Use of Weapons (54 page)

'If
it comes to it.'

Erens
was silent for a while, drawing on the pipe until its red glow faded, then
saying, 'You have a military background, at all, yeah?'

He
sat and watched the stars. Eventually he turned his head and looked at Erens.
'I think the war gave us all a military background, don't you?'

'Hmm,'
Erens said. They both studied the slowly moving star-field.

Twice,
in the depths of the sleeping ship, he almost killed somebody. One of those
times, it was somebody else.

He
stopped on the long, spiralling outer corridor, about halfway to the waist of
the ship, where he felt very light on his feet, and his face was a little
flushed with effects of normal blood pressure working against the reduced pull.
He hadn't intended to look at any of the stored people - the truth was, he
never really thought about them in any but the most abstract way - but suddenly
he wanted to see something more of a sleeper than just a little red light. He stopped
at one of the coffin-drawers.

He
had been shown how to work them after he'd volunteered to act as crew, and had
another, rather perfunctory, run through the procedures shortly after being
revived. He turned the suit lights on, flipped out the drawer's control pad,
and carefully - using one bulky, gloved finger - keyed in the code that Erens
said turned off the ship's monitoring system. A little blue light came on. The
red light stayed steady; if it flashed the ship knew there was something wrong.

He
unlocked the cabinet, drew the whole device sliding out.

He
looked at the woman's name, printed on a plastic strip stuck to the head-unit.
No-one he knew, anyway, he thought. He opened the inner cover.

He
looked in at the woman's calm, deathly pale face. His lights reflected on the
crinkled transparent plastic wrapping covering her like something you'd buy in
a shop. Tubes in her nose and mouth, leading away beneath her. A small screen
flashed on above her tied-up hair, on the head-unit. He looked; she seemed in
good shape, for somebody so nearly completely dead. Her hands were crossed
across the chest of the paper tunic she wore. He looked at her finger-nails,
like Erens had said. Quite long, but he'd seen people grow them longer.

He
looked at the control pad again, entered another code. Lights flashed all over
the control surface; the red light did not start flashing, but almost
everything else did. He opened a little red and green door set in the top of
the head-unit. Out of it he took a small sphere of what looked like fine green
wires, containing an ice blue cube. A compartment alongside gave access to a
covered switch. He pushed the cover back, put his finger down to the switch.

He
held the woman's recorded brain patterns, backed-up onto the little blue cube.
Easily crushable. His other hand, finger resting on the small switch, could
turn off her life.

He
wondered if he would do it, and seemed to wait for a while, as if expecting
some part of his own mind to assume control from him. A couple of times it seemed
to him that he felt the start of the impulse to throw the switch, and could
have started to do so just an instant later, but each time suppressed the urge.
He left his finger there, looked at the small cube inside its protective cage.
He thought how remarkable and at the same time how oddly sad it was that all of
a human mind could be contained in something so small. Then he reflected that a
human brain was not so very much bigger than the little blue cube, and used
resources and techniques far more ancient, and so was no less impressive (and
still as sad).

He
closed the woman up again in her chill sleep, and continued on his slow-motion
walk to the centre of the ship.

'I
don't know any stories.'

'Everybody
knows stories,' Ky told him.

'I
don't. Not proper stories.'

'What's
a "proper" story?' Ky sneered. They sat in the Crew Lounge,
surrounded by their debris.

He
shrugged. 'An interesting one. One people want to listen to.'

'People
want to listen to different things. What one person would call a proper story
might not please somebody else.'

'Well,
I can only go by what I think would be a proper story, and I don't have any.
Not stories that I want to tell, anyway.' He grinned coldly at Ky.

'Ah;
that's different,' Ky nodded.

'Indeed
it is.'

'Well,
tell me what you believe in, then,' Ky said, leaning towards him.

'Why
should I?'

'Why
shouldn't you? Tell me because I asked.'

'No.'

'Don't
be so stand-offish. We're the only three people for billions of kilometres and
the ship's a bore; who else is there to talk to?'

'Nothing.'

'Exactly.
Nothing and nobody.' Ky looked pleased.

'No;
I meant that's what I believe in; nothing.'

'At
all
?'

He
nodded. Ky sat back, thoughtful, nodding. 'They must have hurt you bad.'

'Who?'

'Whoever
robbed you of whatever it was you used to believe in.'

He
shook his head slowly. 'Nobody ever robbed me of anything,' he said. Ky was
silent for a while, so he sighed and said, 'So, Ky, what do you believe in?'

Ky
looked at the blank screen that covered most of one wall of the lounge. 'Something
other than nothing.'

'Anything
with a name is other than nothing,' he said.

'I
believe in what's around us,' Ky said, arms crossed, sitting back in the seat.
'I believe in what you can see from the carousel, what we'd see if that screen
was on, although what you'd see wouldn't be the only
sort
of what I believe in that I believe in.'

'In
a word, Ky,' he said.

'Emptiness,'
Ky said with a flickering, jittery smile. 'I believe in emptiness.'

He
laughed. 'That's pretty close to nothing.'

'Not
really,' Ky said.

'Looks
it to most of us.'

'Let
me tell you a sort of story.'

'Must
you?'

'No
more than you must listen.'

'Yeah...
okay, then. Anything to pass the time.'

'The
story is this. It's a true story, by the way, not that that matters. There is a
place where the existence or non-existence of souls is taken very seriously
indeed. Many people, whole seminaries, colleges, universities, cities and even
states devote almost all their time to the contemplation and disputation of
this matter and related topics.

'About
a thousand years ago, a wise philosopher-king who was considered the wisest man
in the world announced that people spent too much time discussing these things,
and could, if the matter was settled, apply their energies to more practical
pursuits which would benefit everybody. So he would end the argument once and
for all.

'He
summoned the wisest men and women from every part of the world, and of every
known persuasion, to discuss the matter.

'It
took many years to assemble every single person who wished to take part, and
the resulting debates, papers, tracts, books, intrigues and even fights and
murders took even longer.

'The
philosopher-king took himself off to the mountains to spend these years alone,
emptying his mind of everything so that he would be able, he hoped, to come
back once the process of argument was ended and pronounce the final decision.

'After
many years they sent for the king, and when he felt ready he listened to
everyone who thought they had something to say on the existence of souls. When
they had all said their piece, the king went away to think.

'After
a year, the king announced he had come to his decision. He said that the answer
was not quite so simple as everybody had thought, and he would publish a book,
in several volumes, to explain the answer. The king set up two publishing
houses, and each published a great and mighty volume. One repeated the
sentences, "Souls do exist. Souls do not exist," time after time,
part after part, page after page, section after section, chapter after chapter,
book after book. The other repeated the words, "Souls do not exist. Souls
do exist," in the same fashion. In the language of the kingdom, I might
add, each sentence had the same number of words, even the same number of
letters. These were the only words to be found beyond the title page in all the
thousands of pages in each volume. The king had made sure that the books began
and finished printing at the same time, and were published at the same time,
and that exactly the same number were published. Neither of the publishing
houses had any perceivable superiority or seniority over the other.

'People
searched the volumes for clues; they looked for a single repetition, buried
deep in the volumes, where a sentence or even a letter had been missed out or
altered, but they found none. They turned to the king himself, but he had taken
a vow of silence, and bound up his writing hand. He would still nod or shake
his head in reply to questions concerning the governing of his kingdom, but on
the subject of the two volumes, and the existence or otherwise of souls, the
king would give no sign.

'Furious
disputes arose, many books were written; new cults began. Then a half-year
after the two volumes had been published, two more appeared, and this time the
house that had published the volume beginning, "Souls do not exist,"
published the volume which began, "Souls do exist." The other
publisher followed suit, so that theirs now began, "Souls do not
exist." This became the pattern.

'The
king lived to be very old, and saw several dozen volumes published. When he was
on his death bed, the court philosopher placed copies of the book on either
side of him, hoping the king's head would fall to one side or the other at the
moment of death, so indicating by the first sentence of the appropriate volume
which conclusion he had really come to... but he died with his head straight on
the pillow and with his eyes, under the eyelids, looking straight ahead.

'That
was a thousand years ago,' Ky said. 'The books are published still; they have
become an entire industry, an entire philosophy, a source of un-ending argument
and -'

'Is
there an ending to this story?' he asked, holding up one hand.

'No,'
Ky smiled smugly. 'There is not. But that is just the point.'

He
shook his head, got up and left the Crew Lounge.

'But
just because something does not have an ending,' Ky shouted, 'doesn't mean it
doesn't have a...'

The
man closed the elevator door, outside in the corridor; Ky rocked forward in the
seat and watched the lift-level indicator ascend to the middle of the ship.
'... conclusion,' Ky said, quietly.

He'd
been revived nearly half a year when he almost killed himself.

He
was in the elevator car, watching a torch he had left in the centre of the car
as it slowly spun. He had left the torch switched on, and put out all the other
lights. He watched the tiny spot of light move slowly around the circular wall
of the car, slow as any clock hand.

He
remembered the search lights of the Staberinde, and wondered how far they were
away from it now. So far that even the sun itself must be weaker than a
searchlight seen from space.

He
did not know why that made him think of just taking off the helmet, but found
himself starting to do it, nevertheless.

He
stopped. It was quite a complicated procedure to open the suit while in vacuum.
He knew each of the steps, but it would take some time. He looked at the white
spot of light which the torch was shining on the wall of the lift, not far from
his head. The white spot was gradually coming closer as the torch spun. He
would start to ready the suit to take the helmet off; if the torch beam hit his
eye - no, his face, any part of his head - before that, then he would stop, and
go back as though nothing had happened. Otherwise, if the spot of light did not
strike his face in time, he would take the helmet off and die.

He
allowed himself the luxury of letting the memories wash over him, while his
hands slowly began the sequence that would end, unless interrupted, with the
helmet being blasted off his shoulders by the air pressure.

Staberinde,
the great metal ship stuck in stone (and a stone ship, a building stuck in
water), and the two sisters. Darckense; Livueta (and of course he'd realised at
the time that he was taking their names, or something like their names, in
making the one he masqueraded under now). And Zakalwe, and Elethiomel.
Elethiomel the terrible, Elethiomel the Chairmaker...

The
suit beeped at him, trying to warn him he was doing something very dangerous.
The spot of light was a few centimetres from his head.

Zakalwe;
he tried to ask himself what the name meant to him. What did it mean to
anybody? Ask them all back home; what does this name mean to you? War, perhaps,
in the immediate aftermath; a great family, if your memory was long enough; a
kind of tragedy. If you knew the story.