Use of Weapons (60 page)

Livueta
looked at them; the man, the woman, the little pale suitcase that was the
drone.

Sma
glanced to one side, hissed, 'Zakalwe!' She hauled him more upright.

His
eyes had been shut. They blinked open and he squinted uncertainly at the woman
standing in front of them. He appeared not to recognise her at first, then,
slowly, understanding seemed to filter through.

'Livvy?'
he said, blinking quickly, squinting at her. 'Livvy?'

'Hello,
Ms Zakalwe,' Sma said, when the woman did not reply.

Livueta
Zakalwe turned contemptuous eyes from the man half-hanging from Sma's right
arm. She looked at Sma and shook her head, so that just for an instant, Sma
thought she was going to say no, she wasn't Livueta.

'Why
do you keep doing this?' Livueta Zakalwe said softly. Her voice was still
young, the drone thought, just as the
Xenophobe
came back with some fascinating information it had gleaned from historical
records.

(-
Really
? the drone signalled. Dead?)

'Why
do you do this?' she said. 'Why do you do this... to him; to me... why? Can't
you just leave us all alone?'

Sma
shrugged, a little awkwardly.

'Livvy...'
he said.

'I'm
sorry, Ms Zakalwe,' Sma said. 'It's what he wanted; we promised.'

'Livvy;
please; talk to me; let me ex -'

'You
shouldn't do this,' Livueta told Sma. Then she turned her gaze to the man, who
was rubbing one hand over his shaved scalp, grinning inanely at her, blinking.
'He looks sick,' she said flatly.

'He
is,' Sma said.

'Bring
him in here.' Livueta Zakalwe opened another door; a room with a bed.
Skaffen-Amtiskaw, still wondering exactly what was going on in the light of the
information it had just received from the ship, still found the time to be
mildly surprised that the woman was taking it all so calmly this time. Last
time she'd tried to kill the fellow and it had had to move in smartly.

'I
don't want to lie down,' he protested, when he saw the bed.

'Then
just sit, Cheradenine,' Sma said. Livueta Zakalwe made a snaking motion with
her head, muttered something even the drone could not make out. She placed the
tray of drugs down on a table, stood in one corner of the room, arms crossed,
while the man sat down on the bed.

'I'll
leave you alone,' Sma said to the woman. 'We'll be just outside.'

Close
enough for me to hear, thought the drone, and to stop her trying to murder you
again, if that's what she decides to do.

'No,'
the woman said, shaking her head, looking with an odd dispassion at the man on
the bed. 'No; don't leave. There's nothing -'

'But
I want them to leave,' he said, and coughed, doubling over and almost falling
off the bed. Sma went to help him, and pulled him a little further on to the
bed.

'What
can't you say in front of them?' Livueta Zakalwe asked. 'What don't they know?'

'I
just want to have a... a talk in private, Livvy, please,' he said, looking up
at her. 'Please...'

'I
have nothing to say to you. And there is nothing you can say to me.'

The
drone heard somebody in the corridor outside; there was a knock at the door.
Livueta opened it. A young female nurse, who called Livueta Sister, told her
that it was time to prepare one of the patients.

Livueta
Zakalwe looked at her watch. 'I have to go,' she told them.

'Livvy!
Livvy, please!' He leant forward on the bed, both elbows tight by his sides,
both hands clawed out, palm up, in front of him. '
Please
!' There were tears in his eyes.

'This
is pointless,' the old woman shook her head. 'And you are a fool.' She looked
at Sma. 'Don't bring him to me again.'

'LIVVY!'
He collapsed on the bed, curled up and quivering. The drone sensed heat from
the shaven head, could see blood vessels throb on his neck and hands.

'Cheradenine,
it's all right,' Sma said, going to the bed and down on one knee, taking his
shoulders in her hands.

There
was a crack as one of Livueta Zakalwe's hands thumped down into the top of a
table she stood beside. The man wept, shaking. The drone sensed odd brain-wave
patterns. Sma looked up at the woman.

'Don't
call him that,' Livueta Zakalwe said.

'Don't
call him what?' Sma said.

Sma
could be pretty thick, the drone thought.

'Don't
call him Cheradenine.'

'Why
not?'

'It
isn't his name.'

'It
isn't?' Sma looked mystified. The drone monitored the man's brain activity and
blood flow and thought there was trouble coming.

'No,
it isn't.'

'But...'
Sma began. She shook her head suddenly. 'He's your brother; he's Cheradenine
Zakalwe.'

'No,
Ms Sma,' Livueta Zakalwe said, taking the drug-tray up again and opening the
door with one hand. 'No, he isn't.'

'Aneurysm!'
the drone said quickly, and slipped through the air, past Sma to the bed, where
the man was shaking spastically. It scanned him more thoroughly; found a
massive blood vessel leakage pouring into the man's brain.

It
whirled him round, straightened him out, using its effector to make him
unconscious. Inside his brain, the blood continued to pump through the tear
into the surrounding tissue, invading the cortex.

'Sorry
about this, ladies,' the drone said. It produced a cutting field and sliced
through his skull. He stopped breathing. Skaffen-Amtiskaw used another aspect
of its force field to keep his chest moving in and out, while its effector
gently persuaded the muscles that opened his lungs to work again. It took the
top of his skull off; a quick low-powered CREW blast, mirrored off another
field component, cauterised all the appropriate blood vessels. It held his
skull to one side. Blood was already visible, welling through the folded grey
geography of the man's brain tissue. His heart stopped; the drone kept it going
with its effector.

Both
women had stopped, fascinated and appalled at the actions of the machine.

It
stripped away the layers of the man's brain with its own senses; cortex,
limbic, thalamus/cerebellum, it moved through his defences and armaments, down
his thoroughfares and ways, through the stores and the lands of his memories,
searching and mapping and tapping and searing.

'What
do you mean?' Sma said, in an almost dream-like way to the elderly woman just
about to quit the room. 'What do you mean, "no"? What do you mean he
isn't your brother?'

'I
mean he is not Cheradenine Zakalwe,' Livueta sighed, watching the drone's
bizarre operation upon the man.

She was... She
was... She was...

Sma
found herself frowning into the woman's face. 'What? Then...'

Go back; go
right back. What was I to do? Go back. The point is to win. Go back! Everything
must bend to that truth.

'Cheradenine
Zakalwe, my brother,' Livueta Zakalwe said, 'died nearly two hundred years ago.
Died not long after he received the bones of our sister made into a chair.'

The
drone sucked the blood from the man's brain, teasing a hollow field-filament
through the broken tissue, collecting the red fluid in a little transparent
bulb. A second filament tube spun-knit the torn tissue back together. It sucked
more blood to decrease the man's blood pressure, used its effector to alter the
settings in the appropriate glands, so that the pressure would not grow so
great again for a while. It sent a narrow tube of field over to a small sink
under the window, jetting the excess blood down the drain hole, then briefly
turning on the tap. The blood flushed away, gurgling.

'The
man
you
know as Cheradenine Zakalwe
-'

Facing it by
facing it, that's all I ever did; Staberinde, Zakalwe; the names hurt, but how
else could I-

'-
is the man who took my brother's name just as he took my brother's life, just
as he took my sister's life -'

But she-

'-
He
was the commander of the
Staberinde. He
is the Chairmaker. He is
Elethiomel.'

Livueta
Zakalwe walked out, closing the door behind her.

Sma
turned, face almost bloodless, to look at the body of the man lying on the
bed... while Skaffen-Amtiskaw worked on, engrossed in its struggle to make
good.

Epilogue

Dust,
as usual, followed them, though the young man said several times he thought it
might rain. The old man disagreed and said the clouds over the mountains were
deceptive. They drove on through the deserted lands, past blackened fields and
the shells of cottages and the ruins of farms and the burned villages and the
still smoking towns, until they came to the abandoned city. In the city they
drove resoundingly through the wide empty streets, and once took the vehicle
crashing and careering up a narrow alley crammed with bare market stalls and
rickety poles supporting tattered shade-cloths, demolishing it all in a fine
welter of splintering wood and wildly flapping fabric.

They
chose the Royal Park as the best place to plant the bomb, because the troops
could be comfortably accommodated in the Park's wide spaces, and the high
command would likely take to the grand pavilions. The old man thought that
they'd want to occupy the Palace, but the young man was convinced that in their
hearts the invaders were desert people, and would prefer the spaces of the Park
to the clutter of the Citadel.

So
they planted the bomb in the Great Pavilion, and armed it, and then argued
about whether they'd done the right thing. They argued about where to wait
things out, and what to do if the army ignored the city altogether and just
went on by, and whether after the prospective Event the other armies would
retire in terror, or split up into smaller units to continue the invasion, or
know the weapon used had been unique, and so maintain their steady progress,
doubtless in an even more ruthless spirit of vengeance than before. They
argued about whether the invaders would bombard the city first, or send in
scouts, and - if they did shell - where they would target. They had a bet on
that.

About
the only thing they agreed on was that what they were doing was a waste of the
one nuke their side - indeed either side - possessed, because even if they had
guessed correctly, and the invaders behaved as they'd anticipated, the most
they could hope to do was wipe out one army, and that would still leave three
more, any one of which could probably complete the invasion. So the warhead,
like the lives, would be wasted.

They
radioed their superiors and with a code-word told them what they had done.
After a little while they received the blessing of the high command, in the
form of another single word. Their masters didn't really believe the weapon
would work.

The
older man was called Cullis, and he won the argument about where they ought to
wait, and so they settled into their high, grand citadel, and found lots of
weapons and wine and got drunk and talked and told jokes and swapped outrageous
stories of derring-do and conquest, and at one point one of them asked the
other what happiness was, and received a fairly flippant reply, but later
neither could remember which one had asked and which one had answered.