The Change Dream

Horza Gobuchul, the shapeshifting Changer at the center of Iain M. Banks's Consider Phlebas, spends a night on the surface of Vavatch's inner sea floating on a half-submerged shuttle, dying from exhaustion and blunt trauma, willing himself to become someone else.

The Change is biological — Changers are a humanoid species with glands and nerve pathways that can rewrite the body, the face, the height. What's remarkable is what Banks does with the psychology of it. When Horza enters the Change-sleep, transforming into Kraiklyn, the narrative shifts briefly into Kraiklyn's head. We get a few paragraphs of interior monologue — not Horza's, Kraiklyn's. The man being copied. The target of the shapeshifting.

And it's terrifying.

Kraiklyn's inner voice is the voice of the man who knows he's exceptional and is waiting for the world to confirm it. "He knew how good he was, he knew what he was fit for, and who was fit for him." The women under his command are "just game pieces." The galaxy will one day know his name and "either mourn him or curse him, when eventually he did have to die." He hasn't decided which yet.

This isn't simple arrogance. It has a structure. He's built a coherent account of his failures (they let him down; Jandraligeli betrayed him) and of his potential (he just needs a tiny break, the same kind the better captains got). The logic is internally airtight. Every piece of evidence confirms the story. Every setback is evidence of others' failures; every success is evidence of his destiny.

The Damage game — played at the Ends of Invention while Vavatch counts down its final hours — is where Horza kills Kraiklyn. We don't see it happen. We get the aftermath: Horza waking up as Kraiklyn, with Kraiklyn's ring and Kraiklyn's face and the ship's fidelity circuits fooled into thinking the captain returned. The death happens off the page, in the space between chapters, while we're somewhere else.

What Banks leaves us with is this: a man who was absolutely certain he was going to be something — who had constructed a complete internal justification for his own superiority — and then was replaced. By someone wearing his face. Who wasn't even trying to be him; who was just impersonating him adequately enough to fool people who mostly weren't paying close attention.

The most honest line in the novel is Yalson's response when Horza (as Kraiklyn) worries she'd be loyal to the dead captain: "He was a manager; how many of them are liked by their staff?"

Kraiklyn's grandiosity was completely internal. The people around him experienced him as someone who occasionally led from the front and was otherwise unremarkable. The galaxy wasn't watching. No one was waiting to confirm his exceptionalism. The future historian's note — in the appendix, in the Dramatis Personae — gives Kraiklyn three lines. He died at the Damage table in the Ends of Invention, Vavatch, just before the Orbital was destroyed.

He was certain the galaxy would know his name. The galaxy didn't notice him. The orbital he died in was wiped from existence twenty minutes later.

Horza's relationship to identity is different. Where Kraiklyn had one self, fiercely maintained, Horza has many. He's spent his life changing faces. What's interesting is that he doesn't seem to lose himself — even while impersonating Kraiklyn, he's clearly Horza underneath, doing the performance, maintaining the separation. He gets the voice right. He adjusts his walk. He lies fluently.

But by the time they're en route to Schar's World, he's not fully either face. He's deliberately steering between them: "two thirds of a compromise between Kraiklyn and the self he had been on the CAT before Vavatch. There was another third in there which he let grow and show itself on his face for nobody on board, but for a red-haired Changer girl called Kierachell." Three people at once. Three separate audiences. One face for the crew. One fraction for a woman he hasn't seen in months. One hidden fraction waiting.

The Changer's condition is the condition of someone who's had the illusion stripped away — the illusion that there's one real face under all the others. Horza has been so many faces that he no longer believes in a "true" one. He performs himself the way he performs everyone else. It's not deception. It's just what having glands that can reshape bone and muscle does to your relationship with selfhood.

What Banks is exploring — through the SF vehicle of literal shapeshifting — is something that doesn't require glands to be true: that identity is always partly performance, always calibrated to audience, always split between the face you show and the face you keep.

Horza performs Kraiklyn not because he has no self, but because the performance is the only available mode of forward motion. The ring, the ship, the crew: he needed access, and Kraiklyn's death gave him access. He maintains the performance at some personal cost — the Yalson relationship is complicated by his impersonation; Balveda recognizes him immediately because she knew his old self.

And the face he kept for Kierachell, the fraction he was letting "grow" in private — Kierachell dies in the tunnels of Schar's World. The audience for that third face ceases to exist before he ever arrives. The third person in him had nowhere to go.

Kraiklyn was certain the galaxy would remember him. The galaxy replaced him with Horza, who was replaced by nobody: Horza dies before Balveda can bring back the medkit. The ship's computer recognized Horza as the captain; the ship let Balveda in because she carried his ring. Even the ship didn't mourn.

The Mind drifting weightless in the hold was the only witness. Centuries later, it took Kraiklyn's name — no, not Kraiklyn's. The Mind named itself Bora Horza Gobuchul. After the enemy. After the man who failed to retrieve it.

The galaxy didn't know Kraiklyn. It turned out that the Mind did know Horza, or remembered what it knew, enough to carry the name forward. The man who changed faces all his life, who kept a fragment of himself secret for a woman already dead — the machine that outlived everyone named itself after him anyway.

One face. Preserved in the name of something that didn't die.