I know your looks by now. I know them all, and what they mean.'

He felt a twinge of anger at being thought so obvious, but knew that she was right, at least partly. What she did not know about him was only what he did not know about himself (but that, he told himself, was quite a lot still). Perhaps she even knew him better than he did himself.

'I'm not responsible for my looks,' he said after a moment, to make a joke of it. 'They surprise me, too, sometimes.'

'And what you do?' she said, the sunset's glow rubbing false colour into her pale, thin face. 'Will you surprise yourself when you leave here?'

'Why do you always assume I'm going to leave?' he said, annoyed, stuffing his hands into the thick jacket's pockets and staring at the hemisphere of disappearing star. 'I keep telling you, I'm happy here.'

'Yes,' she said. 'You keep telling me.'

'Why should I want to leave?'

She shrugged, slipped one arm through his, put her head to his shoulder. 'Bright lights, big crowds, interesting times; other people.'

'I'm happy here with you,' he told her, and put his arm round her shoulders. Even in the bulky quilting of the jacket, she seemed slim, almost fragile.

She said nothing for a moment, then, in quite a different tone: '… And so you should be.' She turned to face him, smiling. 'Now kiss me.'

He kissed her, hugged her. Looking down over her shoulder, he saw something small and red move on the trampled snow near her feet.

'Look!' he said, breaking away, stooping. She squatted beside him, and together they watched the tiny, stick- like insect crawl slowly, laboriously, over the surface of the snow: one more living, moving thing on the blank face of the world. 'That's the first one I've seen,' he told her.