Use of Weapons (34 page)

'For
a tourist, you've bought an awful lot of souvenirs that you'll never be able to
take home with you,' the woman said. 'Streets, railways, bridges, canals,
apartment blocks, stores, tunnels.' She waved her hand in the air to indicate
that the list went on. 'And that's just in Solotol.'

'I
get carried away.'

'Were
you trying to attract attention?'

He
smiled. 'Yes, I suppose I was.'

'We
heard you suffered an unpleasant experience this morning, Mr Staberinde,' the
woman said. She wriggled down deeper into the chair, drawing up her legs.
'Something to do with a storm-drain.'

'That's
right. My car was diverted down a spillway, from the top.'

'You
weren't hurt?' She sounded sleepy.

'Not
seriously; I stayed in the car until...'

'No,
please.' The hand waved up from the indistinct mass of the chair, tiredly, 'I
have no head for details.'

He
said nothing; he pursed his lips.

'I
understand your driver was not so lucky,' the man said.

'Well,
he's dead.' He leant forward in his seat. 'Actually, I thought you people might
have arranged the whole thing.'

'Yes,'
said the woman from the mass of the chair, her voice floating up like the
smoke, 'Actually we did.'

'I
find frankness so appealing, don't you?' The man looked admiringly at the
knees, breasts and head of the woman, the only parts of her still showing above
the furry arms of the seat. He smiled. 'Of course, Mr Staberinde, my companion
jests. We would never do such a terrible thing. But we might be able to lend
you some assistance in finding the real culprits.'

'Really?'

The
man nodded. 'We think now we might like to help you, you see?'

'Oh,
sure.'

The
man laughed. 'Who exactly are you, Mr Staberinde?'

'I
told you; I'm a tourist.' He sniffed the bowl. 'I wandered into a little money
recently, and I always wanted to visit Solotol - in style - and that's what
I've been doing.'

'How
did you get control of the Vanguard Foundation, Mr Staberinde?'

'I
thought direct questions like that were impolite.'

'They
are,' the man smiled. 'I beg your pardon. May I guess your profession, Mr
Staberinde? I mean before you became a gentleman of leisure, of course.'

He
shrugged. 'If you like.'

'Computers,'
the man said.

He
had started to raise his glass to his lips, just so he could hesitate, as he
now did. 'No comment,' he said, not meeting the man's eyes.

'So,'
the man said. 'The Vanguard foundation is under new management, is it?'

'Damn
right. Better management.'

The
man nodded. 'So I heard, just this afternoon.' He sat forward in his chair and
rubbed his hands together. 'Mr Staberinde; I don't want to pry into your
commercial operations and future plans, but I wonder if you'd give us even a
vague idea in what direction you see the Vanguard Foundation going, over the
next few years. Purely as a matter of interest, for now.'

'That's
easy,' he grinned. 'More profits. Vanguard could have been the biggest corp of
the lot if it had been aggressive with its marketing. Instead it's been run
like a charity; relied on coming up with some new technological gizmo to
restore its position each time it falls behind. But from now on it fights like
the other big boys, and it backs winners.' (The man nodded wisely.) The
Vanguard Foundation's been too... meek until now.' He shrugged. 'Maybe that's
just what happens when you leave something to be run by machines. But that's
over. From now on the machines do what I tell them to, and the Vanguard
Foundation becomes a competitor; a predator, yeah?' He laughed, not too
harshly, he hoped, conscious he might overdo this.

The
man smiled slowly but broadly. 'You... believe in keeping machines in their
place, yes?'

'Yeah.'
He nodded vigorously. 'Yeah, I do.'

'Hmm.
Mr Staberinde, have you heard of Tsoldrin Beychae?'

'Sure.
Hasn't everybody?'

The
man raised his eyebrows liquidly. 'And you think...?'

'Could
have been a great politician, I suppose.'

'Most
people say he
was
a great
politician,' the woman said from the chair's depths.

He
shook his head, looking into his drug bowl. 'He was on the wrong side. It was a
shame, but... to be great you have to be on the winning side. Part of greatness
is knowing that. He didn't. Same as my old man.'

'Ah...'
said the woman.

'Your
father, Mr Staberinde?' the man said.

'Yeah,'
he admitted. 'He and Beychae... well, it's a long story, but... they knew each
other, long ago.'

'We
have time for the story,' the man said easily.

'No,'
he said. He stood up, putting down the bowl and glass, and taking up the suit
helmet. 'Look; thanks for the invitation and all, but I think I'll head back
now; I'm a little tired, and I took a bit of a battering in that car, you
know?'

'Yes,'
the man said, standing too. 'We're really sorry about that.'

'Oh,
thanks.'

'Perhaps
we can offer something in compensation?'

'Oh
yeah? Like what?' He fiddled with the suit helmet. 'I got lots of money.'

'How
would you like to talk to Tsoldrin Beychae?'

He
looked up, frowning. 'I don't know; should I? Is he here?' He gestured out
towards the party. The woman giggled.

'No.'
The man laughed. 'Not here. But in the city. Would you like to talk to him?
Fascinating fellow, and no longer actively on the wrong side, as it were.
Devoted to a life of study, these days. But still fascinating, as I say.'

He
shrugged. 'Well... maybe. I'll think about it. It crossed my mind to leave,
after the craziness this morning.'

'Oh,
I beg you to reconsider that, Mr Staberinde. Please; sleep on it. You might do
a great deal of good, for all of us, if you would talk to the chap. Who knows;
you might even help make him great.' He held out one hand towards the door.
'But I can tell you want to go. Let me see you to the car.' They walked to the
door. Mollen stood back. 'Oh. This is Mollen. Say hello, Mollen.' The
grey-haired man touched a small box at his side.

'Hello,'
it said.

'Mollen
can't speak, you see. Hasn't said a word in all the time we've known him.'

'Yes,'
said the woman. She was completely submerged in the chair now. 'We decided he
needed to clear his throat; so we took out his tongue.' She either giggled or
belched.

'We've
met.' He nodded to the big man, whose face contorted strangely under the scars.

The
party in the boat-house cellar went on. He almost collided with a woman who had
her eyes on the back of her head. Some of the revellers were exchanging limbs
now. People sported four arms, or none (begging for drinks to be brought to
their mouths), or an extra leg, or had arms or legs of the wrong sex. One woman
was parading around with a man in tow who wore a sickly stupid grin; the woman
kept lifting her skirt and displaying a complete set of male sexual equipment.

He
hoped they all forgot who had what at the end of the evening.

They
passed through the tame party, where fireworks were showering everybody with
cool sparks; they were all laughing at that and - he could think of no other
word - cavorting.

He
was wished farewell. It was the same car that took him back, though it had a
different driver. He watched the lights and the city's calm expanses of snow,
and thought about people at parties and people at war; he saw the party they
had just left, and he saw the grey-green trenches with mud-caked men waiting
nervously; he saw people dressed in shiny black, whipping each other and being
tied up... and he saw people shackled to bed frames or chairs, shrieking, while
the uniformed men applied their particular skills.

He
sometimes had to be reminded, he realised, that he still possessed the capacity
to despise.

The
car powered its way through the silent streets. He took the dark glasses off.
The empty city swept past.

VI

Once
- between the time he'd taken the Chosen across the badlands and the time he'd
ended up broken like an insect in the flooded caldera, scratching signs in the
dirt - he had taken some leave, and for a while had entertained the idea of
giving up his work for the Culture, and doing something else instead. It had
always seemed to him that the ideal man was either a soldier or a poet, and so,
having spent most of his years being one of those - to him - polar opposites,
he determined to attempt to turn his life around and become the other.

He
lived in a small village, in a small, rural country on a small, undeveloped,
unhurried planet. He stayed with an old couple in a cottage in the trees in the
dales beneath the high tors. He rose early and went for long walks.

The
countryside looked new and green and fresh; it was summer, and the fields and
woods, the path sides and river banks were full of unnameable flowers of every
colour. The tall trees flexed in the warm summer winds, leaves bright and
fluttering like flags, and water ran off the moors and hills and across the
bunched stones of sparkling streams like some clarified concentrate of the air
itself. He sweated to the crests of the gnarled hills, climbed the outcrop
rocks at their summits, and ran whooping and laughing across the broader tops,
under the brief shadows of the small high clouds.

On
the moors, in the hills, he saw animals. Tiny ones that darted invisibly into
thickets from almost under-foot, larger ones that leapt and stopped, looked
back, then leapt away again, disappearing into burrows or between rocks; larger
ones still that ran flowing off across the ground in herds, watching him, and
then became almost invisible when they stopped to graze. Birds mobbed him when
he walked too near their nests; others called out from nearby, one-wing
fluttering, trying to distract him, when he approached theirs. He was careful
not to step on their nests.

He
always took a small notebook with him on his walks, and made a point of writing
down anything interesting. He tried to describe the feel of the grasses in his
fingers, the way the trees sounded, the visual diversity of the flowers, the
way the animals and birds moved and reacted, the colour of the rocks and the
sky. He kept a proper journal in a larger book, back in his room at the old
couple's cottage. He wrote his notes up in that each evening, as though filling
out a report for some higher authority.

In
another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further
notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed,
annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that
looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.

He
had brought some books of poetry with him, and when the weather was wet, which
was only rarely, he stayed in and tried to read them. Usually, though, they
sent him to sleep. The books he had brought
about
poetry and poets confused him even more, and he had to continually re-read
passage after passage to retain each word, and even then still felt none the
wiser.

He
went into the village tavern every few days, and played skittle and pebble
games with the locals. The mornings after these evenings he regarded as
recovery periods, and left his notebook behind when he walked.

The
rest of the time he tired himself out and kept fit; climbing trees to see how
high he could get before the branches became too thin, climbing rock faces and
old quarries, balancing his way across fallen trees in steep gullies, leaping
from rock to rock across rivers, and sometimes stalking and then chasing the
animals on the moor, knowing he could never catch up with them, but laughing as
he sprinted after them.

The
only other people he saw in the hills were farmers and shepherds. Sometimes he
saw slaves working in the fields, and very rarely he met other people out
walking. He didn't like to stop and talk to them.