Use of Weapons

One

She made her way through the turbine hall, surrounded by an ever-changing ring of friends, admirers and animals — nebula to her attractive focus — talking to her guests, giving instructions to her staff, making suggestions and offering compliments to the many and various entertainers. Music filled the echoing space above the ancient, gleaming machines, sitting silently amongst the chattering throng of gaily dressed party-goers. She bowed graciously and smiled to a passing Admiral and twirled a delicate black flower in her hand, putting the bloom to her nose to draw in its heady fragrance.

Two of the hralzs at her feet leapt up, yelping, fore-paws attempting to find purchase on the smooth lap of her formal gown, their glistening snouts raised to the flower. She bent, tapping both animals gently on the nose with the bloom, making them bounce down to the floor again, sneezing and shaking their heads. The people around her laughed. Stooping, gown belling, she rubbed her hands through the pelt of one of the animals, shaking its big ears, then raised her head to the major-domo as he approached, deferentially threading his way through the crowd around her.

“Yes, Maikril?” she said.

“The System Times photographer,” the major-domo said quietly. He straightened as she rose, until he was looking up at her, his chin level with her bare shoulders.

“Admitting defeat?” She grinned.

“I believe so, ma’am. Requesting an audience.”

She laughed. “So well put. How many did we get this time?”

The major-domo sidled a little closer, looking nervously at one of the hralzs when it snarled at him. “Thirty-two moving-picture cameras, ma’am; over a hundred still.”

She brought her mouth conspiratorially close to the major-domo’s ear and said, “Not counting the ones we found on our guests.”

“Quite, Ma’am.”

“I’ll see… him? Her?”

“Him, Ma’am.”

“Him, later. Tell him ten minutes; remind me in twenty. West atrium.” She glanced at the single platinum bracelet she wore. Recognising her retinae, a tiny projector disguised as an emerald briefly displayed a holo plan of the old power station in twin cones of light aimed straight at her eyes.

“Certainly, Ma’am,” Maikril said.

She touched his arm and whispered, “We’re heading over to the arboretum, all right?”

The major-domo’s head barely moved to indicate he had heard. She turned regretfully to the people around her, her hands clasped as though in pleading. “I’m sorry. Will you all excuse me, just a moment?” She put her head to one side, smiling.

“Hi. Hello. Hi there. How are you.” They walked quickly through the party, past the grey rainbows of drugstreams and the plashing pools of the wine fountains. She led, skirts rustling, while the major-domo struggled to keep up with her long-legged gait. She waved to those who greeted her; government ministers and their shadows, foreign dignitaries and attachés, media stars of all persuasions, revolutionaries and Navy brass, the captains of industry and commerce and their more extravagantly wealthy shareholders. The hralzs snapped perfunctorily at the heels of the major-domo, their claws skittering on the polished mica floor, all ungainly, then bounding forward when they encountered one of the many priceless rugs scattered throughout the turbine hall.

At the steps to the arboretum, hidden from the main hall by the easternmost dynamo housing, she paused, thanked the major-domo, shooed the hralzs away, patted her perfect hair, smoothed her already immaculately smooth gown and checked that the single white stone on the black choker was centered, which it was. She started down the steps towards the tall doors of the arboretum.

One of the hralzs whined from the top of the steps, bouncing up and down on its forelegs, eyes watering.

She looked back, annoyed. “Quiet, Bouncer! Away!”

The animal lowered its head and snuffled off.

She closed the double doors quietly behind her, taking in the quiet extent of luxuriant foliage the arboretum presented.

Outside the high crystal curve of the partial dome, the night was black. Small sharp lights burned on tall masts inside the arboretum, casting deep jagged shadows amongs the crowded plants. The air was warm and smelled of earth and sap. She breathed deeply and walked towards the far side of the enclosure.

“Hello there.”

The man turned quickly to find her standing behind him, leaning against a light-mast, her arms crossed, a small smile on her lips and in her eyes. Her hair was blue-black, like her eyes; her skin was fawn and she looked slimmer than she did on newscasts, when for all her height she could seem stocky. He was tall and very slim and unfashionably pale, and most people would have thought his eyes were too close together.

He looked at the delicately patterned leaf he still held in one fragile-looking hand, then let it go, smiling uncertainly, and stepped out of the extravagantly flowered bush he’d been investigating. He rubbed his hands, looked bashful. “I’m sorry, I…” he gestured nervously.

“That’s all right,” she said, reaching out. They clasped hands. “You’re Relstoch Sussepin, aren’t you?”

“Umm…, yes,” he said, obviously surprised. He was still holding her hand. He realised this, and looked even more discomforted, quickly letting go.

“Diziet Sma.” She bowed her head a little, very slowly, letting her shoulder-length hair swing, keeping her eyes on him.

“Yes, I know, of course. Umm… pleased to meet you.”

“Good,” she nodded. “And I you. I’ve heard your work.”

“Oh.” He looked boyishly pleased and clapped his hands in a gesture he didn’t seem to notice himself making. “Oh. That’s very…”

“I didn’t say that I liked it,” she said, the smile hovering only on one side of her mouth now.

“Ah.” Crestfallen.

So cruel. “But I do like it, very much,” she said, and suddenly she was communicating amused — even conspiratorial — contrition through her expression.

He laughed and she felt something relax inside her. This was going to be all right.

“I did wonder why I’d been invited,” he confessed, the deep-set eyes somehow bright. “Everybody here seems so…”, he shrugged, “… important. That’s why I…”, he waved awkwardly behind him at the plant he’d been inspecting.

“You don’t think composers should be regarded as important?” she asked, gently chiding.

“Well… compared to all these politicians and Admirals and business people… in terms of power, I mean… And I’m not even a very well-known musician. I’d have thought Savntreig, or Khu, or…”

“They’ve composed their careers very well, certainly,” she agreed.

He paused for a moment, then gave a small laugh and looked down. His hair was very fine, and glinted in the high mast light. It was her turn to fall in with his laugh. Maybe she ought to mention the commission now, rather than leaving it to their next meeting, when she would reduce the numbers — even if they were distant numbers, at the moment — to something a little more friendly… or even leaving it to a private rendezvous, later still, once she was sure he had been captivated.

How long should she spin this out? He was what she wanted, but it would mean so much more after a charged friendship; that long, exquisite exchange of gradually more intimate confidences, the slow accumulation of shared experiences, the languorous spiralling dance of attraction, coming and going and coming and going, winding closer and closer, until that laziness was sublimed in the engulfing heat of requital.

He looked her in the eyes, and said, “You flatter me, Ms Sma.”

She returned his gaze, raising her chin a little, acutely aware of each nuance in her carefully translated body language. There was an expression on his face she did not think so childish, now. His eyes reminded her of the stone on her bracelet. She felt a little light-headed, and took a deep breath.

“Ahem.”

She froze.

The word had been pronounced from behind and to one side of her. She saw Sussepin’s gaze falter and shift.

Sma kept her expression serene as she turned, then glared at the grey-white casing of the drone as though attempting to melt holes in it.

“What?” she said, in a voice that might have etched steel.

The drone was the size — and near enough the shape — of a small suitcase. It floated in towards her face.

“Trouble, toots,” it said, then moved briskly to one side, angling its body so that it appeared to be contemplating the inky heights of sky beyond the crystal semisphere.

Sma looked down at the brick floor of the arboretum, her lips pursed. She allowed herself the tiniest of shakes of the head.

“Mr Sussepin,” she smiled, and spread her hands. “This pains me, but… will you…?”

“Of course.” He was already moving, and went quickly past, nodding once.

“Perhaps we can talk later,” she said.

He turned, still backing off. “Yes; I’d… that would…” He seemed to lose inspiration, and nodded nervously again, walking quickly to the doors at the far end of the arboretum. He left without looking back.

Sma whirled round to the drone, which was now humming innocently and apparently staring into the depths of a gaudily coloured flower, its stubby snout half buried in the bloom. It noticed her and looked up. She stood with legs apart, put one fist on her hip and said, “‘Toots’?”

The drone’s aura field flashed on; the mixture of purple regret and gunmetal puzzlement looked distinctly unconvincing. “I don’t know, Sma… just slipped out. Alliteration.”

Sma kicked at a dead branch, fixed the drone with a glare and said, “Well?”

“You’re not going to like this,” the drone said quietly, retreating a little and going dark with sorrow.

Sma hesitated. She looked away for a moment, shoulders suddenly slumping. She sat down on one of the tree roots. The gown crumpled around her. “It’s Zakalwe, isn’t it?”

The drone flashed rainbow in surprise; so quickly — she thought — it might even have been genuine. “Good grief,” it said. “How…?”

She waved the question away. “I don’t know. Tone of voice. Human intuition… Just that time again. Life was getting to be too much fun.” She closed her eyes and rested her head against the rough dark trunk of the tree. “So?”

The drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw lowered itself to the same height as the woman’s shoulder and floated near her. She looked at it.

“We need him back again,” it told her.

“I sort of thought so,” Sma sighed, flicking away an insect which had just landed on her shoulder.

“Well, yes. I’m afraid nothing else will work; it has to be him personally.”

“Yeah, but does it have to be me personally?”

“That’s… the consensus.”

“Wonderful,” Sma said sourly.

“You want the rest?”

“Does it get any better?”

“Not really.”

“Hell,” Sma clapped her hands on her lap and rubbed them up and down. “Might as well have it all at once.”

“You would have to leave tomorrow.”

“Aw, drone, come on!” She buried her head in her hands. She looked up. The drone was fiddling with a twig. “You’re kidding.”

“’Fraid not.”

“What about all this?” She waved towards the turbine hall doors. “What about the peace conference? What about all the froth out there with their greased-up palms and their beady eyes? What about three years work? What about an entire fucking planet…?”

“The conference will go ahead.”

“Oh sure, but what about this ‘pivotal role’ I was supposed to be playing?”

“Ah,” said the drone, bringing the twig right up to the sensing band on the front of its casing, “well…”

“Oh no.”

“Look, I know you don’t like…”

“No, drone; it’s not…” Sma got up suddenly and went to the edge of the crystal wall, looking out into the night.

“Dizzy…”, the drone said, drifting closer.

“Don’t you ‘Dizzy’ me.”

“Sma… it isn’t real. It’s a stand-in; electronic, mechanical, electro-chemical, chemical; a machine; a Mind-controlled machine, not alive in itself. Not a clone or…”

“I know what it is, drone,” she said, clasping her hands behind her.

The drone floated closer to her, putting its fields to her shoulders, squeezing gently. She shook its grip off, looked down.

“We need your permission, Diziet.”

“Yeah, I know that, too.” She looked up for stars that were twice hidden, by cloud and by the lights of the arboretum.

“You can, of course, stay here if you want to.” The drone’s voice was heavy, remorseful. “The peace conference is certainly important; it needs… somebody to smooth things through. No doubt about that.”

“And what’s so goddamn crucial I have to high-tail it tomorrow?”

“Remember Voerenhutz?”

“I remember Voerenhutz,” she said, voice flat.

“Well, the peace lasted forty years, but it’s breaking down now. Zakalwe worked with a man called…”

“Maitchigh?” she frowned, half turning her head to the drone.

“Beychae. Tsoldrin Beychae. He became president of the cluster following our involvement. While he was in power he held the political system together, but he retired eight years ago, long before he had to, to pursue a life of study and contemplation.” The drone made a sighing noise. “Things have slipped back since, and at the moment Beychae lives on a planet whose leaders are subtly hostile to the forces Zakalwe and Beychae represented and we backed, and who are taking a leading part in the factionalising of the group. There are several small conflicts under way and many more brewing; full-scale war involving the entire cluster is, as they say, imminent.”

“And Zakalwe?”

“Basically, it’s an Out. Down to the planet, convince Beychae he’s needed, and at the very least get him to declare an interest. But it may mean a physical spring, and the added complication is Beychae may require a lot of convincing.”

Sma thought it through, still regarding the night. “No tricks we can play?”

“The two men know each other too well for anything other than the real Zakalwe to work… likewise Tsoldrin Beychae and the political machine throughout the entire system. Too many memories involved altogether.”

“Yeah,” Sma said quietly. “Too many memories.” She rubbed her bare shoulders, as though she was cold. “What about big guns?”

“We’ve a nebula fleet assembling; a core of one Limited System Vehicle and three General Contact Units stationed around the cluster itself, plus eighty or so GCUs keeping their tracks within a month’s rush-in distance. There ought to be four or five GSVs within a two-to-three-months dash for the next year or so. But that’s very, very much a last resort.”

“Megadeath figures looking a bit equivocal are they?” Sma sounded bitter.

“If you want to put it that way,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.

“Oh goddamn,” Sma said quietly, closing her eyes. “So; how far away is Voerenhutz? I’ve forgotten.”

“Only about forty days, but we have to pick Zakalwe up first; say… ninety for the whole outward journey.”

She turned around. “Who’s going to control the stand-in if the ship’s taking me?” Her gaze flicked skyward.

“The Just Testing will remain here in any event,” the drone said. “The very fast picket Xenophobe has been put at your disposal. It can uplift tomorrow, a little after noon, earliest… should you wish.”

Sma stood still for a moment, feet together and arms crossed, her lips pursed and face pinched. Skaffen-Amtiskaw introspected for a moment, and decided it felt sorry for her.

The woman was immobile and silent for a few seconds; then, abruptly, she was striding towards the turbine hall doors, heels clattering on the brick pathway.

The drone swooped after her, falling in at her shoulder.

“What I wish,” Sma said, “is that you had a better sense of timing.”

“I’m sorry. Did I interrupt something?”

“Not at all. And what the hell’s a ‘very fast picket’ anyway?”

“New name for a (Demilitarised) Rapid Offensive Unit,” the drone said.

She glanced at it. It wobbled, shrugging.

“It’s supposed to sound better.”

“And it’s called the Xenophobe. Well that’s just fine. Can the stand-in pick up immediately?”

“Noon tomorrow; can you de-brief up to…?”

“Tomorrow morning.” Sma said, as the drone flicked round in front of her and sucked the tall doors open; she strode through and leapt up the steps into the turbine hall, skirts gathered in front of her. The hralzs came skidding round the corner from the hall and gathered yelping and bouncing around her. Sma stopped, while they milled around her, sniffing her hems and trying to lick her hands.

“No,” she told the drone. “On second thoughts, scan me tonight, when I tell you. I’ll get rid of this lot early if I can. I’m going to find Ambassador Onitnert now, have Maikril tell Chuzleis she’s to get the minister over to the bar at turbine one in ten minutes. Make my apologies to the System Times hacks, have them taken back to the city and released; give them a bottle of nightflor each. Cancel the photographer, give him one still camera and let him take… sixty-four snaps, strictly full permission required. Have one of the male staff find Relstoch Sussepin and invite him to my apartments in two hours. Oh, and—”

Sma broke off suddenly and went down on her haunches to cradle the long snout of one of the whimpering hralzs in her hands. “Gainly, Gainly, I know, I know,” she said, as the big-bellied animal keened and licked at her face. “I wanted to be here to see your babies born, but I can’t…” she sighed, hugged the beast, then held its chin in one hand. “What am I to do, Gainly? I could have you put to sleep until I come back, and you’d never know… but all your friends would miss you.”

“Have them all put to sleep,” the drone suggested.

Sma shook her head. “You take care of them till I get back,” she told the other hralz. “All right?” She kissed the animal’s nose and got up. Gainly sneezed.

“Two other things, drone,” Sma said, walking through the excited pack.

“What?”

“Don’t call me ‘Toots’ again, all right?”

“All right. What else?”

They rounded the gleaming bulk of the long-stilled number six turbine, and Sma stopped for a moment, surveying the busy crowd in front of her, taking a deep breath and straightening her shoulders. She was already smiling as she started forward and said quietly to the drone, “I don’t want the stand-in screwing anybody.”

“Okay,” the drone said as they went towards the partying people. “It is, after all, in a sense, your body.”

“That’s just it, drone,” Sma said, nodding to a waiter, who scurried forward, drinks tray proffered. “It isn’t my body.”

Aircraft and ground vehicles floated and wound away from the old power station. The important people had departed. There were a few stragglers left in the hall, but they didn’t need her. She felt weary, and glanded a little snap to lift the mood.

From the south balcony of the apartments fashioned from the station’s admin block, she looked down to the deep valley and the line of tail lights strung out along Riverside Drive. An aircraft whistled overhead, banking and disappearing over the tall curved lip of the old dam. She watched the plane go, then turned towards the penthouse doors, taking off the small formal jacket and slinging it over her shoulder.

Music was playing, deep inside the sumptuous suite beneath the roof garden. She headed instead for the study, where Skaffen-Amtiskaw was waiting.

The scan to update the stand-in took only a couple of minutes. She came round with the usual feeling of dislocation, but it passed quickly enough. She kicked off her shoes and padded through the soft dark corridors towards the music.

Relstoch Sussepin drew himself out of the seat he’d been occupying, still holding a softly glowing glass of nightflor. Sma stopped in the doorway.

“Thank you for staying,” she said, dropping the little jacket onto a couch.

“That’s all right.” He brought the glass of glowing drink towards his lips, then seemed to think the better of it, and cradled it in both hands instead. “What, ah… was there anything in particular you…?”

Sma smiled, somehow sadly, and put both hands on the wings of a big revolving chair, which she stood behind. She looked down at the hide cushion. “Perhaps, now, I’m flattering myself,” she said. “But, not to put too fine a point on it…” She looked up at him. “Would you like to fuck?”

Relstoch Sussepin stood stock still. After a while he raised the glass to his lips and took a long slow drink, then brought the glass slowly back down again. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I wanted to… instantly.”

“There’s only tonight,” she said, holding up one hand. “Just tonight. It’s difficult to explain, but from tomorrow onwards… for maybe half a year or more, I’m going to be incredibly busy; two-places-at-once sort of busy, you know?”

He shrugged. “Sure. Anything you say.”

Sma relaxed then, and a smile grew gradually on her face. She pushed the big chair round and slid the bracelet from her wrist to let it fall into the seat. Then she gently unbuttoned the top of her gown, and stood there.

Sussepin drained his glass, placed it on a shelf, and walked towards her.

“Lights,” she whispered.

The lights slowly dimmed, right down, until eventually the softly glowing dregs of the finished drink made the glass on the shelf the brightest thing in the room.

XIII

“Wake up.”

He woke up.

Dark. He straightened beneath the covers, wondering who had talked to him like that. Nobody talked to him in that tone, not any more; even half asleep, coming unexpectedly awake in what must be the middle of the night, he heard something in that tone he hadn’t heard for two, maybe three decades. Impertinence. Lack of respect.

He brought his head out of the sheltering cover, into the warm air of the room, and looked round in the one-light gloom, to see who had dared address him like that. An instant of fear — had somebody got past the guards and security screens? — was replaced by a furious hunger to see who had the effrontery to speak like that to him.

The intruder sat in a chair just beyond the end of the bed. He looked odd in a way which was itself odd; a very new sort of unusualness, unplaceable, even alien. He gave the impression of being a slightly skewed projection. The clothes looked strange too; baggy, brightly coloured, even in the dim light of the bedside lamp. The man was dressed like a clown or a jester, but his somehow too symmetrical face looked… grim? Contemptuous? That… foreignness made it difficult to tell.

He started to grope for his glasses, but it was just sleep in his eyes. The surgeons had given him new eyes five years ago, but sixty years of short-sightedness had left him with an ingrained reaction to reach for glasses which were not there, whenever he first woke up. A small price to pay, he had always thought, and now, with the new retro-ageing treatment… The sleep cleared from his eyes. He sat up, looking at the man in the chair, and began to think he was having a dream, or seeing a ghost.

The man looked young; he had a broad, tanned face and black hair tied back behind his head, but thoughts of spirits and the dead came into his head not because of that. It was something about the dark, pit-like eyes, and the alien set of that face.

“Good evening, Ethnarch.” The young man’s voice was slow and measured. It sounded, somehow, like the voice of someone much older; old enough to make the Ethnarch feel suddenly young in comparison. It chilled him. He looked around the room. Who was this man? How had he got in here? The palace was meant to be impregnable. There were guards everywhere. What was going on? The fear came back.

The girl from the previous evening lay still on the far side of the wide bed, just a lump under the covers. A couple of dormant screens on the wall to the Ethnarch’s left reflected the bedside light’s weak glow.

He was frightened, but fully awake now and thinking quickly. There was a gun concealed in the bed’s headboard; the man at the end of the bed didn’t seem to be armed (but then why was he here?). But the gun represented a desperate last resort. The voice code was the thing. The mikes and cameras in the room were on standby, their automatic circuits waiting for a specific sentence to activate them; sometimes he wanted privacy in here, other times he wanted to record something only for himself, and of course he’d always known there was a possibility that somebody unauthorised might get in here, no matter how tight the security was.

He cleared his throat. “Well well, this is a surprise.” His voice was even, he sounded calm.

He smiled thinly, pleased with himself. His heart — the heart of an athletic young anarchist woman up until eleven years ago — was beating quickly, but not worryingly so. He nodded. “This is a surprise,” he repeated. There; it was done. An alarm would already be ringing in the basement control room; the guards would come piling through the door in a few seconds. Or they might not risk that, and instead release the ceiling gas cylinders, blasting them both into unconsciousness in a blinding fog. There was a danger that it would rupture his eardrums (he thought, swallowing), but he could always take a new pair from a healthy dissident. Maybe he wouldn’t even have to do that; the rumour was that the retro-ageing might include the possibility of body-parts regrowing. Well, nothing wrong with strength in depth; back-ups. He liked the feeling of security that gave one. “Well, well,” he heard himself say, just in case the circuits hadn’t picked up the code first or second time round, “this is indeed a surprise.” The guards should be here any second…

The brightly dressed young man smiled. He flexed oddly, and leant forward until his elbows rested on the top of the bed’s ornate footboard. His lips moved, to produce what might have been a smile. He reached into one pocket of the baggy pantaloons and produced a small black gun. He pointed it straight at the Ethnarch and said. “Your code won’t work, Ethnarch Kerian. There won’t be any more surprises that you’re expecting and I’m not. The basement security centre is as dead as everything else.”

The Ethnarch Kerian stared at the little gun. He’d seen water pistols that looked more impressive. What is going on? Can he really have come to kill me? The man certainly didn’t dress like an assassin, and surely any serious assassin would just have killed him in his sleep. The longer this fellow sat here, talking, the more danger he was in, whether he had knocked out the links to the security centre or not. So he might be mad, but he probably wasn’t an assassin. It was simply ludicrous that a real, professional assassin would behave like this, and only an extremely able and completely professional assassin could have penetrated the palace security… Thus, the Ethnarch Kerian tried to convince his suddenly wildly beating, mutinous heart. Where were the damn guards? He thought again about the gun hidden in the ornamental headboard behind him.

The young man folded his arms, so that the little gun was no longer pointing at the Ethnarch. “Mind if I tell you a little story?”

He must be mad. “No; no; why don’t you tell me a story?” the Ethnarch said, in his most friendly and avuncular voice. “What’s your name, by the way; you appear to have the advantage over me.”

“Yes, I do, don’t I?” the old voice from the young lips said. “Actually there are two stories, but you know most of one of them. I’ll tell them at the same time; see if you can tell which is which.”

“I—”

“Ssh,” the man said, putting the little gun to his lips. The Ethnarch half glanced at the girl on the other side of the bed. He realised he and the intruder had been talking in quite low tones. Maybe if he could get the girl to wake, she might draw his fire, or at least distract him while he grabbed for the gun in the headboard; he was faster than he had been for twenty years, thanks to the new treatment… where the hell were those guards?

“Now look here, young man!” he roared. “I just want to know what you think you’re doing here! Eh?”

His voice — a voice that had filled halls and squares, without amplification — echoed through the room. Dammit, the guards in the basement security centre ought to be able to hear it without any microphones. The girl on the other side of the bed didn’t even stir.

The young man was smirking. “They’re all asleep, Ethnarch. There’s just you and me. Now; this story…”

“What…” the Ethnarch Kerian gulped, drawing his legs up under the covers. “What are you here for?”

The intruder looked mildly surprised. “Oh, I’m here to take you out, Ethnarch. You are going to be removed. Now…” he laid the gun on the broad top of the bed footboard. The Ethnarch stared at it. It was too far away for him to grab, but…

“The story,” the intruder said, settling back in the chair. “Once upon a time, over the gravity well and far away, there was a magical land where they had no kings, no laws, no money and no property, but where everybody lived like a prince, was very well-behaved and lacked for nothing. And these people lived in peace, but they were bored, because paradise can get that way after a time, and so they started to carry out missions of good works; charitable visits upon the less well-off, you might say; and they always tried to bring with them the thing that they saw as the most precious gift of all; knowledge; information; and as wide a spread of that information as possible, because these people were strange, in that they despised rank, and hated kings… and all things hierarchic… even Ethnarchs.” The young man smiled thinly. So did the Ethnarch. He wiped his brow and shifted back a little in the bed, as though getting more comfortable. Heart still pounding.

“Well, for a time, a terrible force threatened to take away their good works, but they resisted it, and they won, and came out of the conflict stronger than before, and if they had not been so unconcerned with power for its own sake, they would have been terribly feared, but as it was they were only slightly feared, just as a matter of course given the scale of their power. And one of the ways it amused them to wield that power was to interfere in societies they thought might benefit from the experience, and one of the most efficient ways of doing that in a lot of societies is to get to the people at the top.

“Many of their people become physicians to great leaders, and with medicines and treatments that seem like magic to the comparatively primitive people they’re dealing with, ensure that a great and good leader has a better chance of surviving. That’s the way they prefer to work; offering life, you see, rather than dealing death. You might call them soft, because they’re very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they’re soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be.”

“Yes, I see,” the Ethnarch said, sitting back a little further shifting a pillow into place behind his back, and checking just where he was in relation to the section of headboard that concealed the gun. His heart was thrashing in his chest.

“Another thing they do, these people, another way they deal in life rather than death, is they offer leaders of certain societies below a certain technological level the one thing all the wealth and power those leaders command cannot buy them; a cure for death. A return to youth.”

The Ethnarch stared at the young man, suddenly more intrigued than terrified. Did he mean the retro-ageing?

“Ah; it’s starting to click into place now, isn’t it?” the young man smiled. “Well, you’re right. Just that process that you’ve been going through, Ethnarch Kerian. Which you’ve been paying for, this last year. Which you did — if you remember — promise to pay for with more than just platinum. Do you remember, hmmm?”

“I… I’m not sure.” The Ethnarch Kerian stalled. He could see the panel in the headboard where the gun was from the corner of his eye.

“You promised to stop the killings in Youricam, remember?”

“I may have said I’d review our segregation and resettlement policy in the—”

“No,” the young man waved his hand, “I mean the killings, Ethnarch; the death trains, remember? The trains where the exhaust comes out of the rear carriage, eventually.” The young man made a sort of sneer with his mouth, shook his head. “Trigger any memories, that? No?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the Ethnarch said. His palms were sweating, cold and slick. He rubbed them on the bedclothes; the gun mustn’t slip, if he got to it. The intruder’s gun was still lying on the bed’s footboard.

“Oh, I think you do. In fact, I know you do.”

“If there have been any excesses by any members of the security forces, they will be thoroughly—”

“This isn’t a press conference, Ethnarch.” The man tipped slightly back in his seat, away from the gun on the footboard. The Ethnarch tensed, quivering.

“The point is, you made a deal and then didn’t stick to it. And I’m here to collect on the penalty clause. You were warned, Ethnarch. That which is given can also be taken away.” The intruder tipped further back in his seat, glanced round the dark suite, and nodded at the Ethnarch, while putting his hands clasped behind his head. “Say goodbye to all this, Ethnarch Kerian. You’re—”

The Ethnarch turned, banged the hidden panel with his elbow, and the section of headboard flicked round; he tore the gun from its clips and swung it at the man, finding the trigger and pulling.

Nothing happened. The young man was watching him, hands still behind his neck, body rocking slowly back and forward in the chair.

The Ethnarch clicked the trigger a few more times.

“Works better with these,” the man said, reaching into a shirt pocket, and throwing a dozen bullets onto the bed at the Ethnarch’s feet.

The gleaming bullets snicked at they rolled and gathered in a fold in the bedclothes. The Ethnarch Kerian stared at them.

“… I’ll give you anything,” he said, over a thick and dry tongue. He sensed his bowels start to relax, and squeezed desperately, feeling suddenly like a child again, as though the retro-ageing had taken him even further back. “Anything. Anything. I can give you more than you ever dreamed of; I can—”

“Not interested in that,” the man said, shaking his head. “The story isn’t finished yet. You see, these people; these nice kind people who are so soft and prefer to deal in life… when somebody goes back on a deal with them, even when somebody kills after they’ve said they wouldn’t, they still don’t like to kill in return. They’d rather use their magic and their precious compassion to do the next best thing. And so people disappear.” The man sat forward again, leaning on the footboard. The Ethnarch stared, shaking, at him.

“They — these nice people — they disappear bad people,” the young man said. “And they employ people to come and collect these bad men and take them away. And these people — these collectors — they like to put the fear of death into their collectees, and they tend to dress…” he gestured at his own colour-fully motley clothes, “… casually; and of course — thanks to the magic — they never have any problems getting into even the most heavily guarded palace.”

The Ethnarch swallowed, and with one furiously shaking hand, finally put down the useless gun he was holding.

“Wait,” he said, trying to control his voice. His sweat soaked the sheets. “Are you saying—”

“We’re nearly at the end of the story,” the young man interrupted. “These nice people — who you would call soft, like I say — they remove the bad people, and they take them away. They put them somewhere they can’t do any harm. Not a paradise, but not somewhere that feels like a prison, either. And these bad people, they might have to listen sometimes to the nice people telling them how bad they’ve been, and they never again get the chance to change histories, but they live a comfortable, safe life, and they die peacefully… thanks to the nice people.

“And though some would say the nice people are too soft, the soft, nice people would say that the crimes committed by the bad people are usually so terrible there is no known way of making the bad people start to suffer even a millionth of the agony and despair they have produced, so what is the point in retribution? It would be just another obscenity to cap the tyrant’s life with his own death.” The young man looked briefly troubled, then shrugged. “Like I say; some people would say they’re too soft.” He took the little gun from the footboard and put it into a pocket of his pantaloons.

The man stood slowly. The Ethnarch’s heart still pounded, but in his eyes there were tears. The young man leant down, picked up some clothes and threw them at the Ethnarch, who grabbed at them, held them to his chest.

“My offer stands,” the Ethnarch Kerian said. “I can give you—”

“Job satisfaction,” the young man sighed, staring at one set of fingernails. “That’s all you can give me, Ethnarch. I’m not interested in anything else. Get dressed; you’re leaving.”

The Ethnarch started to pull on his shirt. “Are you sure? I believe I have invented some new vices even the old Empire didn’t know about. I’d be willing to share them with you.”

“No, thank you.”

“Who are these people you’re talking about, anyway?” The Ethnarch fastened his buttons. “And may I yet know your name?”

“Just get dressed.”

“Well, I still think we can come to some sort of arrangement…” The Ethnarch secured his collar. “And this is all really quite ridiculous, but I suppose I ought to be thankful you’re not an assassin, eh?”

The young man smiled, seemed to pick something from a fingernail. He put his hands in the pantaloon pockets as the Ethnarch kicked the bedclothes down and picked up his britches.

“Yes,” the young man said. “Must be rather awful, thinking you’re about to die.”

“Not the most pleasant experience,” agreed the Ethnarch, putting one leg, then another, into his trousers.

“But such a relief, I imagine, when you get the reprieve.”

“Hmm.” The Ethnarch gave a small laugh.

“A bit like being rounded up in a village and thinking you’re going to be shot…” the young man mused, facing the Ethnarch from the foot of the bed. “…and then being told your fate is nothing worse than resettlement.” He smiled. The Ethnarch hesitated.

“Resettled; by train,” the man said, taking the little black gun out of his pocket. “By a train which contains your family; your street; your village…”

The young man adjusted something on the small black gun. “…And then ends up containing nothing but engine fumes, and lots of dead people.” He smiled, thinly. “What do you think, Ethnarch Kerian? Something like that?”

The Ethnarch stopped moving, staring wide-eyed at the gun.

“The nice people are called the Culture,” the young man explained, “And I always did think they were too soft.” He stretched his arm out, holding the gun. “I stopped working for them some time ago. I’m freelance now.”

The Ethnarch looked, speechless, into the dark, ancient eyes above the barrel of the black gun.

“I,” said the man, “am called Cheradenine Zakalwe.” He levelled the gun at the Ethnarch’s nose. “You are called dead.”

He fired the gun… The Ethnarch had put his head back and started to scream; so the single shot pierced the roof of his mouth before it exploded inside his skull.

Brain’s splattered over the ornate headboard. The body thumped into the skin-soft bedclothes and twitched once, spreading blood.

He watched the blood as it pooled. He blinked, a couple of times.

Then, moving slowly, he peeled off the gaudy clothes. He put them in a small black rucksack. Underneath, the one-piece suit was shadow-dark.

He took the matt-black mask from the rucksack and put it round his neck, though not yet over his face. He moved to the head of the bed and peeled a little transparent patch from the neck of the sleeping girl, then went back into the dark depths of the room, slipping the mask over his face as he did so.

Using the nightsight, he undipped the panel over the security systems control unit, and carefully removed several small boxes. Then, walking very softly and slowly now, he crossed to the wall-sized pornographic painting which concealed the door to the Ethnarch’s emergency escape route to the sewers and the palace roof.

He turned back, before he slowly closed the door, and looked at the bloody mess on the curved carved surface of the headboard. He smiled his thin smile, a little uncertainly.

Then he slipped away into the stone-black depths of the palace, like a piece of the night.

Two

The dam lay wedged between the tree-studded hills like a fragment from some enormous shattered cup. The morning sunshine shone up the valley, hit the concave grey face of the dam, and produced a white reflecting flood of light. Behind the dam, the long diminished lake was dark and cold. The water came less than halfway up the massive concrete bulwark, and the forests beyond had long since reclaimed over half the slopes the dam’s rising water had once drowned. Sail-boats lay tethered to jetties strung along one side of the lake, the chopping waters slapping at their glistening hulls.

High overhead, birds carved the air, circling in the warmth of the sunlight above the shadow of the dam. One of the birds dipped and swooped, gliding down towards the lip of the dam and the deserted roadway which ran along its curved summit. The bird pulled its wings in just as it seemed it was about to collide with the white railings which ran on either side of the road; it flashed between the dew-sparkled stanchions, executed a half roll, partially opened its wings again, and plummeted towards the obsolete power station that had become the grandly eccentric — not to mention pointedly symbolic — home of the woman called Diziet Sma.

The bird settled belly-down to the swoop, and, level with the roof garden, flung out its wings, grasping at the air and fluttering to a precipitous halt, talons tacketing down on a window ledge set in the highest storey of the old admin block apartments.

Wings folded, soot-dark head to one side, one beady eye reflecting the concrete light, the bird hopped forward to a slid-open window, where soft red curtains rippled out into the breeze. It stuck its head under the fluttering hem of the material and peered into the darkened room beyond.

“You missed it,” Sma said with quiet scorn, happening to pad past the window just at that moment. She sipped from a glass of water she held. Droplets from her shower beaded her tawny body.

The bird’s head swivelled, following her as she crossed to the closet and commenced to dress. Swivelling back, the bird’s gaze shifted to the male body lying in the air a little less than a metre above the floor-mounted bed-base. Inside the dim haze of the bed’s AG field, the pale figure of Relstoch Sussepin stirred, and rolled over in mid-air. His arms floated out to either side, until the weak centering field on his side of the bed brought them slowly back in towards his body again. In the dressing room, Sma gargled with some water, then swallowed it.

Fifty metres east, Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated high in the air above the floor of the turbine hall, surveying the wreckage of the party. The section of the drone’s mind that was controlling the guard-drone disguised as a bird took a last look at the filigree of scratches on Sussepin’s buttocks, and the already fading bite-marks on Sma’s shoulders (as she covered them with a gauzy shirt), and then released the guard-drone from its control.

The bird squawked, jumped back from the curtain, and fell fluttering and frenzied off the ledge, before opening its wings and beating back up past the gleaming face of the dam, its shrill alarm-cries echoing back from the concrete slopes and disturbing it further. Sma heard the distant feedback of commotion as she buttoned her waistcoat, and smiled.

“Good night’s sleep?” Skaffen-Amtiskaw inquired as it met her at the portico of the old admin block.

“Good night, no sleep,” Sma yawned, shooing the whining hralzs back into the building’s marble hall, where Maikril the major-domo stood unhappily with a bunch of leads. She stepped out into the sunlight, pulling on gloves. The drone held the car door open for her. She filled her lungs with the fresh morning air and ran down the steps, boot heels clattering. She jumped into the car, winced a little as she settled in the driver’s seat, then flicked a switch that started the roof folding back, while the drone loaded her luggage into the trunk. She tapped the battery gauges on the vehicle’s dash and blipped the accelerator, just to feel the wheel motors strain against the brakes. The drone secured the trunk and floated into the rear seats. She waved to Maikril, who was chasing one of the hralzs along the steps outside the turbine hall, and didn’t notice. Sma laughed, stood on the throttle and slipped the brakes.

The car leapt off in a spray of gravel, took the right-hander beneath the trees with centimetres to spare, shot out through the station’s granite gates with a farewell shimmy of its rear end, and accelerated hard down Riverside Drive.

“We could have flown,” the drone pointed out, over the rush of air.

But it suspected Sma wasn’t listening.

The semantics of fortification were pan-cultural, she thought, as she descended the stone steps from the curtain wall of the castle, gazing up at the drum-shaped keep, hazy in the distance on its hill behind several more layers of walls. She walked across the grass, Skaffen-Amtiskaw at her shoulder, and exited the fort through a postern.

The view led down to the new port and the straits, where seaships passed smoothly in the late morning sunlight, heading for ocean or inland sea, according to their lanes. From the other side of the castle complex, the city revealed its presence with a distant rumble and — because the light wind came from that direction — the smell of… well, she just thought of it as City, after three years here. She supposed all cities smelled different, though.

Diziet Sma sat on the grass with her legs drawn up to her chin, and looked out across the straits and their arching suspension bridges to the sub-continent on the far shore.

“Anything else?” the drone asked.

“Yeah; take my name off the judging panel for the Academy show… and send a stalling letter to that Petrain guy.” She frowned in the sunlight, shading her eyes. “Can’t think of anything else.”

The drone moved in front of her, teasing a small flower from the grass in front of her and playing with it. “Xenophobe’s just entered the system,” it told her.

“Well happy day,” Sma said sourly. She wetted one finger and rubbed a little speck of dirt from the toe of one boot.

“And that young man in your bed just surfaced; asking Maikril where you’ve got to.”

Sma said nothing, though her shoulders shook once and she smiled. She lay back on the grass, one arm behind her.

The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass, and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the grey-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?

Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.

She stretched, suddenly tired, and shivered with a little flashback of the night’s exertions. And, like somebody holding something precious, and it slipping from their fingers, but then having the speed and the skill to catch it again before it hit the floor, she was able — somewhere inside herself — to dip down and retrieve the vanishing memory as it slipped back into the clutter and noise of her mind, and glanding recall she held it, savoured it, re-experienced it, until she felt herself shiver again in the sunlight, and came close to making a little moaning noise.

She let the memory escape, and coughed and sat up, glancing to see if the drone had noticed. It was nearby, collecting tiny flowers.

A party of what she guessed were schoolchildren came chattering and squealing up the path from the metro station, heading towards the postern. Heading and tailing the noisy column were adults, possessed of that air of calmly tired wariness she’d seen before in teachers and mothers with many children. Some of the kids pointed at the floating drone as they passed, wide-eyed and giggling and asking questions, before they were ushered through the narrow gate, voices disappearing.

It was, she’d noticed, always the children who made a fuss like that. Adults just assumed that there was some trick behind the apparently unsupported body of the machine, but children wanted to know how it worked. One or two scientists and engineers had looked startled, too, but she guessed a stereotype of unworldiness meant nobody believed them that there must be something odd going on. Anti gravity was what was going on, and the drone in this society was like a flashlight in the stone age, but — to her surprise — it was almost disappointingly easy just to brazen it out.

“The ships just met up,” the drone informed her. “They’re transferring the stand-in for real, rather than displacing it.”

Sma laughed, plucked a blade of grass and sucked on it. “Old JT really doesn’t trust its displacer, does it?”

“I think the thing’s senile, myself,” the drone said sniffily. It was carefully slicing holes in the barely more than hair-thin stems of the flowers it had picked, then threading the stems through each other, creating a little chain.

Sma watched the machine, its unseen fields manipulating the little blossoms as dexterously as any lace-maker flicking a pattern into existence.

It was not always so refined.

Once, maybe twenty years ago, far away on another planet in another part of the galaxy altogether, on the floor of a dry sea forever scoured by howling winds, beneath the mesa that had been islands on the dust that had been silt, she had lodged in a small frontier town at the limit of the railways’ reach, preparatory to hiring mounts to venture into the deep desert and search out the new child messiah.

At dusk, the riders came into the square, to take her from the inn; they’d heard her strangely coloured skin alone would fetch a handsome price.

The inn-keeper made the mistake of trying to reason with the men, and was pinned to his own door with a sword; his daughters wept over him before they were dragged away.

Sma turned, sickened, from the window, heard boots thunder on the rickety stairs. Skaffen-Amtiskaw was near the door. It looked, unhurried, at her. Screams came from the square outside and from elsewhere inside the inn. Somebody battered at the door of her room, loosing dust and shaking the floor. Sma was wide eyed, bereft of stratagems.

She stared at the drone. “Do something,” she gulped.

“My pleasure,” murmured Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

The door burst open, slamming against the mud wall. Sma flinched. The two black-cloaked men filled the doorway. She could smell them. One strode in towards her, sword out, rope in the other hand, not noticing the drone at one side.

“Excuse me,” said Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

The man glanced at the machine, without breaking stride.

Then he wasn’t there any more, and dust filled the room, and Sma’s ears were ringing, and pieces of mud and paper were falling from the ceiling and fluttering through the air, and there was a large hole straight through the wall into the next room, across from where Skaffen-Amtiskaw — seemingly defying the law concerning action/reaction — hovered in exactly the same place as before. A woman shrieked hysterically in the room through the hole, where what was left of the man was embedded in the wall above her bed, his blood spattered copiously over ceiling, floor, walls, bed and her.

The second man whirled into the room, discharging a long gun point-blank at the drone; the bullet became a flat coin of metal a centimetre in front of the machine’s snout, and clunked to the floor. The man unsheathed and swung his sword in one flashing movement, scything at the drone through the dust and smoke. The blade broke cleanly on a bump of red-coloured field just above the machine’s casing, then the man was lifted off his feet.

Sma was crouched down in one corner, dust in her mouth and hands at her ears, listening to herself scream.

The man thrashed wildly in the centre of the room for a second, then he was a blur through the air above her, there was another colossal pulse of sound, and a ragged aperture appeared in the wall over her head, beside the window looking out to the square. The floorboards jumped and dust choked her. “Stop!” she screamed. The wall above the hole cracked and the ceiling creaked and bowed down, releasing lumps of mud and straw. Dust clogged her mouth and nose and she struggled to her feet, almost throwing herself out of the window in her desperate attempt to find air. “Stop,” she croaked, coughing dust.

The drone floated smoothly to her side, wafting dust away from Sma’s face with a field-plane, and supporting the sagging ceiling with a slender column. Both field components were shaded deep red, the colour of drone pleasure. “There, there,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said to her, patting her back, Sma choked and spluttered from the window and stared horrified at the square below.

The body of the second man lay like a sodden red sack under a cloud of dust in the midst of the riders. While they were still staring, before most of the raiders could raise their swords, and before the inn-keeper’s daughters — being lashed to two of the mounts by their captors — realised what the almost unrecognisable lump on the ground in front of them was and started screaming again, something thrummed past Sma’s shoulder and darted down towards the men.

One of the warriors roared, brandishing his sword and lunging towards the door of the inn.

He managed two steps. He was still roaring when the knife missile flicked past him, field outstretched.

It separated his neck from his shoulders. The roar turned to a sound like the wind, bubbling thickly through the exposed wind-pipe as his body crashed to the dust.

Faster — and turning more tightly — than any bird or insect, the knife missile made an almost invisibly quick circle round most of the riders, producing an odd stuttering noise.

Seven of the riders — five standing, two still mounted — collapsed into the dust, in fourteen separate pieces. Sma tried to scream at the drone, to make the missile stop, but she was still choking, and now starting to retch. The drone patted her back. “There, there,” it said, concernedly. In the square, both of the inn-keeper’s daughters slipped to the ground from the mounts they had been tied to, their bonds slashed in the same cut that had killed all seven men. The drone gave a little shudder of satisfaction.

One man dropped his sword and started to run. The knife missile plunged straight through him. It curved like red light shining on a hook, and slashed across the necks of the last two dismounted riders, felling both. The mount of the final rider was rearing up in front of the missile, its fangs bared, forelegs lashing, claws exposed. The device went through its neck and straight into the face of its rider.

On emerging from the resulting detonation, the machine slammed to a stop in mid-air, while the rider’s headless body slid off his collapsing, thrashing animal. The knife missile spun slowly about, seemingly reviewing its few seconds’ work, then it started to float back towards the window.

The inn-keeper’s daughters had fainted.

Sma vomited.

The frenzied mounts leapt and screamed and ran about the courtyard, a couple of them dragging bits of their riders with them.

The knife missile swooped and butted one of the hysterical mounts on the head, just as the animal was about to trample the two girls lying still in the dust, then the tiny machine dragged them both out of the carnage, towards the doorway where their father’s body lay.

Finally, the sleek, spotless little device rose gently to the window — daintily avoiding Sma’s projected bile — and snicked back into the drone’s casing.

“Bastard!” Sma tried to punch the drone, then kick it, then picked up a small chair and smashed it against the drone’s body. “Bastard! You fucking murderous bastard!”

“Sma,” the drone said reasonably, not moving in the slowly settling maelstrom of dust, and still holding the ceiling up. “You said do something.”

“Meatfucker!” She smashed a table across its back.

“Ms Sma; language!”

“You split-prick shit, I told you to stop!”

“Oh. Did you? I didn’t quite catch that. Sorry.”

She stopped then, hearing the utter lack of concern in the machine’s voice. She thought very clearly that she had a choice here; she could collapse weeping and sobbing and not get over this for a long time, and maybe never be out of the shadow of the contrast between the drone’s cool and her breakdown; or…

She took a deep breath, calmed herself.

She walked up to the drone and said quietly, “All right; this time… you get away with it. Enjoy it when you play it back.” She put one hand flat on the drone’s side. “Yeah; enjoy. But if you ever do anything like that again…” she slapped its flank softly and whispered, “you’re ore, understand?”

“Absolutely,” said the drone.

“Slag; components; motherjunk.”

“Oh, please, no,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw sighed.

“I’m serious. You use minimum force from now on. Understand? Agree?”

“Both.”

She turned, picked up her bag and headed for the door, glancing once into the adjoining room through the hole the first man had made. The woman in there had fled. The man’s body was still cratered into the wall, blood like rays of ejecta.

Sma looked back to the machine, and spat on the floor.

“The Xenophobe’s heading this way,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, suddenly there in front of her, its body shining in the sunlight. “Here.” It stretched a field out, offering her the little chain of bright flowers it had made.

Sma bowed towards it; the machine slipped the chain over her head like a necklace. She stood up and they went back into the castle.

The very top of the keep was out of bounds to the public; it bristled with aerials and masts and a couple of slowly revolving radar units. Two floors below, once the tour party had disappeared round the curve of the gallery, Sma and the machine stopped at a thick metal door. The drone used its electromagnetic effector to disable the door’s alarm and open the electronic locks, then inserted a field into a mechanical lock, jiggled the tumblers and swung the door wide. Sma slipped through, immediately followed by the machine, which relocked the door. They ascended to the broad, cluttered roof, beneath the vault of turquoise sky; a tiny scout missile the drone had sent ahead sidled up to the machine and was taken back inside.

“When’s it get here?” Sma said, listening to the warm wind hum through the jagged spaces of the aerials around her.

“It’s over there,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, jabbing forward. She looked in the direction it had indicated, and could just make out the spare, curved outline of a four-person module, sitting nearby; it was giving a very good impression of being transparent.

Sma looked around the forest of masts and stays for a moment, the wind ruffling her hair, then shook her head. She walked to the module-shape, momentarily dizzied by the sensation that there wasn’t anything there, then that there was. A door swung up from the module’s side, revealing the interior as though opening a passageway into another world, which was — in a sense, she supposed — exactly what it was doing.

She and the drone entered. “Welcome aboard, Ms Sma,” said the module.

“Hello.”

The door closed. The module tipped back on its rear end, like a predator preparing to pounce. It waited a moment for a flock of birds to clear the airspace a hundred metres above, then it was gone, powering into the air. Watching from the ground — if they hadn’t blinked at the wrong moment — a very keen-eyed observer might just have seen a column of trembling air flick skyward from the summit of the keep, but would have heard nothing; even in high supersonic the module could move more quietly than any bird, displacing tissue-thin layers of air immediately ahead of it, moving into the vacuum so created, and replacing the gases in the skin-thin space it had left behind; a falling feather produced more turbulence.

Standing in the module, gazing at the main screen, Sma watched the view beneath the module shrink rapidly, as the concentric layers of the castle’s defences came crashing in like time-reversed waves from the edges of the screen; the castle became a dot between the city and the straits, and then the city itself disappeared and the view began to tip as the module angled out for its rendezvous with the very fast picket Xenophobe.

Sma sat down, still watching the screen, eyes searching in vain for the valley on the outskirts of the city where the dam and the old power station lay.

The drone watched too, while it signalled to the waiting ship and received confirmation the vessel had displaced Sma’s luggage out of the trunk of the car and into the woman’s quarters on board.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw studied Sma, as she stared — a little glumly, it thought — at the hazing-over view on the module screen, and wondered when the best time would be to give her the rest of the bad news.

Because, despite all this wonderful technology, somehow (incredibly; uniquely, as far as the drone knew… how in the name of chaos did a lump of meat outwit and destroy a knife missile?), the man called Cheradenine Zakalwe had shaken off the tail they’d put on him after he’d resigned the last time.

So, before they did anything else, Sma and it had to find the damn human first. If they could.

The figure slipped from behind a radar housing and crossed the keep’s roof, beneath the wind-moaning aerials. It went down the spiral of steps, checked all was clear beyond the thick metal door, then opened it.

A minute later, something that looked exactly like Diziet Sma joined the tour party, while the guide was explaining how developments in artillery, heavier-than-air flight and rocketry had made the ancient fortress obsolete.

XII

They shared their eyrie with the state coach of the Mythoclast, a cluttered army of statues, and a jumble of assorted chests, cases and cupboards packed with treasure from a dozen great houses.

Astil Tremerst Keiver selected a roquelaure from a tall chiffonier, closed the cabinet’s door and admired himself in the mirror. Yes, the cloak looked very fine on him, very fine indeed. He flourished it, pirouetting, drew his ceremonial rifle from its scabbard, and then made a circuit of the room, around the grand state coach, making a “ki-shauw, ki-shauw!” noise, and pointing the gun at each black-curtained window in turn as he swept by them (his shadow dancing gloriously across the walls and the cold grey outlines of the statues), before arriving back at the fireplace, sheathing the rifle, and sitting suddenly and imperiously down on a highly-wrought little chair of finest bloodwood.

The chair collapsed. He thumped into the flagstones and the holstered gun at the side fired, sending a round into the angle between the floor and the curve of wall behind him.

“Shit, shit, shit!” he cried, inspecting his breeks and cloak, respectively grazed and holed.

The door of the state coach burst open and someone flew out, crashing into an escritoire and demolishing it. The man was still and steady in an instant, presenting — in that infuriatingly efficient martial way of his — the smallest possible target, and pointing the appallingly large and ugly plasma cannon straight at the face of deputy vice-regent-in-waiting Astil Tremerst Keiver the Eighth.

“Eek! Zakalwe!” Keiver heard himself say, and threw the cloak over his head. (Damn!)

When Keiver brought the cloak down again — with, he felt, all the not inconsiderable dignity he could muster — the mercenary was already rising from the debris of the little desk, taking a quick look round the room, and switching off the plasma weapon.

Keiver was, naturally, immediately aware of the hateful similarity of their positions, and so stood up quickly.

“Ah. Zakalwe. I beg your pardon. Did I wake you?”

The man scowled, glanced down at the remains of the escritoire, slammed shut the door of the state coach, and said, “No; just a bad dream.”

“Ah. Good.” Keiver fiddled with the ornamental pommel of his gun, wishing that Zakalwe didn’t make him feel — so unjustifiably, dammit — inferior, and crossed in front of the fireplace to sit (carefully, this time) on a preposterous porcelain throne stationed to one side of the hearth.

He watched the mercenary sit down on the hearth-stone, leaving the plasma cannon on the floor in front of him and stretching. “Well, a half watch’s sleep will have to suffice.”

“Hmm,” Keiver said, feeling awkward. He glanced at the ceremonial coach the other man had been sleeping in, and so recently vacated. “Ah.” Keiver drew the roquelaure about him, and smiled. “I don’t suppose you know the story behind that old carriage, do you?”

The mercenary — the so-called (Ha!) War Minister — shrugged. “Well,” he said. “The version I heard was that in the Interregnum, the Archpresbyter told the Mythoclast he could have the tribute, income and souls of all the monasteries he could raise his state coach above, using one horse. The Mythoclast accepted, founded this castle and erected this tower with foreign loans, and using a highly efficient pulley system powered by his prize stallion, winched the coach up here during the Thirty Golden Days to claim every monastery in the land. He won the bet and the resulting war, disestablished the Final Priesthood, paid off his debts, and only perished because the groom in charge of the prize stallion objected to the fact that the beast died of its exertions, and strangled him with its blood and foam-flecked bridle… which, according to legend, is immured within the base of the porcelain throne you’re sitting on. So we’re told.” He looked at the other man and shrugged again.

Keiver was aware that his mouth was hanging open. He closed it. “Ah, you know the story.”

“No; just a wild guess.”

Keiver hesitated, then laughed loudly. “By hell! You’re a rum chap, Zakalwe!”

The mercenary stirred the remains of the bloodwood chair with one heavily-booted foot, and said nothing.

Keiver was aware that he ought to do something, and so stood. He wandered to the nearest window, drew back the drape and unlocked the interior shutters, levered the external shutters aside and stood, arm against the stones, gazing out at the view beyond.

The Winter Palace, besieged.

Outside, on the snow-strewn plain, amongst the fires and trenches, there were huge wooden siege structures and missile launchers, heavy artillery and rock-throwing catapults; juried field projectors and gas-powered searchlights; a heinous collection of blatant anachronisms, developmental paradoxes and technological juxtapositions. And they called it progress.

“I don’t know,” Keiver breathed. “Men fire guided missiles, from their mounts’ saddles; jets are shot down by guided arrows; throw-knives explode like artillery shells, or like as not get turned back by ancestral armour backed by these damned field projectors… where’s it all to end, eh, Zakalwe?”

“Here, in about three heartbeats, if you don’t close those shutters or pull the black-out drapes behind you.” He stabbed at the logs in the grate with a poker.

“Ha!” Keiver withdrew rapidly from the window, half ducking as he pulled the lever to close the external shutters. “Quite!” He hauled the drape across the window, dusting down his hands, watching the other man as he prodded at the logs in the fire. “Indeed!” He took his place on the porcelain throne again.

Of course, Mr so-called War Minister Zakalwe liked to pretend he did have an idea where it was all going to end; he claimed to have some sort of explanation for it all, about outside forces, the balance of technology, and the erratic escalation of military wizardry. He always seemed to be hinting at greater themes and conflicts, beyond the mere here-and-now, forever trying to establish some — frankly laughable — otherworldly superiority. As though that made any difference to the fact that he was nothing more than a mercenary — a very lucky mercenary — who’d happened to catch the ear of the Sacred Heirs and impress them with a mixture of absurdly risky exploits and cowardly plans, while the one he’d been paired with — him, Astil Tremerst Keiver the Eighth, deputy regent-in-waiting, no less — had behind him a thousand years of breeding, natural seniority and — indeed, for that was just the way things were, dammit — superiority. After all, what sort of War Minister — even in these desperate days — was so incapable of delegating that he had to sit out a watch up here, waiting for an attack that would probably never come?

Keiver glanced at the other man, sitting staring into the flames, and wondered what he was thinking.

I blame Sma. She got me into this crock of shit.

He looked around the cluttered spaces of the room. What had he to do with idiots like Keiver, with all this historical junk, with any of this? He didn’t feel part of it, could not identify with it, and he did not entirely blame them for not listening to him. He supposed he did have the satisfaction of knowing that he had warned the fools, but that was little enough to warm yourself with, on a cold and closing night like this.

He’d fought; put his life at risk for them, won a few desperate rear-guard actions, and he had tried to tell them what they ought to do; but they’d listened too late, and given him some limited power only after the war was already more or less lost. But that was just the way they were; they were the bosses, and if their whole way of life vanished because it was a tenet of that way that people like them automatically knew how to make war better than even the most experienced commoners or outsiders, then that was not unjust; everything came level in the end. And if it meant their deaths, let them all die.

In the meantime, while supplies held out, what could be more pleasant? No more long cold marches, no boggy excuses for camps, no outside latrines, no scorched earth to try and scrape a meal from. Not much action, and maybe he would get itchy feet eventually, but that was more than compensated for by being able to satisfy the more highly-placed itches of some of the noble ladies also trapped in the castle.

Anyway, he knew in his heart that there was a relief in not being listened to, sometimes. Power meant responsibility. Advice unacted upon almost always might have been right, and in the working out of whatever plan was followed, there was anyway always blood; better it was on their hands. The good soldier did as he was told, and if he had any sense at all volunteered for nothing, especially promotion.

“Ha,” Keiver said, rocking in the china chair. “We found more grass seed today.”

“Oh, good.”

“Indeed.”

Most of the courtyards, gardens and patios were already given over to pasture; they’d torn the roofs off some of the less architecturally important halls and planted there as well. If they weren’t blown to bits in the meantime, they might — in theory — feed a quarter of the castle’s garrison indefinitely.

Keiver shivered, and wrapped the cloak more tightly about his legs. “But this is a cold old place, Zakalwe, isn’t it?”

He was about to say something in reply when the door at the far end of the room opened a crack.

He grabbed the plasma cannon.

“Is… is everything all right?” said a quiet, female voice.

He put the gun down, smiling at the small pale face peering from the doorway, long black hair following the line of the door’s studded wood.

“Ah, Neinte!” Keiver exclaimed, rising only to bow deeply to the young girl (princess, indeed!) who was — technically, at least, not that that precluded other, more productive, even lucrative, relationships in the future — his ward.

“Come on in,” he heard the mercenary tell the girl.

(Damn him, always taking the initiative like that; who did he think he was?)

The girl crept into the room, gathering her skirts in front of her. “I thought I heard a shot…”

The mercenary laughed. “That was a little time ago,” he said, rising to show the girl to a seat near the fire.

“Well,” she said, “I had to dress…”

The man laughed louder.

“My lady,” Keiver said, rising slightly late, and flourishing what would now — thanks to Zakalwe — look like a rather awkward bow. “Forfend we should have disturbed your maidenly slumber…”

Keiver heard the other man stifle a guffaw as he kicked a log further into the fire. The princess Neinte giggled. Keiver felt his face heat up, and decided to laugh.

Neinte — still very young, but already beautiful in a delicate, fragile way — wrapped her arms round her drawn-up legs, and stared into the fire.

He looked from her to Keiver, in the silence that followed (except that the deputy vice-regent-in-waiting said, “Yes, well.”), and thought — as the logs crackled and the scarlet flames danced — how like statues the two young people suddenly looked.

Just once, he thought, I’d like to know whose side I’m really on in something like this. Here I am, in this absurd fortress, packed with riches, crammed with concentrated nobility — such as it was, he thought, watching Keiver’s vacant-looking eyes — facing out the hordes beyond (all claw and tackle, brute force and brute intelligence) trying to protect these delicate, simpering products of a millennia’s privilege, and never knowing whether I’m doing the tactically or the strategically right thing.

The Minds did not assume such distinctions; to them, there was no cut-off between the two. Tactics cohered into strategy, strategy disintegrated into tactics, in the sliding scale of their dialectical moral algebra. It was all more than they ever expected the mammal brain to cope with.

He recalled what Sma had said to him, long long ago back in that new beginning (itself the product of so much guilt and pain); that they dealt in the intrinsically untoward, where rules were forged as you went along and were never the same twice anyway, where just by the nature of things nothing could be known, or predicted, or even judged with any real certainty. It all sounded very sophisticated and abstract and challenging to work with, but in the end it came down to people and problems.

This girl was what it came down to, here, this time; barely more than a child, and trapped in the great stone castle with the rest of the cream or scum (depending on how you looked at it), to live or die, depending on how well I advise, and on how capable these clowns are of taking that advice.

He looked at the girl’s flame-lit face, and felt something more than distant desire (for she was attractive), or fatherly protectiveness (for she was so young, and he, despite his appearance, so old). Call it… he didn’t know what. A realisation; an awareness of the tragedy the whole episode represented; the break-up of the Rule, the dissolution of power and privilege and the whole elaborate, top-heavy system this child represented.

The muck and dirt, the king with fleas. For theft, mutilation; for the wrong thoughts, death. An infant mortality rate as astronomical as the life-expectancy was minute, and the whole grisly, working package wrapped in a skein of wealth and advantage designed to maintain the dark dominion of the knowing over the ignorant (and the worst of it was the pattern; the repetition; the twisted variations of the same depraved theme in so many different places).

So this girl, called a princess. Would she die? The war was going against them, he knew, and the same symbolic grammar that presented her with the prospect of power if things went well, also dictated her use, her expendability, if all failed about them. Rank demanded its tribute; the obsequious bow or the mean stab, according to the outcome of this struggle.

He saw her suddenly old, in the flickering firelight. He saw her shut in some slimed dungeon, waiting, hoping, scabbed with lice and ragged in sack-cloth, head shaved, eyes dark and hollow in the raw skin, and finally marched out one snow-filled day, to be nailed to a wall with arrows or bullets, or face the cold axe blade.

Or maybe that too was too romantic. Maybe there would be some desperate flight to asylum, a lonely and bitter exile spent growing old and worn, barren and senile, forever remembering the ever more golden old times, composing futile petitions, hoping for a return, but growing slowly, inevitably, into something like the pampered uselessness her upbringing had always conditioned her for, but without any of the compensations she had been bred to expect from her station.

With a feeling of sickness, he saw that she meant nothing. She was just another irrelevant part of another history, heading — with or without the Culture’s carefully evaluated nudges in what they saw as the right direction — for what would probably be better times and an easier life for most. But not her, he suspected, not right at this moment.

Born twenty years earlier, she might have expected a good marriage, a productive estate, access to the court, and lusty sons, talented daughters… twenty years from now, perhaps an astutely mercantile husband, or even — in the unlikely event this particular genderist society was heading that way so soon — a life of her own; academic, in business, doing good works; whatever.

But, probably, death.

High in a turret of a great castle rising on a black crag above snowy plains, besieged and grand, crammed full of an empire’s treasure, and he sitting by a log fire was a sad and lovely princess… I used to dream about such things, he thought. I used to long for them, ache for them. They seemed the very stuff of life, its essence. So why does all this taste of ashes?

I should have stayed on that beach, Sma. Perhaps after all I am getting too old for this.

He made himself look away from the girl. Sma said he tended to get too involved, and she was not totally wrong. He’d done what they’d asked; he’d be paid, and at the end of all this, after all, there was his own attempt to claim absolution for a past crime. Livueta, say you will forgive me.

“Oh!” The princess Neinte had just noticed the wreckage of the bloodwood chair.

“Yes,” Keiver stirred uncomfortably. “That, ah… that was, umm, me, I’m afraid. Was it yours? Your family’s?”

“Oh, no! But I knew it; it belonged to my uncle; the archduke. It used to be in his hunting lodge. It had a great big animal’s head above it. I was always frightened to sit in it because I dreamt the head would fall from the wall and one of the tusks would stick right into my head and I’d die!” She looked at both men in turn and giggled nervously. “Wasn’t I silly?”

“Ha!” said Keiver.

(While he watched them both and shivered. And tried to smile.)

“Well,” Keiver laughed. “You must promise not to tell your uncle that I broke his little seat, or I shall never be invited to one of his hunts again!” Keiver laughed louder. “Why, I might even end up with my head fixed on one of his walls!”

The girl squealed and put a hand to her mouth.

(He looked away, shivering again, then threw a piece of wood onto the fire, and did not notice then or afterwards that it was a piece of the bloodwood chair he had added to the flames, and not a log at all.)

Three

Sma suspected a lot of ship crews were crazy. For that matter, she suspected a fair few of the ships themselves weren’t totally together in the sanity department, either. There were only twenty people on the very fast picket Xenophobe, and Sma had noticed that — as a general rule — the smaller the crew, the weirder the behaviour. So she was already prepared for the ship’s staff being pretty off the wall even before the module entered the ship’s hangar.

“Ah-choo!” the young crewman sneezed, covering his nose with one hand while extending the other to Sma as she stepped from the module. Sma jerked her hand back, looking at the young man’s red nose and streaming eyes. “Ais Disgarb, Ms Sma,” the fellow said, blinking and sniffing, and looking hurt, “Belcome aboard.”

Sma put her hand out again cautiously. The crewman’s hand was extremely hot. “Thank you,” Sma said.

“Skaffen-Amtiskaw,” the drone said from behind her.

“Heddo,” the young man waved at the drone. He took a small piece of cloth from one sleeve and dabbed at his leaky eyes and nose.

“Are you entirely all right?” Sma said.

“Dot really,” he said. “God a cold. Blease,” he indicated to one side, “cob with be.”

“A cold,” Sma nodded, falling into step alongside the fellow; he was dressed in a jellaba, as though he’d just got out of bed.

“Yes,” the young man said, leading the way through the Xenophobe’s collection of smallcraft, satellites and assorted paraphernalia towards the rear of the hangar. He sneezed again, sniffed. “Sobthig ob a fad on the shib ad the bow-bid.” (Here Sma, immediately behind the man as they walked between two closely parked modules, turned quickly back to look at Skaffen-Amtiskaw and mouthed the word. “What?” at it, but the machine wobbled, shrugging. ME NEITHER it printed on its aura field, in letters of grey on a rosy background.) “Be all tought it’d be abusing to relax our ibude systebs and cadge colds,” the young crewman explained, showing her and the drone into an elevator at one end of the hangar.

“All of you?” Sma said, as the door closed and the elevator rolled and rose. “The whole crew?”

“Yes, dough dot all ad the sabe tibe. The peebil who’ve recobered say id’s very pleasid abter it’s ober.”

“Yes,” Sma said, glancing at the drone, which was keeping a standard pattern of formal blue on its aura field, apart from one large red dot on its side that probably only she could see; it was pulsing rapidly. When she noticed it she almost started laughing herself. She cleared her throat. “Yes, I suppose it would be.”

The young man sneezed mightily.

“Due for a spot of R-and-R soon, are we?” Skaffen-Amtiskaw asked him. Sma nudged the machine with her elbow.

The young crewman looked puzzledly at the machine. “Jusd bidished sub, adjilly.”

He glanced away to the elevator door as it started to open, Skaffen-Amtiskaw and Sma exchanged looks; Sma crossed her eyes.

They stepped into a wide social area, floored and walled with some dark red wood, polished to the point of gleaming; it supported a variety of richly upholstered couches and chairs, and a few low tables. The ceiling wasn’t particularly high, but very attractive, composed of great flutes of gathered-up material rippling in from the walls and hung with many little lanterns. From the light level, it looked to be early morning, ship time. A group of people round one of the tables broke up and came towards her.

“Biz Sba,” the young crewman said indicating Sma, his voice seeming to get thicker all the time. The other people — about fifty-fifty men and women — smiled, introduced themselves. She nodded, exchanged a few words; the drone said hello.

One of the people in the group held a little bundle of brown and yellow fur, cradled against one shoulder rather as one might hold a baby. “Here,” the man said, presenting the tiny furry creature to Sma. She took it reluctantly. It was warm, had four limbs arranged conventionally, smelled attractive and wasn’t any sort of animal she’d ever seen before; it had large ears on a large head, and as she held it, it opened its huge eyes and looked at her. “That’s the ship,” the man who’d handed her the animal said.

“Hello,” the tiny being squeaked.

Sma looked it up and down. “You’re the Xenophobe?”

“Its representative. The bit you can talk to. You can call me Xeny.” It smiled; it had little round teeth. “I know most ships just use a drone, but,” it glanced at Skaffen-Amtiskaw, “they can be a bit boring, don’t you think?”

Sma smiled, and sensed Skaffen-Amtiskaw’s aura flicker out of the corner of her eye. “Well, sometimes,” she agreed.

“Oh yes,” the little creature said, nodding. “I’m much cuter.” It wriggled in her hands, looking happy. “If you like,” it giggled, “I’ll show you to your cabin, yes?”

“Yes; good idea,” nodded Sma, and put the thing over her shoulder. The crewpeople called out to say they’d see her later as she, the ship’s bizarre remote drone and Skaffen-Amtiskaw headed for the accommodation section.

“Ooh, you’re nice and warm,” the little brown and yellow creature mumbled sleepily, snuggling into Sma’s neck as they headed down a deeply carpeted corridor for Sma’s quarters. It stirred and she found herself patting its back. “Left here,” it said, at a junction, then, “That’s us just breaking orbit now, by the way.”

“Good,” Sma said.

“Can I cuddle up with you when you sleep?”

Sma stopped, detached the creature from her shoulder with one hand and stared it in the face. “What?”

“Just for chumminess’ sake,” the little thing said, yawning wide and blinking. “I’m not being rude; it’s a good bonding procedure.”

Sma was aware of Skaffen-Amtiskaw glowing red just behind her. She brought the yellow and brown device closer to her face. “Listen, Xenophobe—”

“Xeny.”

“Xeny; you are a million-tonne starship; a Torturer class Rapid Offensive Unit. Even—”

“But I’m demilitarised!”

“Even without your principal armament, I bet you could waste planets if you wanted to—”

“Aw, come on; any silly GCU can do that!”

“So what is all this shit for?” She shook the furry little remote drone, quite hard. Its teeth chattered.

“It’s for a laugh!” it cried. “Sma; don’t you appreciate a joke?”

“I don’t know. Do you appreciate being drop-kicked back to the accommodation area?”

“Ooo! What’s your problem, lady? Have you got something against small furry animals, or what? Look, Ms Sma; I know very well I’m a ship, and I do everything I’m asked to do — including taking you to this frankly rather fuzzily specified destination — and do it very efficiently, too. If there was the slightest sniff of any real action, and I had to start acting like a warship, this construct in your hands would go lifeless and limp immediately, and I’d battle as ferociously and decisively as I’ve been trained to. Meanwhile, like my human colleagues, I amuse myself harmlessly. If you really hate my current appearance, all right; I’ll change it; I’ll be an ordinary drone, or just a disembodied voice, or talk to you through Skaffen-Amtiskaw here, or through your personal terminal. The last thing I want to do is offend a guest.”

Sma pursed her lips. She patted the thing on its head, and sighed. “Fair enough.”

“I can keep this shape?”

“By all means.”

“Oh goody!” It squirmed with pleasure, then opened its big eyes wide and looked hopefully at her. “Cuddle?”

“Cuddle.” Sma cuddled it, patted its back.

She turned to see Skaffen-Amtiskaw lying dramatically on its back in mid-air, its aura field flashing the lurid orange that was used to signal Sick Drone in Extreme Distress.

Sma nodded goodbye to the little brown and yellow animal as it waddled away down the corridor which led back to the social area (it waved back with one chubby little paw), then closed the cabin door and made sure the room’s internal monitoring was off.

She turned to Skaffen-Amtiskaw. “How long are we on this ship for?”

“Thirty days?” Skaffen-Amtiskaw suggested.

Sma gritted her teeth and looked round the fairly cosy-looking but — compared to the echoing spaces of the old power station mansion — rather small cabin. “Thirty days with a crew of viral masochists and a ship that thinks it’s a cuddly toy.” She shook her head, sat into the bed field. “Subjectively, drone, this could be a long trip.” She collapsed back into the bed, muttering.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw decided right now would probably still not be the best time to tell the woman about Zakalwe being missing.

“I’ll just go and take a look round, if you don’t mind,” it said, drifting towards the door over the neat line of bags that was Sma’s luggage.

“Yeah, on you go,” Sma waved one arm lazily, then shucked off the jacket and let it fall to the deck.

The drone had almost made it to the door when Sma sat bolt upright, a frown on her face, and said, “Wait a minute; what did the ship mean about ‘… rather fuzzily specified destination’? Doesn’t it know where the hell we’re going?”

Oh-oh, thought the drone.

It spun in the air. “Ah,” it said.

Sma’s eyes narrowed. “We are just going to get Zakalwe, aren’t we?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“We’re not doing anything else?”

“Absolutely not. We find Zakalwe; we brief him; we take him to Voerenhutz. Simple as that. We might be asked to hang around for a bit, overseeing, but that isn’t definite yet.”

“Yes, yes, I expected that, but… where exactly is Zakalwe?”

“Where exactly?” The drone said. “Well, I mean; you know, that’s…”

“All right,” Sma said, exasperated, “approximately, then.”

“No problem,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, backing off towards the door.

“No problem?” Sma said, puzzled.

“Yes; no problem. We know that. Where he is.”

“Good,” Sma nodded. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Well,” Sma said loudly, “where is he?”

“Crastalier.”

“Cras…?”

“Crastalier. That’s where we’re heading.”

Sma shook her head, yawned. “Never heard of it.” She flopped back in the bed field, stretching. “Crastalier.” Her yawn deepened; she put a hand to her mouth. “You only had to say that the first time, goddamit.”

“Sorry,” the drone said.

“Mmm. Never mind.” Sma put out one hand, waved it through the bedside beam that controlled the cabin lights, so that they dimmed. She yawned again. “Think I’ll catch some sleep. Take my boots off, will you?”

Gently but quickly, the drone slipped Sma’s boots off, gathered her jacket and hung it in a walk-in cupboard, swept the bags in there too, then — as Sma turned over in the bed field, eyes fluttering closed — the drone slipped out of the room.

It hovered in the air outside, looking at its reflection in the polished wood on the far side of the corridor.

“That,” it said to itself, “was close.” Then it went for a wander.

Sma had arrived on the Xenophobe just after breakfast, by ship time. When she awoke, it was early afternoon. She was completing her toilet, while the drone sorted her clothes into type and colour order and hung or folded them in the cupboard, when the door chimed. Sma wandered out of the little bathroom area, wearing a pair of shorts, her mouth full of toothpaste. She tried saying Open, but the toothpaste apparently stopped the room monitor from recognising the word. She walked over and pressed the door-open instead.

Sma eye’s flicked wide; she yelped, spluttered, jumped back from the door, a scream gathering in her throat.

The instant after her eyes had widened, before the signal to jump back from the door had travelled all the way to her leg muscles, there was an impression of almost invisibly sudden movement in the cabin, belatedly followed by a bang and a sizzling sound.

There, stationed between her and the door, were all three of the drone’s knife missiles, hovering roughly level with her eyes, sternum and groin; she was looking at them through a haze of field the machine had also thrown in front of her. Then it clicked off.

The knife missiles swung lazily away through the air and clicked back into Skaffen-Amtiskaw’s casing. “Don’t do that to me,” the machine muttered, returning to sorting out Sma’s socks.

Sma wiped her mouth and stared at the three-metre tall, brown and yellow coloured furry monster cowering in the corridor outside the door.

“Ship… Xeny, what the hell are you doing?”

“I’m sorry,” the huge creature said, its voice only a little deeper than when it had been baby-sized. “I thought if you didn’t relate to a small furry animal, perhaps a bigger version…”

“Shee-it.” Sma said, shaking her head. “Come in,” she called, heading back for the bathroom area. “Or did you just want to show me how much you’ve grown?” She rinsed out the paste and spat.

Xeny squeezed through the door, stooped, and sidled into a corner. “Sorry about that, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.”

“No problem,” the other machine replied.

“Ah, no, Ms Sma,” Xeny called. “I actually wanted to talk to you about…”

Skaffen-Amtiskaw went still, just for a second. There was, in fact, a fairly lengthy, detailed and slightly heated exchange between the drone and the ship’s Mind during that time, but Sma was only aware of Xeny pausing as it spoke.

“… about having a fancy-dress party, this evening, in your honour,” the ship improvised.

Sma smiled from the bathroom area, “That’s a lovely idea, ship. Thank you, Xeny. Yes; why not?”

“Good; I just thought I’d check with you, first. Any ideas about costumes?”

Sma laughed. “Yeah; I’ll go as you; make me one of those suits you’re wearing.”

“Ha. Yes. Good idea. Actually, that might be rather a common choice, but we’ll make it two people can’t go as the same thing. Right. I’ll talk to you later.” Xeny lumbered from the room and the door slid shut. Sma appeared out from the bathroom area, slightly surprised at this sudden departure, but just shrugged.

“Short but eventful visit,” she observed, rummaging through the socks Skaffen-Amtiskaw had just carefully arranged in chromatic order. “That machine’s weird.”

“What do you expect?” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. “It’s a star-ship.”

— You might (the ship Mind communicated to Skaffen-Amtiskaw) have told me you were keeping the size of our target destination from her.

— I am hoping (the drone replied) that our people already out there will find the guy we’re looking for and give us an exact position, in which case Sma will never need to know there was ever any problem.

— Indeed, but why not just be honest with her in the first place?

— Ha! You don’t know Sma!

— Oh. Do I take it she’s temperamental?

— What do you expect? She’s a human!

The ship prepared a feast, and put as many human-brain-chemistry-altering chemicals into the various dishes and drinks as was normally regarded proper without attaching a specific sanity warning to each bowl, plate, jug or glass. It told the crew about the party, and rearranged the social area, setting up a variety of mirrors and reverser fields (with a total guest list of only twenty-two — not including itself — making the place look suitably crowded was one of the major obstacles it faced in trying to encourage the feel of a serious, thorough-going whoopee).

Sma breakfasted, was shown round the ship — though there was little to see; the ship was almost all engine — and spent most of the rest of the day reviewing her knowledge of the Voerenhutz cluster’s history and politics.

The ship sent formal invitations to each of the crew, and specified a strict rule of No Shop Talk. It hoped that this, plus the narcotic wealth of the consumables, would keep everybody off the subject of where exactly they were heading for. It had toyed with the idea of just telling people there was a problem here and asking them not to talk about it, but suspected there were at least two of the crew who would take such a proscription as a challenge to their integrity requiring them to raise the issue at the first possible opportunity. It was on occasions like this that the Xenophobe tended to consider changing its status to that of an unstaffed ship, but it knew it would miss the humans if it did decide to ask them to leave; they were fun to have around, usually.

The ship played loud music, showed exciting screen holos, and set up a fabulous surrounding holo landscape of lush green and blue, filled with floating bushes and hovering trees where strange, eight-winged birds capered and beyond which a glowing white layer of mist plied by tall, feathery cloudships extended to neck-stretchingly tall cliffs of pastel-shaded rock, set about with further small clouds, draped with blue and sparkling gold waterfalls, and topped by fabulous cities of spires and slender bridges. Ship-slaved soligrams of famous historical figures wandered about the party, adding to the illusion of numbers, and were only too happy to engage the disguised revellers in conversation. More treats and surprises were promised for later.

Sma went as Xeny, Skaffen-Amtiskaw as a model of the Xenophobe, and the ship itself produced yet another remote drone; an aquatic one, still brown and yellow, but looking like a rather fat and large-eyed fish, and floating in a field-held metre-diameter sphere of water which drifted through the party-space like some odd balloon.

“Ais Disgarve, who you’ve met before,” the ship drone said, voice sounding rather bubbly as it introduced Sma to the young man who’d greeted her in the hangar the day before. “And Jetart Hrine.”

Sma smiled, nodded at Disgarve — making a mental note to stop thinking of him as Disgarb — and the young woman at his side.

“Hello again. How do you do?”

“Heddo,” said Disgarve, dressed as some sort of ancient cold-climate explorer, all swathed in furs.

“Hi,” Jetart Hrine said. She was quite short and round, very young looking, and her skin was so black it was almost blue. She wore some ancient — and surprisingly brightly coloured — military uniform, and sported a smooth-bore projectile rifle slung over one shoulder. She sipped from a glass and said. “I know there’s no shop talk, Ms Sma, but frankly Ais and I have been wondering why our dest—”

“Aah!” the ship drone said, its water sphere suddenly collapsing. Water crashed all around the feet of Sma, Hrine and Disgarve, all of whom jumped back a little. The fish-drone fell to the red wood deck and flapped around. “Water!” it croaked. Sma picked it up by the tail.

“What happened?” she asked it.

“Field malfunction. Water! Quickly!”

Sma looked at Disgarve and Hrine, both of whom seemed rather bemused. Skaffen-Amtiskaw, in its starship disguise, wound quickly through the party-goers towards them. “Water!” the ship drone repeated, wriggling.

A frown gathered on Sma’s brow, inside the brown and yellow suit. She looked at the woman dressed as a soldier. “What were you about to say, Ms Hrine?”

“I was — oof!”

A one-in-five-hundred-and-twelfth scale model of the very fast picket Xenophobe thumped into the woman, making her stagger backwards, dropping her glass.

“Hey!” Disgarve said, pushing the offending Skaffen-Amtiskaw away. Hrine looked annoyed, and rubbed her shoulder.

“Sorry; clumsy me!” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, loudly.

“Water! Water!” yelped the ship drone, struggling in Sma’s furry paw.

“Shut up!” Sma told it. She went close to Jetart Hrine, putting her own body between the woman and Skaffen-Amtiskaw. “Ms Hrine; complete your question, would you?”

“I just wanted to know why…”

The floor shook, the entire landscape around them trembled; light flashed from high above, and as they looked up, they saw the fabulous gleaming cities of the cliff tops far above disappear in vast blooms of light, which slowly faded, leaving falling clouds of debris, crashing towers and disintegrating bridges. The mighty cliffs split asunder and kilometres-high tsunami of seething lava and boiling grey-black clouds of smoke and ash burst out, exploding over the quivering landscape below, where the cloudships were sinking and the eight-winged birds were spinning so fast their wings were coming off, sending them spinning into the blue-green shrubbery in squawking explosions of feathers and leaves.

Jetart Hrine stared in disbelief. Sma grabbed the woman’s collar with one paw and shook her. “It’s trying to distract you!” she yelled. She turned to the fish-drone in her other paw. “Cut it out!” she screamed at it. She shook the woman again, while Disgarve tried to pry her paw away from the woman. Sma shook his hand off. “What were you trying to say?”

“Why don’t we know where we’re going?” Hrine shouted into Sma’s face, over the noise of the earth splitting open in a gout of flame. A huge black shape reared from the chasm, red-eyed.

“We’re going to Crastalier!” Sma yelled. A vast silver human baby appeared in the sky, shining, beatific and be-rayed, spun about with glowing figures.

“So what?” Hrine bellowed, as lightning zapped from mega-baby to earth-beast and thunder assaulted the ears. “Crastalier’s an Open Cluster; there must be half a million stars in it!”

Sma froze.

The holos went back to the way they had been before the cataclysms. The music resumed, but it was quieter now, and very soothing. The ship’s crew stood around, looking mystified. There was much shrugging.

The piscine ship-drone and Skaffen-Amtiskaw exchanged looks. The ship drone, still held in Sma’s paw, suddenly became the holo of a fish skeleton. Skaffen-Amtiskaw projected the model of the Xenophobe tumbling disintegrating and trailing smoke to the deck. They both flashed back to their previous disguises as Sma turned slowly and looked at them both.

“An… Open… Cluster?” she said, and took off the brown and yellow head of the fancy-dress suit.

Sma’s mouth was in the shape of a smile. It was not an expression Skaffen-Amtiskaw had learned to view with anything other than extreme trepidation.

— Oh shit.

— I think we are in the presence of one annoyed human female, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

— You don’t say. Any ideas?

— None whatsoever. You can field this; my fish-like ass is out of here.

— Ship! You can’t do this to me!

— Can and am. This is your prototype. Talk to me later. Bye.

The fish-drone went limp in Sma’s paw. She let it drop to the water-slicked floor.

The drone dispensed with the warship disguise; it floated in front of her, fields on clear. It dipped its front a little, held it there. “Sma,” it said quietly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t lie but I did deceive.”

“My cabin,” Sma said calmly, after a brief pause. “Excuse us,” she said to Disgarve and Hrine, and walked away, followed by the drone.

She floated on the bed in the lotus position, naked but for the shorts, the Xeny suit discarded on the floor. She was glanding calm and she looked more sad than furious. Skaffen-Amtiskaw — expecting a fight — was feeling awful, faced with such measured disappointment.

“I thought if I told you, you wouldn’t come.”

“Drone; this is my job.”

“I know, but you were so reluctant to leave…”

“After three years, with no warning, what do you expect? But how long did I actually hold out? Even knowing about the stand-in? Come on, drone; you told me what the situation was and I accepted. There was no need to keep quiet about Zakalwe giving us the slip.”

“I’m sorry,” the drone said, very quietly. “This is inadequate, I know, but I really am sorry. Please say you might be able to forgive me one day.”

“Oh, don’t take the contrition bit too far. Just tell me things in future.”

“All right.”

Sma let her head drop for a moment, then brought it back up. “You can start by telling me how Zakalwe got away. What did we have trailing him?”

“A knife missile.”

“A knife missile?” Sma looked suitably amazed. She rubbed her chin with one hand.

“Quite a late model, too,” the drone said. “Nanoguns, mono-filament warps, effector; point seven value brain.”

“And Zakalwe got away from this beast?” Sma was almost laughing.

“Not just away; he wasted it.”

“Shee-it,” Sma breathed. “I didn’t think Zakalwe was that smart. Was he smart, or just incredibly lucky? What happened? How did he do it?”

“Well, it’s very secret,” the drone said. “So please don’t tell anybody at all.”

“My honour,” Sma said ironically, palm on chest.

“Well,” the drone said, making a sighing noise. “It took him a year to set up, but on the place where we dropped him — after his last job for us — the local humanoids shared their planet with large sea-going mammals of about equivalent intelligence; quite a viable symbiotic relationship, with much cross-cultural contact. Zakalwe — using the exchange we’d given him as payment for his work — bought a company which made medical and signalling lasers. His trap involved a hospital facility the humanoids were setting up on the coast of an ocean to treat these sea-going mammals. One of the pieces of medical equipment being tested was a very large Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Scanner.”

“A what?”

“Fourth most primitive way of looking inside your average water-based living being.”

“Go on.”

“The process involves the use of extremely strong magnetic fields. Zakalwe was supposedly testing a laser attached to the machine — on a holiday, when there was nobody else around — when he somehow got the knife missile to enter the scanning machine, and then turned on the power.”

“I thought knife missiles weren’t magnetic.”

“They’re not, but there was just enough metal in it to set up crippling eddy currents if it tried to move too fast.”

“But it could still move.”

“Not fast enough to get out of the way of the laser Zakalwe had set up at one end of the scanner. It was only supposed to illuminate, to help produce holos of the mammals, but Zakalwe had in fact installed a military strength device; it grilled the knife missile.”

“Wow.” Sma nodded, staring down at the floor. “The man never ceases to amaze.” She looked at the drone. “Zakalwe must have wanted away from us awful bad.”

“It looks that way,” agreed the drone.

“So maybe there’s no way he’ll want to work for us again. Maybe he never wants even to hear from us again.”

“I’m afraid that must be a possibility.”

“Even if we can find him.”

“Quite.”

“And all we know is that he’s somewhere in an Open Cluster called Crastalier?” Sma’s voice sounded tinged with disbelief.

“It’s a bit more focused than that,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. “There are maybe ten or twelve systems he could be in by now, if he left immediately after stiffing the knife missile, and took the fastest ships available. Thankfully, the tech level in the meta-civilisation isn’t that high.” The drone hesitated, then said, “To be honest, we might have been able to catch up with him, if we’d gone in fast and strong immediately… But I think the controlling Minds were so impressed with Zakalwe’s trick they thought he deserved to get away. We kept a very general watch on the volume, but it’s only in the last ten days the search has become serious. We’re bringing in ships and people from wherever we can now; I’m sure we’ll find him.”

“Ten or twelve systems, drone?” Sma said shaking her head.

“Twenty-plus planets; maybe three hundred sizeable space habitats… not including ships, of course.”

Sma closed her eyes. Her head shook. “I don’t believe this.”

Skaffen-Amtiskaw thought the better of saying anything.

The woman’s eyes opened. “Want to pass on a suggestion or two?”

“Certainly.”

“Forget the habitats. And forget any planets that aren’t fairly Standard; check out… deserts, temperate zones; forests but not jungles… and no cities.” She shrugged, rubbed her mouth with her hand. “If he’s still trying hard to stay hidden, we’ll never find him. If he only wanted to get away to live his own life without being watched, we have a chance. Oh, and look for wars, of course. Especially wars that aren’t too big… and interesting wars, know what I mean?”

“Right. Transmitted.” Normally the drone would have poured scorn on this bit of amateur psychological sleuthing, but this time it decided to bite its metaphorical tongue, and relayed Sma’s remarks to the unresponding ship for transmission to the search fleet ahead of them.

Sma took a deep breath, shoulders rising and falling. “Party still going on?”

“Yes,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, surprised.

Sma jumped off the bed and stepped into the Xeny suit. “Well; let’s not be party poopers.”

She fastened the suit, scooped up the brown and yellow head and walked for the door.

“Sma,” the drone said, following. “I thought you’d be mad.”

“Maybe I will be, once the calm wears off,” she admitted, opening the door and putting the suit head on. “But just right now, I really can’t be bothered.”

They went down the corridor. She looked back at the clear-fielded machine behind her; “Come on, drone; it’s meant to be fancy dress. But try something a little more imaginative than a warship this time.”

“Hmm,” the machine said. “Any suggestions?”

“I don’t know,” Sma sighed, “What would suit you? I mean, what is the perfect role-model for a cowardly lying patronising hypocritical bastard with no trust in or respect for another person?”

There was silence from behind as they approached the noise and light of the party. So she turned round and, instead of the drone, saw a classically proportioned, handsome, but somehow anonymous-looking young man following her down the corridor, his gaze just moving up from her behind to her eyes.

Sma laughed. “Yes; very good.” She walked a few more steps. “On second thoughts, I think I preferred the warship.”

XI

He never wrote things in the sand. He resented even leaving footprints. He saw it as a one-way commerce; he did the beachcombing, and the sea provided the materials. The sand was the middle-man, displaying the goods as though it was a long, soggy shop counter. He liked the simplicity of this arrangement.

Sometimes he watched the ships passing, far out to sea. Now and again he’d wish that he was on one of the tiny dark shapes, on his way to some bright and strange place, or on his way — imagining harder — to a quiet home port, to twinkling lights, amiable laughter, friends and welcome. But usually he ignored the slow specks, and got on with his walking and gathering, and kept his eyes on the grey-brown wash of the beach’s slope. The horizon was clear and far and empty, the wind sang low in the dunes, and the seabirds wheeled and cried, comfortingly random and argumentative in the cold skies above.

The brash, noisy home-cars came sometimes, from the interior. The home-cars were loaded with shining metal and flashing lights, they had multi-coloured windows and highly ornamental grilles, they fluttered with flags and dripped with enthusiastically imagined but sloppily executed paint-jobs, and they groaned and flexed, over-loaded, as they came coughing and spluttering and belching fumes down the sandy track from the parktown. Adults leaned out of windows or stood one-legged on running boards; children ran alongside, or clung to the ladders and straps that covered their sides, or sat squealing and shouting on the roof.

They came to see the strange man who lived in a funny wooden shack in the dunes. They were fascinated, if also slightly repelled, by the strangeness of living in something that was dug into the ground, something that did not — could not — move. They would stare at the line where the wood and tar-paper met the sand, and shake their heads, walking right round the small, skewed hut, as if looking for the wheels. They talked amongst themselves, trying to imagine what it must be like to have the same view and the same sort of weather all the time. They opened the rickety door and sniffed the dark, smoky, man-scented air inside the hut, and shut the door quickly, declaring that it must be unhealthy to live in the same place, joined to the earth. Insects. Rot. Stale air.

He ignored them. He could understand their language, but he pretended not to. He knew that the ever-changing population of the parktown inland called him the tree-man, because they liked to imagine he had put down roots like his wheel-less shack had. He was usually out when they came to the shack, anyway. They lost interest in it fairly quickly, he found; they went to the shore line to shriek when they got their feet wet, and throw stones at the waves, and build little cars in the sand; then they climbed back into their home-cars, and went sputtering and creaking back inland, lights flashing, horns honking, leaving him alone again.

He found dead seabirds all the time, and the washed-up carcases of sea mammals every few days. Beachweed and sea-flowers lay strewn like party streamers over the sands, and — when they dried — rippled in the wind and slowly unravelled, finally disintegrating to be blown out to sea or far inland in bright clouds of colour and decay.

Once he found a dead sailor, lying washed and bloated by the ocean, extremities nibbled, one leg moving to the slow foamy beat of the sea. He stood and looked at the man for a while, then emptied his canvas bag of its flotsam booty, tore it flat, and gently covered the man’s head and upper torso with it. The tide was ebbing, so he did not drag the body further up the beach. He walked to the parktown, for once not pushing his little wooden cart of tide treasure before him, and told the sheriff there.

The day he found the little chair he ignored it, but it was still there when he walked back past that stretch of beach on his return. He went on, and the next day combed in the other direction towards a different flat horizon, and thought the gale the following night would have removed it, but found it there again, the next day, and so took it, and in his shack repaired it with twine and a new leg made from a washed-up branch, and put it by the door of the shack, but never sat in it.

A woman came to the shack, every five or six days. He’d met her in parktown, soon after he’d arrived, on the third or fourth day of a drinking binge. He paid her in the mornings, always more than he thought she expected, because he knew she was frightened by the strange, unmoving shack.

She’d talk to him about her old loves and old hopes and new hopes and he half listened, knowing she thought he didn’t really understand what she was saying. When he talked it was in another language, and the story was even less believeable. The woman would lie close to him, her head on his smooth and unscarred chest, while he talked into the dark air above the bed, his voice not echoing in the wood-flimsy space of the shack, and he’d tell her, in words she would never understand, about the magic land where everyone was a wizard and nobody ever had terrible choices to make, and guilt was almost unknown, and poverty and degradation were things you had to teach children about to let them understand how fortunate they were, and where no hearts broke.

He told her about a man, a warrior, who’d worked for the wizards doing things they could or would not bring themselves to do, and who eventually could work for them no more, because in the course of some driven, personal campaign to rid himself of a burden he would not admit to — and even the wizards had not discovered — he found, in the end, that he had only added to that weight, and his ability to bear was not without limit after all.

And he told her, sometimes, about another time and another place, far away in space and far away in time and even further away in history, where four children had played together in a huge and wonderful garden, but seen their idyll destroyed with gunfire, and of the boy who became a youth and then a man, but who for ever after carried more than love for a girl in his heart. Years later, he would tell her, a small but terrible war was waged in this faraway place, and the garden itself laid waste. (And, eventually, the man did lose the girl from his heart.) Finally, when he had almost talked himself to sleep, and the night was at its darkest, and the girl was long since gone to the land of dreams, sometimes he would whisper to her about a great warship, a great metal warship, becalmed in stone but still dreadful and awful and potent, and about the two sisters who were the balance of that warship’s fate, and about their own fates, and about the Chair, and the Chairmaker.

Then he would sleep, and when he woke, each time, the girl and the money would be gone.

He would turn back to the dark tar-paper walls then, and seek sleep, but not find it, and so rise and dress and go out, and comb the horizon-wide beach again, under the blue skies or the black skies, beneath the wheeling seabirds screaming their meaningless songs to the sea and the brine-charged breeze.

The weather varied, and because he’d never bothered to find out, he never knew what season it was, but the weather swung between warm and bright and cold and dull, and sometimes sleet came, chilling him, and winds blew around the dark hut, keening through the gaps in the planks and the tar-paper, and stirring the slack disturbances of sand on the floor inside the shack like abraded memories.

Sand would build up inside the hut, blown in from one direction or another, and he would scoop it carefully, throw it out the door to the wind like an offering, and wait for the next storm.

He always suspected there was a pattern to these slow sandy inundations, but he could not bring himself to try to work out what that pattern was. Anyway, every few days he had to trundle his little wooden cart into the parktown, and sell his sea-begotten wares, and collect money, and so food, and so the girl that came to the shack every five days or six.

The parktown changed every time he went there, streets being created or evaporating as the home cars arrived or departed; it all depended where people chose to park. There were some fairly static landmarks, like the sheriff’s compound and the fuel stockade and the smithy wagon and the area where the light-engineering caravans set up shop, but even those changed slowly, and all about them was in constant flux, so that the geography of the parktown was never the same on two visits. He drew a secret satisfaction from this inchoate permanence, and did not hate going there as much as he pretended.

The track there was rutted and soft, and never got any shorter; he always hoped the random shiftings of the parktown might slowly draw its bustle and light closer to him, but it never happened, and he would console himself with the thought that if the parktown came closer then so would the people, and their bumbling inquisitiveness.

There was a girl in the parktown, the daughter of one of the dealers he traded with, who seemed to care for him more than the others; she made him drinks and brought him sweetmeats from her father’s caravan, and seldom said anything, but slipped the food to him, and smiled shyly and walked quickly off again, her pet seabird — flightless, half of each wing cut off — waddling after her, squawking.

He said nothing to her that he didn’t have to say, and always averted his eyes from her slim brown shape. He did not know what the courting laws were in this place, and while accepting the drink and food always seemed the easiest course, he did not want to intrude any more than he had to in the lives of these people. He told himself she and her family would move away soon, and accepted the offerings she brought him with a nod but no smile or word, and did not always finish what he was given. He noticed there was a young man who always seemed to be around whenever the girl served him, and he caught the boy’s eyes a few times, and knew that the youth wanted the girl, and looked away each time.

The young man came after him one day when he was on his way back to the shack within the dunes. The youth walked in front of him and tried to make him talk; hit him on the shoulder, shouting into his face. He feigned incomprehension. The young man drew lines in the sand in front of him which he duly plodded over with his cart and stood looking, blinking at the youth, both hands still on the handles of the cart, while the boy shouted louder and drew another line on the sand between them.

Eventually, he got fed up with the whole performance, and the next time the young man prodded his shoulder he took his arm and twisted it and forced the youth to the sand and held him there for a while, twisting the arm in its socket just enough — he hoped — to avoid breaking anything but with sufficient force to disable the fellow for a minute or two while he took up his cart again and trundled it slowly away over the dunes.

It seemed to work.

Two nights later — the night after the regular woman had come and he’d told her about the terrible battleship and the two sisters and the man who was not yet forgiven — the girl came knocking at his door. The pet seabird with the clipped wings jumped and squawked outside while the girl cried and told him she loved him and there’d been an argument with her father, and he tried to push her away, but she slipped in underneath his arm and lay weeping on his bed.

He looked out into the starless night and stared into the eyes of the crippled, silent bird. Then he went over to the bed, dragged the girl from it and forced her out of the door, slamming it and bolting it.

Her cries, and those of the bird, came through the gaps in the planks for a while, like the seeping sand. He stuck his fingers in his ears and pulled the grimy covers over his head.

Her family, the sheriff, and perhaps twenty other people from the parktown, came for him the next night.

The girl had been found that evening, battered and raped and dead on the path from his shack. He stood in the doorway of the hut, looking out into the torch-lit crowd, met the eyes of the young man who had wanted the girl, and knew.

There was nothing he could do, because the guilt in one pair of eyes was outshone by the vengeance in too many others, and so he slammed the door and ran, across the shack and straight through the rickety planks on the far side and out into the dunes and the night.

He fought five of them that night and nearly killed two, until he found the young man and one of his friends searching unenthusiastically for him back near the track.

He clubbed the friend unconscious, took the young man by the throat. He gathered up both their knives, and held one blade to the throat of the youth as he marched him back to the shack.

He set fire to the shack.

When the light had attracted a dozen or so of the men, he stood up on the tallest dune above the hollow, holding the youth with one hand.

The parktown people gazed up at the stranger, lit by flames. He let the boy fall to the sand, threw him both knives.

The boy picked up the knives; charged.

He moved, let the boy go past, disarmed him. He gathered both knives; threw them hilt down in the sand in front of the boy. The youth struck out again, knife in each hand. Again — hardly seeming to move — he let the youth crash past, and slipped the knives from his grasp. He tripped the youth, and while he was still lying on the dune’s top, threw the knives, sending them both thudding into the sand a centimetre on either side of his head. The youth screamed, plucked both blades out and threw them.

His head hardly moved as they hissed by his ears. The people watching in the flame-lit hollow moved their heads, following the trajectory the knives had to take, to the dunes behind them. But when they looked back again, wondering, both blades were in the stranger’s hands, plucked from the air. He tossed them to the boy again.

The youth caught them, screamed, fumbled blood-handed to get them the right way round, and rushed again at the stranger, who dropped him, whacked the knives from his hands, and for a long moment held one of the young man’s elbows poised over his knee, arm raised, ready to break… then shoved the boy away. He picked up the knives again, placed them in the open palms of the youth.

He listened to the boy sobbing into the dark sand, while the people watched.

He got ready to run again, glancing behind him.

The crippled seabird hopped and fluttered, clipped wings beating on air and sand, to the top of the dune. It cocked one flame-bright eye at the stranger.

The people in the hollow seemed frozen by the dancing flames.

The bird waddled to the prone, sobbing figure of the boy on the sand, and screamed. It flapped, shrieked, and stabbed at the boy’s eyes.

The boy tried to fend it off, but the bird leapt into the air and whooped and beat and feathers flew and when the boy broke one of its wings and it fell to the sand, facing away from him, it jetted liquid shit at him.

The boy’s face fell back to the sand. His body shook with sobs.

The stranger watched the eyes of the people in the hollow, while his shack caved in and the orange sparks swirled up into the still night sky.

Eventually the sheriff and the girl’s father came and took the boy away, and a moon later the girl’s family left, and two moons later the tightly bound body of the young man was lowered into a freshly picked hole in the nearest outcrop of rock, and covered with stones.

The people in the parktown would not talk to him, though one trader still took his flotsam. The brash and noisy home cars stopped coming down the sandy track. He had not thought he would miss them. He pitched a small tent near the blackened remains of the shack.

The woman stopped coming to him; he never saw her again. He told himself he was getting so little for his haul that he could not have paid her and eaten as well.

The worst thing, he found, was that there was nobody to talk to.

He saw the seated figure on the beach, way in the distance, five moons or so after the night he’d burned his shack. He hesitated, then went on.

Twenty metres from the woman, he stopped and carefully inspected a length of fishing net on the tideline, the floats still attached and gleaming like earth-bound suns in the low morning light.

He glanced at the woman. She was sitting, legs crossed, arms folded across her lap, staring out to sea. Her simple gown was the colour of the sky.

He went up to the woman and put his new canvas bag down at her side. She did not move.

He sat beside her, arranged his limbs similarly, and stared out to sea, like her.

After a hundred or so waves had approached and broken and slipped away again, he cleared his throat.

“A few times,” he said, “I had the feeling I was being watched.”

Sma said nothing for a while. The seabirds pivoted inside the spaces of the air, calling in a language he still did not understand.

“Oh, people have always felt that,” Sma said, at last.

He smoothed away a wormcast in the sand. “I don’t belong to you Diziet.”

“No,” she said, turning to him. “You’re right. You don’t belong to us. All we can do is ask.”

“What?”

“That you come back. We have a job for you.”

“What is it?”

“Oh…” Sma smoothed her gown over her knees. “Helping to drag a bunch of aristos into the next millenium, from the inside.”

“Why?”

“It’s important.”

“Isn’t everything?”

“And we can pay you properly this time.”

“You paid me off very handsomely the last time. Lots of money and a new body. What more can a chap ask for?” He gestured at the canvas bag at her side, and at himself, clothed in salt-stained rags. “Don’t let this fool you. I haven’t lost the loot. I’m a rich man; very rich, here.” He watched the waves roll up towards them, then break and foam and fall away again. “I just wanted the simple life, for a while.” He gave a sort of half-laugh, and realised it was the first time he’d even started to laugh since he’d come here.

“I know,” Sma said. “But this is different. Like I said; we can pay you properly, now.”

He looked at her. “Enough. No more being cryptic. What do you mean?”

She turned her gaze to him. He had to work hard at not looking away.

“We’ve found Livueta,” she said.

He stared into her eyes for a time, and then blinked and looked away. He cleared his throat, looking back out to the glittering sea, and had to sniff and wipe his eyes. Sma watched as the man moved one hand slowly to his chest, not realising he was doing it, and rubbed at the skin there, just over his heart.

“Mm-hmm. You’re sure?”

“Yes, we’re sure.”

He looked out over the waves after that, and suddenly felt that they were no longer bringing things to him, no longer messengers from the distant storms offering their bounty, but instead had become a pathway; a route, another distant sort of opportunity, beckoning.

That simple? he thought to himself. A word — a single name — from Sma and I’m all ready to go, take off, and take up their arms again? Because of her?

He let a few more waves roll up and down. The seabirds wailed. Then he sighed. “All right,” he said. He pushed one hand up through his tangled, matted hair. “Tell me about it.”

Four

“The fact remains,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw insisted, “that the last time we went through this rigmarole, Zakalwe fucked up. They froze his ass in that Winter Palace.”

“All right,” Sma said. “But it wasn’t like him. Okay, so one time he gets it wrong… we don’t know why. So maybe now he’s had time to get over it, he’ll actually want a chance to show he can still do the business. Maybe he can’t wait for us to find him.”

“Good grief,” sighed the drone. “Wishful thinking from Sma the Cynical. Maybe you’re starting to lose your touch too.”

“Oh shut up.”

She watched the planet swing towards them on the module screen.

Twenty-nine days had passed on the Xenophobe.

As an ice breaker, the fancy-dress party had been a crushing success. Sma had woken up in a cushion-filled alcove of the rec area, birth-naked and in a tangle of assorted equally nude limbs and torsos. She had extricated one arm carefully from under the voluptuous sleeping form of Jetart Hrine, stood shakily, and gazed round the softly breathing bodies, appraising the men in particular, and then — treading very carefully, nearly over-balancing several times on the plump cushions, her muscles all complaining and trembly — tip-toed her way between the slumbering crew to the welcome solidity of the red-wood floor. The rest of the area had already been tidied. The ship must have sorted out everybody’s clothes, for they lay in neat piles on a couple of large tables, just outside the alcove.

Sma massaged her slightly tingling genitals, grimacing. Bending over, they looked quite pink and raw; things looked slippery, and she decided she needed a bath.

The drone met her at the entrance to the corridor. Its red glowing field looked at least partially like a comment. “Good night’s sleep?” it inquired.

“Don’t start that again.”

The drone floated at her shoulder as she headed for the elevator.

“You’ve made friends with the crew, then.”

She nodded. “Very good friends with all of them, by the feel of it. Where’s the ship’s pool?”

“Floor above the hangar,” the machine said, following her into the elevator.

“Record anything exciting last night?” Sma asked, leaning back against the elevator wall as they dropped.

“Sma,” exclaimed the drone. “I would not be so ungallant!”

“Hmm.” She raised one eyebrow. The elevator stopped, door opening. “What memories, though,” the drone said, breathily. “Your appetite and stamina are a credit to your species. I think.”

Sma dived into the smaller whirlpool, and, on surfacing, spat a jet of water at the machine, which dodged and backed into the elevator. “I’ll just leave you to it, then. Judging from last night, even an innocent offensive-model drone isn’t safe from you once you get the bit between your teeth. So to speak.”

Sma splashed at it. “Get out of here, you prurient pisspot.”

“And sweet-talking won’t work ei…” the drone said, as the elevator door closed.

She would not have been surprised if the atmosphere in the ship had been a little embarrassed for a day or two thereafter, but the crew seemed quite cool about it all, and she decided that, basically, they were good sports. Happily, the fad for having colds passed quickly. She settled down to studying Voerenhutz, trying to guess where in the interlinked civilisations they were heading for Zakalwe might be… and enjoying herself, though — in the case of the latter activity — not on anything like the same scale or with quite the same frenetic abandon as she obviously had on her first night aboard.

Ten days out, the Just Testing sent news that Gainly had been delivered of twins; mother and pups doing well. Sma prepared a signal that her stand-in was to give the hralz a big kiss from her, then hesitated, realising that the machine that was impersonating her would doubtless already have done so. She felt bad, and in the end just sent a formal acknowledgement.

She kept up on recent developments in Voerenhutz; the latest Contact forecasts were getting gloomier all the time. The brush-fire conflicts on a dozen planets each threatened to ignite a full-scale war, and — while getting a direct answer was proving difficult — she formed the impression that even if they found and convinced Zakalwe almost as soon as they landed, and hauled his ass out on the Xenophobe with the ship pushing its design limits, the chances of getting him to Voerenhutz in time to make any difference were at best fifty-fifty.

“Holy shit,” the drone said one day, as she sat in her cabin, reviewing cautiously optimistic reports on the peace conference back home (for so she had started to think of it, she admitted to herself).

“What?” She turned to the machine.

It looked at her. “They just changed the course schedule for the What Are The Civilian Applications?”

Sma waited.

“That’s a Continent class GSV,” the drone said. “Sub-class Prompt, one of the limiteds.”

“You said it was a General; now it’s a Limited; make up your mind.”

“No, I mean it’s a limited edition; the go-faster model; even nippier than this beast, once it gets going,” the drone said. It floated closer to her, fields set a weird mixture of olive and purple, which she seemed to remember indicated Awe. She’d certainly never seen that expression on Skaffen-Amtiskaw before. “It’s heading for Crastalier,” it told her.

“For us? For Zakalwe?” she frowned.

“Nobody’ll say, but it looks like it to me. A whole General Systems Vehicle, just for us. Wow!”

“Wow,” Sma mimicked sourly, and pressed the screen for the view forward of the Xenophobe, still charging through the star systems for Crastalier. In their false representation on the screen, the stars ahead blazed blue-white, and — at the right magnification — the overall structure of the Open Cluster was easily visible.

She shook her head, went back to the peace conference reports. “Zakalwe, you asshole,” she muttered to herself, “you’d better fucking show up soon.”

Five days later, and still five days away, the General Contact Unit Very Little Gravitas Indeed signalled from the depths of the Open Cluster Crastalier that it thought it had picked up Zakalwe’s trail.

The blue-white globe filled the screen; the module dipped its nose, plunging into the atmosphere.

“I just get the feeling this is going to be a complete debacle,” the drone said.

“Yes,” Sma said, “but you’re not in charge.”

“I’m serious,” the machine told her. “Zakalwe’s lost it. He doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be talked round, and even if by some miracle he can be, he can’t do the same thing with Beychae. The man’s washed up.”

Sma had a sudden, strange flash of memory then, back to the horizon-wide beach, and the man who’d sat at her side for a while, watching the wide ocean roll its waves up and down the glistening slope of sand.

She shook herself out of it. “He’s still together enough to junk a knife missile,” she told the machine, watching the hazy, cloud-shadowed ocean scroll beneath the dropping module. They were approaching the cloud tops.

“That was for him. For us, it’ll be another Winter Palace job; I can feel it.”

She shook her head, apparently hypnotised by the view of cloud and curving ocean. “I don’t know what happened there. He got into that siege and just wouldn’t break out. We warned him; we told him, in the end, but he just wouldn’t… couldn’t do it. I don’t know what happened to him, I really don’t; he just wasn’t himself.”

“Well, he lost his head on Fohls. Maybe he lost more than that. Perhaps he lost it all on Fohls. Maybe we didn’t quite save him in time.”

“We got to him in time,” Sma said, remembering Fohls as well now, as they plunged into a bulging cloud-top and the screen went grey. She didn’t bother to adjust the wavelength, apparently content to look at the glowing, featureless interior of the cumulus.

“It was still traumatic,” the drone said.

“I’m sure, but…” she shrugged. The view of ocean and clouds burst clear onto the screen again, and the module angled steeper, powering down towards the waves. The sea flashed up towards them; Sma turned the screen off. She looked bashfully at Skaffen-Amtiskaw. “I never like watching that,” she confessed. The drone said nothing. Inside the module, all was peace and quiet. After a moment, she asked, “We in yet?”

“Doing our submarine impression,” the drone said crisply. “Landfall in fifteen minutes.”

She turned the screen back on, got it to adjust for a sonic display, and watched the rolling sea floor speed by beneath. The module was manoeuvring hard, swinging and diving and zooming all the time, avoiding sea creatures as it followed the slowly rising slope of continental shelf towards the land. The view on the screen was disconcerting; she switched it off again, turned to the drone.

“He’ll be all right, and he’ll come with us; we still know where that woman is.”

“Livueta the Contemptuous?” sneered the drone. “Short shrift she gave him last time. She’d have blown his head off if I hadn’t been there. Why the hell should Zakalwe want to meet her again?”

“I don’t know,” Sma frowned. “He won’t say, and Contact hasn’t got round to doing the full procedure on the place we think he came from. I think it must involve something from his past… something he did, once, before we ever heard of him. I don’t know. I think he loves her, or did, and still thinks he does… or just wants…”

“What? Wants what? Go on; you tell me.”

“Forgiveness?”

“Sma, given all the things Zakalwe’s done, just since we’ve known him, they’d have to invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start forgiving him.”

Sma turned away to look at the blank screen again. She shook her head and said quietly, “It doesn’t work that way, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.”

Or any other way, the drone thought to itself, but didn’t say anything.

The module surfaced in a deserted dock in the middle of the city, amongst the flotsam and jetsam. It roughed the texture of its outermost fields, so that the oily scum on the surface of the water stuck to it.

Sma watched its top hatch close, and stepped off the back of the drone, onto the pitted concrete of the dock. The module was ninety-per cent submerged; it looked like some flat-bottomed boat turned turtle. She straightened the rather vulgar culottes which were, regrettably, the height of fashion here just now, and looked up and around at the crumbling empty warehouses which all but enclosed the quiet dock. The city — she was oddly gratified to find — grumbled beyond.

“What was that you were saying about not looking in cities?” Skaffen-Amtiskaw inquired.

“Don’t be crass,” she said, then clapped her hands and rubbed them. Looking down at the drone, she grinned. “Anyway: time to start thinking like a suitcase, old chum. Make with a handle.”

“I hope you realise I find this every bit as demeaning as you think I must,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, with quiet dignity, then extended a soligram handle from one side, and flipped over. Sma gripped the handle and strained at it.

“An empty suitcase, asshole,” she grunted.

“Oh, pardon me, I’m sure,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered, and went light.

Sma opened a wallet full of money displaced only hours earlier from a city-centre bank by the good ship Xenophobe, and paid the cab driver. She watched a line of troop carriers thunder past, heading down the boulevard, then sat on a bench which formed part of a stone wall bordering a narrow strip of trees and grass, and looked out over the broad sidewalk and the boulevard beyond, to the large and impressive stone building on the far side. She placed the drone beside her. Traffic roared past; people hurried to and fro in front of her.

At least, she thought, they’re fairly Standard. She had never liked being altered to impersonate the natives. Anyway; they had inter-system travel here, and were fairly used to seeing people who looked different, even alien on occasion. As usual, of course, she was very tall in comparison, but she could live with a few stares.

“He’s still in there?” she said quietly, looking at the armed guards outside the Foreign Ministry.

“Discussing some sort of weird trust set-up with the top brass,” the drone whispered. “Want to eavesdrop?”

“Hmm. No.”

They had a bug in the appropriate conference chamber; literally a fly on the wall.

“Wa!” the drone yelped. “I don’t believe this man!”

Sma glanced at the drone, despite herself. She frowned. “What’s he said?”

“Not that!” the drone gasped. “The Very Little Gravitas Indeed just worked out what the maniac’s been up to here.”

The GCU was still in orbit, providing back-up for the Xenophobe; its Contact procedures and equipment had provided and were providing most of the information about the place; its bug was monitoring the conference chamber. Meanwhile, it was scanning computers and information banks over the entire planet.

“Well?” Sma said, watching another troop carrier rumble past on the boulevard.

“The man’s insane. Power mad!” the drone muttered, seemingly to itself. “Forget Voerenhutz; we have to get him out of here for the sake of these people.”

Sma elbowed the suitcase-drone. “What, dammit?”

“Okay; here, Zakalwe’s a goddamn magnate, right? Mega-powerful; interests everywhere; initial stake what he brought with him from the place he junked the knife missile; the loot we gave him last time, plus profits. And what is the core of his business empire, here? Genetechnology.”

Sma thought for a moment. “Oh-oh,” she said, sitting back on the bench, crossing her arms.

“Whatever you’re imagining, it’s worse. Sma; there are five rather elderly autocrats on this planet, in competing hegemonies. They are all getting healthier. They are all getting, in fact, younger. That oughtn’t to be possible for another twenty, thirty years.”

Sma said nothing. There was a funny feeling in her belly.

“Zakalwe’s corporation,” the drone said quickly, “is receiving crazy money from each of those five people. It was on the take from a sixth geezer, but he died about one-twenty days ago; assassinated. The Ethnarch Kerian. He controlled the other half of this continent. It’s his demise that has led to all this military activity. Also, with the exception of the Ethnarch Kerian, these suddenly rejuvenated autocrats were showing signs of becoming uncharacteristically benign, from about the time they started getting so suspiciously frisky.”

Sma closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. “Is it working?” she said, through a dry mouth.

“Like hell; they’re all under threat from coups; their own military, as a rule. Worse than that, Kerian’s death lit a slow fuse. This whole place is going super-critical! And we are talking tootsies on the event horizon; these meatbrained loonies have thermonukes. He’s crazy!” the drone suddenly screeched. Sma hissed to quiet it, even though she knew the drone would be sound-fielding its words so that only she could hear. The drone spluttered on: “He must have cracked the gene-coding in his own cells; the steady-state retro-ageing that we gave him; he’s been selling it! For money and favours, trying to get these monomaniac dictators to behave like nice people. Sma! He’s trying to set up his own contact section! And he’s fucking it! Completely!”

She whacked the machine with one fist. “Calm down, dammit.”

“Sma,” the drone said, voice almost languid, “I am calm. I’m just trying to communicate to you the enormity of the planetary cock-up Zakalwe has managed to concoct here. The Very Little Gravitas Indeed has blown a fuse; even as we talk, Contact Minds in an ever-expanding sphere centred right here are clearing their intellectual decks and trying to work out what the hell to do to tidy this stunningly ghastly mess. If that GSV hadn’t been on its way here anyway, they’d have diverted it because of this. An asteroid belt-sized pile of shit is about to hit a fan exactly the size of this planet, thanks to Zakalwe’s ludicrous good-guy schemes, and Contact is going to have to try and field all of it.” It hesitated. “Yeah; I just got the word.” It sounded relieved. “You have a day to haul Zakalwe’s loop-eyed ass out of here, otherwise we snatch him; emergency displace, no holds barred.”

Sma took a very deep breath. “Apart from that… everything all right?”

“This, Ms Sma, is no time for levity,” the drone said, soberly. Then; “Shit!”

“What now?”

“Meeting’s over, but Zakalwe the Insane isn’t taking his car; he’s heading for the elevator down to the tube system. Destination… naval base. There’s a submarine waiting for him.”

Sma stood. “Submarine, eh?” She smoothed the culottes. “Back to the docks, agree?”

“Agreed.”

She hefted the drone, started walking, looking for a cab. “I’ve asked the Very Little Gravitas Indeed to fake a radio message,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw told her. “A cab should pull up here momentarily.”

“And they say there’s never one around when you need one.”

“You’re worrying me, Sma. You’re taking all this far too calmly.”

“Oh, I’ll panic later.” Sma took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Could that be the cab?”

“I believe it is.”

“What’s ‘To the docks’?”

The drone told her, and she said it. The cab sped off through the largely military traffic.

Six hours later they were still following the submarine, as it whined and whirred and gurgled its way through the layers of ocean, heading for the equatorial sea.

“Sixty klicks an hour,” fumed the drone. “Sixty klicks an hour!”

“To them it’s fast; don’t be so unsympathetic to your fellow machines.” Sma watched the screen as the vessel a kilometre in front of them burrowed its way through the ocean. The abyssal plain was kilometres below.

“It isn’t one of us, Sma,” the drone said wearily. “It’s just a submarine; the smartest thing inside it is the human captain. I rest my case.”

“Any idea where it’s heading yet?”

“No. The captain’s orders are to take Zakalwe wherever he wants to go, and after giving him this general heading, Zakalwe’s kept quiet. There’s a whole heap of islands and atolls he could be making for, or — several days travel away at this crawl — thousands of kilometres of coastline, on another continent.”

“Check out the islands, and that coastline. There must be a reason he’s heading this way.”

“It’s being checked out!” the drone snapped.

Sma looked at it. Skaffen-Amtiskaw flashed a delicate shade of purple, intimating contrition. “Sma; this… man… totally blew it the last time; we’re five or six million down on that last job, all because he wouldn’t break out of the Winter Palace and balance things out. I could show you scenes of the terror there that would blanch your hair. Now he’s come very close indeed to instigating a global catastrophe here. Since the guy suffered what happened to him on Fohls — since he started trying to be a good guy in his own right — he’s been a disaster. If we do get him, and can get him to Voerenhutz, I just worry what sort of chaos he’ll engender there. The man’s bad news. Never mind outing Beychae; offing Zakalwe would be doing everybody a favour.”

Sma looked into the centre of the drone’s sensory band. “One;” she said, “don’t talk about human lives as though they’re just collateral.” She breathed deeply. “Two; remember the massacre, in the courtyard of that inn?” she asked calmly. “The guys through the walls, and your knife missile let off the leash?”

“One; sorry to have offended your mammalian sensibilities. Two; Sma, will you ever let me forget it?”

“Remember what I said would happen if you ever tried anything like that again?”

“Sma,” the drone said tiredly, “if you are seriously trying to imply that I might kill Zakalwe, all I can say is; don’t be ridiculous.”

“Just remember.” She watched the slowly scrolling screen. “We have our orders.”

“Agreed on courses of action, Sma. We don’t have orders, remember?”

Sma nodded. “We have our agreed on courses of action. We lift Mr Zakalwe and take him to Voerenhutz. If at any stage you disagree, you can always butt out. I’ll be given another offensive drone.”

Skaffen-Amtiskaw was silent for a second, then said, “Sma, that is probably the most hurtful thing you have ever said to me — which is saying a lot — but I’ll ignore it, I think, because we are both under a lot of stress at the moment. Let my actions speak. As you say; we lift the planetfucker and drop him in Voerenhutz. Though, if this voyage goes on too much longer, it’ll all be taken out of our hands — or fields, as the case may be — and Zakalwe will wake up on Xenophobe or the GCU, wondering what happened. All we can do is wait and see.”

The drone paused then. “Looks like it could be those equatorial islands we’re heading for,” it told her. “Zakalwe owns half of them.”

Sma nodded silently, watching the distant submarine creep through the ocean. She scratched at her lower abdomen after a while, and turned to the drone. “You sure you didn’t record anything from that, umm, sort of orgy, first night on the Xenophobe?”

“Positive.”

She frowned back at the screen. “Huh. Pity.”

The submarine spent nine hours underwater, then surfaced near an atoll; an inflatable went ashore. Sma and the drone watched the single figure walk up the golden, sunlit beach towards a complex of low buildings; an exclusive hotel for the ruling class of the country he’d left.

“What’s Zakalwe doing?” Sma said, after he’d been ashore for ten minutes or so. The submarine had dived again as soon as it recovered its inflatable, and taken a course back to the port it had departed from.

“He’s saying goodbye to a girl,” sighed the drone.

“Is that it?”

“That would appear to be the only thing to draw him here.”

“Shit! Couldn’t he have taken a plane?”

“Hmm. No; no airstrip, but anyway, this is a fairly sensitive demilitarised zone; no unexpected flights of any sort allowed, and the next seaplane isn’t for a couple of days. The sub was actually the fastest way of…”

The drone fell silent.

“Skaffen-Amtiskaw?” Sma said.

“Well,” the drone said slowly, “the doxy just smashed a lot of ornaments and a couple of pieces of very valuable furniture, and then ran off and buried herself in her bed, weeping… but apart from that, Zakalwe just sat down in the middle of the lounge with a large drink and said (and I quote), ‘Okay, if that’s you, Sma, come and talk to me.’ ”

Sma looked at the view on the screen. It showed the small atoll, the central island lying green and squashed looking between the vibrant blues and greens of ocean and sky.

“You know,” she said, “I think I would like to kill Zakalwe.”

“There’s a queue. Surface?”

“Surface. Let’s go see the asshole.”

X

Light. Some light. Not very much. Air foul and everywhere pain. He wanted to scream and writhe, but could find no breath and make nothing move. A dark destroying shadow welled up inside him, exterminating thought, and he lost consciousness.

Light. Some light. Not very much. He knew there was pain, too, but somehow it did not seem so important. He was looking at it differently now. That was all you had to do; just think about it differently. He wondered where that idea had come from, and seemed to remember he’d been taught how to do this.

Everything was metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The pain, for example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it. His body was a city and his mind a citadel. All communications between the two seemed to have been cut, but within the keep that was his mind he still had power. The part of his consciousness that was telling him the pain did not hurt, and that all things were like other things, was like… like… he found it hard to think of a comparison. A magic mirror, maybe.

Still thinking about that, the light faded, and he slipped away again, into the darkness.

Light. Some light (he’d been here before, hadn’t he?). Not very much. He seemed to have left the keep that was his mind, and now he was in a storm-struck leaking boat, images dancing before him.

The light grew slowly in strength until it was almost painful. He felt suddenly terrified, because it seemed to him that he really was on a tiny creaking leaking boat, tossed scudding across a seething black ocean, in the teeth of a howling gale, but now there was light, and it appeared to come from somewhere above him, but when he tried to look at his hand, or the tiny boat, he still couldn’t see anything. The light shone into his eyes, but it failed to illuminate anything else. The idea terrified him; the tiny boat was swamped by a wave and he was submerged again in the ocean of pain, burning through every pore of his body. Somewhere, thankfully, somebody threw a switch, and he slipped underneath to darkness, silence and… no pain.

Light. Some light. He remembered this. The light showed a small boat assaulted by waves on a broad dark ocean. Beyond, unreachable for now, there was a great citadel on a small island. And there was sound. Sound… That was new. Been here before, but not with sound. He tried to listen, very hard, but could not make out the words. Still, he formed the impression that maybe somebody was asking questions.

Somebody was asking questions… Who…? He waited for a reply, from outside or from within himself, but nothing came from anywhere; he felt lost and abandoned, and the worst of it was that he felt abandoned by himself.

He decided to ask himself some questions. What was the citadel? That was his mind. The citadel was supposed to come with a city attached, which was his body, but it looked like something else had taken over the city, and there was just the castle, just the keep left. What was the boat, and the ocean? The ocean was pain. He was in the boat now, but before that he’d been in the ocean, up to his neck, waves breaking over him. The boat was… some learned technique which was protecting him from the pain, not letting him forget it was there, but keeping its debilitating effects away from him, letting him think.

So far so good, he thought. Now, what is the light?

He might have to come back to that one. Same with: What is the sound?

He tried another question: Where is this happening?

He searched his sodden clothes but found nothing in any of the pockets. He looked for a name tag that he felt ought to be sewn on to his collar, but it seemed to have been ripped off. He searched the small boat, but still found no answers. So he tried to imagine being in the distant keep over the towering waves, and visualised himself walking into a cavernous store room of jumble and nonsense and memories buried deep in the castle… but could see nothing in detail. His eyes closed and he wept with frustration, while the small boat juddered and tipped underneath him.

When he opened his eyes, he was holding a little clip of paper with the word FOHLS printed on it. He was so surprised he let the slip of paper go; the wind whipped it away into the dark sky over the black waves. But he had remembered. Fohls was the answer. The planet of Fohls.

He felt relieved, and a little proud. He’d discovered something.

What was he doing here?

Funeral. He seemed to remember something about a funeral. Surely it had not been his own.

Was he dead? He thought about this question for a while. He supposed it was possible. Maybe there was an afterlife, after all. Well, if there was life after death, that would teach him. Was this sea of pain a divine punishment? Was the light a god? He dipped his hand over the side of the boat, into the pain; it filled him, and he withdrew. Cruel god if that really was the case. What about all the stuff I did for the Culture? he wanted to ask. Doesn’t that cancel some of the bad out? Or were those smug self-satisfied bastards wrong all along? God, he’d love to be able to go back and tell them. Imagine the look on Sma’s face!

But he didn’t think he was dead. It hadn’t been his funeral. He could remember the flat-topped tower by the cliffs looking out over the sea, and helping to carry some old warrior’s body there. Yes, somebody had died and they were being ceremonially disposed of.

Something was nagging at him.

Suddenly he clutched at the boat’s rotten timbers and stared out over the heaving ocean.

There was a ship. Every now and again he could see a ship, far in the distance. Barely more than a dot, and mostly the waves were in the way, but it was a ship. A hole seemed to open somewhere inside him; his guts fell through it.

He thought he recognised the ship.

Then the boat split apart, and he dropped through it, through the water underneath, then splashed out of the underside of the water, into air again, and saw the ocean beneath him, and a tiny speck of its surface, which he was falling towards. It was another small boat; he crashed through it, through more water, through more air, through the wreckage of a boat, through another layer of water and another level of air…

Hey — one part of his mind thought, as he fell — this is like how Sma described the Reality… splashed through more waves, through the water, out into air, heading for more waves…

This wasn’t going to stop. He remembered that the Reality Sma had described was expanding all the time; you could fall through forever; really forever, not until the end of the universe; literally forever.

That won’t do, he thought to himself. He’d have to face the ship.

He landed in a little creaking, leaking boat.

The ship was much closer now. The ship was huge and dark and bristled with guns and it was heading straight for him, bow wave a huge white V of foam bisected by its stem.

Shit, he wasn’t going to be able to get away from it. The cruel curves of the bows raced slicing towards him. He closed his eyes.

Once upon a time there was… a ship. A great ship. A ship for destroying things with; other ships, people, cities… It was very big and it was designed to kill people and to keep people inside it from being killed.

He tried not to remember what the great ship was called. Instead he saw the ship somehow installed near the middle of a city, and felt confused, and could not work out how it got there. The ship started to look like a castle, for some reason, and that did, and did not, make sense. He began to feel frightened. The ship’s name was like some huge sea creature, bumping into the hull of his boat; like a battering-ram thudding into the walls of the castle keep. He tried to block it out, knowing it was just a name but not wanting to hear it because it always made him feel bad.

He put his hands over his ears. That worked for a moment. But then the ship, set in stone, near the centre of the battered city, fired its great guns, gouting black and flashing yellow-white, and he knew what was coming, and tried to scream to cover the noise, but when it arrived it was the name of the ship that the guns had spoken, and it shattered the boat, demolished the castle, and resounded through the bones and spaces of his skull, like the laughter of an insane god, forever.

The light went out then, and he sank gratefully away from the awful, accusing sound.

Light. Staberinde, said a calm voice from somewhere inside. Staberinde. It’s only a word.

The Staberinde. The ship. He turned away from the light, back into the darkness.

Light. Sounds, too; a voice. What was I thinking about, earlier? (He recalled something about a name, but ignored that.) Funeral. Pains. And the ship. There was a ship. Or there had been. Maybe still is, for all… but there was something about a funeral. The funeral is why you are here. That was what confused you before. You thought you were dead, in fact you were only living. He remembered something about boats and oceans and castles and cities, but could not actually see them any more.

Now, from somewhere, comes touch, touch coming in from out there. Not pain but touch. Two different things…

The touch, again. It feels like the touch of a hand; a hand touching his face, causing more pain, but still a touch, and distinguishably a hand. His face felt terrible. He must look terrible.

Where am I again? Crash. Funeral. Fohls.

Crash. Of course; my name is…

Too hard.

What do I do, then?

That’s easier. You are a paid agent of the most advanced — well, certainly the most energetic — humanoid civilisation in the… Reality? (No.) Universe? (No.) Galaxy? Yes, galaxy… and you were representing them at a… a… funeral, and you were coming back on some stupid aircraft to be picked up and taken away from all this, when something happened on board the aircraft and it went… and he’d seen flames and… and there had been that old jungle floating right… then nothing and pain, and nothing but pain. Then drifting and floating in and out of it.

The hand touched his face again. And this time there was something to see. He thought it looked like a cloud, or like a moon through a cloud, itself unseen but shining through.

Possibly the two were connected, he thought. Yes; here it comes again, and yes, there we are; sensation, feeling; the hand on the face again. Throat, swallowing, water or some liquid. You are being given something to drink. From the way it goes down there seems to be… yes, upright, we are upright, not on our back. The hands, own hands, they are… an open feeling, feeling very open, very vulnerable, naked.

Thinking about his body was bringing the pain back again. He decided to give up on that. Try something else.

Try the crash again. Back from the funeral and the desert coming right up… no, mountains. Or was it jungle? He couldn’t remember. Where are we? Jungle, no… desert, no… what then? Don’t know.

Asleep, he thought suddenly; you were asleep in the aircraft in the night, and had just enough time to wake up in the darkness and see flames and begin to realise before light detonated inside your head. After that, pain. But you didn’t see any sort of terrain floating/rushing up to meet you, because it was very dark.

The next time he came round, everything had changed. He felt vulnerable and exposed. As his eyes opened and he tried to remember how to see, he slowly made out dusty streaks of light in a brown gloom, and saw earthenware pots near a mud or earth wall, and a small fireplace in the centre of the room, and spears leaning against a wall, and other blades. Straining his neck to bring his head up, he could see something else; the rough wooden frame he was tied to.

The wooden frame was in the shape of a square; two diagonals made an X inside the square. He was naked, his hands and feet lashed, one to each corner of the frame, which was propped against a wall at about forty-five degrees. A thick hide strap secured his waist to the centre of the X, and all over his body were markings of blood and paint.

He relaxed his neck. “Oh shit,” he heard himself croak. He didn’t like the look of this.

Where the hell was the Culture? They ought to be rescuing him; that was their job. He did their dirty work, they looked after him. This was the deal. So where the hell were they?

The pain came back, like an old friend by now, from almost everywhere. Straining his neck like that had hurt. Sore head (maybe concussion); broken nose, cracked or broken ribs, one broken arm, two broken legs. Maybe internal injuries; his insides felt pretty sore too; the worst, in fact. He felt bloated and full of decay.

Shit, he thought, I might actually be dying.

He shifted his head, grimacing, (pain poured in as if some protecting shell on his skin had been cracked by the movement) and looked at the ropes lashing him to the wooden frame. Traction was no way to treat a fracture, he told himself, and laughed very briefly, because with the first contraction of his stomach muscles his ribs pulsed suddenly, as though they were at red heat.

He could hear things; distant noises of people shouting now and again, and children yelling, and some sort of animal baying.

He closed his eyes, but heard nothing more distinct. He opened them again. The wall was earth, and he was probably underground, for there were thick sawn-off roots sticking into the space around him. The light was composed of two nearly vertical shafts, slightly angled beams of direct sunlight, so… near midday, near the equator. Underground, he thought, and felt sick. Nice and hard to find. He wondered if the plane had been on course when it crashed, and how far from the crash site he’d been carried. No point in worrying about it.

What else could he see? Crude benches. A coarse cushion, dented. It looked like somebody had sat there, facing him. He assumed it was the owner of the hand he had felt, if there had been one. There was no fire in a circle of stones set underneath one of the holes in the roof. Spears leant against the wall, and other weaponish things were strewn about the place. They were not battle-weapons; ceremonial, or maybe torture. He caught a whiff of something awful, just then, and knew it was gangrene, and knew it must be him.

He began to slip over the edge again, uncertain whether he was falling asleep or really going unconscious, but hoping for one or the other, willing either, because all this was more than he could handle just now. Then the girl came in. She had a jug in her hand, and set it down before looking at him. He tried to speak, but couldn’t. Maybe he hadn’t really spoken earlier when he’d thought he said, “Shit.” He looked at the girl and attempted a smile.

She went out again.

He felt somehow heartened, seeing the girl. A man would have been bad news, he thought. A girl meant things might not be so bad after all. Maybe.

The girl came back, with a bowl of water. She washed him, rubbing away the the blood and the paint. There was some pain. Predictably nothing happened when she washed his genitals; he’d have liked to show signs of life, just for form’s sake.

He tried to speak, but failed. The girl let him sip some water from a shallow bowl, and he croaked at her, but nothing distinguishable. She left again.

The next time she came back with some men. They wore many strange clothes, like feathers and skins and bones and wooden tiles of armour laced with gut. They were painted too, and they brought pots and small sticks with them, and used them to paint him again.

They finished and stood back. He wanted to tell them he didn’t suit red, but nothing came out. He felt himself falling away, out into the darkness.

When he came to again, he was moving.

The entire frame he was strapped to had be lifted and carted out of the gloom. He faced the sky. Blinding light filled his eyes, dust filled his nose and mouth, and shouts and screams filled his mind. He felt himself shiver like a fever victim, tearing pain from each shattered limb. He tried to shout, and to raise his head to see, but all there was was noise and dust. His insides felt worse; skin taut over his belly.

Then he was upright again, and the village was beneath him. It was small, there were some tents, some wicker and clay dwellings and some holes into the ground. Semi-arid; an indeterminate scrub — stamped down inside the perimeter of the village — vanished quickly beyond it, into a yellow-glowing mist. The sun was just visible, low down. He couldn’t work out if it was dawn or dusk.

What he really saw were the people. They were all in front of him; he was up on a mound, the frame tied to two large stakes, and the people were beneath him, all on their knees, heads bowed. There were tiny children, their heads forced down by nearby adults, there were old people held up from collapsing completely by those around them, and every age in between.

Then in front of him walked three people, the girl and two of the men. The men, one on either side of the girl, lowered their heads, knelt down quickly and arose again, and made a sign. The girl did not move, and her gaze was fixed on a point between his eyes. She was dressed in a bright red gown now; he could not remember what she had worn before.

One of the men held a large earthenware pot. The other had a long, curved, broad-bladed sword.

“Hey,” he croaked. He couldn’t manage anything else. The pain was getting very bad now; being upright didn’t do his broken limbs any good at all.

The chanting people seemed to swing about his head; the sunlight dipped and veered, and the three people in front of him became many, multiplying and wavering, unsteady in the waste of mist and dust before him.

Where the hell was Culture?

There was a terrible roaring noise in his head, and the diffuse glow in the midst which was the sun was starting to pulse. The sword glittered to one side; the earthenware pot gleamed on the other. The girl stood directly in front of him, and put her hand into his hair, grasping it.

The roaring noise was filling his ears, and he could not tell if he was shouting and screaming or not. The man to his right raised the sword.

The girl pulled his hair, yanking his head out; he screamed, above the roaring noise, as his broken bones grated. He stared at the dust at the hem of the girl’s robe.

“You bastards!” he thought, not sure, even then, exactly who he meant.

He managed to scream one syllable. “El —!”

Then the blade slammed into his neck.

The name died. Everything had ended but it still went on.

There was no pain. The roaring noise was actually quieter. He was looking down at the village and the crouching people. The view swung; he could still feel the pull of the roots of his hair straining at the skin on his scalp. He was swung round.

The slack, headless body dribbled blood down its chest.

That was me! he thought. Me!

He was swung round again; the man with the sword was wiping blood from the blade with a rag. The man with the earthenware pot was trying not to look into his staring eyes, and holding the pot out towards him, the lid in his other hand. So that’s what it’s for, he thought, feeling somehow stunned into an eerie calmness. Then the roaring noise seemed to gather and start to fade at once. The view was going red. He wondered how much longer this could go on. How long did a brain survive without oxygen?

Now I really am two, he thought, remembering, eyes closing.

And he thought of his heart, stopped now, and only then realised, and wanted to cry but could not, for he had finally lost her. Another name formed in his mind. Dar…

The roar split the skies. He felt the girl’s grip loosen. The expression on the face of the youth holding the pot was almost comically fearful. People looked up from the crowd; the roar became a scream, a blast of air swept dust into the air and made the girl holding him stagger; a dark shape swung quickly through the air above the village.

A little late… he heard himself think, slipping away.

There was more noise for a second or two — screams, maybe — and something whacked into his head, and he was rolling away, dust in his mouth and eyes… but he was starting to lose interest in all that stuff, and was happy to let the darkness wash over him. Maybe he was picked up again, later.

But that seemed to happen to somebody else.

When the terrible noise came, and the great, carved black rock landed in the middle of the village — just after the sky’s offering had been separated from his body and so joined to the air — everybody ran into the thinning mist, to get away from the screaming light. They gathered, whimpering, at the water hole.

After only fifty heartbeats, the dark shape appeared above the village again, rising hazily into the thinner mists near the sky. It did not roar this time, but moved quickly off with a noise like the wind, and shrank to nothing.

The shaman sent his apprentice back to see how things stood; the quaking youth disappeared into the mist. He returned safely, and the shaman led the still terrified people back to the village.

The body of the sky-offering still hung limply on the wooden frame at the summit of the mound. His head had disappeared.

After much chanting and grinding entrails, spotting shapes in the mists and three trances, the priest and his apprentice decided it was a good omen, and yet a warning at the same time. They sacrificed a meat-animal belonging to the family of the girl who had dropped the sky-offering’s head, and put the beast’s head in the earthenware pot instead.

Five

“Dizzy! How the devil are you?” He took her hand and helped her up onto the wooden pier from the roof of the just-surfaced module. He put his arms round her. “Good to see you again!” he laughed. Sma patted his waist, finding herself unwilling to hug him back. He didn’t seem to notice.

He let her go, looked down to see the drone rising up from the module. “And Skaffen-Amtiskaw! They still letting you out without a guard?”

“Hello, Zakalwe,” the drone said.

He put his arm round Sma’s waist. “Come on up to the shack; we’ll have lunch.”

“All right,” she said.

They walked along the small wooden pier to a stone path laid across the sand, and on into the shade under the trees. The trees were blue or purple; huge puff heads of dark colour standing out against the pale blue sky, and tugged at by a warm, intermittent breeze. They sweated delicate perfumes from the tops of their silver-white trunks. The drone lifted to above tree height a couple of times, when other people passed on the path.

The man and woman walked through the sunlit avenues between the trees until they came to where a wide pool of water trembled reflections of twenty or so white huts; a small, sleek seaplane floated at a wooden jetty. They entered the cluster of buildings and climbed some steps to a balcony that looked over the pool and the narrow channel that led from it to the lagoon on the far side of the island.

The sun was sifted through the tree-heads; shadows moved to and fro along the veranda and over the small table and the two hammocks.

He motioned Sma to sit on the first hammock; a female servant appeared and he ordered lunch for two. When the servant had gone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated down and sat on the parapet of the veranda’s wall, overlooking the pool. Sma levered herself into the hammock carefully.

“It true you own this island, Zakalwe?”

“Um…” he looked round, apparently uncertain, then nodded his head. “Oh yes; so I do.” He kicked off his sandals and slumped into the other hammock, letting it sway. He picked up a bottle from the floor, and with each sway of the hammock poured a little more from the bottle into two glasses on the small table. He increased the swing when he had finished to be able to hand her drink to her.

“Thank you.”

He sipped at his drink and closed his eyes. She watched the glass on his chest where his hands held it, and watched the liquid swill this way, that way, lethargic and eye-brown. She moved her gaze to his face and saw he had not changed; hair a bit darker than she remembered; swept away from his broad, tanned forehead and tied in a pony-tail behind. Fit-looking as ever. No older-looking, of course, because they’d stabilised his age as part of his payment for the last job.

His eyes opened slowly, heavy-lidded, and he looked back at her, smiling slowly. The eyes look older, she thought. But she could have been wrong.

“So,” she said, “we playing games here, Zakalwe?”

“What do you mean, Dizzy?”

“I’ve been sent to get you back again. They want you to do another job. You must have guessed that, so tell me now whether I’m wasting my time here or not. I’m in no mood to try and argue you…”

“Dizzy!” he exclaimed, sounding hurt, pivoting his legs off the hammock and onto the floor, then smiling persuasively, “Don’t be like that; of course you’re not wasting your time. I’ve already packed.”

He beamed at her like a happy child, his tanned face open and smiling. She looked at him with relief and disbelief.

“So what was all the run-around for?”

“What run-around?” he said innocently, sitting back in the hammock again. “I had to come here to say goodbye to a close friend, that was all. But I’m ready to go. What’s the scam?”

Sma stared, open-mouthed. Then she turned to the drone. “Do we just go now?”

“No point,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. “The course the GSV’s on, you can have two hours here, then go back to the Xenophobe; it can match with the What in about thirty hours.” It swivelled to look at the man. “But we need a definite word. There’s a teratonne of GSV with twenty-eight million people on board charging in this direction; if it’s to wait here it has to slow down first, so it needs to know for sure. You really are coming? This afternoon?”

“Drone, I just told you. I’ll do it.” He leaned towards Sma. “What is the job again?”

“Voerenhutz,” she told him. “Tsoldrin Beychae.”

He beamed, teeth gleaming. “Old Tsoldrin still above ground? Well, it’ll be good to see him again.”

“You have to talk him back into his working clothes again.”

He waved one hand airily. “Easy,” he said, drinking.

Sma watched him drink. She shook her head.

“Don’t you want to know why, Cheradenine?” she asked.

He started to make a gesture with one hand that meant the same as a shrug, then thought better of it. “Umm; sure. Why, Diziet?” he sighed.

“Voerenhutz is coalescing into two groups; the people gaining the upper hand at the moment want to pursue aggressive terraforming policies…”

“That’s sort of…” he burped, “re-decorating a planet, right?”

Sma closed her eyes briefly. “Yes. Sort of. Whatever you choose to call it, it’s ecologically insensitive, to put it mildly. These people — they call themselves the Humanists — also want a sliding scale of sentient rights which will have the effect of letting them take over whatever even intelligently inhabited worlds they’re militarily able to. There are a dozen brush-fire wars going on right now. Any one of them could spark the big one, and to an extent the Humanists encourage these wars because they appear to prove their case that the Cluster is too crowded and needs to find new planetary habitats.”

“They also,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, “refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists.”

“I see,” he nodded, and looked very serious. “And you want old Beychae to get into harness with these Humanist guys, right?”

“Cheradenine!” Sma scolded, as Skaffen-Amtiskaw’s fields went frosty.

He looked hurt. “But they’re called the Humanists!”

“That’s just their name, Zakalwe.”

“Names are important,” he said, apparently serious.

“It’s still just what they call themselves; it doesn’t make them the good guys.”

“Okay.” He grinned at Sma. “Sorry.” He tried to look more business-like. “You want him pulling in the other direction, like last time.”

“Yes,” Sma said.

“Fine. Sounds almost easy. No soldiering?”

“No soldiering.”

“I’ll do it.” He nodded.

“Do I hear the sound of a barrel-bottom being scraped?” Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered.

“Just send the signal,” Sma told it.

“Okay,” said the drone. “Signal sent.” It made a good impression of glowering at the man with its fields. “But you’d better not change your mind.”

“Only the thought of having to spend any time in your company, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, could possibly disinduce me from accompanying the delightful Ms Sma here to Voerenhutz.” He glanced concernedly at the woman. “You are coming, I hope.”

Sma nodded. She sipped at her drink, while the servant laid some small dishes on the table between the hammocks.

“Just like that, Zakalwe?” she said, once the servant had gone again.

“Just like what, Diziet?” He smiled over his glass.

“You’re leaving. After, what… five years? Building up your empire, sorting out your scheme to make the world a safer place, using our technology, trying to use our methods… you’re prepared just to walk away from it all, for however long it takes? Dammit, even before you knew it was Voerenhutz you’d said yes; could have been on the other side of the galaxy, for all you knew; could have been the Clouds. You might have been saying yes to a four-year trip.”

He shrugged. “I like long voyages.”

Sma looked into the man’s face for a while. He looked unworried, full of life. Pep and vim were the words that came to mind. She felt vaguely disgusted.

He shrugged, eating some fruit from one of the little dishes, “Besides, I have a trust arrangement set up. It’ll all be looked after until I come back.”

“If there’s anything to come back to,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw observed.

“Of course there will be,” he said, spitting a pip over the edge of the veranda wall. “These people like to talk about war, but they aren’t suicidal.”

“Oh, that’s all right then,” the drone said, turning away.

The man just smiled at it. He nodded at Sma’s untouched plate. “You not hungry, Diziet?”

“Lost my appetite,” she said.

He swung out of the hammock, brushing his hands together. “Come on,” he said, “let’s go for a swim.”

She watched him trying to catch fish in a small rock pool, paddling around in his long trunks. She had swum in her briefs.

He bent down, engrossed, his earnest face peering into the water, his face reflected there. He seemed to speak to it.

“You still look very good, you know. I hope you feel suitably flattered.”

She went on drying herself. “I’m too old for flattery, Zakalwe.”

“Rubbish.” He laughed, and the water rippled under his mouth. He frowned hard and dipped his hands under, slowly.

She watched the concentration on his face as his arms slid deeper under the water, mirroring themselves.

He smiled again, his eyes narrowing as his hands steadied; his arms were in deep now, and he licked his lips.

He lunged forward, yelled excitedly, then cupped his hands out of the water and came over to her where she sat against some rocks. He was grinning hugely. He held his hands out for her to see. She looked in and saw a small fish, brilliant shimmering blue and green and red and gold, a gaudy splash of rippling light squirming inside the man’s cupped hands. She frowned as he leant back against the rock again.

“Now just you put that back where you found it, Cheradenine, and the way you found it.”

His face fell and she was about to say something else, kinder, when he grinned again and threw the fish back into the pool.

“As if I’d do anything else.” He came and sat beside her on the rock.

She looked out to sea. The drone was further up the beach, ten metres behind them. She carefully smoothed the tiny dark hairs on her forearms until they were lying flat. “Why did you try all that stuff, Zakalwe?”

“Giving the elixir of youth to our glorious leaders?” He shrugged. “Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he confessed, lightly. “I don’t know; I thought it might be possible. I thought interfering was maybe a lot easier then you lot made it out to be. I thought one man with a strong plan, not interested in his own aggrandisement…” He shrugged, glanced at her. “It might all work out yet. You never know.”

“Zakalwe, it isn’t going to work out. You’re leaving us an incredible mess here.”

“Ah,” he nodded. “You are coming in, then. Thought you might.”

“In some fashion, I think we’ll have to.”

“Best of luck.”

“Luck…” Sma began, but then thought the better of it. She ran her fingers through her damp hair.

“How much trouble am I in, Diziet?”

“For this?”

“Yes, and the knife missile. You heard about that?”

“I heard.” She shook her head. “I don’t think you’re in any more trouble than you’re ever in, Cheradenine, just by being you.”

He smiled. “I hate the Culture’s… tolerance.”

“So,” she said, slipping her blouse over her head, “what are your terms?”

“Pay as well, eh?” He laughed. “Minus the rejuve… the same as the last time. Plus ten per cent more negotiables.”

“Exactly the same?” She looked at him sadly, her wet bedraggled hair hanging down from her shaking head.

He nodded. “Exactly.”

“You’re a fool, Zakalwe.”

“I keep trying.”

“It won’t be any different.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I can guess.”

“And I can hope. Look, Dizzy, it’s my business, and if you want me to come with you then you’ve got to agree to it, all right?”

“All right.”

He looked wary. “You still know where she is?”

Sma nodded. “Yes, we know.”

“So it’s agreed?”

She shrugged and looked out to sea. “Oh; it’s agreed. I just think you’re wrong. I don’t think you should go to her again.” She looked him in the eye. “That’s my advice.”

He stood up and dusted some sand off his legs.

“I’ll remember.”

They walked back to the huts and the still sea pool in the centre of the island. She sat on a wall, waiting while he made his final goodbyes. She listened for crying, or the sound of breakages, but in vain.

The wind blew her hair gently, and to her surprise, despite it all, she felt warm and well; the scent from the tall trees stretched around her, and their shifting shadows made the ground seem to move in time with the breeze so that air and trees and light and earth swayed and rippled like the bright-dark water in the island’s central pool. She closed her eyes and sounds came to her like faithful pets, nuzzling her ear; sounds of the brushing tree-heads, like tired lovers dancing; sounds of the ocean, swirling over rocks, softly stroking the golden sands; sounds of what she did not know.

Perhaps soon she would be back in the house below the grey-white dam.

What an asshole you are, Zakalwe, she thought. I could have stayed home; they could have sent the stand-in… dammit, they could probably have just sent the drone, and you’d still have come…

He appeared looking bright and fresh and carrying a jacket. A different servant carried some bags. “Okay; let’s go,” he said.

They walked to the pier while the drone tracked them, overhead.

“By the way,” she said. “Why ten per cent more money?”

He shrugged as they walked onto the wooden pier. “Inflation.”

Sma frowned. “What’s that?”