Instead, old territory mostly, accepted facts, the already known.
A certain self-disgust at being human, an understanding of the Idirans’ proud disdain for her kind, a reaffirmation that at least one thing was its own meaning, and a probably wrong, probably over-sympathetic glimpse into the character of a man she had never met and never would meet, who was separated from her by most of a galaxy and all of a morality.
Little enough to bring down from the frozen peak.
She sighed. The wind blew, and she watched clouds mass far along the high range. She would have to start down now if she was going to beat the storm. It would seem like cheating not to get back down under her own steam, and Jase would scold her if conditions got so bad she had to send for a flyer to pick her up.
Fal ’Ngeestra stood. The pain in her leg came back, signals from her weak point. She paused for a moment, reassessing the state of that mending bone, and then — deciding it would hold up — started the descent towards the unfrozen world below.
11. The Command System: Stations
He was being shaken gently.
“Wake up, now. Come on, wake up. Come on, now, up you get…”
He recognised the voice as Xoralundra’s. The old Idiran was trying to get him to wake up. He 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 all 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.