Use of Weapons (18 page)

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

'If
there's anything to come back to,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw observed.

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

'Oh,
that's all right then,' the drone said, turning away.

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

'Lost
my appetite,' she said.

He
swung out of the hammock, brushing his hand together. 'Come on,' he said,
'let's go for a swim.'

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

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

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

She
went on drying herself. 'I'm too old for flattery, Zakalwe.'

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

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

He
smiled again, his eyes narrowing as his hands steadied; his arms were in deep
now, and he licked his lips.

He
lunged forward, yelled excitedly, then cupped his hands out of the water and
came over to her where she sat against some rocks. He was grinning hugely. He
held his hands out for her to see. She looked in and saw a small fish,
brilliant shimmering blue and green and red and gold, a gaudy splash of
rippling light squirming inside the man's cupped hands. She frowned as he leant
back against the rock again.

'Now
just you put that back where you found it, Cheradenine, and the way you found it.'

His
face fell and she was about to say something else, kinder, when he grinned
again and threw the fish back into the pool.

'As
if I'd do anything else.' He came and sat beside her on the rock.

She
looked out to sea. The drone was further up the beach, ten metres behind them.
She carefully smoothed the tiny dark hairs on her forearms until they were
lying flat. 'Why did you try all that stuff, Zakalwe?'

'Giving
the elixir of youth to our glorious leaders?' He shrugged. 'Seemed like a good
idea at the time,' he confessed, lightly. 'I don't know; I thought it might be
possible. I thought interfering was maybe a lot easier then you lot made it out
to be. I thought one man with a strong plan, not interested in his own
aggrandisement...' He shrugged, glanced at her. 'It might all work out yet. You
never know.'

'Zakalwe,
it isn't going to work out. You're leaving us an incredible mess here.'

'Ah,'
he nodded. 'You are coming in, then. Thought you might.'

'In
some fashion, I think we'll have to.'

'Best
of luck.'

'Luck...'
Sma began, but then thought the better of it. She ran her fingers through her
damp hair.

'How
much trouble am I in, Diziet?)

'For
this?'

'Yes,
and the knife missile. You heard about that?'

'I
heard.' She shook her head. 'I don't think you're in any more trouble than
you're ever in, Cheradenine, just by being you.'

He
smiled. 'I hate the Culture's... tolerance.'

'So,'
she said, slipping her blouse over her head, 'what are your terms?'

'Pay
as well, eh?' He laughed. 'Minus the rejuve... the same as the last time. Plus
ten per cent more negotiables.'

'Exactly
the same?' She looked at him sadly, her wet bedraggled hair hanging down from
her shaking head.

He
nodded. 'Exactly.'

'You're
a fool, Zakalwe.'

'I
keep trying.'

'It
won't be any different.'

'You
can't know that.'

'I
can guess.'

'And
I can hope. Look, Dizzy, it's my business, and if you want me to come with you
then you've got to agree to it, all right?'

'All
right.'

He
looked wary. 'You still know where she is?'

Sma
nodded. 'Yes, we know.'

'So
it's agreed?'

She
shrugged and looked out to sea. 'Oh; it's agreed. I just think you're wrong. I
don't think you should go to her again.' She looked him in the eye. 'That's my
advice.'

He
stood up and dusted some sand off his legs.

'I'll
remember.'

They
walked back to the huts and the still sea pool in the centre of the island. She
sat on a wall, waiting while he made his final goodbyes. She listened for
crying, or the sound of breakages, but in vain.

The
wind blew her hair gently, and to her surprise, despite it all, she felt warm
and well; the scent from the tall trees stretched around her, and their
shifting shadows made the ground seem to move in time with the breeze so that
air and trees and light and earth swayed and rippled like the bright-dark water
in the island's central pool. She closed her eyes and sounds came to her like
faithful pets, nuzzling her ear; sounds of the brushing tree-heads, like tired
lovers dancing; sounds of the ocean, swirling over rocks, softly stroking the
golden sands; sounds of what she did not know.

Perhaps
soon she would be back in the house below the grey-white dam.

What
an asshole you are, Zakalwe, she thought. I could have stayed home; they could
have sent the stand-in... dammit, they could probably have just sent the drone,
and you'd still have come...

He
appeared looking bright and fresh and carrying a jacket. A different servant
carried some bags. 'Okay; let's go,' he said.

They
walked to the pier while the drone tracked them, overhead.

'By
the way,' she said. 'Why ten per cent more money?'

He
shrugged as they walked onto the wooden pier. 'Inflation.'

Sma
frowned. 'What's that?'

2: An Outing

IX

When
you sleep beside a head full of images, there is an osmosis, a certain sharing
in the night. So he thought. He thought a lot then; more than he ever had,
perhaps. Or maybe he was just more aware of the process, and the identity of
thought and passing time. Sometimes he felt as though every instant he spent
with her was a precious capsule of sensation to be lovingly wrapped and
carefully placed somewhere inviolable, away from harm.

But
he only fully realised that later; it wasn't something he was fully aware of at
the time. At the time, it seemed to him that the only thing he was fully aware
of, was her.

He
lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through
the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with
his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the
physical fact of her existence as though she was some careless star-thing that
slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness and ease with
which she slept there amazed him; he couldn't believe that such beauty could
survive without some superhumanly intense conscious effort.

On
such mornings he would lie and look at her and listen to the sounds that the
house made in the breeze. He liked the house; it seemed... fit. Normally, he'd
have hated it.

Here
and now, though, he could appreciate it, and happily see it as a symbol; open
and closed, weak and strong, outside and inside. When he'd first seen it, he'd
thought it would blow away in the first serious gale, but it seemed these
houses rarely collapsed; in the very rare storms, people would retreat to the
centre of the structures, and huddle round the central fire, letting the
various layers and thicknesses of covering shake and sway on their posts,
gradually sapping the force of the wind, and providing a core of shelter.

Still
- as he'd pointed out to her when he first saw it from the lonely ocean road -
it would be easy to torch and simple to rob, stuck out here in the middle of
nowhere. (She'd looked at him as though he were mad, but then kissed him.)

That
vulnerability intrigued and troubled him. There was a likeness to her there; to
her as a poet and as a woman. It was similar, he suspected, to one of her
images; the symbols and metaphors she used in the poems he loved to hear her
read out loud but could never quite understand (too many cultural allusions,
and this baffling language he had not yet fully understood, and still
sometimes made her laugh with). Their physical relationship seemed to him at
once more whole and complete, and more defyingly complex than anything similar
he had known. The paradox of love physically incarnate and the most personal
attack being the same thing tied knots in him, sometimes sickened him, as in
the midst of this joy he fought to understand the statements and promises that
might be being implied.

Sex
was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could
see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly
conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however
much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was
still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her.
He was aware of the absurdity of trying too hard to develop the comparison
between sex and war; he had been laughed out of several embarrassing
situations trying to do so ('Zakalwe,' she would say, when he tried to explain
some of this, and she would put her cool slim fingers behind his neck, and
stare out from the rumbustious black tangle of her hair, 'You have serious
problems.' She would smile), but the feelings, the acts, the structure of the
two were to him so close, so self-evidently akin, that such a reaction only
forced him deeper into his confusion.

But
he tried not to let it bother him; at any time he could simply look at her and
wrap his adoration for her around himself like a coat on a cold day, and see
her life and body, moods and expressions and speech and movements as a whole
enthralling field of study that he could submerge himself in like a scholar
finding his life's work.

(This
was more like it, some small, remindful voice inside him said. This is more
like the way it's suppose to be; with this, you can leave all that other stuff
behind, the guilt and the secrecy and the lies; the ship and the chair and the
other man... But he tried not listen to that voice.)

They'd
met in a port bar. He'd just arrived and thought he'd make sure their alcohol
was as good as people had said. It was. She was in the next dark booth, trying
to get rid of a man.

You're
saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite,
he thought.)

No,
he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever,
and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.