Use of Weapons (19 page)

She
went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he
thought. I liked that. She sounds interesting. Wonder what she looks like?

He
stuck his head round the corner of the booth and looked in at them. The man was
in tears; the woman was... well, lots of hair...
very
striking face; sharp and almost aggressive. Tidy body.

'Sorry,'
he told them. 'But I just wanted to point out that "Nothing lasts
forever" can be a positive statement... well, in some languages...' Having
said it, it did occur to him that in this language it wasn't; they had
different words for different sorts of nothing. He smiled, ducked back into his
own booth, suddenly embarrassed. He stared accusatorily at the drink in front
of him. Then he shrugged, and pressed the bell to attract a waiter.

Shouts
from the next booth. A clatter and a little shriek. He looked round to see the
man storming off through the bar, heading for the door.

The
girl appeared at his elbow. She was dripping.

He
looked up into her face; it was damp; she wiped it with a handkerchief.

'Thank
you for your contribution,' she said icily. 'I was bringing things to a
conclusion quite smoothly there until you stepped in.'

'I'm
very sorry,' he said, not at all.

She
took her handkerchief and wrung it out over his glass, dribbling. 'Hmm,' he
said, 'too kind.' He nodded at the dark spots on her grey coat. 'Your drink or
his?'

'Both,'
she said, folding the kerchief and starting to turn away.

'Please;
let me buy you a replacement.'

She
hesitated. The waiter arrived at the same moment.
Good omen
, he thought. 'Ah,' he said to the man. 'I'll have
another... whatever it is I've been drinking, and for this lady...'

She
looked at his glass. 'The same,' she said. She sat down across the table.

'Think
of it as... reparations,' he said, digging the word out of the implanted
vocabulary he'd been given for his visit.

She
looked puzzled. '"Reparations"... that's one I'd forgotten; something
to do with war, isn't it?'

'Yep,'
he said, smothering a belch with one hand. 'Sort of like... damages?'

She
shook her head. 'Wonderfully obscure vocabulary, but totally bizarre grammar.'

'I'm
from out of town,' he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a
hundred light years of the place.

'Shias
Engin,' she nodded. 'I write poems.'

'You're
a poet?' he said, delighted. 'I've always been fascinated by poets. I tried
writing poems, once.'

'Yes,'
she sighed and looked wary. 'I suspect everyone does, and you are...?'

'Cheradenine
Zakalwe; I fight wars.'

She
smiled. 'I thought there hadn't been a war for three hundred years; aren't you
getting a little out of practice?'

'Yeah;
boring, isn't it?'

She
sat back in the seat, took off her coat. 'From just how far out of town have
you come, Mr Zakalwe?'

'Aw
heck, you've guessed,' he looked downcast. 'Yeah; I'm an alien. Oh. Thank you.'
The drinks arrived; he passed one to her.

'You
do look funny,' she said, inspecting him.

'
"Funny"?' he said indignantly.

She
shrugged. 'Different.' She drank. 'But not all that different.' She leaned
forward on the table. 'Why do you look so similar to us? I know all the outworlders
aren't humanoid, but a lot are. How come?'

'Well,'
he said, hand at his mouth again, 'It's like this; the...' he belched. '... the
dustclouds and stuff in the galaxy are... its food, and its food keeps speaking
back to it. That's why there are so many humanoid species; nebulae's last meals
repeating on them.'

She
grinned. 'That simple, is it?'

He
shook his head. 'Na; not at all. Very complicated. But,' he held up one finger.
'I think I know the real reason.'

'Which
is?'

'Alcohol
in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents
the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars,
what do they find?' He knocked the glass on the table. 'Loads of stuff; but
much of it alcohol.' He drank from the glass. 'Humanoids are the galaxy's way
of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.'

'It's
all starting to make sense now,' she agreed, nodding her head and looking
serious. She looked inquisitively at him. 'So, why are you here? Not come to
start a war. I hope.'

'No,
I'm on leave; come to get away from them. That's why I chose this place.'

'How
long you here for?'

'Till
I get bored.'

She
smiled at him. 'And how long do you think that will take?'

'Well,;
he smiled back, 'I don't know.' He put his glass down. She drained hers. He
reached out for the button to call the waiter, but her finger was already
there.

'My
turn,' she said. 'Same again?'

'No,'
he said. 'Something quite different, this time, I feel.'

When
he tried to tabulate his love, list all the things about her that drew him to
her, he found himself starting at the larger facts - her beauty, her attitude
to life, her creativity - but as he thought over the day that had just passed,
or just watched her, he found individual gestures, single words, certain steps,
a single movement of her eyes or a hand starting to claim equal attention. He
would give up then, and console himself with something she'd said; that you
could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process;
not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn't too sure about all that; he
seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn't even known was
there, thanks to her.

The
fact of her talent - maybe her genius - played a role, too. It added to the
extent of his disbelief, this ability to be more than the thing he loved, and
to present to the outside world an entirely different aspect. She was what he
knew here and now, complete and rich and measureless, and yet when both of them
were dead (and he found he could think about his own death again now, without
fear), a world at least - many cultures, perhaps - would know her as something
utterly dissimilar, a poet; a fabricator of sets of meanings that to him were
just words on a page or titles that she sometimes mentioned.

One
day, she said, she would write a poem about him, but not yet. He thought what
she wanted was for him to tell her the story of his life, but he had already
told her he could never do that. He didn't need to confess to her; there was no
need. She had already unburdened him, even if he did not know quite how.
Memories are interpretations, not truth, she insisted, and rational thought was
just another instinctive power.

He
felt the slowly healing polarisation of his mind, matching his to hers, the
alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she
represented for him.

She
helped him, and without knowing it. She mended him, reaching back to something
so buried he'd thought it inaccessible forever, and drawing its sting. So perhaps
it was also that which stunned him; the effect this one person was having on
memories so terrible to him that he had long ago resigned himself to them only
growing more potent with age. But she just ringed them off, cut them out,
parcelled them up and threw them away, and she didn't even realise she was
doing it, had no idea of the extent of her influence.

He
held her in his arms.

'How
old are you?' she'd asked, near dawn on that first night.

'Older
and younger than you.'

'Cryptic
crap; answer the question.'

He
grimaced into the darkness. 'Well... how long do you people live?'

'I
don't know. Eighty, ninety years?'

He
had to remember the length of the year, here. Close enough. 'Then I'm... about
two hundred and twenty; a hundred and ten; and thirty.'

She
whistled, moved her head on his shoulder. 'A choice.'

'Sort
of. I was born two hundred and twenty years ago, I have lived for a hundred and
ten of them, and physically I'm about thirty.'

The
laughter was deep in her throat. He felt her breasts sweep across his chest as
she swung on top of him. 'I'm fucking a hundred-and-ten year old?' she sounded
amused.

He
laid his hands on the small of her back, smooth and cool. 'Yeah; great, isn't
it? All the benefits of experience without the con -'

She
came down kissing him.

He
put his head to her shoulder, drew her tighter. She stirred in her sleep, moved
too, her arms around him, drawing him to her. He smelled the skin of her
shoulder, breathing in the air that had been on her flesh, was scented by her,
perfumed by no perfume, carrying her own smell only. He closed his eyes, to
concentrate on this sensation. He opened them, drew in her sleeping look again,
moved his head to hers, his tongue out flickering under her nose to feel the
flow of breath, anxious to touch the thread of her life. The tip of his tongue,
and the tiny hollow between her lips and her nose, vexed and caved, as if
designed.

Her
lips parted, closed again; her lips rubbed against each other, side to side,
and her nose wrinkled. He watched these things with a secret delight, as
fascinated as a child playing boo with an adult who kept disappearing round the
side of a cot.

She
slept on. He rested his head again.

That
first morning, in the grey dawn, he had lain there while she inspected his body
minutely.

'So
many scars, Zakalwe,' she said, shaking her head, tracing lines across his
chest.

'I
keep getting into scraps,' he admitted. 'I could have all these heal
completely, but... they're good for... remembering.'

She
put her chin on her chest. 'Come on; admit you just like showing them off to
the girls.'

'There
is that, too.'

'This
one looks nasty, if your heart's in the same place as ours... given that
everything else seems to be.' She ran her finger round a little puckered mark
near one nipple. She felt him tense, and looked up. There was a look in the
man's eyes that made her shiver. Suddenly he seemed all the years he'd claimed,
and more. She drew herself up, ran her hand through her hair. 'That one still a
bit fresh, huh?'

'That's...'
he made the effort of trying to smile, and ran his own finger over the tiny
dimpled crease on his flesh. '... that's one of the oldest, funnily enough.'
The look faded from his eyes.

'This
one?' she said brightly, touching one side of his head.

'Bullet.'

'In
a big battle?'

'Well,
sort of. In a car, to be precise. A woman.'

'Oh
no!' she clapped a hand to her mouth, mimicking horror.

'It
was very embarrassing.'

'Well,
we won't go into that one... what about this?'

'Laser...
very strong light,' he explained, when she looked puzzled. 'Much longer ago.'

'This
one?'

'Ahm...
combination of things; insects, in the end.'

'
Insects
?' She quivered.

(And
he was back there; in the drowned volcano. A long time ago, now, but still
there, still within him... and still safer to think about than that crater over
his heart, where another, even more ancient memory dwelt. He remembered the
caldera, and saw again the pool of stagnant water, the stone at its centre and
the surrounding walls of the poisoned lake. He felt once more the long slow scrape
his body had made, and the intimacy of insects... But that remorseless
concentricity didn't matter any more; here was here and now was now.)

'You
don't want to know,' he grinned.

'I
think I'll take your word for that,' she agreed, nodding slowly, the long black
hair swinging heavily. 'I know; I'll kiss them all better.'

'Could
be a long job,' he told her as she swivelled and moved to his feet.

'You
in a hurry?' she asked him, kissing a toe.

'Not
at all,' he smiled, lying back. 'Take all the time you want. Take forever.'

He
felt her move, and looked down. Her knuckles rubbed her eyes, her hair spilled,
she patted her nose and cheeks and smiled at him. He looked at her smile. He
had seen a few smiles he might have killed for, but never one he'd have died
for. What else could he do but smile back?

'Why
do you always wake before me?'

'I
don't know,' he sighed. So did the house, as the breeze moved its equivocal
walls. 'I like watching you sleep.'

'Why?'
She rolled and lay on her back, turning her head to him, the hair rolling
bounteously to him. He laid his head on that dark fragrant field, remembering
the smell of her shoulder, stupidly wondering if she smelt different awake than
asleep.

He
nuzzled her shoulder and she laughed a little, shrugging that shoulder and
pressing her head against his. He kissed her neck and answered before he forgot
the question completely