'Ten or twelve systems, drone?' Sma said shaking her head.
'Twenty-plus planets; maybe three hundred sizeable space habitats... not including ships, of course.'
Sma closed her eyes. Her head shook. 'I don't believe this.'
Skaffen-Amtiskaw thought the better of saying anything.
The woman's eyes opened. 'Want to pass on a suggestion or two?'
'Certainly.'
'Forget the habitats. And forget any planets that aren't fairly Standard; check out... deserts, temperate zones; forests but not jungles... and no cities.' She shrugged, rubbed her mouth with her hand. 'If he's still trying hard to stay hidden, we'll never find him. If he only wanted to get away to live his own life without being watched, we have a chance. Oh, and look for wars, of course. Especially wars that aren't too big... and interesting wars, know what I mean?'
'Right. Transmitted.' Normally the drone would have poured scorn on this bit of amateur psychological sleuthing, but this time it decided to bite its metaphorical tongue, and relayed Sma's remarks to the unresponding ship for transmission to the search fleet ahead of them.
Sma took a deep breath, shoulders rising and falling. 'Party still going on?'
'Yes,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, surprised.
Sma jumped off the bed and stepped into the Xeny suit. 'Well; let's not be party poopers.'
She fastened the suit, scooped up the brown and yellow head and walked for the door.
'Sma,' the drone said, following. 'I thought you'd be mad.'
'Maybe I will be, once the calm wears off,' she admitted, opening the door and putting the suit head on. 'But just right now, I really can't be bothered.'
They went down the corridor. She looked back at the clear-fielded machine behind her; 'Come on, drone; it's meant to be fancy dress. But try something a little more imaginative than a warship this time.'
'Hmm,' the machine said. 'Any suggestions?'
'I don't know,' Sma sighed, 'What would suit you? I mean, what is the perfect role-model for a cowardly lying patronising hypocritical bastard with no trust in or respect for another person?'
There was silence from behind as they approached the noise and light of the party. So she turned round and, instead of the drone, saw a classically proportioned, handsome, but somehow anonymous-looking young man following her down the corridor, his gaze just moving up from her behind to her eyes.
Sma laughed. 'Yes; very good.' She walked a few more steps. 'On second thoughts, I think I preferred the warship.'
XI
He never wrote things in the sand. He resented even leaving footprints. He saw it as a one-way commerce; he did the beachcombing, and the sea provided the materials. The sand was the middle-man, displaying the goods as though it was a long, soggy shop counter. He liked the simplicity of this arrangement.
Sometimes he watched the ships passing, far out to sea. Now and again he'd wish that he was on one of the tiny dark shapes, on his way to some bright and strange place, or on his way - imagining harder - to a quiet home port, to twinkling lights, amiable laughter, friends and welcome. But usually he ignored the slow specks, and got on with his walking and gathering, and kept his eyes on the grey-brown wash of the beach's slope. The horizon was clear and far and empty, the wind sang low in the dunes, and the seabirds wheeled and cried, comfortingly random and argumentative in the cold skies above.
The brash, noisy home-cars came sometimes, from the interior. The home-cars were loaded with shining metal and flashing lights, they had multi-coloured windows and highly ornamental grilles, they fluttered with flags and dripped with enthusiastically imagined but sloppily executed paint-jobs, and they groaned and flexed, over-loaded, as they came coughing and spluttering and belching fumes down the sandy track from the parktown. Adults leaned out of windows or stood one-legged on running boards; children ran alongside, or clung to the ladders and straps that covered their sides, or sat squealing and shouting on the roof.
They came to see the strange man who lived in a funny wooden shack in the dunes. They were fascinated, if also slightly repelled, by the strangeness of living in something that was dug into the ground, something that did not - could not - move. They would stare at the line where the wood and tar-paper met the sand, and shake their heads, walking right round the small, skewed hut, as if looking for the wheels. They talked amongst themselves, trying to imagine what it must be like to have the same view and the same sort of weather all the time. They opened the rickety door and sniffed the dark, smoky, man-scented air inside the hut, and shut the door quickly, declaring that it must be unhealthy to live in the same place, joined to the earth. Insects. Rot. Stale air.
He ignored them. He could understand their language, but he pretended not to. He knew that the ever-changing population of the parktown inland called him the tree-man, because they liked to imagine he had put down roots like his wheel-less shack had. He was usually out when they came to the shack, anyway. They lost interest in it fairly quickly, he found; they went to the shore line to shriek when they got their feet wet, and throw stones at the waves, and build little cars in the sand; then they climbed back into their home-cars, and went sputtering and creaking back inland, lights flashing, horns honking, leaving him alone again.
He found dead seabirds all the time, and the washed-up carcases of sea mammals every few days. Beachweed and sea-flowers lay strewn like party streamers over the sands, and - when they dried - rippled in the wind and slowly unravelled, finally disintegrating to be blown out to sea or far inland in bright clouds of colour and decay.
Once he found a dead sailor, lying washed and bloated by the ocean, extremities nibbled, one leg moving to the slow foamy beat of the sea. He stood and looked at the man for a while, then emptied his canvas bag of its flotsam booty, tore it flat, and gently covered the man's head and upper torso with it. The tide was ebbing, so he did not drag the body further up the beach. He walked to the parktown, for once not pushing his little wooden cart of tide treasure before him, and told the sheriff there.
The day he found the little chair he ignored it, but it was still there when he walked back past that stretch of beach on his return. He went on, and the next day combed in the other direction towards a different flat horizon, and thought the gale the following night would have removed it, but found it there again, the next day, and so took it, and in his shack repaired it with twine and a new leg made from a washed-up branch, and put it by the door of the shack, but never sat in it.
A woman came to the shack, every five or six days. He'd met her in parktown, soon after he'd arrived, on the third or fourth day of a drinking binge. He paid her in the mornings, always more than he thought she expected, because he knew she was frightened by the strange, unmoving shack,
She'd talk to him about her old loves and old hopes and new hopes and he half listened, knowing she thought he didn't really understand what she was saying. When he talked it was in another language, and the story was even less believeable. The woman would lie close to him, her head on his smooth and unscarred chest, while he talked into the dark air above the bed, his voice not echoing in the wood-flimsy space of the shack, and he'd tell her, in words she would never understand, about the magic land where everyone was a wizard and nobody ever had terrible choices to make, and guilt was almost unknown, and poverty and degradation were things you had to teach children about to let them understand how fortunate they were, and where no hearts broke.
He told her about a man, a warrior, who'd worked for the wizard doing things they could or would not bring themselves to do, and who eventually could work for them no more, because in the course of some driven, personal campaign to rid himself of a burden he would not admit to - and even the wizards had not discovered - he found, in the end, that he had only added to that weight, and his ability to bear was not without limit after all.
And he told her, sometimes, about another time and another place, far away in space and far away in time and even further away in history, where four childr
en had played together in a huge and wonderful garden, but seen their idyll destroyed with gunfire, and of the boy who became a youth and then a man, but who for ever after carried more than love for a girl in his heart. Years later, he would tell her, a small but terrible war was waged in this faraway place, and the garden itself laid waste. (And, eventually, the man did lose the girl from his heart.) Finally, when he had almost talked himself to sleep, and the night was at its darkest, and the girl was long since gone to the land of dreams, sometimes he would whisper to her about a great warship, a great metal warship, becalmed in stone but still dreadful and awful and potent, and about the two sisters who were the balance of that warship's fate, and about their own fates, and about the Chair, and the Chairmaker.
Then he would sleep, and when he woke, each time, the girl and the money would be gone.
He would turn back to the dark tar-paper walls then, and seek sleep, but not find it, and so rise and dress and go out, and comb the horizon-wide beach again, under the blue skies or the black skies, beneath the wheeling seabirds screaming their meaningless songs to the sea and the brine-charged breeze.
The weather varied, and because he'd never bothered to find out, he never knew what season it was, but the weather swung between warm and bright and cold and dull, and sometimes sleet came, chilling him, and winds blew around the dark hut, keening through the gaps in the planks and the tar-paper, and stirring the slack disturbances of sand on the floor inside the shack like abraded memories.
Sand would build up inside the hut, blown in from one direction or another, and he would scoop it carefully, throw it out the door to the wind like an offering, and wait for the next storm.
He always suspected there was a pattern to these slow sandy inundations, but he could not bring himself to try to work out what that pattern was. Anyway, every few days he had to trundle his little wooden cart into the parktown, and sell his sea-begotten wares, and collect money, and so food, and so the girl that came to the shack every five days or six.
The parktown changed every time he went there, streets being created or evaporating as the home cars arrived or departed; it all depended where people chose to park. There were some fairly static landmarks, like the sheriff's compound and the fuel stockade and the smithy wagon and the area where the light-engineering caravans set up shop, but even those changed slowly, and all about them was in constant flux, so that the geography of the parktown was never the same on two visits. He drew a secret satisfaction from this inchoate permanence, and did not hate going there as much as he pretended.
The track there was rutted and soft, and never got any shorter; he always hoped the random shiftings of the parktown might slowly draw its bustle and light closer to him, but it never happened, and he would console himself with the thought that if the parktown came closer then so would the people, and their bumbling inquisitiveness.
There was a girl in the parktown, the daughter of one of the dealers he traded with, who seemed to care for him more than the others; she made him drinks and brought him sweetmeats from her father's caravan, and seldom said anything, but slipped the food to him, and smiled shyly and walked quickly off again, her pet seabird - flightless, half of each wing cut off - waddling after her, squawking.
He said nothing to her that he didn't have to say, and always averted his eyes from her slim brown shape. He did not know what the courting laws were in this place, and while accepting the drink and food always seemed the easiest course, he did not want to intrude any more than he had to in the lives of these people. He told himself she and her family would move away soon, and accepted the offerings she brought him with a nod but no smile or word, and did not always finish what he was given. He noticed there was a young man who always seemed to be around whenever the girl served him, and he caught the boy's eyes a few times, and knew that the youth wanted the girl, and looked away each time.
The young man came after him one day when he was on his way back to the shack within the dunes. The youth walked in front of him and tried to make him talk; hit him on the shoulder, shouting into his face. He feigned incomprehension. The young man drew lines in the sand in front of him which he duly plodded over with his cart and stood looking, blinking at the youth, both hands still on the handles of the cart, while the boy shouted louder and drew another line on the sand between them.
Eventually, he got fed up with the whole performance, and the next time the young man prodded his shoulder he took his arm and twisted it and forced the youth to the sand and held him there for a while, twisting the arm in its socket just enough - he hoped - to avoid breaking anything but with sufficient force to disable the fellow for a minute or two while he took up his cart again and trundled it slowly away over the dunes.
It seemed to work.
Two nights later - the night after the regular woman had come and he'd told her about the terrible battleship and the two sisters and the man who was not yet forgiven - the girl came knocking at his door. The pet seabird with the clipped wings jumped and squawked outside while the cried and told him she loved him and there'd been an argument with her father, and he tried to push her away, but she slipped in underneath his arm and lay weeping on his bed.
He looked out into the starless night and stared into the eyes of the crippled, silent bird. Then he went over to the bed, dragged the girl from it and forced her out of the door, slamming it and bolting it.
Her cries, and those of the bird, came through the gaps in the planks for a while, like the seeping sand. He stuck his fingers in his ears and pulled the grimy covers over his head.
Her family, the sheriff, and perhaps twenty other people from the parktown, came for him the next night.
The girl had been found that evening, battered and raped and dead on the path from his shack. He stood in the doorway of the hut, looking out into the torch-lit crowd, met the eyes of the young man who had wanted the girl, and knew.
There was nothing he could do, because the guilt in one pair of eyes was outshone by the vengeance in too many others, and so he slammed the door and ran, across the shack and straight through the rickety planks on the far side and out into the dunes and the night.
He fought five of them that night and nearly killed two, until he found the young man and one of his friends searching unenthusiastically for him back near the track.
He clubbed the friend unconscious, took the young man by the throat. He gathered up both their knives, and held one blade to the throat of the youth as he marched him back to the shack.
He set fire to the shack.
When the light had attracted a dozen or so of the men, he stood up on the tallest dune above the hollow, holding the youth with one hand.
The parktown people gazed up at the stranger, lit by flames. He let the boy fall to the sand, threw him both knives.
The boy picked up the knives; charged.
He moved, let the boy go past, disarmed him. He gathered both knives; threw them hilt down in the sand in front of the boy. The youth struck out again, knife in each hand. Again - hardly seeming to move - he let the youth crash past, and slipped the knives from his grasp. He tripped the youth, and while he was still lying on the dune's top, threw the knives, sending them both thudding into the sand a centimetre on either side of his head. The youth screamed, plucked both blades out and threw them.
His head hardly moved as they hissed by his ears. The people watching in the flame-lit hollow moved their heads, following the trajectory the knives had to take, to the dunes behind them. But when they looked back again, wondering, both blades were in the stranger's hands, plucked from the air. He tossed them to the boy again.
The youth caught them, screamed, fumbled blood-handed to get them the right way round, and rushed again at the stranger, who dropped him, whacked the knives from his hands, and for a long moment held one of the young man's elbows poised over his knee, arm raised, ready to break... then shoved the boy away. He picked up the knives again, placed them in the open palms of the youth.
/> He listened to the boy sobbing into the dark sand, while the people watched.
He got ready to run again, glancing behind him.
The crippled seabird hopped and fluttered, clipped wings beating on air and sand, to the top of the dune. It cocked one flame-bright eye at the stranger.
The people in the hollow seemed frozen by the dancing flames.
The bird waddled to the prone, sobbing figure of the boy on the sand, and screamed. It flapped, shrieked, and stabbed at the boy's eyes.
The boy tried to fend it off, but the bird leapt into the air and whooped and beat and feathers flew and when the boy broke one of its wings and it fell to the sand, facing away from him, it jetted liquid shit at him.
The boy's face fell back to the sand. His body shook with sobs.
The stranger watched the eyes of the people in the hollow, while his shack caved in and the orange sparks swirled up into the still night sky.
Eventually the sheriff and the girl's father came and took the boy away, and a moon later the girl's family left, and two moons later the tightly bound body of the young man was lowered into a freshly picked hole in the nearest outcrop of rock, and covered with stones.
The people in the parktown would not talk to him, though one trader still took his flotsam. The brash and noisy home cars stopped coming down the sandy track. He had not thought he would miss them. He pitched a small tent near the blackened remains of the shack.
The woman stopped coming to him; he never saw her again. He told himself he was getting so little for his haul that he could not have paid her and eaten as well.
Use of Weapons Page 8