Use of Weapons (41 page)

'That
figures. What's this?' One of the plinths held a large, rusty metal bowl with a
sharp central spindle.

'Compass,
I think,' Beychae said. 'It works by fields,' he smiled.

'And
this? Looks like a tree stump.' It was a huge, rough, very slightly fluted
cylinder perhaps a metre in height, and twice that across. He tapped the edge. 'Hmm;
stone.'

'Ah!'
Tsoldrin said, joining him at the stone cylinder. 'Well, if it's what I think
it is... it was originally just a tree stump, of course...' He ran his hand
over the stone surface, looked round the edge for something. 'But it was
petrified, long ago. Look though; you can still see the rings in the wood.'

He
leant closer, looking at the grey stone surface by the fading afternoon light.
The growth rings of the long dead tree were indeed visible. He leant forward,
taking off one of the suit gloves, and with his fingers stroked the surface of
the stone. Some differential weathering of the wood-become-rock had made the
rings tangible; his fingers felt the tiny ridges run beneath their surface like
the fingerprint of some mighty stone god.

'So
many years,' he breathed, putting his hand back to the very sapling centre of
the stump, and running his hand out again. Beychae said nothing.

Every
year a complete ring, signature of bad year and good by the spacing, and every
ring complete, sealed, hermetic. Every year like part of a sentence, every ring
a shackle, chained and chaining to the past; every ring a wall, a prison. A
sentence locked in the wood, now locked in stone, frozen twice, sentenced
twice, once for an imaginable time, then for an unimaginable time. His finger
ran over the ring walls, dry paper over ridged rock.

'This
is just the cover,' Beychae said from the other side. He was squatting down,
looking for something on the side of the great stone stump. 'There ought to
be... ah. Here we are. Don't expect we'll be able to actually lift it, of
course...'

'Cover?'
he said, putting the glove back on and walking round to where Beychae was.
'Cover for what?'

'A
sort of
puzzle
the Imperial
Astronomers played when the viewing was patchy,' Beychae said. 'There; see that
handhold?'

'Just
a second,' he said. 'Want to stand back a little?' Beychae stood back. 'It's
supposed to take four strong men, Zakalwe.'

'This
suit's more powerful than that, though balancing might be a little...' He found
two hand-holds on the stone. 'Suit command; strength normal max.'

'You
have to talk to the suit?' Beychae asked.

'Yeah,'
he said. He flexed, lifting one edge of the stone cover up; a tiny explosion of
dust under the sole of one of the suit's boots announced a trapped pebble
giving up the struggle. 'This one you do; they have ones you just have to think
about something, but...' he pulled on one edge of the cover, sticking one leg
out to shift his centre of gravity as he did so. '... but I just never liked
the idea of that.' He held the whole stone top of the petrified stump above his
head, then walked awkwardly, to the noise of crunching, popping gravel under
his feet, to another stone table; he lowered, shifted the stone cover sidways
until it rested on the table, and returned; he made the mistake of clapping his
hands together, and produced what sounded like a gunshot. 'Oops,' he grinned.
'Suit command; strength off.'

Revealed
by the removal of the stone cap was a shallow cone. It seemed to have been
carved from the petrified stump itself. Looking closer, he could see that it
was ridged, tree ring by tree ring.

'Quite
clever,' he said, mildly disappointed.

'You're
not looking at it properly, Cheradenine,' Beychae told him. 'Look closer.'

He
looked closer.

'I
don't suppose you have anything very small and spherical, do you?' Beychae
said, 'Like a... ball-bearing.'

'A
ball-bearing?' he said, a pained expression on his face.

'You
don't have such things?'

'I
think you'll find in most societies ball-bearings don't last much beyond
room-temperature superconductivity, let alone field technology. Unless you're
into industrial archeology and trying to keep some ancient machine running. No,
I don't have any ball...' he peered closer at the centre of the shallow rock
cone. 'Notches.'

'Exactly.'
Beychae smiled.

He
stood back, looking at the ridged cone as a whole. 'It's a maze!'

Maze.
There had been a maze in the garden. They outgrew it, became too familiar with
it, eventually only used it when other children they didn't like came for the
day to the great house; they could lose them in the maze for a few hours.

'Yes,'
Beychae nodded. 'They would start out with small coloured beads or pebbles, and
try to work their way to the rim.' He looked closer. 'They say there might have
been a way to turn it into a game, by painting lines that divided each ring
into segments; little wooden bridges and blocking pieces like walls could be
used to facilitate one's own progress or prevent that of one's rivals.' Beychae
squinted closer in the fading light. 'Hmm. Paint must have faded.'

He
looked down at the hundreds of tiny ridges on the surface of the shallow cone -
like a model of a huge volcano, he thought - and smiled. He sighed, looked at
the screen set into the wrist of the suit, tried the emergency signal button
again. No reply.

'Trying
to contact the Culture?'

'Mmm,'
he said, gazing again at the petrified maze.

'What
will happen to you if Governance find us?' Beychae asked.

'Oh,'
he shrugged, walking back to the balustrade they had stood at earlier.
'Probably not much. Not very likely they'll just blow my brains out; they'll
want to question me. Should give the Culture plenty of time to get me out;
either negotiated or just snapped away. Don't worry about me.' He smiled at
Beychae. 'Tell them I took you by force. I'll say I stunned you and stuffed you
into the capsule. So don't worry; they'll probably let you go straight back to
your studies.'

'Well,'
Beychae said, rejoining the other man at the balustrade. 'My studies were a
delicate construction, Zakalwe; they maintained my carefully developed
disinterest. They may not be so easy to resume, after your... exuberantly
violent interruption.'

'Ah.'
He tried not to smile. He looked down at the trees, then at the suit gloves, as
though checking all the fingers were there. 'Yeah. Look, Tsoldrin... I'm
sorry... I mean about your friend, Ms Shiol.'

'As
am I,' Beychae said quietly. He smiled uncertainly. 'I felt happy, Cheradenine.
I hadn't felt like that for... well, long enough.' They stood watching the sun
sink behind the clouds. 'You are certain she was one of theirs? I mean,
absolutely?'

'Beyond
any reasonable doubt, Tsoldrin.' He thought he saw tears in the old man's eyes.
He looked away. 'Like I said; I'm sorry.'

'I
hope,' Beychae said, 'that is not the only way the old can be made happy... can
be happy. Through deceit.'

'Maybe
it wasn't all deceit,' he said. 'And anyway, being old isn't what it used to
be; I'm
old
,' he reminded Beychae,
who nodded, took out a kerchief and sniffed.

'Of
course; so you are. I forgot. Strange, isn't it? Whenever we see people after a
long time we are always surprised how they've grown or aged. But when I see
you, well, you haven't changed a bit, and instead I feel very old - unfairly,
unjustifiably old - beside you, Cheradenine.'

'Actually
I have changed, Tsoldrin.' He grinned. 'But no, I haven't got any older.' He
looked Beychae in the eye. 'They'd give you this, too, if you asked them. The
Culture would let you grow younger, then stabilise your age, or let you grow
old again, but very slowly.'

'Bribery,
Zakalwe?' Beychae said, smiling.

'Hey,
it was just a thought. And it'd be a payment, not a bribe. And they wouldn't
force it on you. But it's academic, anyway.' He paused, nodding into the sky.
'Completely academic; now. Here comes a plane.'

Tsoldrin
looked out to the red clouds of sunset. He couldn't see any aircraft.

'A
Culture one?' Beychae asked cautiously.

He
smiled. 'In the circumstances, Tsoldrin, if you can see it, it isn't a Culture
one.' He turned and walked quickly, picking up the suit helmet and putting it
on. Suddenly the dark figure became inhuman, behind the armoured,
sensor-studded faceplate of the suit. He took a large pistol from the suit
holster.

'Tsoldrin,'
his voice came booming from speakers set in the suit chest as he checked the
settings on the gun. 'If I were you I'd get back to the capsule, or just plain
run away and hide.' The figure turned to face Beychae, the helmet like the head
of some gigantic, fearsome insect. 'I'm fixing to give these assholes a fight,
just for the sheer hell of it, and it might be best for you if you weren't
nearby.'

IV

The
ship was over eighty kilometres long and it was called the
Size Isn't Everything.
The last thing he'd been on for any length
of time had actually been bigger, but then that had been a tabular iceberg big
enough to hide two armies on, and it didn't beat the General Systems Vehicle by
much.

'How
do these things hold
together
?' He
stood on a balcony, looking out over a sort of miniature valley composed of
accommodation units; each stepped terrace was smothered in foliage, the space
was criss-crossed by walk-ways and slender bridges, and a small stream ran
through the bottom of the V. People sat at tables in little courtyards, lounged
on the grass by the stream side or amongst the cushions and couches of cafes
and bars on the terraces. Hanging above the centre of the valley, beneath a
ceiling of glowing blue, a travel-tube snaked away into the distance on either
side, following the wavy line of the valley. Under the tube, a line of fake
sunlight burned, like some enormous strip light.

'Hmm?'
Diziet Sma said, arriving at his elbow with two drinks; she handed one to him.

'They're
too big,' he said. He turned to face the woman. He'd seen the things they
called
bays
, where they built smaller
space ships (smaller in this case meant over three kilometres long); vast
unsupported hangars with thin walls. He'd been near the immense engines, which
as far as he could gather were solid, and inaccessible (how?), and obviously
extremely massive; he'd felt oddly threatened on discovering that there was no
control room, no bridge, no flight deck anywhere in the vast vessel, just three
Minds - fancy computers, apparently - controlling everything (what!?)

And
now he was finding out where the people lived, but it was all too big, too
much, too flimsy somehow, especially if the ship was supposed to accelerate as
smartly as Sma claimed. He shook his head. 'I don't understand; how does it
hold together?'

Sma
smiled. 'Just think; fields, Cheradenine. It's all done with force fields.' She
put one hand out to his troubled face, patted one cheek. 'Don't look so
confused. And don't try to understand it all too quickly. Let it soak in. Just
wander around; lose yourself in it for a few days. Come back whenever.'

Later,
he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could
never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then
the people who had built it.

He
walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty,
hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little
floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like
servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while.

'Of
course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning
the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down
beside him. 'But look; this table's clean.'

He
agreed that the table was clean.

'Usually,'
the man said. 'I work on alien - no offence - alien religions; Directional
Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my speciality... like when temples or
graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of
thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue
with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But... the job's never finished; always
new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along
with new ideas about what you thought was settled... but,' he slapped the
table, 'when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done
something. It's an achievement.'