Use of Weapons

Ten

He loved the plasma rifle. He was an artist with it; he could paint pictures of destruction, compose symphonies of demolition, write elegies of annihilation, using that weapon.

He stood, thinking about it, while the wind moved dead leaves round his feet and the ancient stones faced into the wind.

They hadn’t made it off the planet. The capsule had been attacked by… something. He couldn’t tell from the damage whether it had been a beam weapon or some sort of warhead going off nearby. Whatever it had been, it had disabled them. Clamped to the outside of the capsule, he’d been lucky to be on the side that shielded him from whatever had hit it. Had he been on the other side, facing the beam or the warhead, he’d be dead.

They must have been hit by some crude effector weapon as well, because the plasma rifle seemed to have fused. It had been cradled between his suit and the capsule skin and couldn’t have been affected by whatever wrecked the capsule itself, but the weapon had smoked and got hot, and when they’d finally landed — Beychae shaken but unhurt — and opened up the gun’s inspection panels, it was to find a melted, still-warm mess inside.

Maybe if he’d taken just a little less time to convince Beychae; maybe if he’d just knocked the old guy out and left the talking for later. He’d taken too much time, given them too much time. Seconds counted. Dammit, milliseconds, nanoseconds counted. Too much time.

“They’re going to kill you!” he’d shouted. “They want you on their side or they want you dead. The war’s going to start soon, Tsoldrin; you support them or you’ll have an accident. They won’t let you stay neutral!”

“Insane,” Beychae repeated, cradling Ubrel Shiol’s head in his hands. Saliva trickled from the woman’s mouth. “You’re insane, Zakalwe; insane.” He started to cry.

He went over to the old man, knelt on one knee, holding the gun he’d taken from Shiol. “Tsoldrin; what do you think she had this for?” He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Didn’t you see the way she moved when she tried to kick me? Tsoldrin; librarians… research assistants… they just don’t move like that.” He reached out and patted the unconscious woman’s collar flat and tidy again. “She was one of your jailers, Tsoldrin; she would probably have been your executioner.” He reached under the car, pulled out the bouquet of flowers, and placed them gently under her blonde head, removing Beychae’s hands.

“Tsoldrin,” he said. “We have to go. She’ll be all right.” He arranged Shiol’s arms in a less awkward position. She was already on her side, so she wouldn’t choke. He reached carefully under Beychae’s arms and slowly drew the old man up to his feet. Ubrel Shiol’s eyes flickered open; she saw the two men in front of her; she muttered something, and one hand went to the back of her neck. She started to roll over, unbalanced in her grogginess; the hand that had gone to her neck came away clutching a tiny cylinder like a pen; he felt Beychae stiffen as the girl looked up and, as she fell forward, tried to point the little laser at Beychae’s head.

Beychae looked into her dark, half-unfocused eyes, over the top of the pen laser, and felt a sort of appalled disconnectedness. The girl tried hard to steady herself, aiming at him. Not Zakalwe, he thought; at me. Me!

“Ubrel…” he began.

The girl fell back in a dead faint.

Beychae stared down at her body lying limp on the road. Then he heard somebody saying his name and tugging his arm.

“Tsoldrin… Tsoldrin… Come on, Tsoldrin.”

“Zakalwe; she was aiming at me, not you!”

“I know, Tsoldrin.”

“She was aiming at me!”

“I know. Come on; here’s the capsule.”

“At me…”

“I know, I know. Get in here.”

He watched the grey clouds move overhead. He stood on the flat stone summit of a high hill, surrounded by other hilltops almost as high, all wooded. He looked resentfully around the forested slopes and the curious, truncated stone pillars and plinths that covered the platform peak. He felt a sense of vertigo, exposed to such wide horizons again after so long spent in the cleft city. He left the view, kicked his way through some wind-piled leaves, back to where Beychae sat and the plasma rifle rested against a great round stone. The capsule was a hundred metres away, down in the trees.

He picked up the plasma rifle for the fifth or sixth time and inspected it.

It made him want to cry; it was such a beautiful weapon. Every time he picked it up he half hoped that it would be all right, that the Culture had fitted it with some self-repair facility without telling him, that the damage would be no more…

The wind blew; the leaves scattered. He shook his head, exasperated. Beychae, sitting in his thickly padded trousers and long jacket, turned to look at him.

“Broken?” the old man asked.

“Broken,” he said. His face took on an expression of annoyance; he gripped the weapon round the muzzle with both hands and swung it round his head, then let it go and sent it whirling away into the trees below; it disappeared in a flurry of dislodged leaves.

He sat down beside Beychae.

Plasma rifle gone, just a pistol left; only one suit; probably no way he could use the suit’s AG without giving away their position; capsule wrecked; module nowhere to be seen; no word from the terminal earring or the suit itself… it was a sorry mess. He checked the suit for whatever broadcast signals it was picking up; the wrist screen displayed some news headlines programme; nothing about Solotol was mentioned. A few of the Cluster’s brush-fire wars were.

Beychae looked at the small screen too. “Can you tell from that whether they are looking for us?” he asked.

“Only if we see it on the news. Military stuff will be tight-beamed; slim chance we’ll pick up a transmission.” He looked at the clouds. “We’ll probably find out more directly, soon enough.”

“Hmm,” Beychae said. He frowned at the flagstones, then said, “I think I might know where this place is, Zakalwe.”

“Yeah?” he said, unenthusiastically. He put his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, and looked out over the wooded plains to the low hills on the horizon.

Beychae nodded. “I’ve been thinking about it. I believe this is the Srometren Observatory, in Deshal Forest.”

“How far is that from Solotol?”

“Oh; different continent. Good two thousand kilometres.”

“Same latitude,” he said glumly, looking up at the chill grey skies.

“Approximately, if this is the place I think it is.”

“Who’s in charge here?” he asked. “Whose jurisdiction? Same lot as in Solotol; the Humanists?”

“The same.” Beychae said, and got up, brushing the seat of his pants and looking around the flattened hill-top at the curious stone instruments that covered its flagstones. “Srometren Observatory!” he said. “How ironic we should happen to come down here, on our way to the stars!”

“Probably not just chance,” he said, picking up a twig and brushing a few random shapes in the dust at his feet. “This place famous?”

“Of course,” Beychae said. “It was the centre of astronomical research for the old Vrehid Empire for five hundred years.”

“On any tourist routes?”

“Certainly.”

“Then it probably has a beacon nearby, to guide aircraft in. Capsule may have made for it when it knew it was crippled. Makes us easier to find.” He gazed up at the sky. “For everybody, unfortunately.” He shook his head, went back to scratching in the dust with the twig.

“What happens now?” Beychae said.

He shrugged. “We wait and see who turns up. I can’t get any of the communication gear to work, so we don’t know if the Culture knows all that’s happened or not… for all I know the Module’s still coming for us, or a whole Culture starship’s on its way, or — probably more likely — your pals from Solotol…” He shrugged, threw down the twig and sat back against the stonework behind him, glancing skyward. “They might be watching us right now.”

Beychae looked up too. “Through the clouds?”

“Through the clouds.”

“Shouldn’t you be hiding, then? Running off through the woods?”

“Maybe,” he said.

Beychae stood looking down at the other man. “Where were you thinking of taking me, if we’d got away?”

“The Impren System. There are space Habitats there,” he said. “They’re neutral, or at least not as pro-war as this place.”

“Do your… superiors really think war is so close, Zakalwe?”

“Yes,” he sighed. He already had the suit’s face-plate hinged up; now, with another look at the sky, he took the whole helmet off. He put one hand up over his forehead and through his drawn-back hair, then reached back and took the pony-tail out of its little ring, shaking his long black hair down. “It might take ten days, might take a hundred, but it’s coming.” He smiled thinly at Beychae. “For the same reasons as last time.”

“I thought we’d won the ecological argument against terra-forming,” said Beychae.

“We did, but times change; people change, generations change. We won the battles for the acknowledgement of machine sentience, but by all accounts the issue was fudged after that. Now people are saying, yes, they’re sentient, but it’s only human sentience that counts. Plus, people never need too much of an excuse to see other species as inferior.”

Beychae was silent for a while, then said, “Zakalwe, has it ever occurred to you that in all these things the Culture may not be as disinterested as you imagine, and it claims?”

“No, it never occurred to me,” he said, though Beychae got the impression the man hadn’t really thought first before answering.

“They want other people to be like them, Cheradenine. They don’t terraform, so they don’t want others to either. There are arguments for it as well, you know; increasing species diversity often seems more important to people than preserving a wilderness, even without the provision of extra living space. The Culture believes profoundly in machine sentience, so it thinks everybody ought to, but I think it also believes every civilisation should be run by its machines. Fewer people want that. The issue of cross-species tolerance is, I’ll grant, of a different nature, but even there the Culture can sometimes appear to be insistent that deliberate inter-mixing is not just permissible but desirable; almost a duty. Again, who is to say that is correct?”

“So you should have a war to… what? Clear the air?” He inspected the suit helmet.

“No, Cheradenine, I’m just trying to suggest to you that the Culture may not be as objective as it thinks it is, and, that being the case, its estimation concerning the likelihood of war may be equally untrustworthy.”

“There are small wars on a dozen planets right now, Tsoldrin. People are talking war in public; either about how to avoid it, or how it might be limited, or how it can’t possibly happen… but it’s coming; you can smell it. You should catch the newscasts, Tsoldrin. Then you’d know.”

“Well then, perhaps war is inevitable,” Beychae said, looking away over the wooded plains and hills beyond the observatory. “Maybe it’s just… time.”

“Crap,” he said. Beychae looked at him, surprised. “There’s a saying: ‘War is a long cliff.’ You can avoid the cliff completely, you can walk along the top for as long as you have the nerve, you can even choose to leap off, and if you only fall a short way before you hit a ledge you can always scramble back up again. Unless you’re just plain invaded, there are always choices, and even then, there’s usually something you’ve missed — a choice you didn’t make — that could have avoided invasion in the first place. You people still have your choices. There’s nothing inevitable about it.”

“Zakalwe,” Beychae said. “You surprise me. I’d have thought you—”

“You’d have thought I’d be in favour of war?” he said, standing, a sad small smile on his lips. He put one hand on the other man’s shoulder. “You’ve had your nose buried in books for too long, Tsoldrin.” He walked away past the stone instruments. Beychae looked down at the suit helmet, lying on the flagstones. He followed the other man.

“You’re right, Zakalwe. I have been out of the flow of things for a long time. I probably don’t know who half the people in power are these days, or exactly what the issues are, or the precise balance of the various alliances… so the Culture cannot be so… desperate they think I can alter whatever’s going to happen. Can they?”

He turned round. He looked into Beychae’s face. “Tsoldrin, the truth is I don’t know. Don’t think I haven’t thought about this. It might be just that you, as a symbol, really would make all the difference, and maybe everybody is desperate to find an excuse not to have to fight; you could be that excuse if you come along, uncontaminated by recent events, as though from the dead, and provide a face-saving compromise.

“Or maybe the Culture secretly thinks a small short war is a good idea, or even knows there’s nothing it can do to stop a full-scale one, but has to be seen to be doing something, no matter how long a shot it might be, so that people can’t say later ‘Why didn’t you try this?’ ” He shrugged. “I never try to second-guess the Culture, Tsoldrin, let alone Contact, and certainly not Special Circumstances.”

“You just do their bidding.”

“And get well paid for it.”

“But you see yourself on the side of good, do you, Cheradenine?”

He smiled and sat on the stone plinth, legs swinging. “I have no idea whether they’re the good guys or not, Tsoldrin. They certainly seem to be, but then who knows that seeming is being?” He frowned, looked away. “I have never seen them be cruel, even when they might have claimed they had an excuse to be so. It can make them seem cold, sometimes.” He shrugged again. “But there are folks that’ll tell you it’s the bad gods that always have the most beautiful faces and the softest voices. Shit,” he said, and jumped off the stone table. He went to stand by the balustrade which marked one edge of the old observatory, looking to where the sky was starting to redden above the horizon. It would be dark in an hour. “They keep their promises and they pay top rates. They make good employers, Tsoldrin.”

“That does not mean we ought to let them decide our fate.”

“You’d rather let those decadent dickheads in Governance do it instead?”

“At least they’re involved, Zakalwe; it isn’t just a game to them.”

“Oh, I think it is. I think that’s exactly what it is to them. The difference is that unlike the Culture’s Minds, they don’t know enough to take games seriously.” He took a deep breath and watched the wind stir the branches beneath them; leaves fell away. “Tsoldrin; don’t say you’re on their side.”

“The sides were always strange,” Beychae said. “We all said that all we wanted was the best for the Cluster, and I think we all meant it, mostly. We all still want that. But I don’t know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I know too much, I’ve studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that settles over… whatever machinery we carry inside us that leads us to act, and puts the same weight everywhere, so that always you can see good and bad on each side, and always there are arguments, precedents for every possible course of action… so of course one ends up doing nothing. Perhaps that’s only right; perhaps that’s what evolution requires, to leave the field free for younger, unencumbered minds, and those not afraid to act.”

“Okay, so it’s a balance. All societies are like that; the damping hand of the old and the firebrand youth together. It works out through generations, or through the set-up of your institutions, and their change and even replacement; but Governance, the Humanists, combine the worst of both approaches. Ancient, vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war-mania. It’s a crock of shit, Tsoldrin, and you know it. You’ve earned the right to some leisure; nobody’s arguing. But that won’t stop you feeling guilty when — not if — the bad stuff comes. You have the power, Tsoldrin, whether you like it or not; just doing nothing is a statement, don’t you understand that? What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do? You’re almost a god to some of the people in this civilisation, Tsoldrin; again, whether you like it or not. If you do nothing… they’ll feel abandoned. They’ll feel despair. And who can blame them?”

He made a resigned sort of gesture with his hands, putting them both down on the stone parapet, gazing out to the darkening sky. Beychae was silent.

He gave the old man a while longer to think, then looked round at the flat stone summit of the hill, at all the strange stone instruments. “An observatory, eh?”

“Yes,” Beychae said after a moment’s hesitation. He touched one of the stone plinths with one hand. “Believed to have been a burial site, four or five thousand years ago; then to have had some sort of astrological significance; later, they may have predicted eclipses with readings taken here. Finally, the Vrehids built this observatory to study the motions of the moons, planets and stars. There are water-clocks, sundials, sextants, planet-dials… partial orreries… there are crude seismographs here, too, or at least earthquake direction indicators.”

“They have telescopes?”

“Very poor ones, and only for a decade or so before the Empire fell. The results they got from the telescopes caused a lot of problems; contradicted what they already knew, or thought they knew.”

“That figures. What’s this?” One of the plinths held a large, rusty metal bowl with a sharp central spindle.

“Compass, I think,” Beychae said. “It works by fields,” he smiled.

“And this? Looks like a tree stump.” It was a huge, rough, very slightly fluted cylinder perhaps a metre in height, and twice that across. He tapped the edge. “Hmm; stone.”

“Ah!” Tsoldrin said, joining him at the stone cylinder. “Well, if it’s what I think it is… it was originally just a tree stump, of course…” He ran his hand over the stone surface, looked round the edge for something. “But it was petrified, long ago. Look though; you can still see the rings in the wood.”

He leant closer, looking at the grey stone surface by the fading afternoon light. The growth rings of the long dead tree were indeed visible. He leant forward, taking off one of the suit gloves, and with his fingers stroked the surface of the stone. Some differential weathering of the wood-become-rock had made the rings tangible; his fingers felt the tiny ridges run beneath their surface like the fingerprint of some mighty stone god.

“So many years,” he breathed, putting his hand back to the very sapling centre of the stump, and running his hand out again. Beychae said nothing.

Every year a complete ring, signature of bad year and good by the spacing, and every ring complete, sealed, hermetic. Every year like part of a sentence, every ring a shackle, chained and chaining to the past; every ring a wall, a prison. A sentence locked in the wood, now locked in stone, frozen twice, sentenced twice, once for an imaginable time, then for an unimaginable time. His finger ran over the ring walls, dry paper over ridged rock.

“This is just the cover,” Beychae said from the other side. He was squatting down, looking for something on the side of the great stone stump. “There ought to be… ah. Here we are. Don’t expect we’ll be able to actually lift it, of course…”

“Cover?” he said, putting the glove back on and walking round to where Beychae was. “Cover for what?”

“A sort of puzzle the Imperial Astronomers played when the viewing was patchy,” Beychae said. “There; see that handhold?”

“Just a second,” he said. “Want to stand back a little?”

Beychae stood back. “It’s supposed to take four strong men, Zakalwe.”

“This suit’s more powerful than that, though balancing might be a little…” He found two hand-holds on the stone. “Suit command; strength normal max.”

“You have to talk to the suit?” Beychae asked.

“Yeah,” he said. He flexed, lifting one edge of the stone cover up; a tiny explosion of dust under the sole of one of the suit’s boots announced a trapped pebble giving up the struggle. “This one you do; they have ones you just have to think about something, but…” he pulled on one edge of the cover, sticking one leg out to shift his centre of gravity as he did so. “…but I just never liked the idea of that.” He held the whole stone top of the petrified stump above his head, then walked awkwardly, to the noise of crunching, popping gravel under his feet, to another stone table; he lowered, shifted the stone cover sideways until it rested on the table, and returned; he made the mistake of clapping his hands together, and produced what sounded like a gunshot. “Oops,” he grinned. “Suit command; strength off.”

Revealed by the removal of the stone cap was a shallow cone. It seemed to have been carved from the petrified stump itself. Looking closer, he could see that it was ridged, tree ring by tree ring.

“Quite clever,” he said, mildly disappointed.

“You’re not looking at it properly, Cheradenine,” Beychae told him. “Look closer.”

He looked closer.

“I don’t suppose you have anything very small and spherical, do you?” Beychae said, “Like a… ball-bearing.”

“A ball-bearing?” he said, a pained expression on his face.

“You don’t have such things?”

“I think you’ll find in most societies ball-bearings don’t last much beyond room-temperature superconductivity, let alone field technology. Unless you’re into industrial archeology and trying to keep some ancient machine running. No, I don’t have any ball…” he peered closer at the centre of the shallow rock cone. “Notches.”

“Exactly.” Beychae smiled.

He stood back, looking at the ridged cone as a whole. “It’s a maze!”

Maze. There had been a maze in the garden. They outgrew it, became too familiar with it, eventually only used it when other children they didn’t like came for the day to the great house; they could lose them in the maze for a few hours.

“Yes,” Beychae nodded. “They would start out with small coloured beads or pebbles, and try to work their way to the rim.” He looked closer. “They say there might have been a way to turn it into a game, by painting lines that divided each ring into segments; little wooden bridges and blocking pieces like walls could be used to facilitate one’s own progress or prevent that of one’s rivals.” Beychae squinted closer in the fading light. “Hmm. Paint must have faded.”

He looked down at the hundreds of tiny ridges on the surface of the shallow cone — like a model of a huge volcano, he thought — and smiled. He sighed, looked at the screen set into the wrist of the suit, tried the emergency signal button again. No reply.

“Trying to contact the Culture?”

“Mmm,” he said, gazing again at the petrified maze.

“What will happen to you if Governance find us?” Beychae asked.

“Oh,” he shrugged, walking back to the balustrade they had stood at earlier. “Probably not much. Not very likely they’ll just blow my brains out; they’ll want to question me. Should give the Culture plenty of time to get me out; either negotiated or just snapped away. Don’t worry about me.” He smiled at Beychae. “Tell them I took you by force. I’ll say I stunned you and stuffed you into the capsule. So don’t worry; they’ll probably let you go straight back to your studies.”

“Well,” Beychae said, rejoining the other man at the balustrade. “My studies were a delicate construction, Zakalwe; they maintained my carefully developed disinterest. They may not be so easy to resume, after your… exuberantly violent interruption.”

“Ah.” He tried not to smile. He looked down at the trees, then at the suit gloves, as though checking all the fingers were there. “Yeah. Look, Tsoldrin… I’m sorry… I mean about your friend, Ms Shiol.”

“As am I,” Beychae said quietly. He smiled uncertainly. “I felt happy, Cheradenine. I hadn’t felt like that for… well, long enough.” They stood watching the sun sink behind the clouds. “You are certain she was one of theirs? I mean, absolutely?”

“Beyond any reasonable doubt, Tsoldrin.” He thought he saw tears in the old man’s eyes. He looked away. “Like I said; I’m sorry.”

“I hope,” Beychae said, “that is not the only way the old can be made happy… can be happy. Through deceit.”

“Maybe it wasn’t all deceit,” he said. “And anyway, being old isn’t what it used to be; I’m old,” he reminded Beychae, who nodded, took out a kerchief and sniffed.

“Of course; so you are. I forgot. Strange, isn’t it? Whenever we see people after a long time we are always surprised how they’ve grown or aged. But when I see you, well, you haven’t changed a bit, and instead I feel very old — unfairly, unjustifiably old — beside you, Cheradenine.”

“Actually I have changed, Tsoldrin.” He grinned. “But no, I haven’t got any older.” He looked Beychae in the eye. “They’d give you this, too, if you asked them. The Culture would let you grow younger, then stabilise your age, or let you grow old again, but very slowly.”

“Bribery, Zakalwe?” Beychae said, smiling.

“Hey, it was just a thought. And it’d be a payment, not a bribe. And they wouldn’t force it on you. But it’s academic, anyway.” He paused, nodding into the sky. “Completely academic; now. Here comes a plane.”

Tsoldrin looked out to the red clouds of sunset. He couldn’t see any aircraft.

“A Culture one?” Beychae asked cautiously.

He smiled. “In the circumstances, Tsoldrin, if you can see it, it isn’t a Culture one.” He turned and walked quickly, picking up the suit helmet and putting it on. Suddenly the dark figure became inhuman, behind the armoured, sensor-studded faceplate of the suit. He took a large pistol from the suit holster.

“Tsoldrin,” his voice came booming from speakers set in the suit chest as he checked the settings on the gun. “If I were you I’d get back to the capsule, or just plain run away and hide.” The figure turned to face Beychae, the helmet like the head of some gigantic, fearsome insect. “I’m fixing to give these assholes a fight, just for the sheer hell of it, and it might be best for you if you weren’t nearby.”

IV

The ship was over eighty kilometres long and it was called the Size Isn’t Everything. The last thing he’d been on for any length of time had actually been bigger, but then that had been a tabular iceberg big enough to hide two armies on, and it didn’t beat the General Systems Vehicle by much.

“How do these things hold together?” He stood on a balcony, looking out over a sort of miniature valley composed of accommodation units; each stepped terrace was smothered in foliage, the space was criss-crossed by walk-ways and slender bridges, and a small stream ran through the bottom of the V. People sat at tables in little courtyards, lounged on the grass by the stream side or amongst the cushions and couches of cafés and bars on the terraces. Hanging above the centre of the valley, beneath a ceiling of glowing blue, a travel-tube snaked away into the distance on either side, following the wavy line of the valley. Under the tube, a line of fake sunlight burned, like some enormous strip light.

“Hmm?” Diziet Sma said, arriving at his elbow with two drinks; she handed one to him.

“They’re too big,” he said. He turned to face the woman. He’d seen the things they called bays, where they built smaller space ships (smaller in this case meant over three kilometres long); vast unsupported hangars with thin walls. He’d been near the immense engines, which as far as he could gather were solid, and inaccessible (how?), and obviously extremely massive; he’d felt oddly threatened on discovering that there was no control room, no bridge, no flight deck anywhere in the vast vessel, just three Minds — fancy computers, apparently — controlling everything (what!?).

And now he was finding out where the people lived, but it was all too big, too much, too flimsy somehow, especially if the ship was supposed to accelerate as smartly as Sma claimed. He shook his head. “I don’t understand; how does it hold together?”

Sma smiled. “Just think; fields, Cheradenine. It’s all done with force fields.” She put one hand out to his troubled face, patted one cheek. “Don’t look so confused. And don’t try to understand it all too quickly. Let it soak in. Just wander around; lose yourself in it for a few days. Come back whenever.”

Later, he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then the people who had built it.

He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.

“Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look; this table’s clean.”

He agreed that the table was clean.

“Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien — no offence — alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my speciality… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but,” he slapped the table, “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.”

“But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.”

“And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested.

He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.”

“But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway,” the man laughed, “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from, anyway?”

He talked to people all the time; in bars and cafés, mostly. The GSV’s accommodation seemed to be divided into various different types of lay-out; valleys (or ziggurats, if you wanted to look at them like that) seemed to be the most common, though there were different configurations.

He ate when he was hungry and drank when he was thirsty, every time trying a different dish or drink from the stunningly complicated menus, and when he wanted to sleep — as the whole vessel gradually cycled into a red-tinged dusk, the ceiling light-bars dimming — he just asked a drone, and was directed to the nearest unoccupied room. The rooms were all roughly the same size, and yet all slightly different; some were very plain, some were highly decorated. The basics were always there; bed — sometimes a real, physical bed, sometimes one of their weird field-beds — somewhere to wash and defaecate, cupboards, places for personal effects, a fake window, a holo screen of some sort, and a link up to the rest of the communications net, both aboard and off-ship. The first night away, he linked into one of their direct-link sensory entertainments, lying on the bed with some sort of device activated under the pillow.

He did not actually sleep that night; instead he was a bold pirate prince who’d renounced his nobility to lead a brave crew against the slaver ships of a terrible empire amongst the spice and treasure isles; their quick little ships darted amongst the lumbering galleons, picking away the rigging with chain shot. They came ashore on moonless nights, attacking the great prison castles, releasing joyous captives; he personally fought the wicked governor’s chief torturer, sword against sword; the man finally fell from a high tower. An alliance with a beautiful lady pirate begot a more personal liaison, and a daring rescue from a mountain monastery when she was captured…

He pulled away from it, after what had been weeks of compressed time. He knew (somewhere at the back of his mind) even as it happened that none of it was real, but that seemed like the least important property of the adventure. When he came out of it — surprised to discover that he had not actually ejaculated during some of the profoundly convincing erotic episodes — he discovered that only a night had passed, and it was morning, and he had, somehow, shared the strange story with others; it had been a game, apparently. People had left messages for him to get in touch, they had enjoyed playing the game with him so much. He felt oddly ashamed, and did not reply.

The rooms he slept in always contained places to sit; field extensions, mouldable wall units, real couches, and — sometimes — ordinary chairs. Whenever the rooms held chairs, he moved them outside, into the corridor or onto the terrace.

It was all he could do to keep the memories at bay.

“Na,” the woman said in the Mainbay. “It doesn’t really work that way.” They stood on a half-constructed starship, on what would eventually be the middle of the engines, watching a huge field-unit swing through the air, out of the engineering space behind the bay proper and up towards the skeletal body of the General Contact Unit. Little lifter tugs manoeuvred the field unit down towards them.

“You mean it makes no difference?”

“Not much,” the woman said. She pressed on a little studded lanyard she held in one hand, spoke as though to her shoulder. “I’ll take it.” The field-unit put them in shadow as it hovered above them. Just another solid slab, as far as he could see. It was red; a different colour from the black slickness of the starboard Main Engine Block Lower under their feet. She manipulated the lanyard, guiding the huge red block down; two other people standing twenty metres away watched the far end of the unit.

“The trouble is,” the woman said, watching the vast red building-brick come slowly down, “that even when people do get sick and die young, they’re always surprised when they get sick. How many healthy people do you think actually say to themselves, ‘Hey, I’m healthy today!’, unless they’ve just had a serious illness?” She shrugged, pressed the lanyard again as the field-unit lowered to a couple of centimetres off the engine surface. “Stop,” she said quietly. “Inertia down five. Check.” A line of light flashed on the surface of the engine block. She put one hand on the block, and pressed it again. It moved. “Down dead slow,” she said. She pressed the block into place. “Sorzh; all right?” she asked. He didn’t hear the reply, but the woman obviously did.

“Okay; positioned; all clear.” She looked up as the lifter tugs sailed back towards the engineering space, then back at him. “All that’s happened is that reality has caught up with the way people always did behave anyway. So, no, you don’t feel any wonderful release from debilitating illnesses.” She scratched one ear. “Except maybe when you think about it.” She grinned. “I guess in school, when you’re seeing how people used to live… how aliens still do live… then it hits home, and I suppose you never really lose that entirely, but you don’t spend much time thinking about it.”

They walked across the black expanse of thoroughly featureless material. (“Ah,” the woman had said, when he’d mentioned this, “you take a look at it under a microscope; it’s beautiful! What did you expect, anyway? Cranks? Gears? Tanks full of chemicals?”)

“Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman, looking around the starship shell.

“Why, of course!” she laughed.

“Then why do you do it?”

“It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite happy, and you think; I helped build that. The fact a machine could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was you who actually did it.”

“Hmm,” he said.

(Learn woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a carpenter or a blacksmith any more than mastering writing will make you a clerk.)

“Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said, approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship, where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding, or swum underwater?”

“Yes,” he agreed.

The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do, and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because of this?”

He smiled. “I suppose not.”

“You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” she looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.” She looked at the holo model of the ship to one side. One of the other workers called to her, pointing at something in the model. She looked at him. “Excuse me, will you?”

He nodded, as he backed off. “Build well.”

“Thank you. I trust we shall.”

“Oh,” he asked. “What’s this ship to be called?”

“Its Mind wishes it to be called the Sweet and Full of Grace,” the woman laughed. Then she was deep in discussion with the others.

He watched their many sports; tried a few. Most of them he just didn’t understand. He swam quite a lot; they seemed to like pools and water complexes. Mostly they swam naked, which he found a little embarrassing. Later he discovered there were whole sections — villages? areas? districts? he wasn’t sure how to think of them — where people never wore clothes, just body ornaments. He was surprised how quickly he got used to this behaviour, but never fully joined in.

It took him a while to realise that all the drones he saw — even more various in their design than humans were in their physiology — didn’t all belong to the ship. Hardly any did, in fact; they had their own artificial brains (he still tended to think of them as computers). They seemed to have their own personalities, too, though he remained sceptical.

“Let me put this thought experiment to you,” the old drone said, as they played a card-game which it had assured him was mostly luck. They sat — well, the drone floated — under an arcade of delicately pink stone, by the side of a small pool; the shouts of people playing a complicated ball-game on the far side of the pool filtered through bushes and small trees to them.

“Forget,” said the drone, “about how machine brains are actually put together; think about making a machine brain — an electronic computer — in the image of a human one. One might start with a few cells, as the human embryo does; these multiply, gradually establish connections. So one would continually add new components and make the relevant, even — if one was to follow the exact development of one single human through the various stages — the identical connections.

“One would, of course, have to limit the speed of the messages transmitted down those connections to a tiny fraction of their normal electronic speed, but that would not be difficult, nor would having these neuron-like components act like their biological equivalents internally, firing their own messages according to the types of signal they received; all this could be done comparatively simply. By building up in this gradual way, you could mimic exactly the development of a human brain, and you could mimic its output; just as an embryo can experience sound and touch and even light inside the womb, so could you send similar signals to your developing electronic equivalent; you could impersonate the experience of birth, and use any degree of sensory stimulation to fool this device into thinking it was feeling touching, tasting, smelling, hearing and seeing everything your real human was (or, of course, you might choose not actually to fool it, but always give it just as much genuine sensory input, and of the same quality, as the human personality was experiencing at any given point).

“Now; my question to you is this; where is the difference? The brain of each being works in exactly the same way as the other; they will respond to stimuli with a greater correspondence than one finds even between monozygotic twins; but how can one still choose to call one a conscious entity, and the other merely a machine?

“Your brain is made up of matter, Mr Zakalwe, organised into information-handling, processing and storage units by your genetic inheritance and by the biochemistry of first your mother’s body and later your own, not to mention your experiences since some short time before your birth until now.

“An electronic computer is also made up of matter, but organised differently; what is there so magical about the workings of the huge, slow cells of the animal brain that they can claim themselves to be conscious, but would deny a quicker, more finely-grained device of equivalent power — or even a machine hobbled so that it worked with precisely the same ponderousness — a similar distinction?

“Hmm?” the machine said, its aura field flashing the pink he was beginning to identify as drone amusement. “Unless, of course, you wish to invoke superstition? Do you believe in gods?”

He smiled. “I have never had that inclination,” he said.

“Well then,” the drone said. “What would you say? Is the machine in the human image conscious, sentient, or not?”

He studied his cards. “I’m thinking,” he said, and laughed.

Sometimes he saw other aliens (obviously aliens, that is; he was sure that a few of the humans he saw each day were not Culture people, though without stopping to ask them it was impossible to tell; somebody dressed as a savage, or in some obviously non-Culture garb, was quite possibly just dressing up like that for a laugh, or going to a party… but there were some very obviously different species around as well).

“Yes, young man?” the alien said. It had eight limbs, a fairly distinct head with two quite small eyes, curiously flower-like mouth parts, and a large, almost spherical, lightly haired body, coloured red and purple. Its own voice was composed of clicks from its mouth and almost subsonic vibrations from its body; a small amulet did the translating.

He asked if he could sit with the alien; it directed him to the seat across the table from it in the café where he had overheard it talking briefly to a passing human about Special Circumstances.

“… It is in layers,” the alien replied to his question. “A tiny core of Special Circumstances, a shell of Contact, and a vast chaotic ecosphere of everything else. Bit like a… you come from a planet?”

He nodded. The creature glanced at its amulet for a translation of the gesture the man had used — it was not what the Culture called nodding — then said, “Well, it is like a planet, only the core is tiny; very tiny. And the ecosphere is more disparate and less distinct than the wrapping of atmosphere round a globe; a red giant star might even be a better comparison. But in the end, you will never know them, because you will be like me, in Special Circumstances, and only ever know them as the great, irresistible force behind you; people like you and I are the edge; you will in time come to feel like a tooth on the biggest saw in the galaxy, sir.” The alien’s eyes closed; it waggled all its limbs very energetically, and its mouth parts crackled. “Ha ha ha!” the amulet said, primly.

“How did you know I was actually involved with Special Circumstances?” he asked, sitting back.

“Ah! How much my vanity wishes me to claim I simply guessed, so clever I am… but I heard there was a new recruit coming aboard,” the alien told him. “And that it was a fairly human-basic male. You… smell right, if I may use that turn of phrase. And you… have just been asking all the right questions.”

“And you’re in SC too?”

“For ten standard years now.”

“Think I should do it? Work for them?”

“Oh yes; I imagine it’s better than what you left, no?”

He shrugged, remembering the blizzard and the ice. “I suppose.”

“You enjoy… fighting, yes?”

“Well… sometimes,” he admitted. “I’m good at it, so they say. Not that I’m necessarily convinced of that myself.”

“No-one wins all the time, sir,” the creature said. “Not through skill, anyway, and the Culture does not believe in luck, or at the very least does not believe it is transferrable. They must like your attitude, that’s all. Hee hee.”

The alien laughed quietly.

“To be good at soldiering,” it said, “is a great curse, I think sometimes. Working for these people at least relieves one of some of the responsibility. I have never found cause to complain.” The alien scratched its body, looked down, picked something from the hairs around where he would have guessed its belly might be, and ate it. “Of course, you must not expect to be told the truth all the time. You can insist that they do, always, and they will do so, but they may not be able to use you as often as they might like to; sometimes they need you not to know you are fighting on the wrong side. My advice would be to just do as they ask; much more exciting.”

“Are you in it for the excitement?”

“Partly, and partly because of family honour; SC did something for my people once, and we could not let them steal our honour by accepting nothing in return. I work until that debt is paid off.”

“How long’s that?”

“Oh, for life,” the creature said, sitting back in a gesture he felt reasonably justified in translating as surprise. “Until I die, of course. But who cares? As I say; it’s fun. Here.” It banged its drink-bowl on the table to attract a passing tray. “Let’s have another drink; see who gets drunk first.”

“You have more legs.” He grinned. “I think I might fall over more easily.”

“Ah, but the more the legs, the bigger the tangle.”

“Fair enough.” He waited for a fresh glass.

To one side of them was a small terrace and the bar, to the other a gulf of airy space. The ship, the GSV, went on beyond its apparent boundaries. Its hull was pierced multitudinously by terraces, balconies, walk-ways, open windows, and open bay doors. Surrounding the vessel proper was an immense ellipsoid bubble of air, held inside dozens of different fields, which together made up the Vehicle’s real — though insubstantial — hull.

He took up the recharged glass when it arrived, and watched a puttering, piston-engined, paper-winged hang-glider zip past the terrace; he waved at the pilot, then shook his head.

“To the Culture,” he said, raising his glass to the alien. It matched his gesture. “To its total lack of respect for all things majestic.”

“Agreed,” the alien said, and together they drank.

The alien was called Chori, he found out later. It was only due to a chance remark that he discovered Chori was a female, which at the time seemed hilariously funny.

He woke up the next morning lying soaked as well as soused half underneath a small waterfall in one of the ace section valleys; Chori was suspended from a nearby railing by all eight leg-hooks, making a sporadic clattering noise that he decided was snoring.

The first night he spent with a woman, he thought she was dying; he thought he’d killed her. She seemed to climax at almost the same time as he did, but then — apparently — had a seizure; screaming, clutching at him. He had an awful, sickening idea that despite the seeming similarity of their physiology, his race and the mongrel-species that was the Culture were somehow quite different, and for a few ghastly moments entertained the idea that his seed was like acid inside her. It felt like she was trying to break his back with her arms and legs. He tried to pull himself away from her, calling her name, trying to see what was wrong, what he had done, what he could do.

“What’s wrong?” she gasped.

“What? With me; nothing! What’s wrong with you?”

She made a sort of shrugging motion, looked puzzled. “I came; that’s all; what’s the… Oh.” She put one hand to her mouth, eyes wide. “I forgot. I’m sorry. You’re not… Oh dear.” She giggled. “How embarrassing.”

“What?”

“Well, we just… you know; it takes… it goes on… longer, you know?”

He didn’t think he had quite believed what he had heard about the Culture’s altered physiology until then. He hadn’t accepted that they had changed themselves so. He had not believed that they really had chosen to extend such moments of pleasure, let alone breed into themselves all the multifarious drug glands that could enhance almost any experience (not least sex).

Yet — in a way — it made sense, he told himself. Their machines could do everything else much better than they could; no sense in breeding super-humans for strength or intelligence, when their drones and Minds were so much more matter- and energy-efficient at both. But pleasure… well, that was a different matter.

What else was the human form good for?

He supposed such single-mindedness was admirable, in a way.

He took the woman in his arms again. “Never mind,” he said. “Quality not quantity. Let’s try that again, shall we?”

She laughed and took his face in her hands. “Dedication; that’s a good quality in a man.”

(The cry in the summerhouse that had attracted; “Hello, old chap.” Tanned hands on the pale hips…)

He was away five nights, just wandering. As far as he could tell, he never crossed his own trail, and never visited the same section twice. He ended up with different women on three of those nights, and politely turned down one young man.

“Any more at your ease, Cheradenine?” Sma asked him, stroking up the pool ahead of him. She turned on her back to look at him. He swam after her.

“Well, I have stopped offering to pay for things in bars.”

“That’s a start.”

“It was a very easy habit to break.”

“Par for the course. That all?”

“Well… also, your women are very friendly.”

“So are the men,” Sma arched one eyebrow.

“The life here seems… idyllic.”

“Well, you have to like crowds, perhaps.”

He looked round the almost deserted pool complex. “That’s relative, I suspect.”

(And thought: the garden; the garden. They have made their life in its image!)

“Why,” Sma smiled. “Are you tempted to stay?”

“Not even slightly.” He laughed. “I’d go crazy here, or slip forever into one of your shared dream-games. I need… more.”

“But will you take it from us?” Sma said, stopping, treading water. “Do you want to work with us?”

“Everybody seems to think I should; they believe you’re fighting the good fight. It’s just that… I get suspicious when everybody agrees about something.”

Sma laughed. “How much would it matter if we weren’t fighting the good fight, Cheradenine? If all we were offering was pay and excitement?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It would make it even harder. I’d just like… I’d like to believe, to finally know, to finally be able to prove that I was…” He shrugged, grinned. “…doing good.”

Sma sighed. In the water, this meant that she bobbed up then sank down a little. “Who knows, Zakalwe? We don’t know that; we think we’re right; we even think we can prove it, but we can never be sure; there are always arguments against us. There is no certainty; least of all in Special Circumstances, where the rules are different.”

“I thought the rules were meant to be the same for everybody.”

“They are. But in Special Circumstances we deal in the moral equivalent of black holes, where the normal laws — the rules of right and wrong that people imagine apply everywhere else in the universe — break down; beyond those metaphysical event-horizons, there exist… special circumstances.” She smiled. “That’s us. That’s our territory; our domain.”

“To some people,” he said, “that might sound like just a good excuse for bad behaviour.”

Sma shrugged. “And perhaps they would be right. Maybe that is all it is.” She shook her head, pulled one hand through her long wet hair. “But if nothing else, at least we need an excuse; think how many people need none at all.”

She swam off.

He watched her stroke powerfully away through the water for a moment. One of his hands went, without him really realising it, to a small puckered scar on his chest, just over where his heart was, and rubbed it, while he frowned, staring at the glittering, unsteady surface of the water.

Then he swam after the woman.

He spent a couple of years on the Size Isn’t Everything, and on a few of the planets, rocks, habitats and orbitals it stopped at. He was being trained, and learning to use some of the new abilities he had let them give him. When he eventually left the craft, to go on his first tour of duty for the Culture — a series of missions which culminated in him taking the Chosen to the Perfumed Palace on the cliff — it was on a ship just starting its second tour of duty; the General Contact Unit Sweet and Full of Grace.

He never saw Chori again, and heard that she’d been killed on active service some fifteen years later. He was told this news while they were regrowing his body on the GSV Congenital Optimist after he’d been beheaded on — and then rescued from — a planet called Fohls.

Eleven

He crouched behind the parapet, at the far edge of the old observatory from the single approaching plane. Behind him, down a steep slope, were bushes and trees and a collection of roofless, overgrown buildings. He watched the aircraft come closer, checked for more coming from other directions, but couldn’t find any. Inside the suit, watching the transmitted view, he frowned as the aircraft came closer, slowing all the time, its obese arrowhead shape silhouetted against the sunset as it approached.

He watched it drop slowly towards the observatory platform; a ramp hinged from the craft’s belly; three legs flexed out. He took some effector readings from the machine, then shook his head, ducked and ran back down the slope.

Tsoldrin was sitting in one of the ruined buildings. He looked surprised when the suited figure entered through the creeper-choked doorway.

“Yes, Cheradenine?”

“It’s a civilian craft,” he said, pushing the face-plate up. He was grinning. “I don’t think it’s looking for us after all. Might still provide an escape route, though.” He shrugged. “Worth a try.” He gestured back up the slope. “You coming along?”

Tsoldrin Beychae looked through the dusk at the matt black figure in the doorway. He had been sitting here wondering what he ought to do, and had not yet come up with any answers. Part of him just wanted to get back to the peace and quiet and certainty of the university library, where he could live happily, without fuss, ignore the world, and immerse himself in the old books, trying to understand ancient ideas and histories, hoping to make sense of them, one day, and perhaps explain his own ideas, try to point out the lessons of these elder histories, perhaps make people think again about their own times and ideologies. For a time — for a long time, there — it had seemed entirely and definitely the most worthwhile and productive thing he could do… but he was not sure of that any longer.

Perhaps, he thought, there were more important things to be done which he could have a hand in. Perhaps he ought to go with Zakalwe, as the man — and the Culture — wanted.

Could he just relapse back into his studies, after this?

Zakalwe coming back from the past, as rash and brash as ever; Ubrel — could she really have been? — just acting a part, making him feel very old and foolish, now, but angry as well; and the whole Cluster drifting rudderless towards the rocks, all over again.

Did he have any right not to try and do something, even if the Culture was wrong about his stature in the civilisation? He didn’t know. He could see that Zakalwe had tried to appeal to his vanity, but what if even half of what he said was true? Was it right to sit back and just let things happen, however much it might be the easiest, least stressful course? If there was a war, and he knew he’d done nothing, how would he feel afterwards?

Damn you, Zakalwe, he thought. He stood up. “I’m still thinking,” he said. “But let’s see how far you can get.”

“Good man.” The suited figure’s voice betrayed no obvious trace of emotion.

“… Extremely sorry for the delay, gentlepeople; it really wasn’t within our control; some sort of traffic control panic, but do let me apologise again on behalf of Heritage Tours. Well; here we are, a bit later than we expected (but isn’t that a pretty sunset?); the very famous Srometren Observatory; at least four and a half thousand years of history have been played out beneath your feet here, gentlepeople. I’m going to have to fairly rattle through it to tell it all to you in the time we have here, so listen close…”

The aircraft hovered, AG field buzzing, just above the western edge of the observatory platform. Its legs hung, dangling in mid-air, apparently extended merely as a precaution. About forty people had disembarked from it down the belly-ramp, and now stood around one of the stone instrument plinths while an eager young tour guide talked to them.

He watched through the stone balustrade, scanning the group with the suit’s built-in effector and watching the results on the visor-screen head-up. Thirty plus of the people were carrying what were in effect terminals; links to the planet’s communications net. The suit’s computer covertly interrogated the terminals through the effector. Two of the terminals were switched on; one receiving a sports broadcast, another receiving music. The rest were on stand-by.

“Suit,” he whispered (not that even Tsoldrin, right beside him, could have heard him, let alone the people in the tourist group). “I want to disable those terminals, quietly; to stop them from transmitting.”

“Two receiving terminals are transmitting location code,” the suit said.

“Can I disable their transmit function without altering their present location code function, or their present reception?”

“Yes.”

“Right; the priority being preventing any further new signals, disable all the terminals.”

“Disabling all thirty-four non-Culture personal commnet terminals within range; confirm.”

“Confirmed, dammit; do it…”

“Order carried out.”

He watched the head-up alter as the internal power-states of the terminals sank back to near zero. The tour guide was leading the people across the stone plateau of the old observatory, towards where he and Beychae were, and away from the hovering aircraft.

He shoved the suit face-plate up, looked round at the other man. “Okay; let’s go. Quietly.”

He went first, through the undergrowth, between the crowding trees; it was quite dark under the half-fallen foliage, and Beychae stumbled a couple of times, but they made relatively little noise as they trod the carpet of dead leaves round two sides of the observatory platform.

When they were under the aircraft, he scanned it with the suit effector.

“You beautiful little machine,” he breathed, watching the results come up. The aircraft was automatic, and very stupid. A bird probably had a more complicated brain. “Suit; patch into the aircraft; assume control without letting anybody else know.”

“Assuming covert control-jurisdiction of single aircraft within range; confirm.”

“Confirmed. And stop asking me to confirm everything.”

“Control-jurisdiction assumed. Lapsing confirmatory instruction protocols; confirm.”

“Good grief. Confirmed!”

“Confirm protocol lapsed.”

He considered just floating up, holding Beychae, into the craft, but even though the aircraft’s own AG would probably mask the signal his suit gave off, it might not. He glanced up the steep slope, then turned to Beychae and whispered. “Give me your hand; we’re going up.” The old man did as he asked.

They went steadily up the slope, the suit kicking foot-holds in the earth. They stopped at the balustrade. The aircraft blocked out the evening sky above them, yellow light spilling from the belly entrance above the ramp, faintly illuminating the nearer stone instruments.

He checked on the tour group while Beychae got his breath back. The tourists were at the far side of the observatory; the guide was shining a flashlight at some ancient piece of stonework. He stood up. “Let’s go,” he told Beychae, who straightened. They stepped over the balustrade, walked to the ramp and up into the aircraft. He followed Beychae; he watched the rear view on the helmet screen, but couldn’t tell whether anybody in the tour group had noticed them or not.

“Suit; close the ramp,” he told the suit, as he and Beychae entered the single large space of the craft’s interior. It was ornately luxurious, its walls slung with hangings and its deeply carpeted floor dotted with large chairs and couches; there was an autobar at one end, while the opposite wall was a single huge screen, presently displaying the last of the sunset.

The ramp chimed and hissed as it came up. “Suit; retract legs,” he said, hinging the suit face-plate back. Happily, the suit was smart enough to realise he meant the aircraft’s legs, not its own. It had occurred to him that somebody might just be able to leap onto one of the craft’s legs from the observatory balustrade. “Suit; adjust aircraft altitude; up ten metres.”

The light buzzing noise around them changed, then settled back to what it had been before. He watched Beychae take off his heavy jacket, then looked round the interior of the craft; the effector said there was nobody else aboard, but he wanted to make sure. “Let’s see where this thing was headed next,” he said, as Beychae sat down on a long couch, sighing and stretching. “Suit; the aircraft’s next destination?”

“Gipline Space Terminal,” the clipped voice told him.

“That sounds perfect. Take us there, suit, and make it look as legal and normal as possible.”

“Under way,” the suit said. “ETA forty minutes.”

The craft’s background noise altered, climbing in pitch; the floor moved just a little. The screen on the far side of the large cabin showed them moving out across the wooded hills, rising into the air.

He took a walk round the craft, confirming there was nobody else aboard, then sat by Beychae, who he thought looked very tired. It had been a long day, he supposed.

“You all right?”

“I’m glad to be sitting down, I’ll say that.” Beychae kicked off his boots.

“Let me get you a drink, Tsoldrin,” he said, taking off the helmet and heading for the bar. “Suit,” he said, suddenly struck by an idea. “You know one of the Culture’s down-link numbers in Solotol.”

“Yes.”

“Connect with one via the aircraft.”

He bent down, looking at the autobar. “And how does this work?”

“The autobar is voice acti—”

“Zakalwe!” Sma’s voice cut across that of the suit, making him start. He straightened. “Where are…?” the woman’s voice said, then paused. “Oh; you’ve got yourself an aircraft, have you?”

“Yes,” he said. He looked across to where Beychae was watching him. “On our way to Gipline Port. So what happened? Where’s that module? And Sma, I’m hurt; you haven’t called, you haven’t written, sent flowers…”

“Is Beychae all right?” Sma said urgently.

“Tsoldrin’s fine,” he told her, smiling at the other man. “Suit; get this autobar to fix us a couple of refreshing but strong drinks.”

“He’s okay; good.” The woman sighed. The autobar made a clicking, gurgling noises. “We haven’t called,” Sma said, “because if we had we’d have let them know where you were; we lost the tight-link when the capsule got blasted. Zakalwe, that was ridiculous; it was pure chaos after the capsule wasted the truck in the Flower Market and you downed that fighter; you’re lucky you made it as far as you did. Where is the capsule, anyway?”

“Back at the observatory; Srometren,” he said, looking down as a hatch opened in the autobar. He took the tray with the two drinks on it over to Beychae, sat down at his side. “Sma; say hello to Tsoldrin Beychae,” he said, handing the other man his drink.

“Mr Beychae?” Sma’s voice said from the suit.

“Hello?” Beychae said.

“Pleased to talk to you Mr Beychae. I do hope Mr Zakalwe is treating you all right. Are you well?”

“Tired, but hale.”

“I trust Mr Zakalwe has found time to communicate to you the seriousness of the political situation in the Cluster.”

“He has,” Beychae said. “I am… I am certainly considering doing what you ask, and for the moment have no urge to return to Solotol.”

“I see,” Sma said, “I appreciate what you say. I’m sure Mr Zakalwe will do all he can to keep you safe and well while you’re deliberating, won’t you, Cheradenine?”

“Of course, Diziet. Now; where’s that module?”

“Stuck under the cloud tops of Soreraurth, where it was before. Thanks to your nova-profile escapades down there, everything’s on maximum alert; we can’t move anything without being seen, and if we’re seen to be interfering, we might start the war all by ourselves. Describe where that capsule is again; we’re going to have to passive-spot it from the microsatellite and then blast it from up here, to remove the evidence. Shit, this is messy, Zakalwe.”

“Well, pardon me,” he said. He drank again. “The capsule’s under a large yellow-leafed deciduous tree between eighty and… one-thirty metres north-east of the observatory. Oh; and the plasma rifle’s about… twenty to forty metres due west.”

“You lost it?” Sma sounded incredulous.

“Threw it away in a fit of pique,” he admitted, yawning. “It got Effectorized.”

“Told you it belonged in a museum,” another voice interrupted.

“Shut-up, Skaffen-Amtiskaw,” he said. “So, Sma, what now?”

“Gipline Space Terminal, I suppose,” the woman replied. “We’ll see if we can book you on something outgoing; for Impren, or nearby. At worst, you’ve got a civilian trip ahead of you of weeks at least; if we’re lucky they’ll stand down the alert and the module can sneak out and rendezvous. Either way though, the war may be a little closer, thanks to what happened in Solotol today. Just think about that, Zakalwe.” The channel closed.

“She sounds unhappy with you, Cheradenine,” Beychae said.

He shrugged. “No change there,” he sighed.

“I’m really most terribly sorry, gentlepeople; this has never happened before; never. I really am sorry… I just can’t understand it… I’ll, um… I’ll try…” The young man hit buttons on his pocket terminal. “Hello? Hello! HELLO!” He shook it, banged it with the heel of his hand. “This is just… just… this has never, never happened before; it really hasn’t…” He looked apologetically up at the people in the tour group, clustered round the single light. Most of the people were looking at him; a few were trying their own terminals with no more success than he, and a couple were watching the western sky as though the last red smudge there would give up the aircraft that had so mysteriously decided to leave of its own accord, “Hello? Hello? Anybody? Please reply.” The young man sounded almost in tears. The very last dreg of light left the sunset sky; moon-glow lit up some thinner patches of cloud. The flashlight flickered. “Anybody at all; please reply! Oh, please!”

Skaffen-Amtiskaw got back in touch a few minutes later to say that he and Beychae had cabins reserved on a clipper called the Osom Emananish, heading for Breskial System, just three light years from Impren; the hope was that the module would get to them before that. It would probably have to; their trail would almost certainly be picked up. “It might be an idea for Mr Beychae to alter his appearance,” the drone’s smooth voice told them.

He looked up at the wall-drapes. “I suppose we could try and make some clothes out of stuff here,” he said doubtfully.

“The aircraft baggage hold might prove a more fruitful source of attire,” the drone’s voice purred, and told him how to open the floor hatch.

He surfaced with two suitcases, wrenched them open. “Clothes!” he said. He took some out; they looked sufficiently unisex.

“And you’ll have to lose your suit and weaponry, too,” the drone said.

“What?”

“You’ll never get on board a ship with that stuff, Zakalwe, even with our help. You’ve to pack it all in something — one of those cases would be ideal — and leave it in the port; we’ll try and pick it up once the heat’s off.”

“But!”

Beychae himself suggested they shaved his head, when they were discussing how to disguise him. The last use the wonderfully sophisticated combat suit was put to was as a razor. Then he took it off; they both changed into the rather loud but thankfully loose-fitting clothes.

The craft landed; the Space Terminal was a wilderness of concrete lined off like a game board by the lifts that took craft down to and up from the handling facilities.

Tight beam established again, the earring terminal could whisper to him, guide him and Beychae.

But he felt naked without the suit.

They stepped from the aircraft into a hangar; pleasantly forgettable music tinkled. Nobody met them. They could hear a distant alarm.

The earring terminal indicated which door to take. They moved along a staff-only corridor, through two security doors which swung open for them even before they got to them, then — after a pause — came out into a huge crowded concourse full of people, screens, kiosks and seats. Nobody noticed them, because a moving walkway had just slammed to a stop, toppling dozens of people on top of each other.

A security camera in the left luggage area swung up to look at the ceiling for the minute it took them to deposit the suitcase with the suit in it. The instant they’d gone, the camera resumed its slow sweeping.

More or less the same happened when they picked up their tickets at the appropriate desk. Then, while they were walking along another corridor, they saw a party of armed security guards enter from the other end.

He just kept on walking. He sensed Beychae hesitate at his side. He turned, smiled easily at the other man, and when he turned back, the guards were stopped, the leading guard holding one hand to his ear and looking at the floor; he nodded, turned and pointed to a side corridor; the guards set off down it.

“We’re not just being incredibly lucky, I take it?” Beychae muttered.

He shook his head. “Not unless you count it as incredibly lucky that we’ve got a near military-standard electro-magnetic effector controlled by a hyper-fast starship Mind working this entire port like an arcade game from a light-year or so off, no.”

They were passed through a VIP channel to the small shuttle that would take them to the orbiting station. The final security check was the only one the ship couldn’t rig; a man with practised eyes and hands. He seemed happy they had nothing dangerous on them. The earring jabbed his ear as they passed down another corridor; more X-rays, and a strong magnetic field, both manually controlled, double checking.

The shuttle flight was relatively uneventful; in the station, they passed across one transit lounge — in something of a commotion, due to a man with a direct neural implant seemingly having a fit on the floor — straight into a final security check.

In the corridor between the lounge lock and the ship, he heard Sma’s voice, tiny in his ear. “That’s it, Zakalwe. Can’t tight beam on the ship without being spotted. We’ll only contact in a real emergency. Use the Solotol phonelink if you want to talk, but remember it’ll be monitored. Goodbye; good luck.”

And then he and Beychae were through another air lock, and on the clipper Osom Emananish, which would take them into interstellar space.

He spent the hour or so before departure walking round the clipper, just checking it all out, so that he knew where everything was.

The speaker system, and most of the visible screens, announced their departure. The clipper drifted, then dawdled, then raced away from the station; it swung away past the sun and the gas-giant Soreraurth. Soreraurth was where the module was having to keep hidden, a hundred kilometres deep in the vast perpetual storm that was the mighty planet’s atmosphere. An atmosphere that would be plundered, mined, stripped and altered by the Humanists, if they had their way. He watched the gas-giant fall astern, wondered who was really right and wrong, and felt an odd helplessness.

He was passing through the bustle of a small bar, on his way to check on Beychae, when he heard a voice behind him say, “Ah; sincere hellos, and things! Mr Starabinde, isn’t it?”

He turned slowly.

It was the small doctor from the scar party. The little man stood at the crowded bar, beckoning to him.

He walked over, squeezing between the chattering passengers.

“Doctor; good day.”

The little man nodded, “Stapangarderslinaiterray; but call me Stap.”

“With pleasure, and even relief.” He smiled. “And please call me Sherad.”

“Well! Small cluster, isn’t it? May I buy you a drink?” He flashed his toothy grin, which — caught in a small spotlight above the bar — glared quite startlingly.

“What an excellent idea.”

They found a small table, wedged up against one bulkhead. The doctor wiped his nose, adjusted his immaculate suit.

“So, Sherad, what brings you along on this little jaunt?”

“Well, actually… Stap,” he said quietly. “I’m travelling sort of… incognito, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t… broadcast my name, you know?”

“Absolutely!” Doctor Stap said, nodding fiercely. He glanced round conspiratorially, leaned closer. “My discretion is exemplary. Have had to ‘travel quietly’…” his eyebrows waggled “…myself, on occasion. You just let me know if I can be of any help.”

“You’re very kind.” He raised his glass.

They drank to a safe voyage.

“Are you going to the ‘end of the line’, to Breskial?” Stap asked.

He nodded. “Yes; myself and a business associate.”

Doctor Stap nodded, grinning. “Ah, a ‘business associate’. Ah.”

“No, doctor; not a ‘business associate’, a business associate; a gentleman, and quite elderly, and in a different cabin… would that all three descriptions were their opposite, of course.”

“Ha! Quite!” the doctor said.

“Another drink?”

“You don’t think he knows anything?” Beychae asked.

“What’s to know?” He shrugged. He glanced at the screen, on the door of Beychae’s cramped cabin. “Nothing on the news?”

“Nothing,” Beychae said. “They mentioned an all-ports security exercise, but nothing directly about you or me.”

“Well, we probably aren’t in any more danger because the doc’s aboard than we were already.”

“How much is that?”

“Too much. They’re bound to work out what happened eventually; we’ll never get to Breskial before they do.”

“Then?”

“Then, unless I can think of something, the Culture either has to let us be taken back, or take this ship over, which is going to be tricky to explain, and bound to remove some of your credibility.”

“If I decide to do as you ask, Cheradenine.”

He looked at the other man, sitting alongside him on the narrow bed. “Yeah; if.”

He prowled the ship. The clipper seemed cramped and crowded; he’d got too used to Culture vessels, he supposed. There were plans of the ship available on-screen, and he studied them, but they were really just for people to find their way about, and provided little useful information on how the ship might be taken over or disabled. Judging from watching the crew when they appeared, entry to crew-only areas was by voice and/or hand-print match.

There was little flammable on board, nothing explosive, and most of the circuitry was optical rather than electronic. Doubtless the Xenophobe could make the clipper Osom Emananish dance and sing with the effector equivalent of one hand tied behind its back, from somewhere in the next stellar system, but without the combat suit or a weapon, he was going to have a tough job trying to do anything, if and when it came to it.

Meanwhile the clipper crawled through space; Beychae stayed in his cabin, catching up on the news via the screen, and sleeping.

“I seem to have swapped one subtle form of imprisonment for another, Cheradenine,” he observed, the day after they left, as the other man brought him supper.

“Tsoldrin, don’t go cabin crazy; if you want to go out, go out. It’s a little safer this way, but… well, only a little.”

“Well,” Tsoldrin said, taking the tray and lifting the cover to inspect the contents. “For now it’s easy enough to treat the news and current affairs casts as my research material, so I do not feel unduly confined.” He set the cover aside. “But a couple of weeks might be asking rather too much, Cheradenine.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, dejectedly. “I doubt it’ll come to that.”

“Ah; Sherad!” The small fussy shape of Doctor Stap sidled up to him a day later, while people were watching a magnified view of an impressive gas-giant in a nearby system slide past on the principle lounge main screen. The small doctor took his elbow. “I’m having a small private party, this evening, in the Starlight Lounge; one of my, um, special parties, you know? I wondered if you and your hermit-like business partner might like to participate?”

“They let you aboard with that thing?” he laughed.

“Shh, good sir,” the doctor said, pulling the other man away from the press of people. “I have a long-standing arrangement with the shipping line; my machine is recognised as being of primary medical importance.”

“Sounds expensive. You must have to charge a lot, doctor.”

“There is, of course, a small consideration involved, but well within the means of most cultured people, and I can assure you of some very exclusive company, and complete discretion, as ever.”

“Thank you for the offer, Doctor, but I’m afraid not.”

“It really is the opportunity of a lifetime; you are most lucky to have the chance a second time.”

“I’m sure. Perhaps if it occurs a third time. Excuse me.” He patted Stap on the shoulder. “Oh; shall I see you for drinks this evening?”

The doctor shook his head. “I’ll be setting up; preparing, I’m afraid, Sherad.” He looked somehow plaintive. “It is a great opportunity,” he said, toothily.

“Oh, I’m well aware of that, Doctor Stap.”

“You’re a wicked man.”

“Thank you. It’s taken years of diligent practice.”

“I bet.”

“Oh no; you’re going to tell me you’re not wicked at all; I can see it in your eyes. Yes; yes, it’s there; purity! I recognise the symptoms. But,” he put one hand on her forearm, “don’t worry. It can be cured.”

She pushed him away, but only with the softest of pressures. “You’re terrible.” The hand that had pushed him away lingered just for a moment on his chest. “You’re bad.”

“I confess. You have seen into my soul…” He looked round for a second, as the background noise of the ship altered. He smiled back at the lady. “But, ah, it gives me such succour to confess to one so close to a goddess-like beauty.”

She laughed throatily, her slender neck exposed as she put her head back. “Do you normally get anywhere with this line?” she asked, shaking her head.

He looked hurt, shook his head sadly. “Oh, why are beautiful women so cynical these days?”

Then he saw her gaze shift to somewhere behind him.

He turned. “Yes, Officer?” he said to one of the two junior officers he found standing behind him. Both had guns in open holsters.

“Mr… Sherad?” the young man said.

He watched the young officer’s eyes and suddenly felt sick; the man knew. They’d been traced. Somebody somewhere had put the numbers together and come up with the right answer. “Yes?” he said, grinning rather stupidly. “You guys wanna drink?” He laughed, looked round at the woman.

“No thank you, sir. Would you come with us please?”

“Whassa matter?” he said, sniffing, then draining his glass. He wiped his hands on the lapels of his jacket. “Captain need some help steering the ship, yeah?” he laughed, slid off his bar stool, turned to the woman, took her hand and kissed it. “My dear lady; I bid you farewell, until we meet again.” He put both hands to his chest. “But always remember this; there is forever a piece of my heart that belongs to you.”

She smiled uncertainly. He laughed loudly, turned and bumped into the bar stool. “Whoops!” he said.

“This way, Mr Sherad,” the first one said.

“Yeah; yeah; just wherever.”

He’d hoped they’d take him into the crew-only section, but when they got into the small lift, they pressed for the lowest deck; stores, non-vacuum luggage, and the brig.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” he said, as soon as the doors closed. He bent over, retched, forcing out the last few drinks.

One jumped out of the way, to keep his shiny boots clean; the other, he sensed, was bending down, putting one hand to his back.

He stopped throwing up, slammed one elbow up into the man’s nose; he crashed back into the elevator’s rear doors. The second man hadn’t quite recovered his balance. He straightened and punched him straight in the face. The second one folded, knees then backside hammering into the floor. The lift chimed, stopped between decks, its weight-limit alarm triggered by all the commotion. He thumped the topmost button and the lift started up.

He took the guns from the two unconscious officers; neural stunners. He shook his head. The elevator chimed again. The floor they’d left. He stepped forward, stuffing the two stun guns into his jacket as he braced his feet in the far corners of the small space, straddling the two men, and pressed his hands against the doors. He grunted with the effort of holding the doors closed, but eventually the elevator gave up the struggle. Still holding the doors with both hands, he twisted his body until he got his head to the topmost button, and pressed it with his forehead. The lift hummed upwards again.

When the doors opened, three people stood outside, on the private lounge level. They looked at the two unconscious guards and the small watery pool of vomit. Then he zapped them with the stun guns, and they fell. He pulled one of the officers half out of the elevator so the lift couldn’t close its doors, and used a stun gun on both men too.

The Starlight Lounge door was closed. He pressed the button, looking back down the corridor, where the lift doors pulsed gently against the fallen officer’s body like some unsubtle lover. There was a distant chime, and a voice said, “Please clear the doors. Please clear the doors.”

“Yes?” said the door to the Starlight Lounge.

“Stap; it’s Sherad. I changed my mind.”

“Excellent!” The door opened.

He went quickly inside, hit the shut button. The modest lounge was full of drug smoke, low light, and mutilated people. Music played, and all eyes — not all of them in their sockets — turned to him. The doctor’s tall grey machine was over near the bar, where a couple of people were serving.

He got the doctor between him and the others, stuck the stun gun under the little man’s chin. “Bad news, Stap. These things can be fatal at close range, and this one’s on maximum. I need your machine. I’d prefer to have your co-operation, too, but I can get by without it. I’m very serious, and in a terrible hurry, so what’s it to be?”

Stap made a gurgling noise.

“Three,” he said, pressing the stun gun a little harder into the little doctor’s neck. “Two…”

“All right! This way!”

He let him go, following Stap across the floor to the tall machine he used for his strange trade. He kept his hands together, stun pistols hidden up each sleeve; he nodded to a few people as they passed. He spotted a clear line of fire to somebody on the far side of the room, just for an instant. He zapped them; they fell spectacularly onto a laden table. While everybody was looking there, he and Stap — prodded once to keep going when the crash came from the distant table — got to the machine.

“Excuse me,” he said to one of the bar girls. “Would you help the doctor?” He nodded behind the bar. “He wants to move the machine through there, don’t you, Doc?”

They entered the small store room behind the bar. He thanked the girl outside, closed the door, locked it, and shifted a pile of containers in front of it. He smiled at the alarmed-looking doctor.

“See that wall behind you, Stap?”

The doctor’s gaze flicked that way.

“We’re going through it, Doc, with your machine.”

“You can’t! You…”

He put the stun gun against the man’s forehead. Stap closed his eyes. A corner of handkerchief, protruding from a breast pocket, trembled.

“Stap; I think I know how that machine must work to do what it does. I want a cutting field; a slicer that’ll take molecular bonds apart. If you won’t do it, and right now, I’ll put you out and try it myself, and if I get it wrong and fuse the fucker, you’re going to have some very, very unhappy customers out there; they might even do what you’ve done to them, but without the old machine here, hmm?”

Stap swallowed. “Mm…” he began. One of his hands moved slowly towards his jacket. “Mmm… mmm… my t-t-tool k-kit.”

He took the wallet of tools out, turned shakily to the machine and opened a panel.

The door behind them chimed. He found some sort of chromed bar utensil on a shelf, moved the containers in front of the door aside — Stap looked round, but saw the gun was still pointed at him, and turned back — and jammed the piece of metal into the gap between the sliding door and its housing. The door gave an outraged chirp, and a red light blinked urgently on the open/close button. He slid the containers back again.

“Hurry up, Stap,” he said.

“I’m doing all I can!” the little doctor yelped. The machine made a deep buzzing noise. Blue light played around a cylindrical section about a metre from the floor.

He looked at the section, eyes narrowing.

“What are you hoping to do?” the doctor said, voice shaking.

“Just keep working, Doc; you have half a minute before I try doing it myself.” He looked over the doctor’s shoulder, saw him fiddling with a circular control mapped out in degrees.

All he could hope to do was get the machine going and then attack whatever parts of the ship he could. Disable it, somehow. All ships tended to be complicated, and, to a degree, the cruder a ship was, paradoxically the more complicated it was too. He just had to hope he could hit something vital without blowing the thing up.

“Nearly ready,” the doctor said. He looked nervously backwards, one shaking finger going towards a small red button.

“Okay, Doc,” he told the trembling man, looking suspiciously at the blue light playing round the cylindrical section. He squatted down level with the doctor. “Go on,” he nodded.

“Um…” The doctor swallowed. “It might be better if you stood back, over there.”

“No. Let’s just try it, eh?” He hit the little red button. A hemi-disc of blue light shot out over their heads from the cylindrical section of the machine and sliced through the containers he had stacked against the door; fluids spurted out of them. The shelves to one side collapsed, supports severed by the humming blue disc. He grinned at the wreckage; if he’d still been standing, the blue field would have cut him in half.

“Nice try, Doc,” he said. The little doctor slumped to the floor like a pile of wet sand as the stun pistol hummed. Snack packets and drink cartons showered onto the floor from the demolished shelves; the ones falling through the blue beam hit the floor shredded; drink poured from the punctured containers in front of the door. There was a thumping noise coming from behind the containers.

He rather appreciated the heady smell of alcohol filling the store room, but hoped there weren’t enough spirits involved to cause a fire. He spun the machine around, splashing through the drink gradually collecting on the floor of the small store room; the flickering blue half-disc cut through more shelves before sinking into the bulkhead opposite the door.

The machine shook; the air filled with a teeth-cracking whine, and black smoke spun round against the wrecked shelves as though propelled by the cutting blue light and then fell quickly to the surface of the sloshing drink filling the bottom decimetre of the store room, where it collected like a tiny dark fogbank. He started manipulating the controls on the machine; a little holo screen showed the shape of the field; he found a couple of tiny joysticks that altered it, producing an elliptical field. The machine thumped harder; the noise rose in pitch and black smoke poured out around him.

The thumping from behind the door got louder. The black smoke was rising in the room, and already he felt light-headed. He pushed hard against the machine with his shoulder; it trundled forward, howling; something gave.

He put his back against the machine and pushed with his feet; there was a bang from in front of the machine and it started to roll away from him; he turned, pushed with his shoulder again, staggering past smoking shelves through a glowing hole into a wrecked room full of tall metal cabinets. Drink spluttered through the gap. He held the machine steady for a moment; he opened one of the cabinets, to find a glittering mass of hair-fine filaments wrapped round cables and rods. Lights winked on a long thin control board, like some linear city seen at night.

He pursed his lips and made a kissing sound at the fibres. “Congratulations,” he said to himself. “You have won a major prize.” He hunkered down at the humming machine, adjusted the controls to something like the way Stap had had them, but producing a circular field, then switched it to full power.

The blue disc slammed into the grey cabinets in a blinding maelstrom of sparks; the noise was numbing. He left the machine where it was and waddled away under the blue disc, splashing back into the control room. He eased himself over the still unconscious doctor, kicked the containers away from the door and removed the metal tool from the door. The blue beam wasn’t extending far through the gap from the control room, so he stood up, shoved the door open with his shoulder, and fell out into the arms of a startled ship’s officer, just as the field machine blew up and blasted both of them across the bar and into the lounge.

All the lights in the lounge went out.

III

The hospital ceiling was white, like the walls and the sheets. Outside, on the surface of the berg, all was white as well. Today was a whiteout; a bright scour of dry crystals wheeling past the hospital windows. The last four days had been the same while the storm-wind blew, and the weather people said they expected no break for another two or three days. He thought of the troops, hunkered down in trenches and ice caves, afraid to curse the howling storm, because it meant there would probably be no fighting. The pilots would be glad too, but pretend they were not, and would loudly curse the storm that prevented them flying; having looked at the forecast, most would now be getting profoundly drunk.

He watched the white windows. Seeing the blue sky was supposed to be good for you. That was why they built hospitals on the surface; everything else was under the surface of the ice. The outer walls of the hospital were painted bright red, so that they would not be attacked by enemy aircraft. He had seen enemy hospitals from the air, strung out across the white glare of the berg’s snow hills like bright drops of blood fallen frozen from some wounded soldier.

A whorl of whiteness appeared briefly at one window as the snow flurry circled on some vortex in the gale, then disappeared. He stared at the falling chaos beyond the layers of glass, eyes narrowing, as though by sheer concentration he might find some pattern in the inchoate blizzard. He put one hand up, touching the white bandage which circled his head.

His eyes closed, as he tried — again — to remember. His hand fell to the sheets over his chest.

“How are we today?” said the young nurse. She appeared at the bedside, holding a small chair. She placed the chair between his bed and the empty one to his right. All the other beds were empty; he was the only person in the ward. There hadn’t been a big attack for a month or so.

She sat down. He smiled, glad to see her, and glad that she had the time to stop and talk. “Okay,” he nodded. “Still trying to remember what happened.”

She smoothed her white uniform over her lap. “How are your fingers today?”

He held up both hands, waggled the fingers on his right hand, then looked at his left; the fingers moved a little. He frowned. “About the same,” he said, as though apologising.

“You’re seeing the doc this afternoon; he’ll probably get the physics to take a look at you.”

“What I need is a physio for my memory,” he said, closing his eyes briefly. “I know there was something important I had to remember…” His voice trailed off. He realised he’d forgotten the nurse’s name.

“I don’t think we have such things,” she smiled. “Did they have them where you came from?”

“This had happened before; yesterday, hadn’t it? Hadn’t he forgotten her name yesterday too? He smiled. “I ought to say I don’t remember,” he said, grinning. “But no, I don’t think they did.”

He’d forgotten her name yesterday, and the day before, but he’d come up with a plan; he’d done something about it…

“Perhaps they didn’t need them there, with that thick skull of yours.”

She was still smiling. He laughed, trying to remember what the plan was he’d come up with. Something to do with blowing, with breath, and paper…

“Perhaps not,” he agreed. His thick skull; that was why he was here. A thick skull, a skull thicker or at least more hardy than they were used to; a thick skull that had not quite shattered when somebody had shot him in in the head. (But why, when he had not been fighting at the time, when he’d been amongst his own side, his fellow pilots?)

Fractured, instead; fractured, broken, but not smashed irretrievably… He looked to one side, where there was a little cabinet. A fold of paper lay on its surface.

“Don’t tire yourself out trying to remember things,” the nurse said. “Maybe you won’t remember things; it doesn’t matter very much. Your mind has to heal too, you know.”

He heard her talk, took in what she was saying… but he was trying to remember what it was he’d told himself the day before; that little slip of paper; he had to do something to it. He blew at it; the top of the folded paper slip hinged up, so that he could see what was written underneath; TALIBE. The paper sank back again. He’d angled it — he remembered now — so that she couldn’t see.

Her name was Talibe. Of course; it sounded familiar.

“I am healing,” he said. “But there was something I had to remember, Talibe. It was important; I know it was.”

She stood up, patted him on one shoulder. “Forget it. You mustn’t worry yourself. Why not take a nap; shall I draw the curtains?”

“No,” he said. “Can’t you stay longer, Talibe?”

“You need your rest, Cheradenine,” she said, putting one hand to his brow. “I’ll be back soon, to take your temperature and change your dressings. Ring the bell if you need anything else.” She patted his hand, and went away, taking the small white chair with her; she stopped at the doors, looked back. “Oh, yes; did I leave a pair of scissors here, last time I changed your dressing?”

He looked around him, and shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

Talibe shrugged. “Oh well.” She went out of the ward; he heard her put the chair down on the corridor floor as the doors swung closed.

He looked at the window again.

Talibe took the chair away each time because he’d gone crazy when he’d first seen it, when he woke up for the first time. Even after that, when his mental state seemed more stable, he would shiver, wide-eyed with fear when he woke each morning, just because the white chair was sitting there at the side of his bed. So they had stacked the ward’s few chairs out of his sight, in one corner, and Talibe, or the doctors, brought the chair in from the corridor with them when they came to see him.

He wished he could forget that; forget about the chair, and the Chairmaker, forget about the Staberinde. Why did that stay sharp and fresh, after so many years and so long a journey? And yet whatever had happened just a few days ago — when somebody had shot him, left him for dead in the hangar — that was dim and vague as something seen through the storm of snow.

He stared at the frozen clouds beyond the window, the amorphous frenzy of the snow. Its meaninglessness mocked him.

He slumped down in the bed, letting the piled bedclothes submerge him, like some drift, and slept, his right hand under the pillow, curled round one leg of the scissors he’d taken from Talibe’s tray the day before.

“How’s the head, old buddy-pal?” Saaz Insile tossed him a fruit which he failed to catch. He picked it up off his lap, where it had landed after hitting his chest.

“Getting better,” he told the other man.

Insile sat on the nearest bed, threw his cap on the pillow, unfastened the top button of his uniform. His short, spiky black hair made his pale face look white as the blankness still filling the world beyond the ward windows. “How they treating you?”

“Fine.”

“Damn good-looking nurse you’ve got out there.”

“Talibe.” He smiled. “Yes; she’s okay.”

Insile laughed and sat back on the bed, supporting himself with his arms splayed out behind. “Only ‘okay’? Zakalwe, she’s gorgeous. You get bed-baths?”

“No; I’m able to walk to the bathroom.”

“Want me to break your legs?”

“Perhaps later.” He laughed.

Insile laughed a little too, then looked at the storm beyond the windows. “How about your memory? Getting any better?” He picked at the doubled-over white sheet near where his cap lay.

“No,” he said. In fact he thought it might be, but somehow he didn’t want to tell people; maybe he thought it would be bad luck. “I remember being in the mess, and that card game… then…” Then he remembered seeing the white chair at his bedside and filling his lungs with all the air in the world and screaming like a hurricane until the end of time, or at least until Talibe came and calmed him (Livueta? he’d whispered; Dar… Livueta?). He shrugged. “…then I was here.”

“Well,” Saaz said, straightening the crease on his uniform trousers, “the good news is, we managed to get the blood off the hangar floor.”

“I expect it to be returned.”

“Deal, but we’re not cleaning it.”

“How are the others?”

Saaz sighed, shook his head, smoothed the hair at the back of his neck. “Oh, just the same dear lovable fine bunch of lads they ever were.” He shrugged. “The rest of the squadron… said to send their best wishes for a rapid recovery. But you pissed them off that night.” He looked sadly at the man in the bed. “Cheri, old pal, nobody likes the war, but there are ways of saying so… You just did it wrong. I mean, we all appreciate what you’ve done; we know this isn’t really your battle, but I think… I think some of the guys… even feel bad about that. I hear them sometimes; you must have; at night, having nightmares. You can see that look in their eyes sometimes, like they know how bad the odds are, and they just aren’t going to come through all this. They’re scared; they might try to put a bullet through my head if I said so to their face, but scared is what they are. They’d love a way out of this war. They’re brave men, and they want to fight for their country, but they want out, and nobody who knew the odds would blame them. Any honourable excuse. They wouldn’t shoot themselves in the foot, and nowadays they won’t go for a walk outside in ordinary shoes and come back with frostbite because too many did that early on; but they’d love a way out of this. You don’t have to be here, but you are; you choose to fight, and a lot of them resent you for it; it makes them feel like cowards, because they know that if they were in your boots they’d be on land, telling the girls what a brave pilot they have the chance to dance with.”

“I’m sorry I upset them.” He touched the bandages on his head. “I’d no idea they felt this strongly though.”

“They don’t.” Insile frowned. “That’s what’s weird.” He got up and walked over to the nearest window, looking out at the blizzard.

“Shit, Cheri, half those guys would’ve gladly invited you into the hangar and done their best to lose you a couple of teeth, but a gun?” He shook his head. “There’s not one of those guys I’d trust behind me with a bread roll or a handful of ice-cubes, but if it was a gun…” He shook his head again. “I wouldn’t think twice. They just aren’t like that.”

“Maybe I imagined it all, Saaz,” he said.

Saaz looked round, a worried expression on his face. It melted a little when he saw his friend was smiling. “Cheri; I admit I don’t want to imagine I’m wrong about one of them, but the alternative is… just somebody else. I don’t know who. The military police don’t know either.”

“I don’t think I was much help to them,” he confessed.

Saaz came back, sat down on the other bed again. “You really have no idea who you talked to afterwards? Where you went?”

“None.”

“You told me you were going to the briefing room, to check out the latest targets.”

“Yes, so I’ve heard.”

“But when Jine went there — to invite you to step into the hangar for saying such terrible things about our high command and our low tactics — you weren’t there.”

“I don’t know what happened, Saaz; I’m sorry, but I just…” He felt tears prick behind his eyes. The suddenness surprised him. He put the fruit back down in his lap. He made a very large sniffing noise, rubbed his nose, and coughed, patted his chest. “I’m sorry,” he repeated.

Insile watched the other man for a moment as he reached for a handkerchief from the bedside table.

Saaz shrugged, grinned broadly. “Hey; never mind. It’ll come back to you. Maybe it was just some loony ground-crewman pissed off because you’d stepped on his fingers once too often. If you want to remember, don’t try too hard.”

“Yeah; ‘Get some rest’, I’ve heard that before, Saaz.” He picked the fruit from his lap, placed it on the bedside cabinet.

“Can I get you anything, for next time?” Insile asked. “Apart from Talibe, on whom I may have designs myself if you refuse to rise to the occasion.”

“No, thanks.”

“Booze?”

“No, I’m saving myself for the mess-room bar.”

“Books?”

“Really, Saaz; nothing.”

“Zakalwe,” Saaz laughed. “There isn’t even anybody else here for you to talk to; what do you do all day?”

He looked at the window, then back at Saaz. “I think, quite a lot,” he said. “I try to remember.”

Saaz came over to the bed. He looked very young. He hesitated, then punched him gently in the chest. He glanced at the bandages. “Don’t get lost in there, old buddy-pal.”

He was expressionless for a moment. “Yeah; don’t worry. But anyway, I’m a good navigator.”

There was something he’d meant to tell Saaz Insile, but he couldn’t remember what that was either. Something that would warn him, because there was something that he knew about that he hadn’t known about before, and something that required… warning.

The frustration of it made him want to scream sometimes; to tear the white plump pillows in half and pick up the white chair and smash it through the windows to let the mad white fury out there inside.

He wondered how quickly he’d freeze if the windows were open.

Well, at least it would be appropriate; he’d arrived here frozen, so why not leave the same way? He entertained the thought that some cell-memory, some bone-remembered affinity had drawn him here, of all places, where the great battles were fought on the titanic crashing tabular bergs, calved from their vast glaciers and swirling like ice-cubes in some planet-sized cocktail glass, a scatter of ever-shifting frozen islands, some of them hundreds of kilometres long, circling the world between pole and tropic, their broad backs a white wasteland spattered with blood and bodies, and the wrecks of tanks and planes.

To fight for what would inevitably melt and could never provide food or minerals or a permanent place to live, seemed an almost deliberate caricature of the conventional folly of war. He enjoyed the fight, but even the way the war was fought disturbed him, and he had made enemies amongst the other pilots, and his superiors, by speaking his mind.

But somehow he knew that Saaz was right; it had not been what he’d said in the mess that had led to somebody trying to kill him. At least (said something in him), not directly…

Thone, the squadron’s CO, came to see him; no flunkies, for a change.

“Thank you, Nurse,” he said at the door, then closed it, smiled, and came over to the bed; he had the white chair. He sat in it and drew himself up, so that his girth was made to look less. “Well, Captain Zakalwe, how are we coming along?”

A flowery smell, Thone’s preferred scent, drifted over from the man. “I hope to be flying within a couple of weeks, sir,” he said. He’d never liked the CO, but made the effort of smiling bravely.

“Do you?” Thone said. “Do you now. That’s not what the doctors say, Captain Zakalwe. Unless they’re saying different things to me than they are to you.”

He frowned. “Well, it might be a… few weeks, sir…”

“It might be we have to send you home, I think, Captain Zakalwe,” Thone said, with an insincere smile, “…or at least to the mainland, as I’m told your home is further afield, eh?”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to return to my duties, sir. Of course, I realise there will be a medical, but…”

“Yes, yes, yes,” Thone said. “Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we. Hmm. Very good.” He stood up. “Is there anyth—”

“There’s nothing you can get—” He began, then saw the look on Thone’s face. “I beg your pardon, sir.”

“As I was saying, Captain; is there anything I can get you?”

He looked down at the white sheets. “No, sir. Thank you, sir.”

“A speedy recovery, Captain Zakalwe,” Thone said frostily.

He saluted Thone, who nodded, turned and left.

He was left looking at the white chair.

Nurse Talibe came in after a few moments, arms crossed, her round, pale face very calm and kind. “Try to sleep,” she told him, and took the chair away.

He woke in the night and saw the lights shining through the snow outside; silhouetted against the floodlights, the falling flakes became translucent shadows, massing soft against the harsh, downward light. The whiteness beyond, in the black night, came compromised as grey.

He woke with the smell of flowers in his nostrils.

He clutched beneath the pillow, felt the single leg of the sharp, long-nosed scissor.

He remembered Thone’s face.

He remembered the briefing room, and the four COs; they’d invited him for a drink, said they wanted a word.

In the room of one of them — he couldn’t remember their names, but he would remember soon, and already he would recognise them — they asked him about what they’d heard he’d said in the mess.

And, a little drunk, and thinking he was very clever, thinking he might find out something interesting, he’d told them what he suspected they wanted to hear, not what he’d said to the other pilots.

And had discovered a plot. He wanted the new government to be true to its populist promises, and end the war. They wanted to stage a coup, and they needed good pilots.

High on the drink and his nerves, he’d left them thinking he was for them, and gone straight to Thone. Thone the hard but fair; Thone the dislikeable and petty, Thone the vain, the perfumed, but Thone the man known to be pro-government. (Though Saaz Insile had once said the man was pro-government with the pilots, and anti-government with their superiors.)

And the look on Thone’s face…

Not then; later. After Thone had told him to say nothing to anybody else, because he thought there might be traitors amongst the pilots too, and told him to go to bed as though nothing had happened, and he’d gone, and because he’d still been drunk, maybe, woken up that second too late as they came for him, shoved some impregnated rag over his face and held it there while he struggled, but eventually had to breathe, and the choking fumes took him.

Dragged through the corridors, socked feet sliding over the tiles; men on either side. They went to one of the hangars, and somebody went to the lift controls, and he still could only dimly see the floor in front of him and could not raise his head. But he could smell flowers, from the man on his right.

The clamshell doors opened overhead, cracking; he heard the noise of the storm, shrieking from the darkness. They dragged him over to the lift.

He tensed, swung round, grabbed at Thone’s collar; saw the man’s face; appalled, full of fear. He felt the man on the other side of him grab at his free arm; he wriggled, got his other arm free from Thone, saw the pistol in the CO’s holster.

He got the gun; he remembered shouting, getting away but falling; he tried to shoot but the gun would not work. Lights flickered on at the far side of the hangar. It’s not loaded! It’s not loaded! Thone shouted to the others. They looked over to the far side of the hangar; there were planes in the way, but there was somebody there, shouting about opening the hangar doors at night with the lights on.

He never saw who shot him. A sledgehammer hit the side of his head and the next thing he saw was the white chair.

The snow boiled wildly beyond the floodlit windows.

He watched it until dawn, remembering and remembering.

“Talibe; will you send a message to Captain Saaz Insile. Tell him I need to see him, urgently; please send a message to my squadron, will you?”

“Yes, of course, but first your medication.”

He took her hand in his. “No, Talibe; first phone the squadron.” He winked at her. “Please, for me.”

She shook her head. “Pest.” She walked away through the doors.

“Well, is he coming?”

“He’s on leave,” she told him, taking up the clipboard to check off the medication he was receiving.

“Shit!” Saaz hadn’t said anything about leave.

“Captain, tut tut,” she said, shaking a bottle.

“The police, Talibe. Call the military police; do it now. This really is urgent.”

“Medication first, Captain.”

“Well as soon as I’ve taken it, you promise?”

“Promise. Open wide.”

“Aaaah…”

Damn Saaz for being on leave, and damn him twice for not mentioning it. And Thone; the nerve of the man! Coming to see him, to check him out, to see if he remembered.

And what would have happened if he had?

He felt under the pillow again, for the scissor. It was there, cool and sharp.

“I told them it was urgent; they say they’re on their way,” Talibe said, coming in, not with the chair this time. She looked at the windows, where the storm still blew. “And I’ve to give you something to keep you awake; they want you perky.”

“I am perky; I am awake!”

“Quiet, and take these.”

He took them.

He fell asleep clutching the scissor under the pillow, while the whiteness outside the windows went on and on and eventually penetrated the glass, layer by layer, by a process of discrete osmosis, and gravitated naturally to his head, and spun slowly in orbit round him, and joined with the white torus of bandages and dissolved them and unwound them and deposited the remains in one corner of the room where the white chairs gathered, muttering, plotting, and slowly pressed in against his head, tighter and tighter, whirling in the silly snow-flake dance, faster and faster as they came closer and closer until eventually they became the bandage, cold and tight about his fevered head, and — finding the treated wound — slunk in through his skin and his skull, coldly and crisply and crystally into his brain.

Talibe unlocked the ward doors and let the officers in.

“You sure he’s out?”

“I gave him twice the usual dose. If he isn’t out he’s dead.”

“Still got a pulse. You take his arms.”

“Okay… Hup! Hey: look at this!”

“Huh.”

“My fault. I wondered where those had got to. Sorry.”

“You did fine, kid. You better go. Thanks. This won’t be forgotten.”

“Okay…”

“What?”

“It… it will be quick, yes? Before he wakes up?”

“Sure. Oh, sure; yeah. He won’t ever know. Won’t feel a thing.”

…And so he awoke in the cold snow, roused by the freezing blast inside him coming to the surface, piercing his skin at every pore, shrieking out.

He woke, and knew he was dying. The blizzard had already numbed one side of his face. One hand was stuck to the hard-packed snow beneath him. He was still in the standard-issue hospital pyjamas. The cold was not cold; it was a stunning sort of pain, eating into him from every direction.

He raised his head, looking around. A few flat metres of snow, in what might have been morning light. The blizzard a little quieter than it had been, but still fierce. The last temperature he’d heard quoted had been ten below, but with the wind-chill, it was much, much worse than that. His head and hands and feet and genitals all ached.

The cold had woken him. It must have. It must have woken him quickly or he would already be dead. They must just have left him. If he could find which way they’d gone, follow them…

He tried to move, but could not. He screamed inside, to produce the most awesome surge of will he had ever attempted… and succeeded only in rolling over, and sitting up.

The effort of it was almost too much; he had to put his hands behind him to steady himself. He felt them both freeze there. He knew he would never stand up.

Talibe… he thought, but the blizzard swept that away in an instant.

Forget Talibe. You’re dying. There are more important things.

He stared into the milky depths of the blizzard as it swept towards and past him, like tiny soft stars all packed and hurrying. His face felt pierced by a million tiny hot needles, but then started to go numb.

To have come all this way, he thought, just to die in somebody else’s war. How silly it all seemed now. Zakalwe, Elethiomel, Staberinde; Livueta, Darckense. The names reeled off, were blown away by the sapping cold of the howling wind. He felt his face shrivel, felt the cold burrow through skin and eyeballs to his tongue and teeth and bones.

He ripped one hand away from the snow behind him; the cold already anaesthetising the flayed palm. He opened the jacket of the pyjamas, tore off buttons, and exposed the puckered little mark on his chest over his heart to the cold blast. He put his hand on the ice behind him, and tipped his head up. The bones in his neck seemed to grate, clicking as his head moved, as though the cold was seizing up his joints. “Darckense…” he whispered to the boiling chill of the blizzard.

He saw the woman walking calmly towards him through the storm.

She walked on the surface of the hard-packed snow, dressed in long black boots and a long coat with a furry black collar and cuffs, and she wore a small hat.

Her neck and face were exposed, as were her gloveless hands. She had a long, oval face, and deep dark eyes. She walked easily up to him, and the storm behind her seemed to part at her back, and he felt himself in the lee of something more than just her tall body, and something like warmth seemed to seep through his skin, wherever it faced her.

He closed his eyes. He shook his head, which hurt a little, but he did it all the same. He opened his eyes again.

She was still there.

She had half knelt in front of him, her hands folded on one skirted knee, her face level with his. He peered forward, wrenched one hand free from the snow again (it was numb, but when he brought the hand round, he saw the raw flesh he’d torn from the snow). He tried to touch her face, but she took his hand in one of hers. She was warm. He thought he had never felt such glorious warmth in all his life.

He laughed, as she held his hand and the storm parted round her and her breath clouded the air.

“Goddamn,” he said. He knew he sounded groggy with the cold and with the drug. “An atheist my entire fucking life, and it turns out the credulous assholes were right all along!” He wheezed, coughed. “Or do you surprise them too by not turning up?”

“You flatter me, Mr Zakalwe,” the woman said, in a superbly deep and sexy voice. “I am not Death, or some imagined Goddess. I am as real as you…” She stroked his torn, bleeding palm with one long, strong thumb. “If a little warmer.”

“Oh, I’m sure you’re real,” he said. “I can feel you’re rea…”

His voice faded; he looked behind the woman. There was a huge shape appearing inside the whirling snow. Grey-white like the snow, but a single shade darker, it floated up behind the woman, quiet and huge and steady. The storm seemed to die, just around them.

“That’s called a twelve person module, Cheradenine,” the woman said. “It’s come to take you away, if you want to be taken away; to the mainland, if you like. Or further afield, away with us if you’d prefer that.”

He was tired of blinking and shaking his head. Whatever insane part of his mind wanted to play this bizarre game out would just have to be humoured for as long as it took. What it had to do with the Staberinde and the Chair, he couldn’t tell yet, but if that was what it was all about — and what else could it be about? — then there was still no point, in this weakened, dying state, trying to fight it. Let it happen. He had no real choice. “With you?” he said, trying not to laugh.

“With us. We’d like to offer you a job.” She smiled. “But let’s talk somewhere a little warmer, shall we?”

“Warmer?”

She made a single tossing motion with her head. “The module.”

“Oh; yeah,” he agreed. “That.” He tried to pull his other hand away from the packed snow behind, failed.

He looked back at her; she had taken a small flask from her pocket. She reached round behind him, slowly poured the flask’s contents over his hand. It warmed, and came away steaming gently.

“Okay?” she said, taking his hand, gently helping him up. She pulled some slippers from her pocket. “Here.”

“Oh.” He laughed. “Yeah; thanks.”

She put her arm under one of his, her hand under his other shoulder. She was strong. “You seem to know my name,” he said. “What’s yours, if that isn’t an impertinent question?”

She smiled as they walked through the few flakes of gently falling snow, towards the slab-sided bulk of the thing she’d called a module. It had got so quiet — despite the snow nearby, streaking past — that he could hear their feet making the snow creak.

“My name,” she said. “Is Rasd-Coduresa Diziet Embless Sma da’ Marenhide.”

“No kidding!”

“But you may call me Diziet.”

He laughed. “Yeah; right. Diziet.”

She walked, he stumbled, into the orange warmth of the module interior. The walls looked like highly polished wood, the seats like burnished hide, the floor like a fur rug. It all smelled like a mountain garden.

He tried to fill his lungs with the warm, fragrant air. He swayed and turned, stunned, to the woman.

“This is real!” he breathed.

With enough breath, he might have screamed it.

The woman nodded. “Welcome aboard, Cheradenine Zakalwe.”

He fainted.

Twelve

He stood in the long gallery and faced into the light. The tall white curtains billowed softly around him, quiet in the warm breeze. His long black hair was lifted only slightly by the gentle wind. His hands were clasped behind his back. He looked pensive. The silent, lightly clouded skies over the mountains, beyond the fortress and the city, threw a blank, pervasive light across his face, and standing there like that, in plain dark clothes, he looked somehow insubstantial, like some statue, or a dead man propped against the battlements to fool the foe.

Somebody spoke his name.

“Zakalwe. Cheradenine?”

“Whaa…?” He came to. He looked into the face of an old man who looked vaguely familiar. “Beychae?” he heard himself say. Of course; the old man was Tsoldrin Beychae. Older-looking than he remembered.

He looked around, listening. He heard a hum and saw a small, bare cabin. Seaship? Spaceship?

Osom Emananish, a voice from his memory told him. Spaceship; clipper, bound for… somewhere near Impren (whatever and wherever that was). Impren Habitats. He had to get Tsoldrin Beychae to the Impren Habitats. Then he remembered the little doctor and his wonderful field machine with the cutting blue disc. Digging deeper, in a way that would not have been possible without the Culture’s training and subtle changes, he found the little running loop of memory that took over from what his brain had already stored. The room with the fibre optics; blowing a kiss because it was just what he’d wanted; the explosion, sailing across the bar into the lounge; crashing, hitting his head. The rest was very vague; distant screams, and being picked up and carried. Nothing sensible from the voices he’d registered while he’d been unconscious.

He lay for a moment, listening to what his body was telling him. No concussion. Slight damage to his right kidney, lots of bruises, abrasions on both knees, cuts on right hand… nose still mending.

He raised himself up, looked again at the cabin; bare metal walls, two bunks, one small stool Beychae was sitting on. “This the brig?”

Beychae nodded. “Yes; the prison.”

He lay back. He noticed he was wearing a disposable crew jumpsuit. The terminal bead had gone from his ear, and the lobe was raw and sore enough to make him suspect the transceiver hadn’t relinquished its grip there without a struggle. “You too, or just me?” he asked.

“Just you.”

“What about the ship?”

“I believe we are heading for the nearest stellar system, on the vessel’s back-up drive.”

“What’s the nearest system?”

“Well, the one inhabited planet is called Murssay. There’s a war going on in part of it; one of those brush-fire conflicts you mentioned. Apparently the ship may not be allowed to land.”

“Land?” He grunted, feeling the back of his head. Largish bruise. “This ship can’t land; it’s not built for in-atmosphere stuff.”

“Oh,” Tsoldrin said. “Well, perhaps they meant we wouldn’t be able to go down to the surface.”

“Hmm. Must have some sort of orbiter; a space station, yes?”

Beychae shrugged. “I suppose so.”

He looked round the cabin, making it obvious he was looking for something, “What do they know about you?” He gestured round the cabin with his eyes.

Beychae smiled. “They know who I am; I’ve talked to the captain, Cheradenine. They did receive an order from the shipping company to turn back, though they didn’t know why. Now they know why. The captain had the choice of waiting for Humanist naval units to pick us up, or heading for Murssay, and he chose the latter — despite some pressure, I believe — from Governance, via the shipping company. Apparently he insisted that the distress channel was used when he informed the shipping line of both what had happened to the ship, and who I was.”

“So now everybody knows?”

“Yes. I imagine by now the whole Cluster knows exactly who both of us are. But the point is that I think the captain might not be entirely unsympathetic to our cause.”

“Yeah, but what happens when we get to Murssay?”

“Looks like we get rid of you, Mr Zakalwe,” said a voice from a speaker overhead.

He looked at Beychae. “I hope you heard that too.”

“I believe that might be the captain,” Beychae said.

“It is,” said the man’s voice, “And we just got informed that we part company before we even get to Murssay station.” The man sounded peeved.

“Really, captain?”

“Yes, really, Mr Zakalwe; I have just received a military communication from the Balzeit Hegemonarchy of Murssay. They want to uplift you and Mr Beychae before we connect with the Station. As they’re threatening to attack us if we don’t comply, I intend to do as they ask; technically under protest, but frankly it will be a relief to be rid of you. I may add that the vessel they intend to take you off with must be a couple of centuries old, and was not thought to be space-worthy until now. If it survives to make the rendezvous in a couple of hours, you ought to have an eventful journey through Murssay’s atmosphere. Mr Beychae; I believe if you reasoned with the Balzeit people they might let you continue with us to Murssay Station. Whatever you decide, sir, let me wish you a safe trip.”

Beychae sat back on the small stool. “Balzeit,” he said, nodding thoughtfully. “I wonder why they want us?”

“They want you, Tsoldrin,” he said, swinging his feet off the bed. He looked uncertain. “They on the good-guys’s side? There’s so damn many of these little wars…”

“Well, in theory they are,” Beychae said. “I think they believe planets and machines can have souls.”

“Yeah, I thought they were,” he said, getting slowly to his feet. He flexed his arms, moved his shoulders. “If this Murssay Station is neutral territory, you’d be better going there, though I’d guess this Balzeit gang want you, not me.”

He rubbed the back of his head again, trying to remember what the situation was on Murssay. Murssay was just the sort of place that could start a full-scale war. There was, in effect, a Consolidationist-Humanist war taking place between relatively archaic military forces on Murssay; Balzeit was on the consolidationist side, even though the high command was some sort of priesthood. Why they wanted Beychae, he wasn’t sure, though he vaguely recalled that the priests were into hero-worship in a fairly serious way. Though, having heard that Beychae was nearby, maybe they just wanted to hold him to ransom.

Six hours later they rendezvoused with the ancient Balzeit spacecraft.

“They want me?” he said.

They stood by the airlock; him, Beychae, the Osom Emananish’s captain, and four suited figures with guns. The suited men wore visored helmets, their pale brown faces visible inside, foreheads marked with a blue circle. The circles actually seemed to glow, he thought, and he wondered if they were there because of some generous religious principle, to help snipers.

“Yes, Mr Zakalwe,” the captain said. He was a rotund little man with a shaved head. He smiled. “They want you, not Mr Beychae.”

He looked at the four armed men. “What are they up to?” he asked Beychae.

“I have no idea,” Beychae admitted.

He waved his hands out, appealing to the four men. “Why do you want me?”

“Please come with us, sir,” one of the suited men said, via a suit speaker, in what was obviously not his first language.

“ ‘Please’?” he said. “You mean I have a choice?”

The man looked uncomfortable in his suit. He talked for a while without any noise coming from the speaker, then said, “Sir Zakalwe, is very important you come. You must. Is very important.”

He shook his head. “I must,” he repeated seemingly to himself. He turned to the captain. “Captain, sir; could I have my earring back, please?”

“No,” the captain said, with a beatific grin. “Now, get off my ship.”

The craft was cramped and very low tech and the air was warm and smelled of electrics. They gave him an old suit to put on and he was shown to a couch, and belted in. It was a bad sign when they made you put a suit on inside a ship. The troopers who’d taken him from the clipper sat behind him. The three-man crew — also suited up — seemed suspiciously busy, and he had the disquieting impression that the manual controls in front of them were not just for emergencies.

The craft re-entered the atmosphere spectacularly; buffeted, creaking, surrounded by gas glowing bright (seen through, he realised with a gut-wrenching shock, windows; crystal or glass, not screens), and with a gradually increasing howl. The air got even warmer. Flashing lights, hurried chatter between the crew, and some hurried movements and more excited talk, did not make him feel any happier. The glow disappeared and the sky turned from violet to blue; the buffeting returned.

They swept into the night, and plunged into cloud. The flashing lights all over the control panels looked even more worrying in darkness.

It was a rolling landing on some sort of runway, in a thunderstorm. The four troopers who’d boarded the Osom Emananish cheered weakly from behind him as the landing gear — wheels, he supposed — touched down. The craft trundled on for a worryingly long time, slewing twice.

When they finally rolled to a stop, the three crewmen all sat back slumped in their seats, arms dangling over the edges, silent and staring out into the rain-filled night.

He undid the belts, took off the helmet. The troopers opened the interior airlock.

When they opened the outer door, it was to reveal rain and lights and trucks and tanks and some low buildings in the background, and a couple of hundred people, some in military uniforms, some in long robes, rain-slicked, some trying to hold umbrellas over others; all seemed to have the circular marks on their foreheads. A group of a dozen or so, all old, robed, white haired, faces spattered with rain, walked to the bottom of the steps that led from the craft to the ground.

“Please, sir,” one of the troopers held out a hand to indicate they should descend. The white-haired men in the robes gathered in an arrowhead formation at the foot of the steps.

He stepped out, stood on the little platform before the stairs. The rain battered into one side of his head.

A great shout went up, and the dozen old men at the foot of the steps each bowed their head and went down on one knee, into the puddles on the dark and wind-whipped runway. A blast of blue light ripped the blackness beyond the low buildings, its flickering brilliance momentarily illuminating hills and mountains in the distance. The assembled people started to chant. It took him a few moments to work out what it was, then realised they were yelling, “Za-kal-we! Za-kal-we!”

“Oh oh,” he said to himself. Thunder bellowed in the hills.

“Yeah… could you just run that past me again?”

“Messiah…”

“I really wish you wouldn’t use that word.”

“Oh! Oh, well, Sir Zakalwe; what do you wish?”

“Ah… how about,” he gestured with his hands. “Mister?”

“Sir Zakalwe, sir; you are pre-ordained! You have been beseen!” The high priest, sitting across the railway carriage, clenched his hands.

“ ‘Be-seen’?”

“Indeed! You are our salvation; our divine recompense! You have been sent!”

“Sent,” he repeated, still trying to come to terms with what had happened to him.

They’d switched the floodlights off shortly after he’d set foot on the ground. The priests enveloped him, took him, many arms round his shoulders, from the concrete apron to an armoured truck; the lights went out on the runway and they were left with the slit-light from the truck and tank-lights; cones made fans by blinkers clipped over the lights. He was bustled away down a track to a railway station where they transferred to a shuttered carriage that clattered into the night.

There were no windows.

“Why yes! Our faith has a tradition of finding outside influences, because they are always greater.” The high priest — Napoerea, he’d said his name was — made a bowing motion. “And what can be greater than the man who was ComMil?”

ComMil; he had to dredge his memory for that one. ComMil; that was what he had been, according to the Cluster’s media; director of military operations when he and Tsoldrin Beychae had been involved in the whole crazy dance the last time. Beychae had been ComPol, in charge of politics (ah, these fine divisions!).

“ComMil…” He nodded, not really much the wiser. “And you think I can help you?”

“Sir Zakalwe!” the high priest said, shifting down from his seat to kneel on the floor again. “You are what we believe in!”

He sat back in the upholstered cushions. “May I ask why?”

“Sir; your deeds are legend! Forever since the last unpleasantness! Our Guider, before he died, prophesied that our salvation would come from ‘beyond the skies’, and your name was one of those mentioned; so coming to us in our hour of need, you must be our salvation!”

“I see,” he said, seeing nothing. “Well, we’ll see what we can do.”

“Messiah!”

The train drew up in a station somewhere; they were escorted from it to an elevator, then to a suite of rooms that he was told looked out over the city beneath but it was all in black-out. The internal screens were closed. The rooms themselves were quite opulent. He inspected them.

“Yes. Very nice. Thank you.”

“And here are your boys,” the high priest said, sweeping aside a curtain in the bedroom to reveal a languorously displayed half-dozen or so young men lying on a very large bed.

“Well… I, uh… Thank you,” he said, nodding to the high priest. He smiled at the boys, who all smiled back.

He lay awake in the ceremonial bed in the palace, hands behind his neck. After a while, in the darkness, there was a distinct “pop”, and in a disappearing blue sphere of light there was a tiny machine about the size of a human thumb.

“Zakalwe?”

“Hi, Sma.”

“Listen…”

“No. You listen; I would really like to know what the fuck is going on here.”

“Zakalwe,” Sma said, through the scout missile. “It’s complicated, but…”

“But I’m in here with a gang of homosexual priests who think I’m going to solve all their military problems.”

“Cheradenine,” Sma said, in her winning voice. “These people have successfully incorporated a belief in your martial prowess into their religion; how can you deny them?”

“Believe me; it would be easy.”

“Like it or not, Cheradenine, you’ve become a legend to these people. They think you can do things.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

“Guide them. Be their General.”

“That’s what they expect me to be, I think. But what should I really do?”

“Just that,” Sma’s voice said. “Lead them. Meanwhile Beychae’s in the Station; Murssay Station. That counts as neutral territory for now, and he’s making the right noises. Don’t you see, Zakalwe?” Sma’s voice sounded tense, exultant. “We’ve got them! Beychae’s doing just what we wanted, and all you have to do is…”

“What?”

“… Just be yourself; operate for these guys!”

He shook his head. “Sma; spell it out for me. What am I supposed to do?”

He heard Sma sigh. “Win their war, Zakalwe. We’re putting our weight behind the forces you’re working with. Maybe if they can win this, and Beychae gets behind the winning side here, we can — perhaps — swing the Cluster.” He heard her take another deep breath. “Zakalwe; we need this. To a degree, our hands are tied, but we need you to make the whole thing settle out. Win their war for them, and we might just be able to get it all together. Seriously.”

“Fine, seriously,” he said to the scout missile. “But I’ve already had a quick look at their maps, and these guys are in deep shit. If they’re going to win this war they’re going to need a real miracle.”

“Just try, Cheradenine. Please.”

“Do I get any help?”

“Um… how do you mean?”

“Intelligence, Sma; if you could keep an eye on what the enemy’s—”

“Ah, no, Cheradenine, I’m sorry we can’t.”

“What?” he said loudly, sitting up in the bed.

“I’m sorry, Zakalwe; really I am, but we’ve had to agree to that. This is a really delicate deal here, and we’re having to keep strictly out of it. This missile shouldn’t even be here; and it’ll have to leave soon.”

“So I’m on my own?”

“I’m sorry,” Sma said.

“You’re sorry!” he said, collapsing back dramatically on the bed.

No soldiering, he recalled Sma saying, some time ago now. “No fucking soldiering,” he muttered to himself as he gathered his hair at the nape of his neck and pulled the little hide band over it. It was dawn; he patted the pony-tail and looked out through thick, distorting glass to the mist-shrouded city, just starting to wake to the dawn-rouged mountain peaks and the blue-glowing skies above. He looked with distaste at the over-ornamented long robes the priests expected him to wear, then reluctantly put them on.

The Hegemonarchy and its opponents, the Glaseen Empire, had been fighting, on and off, for control of their modestly-sized sub-continent for six hundred years before the rest of the Cluster came calling in its strange floating sky-ships, a century ago. They’d been backward even then, compared to the other societies on Murssay, which were decades ahead in technology, and — arguably — several centuries ahead morally and politically. Before they’d been contacted, the natives had the crossbow and the muzzle-loading cannon. Now, a century later, they had tanks. Lots of tanks. Tanks and artillery and trucks and a few very inefficient aircraft. Each side also had one prestige system, partially bought from but mostly just donated by some of the Cluster’s more advanced societies. The Hegemonarchy had its single sixth- or seventh-hand spacecraft; the Empire had a clutch of missiles which were generally reckoned to be inoperable, and probably were politically unusable anyway because they were supposed to be nuclear-tipped. Public opinion in the Cluster could tolerate the technologically enhanced continuation of a pointless war so long as men, women and children died in relatively small, regular batches, but the thought of a million or so being incinerated at once, nuked in a city, was not to be tolerated.

The Empire was winning a conventional war, then, being waged across two impoverished countries which left to themselves would probably just be harnessing steam power. Instead refugee peasants filled the roads, carts loaded with whole households swayed between hedgerows, while the tanks ploughed the crop fields and the droning planes dropping bombs took care of slum-clearance.

The Hegemonarchy was retreating across the plains and into the mountains as its beleaguered forces fell back before the Empire’s motorised cavalry.

He went straight to the map room after dressing; a few dozy general staff officers jumped to attention and rubbed sleep from their eyes. The maps didn’t look any better in the morning than they had the previous evening, but he stood looking at them for a long time, sizing up the positions of their forces and the Empire’s, asking the officers questions and trying to gauge how accurate their intelligence was and what level their own troops’ morale was at.

The officers seemed to know more about the disposition of their enemy’s forces than they did about the feelings of their own men.

He nodded to himself, scanned all the maps, then left for breakfast with Napoerea and the rest of the priests. He dragged them all back down into the map room afterwards — they would normally have returned to their own apartments for contemplation — and asked even more questions.

“And I want a uniform like these guys,” he said, pointing at one of the junior regular army officers in the map room.

“But, Sir Zakalwe,” Napoerea said, looking worried. “Those would demean you!”

“And these will slow me down,” he said, indicating the long, heavy robes he was wearing. “I want to take a look at the front myself.”

“But, sir, this is the holy citadel; all our intelligence comes here, all our people’s prayers are directed here.”

“Napoerea,” he said, putting his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “I know; but I need to see things for myself. I only just got here, remember?” He looked round the unhappy faces of the other high priests. “I’m sure your ways work when circumstances are as they have been in the past,” he told them, straight-faced. “But I’m new, and so I have to use new ways to discover what you probably already know.” He turned back to Napoerea. “I want my own plane; a modified reconnaissance aircraft should do. Two fighters as an escort.”

The priests had thought it the height of daring unorthodoxy to venture out to the space port, thirty kilometres away, by train and truck; they thought he was mad to want to start flying all over the sub-continent.

It was what he did for the next few days, however. There was a lull of sorts in the fighting just at that point — as the Hegemonarchy’s forces fled and the Empire’s consolidated — which made his task a little easier. He wore a plain uniform, without even the half-dozen or so medal ribbons that even the most junior officer seemed to warrant just for existing. He spoke to the mostly dull, demoralised and thoroughly hidebound field generals and colonels, to their staff, and to the foot soldiers and tank crews, as well as to the cooks and the supply teams and the orderlies and doctors. Most of the time he needed an interpreter; only the top brass spoke the Cluster’s common tongue, but even so he suspected the troops felt closer to somebody who spoke a different language but asked them questions than they did to somebody who shared their language and only ever used it to give orders.

He toured every major air field in the course of that first week, sounding out the Air Force staff for their feelings and opinions. About the only person he tended to ignore on such occasions was the always watchful priest every squadron, regiment and fort had as its titular head. The first few of these priests he’d encountered had had nothing useful to say, and none of those he saw subsequently ever seemed to have anything interesting to add beyond the ritualised initial greetings. He had decided within the first couple of days that the main problem the priests had was themselves.

“Shenastri Province!” Napoerea exclaimed. “But there are a dozen important religious sites there! More! And you propose to surrender without a fight?”

“You’ll get the temples back once we’ve won the war, and probably lots of new treasure to put inside them. They’re going to fall whether we try to hold there or not, and they’ll probably be damaged if not destroyed in the fighting. This way, they’ll survive intact. And it stretches their supply lines like crazy. Look; the rains start in, what? A month? By the time we’re ready to counter-attack, they’ll have even worse supply problems; the wet lands behind them mean they can’t bring stuff that way, and they can’t retreat there once we do attack. Nappy; old son; this is beautiful, believe me. If I was a commander on the other side and I saw this area being offered, I wouldn’t go within a million klicks of it, but the Imperial Army boys are going to have to because the Court won’t let them do anything else. But they’ll know it’s a trap. Terrible for the morale.”

“I don’t know, I don’t know…” Napoerea shook his head, both his hands at his mouth, massaging his lower lip while he looked worriedly at the map.

(No, you don’t know, he thought to himself, watching the man’s nervous body-language. You lot haven’t known anything very useful for generations, chum.) “It must be done,” he said. “The withdrawal should start today.” He turned to another map. “Aircraft; stop the bombing and strafing of the roads. Give the pilots two days’ rest, then raid the oil refineries, here.” He pointed. “A mass raid; use everything with the range that’ll fly.”

“But if we stop attacking the roads…”

“They’ll fill with even more refugees,” he told the man. “That’ll slow the Imperial Army down more than our planes. I do want some of these bridges taken out.” He tapped a couple of river crossings. He looked mystified at Napoerea. “You guys sign some sort of agreement not to bomb bridges or something?”

“It has always been felt that destroying bridges would hinder a counter-attack, as well as being… wasteful,” the priest said, unhappily.

“Well, these three have to go, anyway.” He tapped the surface of the map. “That and the refinery raid should put some sand in their fuel-lines,” he said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them.

“But we believe the Imperial Army has great reserves of fuel,” Napoerea said, looking very unhappy.

“Even if they have,” he told the high-priest, “Commanders will move more cautiously knowing supplies have been interrupted; they’re careful guys. But I bet they never did have the supplies you thought; they probably think you have bigger supplies than you do, and with the advance they’ve had to fund recently… believe me; they may panic a little if the refinery raid comes off the way I hope it will.”

Napoerea looked downcast, rubbed his chin while he gazed forlornly at the maps. “It all sounds very…” he began, “…very… adventurous.”

The high-priest invested the word with a degree of loathing and contempt that might have been amusing in other circumstances.

Under great protest, the high priests were persuaded they must give up their precious province and its many important religious sites to the enemy; they agreed to the mass raid on the refinery.

He visited the retreating soldiers and the main airfields that would take part in the refinery raid. Then he took a couple of days travelling the mountains by truck, inspecting the defences. There was a valley with a dam at its head that might also provide an effective trap if the Imperial Army made it that far (he remembered the concrete island, the snivelling girl and the chair). While he was driven along the rough roads between the hill forts, he saw a hundred or more aircraft drone overhead, heading out across the still peaceful looking plains, their wings loaded with bombs.

The refinery raid was expensive; almost a quarter of the planes never came back. But the Imperial Army’s advance halted a day later. He had hoped they would keep on coming for a bit — their supplies hadn’t been supplied straight from the refinery, so they could have kept going for a week or so — but they’d done the sensible thing, and stopped for the moment.

He flew to the spaceport, where the lumbering spaceship — it looked even more dangerous and dilapidated in daylight — was being slowly patched up and repaired in case it was ever wanted again. He talked to the technicians, took a look round the ancient device. The ship had a name, he discovered; the Hegemonarchy Victorious.

“It’s called decapitation,” he told the priests. “The Imperial Court travels to Willitice Lake at the start of every Second Season; the high command comes to brief them. We drop the Victorious in on them, the day the general staff arrive.”

The priests looked puzzled. “With what, Sir Zakalwe? A commando force? The Victorious is only able to hold…”

“No no,” he said. “When I say drop it, I mean we bomb them with it. We put it into space and then bring it back in, down on top of the Lake Palace. It’s a good four hundred tonnes; even travelling at only ten times the speed of sound it’ll hit like a small nuke going off; we’ll get the entire Court and the general staff in one go. We offer peace to the commoners’ parliament immediately. With any luck at all we cause immense civil disturbance; probably the commoners’ parliament will see this as their chance to grab real power; the army will want to take up the reigns itself, and may even have to turn round and fight a civil war. Junior aristos filing competing claims should complicate the situation nicely.”

“But,” Napoerea said, “this means destroying the Victorious, does it not?” The other priests were shaking their heads.

“Well, impacting at four or five kilometres a second wouldn’t leave it totally undented, I suspect.”

“But Zakalwe!” Napoerea roared, doing a reasonable impression of a small nuclear explosion himself, “That’s absurd! You can’t do it! The Victorious is a symbol of… it’s our hope! All the people look at our…”

He smiled, letting the priest ramble on for a little while. He was fairly certain the priests looked on the Hegemonarchy Victorious as their escape route if things went badly in the end.

He waited until Napoerea had almost finished, then said, “I understand; but the craft is on its last legs already, gentlemen. I’ve talked to the technicians and the pilots; it’s a death-trap. It was more luck than anything else that it got me here safely.” He paused, watching the men with the blue circles on their foreheads look wide-eyed at each other. The muttering increased. He wanted to smile. That had put the fear of god into them. “I’m sorry, but this is the one thing the Victorious is good for.” He smiled. “And it could indeed produce Victory.”

He left them to mull over the concepts of high-hypersonic dive-bombing (no, no suicide mission required; the craft’s computers were perfectly capable of taking it up and bringing it straight down), symbol-trashing (a lot the peasants and factory workers would care about their piece of high-tech baublery getting junked), and Decapitation (probably the most worrying idea of the lot for the high-priests; what if the Empire thought of doing it to them?) He assured them the Empire would be in no state to retaliate; and when they offered peace, the priests would hint heavily they had used a missile of their own, not the spacecraft, and pretend there were more where that came from. Even though this would not be difficult to disprove, especially if one of the world’s more sophisticated societies chose to tell the Empire what had really happened, it would still be worrying for whoever was trying to work out what to do on the other side. Besides, they could always just get out of the city. Meanwhile he went to visit more army units.

The Imperial Army started its advance again, though slower than before. He had drawn his troops back almost to the foothills of the mountains, burning the few unharvested fields and razing the towns behind them. Whenever they abandoned an airfield they planted bombs under the runways with days-long time delays, and dug plenty of other holes that looked like they might contain bombs.

In the foothills he supervised much of the lay-out of their defensive lines himself, and kept up his visits to airfields, regional headquarters and operational units. He kept up, too, the pressure on the high priests at least to consider using the spacecraft for a decapitation strike.

He was busy, he realised one day, as he lay down to sleep in an old castle that had become operational HQ for this section of the front (the sky had bloomed with light on the tree-lined horizon, and the air shaken with the sound of a bombardment, just after dusk). Busy and — he had to admit, as he put the last reports on the floor under the camp bed, and put the light out and was almost instantly asleep — happy.

Two weeks, three weeks from his arrival; the little news that came in from outside seemed to indicate there was an awful lot of nothing going on. He suspected there was a lot of intense politicking taking place. Beychae’s name was mentioned; he was still on the Murssay Station, in touch with the various parties. No word of the Culture, or from it. He wondered if they ever just forgot things; maybe they’d forget about him, leave him here, struggling forever in the priests’ and the Empire’s insane war.

The defences grew; the Hegemonarchy’s soldiers dug and built, but were mostly not under fire, and the Imperial Army gradually lapped against the foothills and paused. He had the Air Force harry the supply lines and the front line units, and pound the nearest airfields.

“There are far too many troops stationed here, round the city. The best troops should be at the front. The attack will come soon, and if we’re to counter-attack successfully — and it could be very successfully, if they’re tempted to go for a knockout; they’ve little left in reserve — then we need those elite squads where they can do some good.”

“There is the problem of civil unrest,” Napoerea said. He looked old and tired.

“Keep a few units here, and keep them in the streets, so people don’t forget they’re here, but dammit, Napoerea, most of these guys spend all their time in barracks. They’re needed at the front. I have just the place for them, look…”

Actually he wanted to tempt the Imperial Army to go for the knock-out, and the city was to be the bait. He sent the crack troops into the mountain passes. The priests looked at how much territory they’d now lost, and tentatively gave the go-ahead for preparing for decapitation; the Hegemonarchy Victorious would be readied for its final flight, though not used unless the situation appeared genuinely desperate. He promised he would try to win the war conventionally first.

The attack came; forty days after he had arrived on Murssay, the Imperial Army crashed into the foothill forests. The priests began to panic. He had the Air Force attack the supply lines the majority of the time, not the front. The defensive lines gradually gave way; units retreated, bridges were blown. Gradually, as the foothills led into the mountains, the Imperial Army was concentrated, funnelled into the valleys. The trick with the dam didn’t work this time; the charges placed under it just didn’t go off. He had to move fast to shift two elite units to cover the pass above that valley.

“But if we leave the city?” The priests looked stunned. Their eyes looked as empty as the painted blue circle on their foreheads. The Imperial Army was slowly moving up the valleys, forcing their soldiers back. He kept telling them things would be all right, but things just got worse and worse. There was nothing else for them to do; it all seemed too hopeless, and too late to take things back into their own hands. Last night, with the wind blowing down from the mountains to the city, the sound of distant artillery had been audible.

“They’ll try to take Balzeit City if they think they can,” he said. “It’s a symbol. Well fine, but it doesn’t actually have much military importance. They’ll grab at it. We let just so many through, then we close the passes; here,” he said, tapping the map. The priests shook their heads.

“Gents, we are not in disarray! We are falling back. But they are in much worse shape than we are, taking far heavier casualties; each metre is costing them blood. And, all the time, their supply lines get longer. We must take them to the point where they start to think about pulling back, then present them with the possibility — the seeming possibility — of a knock-out blow. But it won’t knock us out; it knocks them out.” He looked round them. “Believe me; it’ll work. You may have to leave the citadel for a while, but when you return, I guarantee it will be in triumph.”

They did not look convinced, but — possibly because they were just too stunned to fight — they let him have his way.

It took a few days, while the Imperial Army struggled up the valleys, and the Hegemonarchy’s forces resisted, retreated, resisted, retreated, but eventually — watching for signs that the Imperial soldiers were tiring, and the tanks and trucks not always moving when they might have wanted to, starved of fuel — he decided that were he on the other side, he’d be thinking about halting the advance. That night, in the pass which led down to the city, most of the Hegemonarchy troops left their positions. In the morning the battle resumed, and the Hegemonarchy’s men suddenly retreated, shortly before they would have been over-run. A puzzled, excited but still exhausted and worried General in the Imperial High Command watched through field glasses as a distant convoy of trucks crawled away down the pass towards the city, occasionally strafed by Imperial aircraft. Reconnaissance suggested the infidel priests were making preparations to leave their citadel. Spies indicated that their spacecraft was being readied for some special mission.

The General radioed the Court High Command. The order to advance on the city was given the following day.

He watched the terminally worried-looking priests leave from the train station under the citadel. In the end he had to dissuade them from ordering the decapitation attack. Let me try this first, he’d told them.

They could not understand each other.

The priests looked at the territory they had lost, and the fraction they had left, and thought it was all over for them. He looked at his relatively unscathed divisions, his fresh units, his crack squads, all positioned just where they should be, knives laid against and inside the body of an over-extended, worn-out enemy, just ready to cut… and thought it was all over for the Empire.

The train pulled out, and — unable to resist — he waved cheerily. The high priests would be better out of the way, in one of their great monasteries in the next mountain range. He ran back upstairs to the map room, to see how things were going.

He waited until a couple of divisions had made it through the pass, then had the units that had held it — and mostly retreated into the forests around the pass, not gone down the pass at all — take it again. The city and the citadel were bombed, though not well; the Hegemonarchy’s fighters shot most of the bombers down. The counter-attack finally began. He started with the elite troops, then brought in the rest. The Air Force still concentrated on the supply lines for the first couple of days, then switched to the front line. The Imperial Army wavered, line crinkling; it seemed to hesitate like some wash of water almost but not quite capable of overspilling the damming line of mountains save in one place (and that trickle was drying, still pushing for the city, leaving the pass, fighting through the forests and fields for the shining goal they still hoped might win the war…), then the line fell back; the soldiers too exhausted, their supplies of ammunition and fuel too sporadic.

The passes stayed with the Hegemonarchy, and slowly they pushed down from them again, so that it must have seemed to the Imperial soldiers that they were forever shooting up-hill, and that while advancing had been a heavy, dangerous slog, retreating was only too easy.

The retreat became a rout in valley after valley. He insisted on keeping the counter-attack going; the priests cabled that more forces ought to be deployed to stop the advance of the two Imperial divisions on the capital. He ignored them. There was barely enough left of the two tattered divisions to make one whole one, and they were being gradually eroded further all the time. It was possible they might make it to the city, but after that they would have nowhere to go. He thought it might be satisfying to accept their eventual surrender personally.

The rains came on the far side of the mountains, and as the bedraggled Imperial forces made their way through the dripping forests, their Air Force was all too often grounded by bad weather, while the Hegemonarchy’s planes bombed and strafed them with impunity.

People fled to the city; artillery duels thundered nearby. The remnants of the two divisions that had broken through the mountains fought desperately on towards their goal. On the distant plains on the far side of the mountains, the rest of the Imperial Army was retreating as fast as it could. The divisions trapped in Shenastri Province, unable to retreat through the quagmire behind them, surrendered en masse.

The Imperial Court signalled its desire for peace the day what was left of its two divisions entered Balzeit City. They had a dozen tanks and a thousand men, but they left their artillery in the fields, bereft of ammunition. The few thousand people left in the city sought refuge in the wide parade grounds of the citadel. He watched them stream in through the gates in the high walls, far in the distance.

He’d been going to quit the citadel that day — the priests had been screaming at him to do so for days, and most of the general staff had already left — but now he held the transcript of the message they’d just received from the Imperial Court.

Two Hegemonarchy divisions were, anyway, on their way out of the mountains, coming to the aid of the city.

He radioed the priests. They decided to accept a truce; fighting would stop immediately, if the Imperial Army withdrew to the positions it had held before the war. There were a few more radio exchanges; he left the priests and the Imperial Court to sort it all out. He took off his uniform and for the first time since he’d arrived, dressed as a civilian. He went to a high tower with some field glasses, and watched the tiny specks that were enemy tanks as they rolled down a street, far away. The citadel gates were closed.

A truce was declared at midday. The weary Imperial soldiers outside the citadel gates billeted themselves in the bars and hotels nearby.

He stood in the long gallery and faced into the light. The tall white curtains billowed softly around him, quiet in the warm breeze. His long black hair was lifted only slightly by the gentle wind. His hands were clasped behind his back. He looked pensive. The silent, lightly clouded skies over the mountains, beyond the fortress and the city, threw a blank, pervasive light across his face, and standing there like that, in plain dark clothes, he looked insubstantial, like some statue, or a dead man propped against the battlements to fool the foe.

“Zakalwe?”

He turned. His eyes widened in surprise. “Skaffen-Amtiskaw! This is an unexpected honour. Sma letting you out alone these days, or is she about too?” He looked the length of the citadel’s long gallery.

“Good day, Cheradenine,” the drone said, floating towards him. “Ms Sma is on her way, in a module.”

“And how is Dizzy?” He sat down on a small bench set against the wall which faced the long line of white-curtained windows. “What’s the news?”

“I believe it is mostly good,” Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, floating level with his face. “Mr Beychae is on his way to the Impren Habitats, where a summit conference between the Cluster’s two main tendencies is to be held. It would appear the danger of war is lessening.”

“Well, isn’t this all very wonderful,” he said, sitting back with his hands behind his neck. “Peace here; peace out there.” He squinted at the drone, his head to one side. “And yet, drone, somehow you do not seem to be overflowing with joy and happiness. You seem — dare I say it? — positively sombre. What’s the matter? Batteries low?”

The machine was silent for a second or two. Then it said, “I believe Ms Sma’s module is about to land; shall we go to the roof?”

He looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded, stood smartly and clapped his hands once, indicating the way forward. “Certainly; let’s go.”

They went to his apartments. He thought Sma seemed rather subdued, too. He’d imagined she’d be bubbling over with excitement because the Cluster looked like it wasn’t going to go to war after all.

“What’s the problem, Dizzy?” he asked, pouring her a drink. She was pacing up and down in front of the room’s shuttered windows. She took the drink from him, but didn’t seem interested in it. She turned to face him, her long, oval face looking… he wasn’t sure. But there was a cold feeling somewhere in his guts.

“You have to leave, Cheradenine,” she told him.

“Leave? When?”

“Now; tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”

He looked confused, then laughed. “Okay; I confess; the catamites were starting to look attractive, but…”

“No,” Sma said. “I’m serious, Cheradenine. You have to go.”

He shook his head. “I can’t. There’s no guarantee the truce will hold. They might need me.”

“The truce isn’t going to hold,” Sma told him, looking away. “Not on one side, anyway.” She put her glass down on a shelf.

“Eh?” he said. He glanced at the drone, which was looking non-committal. “Diziet, what are you talking about?”

“Zakalwe,” she said, eyes blinking rapidly; she tried to look at him, “A deal’s been done; you have to leave.”

He stared at her.

“What’s the deal, Dizzy?” he said softly.

“There was some… fairly low-level help being given to the Empire by the Humanist faction,” she told him, walking towards one wall, then returning, talking not to him but to the tile and carpet floor. “They had… face invested in what’s been happening here. The whole delicate structure of the deal did rather depend on the Empire triumphing here.” She stopped, glanced at the drone, looking away again. “Which is what everybody agreed was going to happen, up until a few days ago.”

“So,” he said slowly, putting aside his own drink, sitting down in a great chair that looked like a throne. “I messed things up by turning the game against the Empire, did I?”

“Yes,” Sma said, swallowing. “Yes, you did. I’m sorry. And I know it’s crazy, but that’s the way things are here, the way the people are here; the Humanists are divided at the moment, and there are factions within them that would use any excuse to argue for getting out of the deal, however insignificant that excuse might be. They might just be able to pull the whole thing down. We can’t take that risk. The Empire has to win.”

He sat, looking at a small table in front of him. He sighed. “I see. And all I have to do is leave?”

“Yes; come with us.”

“What happens after that?”

“The high priests will be kidnapped by an Imperial commando squad brought in by Humanist controlled aircraft. The citadel here will be taken over by the troops outside; there are raids planned on the field HQs; they should be pretty bloodless. If necessary, the Hegemonarchy planes, tanks, artillery pieces and trucks will be put out of action, should the armed forces ignore the call put out by the high priesthood to surrender their arms. Once they’ve seen a few planes and tanks laser-blasted from space, it’s expected the fight will go out of the army.”

Sma stopped pacing, came to stand in front of him, on the far side of the little table. “It all happens at dawn tomorrow. It should be fairly bloodless, really, Zakalwe. You might as well leave now; it would be best.” He heard her exhale. “You’ve done… brilliantly, Cheradenine. It’s worked; you did it; brought Beychae out, got him… motivated or whatever. We’re grateful. We’re very grateful, and it’s not easy…”

He raised one hand to stop her. He heard her sigh. He looked up from the small table, up to her face. “I can’t leave right away. There are a few things I have to do. I’d rather you left now and then came back. Pick me up tomorrow; at dawn.” He shook his head. “I won’t desert them until then.”

Sma opened her mouth, then closed it, glanced at the drone. “All right; we’ll be back tomorrow. Zakalwe, I—”

“It’s all right, Diziet,” he interrupted calmly, and slowly stood up. He looked into her eyes; she had to look away. “It’ll be as you say. Good-bye.” He didn’t hold out his hand.

Sma walked to the door; the drone followed her.

The woman looked back. He nodded once; she hesitated, seemed to think the better of saying anything, and went out.

The drone stopped there too. “Zakalwe,” it said. “I just want to add—”

“Out!” he screamed, and in one movement turned, swooped, caught the small table between the legs and threw it with all his might at the floating machine. The table bounced off an invisible field and clattered to the floor; the drone swept out and the door closed.

He stood staring at it for some time.

II

He was younger then. The memories were still fresh. He discussed them with the frozen, seemingly sleeping people sometimes, on his wanderings through the cold, dark ship, and wondered, in its silence, if he really was mad.

The experience of being frozen and of then being woken up had done nothing to dull his memories; they remained keen and bright. He had rather hoped that the claims they made for freezing were over-optimistic, and the brain did indeed lose at least some of its information; he’d secretly desired that attrition, but been disappointed. The process of warming and revival was actually rather less traumatic and confusing than coming round after being knocked unconscious, something that had happened to him a few times in his life. Revival was smoother, took longer, and was really quite pleasant; in truth quite like waking up after a good night’s sleep.

They left him alone for a couple of hours after they’d run the medical checks and pronounced him fit and well. He sat, wrapped in a big thick towel, on the bed, and — like somebody probing a diseased tooth with tongue or finger, unable to stop checking that it really does hurt every now and again — he called up his memories, going through the roll-call of those old and recent adversaries he’d hoped he might have lost somewhere in the darkness and the cold of space.

All his past was indeed present, and everything that had been wrong present too, and correct.

The ship was called the Absent Friends; its journey would take it over a century. It was a mercy voyage, in a way; its services donated by its alien owners to help assuage the after-effects of a terrible war. He had not really deserved his place, and had used false papers and a false name to secure his escape. He’d volunteered to be woken up near the middle of the journey to provide part of the human crew because he thought it would be a shame to travel in space and never really know it, never appreciate it, never look out into that void. Those who did not choose to do crew duty would be drugged on planet, taken into space unconscious, frozen out there, and then wake up on another planet.

This seemed undignified, to him. To be treated so was to become cargo.

The two other people on duty when he was woken were Ky and Erens. Erens had been supposed to return to the ranks of the frozen people five years earlier, after a few months of duty on the ship, but had decided to stay awake until they arrived at their destination. Ky had been revived three years later and should also have gone back to sleep, to be replaced after a few months by the next person on the crew rota, but by then Erens and Ky had started to argue, and neither wanted to be the first to return to the stasis of the freeze; there had been stalemate for two and a half years while the great slow ship moved, quiet and cold, past the distant pinprick lights that were the stars. Finally they’d woken him up, at last, because he was next on the rota and they wanted somebody else to talk to. As a rule, however, he just sat in the crew section and listened to the two of them argue.

“There’s still fifty years to go,” Ky reminded Erens.

Eren waved a bottle. “I can wait. It isn’t forever.”

Ky nodded at the bottle. “You’ll kill yourself with that stuff, and all the other junk you take. You’ll never make it. You’ll never see real sunlight again, or taste rain. You won’t last one year let alone fifty; you should go back to sleep.”

“It isn’t sleep.”

“You should go back to it, whatever you want to call it; you should let yourself be frozen again.”

“And it isn’t literally frozen… freezing, either.” Erens looked annoyed and puzzled at the same time.

The man they’d woken up wondered how many hundreds of times the two had been through this argument.

“You should go back into your little cold cubicle like you were supposed to, five years ago, and get them to treat you for your addictions when they revive you,” Ky said.

“The ship already treats me,” Erens told Ky, with a kind of slow drunken dignity. “I am in a state of grace with my enthusiasms; sublimely tensioned grace.” So saying, Erens tipped the bottle back and drained it.

“You’ll kill yourself.”

“It’s my life.”

“You might kill us all; everybody on the whole ship, sleepers too.”

“The ship looks after itself,” Erens sighed, looking round the Crew Lounge. It was the only dirty place on the ship. Everywhere else, the ship’s robots tidied, but Erens had worked out how to delete the Crew Lounge from the craft’s memory, and so the place could look good and scruffy. Erens stretched, kicking a couple of small recyclable cups off the table.

“Huh,” Ky said. “What if you’ve damaged it with all your messing around?”

“I have not been ‘messing around’ with it,” Erens said, with a small sneer. “I have altered a few of the more basic housekeeping programs; it doesn’t talk to us anymore, and it lets us keep this place looking lived-in; that’s about it. Nothing that’s going to make the ship wander into a star or start thinking it’s human and what are these intestinal parasites doing in there. But you wouldn’t understand. No technical background. Livu, here; he might understand, eh?” Erens stretched out further, sliding down the grubby seat, boots scraping on the filthy surface of the table. “You understand, don’t you, Darac?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted (he was used to answering to Darac, or Mr Livu, or just Livu, by now). “I suppose if you know what you’re doing, there’s no real harm.” Erens looked pleased. “On the other hand, a lot of disasters have been caused by people who thought they knew what they were doing.”

“Amen,” Ky said, looking triumphant, and leant aggressively towards Erens. “See?”

“As our friend said,” Erens pointed out, reaching for another bottle. “He doesn’t know.”

“You should go back with the sleepers,” Ky said.

“They’re not sleeping.”

“You’re not supposed to be up right now; there’s only supposed to be two people up at any point.”

“You go back then.”

“It isn’t my turn. You were up first.”

He left them to argue.

Sometimes he would put a spacesuit on and go through the airlock into the storage sections, which were in vacuum. The storage sections made up most of the ship; over ninety-nine per cent of it. There was a tiny drive unit at one end of the craft, an even tinier living unit at the other, and — in between — the bulging bulk of the ship, packed with the un-dead.

He walked the cold, dark corridors, looking from side to side at the sleeper units. They looked like drawers in a filing cabinet; each was the head-end of something very like a coffin. A little red light glowed faintly on each one, so that standing in one of the gently spiralling corridors, with his own suit lights switched off, those small and steady sparks curved away in a ruby lattice folded over the darkness, like some infinite corridor of red giant suns set up by some obsessively tidy-minded god.

Spiralling gradually upwards, moving away from the living unit at what he always thought of as the head of the ship, he walked up through its quiet, dark body. Usually he took the outermost corridor, just to appreciate the scale of the vessel. As he ascended, the pull of the ship’s fake gravity gradually decreased. Eventually, walking became a series of skidding leaps in which it was always easier to hit the ceiling than make any forward progress. There were handles on the coffin-drawers; he used them once walking became too inefficient, pulling himself along towards the waist of the ship, which — as he approached it — turned one wall of coffin-drawers to a floor and the other to a ceiling, in places. Standing under a radial corridor, he leapt up, floated towards what was now the ceiling with the radial corridor a chimney up through it. He caught a coffin-drawer handle, and used a succession of them as rungs, climbing into the centre of the ship.

Running through the centre of the Absent Friends there was an elevator shaft that extended from living unit to drive unit. In the very centre of the whole ship, he would summon the elevator, if it wasn’t already waiting there from last time.

When it came, he would enter it, floating inside the squat, yellow-lit cylinder. He would take out a pen, or a small torch, and place it in the centre of the elevator car, and just float there, watching the pen or torch, waiting to see if he had stationed it so exactly in the centre of the whole slowly spinning mass of the ship that it would stay where he’d left it.

He got very good at doing this, eventually, and could spend hours sitting there, with the suit lights and the elevator lights on sometimes (if it was a pen) or off (if it was a torch), watching the little object, waiting for his own dexterity to prove greater than his patience, waiting for — in other words, he could admit to himself — one part of his obsession to win over the other.

If the pen or torch moved and eventually connected with the walls or floor or ceiling of the elevator car, or drifted through the open door, then he had to float, climb (down) and then pull and walk back the way he had come. If it stayed still in the centre of the car, he was allowed to take the elevator back to the living unit.

“Come on, Darac,” Erens said, lighting up a pipe. “What brought you along on this one-way ride, eh?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He turned up the ventilation to get rid of Erens’ drug fumes. They were in the viewing carousel, the one place in the ship where you could get a direct view of the stars. He came up here every now and again, opened the shutters and watched the stars spin slowly overhead. Sometimes he tried to read poetry.

Erens still visited the carousel alone as well, but Ky no longer did; Erens reckoned Ky got homesick, seeing the silent nothingness out there, and the lonely specks that were other suns.

“Why not?” Erens said.

He shook his head and sat back in the couch, looking out into the darkness. “It isn’t any of your business.”

“I’ll tell you why I came along if you tell me why you did,” Erens grinned, making the words sound childish, conspiratorial.

“Get lost, Erens.”

“Mine is an interesting story; you’d be fascinated.”

“I’m sure,” he sighed.

“But I won’t tell you unless you tell me first. You’re missing a lot; mm-hmm.”

“Well, I’ll just have to live with that,” he said. He turned down the lighting in the carousel until the brightest thing in it was Erens’ face, glowing red with reflected light on each draw of the pipe. He shook his head when Erens offered him the drug.

“You need to loosen up, my friend,” Erens told him, slumping back in the other seat. “Get high; share your problems.”

“What problems?”

He saw Erens’ head shake in the darkness. “Nobody on this ship hasn’t got problems, friend. Nobody out here not running away from something.”

“Ah; ship psychiatrist now are we?”

“Hey, come on; nobody’s going back, are they? Nobody on here’s ever going back home. Half the people we know are probably dead already, and the ones that aren’t will be, by the time we get where we’re going. So if we can’t ever see the people we used to know again, and probably never see home again, it has to be something pretty damn important and pretty damn bad, pretty damn evil to make a body up and leave like that. We all got to be running from something, whether it’s something we did or something we had done to us.”

“Maybe some people just like travelling.”

“That’s crap; nobody likes travelling that much.”

He shrugged. “Whatever.”

“Aw, Darac, come on; argue, dammit.”

“I don’t believe in argument,” he said, looking out into the darkness (and saw a towering ship, a capital ship, ringed with its layers and levels of armament and armour, dark against the dusk light, but not dead).

“You don’t?” Erens said, genuinely surprised. “Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.”

“It’s not cynicism,” he said flatly. “I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.”

“Oh well, thank you.”

“It’s comforting, I suppose.” He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night; rising, peaking, falling… (And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) “Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,” he said. “And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses.”

“Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain’t cynicism, what is?” Erens snorted.

“Yes, excuses,” he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. “I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.” He looked at Erens. “You’ve attacked the wrong thing.”

“So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile… arguing stuff?”

“Agree to disagree,” he said. “Or fight.”

“Fight?”

He shrugged. “What else is left?”

“Negotiate?”

“Negotiation is a way to come to a conclusion; it’s the type of conclusion that I’m talking about.”

“Which basically is disagree or fight?”

“If it comes to it.”

Erens was silent for a while, drawing on the pipe until its red glow faded, then saying, “You have a military background, at all, yeah?”

He sat and watched the stars. Eventually he turned his head and looked at Erens. “I think the war gave us all a military background, don’t you?”

“Hmm,” Erens said. They both studied the slowly moving star-field.

Twice, in the depths of the sleeping ship, he almost killed somebody. One of those times, it was somebody else.

He stopped on the long, spiralling outer corridor, about halfway to the waist of the ship, where he felt very light on his feet, and his face was a little flushed with effects of normal blood pressure working against the reduced pull. He hadn’t intended to look at any of the stored people — the truth was, he never really thought about them in any but the most abstract way — but suddenly he wanted to see something more of a sleeper than just a little red light. He stopped at one of the coffin-drawers.

He had been shown how to work them after he’d volunteered to act as crew, and had another, rather perfunctory, run through the procedures shortly after being revived. He turned the suit lights on, flipped out the drawer’s control pad, and carefully — using one bulky, gloved finger — keyed in the code that Erens said turned off the ship’s monitoring system. A little blue light came on. The red light stayed steady; if it flashed the ship knew there was something wrong.

He unlocked the cabinet, drew the whole device sliding out.

He looked at the woman’s name, printed on a plastic strip stuck to the head-unit. No-one he knew, anyway, he thought. He opened the inner cover.

He looked in at the woman’s calm, deathly pale face. His lights reflected on the crinkled transparent plastic wrapping covering her like something you’d buy in a shop. Tubes in her nose and mouth, leading away beneath her. A small screen flashed on above her tied-up hair, on the head-unit. He looked; she seemed in good shape, for somebody so nearly completely dead. Her hands were crossed across the chest of the paper tunic she wore. He looked at her finger-nails, like Erens had said. Quite long, but he’d seen people grow them longer.

He looked at the control pad again, entered another code. Lights flashed all over the control surface; the red light did not start flashing, but almost everything else did. He opened a little red and green door set in the top of the head-unit. Out of it he took a small sphere of what looked like fine green wires, containing an ice blue cube. A compartment alongside gave access to a covered switch. He pushed the cover back, put his finger down to the switch.

He held the woman’s recorded brain patterns, backed-up onto the little blue cube. Easily crushable. His other hand, finger resting on the small switch, could turn off her life.

He wondered if he would do it, and seemed to wait for a while, as if expecting some part of his own mind to assume control from him. A couple of times it seemed to him that he felt the start of the impulse to throw the switch, and could have started to do so just an instant later, but each time suppressed the urge. He left his finger there, looked at the small cube inside its protective cage. He thought how remarkable and at the same time how oddly sad it was that all of a human mind could be contained in something so small. Then he reflected that a human brain was not so very much bigger than the little blue cube, and used resources and techniques far more ancient, and so was no less impressive (and still as sad).

He closed the woman up again in her chill sleep, and continued on his slow-motion walk to the centre of the ship.

“I don’t know any stories.”

“Everybody knows stories,” Ky told him.

“I don’t. Not proper stories.”

“What’s a ‘proper’ story?” Ky sneered. They sat in the Crew Lounge, surrounded by their debris.

He shrugged. “An interesting one. One people want to listen to.”

“People want to listen to different things. What one person would call a proper story might not please somebody else.”

“Well, I can only go by what I think would be a proper story, and I don’t have any. Not stories that I want to tell, anyway.” He grinned coldly at Ky.

“Ah; that’s different,” Ky nodded.

“Indeed it is.”

“Well, tell me what you believe in, then,” Ky said, leaning towards him.

“Why should I?”

“Why shouldn’t you? Tell me because I asked.”

“No.”

“Don’t be so stand-offish. We’re the only three people for billions of kilometres and the ship’s a bore; who else is there to talk to?”

“Nothing.”

“Exactly. Nothing and nobody.” Ky looked pleased.

“No; I meant that’s what I believe in; nothing.”

“At all?”

He nodded. Ky sat back, thoughtful, nodding. “They must have hurt you bad.”

“Who?”

“Whoever robbed you of whatever it was you used to believe in.”

He shook his head slowly. “Nobody ever robbed me of anything,” he said. Ky was silent for a while, so he sighed and said, “So, Ky, what do you believe in?”

Ky looked at the blank screen that covered most of one wall of the lounge. “Something other than nothing.”

“Anything with a name is other than nothing,” he said.

“I believe in what’s around us,” Ky said, arms crossed, sitting back in the seat. “I believe in what you can see from the carousel, what we’d see if that screen was on, although what you’d see wouldn’t be the only sort of what I believe in that I believe in.”

“In a word, Ky,” he said.

“Emptiness,” Ky said with a flickering, jittery smile. “I believe in emptiness.”

He laughed. “That’s pretty close to nothing.”

“Not really,” Ky said.

“Looks it to most of us.”

“Let me tell you a sort of story.”

“Must you?”

“No more than you must listen.”

“Yeah… okay, then. Anything to pass the time.”

“The story is this. It’s a true story, by the way, not that that matters. There is a place where the existence or non-existence of souls is taken very seriously indeed. Many people, whole seminaries, colleges, universities, cities and even states devote almost all their time to the contemplation and disputation of this matter and related topics.

“About a thousand years ago, a wise philosopher-king who was considered the wisest man in the world announced that people spent too much time discussing these things, and could, if the matter was settled, apply their energies to more practical pursuits which would benefit everybody. So he would end the argument once and for all.

“He summoned the wisest men and women from every part of the world, and of every known persuasion, to discuss the matter.

“It took many years to assemble every single person who wished to take part, and the resulting debates, papers, tracts, books, intrigues and even fights and murders took even longer.

“The philosopher-king took himself off to the mountains to spend these years alone, emptying his mind of everything so that he would be able, he hoped, to come back once the process of argument was ended and pronounce the final decision.

“After many years they sent for the king, and when he felt ready he listened to everyone who thought they had something to say on the existence of souls. When they had all said their piece, the king went away to think.

“After a year, the king announced he had come to his decision. He said that the answer was not quite so simple as everybody had thought, and he would publish a book, in several volumes, to explain the answer. The king set up two publishing houses, and each published a great and mighty volume. One repeated the sentences, ‘Souls do exist. Souls do not exist,’ time after time, part after part, page after page, section after section, chapter after chapter, book after book. The other repeated the words, ‘Souls do exist. Souls do not exist,’ in the same fashion. In the language of the kingdom, I might add, each sentence had the same number of words, even the same number of letters. These were the only words to be found beyond the title page in all the thousands of pages in each volume. The king had made sure that the books began and finished printing at the same time, and were published at the same time, and that exactly the same number were published. Neither of the publishing houses had any perceivable superiority or seniority over the other.

“People searched the volumes for clues; they looked for a single repetition, buried deep in the volumes, where a sentence or even a letter had been missed out or altered, but they found none. They turned to the king himself, but he had taken a vow of silence, and bound up his writing hand. He would still nod or shake his head in reply to questions concerning the governing of his kingdom, but on the subject of the two volumes, and the existence or otherwise of souls, the king would give no sign.

“Furious disputes arose, many books were written; new cults began. Then a half-year after the two volumes had been published, two more appeared, and this time the house that had published the volume beginning, ‘Souls do not exist,’ published the volume which began, ‘Souls do exist.’ The other publisher followed suit, so that theirs now began, ‘Souls do not exist.’ This became the pattern.

“The king lived to be very old, and saw several dozen volumes published. When he was on his death bed, the court philosopher placed copies of the book on either side of him, hoping the king’s head would fall to one side or the other at the moment of death, so indicating by the first sentence of the appropriate volume which conclusion he had really come to… but he died with his head straight on the pillow and with his eyes, under the eyelids, looking straight ahead.

“That was a thousand years ago,” Ky said. “The books are published still; they have become an entire industry, an entire philosophy, a source of un-ending argument and—”

“Is there an ending to this story?” he asked, holding up one hand.

“No,” Ky smiled smugly. “There is not. But that is just the point.”

He shook his head, got up and left the Crew Lounge.

“But just because something does not have an ending,” Ky shouted, “doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a…”

The man closed the elevator door, outside in the corridor; Ky rocked forward in the seat and watched the lift-level indicator ascend to the middle of the ship. “…conclusion,” Ky said, quietly.

He’d been revived nearly half a year when he almost killed himself.

He was in the elevator car, watching a torch he had left in the centre of the car as it slowly spun. He had left the torch switched on, and put out all the other lights. He watched the tiny spot of light move slowly around the circular wall of the car, slow as any clock hand.

He remembered the search lights of the Staberinde, and wondered how far they were away from it now. So far that even the sun itself must be weaker than a searchlight seen from space.

He did not know why that made him think of just taking off the helmet, but found himself starting to do it, nevertheless.

He stopped. It was quite a complicated procedure to open the suit while in vacuum. He knew each of the steps, but it would take some time. He looked at the white spot of light which the torch was shining on the wall of the lift, not far from his head. The white spot was gradually coming closer as the torch spun. He would start to ready the suit to take the helmet off; if the torch beam hit his eye — no, his face, any part of his head — before that, then he would stop, and go back as though nothing had happened. Otherwise, if the spot of light did not strike his face in time, he would take the helmet off and die.

He allowed himself the luxury of letting the memories wash over him, while his hands slowly began the sequence that would end, unless interrupted, with the helmet being blasted off his shoulders by the air pressure.

Staberinde, the great metal ship stuck in stone (and a stone ship, a building stuck in water), and the two sisters. Darckense; Livueta (and of course he’d realised at the time that he was taking their names, or something like their names, in making the one he masqueraded under now). And Zakalwe, and Elethiomel. Elethiomel the terrible, Elethiomel the Chairmaker…

The suit beeped at him, trying to warn him he was doing something very dangerous. The spot of light was a few centimetres from his head.

Zakalwe; he tried to ask himself what the name meant to him. What did it mean to anybody? Ask them all back home; what does this name mean to you? War, perhaps, in the immediate aftermath; a great family, if your memory was long enough; a kind of tragedy. If you knew the story.

He saw the chair again. Small and white. He closed his eyes, tasting bitterness in his throat.

He opened his eyes. Three final clips to go, then one quick twist… he looked at the spot of light. It was invisible, so close to the helmet, so close to his head. The torch in the centre of the elevator car was facing almost straight at him, its lens bright. He undid one of the three final helmet clips. There was a tiny hiss, barely noticeable.

Dead, he thought, seeing the girl’s pale face. He undid another clip. The hiss grew no louder.

There was a sense of brightness at the side of the helmet, where the light would be shining.

Metal ship, stone ship, and the unconventional chair. He felt tears come to his eyes, and one hand — the one not undoing the third helmet clip — went to his chest, where, under the many synthetic layers of the suit, beneath the fabric of the under-suit, there was a small puckered mark on the skin just over his heart; a scar that was two decades old, or seven decades old, depending how you measured time.

The torch swung, and just as the final clip came undone, and the spot of light started to leave the inside edge of the suit, to shine on his face, the torch flickered and went out.

He stared. It was almost totally dark. There was the hint of light from outside the car; the faintest of red glows, produced by all the near-dead people and the quietly watching equipment.

Out. The torch had gone out; charge exhausted or just a fault, it didn’t matter. It had gone out. It hadn’t shone on his face. The suit beeped again, plaintive above the quiet hiss of escaping air.

He looked down, at the hand that lay over his chest.

He looked back up at where the torch must be, unseen in the centre of the car in the centre of the ship, in the middle of its journey.

How do I die now? he thought.

He did go back to his chill sleep, after a year. Erens and Ky, their sexual predilections forever estranging them despite the fact they seemed like a well-matched couple otherwise, were still arguing when he left.

He ended up in another lo-tech war, learning to fly (because he knew now that aircraft would always win against a battleship), and flying the frosty vortices of air above the vast white islands that were the colliding tabular icebergs.

Thirteen

Where they lay, the discarded robes looked like the just-shed skin of some exotic reptile. He had been going to wear those, but then changed his mind. He would wear the clothes he had come here in.

He stood in the bathroom, in its steams and smells, stopping the razor again, then putting it to his head, slowly and carefully as though pulling a comb through his hair in slow motion. The razor scraped through the foam on his skin, catching a last few stubbly hairs. He swept the razor past the tops of his ears, then took up a towel, wiped the gleaming skin of his skull, inspecting the baby-smooth landscape he had revealed. The long dark hair lay scattered on the floor, like plumage scattered during a fight.

He looked out to the citadel parade grounds, where a few weak fires glowed. Above the mountains, the sky was just starting to become light.

From the window, he could see a few craggy levels of the citadel’s curbed wall and jutting towers. In that first outlining light, it looked, he thought — though trying hard not to feel maudlin — poignant, even noble, now that he knew it was doomed.

He turned from the sight and went to put on his shoes. The air moved over his shaven skull, feeling very strange. He missed the feel and sweep of his hair on the nape of his neck. He sat on the bed, pulled on the shoes and clasped them, then looked at the telephone sitting on the bedside cabinet. He lifted the device.

He recalled (he seemed to remember) contacting the space port last night, after Sma and Skaffen-Amtiskaw had gone. He had been feeling bad, dissociated and remote somehow, and he was not at all certain he really did remember calling the technicians there, but he thought he probably had. He’d told them to ready the ancient space craft, for the Decapitation strike, sometime that morning. Or he hadn’t. One of the two. Maybe he had been dreaming.

He heard the citadel operator asking him who he wanted. He asked for the space port.

He talked to the technicians. The chief flight engineer sounded tense, excited. The craft was ready, fuelled up, coordinates locked in; it could be launched within a few minutes as soon as he gave the word.

He nodded to himself as he listened to the man. He heard the chief flight engineer pause. The question was unasked, but there.

He watched the skies outside the window. They still looked dark, from inside here. “Sir?” the chief flight engineer said. “Sir Zakalwe? What are your orders, sir?”

He saw the little blue cube, the button; he heard the whisper of escaping air. There was a shudder, just then. He thought it was his own body, reacting involuntarily, but it was not; the shudder ran through the fabric of the citadel, through the walls of the room, through the bed beneath him. Glass rattled in the room. The noise of the explosion rumbled through the air beyond the thick windows, low and unsettling.

“Sir?” the man said. “Are you still there?”

They would probably intercept the spacecraft; the Culture itself — the Xenophobe, probably — would use effectors on it… the decapitation strike was bound to fail…

“What should we do, sir?”

But there was always a possibility…

“Hello? Hello, sir?”

Another explosion shook the citadel. He looked at the handset he held. “Sir, do we go ahead?” he heard a man say, or remembered a man saying, from long ago and far away… And he had said yes, and taken on a terrible cargo of memories, and all the names that might bury him…

“Stand down,” he said quietly. “We won’t need the strike now,” he said. He put the handset down, and left the room quickly, taking the rear stairs, away from the main entrance to his apartments, where he could already hear a commotion building.

More explosions shook the citadel, dislodging dust around him as the curtain wall was breached and breached again. He wondered how it would be with the regional headquarters, how they would fall, and whether the raid to capture the high priests would be as bloodless as Sma had hoped. But he realised even as he thought about it all that he no longer really cared.

He left the citadel via a postern and entered the great square that was the parade ground. The small fires still burned outside the tents of the refugees. In the distance, great clouds of dust and smoke floated slowly into the grey dawn sky above the curtain wall. He could see a couple of gaps in the wall from here. The people in the tents were starting to wake up and come out. From the citadel walls at his back and above him, he could hear the crackle of gunfire.

A heavier gun fired from the breached walls, and a huge explosion shook the ground, ripping a great hole in the cliff that was the citadel; an avalanche of stone thundered into the parade ground, burying a dozen tents. He wondered what sort of ammunition the tank was firing; not a type they’d had until this morning, he suspected.

He walked on through the tent city, as the people appeared, blinking, from their sleep. Scattered firing continued from the citadel; the vast cloud of dust rolled over the parade ground from the great tumbled breach in the towering walls. Another shot from near the curtain walls; another ground-quaking detonation that brought a whole side of the citadel down, the stones bursting from the wall as though with relief, falling and tumbling in their own rolling dust; released, returning to the earth.

There was less firing from the citadel ramparts now, as the dust drifted and the sky slowly lightened and the frightened people clutched at each other outside their tents. More firing came from the breached curtain walls, and from inside the parade ground, within the tent city.

He walked on. Nobody stopped him; few people really seemed to notice him. He saw a soldier fall from the curtain wall to his right, tumbling into the dust. He saw the people running this way and that. He saw the Imperial Army soldiers, in the distance, riding on a tank.

He walked through the clustered tents, avoiding people running, stepping over a couple of the smouldering fires. The huge breaches in the curtain wall and the citadel itself smoked in the increasing grey light, which was just starting to take on colour as the sky burned pink and blue.

Sometimes, as the people milled and streamed around him, running past, clutching babies, dragging children, he thought he saw people he recognised, and several times was on the point of turning and talking to them, putting out his hand to stop the snowfall effaces rushing past him, shouting after them…

Suddenly aircraft screamed overhead, tearing through the air over the curtain wall, dropping long canisters into the tents, which erupted in flame and black, black smoke. He saw burning people, heard the screams, smelled the roasting flesh. He shook his head.

Terrified people jostled him, bumped into him, once knocked him down so that he had to pick himself up, dust himself down, and suffer the knocks and the shouts and screams and curses. The aircraft came back, strafing, and he was the only one who stayed upright, walking while the rest fell to the ground; he watched the puffs and bursts of dust fountain in lines around him, saw the clothing of a few of the fallen people suddenly jerk and flap as a round hit home.

It was getting lighter as he encountered the first troops. He dodged behind a tent and rolled as a trooper fired at him, then got back on his feet and ran round the rear of a tent, almost bumping into another soldier, who swung his carbine round too late. He kicked it away. The soldier drew a knife. He let him lunge and took the knife, throwing the soldier to the ground. He looked at the blade he held in his hand, and shook his head. He threw the knife away, looked at the soldier — lying on the ground staring fearfully up at him — then shrugged and walked away.

Still people rushing past; soldiers shouting. He saw one take aim at him, and could not see anywhere to go for cover. He raised his hand to explain, to say there was really no need, but the man shot him anyway.

Not a very good shot, considering the range, he thought as he was kicked back and spun round by the force of the impact.

Upper chest near the shoulder. No lung damage, and possibly not even a chipped rib, he thought as the shock and pain burst through him, and he fell.

He lay still in the dust, near the staring face of a dead city guardsman. As he’d spun round, he’d seen the Culture module; a clear shape hovering uselessly over the remains of his apartments high in the ruined citadel.

Somebody kicked him, turning him over and bursting a rib at the same time. He tried not to react to the stab of pain, but looked through cracked eyes. He waited for the coup-de-grace, but it did not come.

The shadow-figure above him, dark against light, passed on.

He lay a while longer, then got up. It wasn’t too difficult to walk at first, but then the planes came back again, and though he didn’t get hit by a bullet, something splintered somewhere nearby, as he passed by some tents that shook and rippled as the bullets hit them, and he wondered if the sharp, puncturing pain in his thigh was a bit of wood or stone, or even bone, from somebody in one of the tents. “No,” he muttered to himself as he limped away, heading for the biggest breach in the wall. “No; not funny. Not bone. Not funny.”

An explosion blew him off his feet, into and through a tent. He got up, head buzzing. He looked round and up at the citadel, its summit starting to glow with the first direct sunlight of the day. He couldn’t see the module any more. He took a shattered wooden tent pole to use as a crutch; his leg was hurting.

Dust wrapped him, screams of engines and aircraft and human voices pierced him; the smells of burning and stone-dust and exhaust fumes choked him. His wounds talked to him in the languages of pain and damage, and he had to listen to them, but paid them no further heed. He was shaken and pummelled and tripped and stumbled and drained and fell to his knees, and thought perhaps he was hit by more bullets, but was no longer sure.

Eventually, near the breach, he fell, and thought he might just lie here for a while. The light was better, and he felt tired. The dust drifted like pale shrouds. He looked up at the sky, pale blue, and thought how beautiful it was, even through all this dust, and, listening to the tanks as they came crunching up through the slope of wrecked stones, reflected that, like tanks everywhere, they squeaked more than they roared.

“Gentlemen,” (he whispered to the rabid blue sky) “I am reminded of something the worshipful Sma said to me once, on the subject of heroism, which was something like: ‘Zakalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.’ ” He sighed. “Well, no doubt she didn’t say every age and every state, because the Culture just loves there to be exceptions to everything, but… that was the gist of it… I think…”

He rolled over, away from the achingly blue sky, to stare at the blurred dust.

Eventually, reluctantly, he pushed himself over, and then half up, then to his knees, then clutched at the tent-pole crutch and forced down on it, and got to his feet, ignoring all the pestering aches and pains, and staggered for the piled wreckage of the walls, and somehow dragged and hauled and scraped his way to the top, where the walls ran smooth and wide for a way, like roadways in the sky, and the bodies of a dozen or so soldiers lay, blood pooling, the ramparts around them scarred with bullet holes and grey with dust.

He staggered towards them, as though anxious to be one of their number. He scanned the skies for the module.

It was some time before they spotted the “Z” sign he made from the bodies on the top of the walls, but in that language it was a complicated letter, and he kept getting mixed up.

I

No lights burned on the Staberinde. It sat squat against the grey leechings of the false dawn, its dim silhouette a piled cone which only hinted at the concentric loops and lines of its decks and guns. Some effect of the marsh mists between him and the ziggurat of the ship made it look as though its black shape was not attached to the land at all, but floated over it, poised like some threatening dark cloud.

He watched with tired eyes, stood on tired feet. This close to the city and the ship, he could smell the sea, and — nose this close to the concrete of the bunker — a limey scent, acrid and bitter. He tried to remember the garden and the smell of flowers, the way he sometimes did whenever the fighting started to seem just too futile and cruel to have any point whatsoever, but for once he could not conjure up that faintly-remembered, beguilingly poignant perfume, or recall anything good that had come out of that garden (instead he saw again those sun-tanned hands on his sister’s pale hips, the ridiculous little chair they’d chosen for their fornication… and he remembered the last time he had seen the garden, the last time he’d been to the estate; with the tank corps, and he’d seen the chaos and ruin Elethiomel had visited upon the place that had been the cradle for both of them; the great house gutted, the stone boat wrecked, the woods burned… and his last glimpse of the hateful little summer house where he’d found them, as he took his own retaliatory action against the tyranny of memory; the tank rocking beneath him, the already flare-lit clearing whiting out with bright flame, his ears ringing with a sound that was no sound, and the little house… was still there; the shot had gone right through, exploded somewhere in the woods behind, and he’d wanted to weep and scream and tear it all down with his own hands… but then had remembered the man who had sat there, and thought how he might treat something like this, and so had gathered the strength to laugh at it, and ordered the gunner to aim at the top step beneath the little house, and saw it all finally lift and burst into the air. The debris fell around the tank, sprinkling him with earth and wood and ripped bundles of thatch).

The night beyond the bunker was warm and oppressive, the land’s day-time heat trapped and pressed to the ground by the weight of clouds above, sticking against the skin of the land like some sweat-soaked shirt. Perhaps the wind changed then, for he thought he detected the smell of the grass and the hay in the air, swept hundreds of kilometres from the great prairies inland by some wind since spent, the old fragrance going stale now. He closed his eyes and leant his forehead against the rough concrete of the bunker wall, beneath the slit he’d been looking through; his fingers splayed out lightly on the hard, grainy surface, and he felt the warm material press into his flesh.

Sometimes all he wanted was for it all to be over, and the way of it did not really seem to matter. Cessation was all, simple and demanding and seductive, and worth almost anything. That was when he had to think of Darckense, trapped on the ship, held captive by Elethiomel. He knew she didn’t love their cousin any more; that had been something brief and juvenile, something she’d used in her adolescence to get back at the family for some imagined slight, some favouring of Livueta over her. It might have seemed like love at the time, but he suspected even she knew it was not, now. He believed that Darckense really was an unwilling hostage; many people had been taken by surprise when Elethiomel attacked the city; just the speed of the advance had trapped half the population, and Darckense had been unlucky to be discovered trying to leave from the chaos of the airport; Elethiomel had had agents out looking for her.

So for her he had to go on fighting, even if he had almost worn away the hate in his heart for Elethiomel, the hate that had kept him fighting these last years, but now was running out, just worn down by the abrading course of the long war.

How could Elethiomel do it? Even if he didn’t still love her (and the monster claimed that Livueta was his real desire), how could he use her like another shell stored in the battleship’s cavernous magazines?

And what was he supposed to do in reply? Use Livueta against Elethiomel? Attempt the same level of cunning cruelty?

Already Livueta blamed him, not Elethiomel, for all that had happened. What was he supposed to do? Surrender? Barter sister for sister? Mount some mad, doomed rescue attempt? Simply attack?

He had tried to explain that only a prolonged siege guaranteed success, but argued about it so often now that he was starting to wonder if he was right.

“Sir?”

He turned, looked at the dim figures of the commanders behind him. “What?” he snapped.

“Sir,” — it was Swaels — “Sir, perhaps we should be setting off now, back to headquarters. The cloud is breaking from the east, and it will be dawn soon… we shouldn’t be caught in range.”

“I know that,” he said. He glanced out at the dark outline of the Staberinde, and felt himself flinch a little, as though he expected its huge guns to belch flame right there and then, straight at him. He drew a metal shutter across the concrete slit. It was very dark in the bunker for a second, then somebody switched on the harsh yellow lights and they all stood there, blinking in the glare.

They left the bunker; the long mass of the armoured staff car waited in the darkness. Assorted aides and junior officers leapt to attention, straightened caps, saluted and opened doors. He climbed into the car, sitting on the fur-covered rear bench, watching as three of the other commanders followed, sitting in a line opposite him. The armoured door clanged shut; the car growled and moved, bumping over the uneven ground and back into the forest, away from the dark shape resting in the night behind.

“Sir,” Swaels said, exchanging looks with the other two commanders. “The other commanders and I have discussed—”

“You are going to tell me that we should attack; bomb and shell the Staberinde until it is a flaming hulk and then storm it with troop hovers,” he said, holding up one hand, “I know what you’ve been discussing and I know what… decisions you think you’ve arrived at. They do not interest me.”

“Sir, we all realise the strain you are under because your sister is held on the ship, but—”

“That has nothing to do with it, Swaels,” he told the other man. “You insult me by implying that I even consider that a reason for holding off. My reasons are sound military reasons, and foremost of those is that the enemy has succeeded in creating a fortress that is, at the moment, almost impregnable. We must wait until the winter floods, when the fleet can negotiate the estuary and the channel, and engage the Staberinde on equal terms; to send in aircraft or attempt to engage in an artillery duel would be the height of folly.”

“Sir,” Swaels said. “Much as we are distressed at having to disagree with you, we nevertheless—”

“You will be silent, Commander Swaels,” he said icily. The other man swallowed. “I have sufficient matters to worry about without having to concern myself with the drivel that passes for serious military planning between my senior officers, or, I might add, with replacing any of those senior officers.”

For a while there was only the distant grumbling noise of the car engine. Swaels looked shocked; the other two commanders were staring at the rug floor. Swaels’ face looked shiny. He swallowed again. The voice of the labouring car seemed to emphasize the silence in the rear compartment as the four men were jostled and shaken; then the car found a metalled road, and roared off, pressing him back in the seat, making the other three sway towards him before sitting back again.

“Sir, I am ready to lea—”

“Must this go on?” he complained, hoping to stop Swaels. “Can’t you lift even this small burden from me? All I ask is that you do as you ought. Let there be no disagreement; let us fight the enemy, not amongst ourselves.”

“… to leave your staff, if you so wish,” Swaels continued.

Now it was as though the noise of the engine did not intrude inside the passenger cell at all; a frozen silence — held not in the air, but in the expression of Swaels’ face and the still, tensed bodies of the other two commanders — seemed to settle over the four, like some prescient breath of a winter that was still half a year away. He wanted to close his eyes, but could not show such weakness. He kept his gaze fixed on the man directly across from him.

“Sir, I have to tell you that I disagree with the course you are pursuing, and I am not alone. Sir, please believe me that I and the other commanders love you as we love our country; with all our hearts. But because of that love, we cannot stand by while you throw away everything you stand for and all we believe in trying to defend a mistaken decision.”

He saw Swaels’ hands knit together, as though in supplication. No gentleman of breeding, he thought, almost dreamily, ought to begin a sentence with the unfortunate word “but”…

“Sir, believe me I wish that I was wrong. I and the other commanders have done everything to try to accommodate your views, but we cannot. Sir, if you have any love for any of your commanders, we beseech you; think again. Remove me if you feel you must, sir, for having spoken like this; court-martial me, demote me, execute me, forbid my name, but, sir; reconsider, while there is still time.”

They sat still, as the car hummed along the road, swerving occasionally for corners, jiggling left-right or right-left to avoid craters, and… and we must all look, he thought, as we sit here, frozen in the weak yellow light, like the stiffening dead.

“Stop the car,” he heard himself saying. His finger was already depressing the intercom button. The car rumbled down through the gears and came to a halt. He opened the door. Swaels’ eyes were closed.

“Get out,” he told him.

Swaels looked suddenly like an old man hit by the first of many blows. It was as though he had shrunk, collapsed inside. A warm gust of wind threatened to close the door again; he held it open with one hand.

Swaels bent forward and got slowly out of the car. He stood by the dark roadside for a moment; the cone of light thrown out by the staff car’s interior lights swept across his face, then disappeared.

Zakalwe locked the door, “Drive on,” he told the driver.

They raced away from the dawn and the Staberinde, before its guns could find and destroy them.

They had thought they’d won. In the spring they’d had more men and more matériel and in particular they had more heavy guns; at sea the Staberinde lurked as a threat but not a presence, famished of the fuel it needed for effective raids against their forces and convoys; almost more of a liability. But then Elethiomel had had the great battleship tugged and dredged through the seasonal channels, over the ever-changing banks to the empty dry-dock, where they’d blasted the extra room and somehow got the ship inside, closed the gates, pumped out the water and pumped in concrete, and — so his advisors had suggested — probably some sort of shock-absorbing cushion between the metal and the concrete, or the half-metre calibre guns would have shaken the vessel to pieces by now. They suspected Elethiomel had used rubbish; junk, to line the sides of his improvised fortress.

He found that almost amusing.

The Staberinde was not really impregnable (though it was, now, quite literally unsinkable); it could be taken, but it would exact a terrible price in the taking.

And of course, having had their breathing space, and time to re-equip, perhaps the forces in and around the ship and the city would break out; that possibility had been discussed, too, and Elethiomel was quite capable of it.

But whatever he thought about it, however he approached the problem, it always came back to him. The men would do as he asked; the commanders would too, or he’d have them replaced; the politicians and the church had given him a free hand and would back him in anything he did. He felt secure in that; as secure as any commander ever could. But what was he to do?

He had expected to inherit a perfectly drilled peace-time army, splendid and impressive, and eventually to hand that over to some other young scion of the Court in the same creditable condition, so that the traditions of honour and obedience and duty could be continued. Instead he found himself at the head of an army going to furious war against an enemy he knew was largely made up of his own countrymen, and commanded by a man he had once thought of as a friend as well as almost a brother.

So he had to give orders that meant men died, and sometimes sacrifice hundreds, thousands of them, knowingly sending them to their near-certain deaths, just to secure some important position or goal, or protect some vital position. And always, whether they liked it or not, the civilians suffered too; the very people they both claimed to be fighting for made up perhaps the bulk of the casualties in their bloody struggle.

He had tried to stop it, tried to bargain, from the beginning, but neither side wanted peace on anything except its own terms, and he had no real political power, and so had had to fight. His success had amazed him, as it had others, probably not least Elethiomel, but now, poised on the brink of victory — perhaps — he just did not know what to do.

More than anything else now, though, he wanted to save Darckense. He had seen too many dead, dry eyes, too much air-blackened blood, too much fly-blown flesh, to be able to relate such ghastly truths to the nebulous ideas of honour and tradition that people claimed they were fighting for. Only the well-being of one loved person seemed really worth fighting for now; it was all that seemed real, all that could save his sanity. To acknowledge the interest millions of other people had in whatever happened here was to place too great a burden on him; it would be to admit, by implication, that he was at least partially responsible for the deaths already of hundreds of thousands, even if nobody else could have fought more humanely.

So he waited; held back the commanders and the squadron leaders, and waited for Elethiomel to reply to his signals.

The two other commanders said nothing. He put out the lights in the car, un-shuttered the doors, and looked out at the dark mass of the forest, racing past under dull dawn skies the colour of steel.

They moved past dim bunkers, dark trenches, still figures, stopped trucks, sunken tanks, taped windows, hooded guns, raised poles, grey clearings, wrecked buildings and slitted lamps; all the paraphernalia of the outskirts of the headquarters camp. He watched it all and wished — as they moved closer to the centre, to the old castle that had become his home in all but name over the last couple of months — he wished that he did not have to stop, and could just go on driving through the dawn and the day and the night again forever, cleaving the finally unyielding trees towards nothing and nowhere and no-one — even if it was in an icy silence — secure in the nadir of his sufferings, perversely content that at least now they could grow no worse; just to go on and on and never have to stop and make decisions that would not wait but which might mean he would commit mistakes he could never forget and would never be forgiven for…

The car reached the castle courtyard and he got out. Surrounded by aides, he swept into the grand old house that had, once, been Elethiomel’s HQ.

They pestered him with a hundred details of logistics and intelligence reports and skirmishes and small amounts of ground lost or gained; there were requests from civilians and the foreign press for this and that. He dismissed them all, told the junior commanders to deal with them. He took the stairs to his offices two at a time, handed his jacket and cap to his ADC, and closed himself in his darkened study, his eyes closed, his back against the double doors, the brass handles still clutched in his hands at the small of his back. The quiet, dark room was a balm.

“Been out to gaze upon the beast, have you?”

He started, then recognized Livueta’s voice. He saw her by the windows, a dark figure. He relaxed. “Yes,” he said. “Close the drapes.”

He turned on the room lights.

“What are you going to do?” she said, walking slowly closer, her arms folded, her dark hair gathered up, her face troubled.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, going to the desk and sitting. He put his face in his hands and rubbed it. “What would you have me do?”

“Talk with him,” she said, sitting on the corner of the desk, arms still crossed. She was dressed in a long dark skirt, dark jacket. She was always in dark clothes nowadays.

“He won’t talk to me,” he said, sitting back in the ornate chair he knew the junior officers called his throne. “I can’t make him reply.”

“You can’t be saying the right things,” she said.

“I don’t know what to say, then,” he said, closing his eyes again. “Why don’t you compose the next message?”

“You wouldn’t let me say what I’d want to say, or if you let me say it, you wouldn’t live up to it.”

“We can’t just all lay down our weapons, Livvy, and I don’t think anything else would work; he wouldn’t pay any attention.”

“You could meet face to face; that might be the way to settle things.”

“Livvy; the first messenger we sent personally came back without his SKIN!” He screamed the last word, suddenly losing all patience and control. Livueta flinched, and stepped away from the desk. She sat in an ornamental winged couch, her long fingers rubbing at the gold thread sewn into an arm.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I didn’t mean to shout.”

“She’s our sister, Cheradenine. There must be more we can do.”

He looked about the room, as though for some fresh inspiration, “Livvy; we have been over this and over this and over this; don’t you… can’t I get it through? Isn’t it clear?” He slapped both hands on the desk. “I am doing all I can. I want her out of there as much as you do, but while he has her, there is just nothing more I can do; except attack, and that probably would be the death of her.”

She shook her head. “What is it between you two?” she asked. “Why won’t you talk to each other? How can you forget everything from when we were children?”

He shook his head, pushed himself up from the desk, turned to the book-lined wall behind, gaze running over the hundreds of titles without really seeing them. “Oh,” he said tiredly, “I haven’t forgotten, Livueta.” He felt a terrible sadness then, as though the extent of what he felt they had all lost only became real to him when there was somebody else there to acknowledge it. “I haven’t forgotten anything.”

“There must be something else you can do,” she insisted.

“Livueta, please believe me; there isn’t.”

“I believed you when you told me she was safe and well,” the woman said, looking down at the arm of the couch, where her long nails had started to pick at the precious thread. Her mouth was a tight line.

“You were ill,” he sighed.

“What difference does that make?”

“You might have died!” he said. He went to the curtains and began straightening them. “Livueta; I couldn’t have told you they had Darckle; the shock—”

“The shock for this poor, weak woman,” Livueta said, shaking her head, still tearing at the threads on the couch arm. “I’d rather you spared me that insulting nonsense than spare me the truth about my own sister.”

“I was only trying to do what was best,” he told her, starting towards her, then stopping, retreating to the corner of the desk where she had sat.

“I’m sure,” she said laconically. “The habit of taking responsibility comes with your exalted position, I suppose. I am expected to be grateful, no doubt.”

“Livvy, please, must you —?”

“Must I what?” She looked at him, eyes sparkling. “Must I make life difficult for you? Yes?”

“All I want,” he said slowly, trying to control himself. “Is for you to try… and understand. We need to… to stick together, to support each other right now.”

“You mean I have to support you even though you won’t support Darckle,” Livueta said.

“Dammit, Livvy!” he shouted. “I am doing my best! There isn’t just her; there’s a lot of other people I have to worry about. All my men; the civilians in the city; the whole damn country!” He went forward to her, knelt in front of the winged couch, put his hand on the same arm that her long-nailed hand picked at. “Livueta; please. I am doing all it is possible to do. Help me in this. Back me up. The other commanders want to attack; I’m all there is between Darckense and—”

“Maybe you should attack,” she said suddenly. “Maybe that’s the one thing he isn’t expecting.”

He shook his head. “He has her in the ship; we’d have to destroy that before we can take the city.” He looked her in the eye. “Do you trust him not to kill her, even if she isn’t killed in the attack?”

“Yes,” Livueta said. “Yes, I do.”

He held her gaze for a while, certain that she would recant or at least look away, but she just kept looking straight back at him. “Well,” he said eventually, “I can’t take that risk.” He sighed, closing his eyes, resting his head against the arm of the couch. “There’s so much… pressure on me.” He tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away. “Livueta, don’t you think I feel? Don’t you think I care about what happens to Darckle? Do you think that I’m not still the brother you knew as well as the soldier they made me? Do you think that because I have an army to do my bidding, and ADCs and junior officers to obey every whim, I don’t get lonely?”

She stood up suddenly, without touching him. “Yes,” she said, looking down at him, while he looked at the threads of gold on the couch arm. “You are lonely, and I am lonely, and Darckense is lonely, and he is lonely, and everybody is lonely!”

She turned quickly, the long skirt briefly belling, and walked to the door and out. He heard the doors slam, and stayed where he was, kneeling in front of the abandoned couch like some rejected suitor. He pushed his smallest finger through a loop in the gold thread Livueta had teased from the couch arm, and pulled at it until it burst.

He got up slowly, walked to the window, slipped through the drapes and stood looking out at the grey dawn. Men and machines moved through the vague wisps of mist, grey skeins like nature’s own gauzy camouflage nets.

He envied the men he could see. He was sure most of them envied him, in return; he was in control, he had the soft bed and did not have to tread through trench mud, or deliberately stub his toes against rocks to keep awake on guard duty… But he envied them, nevertheless, because they only had to do what they were told. And — he admitted to himself — he envied Elethiomel.

Would that he were more like him, he thought, all too often. To have that ruthless cunning, that extemporising guile; he wanted that.

He slunk back through the drapes, guilty at the thought. At the desk he turned the room lights off and sat back in the seat. His throne, he thought and, for the first time in days, laughed a little, because it was such an image of power and he felt so utterly powerless.

He heard a truck draw up outside the window, where it was not supposed to. He sat still, suddenly thinking; a massive bomb, just out there… and was suddenly terrified. He heard a sergeant barking, some talk, and then the truck moved a little way off, though he could still hear its engine.

After a while, he heard raised voices in the hall stair-well. There was something about the tone of the voices that chilled him. He tried to tell himself he was being foolish, and turned all the lights back on, but he could still hear them. Then there was something like a scream, cut-off abruptly. He shook. He unholstered his pistol, wishing he had something more lethal than this slim little dress-uniform gun. He went to the door. The voices sounded odd; some were raised, while some people were apparently trying to keep theirs quiet. He opened the door a crack, then went through; his ADC was at the far door, onto the stairs, looking down.

He put the pistol back in his holster. He walked out to join the ADC, and followed his gaze, down into the hall. He saw Livueta, staring wide-eyed back up at him; there were a few other soldiers, one of the other commanders. They stood round a small white chair. He frowned; Livueta looked upset. He went quickly down the steps; Livueta suddenly came bounding up to meet him, skirt hem flying. She pushed into him, both hands against his chest. He staggered back, amazed.

“No,” she said. Her eyes were bright and staring; her face looked more pale than he’d ever seen before. “Go back,” she said. Her voice sounded thick, like it was not her own.

“Livueta…” he said, annoyed, and pushed himself away from the wall, trying to glance round her at whatever was happening in the hall round the little white chair.

She pushed him again. “Go back,” the thick, strange voice said.

He took her wrists in his hands, “Livueta,” he said, voice low, eyes flicking to indicate the people standing beneath in the hall.

“Go back,” the strange, terrifying voice said.

He pushed her away, annoyed at her, tried to go past her. She attempted to grab him from behind. “Back!” she gasped.

“Livueta, stop this!” he shook her off, embarrassed now. He clattered quickly down the steps before she could grab him again.

Still she threw herself down after him, clutched at his waist. “Go back!” she wailed.

He turned round. “Get off me! I want to see what’s going on!” He was stronger than her; he tore her arms free, threw her down on the stairs. He went down, walked across the flagstones to where the silent group of men stood round the little white chair.

It was very small; it looked so delicate that an adult might have broken it. It was small and white, and as he took a couple of more paces forwards, as the rest of the people and the hall and the castle and the world and the universe disappeared into the darkness and the silence and he came closer and slowly closer to the chair, he saw that it had been made out of the bones of Darckense Zakalwe.

Femora formed the back legs, tibiae and some other bones the front. Arm bones made the seat frame; the ribs were the back. Beneath them was the pelvis; the pelvis that had been shattered years earlier, in the stone boat, its bone fragments rejoined; the darker material the surgeons had used quite visible too. Above the ribs, there was the collar bone, also broken and healed, memoir of a riding accident.

They had tanned her skin and made a little cushion out of it; a tiny plain button in her navel, and at one corner, just the hint, the start of some dark but slightly red-tinged hair.

There were stairs, and Livueta, and the ADC, and the ADC’s office, between there and here, he found himself thinking, as he stood at his desk again.

He tasted blood in his mouth, looked down at his right hand. He seemed to recall having punched Livueta on his way up the stairs. What a terrible thing to do to one’s own sister.

He looked about, distracted, for a moment. Everything looked blurred.

Intending to rub his eyes, he raised one hand and found the pistol in it.

He put it to his right temple.

This was, of course, he realised, exactly what Elethiomel wanted him to do, but then, what chance did one have against such a monster? There was only so much a man could take, after all.

He smiled at the doors (somebody was thumping on them, calling out a word that might have been his name; he couldn’t remember now). So silly. Doing the Right Thing; the Only Way Out. The Honourable Exit. What a load of nonsense. Just despair, just the last laugh to have, opening a mouth through the bone to confront the world direct; here.

But such consummate skill, such ability, such adaptability, such numbing ruthlessness, such a use of weapons when anything could become weapon…

His hand was shaking. He could see the doors starting to give way; somebody must be hitting them very hard. He supposed he must have locked them; there was nobody else in the room. He ought to have chosen a bigger gun, he realised; this one might not be big enough to do the job.

His mouth was very dry.

He pressed the gun hard against his temple and pulled the trigger.

The besieged forces round the Staberinde broke out within the hour, while the surgeons were still fighting for his life. It was a good battle, and they nearly won.

Fourteen

“Zakalwe…”

“No.”

Still the same refusal. They stood in a park, at the edge of a large, neatly mown lawn, under some tall, pollarded trees. The warm breeze carried the ocean scent and a hint of flowers, whispering through the copse. The clearing morning mist still veiled two suns. Sma shook her head in exasperation, and walked off a little way.

He leant against a tree, clutching at his chest, breathing with difficulty. Skaffen-Amtiskaw hovered nearby, keeping a watch on the man, but playing with an insect on the trunk of another tree.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw thought the man was mad; certainly he was weird. He had never really explained why he’d gone wandering through the mayhem of the citadel-storming. When Sma and the drone had finally found him and picked him up, bullet-riddled, half-dead and raving from the top of the curtain wall, he had insisted they stabilise his condition; no more. He did not want to be made well. He would not listen to sense, and still the Xenophobe — when it had picked them all up — had refused to pronounce the man insane and incapable of making up his own mind, and so had dutifully put him into a low-metabolism sleep for the fifteen day journey to the planet where the woman called Livueta Zakalwe now lived.

He’d come out of his slow-sleep as ill as he’d gone into it. The man was a walking mess and there were still two bullets inside him, but he refused to accept any treatment until he’d seen this woman. Bizarre, Skaffen-Amtiskaw thought, using an extended field to block the path of a small insect as it felt and picked its way up the trunk of the tree. The insect changed direction, feelers waving. There was another type of insect further up the trunk, and Skaffen-Amtiskaw was trying to get them to meet, to see what would happen.

Bizarre, and even — indeed — perverse.

“Okay.” He coughed (one lung, the drone knew, filling up with blood). “Let’s go.” He pushed himself away from the tree. Skaffen-Amtiskaw abandoned its game with the two insects regretfully. The drone felt odd, being here; the planet was known about but had not yet been fully investigated by Contact. It had been discovered through research rather than physical exploration, and — while there was nothing obviously outlandish about the place, and a very rudimentary survey had been carried out — technically it was still terra incognita, and Skaffen-Amtiskaw was on a relatively high state of alert, just in case the place held any nasty surprises.

Sma went to the bald-headed man and put her arm round his waist, helping to support him. Together they walked up the small slope of lawn towards a low ridge. Skaffen-Amtiskaw watched them go, from the cover of the tree tops, then swooped slowly down towards them as they walked to the summit of the gentle slope.

The man staggered when he saw what was on the far side, in the distance. The drone suspected he would have fallen to the grass if Sma hadn’t been there to hold him up.

“Shiiit,” he breathed, and tried to straighten, blinking in a sudden slant of sunlight as the mists continued to evaporate.

He stumbled another couple of steps, shook Sma off, and turned round once, taking in the parkland; shaped trees and manicured lawns, ornamental walls and delicate pergolas, stone-bordered ponds and shady paths through quiet groves. And, in the distance, set amongst mature trees, the tattered black shape of the Staberinde.

“They’ve made a fucking park out of it,” he breathed, and stood, swaying, bent slightly at the waist, looking at the battered silhouette of the old warship. Sma walked to his side. He seemed to sag a little, and she put her arm round his waist again. He grimaced with pain; they walked on, down towards a path which led to the ship.

“Why did you want to see this, Cheradenine?” Sma said quietly as they crunched along the gravel. The drone floated behind and above.

“Hmm?” the man said, taking his eyes off the ship for a second.

“Why did you want to come here, Cheradenine?” Sma asked. “She isn’t here. This isn’t where she is.”

“I know,” he breathed. “I know that.”

“So why do you want to see this wreck?”

He was silent for a little while. It was as though he hadn’t heard, but then he took a deep breath — flinching with pain as he did so — and shook his sweat-sheened head as he said, “Oh; just for… old times’ sake…” They passed through another copse of trees. He shook his shaved head again as they came out of the grove, and saw the ship better. “I just didn’t think… they’d do this to it,” he said.

“Do what?” Sma asked.

“This.” He nodded at the blackened hulk.

“What have they done, Cheradenine?” Sma said patiently.

“Made it.” He began, then stopped, coughed, body tense with pain. “Made the damn thing… an ornament. Preserved it.”

“What, the ship?”

He looked at her as though she were crazy. “Yes,” he said. “Yes; the ship.”

Just a big old battleship hulk cemented into a dock, as far as Skaffen-Amtiskaw could see. It contacted the Xenophobe, which was passing the time by making a detailed map of the planet.

— Hello, ship. This ship-ruin in the park; Zakalwe seems very interested. Just wondering why. Care to do some research?

— In a while; I’ve still got one continent, the deep sea beds and the sub-surface to do.

— They’ll still be there later; this could prove interesting now.

— Patience, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

Pedant, thought the drone, breaking off.

The two humans walked down twisty paths past litter bins and benches, picnic tables and information points. Skaffen-Amtiskaw activated one of the old information points as it passed. A slow and crackly tape started up; “The vessel you see before you…” This was going to take ages, Skaffen-Amtiksaw thought. It used its effector to speed the machine up, winding the voice up into a high-pitched warble. The tape broke. Skaffen-Amtiskaw delivered the effector equivalent of an annoyed slap, and left the information machine smoking and dripping burning plastic onto the gravel beneath, as the two humans walked into the shadow of the battered ship.

The ship had been left as it was; bombed, shelled, strafed, blasted and ripped but not destroyed. Where hands could not reach and rain did not strike, traces of the original soot from flames two centuries old still marked the armour plate. Gun turrets lay peeled open like tin cans; gun barrels and range-finders bristled askew all over the mounting levels of deck; tangled stays and fallen aeriels lay strewn over shattered search lights and lop-sided radar dishes; the single great funnel looked tipped and subsided, metal pitted and flayed.

A little awning-covered stairway led up to the ship’s main deck; they followed a couple with two young children. Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated, almost invisible, ten metres away, rising slowly with them. One of the toddlers cried when she saw the hobbling, bald-headed man with the staring eyes behind her. Her mother lifted her up and carried her.

He had to stop and rest when they got to the deck. Sma guided him to a bench. He sat doubled up for a while, then looked at the ship above, taking in the blackened rusted wreckage all around. He shook his shaven head, muttered to himself once, then ended up laughing quietly, holding his chest and coughing.

“Museum,” he said. “A museum…”

Sma put her hand on his damp brow. She thought he looked terrible, and the baldness didn’t suit him. The simple dark clothes they’d found him wearing when they picked him up from the citadel’s curtain wall had been torn and crusted with blood; they’d been cleaned and repaired on the Xenophobe but they looked out of place here, where everybody seemed to be dressed in bright colours. Even Sma’s culottes and jacket were sombre compared to the gaily decorated dresses and smocks most of the people were wearing.

“This an old haunt of yours, Cheradenine?” she asked him.

He nodded. “Yes,” he breathed, looking up at a last few tendrils of mist flowing and disappearing like gaseous pennants from the tilted main mast. “Yes,” he repeated.

Sma looked round at the park behind and the city off to one side. “This where you came from?”

He seemed not to hear. After a while, he stood slowly, and looked, distracted, into Sma’s eyes. She felt herself shiver, and tried to remember exactly how old Zakalwe was. “Let’s go, Da — … Diziet.” He smiled a watery sort of smile. “Take me to her, please?”

Sma shrugged and supported the man by one shoulder. They went back to the steps that led back down to the ground.

“Drone?” Sma said to a brooch on her lapel.

“Yep?”

“Our lady still where we last heard?”

“Indeed,” said the drone’s voice. “Want to take the module?”

“No,” he said, stumbling down a stair, until Sma caught him. “Not the module. Let’s… take a train, or a cab or…”

“You sure?” Sma said.

“Yes; sure.”

“Zakalwe,” Sma sighed. “Please accept some treatment.”

“No,” the man said, as they reached the ground.

“There’s an underground station right and right again,” the drone told Sma. “Alight Central Station; platform eight for trains to Couraz.”

“Okay,” Sma said reluctantly, glancing at him. He was looking down at the gravel path as though concentrating on working out which foot to put in front of another. He swung his head as they passed under the stem of the ruined battleship, squinting up at the tall curving V of the bows. Sma watched the expression on his sweating face, and could not decide whether it was awe, disbelief, or something like terror.

The underground train whisked them into the city centre down concrete-lined tunnels; the main station was crowded, tall, echoing and clean. Sunlight sparkled on the vault of the arched glass roof. Skaffen-Amtiskaw had done its suitcase impression, and sat lightly in Sma’s hand. The wounded man was a heavier weight on her other arm.

The Maglev train drew in, disgorged its passengers; they boarded with a few other people.

“You going to make it, Cheradenine?” Sma asked him. He was slumped in the seat, resting his arms on the table in a way that somehow made them look as though they were broken, or paralysed. He stared at the seat across from him, ignoring the cityscape as it slid by, the train accelerating along viaducts towards the suburbs and the countryside.

He nodded. “I’ll survive.”

“Yes, but for how much longer?” said the drone, sitting on the table in front of Sma. “You are in terrible shape, Zakalwe.”

“Better than looking like a suitcase,” he said, glancing at the machine.

“Oh, how droll,” the machine said.

— You finished drawing things yet? it asked the Xenophobe.

— No.

— Can’t you devote just a little of your supposedly bogglingly fast Mind to finding out why he was so interested in that ship?

— Oh, I suppose so, but—

— Wait a minute; what have we here? Listen to this:

“… You’ll find out, I suppose. Past time I told you,” he said, looking out of the window but talking to Sma. The city slid by beyond, bright in the sunlight. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated, and somehow Sma got the impression he was looking at one city, but seeing another, or seeing the same one but long ago, as though in some time-polarised light only his distressed, enfevered eyes could see.

“This is where you come from?”

“Long time ago, now,” he said, coughing, doubling up, holding one arm tight to his side. He took a long slow breath. “I was born here…”

The woman listened. The drone listened. The ship listened.

While he told them the story, of the great house that lay halfway between the mountains and the sea, upstream from the great city. He told them about the estate surrounding the house, and the beautiful gardens, and about the three, later four, children who were brought up in the house, and who played in the garden. He told them about the summerhouses and the stone boat and the maze and the fountains and the lawns and the ruins and the animals in the woods. He told them about the two boys and the two girls, and the two mothers, and the one strict father and the one unseen father, imprisoned in the city. He told them about the visits to the city, which the children always thought lasted too long, and about the time when they were no longer allowed to go into the garden without guards to escort them, and about how they stole a gun, one day, and were going to take it out into the estate to shoot it, but only got as far as the stone boat, and surprised an assassination squad come to kill the family, and saved the day by alerting the house. He told them about the bullet that hit Darckense, and the sliver of her bone that pierced him almost to his heart.

He started to dry up, voice croaking. Sma saw a waiter pushing a trolley into the far end of the coach. She bought a couple of soft drinks; he gulped at first, but coughed painfully, and then just sipped his.

“And the war did start,” he said, looking at but not seeing the last of the suburbs flow past; the countryside was a green blur as they accelerated again. “And the two boys, that had become men… ended up on different sides.”

— Fascinating, the Xenophobe communicated to Skaffen-Amtiskaw. I think I will do a little quick research.

— About time too, the drone sent back, listening to the man talk at the same time.

He told them about the war, and the siege that involved the Staberinde, and the besieged forces breaking out… and he told them about the man, the boy who’d played in the garden who, in the depths of one terrible night, had caused the thing to be done which led to him being called the Chairmaker, and the dawn when Darckense’s sister and brother had found what Elethiomel had done, and the brother trying to take his own life, giving up his generalship, abandoning the armies and his sister in the selfishness of despair.

And he told them about Livueta, who had never forgiven, and had followed him — though he did not know it at the time — on another cold ship, for a century through the intractable calm slowness of real space, to a place where the icebergs swirled round a continental pole, forever calving and crashing and shrinking… But then she had lost him, the trail gone appropriately cold, and she had stayed there, searching, for years, and could not have known that he had left for another life entirely, taken away by the tall lady who walked through the blizzard as though it wasn’t there, a small space ship at her back like a faithful pet.

And so Livueta Zakalwe gave up, and took another long journey, to get away from the burden of her memories, and where she had ended up — (the ship quizzed the drone for the location; Skaffen-Amtiskaw gave it the name of the planet and the system, a few decades away) — that had been where she’d finally been tracked down, after his last job for them.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw remembered. The grey-haired woman, in her early late-years, working in a clinic in the slums, a delicate shanty town strewn like trash across the mud and tree-lined slopes above a tropical city looking out across sparkling lagoons and golden sandbars to the rollers of a vast ocean. Thin, marks under her eyes, a pot-bellied child on each hip when they first went to see her, standing in the middle of the crowded room, wailing children tugging at her hems.

The drone had learned to appreciate the full range of pan-human facial expression, and thought that, in witnessing the one that appeared on Livueta Zakalwe’s face when she saw Zakalwe, it had experienced something close to unique. Such surprise; but such hatred!

“Cheradenine…” Sma said tenderly, gently laying one hand on his. She put her other hand to the nape of his neck, stroking him there as his head bent lower to the table. He turned and watched the prairie stream past like a sea of gold.

He put one hand up, smoothing it slowly over his brow and shaved scalp, as though through long hair.

Couraz had been everything; ice and fire, land and water. Once, the broad isthmus had been a place of rock and glaciers, then a land of forests as the world and its continents shifted and the climate altered. Later it became a desert, but then suffered something beyond the capacity of the globe itself to provide. An asteroid the size of a mountain hit the isthmus, like a bullet striking flesh.

It burst into the granite heart of the land, ringing the planet like a bell. Two oceans met for the first time; the dust of the immense explosion blocked out the sun, started a small ice age, wiped out thousands of species. The ancestors of the species that later came to rule the planet took their initial opportunity from that cataclysm.

The crater became a dome as the planet reacted over the millennia; the oceans were separated again when the rocks — even the seemingly solid layers flowing and warping, over those great scales of time and distance — pushed back, like an aeons late bruise forming on the skin of the world.

Sma had found the information brochure in a seat pocket. She looked up from it for a moment at the man in the seat beside her. He’d fallen asleep. His face looked drawn and grey and old. She could not remember ever having seen him look so ancient and ill. Dammit, he’d looked healthier when he’d been beheaded. “Zakalwe,” she whispered, shaking her head. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Death-wish,” the drone muttered, quietly. “With extrovert complications.”

Sma shook her head and went back to the brochure. The man slept fitfully and the drone monitored him.

Reading about Couraz, Sma suddenly recalled the great fortress she had been picked up from by the Xenophobe’s module, on a sunny day that now seemed as long ago as it was far away. She looked up, sighing, from a photograph of the isthmus taken from space, and thought back to the house under the dam, and felt home-sick… Couraz had been a fortified town, a prison, a fortress, a city, a target. Now — perhaps appropriately, Sma thought, looking at the injured, shivering man at her side — the great dome of rock held a small city that was mostly taken up with the biggest hospital in the world.

The train hurtled into a tunnel carved from naked rock.

They passed through the station, took an elevator to one of the hospital reception levels. They sat on a couch, surrounded by potted plants and soft music, while the drone, sitting on the floor at their feet, plundered the nearest computer work station for information.

“Got her,” it announced quietly. “Go to the receptionist and tell her your name; I’ve ordered you a pass; no verification required.”

“Come on, Zakalwe.” Sma rose, collected her pass, and helped him to his feet. He staggered. “Look,” she said, “Cheradenine, let me at—”

“Just take me to her.”

“Let me talk to her first.”

“No; take me to her. Now.”

The ward was up another few levels, in the sunlight. The light came through clear, high windows. The sky was white with scudding cloud outside, and way in the distance, beyond the dappled fields and woodland, the ocean was a line of blue haze beneath the sky.

Old men lay quietly in the broad, partitioned ward. Sma helped him towards the far end, where the drone said Livueta must be. They entered a short, broad corridor. Livueta came out of a side room. She stopped when she saw them.

Livueta Zakalwe looked older; white-haired, skin soft and lined with age. Her eyes were undulled. She drew herself up a little. She was holding a deep-sided tray full of little boxes and bottles.

Livueta looked at them; the man, the woman, the little pale suitcase that was the drone.

Sma glanced to one side, hissed, “Zakalwe!” She hauled him more upright.

His eyes had been shut. They blinked open and he squinted uncertainly at the woman standing in front of them. He appeared not to recognise her at first, then, slowly, understanding seemed to filter through.

“Livvy?” he said, blinking quickly, squinting at her. “Livvy?”

“Hello, Ms Zakalwe,” Sma said, when the woman did not reply.

Livueta Zakalwe turned contemptuous eyes from the man half-hanging from Sma’s right arm. She looked at Sma and shook her head, so that just for an instant, Sma thought she was going to say no, she wasn’t Livueta.

“Why do you keep doing this?” Livueta Zakalwe said softly. Her voice was still young, the drone thought, just as the Xenophobe came back with some fascinating information it had gleaned from historical records.

(- Really? the drone signalled. Dead?)

“Why do you do this?” she said. “Why do you do this… to him; to me… why? Can’t you just leave us all alone?”

Sma shrugged, a little awkwardly.

“Livvy…” he said.

“I’m sorry, Ms Zakalwe,” Sma said. “It’s what he wanted; we promised.”

“Livvy; please; talk to me; let me ex—”

“You shouldn’t do this,” Livueta told Sma. Then she turned her gaze to the man, who was rubbing one hand over his shaved scalp, grinning inanely at her, blinking. “He looks sick,” she said flatly.

“He is,” Sma said.

“Bring him in here.” Livueta Zakalwe opened another door; a room with a bed. Skaffen-Amtiskaw, still wondering exactly what was going on in the light of the information it had just received from the ship, still found the time to be mildly surprised that the woman was taking it all so calmly this time. Last time she’d tried to kill the fellow and it had had to move in smartly.

“I don’t want to lie down,” he protested, when he saw the bed.

“Then just sit, Cheradenine,” Sma said. Livueta Zakalwe made a shaking motion with her head, muttered something even the drone could not make out. She placed the tray of drugs down on a table, stood in one corner of the room, arms crossed, while the man sat down on the bed.

“I’ll leave you alone,” Sma said to the woman. “We’ll be just outside.”

Close enough for me to hear, thought the drone, and to stop her trying to murder you again, if that’s what she decides to do.

“No,” the woman said, shaking her head, looking with an odd dispassion at the man on the bed. “No; don’t leave. There’s nothing—”

“But I want them to leave,” he said, and coughed, doubling over and almost falling off the bed. Sma went to help him, and pulled him a little further on to the bed.

“What can’t you say in front of them?” Livueta Zakalwe asked. “What don’t they know?”

“I just want to have a… a talk in private, Livvy, please,” he said, looking up at her. “Please…”

“I have nothing to say to you. And there is nothing you can say to me.”

The drone heard somebody in the corridor outside; there was a knock at the door. Livueta opened it. A young female nurse, who called Livueta Sister, told her that it was time to prepare one of the patients.

Livueta Zakalwe looked at her watch. “I have to go,” she told them.

“Livvy! Livvy, please!” He leant forward on the bed, both elbows tight by his sides, both hands clawed out, palm up, in front of him. “Please!” There were tears in his eyes.

“This is pointless,” the old woman shook her head. “And you are a fool.” She looked at Sma. “Don’t bring him to me again.”

“LIVVY!” He collapsed on the bed, curled up and quivering. The drone sensed heat from the shaven head, could see blood vessels throb on his neck and hands.

“Cheradenine, it’s all right,” Sma said, going to the bed and down on one knee, taking his shoulders in her hands.

There was a crack as one of Livueta Zakalwe’s hands thumped down into the top of a table she stood beside. The man wept, shaking. The drone sensed odd brain-wave patterns. Sma looked up at the woman.

“Don’t call him that,” Livueta Zakalwe said.

“Don’t call him what?” Sma said.

Sma could be pretty thick, the drone thought.

“Don’t call him Cheradenine.”

“Why not?”

“It isn’t his name.”

“It isn’t?” Sma looked mystified. The drone monitored the man’s brain activity and blood flow and thought there was trouble coming.

“No, it isn’t.”

“But…” Sma began. She shook her head suddenly. “He’s your brother; he’s Cheradenine Zakalwe.”

“No, Ms Sma,” Livueta Zakalwe said, taking the drug-tray up again and opening the door with one hand. “No, he isn’t.”

“Aneurysm!” the drone said quickly, and slipped through the air, past Sma to the bed, where the man was shaking spastically. It scanned him more thoroughly; found a massive blood vessel leakage pouring into the man’s brain.

It whirled him round, straightened him out, using its effector to make him unconscious. Inside his brain, the blood continued to pump through the tear into the surrounding tissue, invading the cortex.

“Sorry about this, ladies,” the drone said. It produced a cutting field and sliced through his skull. He stopped breathing. Skaffen-Amtiskaw used another aspect of its force field to keep his chest moving in and out, while its effector gently persuaded the muscles that opened his lungs to work again. It took the top of his skull off; a quick low-powered CREW blast, mirrored off another field component, cauterised all the appropriate blood vessels. It held his skull to one side. Blood was already visible, welling through the folded grey geography of the man’s brain tissue. His heart stopped; the drone kept it going with its effector.

Both women had stopped, fascinated and appalled at the actions of the machine.

It stripped away the layers of the man’s brain with its own senses; cortex, limbic, thalamus/cerebellum, it moved through his defences and armaments, down his thoroughfares and ways, through the stores and the lands of his memories, searching and mapping and tapping and searing.

“What do you mean?” Sma said, in an almost dream-like way to the elderly woman just about to quit the room. “What do you mean, ‘no’? What do you mean he isn’t your brother?”

“I mean he is not Cheradenine Zakalwe,” Livueta sighed, watching the drone’s bizarre operation upon the man.

She was… She was… She was…

Sma found herself frowning into the woman’s face. “What? Then…”

Go back; go right back. What was I to do? Go back. The point is to win. Go back! Everything must bend to that truth.

“Cheradenine Zakalwe, my brother,” Livueta Zakalwe said, “died nearly two hundred years ago. Died not long after he received the bones of our sister made into a chair.”

The drone sucked the blood from the man’s brain, teasing a hollow field-filament through the broken tissue, collecting the red fluid in a little transparent bulb. A second filament tube spun-knit the torn tissue back together. It sucked more blood to decrease the man’s blood pressure, used its effector to alter the settings in the appropriate glands, so that the pressure would not grow so great again for a while. It sent a narrow tube of field over to a small sink under the window, jetting the excess blood down the drain hole, then briefly turning on the tap. The blood flushed away, gurgling.

“The man you know as Cheradenine Zakalwe—”

Facing it by facing it, that’s all I ever did; Staberinde, Zakalwe; the names hurt, but how else could I—

“— is the man who took my brother’s name just as he took my brother’s life, just as he took my sister’s life—”

But she—

“— He was the commander of the Staberinde. He is the Chairmaker. He is Elethiomel.”

Livueta Zakalwe walked out, closing the door behind her.

Sma turned, face almost bloodless, to look at the body of the man lying on the bed… while Skaffen-Amtiskaw worked on, engrossed in its struggle to make good.