Use of Weapons (27 page)

'Yeah.
Bye.' He put the phone down and turned the screen sound up again.

'Caves,
natural and artificial, are scattered through the rock of the canyon walls in
almost as great a profusion as the buildings on the sloping surface. Many of
the city's old hydroelectric sources are there, hollowed out into rock and
humming; and a few small factories and workshops still survive, hidden away
beneath the cliffs and shale, with only their stubby chimneys on the desert
surface to show their position. This upward river of warm fumes counterpoints
the network of sewage and drainage pipes, which also shows on the surface on
occasion, and presents a complex pattern of tracery through the fabric of the
city.'

The
phone beeped.

'Hello?'

'Mr...
Staberinde?'

'Yes.'

'Ah,
yes; good morning. My name is Kiaplor, of...'

'Ah;
the lawyers.'

'Yes.
Thank you for your message. I have here a cable granting you full access to the
income and securities of the Vanguard Foundation.'

'I
know. Are you quite happy with this, Mr Kiaplor?'

'Umm...
I... yes; the cable makes the position quite clear... though it is an
unprecedented degree of individual discretion, given the size of the account.
Not that the Vanguard Foundation has ever behaved exactly conventionally at any
time.'

'Good.
The first thing I'd like is to have funds sufficient to cover a month's hire of
two floors of the Excelsior transferred to the hotel's account, immediately.
Then I want to start buying a few things.'

'Ah...
yes. Such as?'

He
dabbed at his lips with a napkin. 'Well, for a start, a street.'

'A
street?'

'Yes.
Nothing too ostentatious, and it doesn't have to be very long, but I want a
whole street, somewhere near the city centre. Do you think you can look for a
suitable one, immediately?'

'Ah...
well, yes, we can certainly start looking. I...'

'Good.
I'll call at your offices in two hours; I'd like to be in a position to come to
a decision then.'

'Two...?
Umm... well, ah...'

'Speed
is essential, Mr Kiaplor. Put your best people on it.'

'Yes.
Very well.'

'Good.
I'll see you in a couple of hours.'

'Yes.
Right. Goodbye.' He turned the screen sound back up again.

'Very
little new building has been done for hundreds of years; Solotol is a monument,
an institution; a museum. The factories, like the people, are mostly gone.
Three universities lend areas of the city some life, during part of the year,
but the general air is said by many people to be archaic, even stultified,
though some people enjoy the feel of living in what is, in effect, the past.
Solotol has no sky-lighting; the trains still run on metal rails, and the
ground vehicles must remain on the ground, because flying within the city or
immediately above it is banned. A sad old place, in many ways; large sections
of the city are uninhabited or only occupied for part of the year. The city is
still a capital in name, but it does not represent the culture to which it
belongs; it is an exhibit, and while many come to visit it, few choose to stay.'

He
shook his head, put his dark glasses on, and turned the screen off.

When
the wind was in the right direction he blasted huge netted balls of paper money
into the air from an old firework mortar mounted in a high roof garden; the
notes drifted down like early snowflakes. He'd had the street decorated with
bunting, streamers and balloons and filled with tables and chairs and bars
serving free drink; covered ways extended the length of it and music played;
there were brightly coloured canopies over the important areas, such as the
bandstands and the bars, but they were not needed; the day was bright, and
unseasonably warm. He looked out of one of the highest windows in one of the
tallest buildings in the street, and smiled at the sight of all the folk.

So
little happened in the city during the off season that the carnival had
attracted instant attention. He had hired people to serve the drugs and food
and drink he had laid on; he had banned cars and unhappy faces, and people who
didn't smile when they tried to get into the street were made to wear funny
masks until they had livened up a bit. He breathed in deeply from where he
leaned on the high window, and his lungs soaked up the heady fumes of a very
busy bar just below; the drug smoke made it just this far up and hung in a
cloud. He smiled, found it very heartening; it was all perfect.

People
walked around and talked together or in groups, exchanging their smoky bowls,
laughing and smiling. They listened to the band and watched people dancing.
They gave a great cheer each time the mortar fired. Many of them laughed at the
leaflets full of political jokes that were given out with every bowl of drugs
or food and every mask and novelty; they laughed too at the big, guady banners
that were strung across the fronts of the dilapidated old buildings and across
the street itself. The banners were either absurd or humorous, too. PACIFISTS
AGAINST WALLS! and, EXPERTS? WHAT DO THEY KNOW? were two of the more
translatable examples.

There
were games and trials of wit or strength, there were free flowers and party
hats and a much frequented Compliments stall where one paid a little money, or
gave a paper hat or whatever, and was told what a nice, pleasant, good,
unshowy, quiet-tempered, undemonstrative, restrained, sincere, respectful,
handsome, cheerful, good-willed person one was.

He
looked down on all of this, shades pushed up onto the tied-back hair above his
forehead. Down there, submerged in it, he knew he would feel somehow apart from
it all. But from his high vantage point he could look down and see the people
as a mass with different faces; they were far enough away to present a single
theme, close enough to introduce their own harmonious variations. They enjoyed
themselves, were made to laugh or to giggle, encouraged to get drugged and
silly, captivated by the music, slightly deranged by the atmosphere.

He
watched two people in particular.

They
were a man and a woman, walking slowly through the street, looking all around.
The man was tall and had dark hair cut short and kept artificially unkempt and
curly; he was smartly dressed and carried a small dark beret in one hand; a
mask dangled from the other.

The
woman was almost as tall, and slimmer. She was dressed like the man, in unfussy
dark grey-black, with a mandala of pleated white at her neck. Her hair was
black, shoulder-length, and quite straight. She walked as though there were
many admiring people watching her.

They
walked side by side, without touching each other; they spoke now and again,
merely tipping their heads in the direction of their companion and looking to
the other side, perhaps at what they were talking about, as they spoke.

He
thought he remembered their photographs from one of the briefings on the GSV.
He moved his head a little to one side, to make sure the earring terminal had a
good shot of them, then told the tiny machine to record the view.

A
few moments later, the two people disappeared beneath the banners at the far
end of the street; they'd walked through the carnival without taking part in
anything.

The
street party went on; a small shower came and drove people under the awnings
and covers and into some of the small houses, but it was short, and more people
were coming all the time; small children ran with bright streamers of paper,
winding coloured trails round posts and people and stalls and tables.
Puff-bombs exploded in smoky balls of coloured incense, and laughing, choking
people staggered about, thumping each others' backs and shouting at the
laughing children who threw the things.

He
drew away from the window, losing interest. He sat in the room for a little,
squatting on an old chest in the dust, hand rubbing his chin, thoughtful, only
raising his eyes when an upward landslide of balloons jostled up past the
casement. He brought the dark glasses down. From inside, the balloons looked
just the same.

He
walked down the narrow stairs, his boots clacking on the old wood; he took the
old raincoat up from the rail at the bottom, and let himself out of the rear
door into another street.

The
driver pulled the car away and he sat in the back as they rolled past the rows
of old buildings. They came to the end of the street and turned into the steep
road that ran at right-angles to it and the street the party was in. They slid
past a long dark car with the man and the woman in it.

He
looked round. The dark car followed them.

He
told the driver to exceed the speed limit. They sped, and the car following
them kept pace. He hung on and watched the city slithering past. They raced
through some of the old government areas; the grand buildings were grey, and
heavily decorated with wall founts and water channels; elaborate patterns of
water ran down their walls in vertical waves, dropping like theatre curtains.
There were some weeds, but less than he would have expected. He couldn't
remember if they let the water-walls ice up, turned them off, or added
antifreeze. Scaffolding hung from many of the buildings. Workmen scratched and
scraped at the worn stones, and turned to watch the two big cars go tearing
through the squares and plazas.

He
clung on to a grab handle in the rear of the car, and sorted through a large
collection of keys.

They
stopped in an old narrow street, down near the banks of the great river itself.
He got out smartly and hurried into a small entrance under a tall building. The
following car roared into the street as he closed but did not lock the door. He
went down some steps, unlocking several rusting sets of gates. When he got down
to the bottom of the building he found the funicular car waiting on the
platform. He opened the door, got in and pulled the lever.

There
was a slight jerk as the car started off up the incline, but it ran smoothly
enough. He watched through the back windows as the man and then the woman came
out onto the platform. He smiled as they looked up and saw the car
disappearing into the tunnel. The little coach struggled up the smooth slope
into the daylight.

At
the point where the uphill and the downhill coach passed each other, he got out
onto the outer platform of the car and stepped over onto the downhill coach. It
ran on, propelled by the extra weight of water that it carried in its tanks,
picked up from the stream at the high terminal of the old line. He waited a
bit, then jumped out of that car about a quarter of the way down, onto the
step? at the side of the track. He climbed up a long metal ladder, into another
building.

He
was sweating slightly by the time he got to the top. He took off the old
raincoat and walked back to the hotel with it over his arm.

The
room was very white and modern-looking, with large windows. The furniture was
integrated with the plasticised walls, and light came from bulges in the
one-piece roof. A man stood watching the first snow of winter as it fell softly
over the grey city; it was late afternoon, and getting dark quickly. On a white
couch a woman lay face-down, her elbows spread out, but her hands together
under her side-turned face. Her eyes were closed and her pale, oiled body was
massaged with apparent roughness by a powerfully-built man with grey hair and
facial scars.

The
man at the window watched the falling snow in two ways. First as a mass, with
his eyes on one static point, so that the snowflakes became a mere swirl and
the currents of air and gusts of light wind that moved them became manifest in
patterns of circling, spiralling, falling. Then, by looking at the snow as
individual flakes, selecting one high in the indeterminate galaxy of grey on
grey, he saw one path, one separate way down through all the quiet hurry of the
fall.

He
watched them as they hit the black sill outside, where they grew steadily but
imperceptibly to form a soft white ledge. Others struck the window itself,
sticking there briefly, then falling away, blown off.

The
woman seemed asleep. She smiled slightly, and the exact geography of her face
was altered by the forces that the grey-haired man exerted on her back,
shoulders and flanks. Her oiled flesh moved this way and that, and the gliding
fingers seemed to provide force without causing friction, ribbing and creasing
the skin like the smooth action of the sea on underwater grass. Her buttocks
were covered by a black towel, her hair was loose and spilling over pan of her
face, and her pale breasts were long ovals squashed beneath her trim body.

'What
is to be done, then?'

'We
need to know more.'

'That
is always true. Back to the problem.'

'We
could have him deported.'

'For
what?'

'We
need to give no reason, though we could invent one easily enough.'

'That
might start the war before we are ready for it.'

'Shush
now; we must not talk of this "war" thing. We are officially on the
best of terms with all our Federation members; there is no need for worry.
Everything is under control.'