Use of Weapons (17 page)

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

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

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

He
managed to scream one syllable. 'El -!'

Then
the blade slammed into his neck.

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

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

The
slack, headless body dribbled blood down its chest.

That
was me! he thought. Me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

But
that seemed to happen to somebody else.

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

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

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

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

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

Five

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

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

'Hello,
Zakalwe,' the drone said.

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

'All
right,' she said.

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

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

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

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

'It
true you own this island, Zakalwe?'

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

'Thank
you.'

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

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

'So,'
she said, 'we playing games here, Zakalwe?'

'What
do you mean, Dizzy?'

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

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

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

'So
what was all the run-around for?'

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

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

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

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

'Voerenhutz,'
she told him. 'Tsoldrin Beychae.'

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

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

He
waved one hand airily. 'Easy,' he said, drinking.

Sma
watched him drink. She shook her head.

'Don't
you want to know why, Cheradenine?' she asked.

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

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

'That's
sort of...' he burped, 're-decorating a planet, right?'

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

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

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

'Cheradenine!'
Sma scolded, as Skaffen-Amtiskaw's fields went frosty.

He
looked hurt. 'But they're called the Humanists!'

'That's
just their name, Zakalwe.'

'Names
are important,' he said, apparently serious.

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

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

'Yes,'
Sma said.

'Fine.
Sounds almost easy. No soldiering?'

'No
soldiering.'

'I'll
do it.' He nodded.

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

'Just
send the signal.' Sma told it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

He
shrugged. 'I like long voyages.'

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