Consider Phlebas
Chapters - Iain M. Banks
Prologue
A Culture warship, hastily assembled by a doomed factory craft from cannibalised components and built around a single, vastly powerful new Mind, flees into hyperspace before the factory vessel destructs. Unfinished and crewed only by construction drones, it weaves across the galactic strand towards the Sullen Gulf, where on the edge of the empty space between two arms it is caught by a passing Idiran fleet. Outnumbered and outgunned, it destroys itself, scattering its warheads in a coded annihilation pattern that broadcasts its fate to anyone watching the unreal light. Within fractions of a second, the Mind threads an impossible escape: it warps below the surface of a nearby planet in hyperspace and shelters in the granite-buried Command System tunnels of Schar's World, one of the forbidden Planets of the Dead, guarded by the Dra'Azon. The Idirans, denied any chance of simply attacking or landing on a Dra'Azon world, can only register the loss and prepare a more delicate retrieval. The escape is brilliant, but the Mind is now alone, damaged, and stranded inside a sealed monument to a long-extinct civilisation.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Perosteck Balveda·Mentioned: Xoralundra
Chapter 1: Sorpen
In a stinking sewer cell deep beneath the palace of the Gerontocracy of Sorpen, the Changer Bora Horza Gobuchul hangs manacled to the wall as filth and waste pumped from the kitchens above slowly fills the chamber. He has been exposed and condemned for impersonating the Outworld minister Egratin on behalf of the Idirans. His Changing trance is too slow to free him in time, and as the foul liquid rises to his nose he prepares to drown. The security minister Amahain-Frolk visits with the Culture agent Perosteck Balveda, who had first uncovered him; the old Gerontocrat gloats, Balveda pleads quietly for his life and is refused, and she takes her formal leave with what sounds to Horza like genuine regret. Horza taunts Frolk about the Culture's reliance on its machines, then is left to die. Just as his lungs are about to give out, the cell wall is blasted apart by an Idiran assault team led by a three-metre warrior with a plasma cannon; an Idiran gun-platform looms beyond. The battle for Sorpen is still raging as Horza, half-drowned and broken-wristed, is cut down and carried into the rescue shuttle.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Perosteck Balveda, Amahain-Frolk
Chapter 2: The Hand of God 137
Aboard the Idiran light cruiser The Hand of God 137, Bora Horza Gobuchul recovers and meets the Querl Xoralundra, who reveals that a Culture Mind has escaped to Schar's World and the Idirans need Horza, a former sentinel there, to retrieve it. The captured Culture agent Perosteck Balveda is brought aboard. Horza visits her in her cell, and they debate the morality of the war before the ship comes under attack from a Culture GCU that had been hiding in the system's sun. Xoralundra orders Balveda killed and ejects Horza into space in a suit with a warp unit. Horza drifts alone until his suit detects an incoming craft.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Xoralundra, Perosteck Balveda
Chapter 3: Clear Air Turbulence
Bora Horza Gobuchul is captured by the Clear Air Turbulence, a mercenary Free Company ship captained by Kraiklyn. Stripped of his suit, Horza is forced to fight the crew member Zallin to the death for a place on the ship. Despite his weakened, aged appearance, Horza wins the fight and breaks Zallin's neck when Kraiklyn insists on a lethal outcome. The crew member Yalson, who bet on Horza, helps him up and introduces herself. Zallin's body is ejected into space as the CAT resumes its journey.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Kraiklyn, Yalson, Wubslin, Zallin·Mentioned: Perosteck Balveda
Source: Conside Phlebas
Chapter 4: Temple of Light
The Clear Air Turbulence raids the Temple of Light on the stage-three planet Marjoin, a job Kraiklyn has pitched as "easy in, easy out" against unarmed monks. The shuttle drops the Free Company into jungle near the temple under sniper fire, and the assault begins well enough until they push inside the great hall. Only there does Horza realise the temple's interior is built of mossy-covered crystal: laser fire vaporises the moss and then mirror-bounces off the polished blocks back at the firers. In the resulting chaos, lit by their own ricocheting beams, much of the Company is killed or blinded - Rava Gamdol and Tzbalik Odraye die in the hall, kee-Alsorofus is laser-burned in a side corridor, and Gow, finding her partner dead, shoots herself in the head on the wall-walk. All three Bratsilakins fail to answer when the channel clears. Dorolow is temporarily blinded, Lenipobra rescues her, and Kraiklyn orders the retreat. They learn afterwards that the temple is a front-line fortification in a local sectarian war, hence the laserproofing. That night, in the cabin that had been Gow and kee-Alsorofus's, Yalson comes to Horza for the first time.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Yalson, Kraiklyn, Dorolow, Aviger, Wubslin, Lamm, Neisin, Jandraligeli, Mipp, Lenipobra, Gow, kee-Alsorofus, Rava Gamdol, Tzbalik Odraye, The Bratsilakins
Source: Conside Phlebas
Section 1: One
On a Culture Orbital, the Referer Fal 'Ngeestra sits on a terrace with her broken leg, attended by the ancient drone Jase. Jase briefs her on the escaped Culture Mind now sheltering in Schar's World's Command System tunnels, and the Changer Bora Horza Gobuchul who once served there and may be sent by the Idirans to retrieve it. Fal analyses the problem with her extraordinary intuitive abilities, recognising the difficulty of the situation given the Dra'Azon's protection of the planet, and asks for more information about the region around the Sullen Gulf.
POV: Fal 'Ngeestra·On page: Jase·Mentioned: Bora Horza Gobuchul, Perosteck Balveda, Xoralundra
Source: Conside Phlebas
Chapter 5: Megaship
The CAT arrives at the vast Vavatch Orbital, a fourteen-million-kilometre hoop the Culture is about to destroy with gridfire and CAM bombardment to stop the Idirans from seizing it. On the journey from Marjoin, Yalson tells Horza in bed that Kraiklyn's real reason for the Vavatch detour is a major Damage game in Evanauth; Horza has also been quietly Changing himself to match Kraiklyn's face. Kraiklyn announces a salvage job on the Megaship Olmedreca, a four-kilometre ocean liner crippled by a stray nuke and now drifting through fog towards the Edgewall, supposedly for its forgotten bow lasers. The young medic Lenipobra dies the moment they land: forgetting that anti-gravity does not work against an Orbital's spin gravity, he vaults a parapet and falls five decks to the lower promenade. Worse follows when the Olmedreca, with no working radar, rams a vast tabular iceberg hidden in the cloud bank; the Company is scattered as the kilometres of ship behind them concertina forwards in a thundering wall of compacted wreckage. Mipp panics, lifts the shuttle and saves Horza but refuses to go back for the others; Lamm, abandoned and screaming, sets off the nuke he had carried in his suit. The shock wave hurls Horza aboard the damaged shuttle, which limps away over the Circlesea with a dying Mipp at the controls.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Yalson, Kraiklyn, Lamm, Wubslin, Aviger, Dorolow, Neisin, Jandraligeli, Mipp, Lenipobra
Source: Conside Phlebas
Chapter 6: The Eaters
After Mipp dies on impact and the shuttle ditches in the Circlesea, Horza swims to a tiny atoll inhabited by the Eaters, a starving cargo-cult led by the gross, golden-skinned prophet Fwi-Song. The cult worships entropy and consumption of waste, and lives off scraps of putrid offal while awaiting the Orbital's destruction; their pickup is a Culture shuttle sent to evacuate volunteers. Horza is staked out by the fire as Fwi-Song's chosen "gift from the sea". He witnesses the prophet's brutal ritual butchery of a dissident disciple, Twenty-Seventh, who is eaten alive by Fwi-Song with sets of changeable metal teeth and finally suffocated under his bulk. The next day, with his wrists slowly weakened by acid-sweat, Horza waits until Fwi-Song bites off one of his fingers and pulls the prophet down with venom secreted from his teeth glands; he then spits venom into Mr First's eyes. Fwi-Song chokes and topples, crushing Mr First beneath him. Horza, free, walks into the Culture shuttle, tricks its naive AI into believing it is on fire, and shoots the brain out with his projectile pistol. He patches into the Orbital navigation network, learns the Olmedreca has been abandoned with no sign of his former crew, and sets course for Evanauth and the Damage game.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Mipp, Fwi-Song, Mr First·Mentioned: Yalson
Source: Conside Phlebas
Section 1: Interlude: Interlude in darkness
The escaped Culture Mind waits in the dark tunnels of Schar's World's Command System, running on reduced backup systems with its primary memory frozen to prevent decay. It contemplates its diminished state, explores the crude ancient technology of the tunnels, and formulates contingency plans to arm itself and hide if threatened. The Mind reflects on its brilliant escape from the doomed warship and worries about whether the Idirans will send the Changer who once served on the planet to capture it.
Mentioned: Bora Horza Gobuchul
Source: Conside Phlebas
Chapter 7: A Game of Damage
Bora Horza Gobuchul, now Changed to look like Kraiklyn, arrives at the doomed Vavatch Orbital's capital Evanauth to attend a Damage game where the real Kraiklyn is playing. He watches the elaborate, high-stakes card game that uses emotional manipulation fields, observing the famous Players including Ghalssel, Tengayet Doy-Suut, and the grotesque Wilgre. A reporter named Sarble the Eye is caught trying to infiltrate the game. Horza tracks and eventually confronts the real Kraiklyn, killing him in a brutal fight beneath passing hovercraft in the docks. He takes Kraiklyn's identity ring and fingerprints, then boards The Ends of Invention, a massive demilitarised Culture GSV, to reach the CAT.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Kraiklyn·Mentioned: Perosteck Balveda
Chapter 8: The Ends of Invention
Bora Horza Gobuchul-as-Kraiklyn boards the CAT and discovers that a new recruit, 'Gravant', is actually the Culture agent Perosteck Balveda in disguise. When the Culture tries to trap the ship by evacuating the Smallbay's air, Horza stuns Balveda and makes a desperate escape by blasting through the GSV's internal walls with fusion motors and lasers, crashing through multiple bays, a flooded section, and finally out into space. After evading port police, they watch the Culture destroy Vavatch Orbital with gridfire and CAM bombardment. Horza reveals his true identity to the crew, explaining his mission to Schar's World. The surviving crew - Yalson, Aviger, Wubslin, Dorolow, Neisin, and the drone Unaha-Closp - reluctantly accept the situation.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Yalson, Perosteck Balveda, Wubslin, Aviger, Dorolow, Neisin, Unaha-Closp·Mentioned: Kraiklyn
Section 2: Two
On a yacht cruise out from the mainland, Fal 'Ngeestra sits on the stern deck and is pestered by a thin, golden-skinned young man recently rejected from Contact, who needles her about the Culture's lack of will to fight and insists the Idirans will win because they are natural warriors. Fal, distracted and depressed, has just heard from Jase about the events at Vavatch: her hunch about the Changer and Kraiklyn proved correct, but Perosteck Balveda has been captured and carried off aboard the Clear Air Turbulence. The success of her prediction tastes only of guilt - she had argued that Balveda should be the one sent in, and now thinks Horza will almost certainly have recognised her. The young man's smug talk of the Culture "running away" cuts too close and she walks off in tears. She climbs to the wheelhouse roof and stares out across the inland sea at a distant ridge of white shimmering in the haze, unable to tell whether it is snowy mountains or only cloud, and thinks of a small frozen disc of yellow-white foam she had once found caught in a peaty pool below a moorland rapid - a tiny spiral, like a model galaxy, that she had held in her hands and then set back to melt. She wonders whether such small and vast forms are shaped by the same forces.
POV: Fal 'Ngeestra·On page: Jase·Mentioned: Perosteck Balveda, Bora Horza Gobuchul, Kraiklyn
Chapter 9: Schar's World
During the twenty-one day journey to Schar's World, Bora Horza Gobuchul gradually Changes back towards his true appearance, gives briefings about the mission, and reconciles with Yalson, who comes to his cabin one night. Perosteck Balveda is kept as a well-behaved prisoner. Two Culture ROUs stage a fake battle near the system to try to lure the CAT off course with false messages. Horza ignores the bait. At the Quiet Barrier, the Dra'Azon guardian communicates with them, warning of death, but grants entry. The CAT lands on Schar's World to find the Changer base destroyed and the caretakers dead, with signs of Idiran involvement.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Yalson, Perosteck Balveda, Wubslin, Aviger, Dorolow, Neisin, Unaha-Closp·Mentioned: Xoralundra
Chapter 10: The Command System: Batholith
The Clear Air Turbulence lands on the snowfields above the Command System and the Free Company finds the Changer base raided: the caretakers, including Horza's old lover Kierachell, lie frozen and dead, killed by Idirans who came through the Quiet Barrier inside a damaged chuy-hirtsi warp animal. Horza covers the bodies and briefs the crew on the layout - nine stations and eight trains in a paired loop of twenty-two-metre tunnels five kilometres down in granite, accessible from the surface only via lift shafts and a transit-tube spiral. At the shaft head a single surviving medjel ambushes them with a laser; Horza shoots it and it falls screaming down the kilometres-deep lift shaft. They descend on suit AG to station four with Balveda restrained on the equipment pallet carried by the drone Unaha-Closp. In the station's switching room Horza finds the burnt-out cable run that tells him the Idirans tried and failed to bring the power up; they will have to push on through dark tunnels to station seven before the System can be reactivated. Wubslin rigs the ship's mass sensor into a portable unit. The reactor trace from a deeper service level shows on the screen but no Mind, and the group beds down for the night while Horza, troubled by guilt over Kierachell, watches the dark.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Yalson, Perosteck Balveda, Wubslin, Aviger, Dorolow, Neisin, Unaha-Closp, Kierachell Zorant
Section 3: Three
Fal 'Ngeestra, her leg almost healed, climbs to the summit of a mountain ridge alone, refusing the flyer Jase had suggested. She seats herself in the snow at the top, calls up her genofixed trance with a quiet internal chant, and the world inverts: the hills become rolling brown-and-green waves, the peaks vibrate as sources of light and sound, and she feels herself as the nucleus of the landscape. She thinks her way through the layered contempts of the war - the Culture's quiet disdain for primitives, the Idirans' near-immortal scorn for the swarming, self-altering, machine-worshipping humans - and tries to understand the Changer Bora Horza Gobuchul as a creature shaped by some long-forgotten war, a weapon no longer needed by anyone. Frightened at last by the trance, she grips the snow and remembers the frozen circle of foam she once held by a moorland rapid, and finds in that small spiral of bubbles her answer: we are what we are taken as being, patterns of nothing arranged as well as we can manage. Sweat starts to freeze on her brow; she comes out of the trance, finds little practical use in what she has seen, and starts down the mountain ahead of a gathering storm.
POV: Fal 'Ngeestra·On page: Jase
Chapter 11: The Command System: Stations
At station five the group finds four dead medjel laid out under Idiran religious symbols, killed in a fight with a crude wheeled gun-cart the Mind had improvised in a workshop. Following the Idirans' tracks to station six, they find a Command System train standing in the cavern and what appears to be the Mind floating beside it - Horza tries to hail the Idirans by suit PA and is met instantly with plasma fire that destroys his helmet's electronics and almost kills him. In the firefight that follows, Dorolow is hit on the platform and bleeds out inside her suit; Neisin's projectile rifle barrelcrashes when the shells start detonating in the muzzle, killing him with his own gun, an outcome Balveda recognises in time to scream a warning Yalson cannot understand. One of the two Idirans, Quayanorl, is shot to pieces and falls burning over the access ramp, leg snapped off and apparently dead. The other, the section leader Xoxarle, is pinned alive under the collapsed gantry; Horza captures and binds him, intending to take him back to the Fleet for court-martial. The floating Mind turns out to be a holographic decoy generated by a small remote drone hidden by the train - the real Mind is still loose somewhere in the System. Aviger, bitter, kicks Quayanorl's corpse and later puts laser shots through its head at Horza's order. Yalson tells Horza in private that she is pregnant by him.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Yalson, Perosteck Balveda, Wubslin, Aviger, Dorolow, Neisin, Unaha-Closp, Xoxarle, Quayanorl
Chapter 12: The Command System: Engines
On the long walk from station six to station seven, Xoxarle - hobbled and bound - feigns internal collapse, falls in the tunnel, and the moment they prop him upright to pour Balveda's improvised anti-coagulant down his throat he explodes into action. He snaps the wires on his arms, smashes the portable mass sensor on the pallet with one fist and lunges for Wubslin's laser; only Unaha-Closp ramming him in the jaw stops the section leader from gunning down the survivors. Re-tied, Xoxarle laughs and recites old Idiran conquests. They reach station seven, where Horza throws the master switch and the Command System wakes - lights, fans, the train itself coming alive. While Wubslin obsessively explores the train's footplate and Aviger is left to guard the Idiran, the badly broken Quayanorl - alive after all on the shot-up ramp in station six - drags himself, one arm and one eye, through the wreckage of his own train and into its control deck. There, dying, he works out the unfamiliar controls, releases the door fail-safes and pushes the power lever to maximum, sending the train accelerating down the long final tunnel toward station seven, where the power-monitoring screen has just registered the massive energy drain.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Yalson, Perosteck Balveda, Wubslin, Aviger, Unaha-Closp, Xoxarle, Quayanorl
Chapter 13: The Command System: Terminus
Quayanorl's runaway train comes howling up the final straight just as the trapped Mind, which had been hiding inside the reactor car of the station-seven train, finally reveals itself - Unaha-Closp punches its way in, a hatch blows out and a silvery ellipsoid floats free into the station. Xoxarle, free at last, kills Aviger by crushing his skull and opens fire down the platform from a side tunnel; his lasers rake the access ramp and bring down the Mind, then catch Yalson in mid-air as she leaps clear on damaged AG and tear her apart against the station wall. Wubslin refuses to leave the controls, trying to nudge the station-seven train out into the side tunnel to save it; his train has barely cleared the gantries when Quayanorl's racing locomotive arrives at over a hundred and ninety kilometres per hour and shovels both trains into a churning wad of wreckage that crushes Wubslin and brushes Yalson's body into the rock. Horza, half-mad with grief, charges down the burning platform after Xoxarle; Balveda, broken-armed and slung from the gantry above the repair cavern by the fleeing Idiran, drags herself back over the catwalk after Horza saves her on his way past. When Xoxarle finally turns and disarms Horza in the corridor, it is Balveda who shoots the section leader apart with a tiny memoryform pistol she had hidden as a back tooth. Horza, his skull fractured and consciousness fading under the sprinkler rain, asks her his own name; Balveda tells him, and he relaxes.
POV: Bora Horza Gobuchul·On page: Yalson, Perosteck Balveda, Wubslin, Aviger, Unaha-Closp, Xoxarle, Quayanorl
Chapter 14: Consider Phlebas
Perosteck Balveda faces the frozen landscape of Schar's World, having dragged the unconscious Bora Horza Gobuchul, the damaged drone, and the rescued Mind through the tunnels to the surface. With a broken arm and multiple wounds, she struggles through deep snow to reach the Clear Air Turbulence. The ship's autoguard accepts Kraiklyn's ring from Horza's hand. She brings Horza aboard and goes to fetch medical supplies, but when she returns, the Changer is dead, his face blank and featureless, all the identities he had worn seemingly drained away.
POV: Perosteck Balveda·On page: Bora Horza Gobuchul, Unaha-Closp
Epilogue
A short closing scene set generations later. Gimishin Foug - a great-great-great-great-great-great-grand-niece of Perosteck Balveda, heavily pregnant and a budding poet - is the last of her holidaying family to board a Culture General Systems Vehicle for transport to the new System class GSV Determinist. As a remote drone helps her with her baggage in the smallbay, she remembers to be polite and asks the ship its name. The ship answers, through the drone: "I am the Bora Horza Gobuchul." Foug remarks that this is a weird name and asks how it ended up calling itself that. The drone dips one corner in its equivalent of a shrug and offers, "It's a long story." Foug shrugs back and says she likes long stories. The book ends there.
On page: Gimishin Foug·Mentioned: Perosteck Balveda, Xoralundra, Jandraligeli, Unaha-Closp, Fal 'Ngeestra, Bora Horza Gobuchul