~ I did not say that I am speaking on behalf of Special Circumstances.
~ Are you denying that you are?
~ Not as such, but –
~ So stop fucking around. Who the hell else is going to start hauling a gifted and highly effective ambassador off – ?
~ Genar-Hofoen, we are wasting time here.
~ We?, Genar-Hofoen thought, watching the two scratchounds launch themselves at each other slowly. ~ Never mind. Go on.
~ The task required of you is, apparently, a delicate one, which is why I personally regard you as being utterly unsuited to it, and as such it would be foolish to entrust the full details either to myself, to your module, your suit or indeed to you until all these details are required.
~ There you are; that’s exactly what you can shove; all that SC need-to-know crap. I don’t care how fucking delicate the task is, I’m not even going to consider it until I know what’s involved.
The scratchounds were in mid-pounce now, both of them twisting as they leapt. Shit, thought Genar-Hofoen; this might be one of those scratchound bouts where the whole thing was decided on the initial lunge, depending entirely on which beast got its teeth into the neck of the other first.
~ What is required, said the message, with a fair approximation of the way the Death And Gravity had always sounded when it was exasperated, is eighty days of your time, ninety-nine to ninety-nine point nine-plus percent of which you will spend doing nothing more onerous or demanding than being carried from point A to point B; the first part of your journey will be spent travelling, in considerable comfort, I imagine, aboard the Affronter ship which we will ask (or rather pay, probably) them to put at your disposal, the second part will be spent in guaranteed comfort aboard a Culture GCU and will be followed by a short visit aboard another Culture vessel whereupon the task we would ask of you will actually be accomplished – and when I say a short visit, I mean that it may be possible for you to carry out what is required of you within an hour, and that certainly the assignment should take no longer than a day. Then you will make the return journey to take up wherever you left off with our dear friends and allies the Affront. I take it all that doesn’t sound too much like hard work, does it?
The scratchounds were meeting in the air a metre above the centre of the bait-pit, their jaws aimed as best they could at each other’s throats. It was still a little hard to tell, but Genar-Hofoen didn’t think it was looking too good for Fivetide’s animal.
~ Yeah yeah yeah, well I’ve heard all this sort of thing before, D and G. What’s in it for me? Why the hell should I-? Oh, fuck…
~ What? said the Death And Gravity’s message.
But Genar-Hofoen’s attention was elsewhere.
The two scratchounds met and locked, falling to the floor of the bait-pit in a tangle of slowly thrashing limbs. The blue-collared animal had its jaws clamped around the throat of the red-collared one. Most of the Affronters were starting to cheer. Fivetide and his supporters were screaming.
Shit.
~ Suit? Genar-Hofoen thought.
~ What is it? said the gelfield. ~ I thought you were talking to-?
~ Never mind that now. See that blue scratchound?
~ Can’t take my or your eyes off the damn thing.
~ Effectorise the fucker; get it off the other one.
~ I can’t do that! That would be cheating!
~ Fivetide’s arse is hanging way out the merry-go-round on this, suit. Do it now or take personal responsibility for a major diplomatic incident. Up to you.
~ What? But-!
~ Effectorise it now, suit. Come on; I know that last upgrade let you sneak it under their monitors. Oh! Look at that. Ow! Can’t you just feel those prosthetics round your neck? Fivetide must be kissing his diplomatic career goodbye right now; probably already working out a way to challenge me to a duel. After that, doesn’t really matter if I kill him or he kills me; probably come to war between-
~ All right! All right! There!
There was a buzzing sensation on top of Genar-Hofoen’s right shoulder. The red scratchound jerked, the blue one doubled up around its midriff and loosened its grip. The red-collared beast wriggled out from underneath the other and, twisting, turned on the other beast and immediately reversed the situation, fastening its prosthetic jaws around the throat of the blue-collared animal. At Genar-Hofoen’s side, still in slow motion, Fivetide was starting to rise into the air.
~ Right, D and G, what were you saying?
~ What was the delay? What were you doing?
~ Never mind. Like you said, time’s a wasting. Get on with it.
~ I assume it is reward you seek. What do you want?
~ Golly, let me think. Can I have my own ship?
~ I understand that to be negotiable.
~ I’ll bet.
~ You may have whatever you want. There. Will that do?
~ Oh, of course.
~ Genar-Hofoen, please. I beg you; say you will do this thing.
~ D and G, you’re begging me? Genar-Hofoen asked with a laugh in his thought, as the blue-collared scratchound writhed hopelessly in the other beast’s jaws and Fivetide started to turn to him.
~ Yes, I am! Now will you agree? Time is of the essence!
From the corner of one eye, Genar-Hofoen watched one of Fivetide’s limbs begin to flip towards him. He readied his slow-reacting body for the blow.
~ I’ll think about it.
~ But-!
~ Quit that signal, suit. Tell the module not to wait up. Now, suit – command instruction: take yourself off-line until I call on you.
Genar-Hofoen halted the effects of the quicken. He smiled and sighed a happy sigh as Fivetide’s celebratory blow landed with a teeth-rattling thud on his back and the Culture lost a thousand suckers. Could be a fun evening.
IV
The horror came for the commandant again that night, in the grey area that was the half-light from a full moon. It was worse this time.
In the dream, he rose from his camp bed in the pale light of dawn. Down the valley, the chimneys above the charnel wagons belched dark smoke. Nothing else in the camp was moving. He walked between the silent tents and under the guard towers to the funicular, which took him up through the forests to the glaciers.
The light was blinding white and the cold, thin air rasped the back of his throat. The wind buffeted him, raising veils of snow and ice that shifted across the fractured surface of the great river of ice, contained between the jagged banks of the rock-black and snow-white mountains.
The commandant looked around. They were quarrying the deep western face now; it was the first time he had seen this latest site. The face itself lay inside a great bowl they had blasted in the glacier; men, machines and drag-lines moved like insects in the bottom of the vast cup of shining ice. The face was pure white except for a speckling of black dots which from this distance appeared just like boulders. It looked dangerously steep, he thought, but cutting it at a shallower angle would have taken longer, and they were forever being hurried along by headquarters…
At the top of the inclined ramp where the drag lines released their hooked cargoes, a train waited, smoke drifting blackly across the blindingly white landscape. Guards stamped their feet, engineers stood in animated discussion by the winch engine and a caravan shack disgorged another shift of stackers fresh from a break. A sledge full of face-workers was being lowered down the huge gash in the ice; he could make out the sullen, pinched faces of the men, bundled in uniforms and clothes that were little better than rags.
There was a rumble, and a vibration beneath his feet.
He looked round to the ice face again to see the entire eastern half of it crumbling away, collapsing and falling with majestic slowness in billowing clouds of whiteness onto the tiny black dots of the workers and guards below. He watched the little figures turn and run from the rushing avalanche of ice as it pressed down through the air and along the surface towards them.
A few made it. Most did not, disappearing under the huge white wave, rubbed out amongst that chalky, glittering turmoil. The noise was a roar so deep he felt it in his chest.
He ran along the lip of the face-cut to the top of the inclined plane; everybody was shouting and running around. The entire bottom of the bowl was filling with the white mist of the kicked-up snow and pulverised ice, obscuring the still-running survivors just as the ice-fall itself had those it had buried.