Consider Phlebas

pretended to stay asleep.

'I know you're awake. Come on, now, it's time to get up.

He opened his eyes with a false weariness. Xoralundra was there, in a bright blue circular room with lots of large couches set into alcoves in the blue material. Above hung a white sky with black clouds. It was very bright in the room. He shielded his eyes and looked at the Idiran.

'What happened to the Command System?' he said, looking around the circular blue room.

'That dream is over now. You did well, passed with flying colours. The Academy and I are very pleased with you.

He couldn't help but feel pleased. A warm glow seemed to envelop him, and he couldn't stop a smile appearing on his face.

'Thanks,' he said. The Querl nodded.

'You did very well as Bora Horza Gobuchul,' Xoralundra said in his rumbling great voice. 'Now you should take some time off; go and play with Gierashell.

He was swinging his feet off the bed, getting ready to jump down to the floor, when Xoralundra said that. He smiled at the old Querl.

'Who?' he laughed.

'Your friend; Gierashell,' the Idiran said.

'You mean Kierachell,' he laughed, shaking his head; Xoralundra must be getting old!

'I mean Gierashell,' the Idiran insisted coldly, stepping back and looking at him strangely. 'Who is Kierachell?'

'You mean you don't know? But how could you get her name wrong?' he said, shaking his head again at the Querl's foolishness. Or was this still part of some test?

'Just a moment,' Xoralundra said. He looked at something in his hand which threw coloured lights across his broad, gleaming face. Then he slapped his other hand to his mouth, an expression of astonished surprise on his face as he turned to him and said, 'Oh! Sorry!' and suddenly reached over and shoved him back into the-

He sat upright. Something whined in his ear.

He sat back down again slowly, looking round in the grainy darkness to see if any of the others had noticed, but they were all still. He told the remote sensor alarm to switch off. The whine in his ear faded. Unaha-Closp's casing could be seen high on the far gantry.

Horza opened his visor and wiped some sweat from his nose and brows. The drone had no doubt seen him each time he woke up. He wondered what it was thinking now, what it thought of him. Could it see well enough to know that he was having nightmares? Could it see through his visor to his face, or sense the small twitches his body made while his brain constructed its own images from the debris of an his days? He could blank the visor out; he could set the suit to expand and lock rigid.

He thought about how he must look to it: a small, soft naked thing writhing in a hard cocoon, convulsed with illusions in its coma.

He decided to stay awake until the others started to rise.

The night passed, and the Free Company awoke to darkness and the labyrinth. The drone said nothing about seeing him wake up during the night, and he didn't ask it. He was falsely jolly and hearty, going round the others, laughing and slapping backs, telling them they'd get to station seven today and there they could turn on the lights and get the transit tubes working.

'Tell you what, Wubslin,' he said, grinning at the engineer as he rubbed his eyes, 'we'll see if we can't get one of those big trains working, just for the hell of it.'

'Well,' Wubslin yawned, 'if that's all right…'

'Why not?' Horza said, spreading his arms out. 'I think Mr Adequate's leaving us to it; he's turning a blind eye to this whole thing. We'll get one of those super-trains running, eh?'

Wubslin stretched, smiling and nodding. 'Well, yeah, sounds like a good idea to me.' Horza smiled widely, winked at Wubslin and went to release Balveda. It was like going to release a wild animal, he thought, as he shifted the empty cable drum he had used to block the door. He half expected to find Balveda gone, miraculously escaped from her bonds and disappeared from the room without opening the door; but when he looked in, there she was, lying calmly in her warm clothes, the harness making troughs in the fur of the jacket and still attached to the wall Horza had fixed it to.

'Good morning, Perosteck!' he said breezily.

'Horza,' the woman said grumpily, sitting slowly upright, flexing her shoulders and arching her neck, 'twenty years at my mother's side, more than I care to think of as a gay and dashing young blade indulging in all the pleasures the Culture has ever produced, one or two of maturity, seventeen in Contact and four in Special Circumstances have not made me pleasant to know or quick to wake in the mornings. You wouldn't have some water to drink, would you? I've slept too long, I wasn't comfortable, it's cold and dark, I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was like at the moment, and… I mentioned water a moment or two ago; did you hear? Or aren't I allowed any?'

'I'll get you some,' he said, going back to the door. He stopped there. 'You're right, by the way. You are pretty off-putting in the morning.'

Balveda shook her head in the darkness. She put one finger in her mouth and rubbed it around on one side, as though massaging her gums or cleaning her teeth, then she just sat with her head between her knees, staring at the jet-black nothing of the cold rock floor beneath her, wondering if this was the day she died.

They stood in a huge semi-circular alcove carved out of the rock and looking out over the dark space of station four's repair and maintenance area. The cavern was three hundred metres or more square, and from the bottom of the scooped gallery they stood on to the floor of the vast cave — littered with machinery and equipment — was a thirty-metre drop.

Great cradle-arms capable of lifting and holding an entire Command System train were suspended from the roof above, another thirty metres up in the gloom. In the mid-distance a suspended gantry lanced out over the cave, from a gallery on one side to the other, bisecting the cavern's dark bulk.

They were ready to move; Horza gave the order.

Wubslin and Neisin each headed down small side tubes towards the main Command System tunnel and the transit tubeway respectively, using AG. Once in the tunnels they would keep level with the main group. Horza switched on his own AG, rose about a metre from the floor and floated down a branch tunnel of the foot gallery, then started slowly forward, down into the darkness, towards station five, thirty kilometres away. The rest would follow him, also floating. Balveda shared the pallet with the equipment.

He smiled when Balveda sat down on the pallet; she suddenly reminded him of Fwi-Song sitting on his heavy-duty litter, in the space and sunlight of a place now gone. The comparison struck him as wonderfully absurd.

Horza floated along the foot tunnel, stopping to check the side tubes as they appeared and contacting the others whenever he did so. His suit senses were turned as high as they would go; any light, the slightest noise, an alteration in the air flow, even vibrations in the rock around him: all were catered for. Unusual smells would register, too, as would power flowing through the cables buried in the tunnel walls and any sort of broadcast communication.

He'd thought about signalling the Idirans as they went along, but decided not to. He had sent one short signal from station four, without receiving a reply, but to send more on the way would be to give too much away if (as he suspected) the Idirans were not in a mood to listen.

He moved through the darkness as though sitting on an invisible seat, the CREWS cradled in his arms. He heard his heartbeat, his breathing and the quiet slipstreaming of the cold, half-stale air around his suit. The suit registered vague background radiation from the surrounding granite, punctuated by intermittent cosmic rays. On the faceplate of the suit's helmet, he watched a ghostly radar image of the tunnels as they unwound through the rock.