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Balveda was laughing quietly. Horza could see some tears in her eyes. The
others just looked confused. The drone said:
'Well, Mr Observant there is probably the only person on this mobile asylum
with an untroubled mind at the moment.' The machine turned on the table,
scratching the surface as it faced Horza.
'Are you really claiming to be one of these fabled human impersonators?' it
asked with a sneer in its voice.
Horza looked down the table, then into Yalson's wary, frowning eyes. 'That's
what I am.'
'They're extinct,' Aviger said, shaking his head.
'They're not extinct,' Balveda told him, her thin, finely moulded head turning
briefly to the old man. 'But they're part of the Idiran sphere now; absorbed.
Some of them always did support the
Idirans, the rest either left or decided they might as well throw in their lot
with them. Horza's one of the first lot. Can't stand the Culture. He's taking
you all to Schar's World to kidnap a shipwrecked Mind for his Idiran masters.
A Culture Mind. So that the galaxy will be free from human interference and
the Idirans can have a free run at - '
'All right, Balveda,' Horza said. She shrugged.
'You're Horza,' Yalson said, pointing at him. He nodded. She shook her head.
'I don't believe
file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20Consider%20Phelbas.txt (115 of
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file:///F|/rah/Iain%20Banks/Banks,%20Iain%20-%20Consider%20Phelbas.txt it. I'm
starting to come round to the drone's way of thinking; you're both crazy. You
took a nasty blow to the head, Kraiklyn, and you, lady' - she looked at
Balveda - 'have had your brains scrambled by this thing.' Yalson picked up the
stun gun and then put it down again.
'I don't know,' Wubslin said, scratching his head and looking at Horza as
though he was some sort of exhibit. 'I thought the captain seemed a bit
strange. I couldn't imagine him doing what he just did in the GSV.'
'What did you do, Horza?' Balveda said. 'I seem to have missed something. How
did you get away?'
'I flew out, Balveda. Used the fusion motors and the laser and blasted out.'
'Really?' Balveda laughed again, throwing her head back. She went on laughing,
but her laughter was a little too loud, and the tears were coming too quickly
to her eyes. 'Ho ho. Well, I
am impressed. I thought we had you.'
'When did you find out?' he asked her quietly. She sniffed and tried to wipe
her nose on her shoulder.
'What? That you weren't Kraiklyn?' She played her tongue along her top lip.
'Oh, just before you came aboard. We had a microdrone pretending to be a fly.
It was programmed to land on anybody approaching the ship while it was in the
Smallbay and take a skin cell or hair or something away with it. We identified
you from your own chromosomes. There was another agent outside; he must have
used his effector on the bay controls when he monitored you starting to get
ready to leave. I
was supposed to . . . do whatever I could if you appeared. Kill you, capture
you, disable the ship: anything. But they didn't tell me until too late. They
knew somebody might overhear if they warned me, but they must have started to
get worried.'
'That was the noise you heard from her kitbag,' Horza told Yalson, 'just
before I zapped her.'
He looked back at Balveda. 'I got rid of the gear, by the way, Balveda. Dumped
it all through the vactubes. Your bomb went off.'
Balveda seemed to sag a little further in her seat. He guessed that she had
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been hoping her gear was on board. At the very least she might have been
hoping the bomb had still to be triggered and that, while she would die, she
would not die in vain, or alone.
'Oh yes,' she said, looking down at the table, 'the vactubes.'
'What about Kraiklyn?' Yalson asked.
'He's dead,' Horza said. 'I killed him.'
'Oh well,' Yalson tutted, and rapped her fingers on the table surface. 'That's
that. I don't know if you two really are mad or if you're telling the truth;
both possibilities are pretty awful.' She looked from Balveda to Horza,
raising her eyebrows at the man and saying, 'By the way, if you really are
Horza, it's a lot less pleasant to see you back than I thought it was going to
be.'
'I'm sorry,' he told her. She turned her head away from him.
'I still think the best thing to do is to head back for The Ends of Invention
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