Use of Weapons (13 page)

It
seemed to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He
set fire to the shack.

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

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

The
boy picked up the knives; charged.

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

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

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

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

He
got ready to run again, glancing behind him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'What?'

'That
you come back. We have a job for you.'

'What
is it?'

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

'Why?'

'It's
important.'

'Isn't
everything?'

'And
we can pay you properly this time.'

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

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

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

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

'We've
found Livueta,' she said.

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

'Mm-hmm.
You're sure?'

'Yes,
we're sure.'

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

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

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

Four

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

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

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

'Oh
shut up.'

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

Twenty-nine
days had passed on the
Xenophobe.

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

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

The
drone met her at the entrance to the corridor. Its red glowing field looked at
least partially like a comment. 'Good night's sleep?' it inquired. 'Don't start
that again.'

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

'You've
made friends with the crew, then.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'And
sweet-talking won't work ei...' the drone said, as the elevator door closed.

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