The worst thing, he found, was that there was nobody to talk to.
He saw the seated figure on the beach, way in the distance, five moons or so after the night he'd burned his shack. He hesitated, then went on.
Twenty metres from the woman, he stopped and carefully inspected a length of fishing net on the tideline, the floats still attached and gleaming like earth-bound suns in the low morning light.
He glanced at the woman. She was sitting, legs crossed, arms folded across her lap, staring out to sea. Her simple gown was the colour of the sky.
He went up to the woman and put his new canvas bag down at her side. She did not move.
He sat beside her, arranged his limbs similarly, and stared out to sea, like her.
After a hundred or so waves had approached and broken and slipped away again, he cleared his throat.
'A few times,' he said, 'I had the feeling I was being watched.'
Sma said nothing for a while. The seabirds pivoted inside the spaces of the air, calling in a language he still did not understand.
'Oh, people have always felt that,' Sma said, at last.
He smoothed away a wormcast in the sand. 'I don't belong to you Diziet.'
'No,' she said, turning to him. 'You're right. You don't belong to us. All we can do is ask.'
'What?'
'That you come back. We have a job for you.'
'What is it?'
'Oh...' Sma smoothed her gown over her knees. 'Helping to drag a bunch of aristos into the next millenium, from the inside.'
'Why?'
'It's important.'
'Isn't everything?'
'And we can pay you properly this time.'
'You paid me off very handsomely the last time. Lots of money and a new body. What more can a chap ask for?' He gestured at the canvas bag at her side, and at himself, clothed in salt-stained rags. 'Don't let this fool you. I haven't lost the loot. I'm a rich man; very rich, here.' He watched the waves roll up towards them, then break and foam and fall away again. 'I just wanted the simple life, for a while.' He gave a sort of half-laugh, and realised it was the first time he'd even started to laugh since he'd come here.
'I know,' Sma said. 'But this is different. Like I said; we can pay you properly, now.'
He looked at her. 'Enough. No more being cryptic. What do you mean?'
She turned her gaze to him. He had to work hard at not looking away.
'We've found Livueta,' she said.
He stared into her eyes for a time, and then blinked and looked away. He cleared his throat, looking back out to the glittering sea, and had to sniff and wipe his eyes. Sma watched as the man moved one hand slowly to his chest, not realising he was doing it, and rubbed at the skin there, just over his heart.
'Mm-hmm. You're sure?'
'Yes, we're sure.'
He looked out over the waves after that, and suddenly felt that they were no longer bringing things to him, no longer messengers from the distant storms offering their bounty, but instead had become a pathway; a route, another distant sort of opportunity, beckoning.
That simple? he thought to himself. A word - a single name - from Sma and I'm all ready to go, take off, and take up their arms again? Because of her?
He let a few more waves roll up and down. The seabirds wailed. Then he sighed. 'All right,' he said. He pushed one hand up through his tangled, matted hair. 'Tell me about it.'
Four
'The fact remains,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw insisted, 'that the last time we went through this rigmarole, Zakalwe fucked up. They froze his ass in that Winter Palace.'
'All right,' Sma said. 'But it wasn't like him. Okay, so one time he gets it wrong... we don't know why. So maybe now he's had time to get over it, he'll actually want a chance to show he can still do the business. Maybe he can't wait for us to find him.'
'Good grief,' sighed the drone. 'Wishful thinking from Sma the Cynical. Maybe you're starting to lose your touch too.'
'Oh shut up.'
She watched the planet swing towards them on the module screen.
Twenty-nine days had passed on the Xenophobe.
As an ice breaker, the fancy-dress party had been a crushing success. Sma had woken up in a cushion-filled alcove of the rec area, birth-naked and in a tangle of assorted equally nude limbs and torsos. She had extricated one arm carefully from under the voluptuous sleeping form of Jetart Hrine, stood shakily, and gazed round the softly breathing bodies, appraising the men in particular, and then - treading very carefully, nearly over-balancing several times on the plump cushions, her muscles all complaining and trembly - tip-toed her way between the slumbering crew to the welcome solidity of the red-wood floor. The rest of the area had already been tidied. The ship must have sorted out everybody's clothes, for they lay in neat piles on a couple of large tables, just outside the alcove.
Sma massaged her slightly tingling genitals, grimacing. Bending over, they looked quite pink and raw; things looked slippery, and she decided she needed a bath.
The drone met her at the entrance to the corridor. Its red glowing field looked at least partially like a comment. 'Good night's sleep?' it inquired. 'Don't start that again.'
The drone floated at her shoulder as she headed for the elevator.
'You've made friends with the crew, then.'
She nodded. 'Very good friends with all of them, by the feel of it. Where's the ship's pool?'
'Floor above the hangar,' the machine said, following her into the elevator.
'Record anything exciting last night?' Sma asked, leaning back against the elevator wall as they dropped.
'Sma,' exclaimed the drone. 'I would not be so ungallant!'
'Hmm.' She raised one eyebrow. The elevator stopped, door opening. 'What memories, though,' the drone said, breathily. 'Your appetite and stamina are a credit to your species. I think.'
Sma dived into the smaller whirlpool, and, on surfacing, spat a jet of water at the machine, which dodged and backed into the elevator. 'I'll just leave you to it, then. Judging from last night, even an innocent offensive-model drone isn't safe from you once you get the bit between your teeth. So to speak.'
Sma splashed at it. 'Get out of here, you prurient pisspot.'
'And sweet-talking won't work ei...' the drone said, as the elevator door closed.
She would not have been surprised if the atmosphere in the ship had been a little embarrassed for a day or two thereafter, but the crew seemed quite cool about it all, and she decided that, basically, they were good sports. Happily, the fad for having colds passed quickly. She settled down to studying Voerenhutz, trying to guess where in the interlinked civilisations they were heading for Zakalwe might be... and enjoying herself, though - in the case of the latter activity - not on anything like the same scale or with quite the same frenetic abandon as she obviously had on her first night aboard.
Ten days out, the Just Testing sent news that Gainly had been delivered of twins; mother and pups doing well. Sma prepared a signal that her stand-in was to give the hralz a big kiss, from her, then hesitated, realising that the machine that was impersonating her would doubtless already have done so. She felt bad, and in the end just sent a formal acknowledgement.
She kept up on recent developments in Voerenhutz; the latest Contact forecasts were getting gloomier all the time. The brush-fire conflicts on a dozen planets each threatened to ignite a full-scale war, and - while getting a direct answer was proving difficult - she formed the impression that even if they found and convinced Zakalwe almost as soon as they landed, and hauled his ass out on the Xenophobe with the ship pushing its design limits, the chances of getting him to Voerenhutz in time to make any difference were at best fifty-fifty.
'Holy shit,' the drone said one day, as she sat in her cabin, reviewing cautiously optimistic reports on the peace conference back home (for so she had started to think of it, she admitted to herself).
'What?' She turned to the machine.
It looked at her. 'They just cha
nged the course schedule for the What Are The Civilian Applications?'
Sma waited.
'That's a Continent class GSV,' the drone said. 'Sub-class Prompt, one of the limiteds.'
'You said it was a General; now it's a Limited; make up your mind.'
'No, I mean it's a limited edition; the go-faster model; even nippier than this beast, once it gets going,' the drone said. It floated closer to her, fields set a weird mixture of olive and purple, which she seemed to remember indicated Awe. She'd certainly never seen that expression on Skaffen-Amtiskaw before. 'It's heading for Crastalier,' it told her.
'For us? For Zakalwe?' she frowned.
'Nobody'll say, but it looks like it to me. A whole General Systems Vehicle, just for us. Wow!'
'Wow,' Sma mimicked sourly, and pressed the screen for the view forward of the Xenophobe, still charging through the star systems for Crastalier. In their false representation on the screen, the stars ahead blazed blue-white, and - at the right magnification - the overall structure of the Open Cluster was easily visible.
She shook her head, went back to the peace conference reports. 'Zakalwe, you asshole,' she muttered to herself, 'you'd better fucking show up soon.'
Five days later, and still five days away, the General Contact Unit Very Little Gravitas Indeed signalled from the depths of the Open Cluster Crastalier that it thought it had picked up Zakalwe's trail.
The blue-white globe filled the screen; the module dipped its nose, plunging into the atmosphere.
'I just get the feeling this is going to be a complete debacle,' the drone said.
'Yes,' Sma said, 'but you're not in charge.'
'I'm serious,' the machine told her. 'Zakalwe's lost it. He doesn't want to be found, he won't be talked round, and even if by some miracle he can be, he can't do the same thing with Beychae. The man's washed up.'
Sma had a sudden, strange flash of memory then, back to the horizon-wide beach, and the man who'd sat at her side for a while, watching the wide ocean roll its waves up and down the glistening slope of sand.
She shook herself out of it. 'He's still together enough to junk a knife missile,' she told the machine, watching the hazy, cloud-shadowed ocean scroll beneath the dropping module. They were approaching the cloud tops.
'That was for him. For us, it'll be another Winter Palace job; I can feel it.'
She shook her head, apparently hypnotised by the view of cloud and curving ocean. 'I don't know what happened there. He got into that siege and just wouldn't break out. We warned him; we told him, in the end, but he just wouldn't... couldn't do it. I don't know what happened to him, I really don't; he just wasn't himself.'
'Well, he lost his head on Fohls. Maybe he lost more than that. Perhaps he lost it all on Fohls. Maybe we didn't quite save him in time.'
'We got to him in time,' Sma said, remembering Fohls as well now, as they plunged into a bulging cloud-top and the screen went grey. She didn't bother to adjust the wavelength, apparently content to look at the glowing, featureless interior of the cumulus.
'It was still traumatic,' the drone said.
'I'm sure, but...' she shrugged. The view of ocean and clouds burst clear onto the screen again, and the module angled steeper, powering down towards the waves. The sea flashed up towards them; Sma turned the screen off. She looked bashfully at Skaffen-Amtiskaw. 'I never like watching that,' she confessed. The drone said nothing. Inside the module, all was peace and quiet. After a moment, she asked, 'We in yet?'
'Doing our submarine impression,' the drone said crisply. 'Landfall in fifteen minutes.'
She turned the screen back on, got it to adjust for a sonic display, and watched the rolling sea floor speed by beneath. The module was manoeuvring hard, swinging and diving and zooming all the time, avoiding sea creatures as it followed the slowly rising slope of continental shelf towards the land. The view on the screen was disconcerting; she switched it off again, turned to the drone.
'He'll be all right, and he'll come with us; we still know where that woman is.'
'Livueta the Contemptuous?' sneered the drone. 'Short shrift she gave him last time. She'd have blown his head off if I hadn't been there. Why the hell should Zakalwe want to meet her again?'
'I don't know,' Sma frowned. 'He won't say, and Contact hasn't got round to doing the full procedure on the place we think he came from. I think it must involve something from his past... something he did, once, before we ever heard of him. I don't know. I think he loves her, or did, and still thinks he does... or just wants...'
'What? Wants what? Go on; you tell me.'
'Forgiveness?'
'Sma, given all the things Zakalwe's done, just since we've known him, they'd have to invent a personal deity for him alone, to even start forgiving him.'
Sma turned away to look at the blank screen again. She shook her head and said quietly, 'It doesn't work that way, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.'
Or any other way, the drone thought to itself, but didn't say anything.
The module surfaced in a deserted dock in the middle of the city, amongst the flotsam and jetsam. It roughed the texture of its outermost fields, so that the oily scum on the surface of the water stuck to it.
Sma watched its top hatch close, and stepped off the back of the drone, onto the pitted concrete of the dock. The module was ninety-per cent submerged; it looked like some flat-bottomed boat turned turtle. She straightened the rather vulgar culottes which were, regrettably, the height of fashion here just now, and looked up and around at the crumbling empty warehouses which all but enclosed the quiet dock. The city - she was oddly gratified to find - grumbled beyond.
'What was that you were saying about not looking in cities?' Skaffen-Amtiskaw inquired.
'Don't be crass,' she said, then clapped her hands and rubbed them. Looking down at the drone, she grinned. 'Anyway: time to start thinking like a suitcase, old chum. Make with a handle.'
'I hope you realise I find this every bit as demeaning as you think I must,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, with quiet dignity, then extended a soligram handle from one side, and flipped over. Sma gripped the handle and strained at it.
'An empty suitcase, asshole,' she grunted.
'Oh, pardon me, I'm sure,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered, and went light.
Sma opened a wallet full of money displaced only hours earlier from a city-centre bank by the good ship Xenophobe, and paid the cab driver. She watched a line of troop carriers thunder past, heading down the boulevard, then sat on a bench which formed part of a stone wall bordering a narrow strip of trees and grass, and looked out over the broad sidewalk and the boulevard beyond, to the large and impressive stone building on the far side. She place the drone beside her. Traffic roared past; people hurried to and fro in front of her.
At least, she thought, they're fairly Standard. She had never liked being altered to impersonate the natives. Anyway; they had inter-system travel here, and were fairly used to seeing people who looked different, even alien on occasion. As usual, of course, she was very tall in comparison, but she could live with a few stares.
'He's still in there?' she said quietly, looking at the armed guards outside the Foreign Ministry.
'Discussing some sort of weird trust set-up with the top brass,' the drone whispered. 'Want to eavesdrop?'
'Hmm. No.'
They had a bug in the appropriate conference chamber; literally a fly on the wall.
'Wa!' the drone yelped. 'I don't believe this man!'
Sma glanced at the drone, despite herself. She frowned. 'What's he said?'
'Not that!' the drone gasped. 'The Very Little Gravitas Indeed just worked out what the maniac's been up to here.'
The GCU was still in orbit, providing back-up for the Xenophobe; its Contact procedures and equipment had provided and were providing most of the information about the place; its bug was monitoring the conference chamber. Meanwhile, it was scanning computers and information banks over the entire planet.
'Well?' Sma said, watching anoth
er troop carrier rumble past on the boulevard.
'The man's insane. Power mad!' the drone muttered, seemingly to itself. 'Forget Voerenhutz; we have to get him out of here for the sake of these people.'
Sma elbowed the suitcase-drone. 'What, dammit?'
'Okay; here, Zakalwe's a goddamn magnate, right? Mega-powerful; interests everywhere; initial stake what he brought with him from the place he junked the knife missile; the loot we gave him last time, plus profits. And what is the core of his business empire, here? Genetechnology.'
Sma thought for a moment. 'Oh-oh,' she said, sitting back on the bench, crossing her arms.
'Whatever you're imagining, it's worse. Sma; there are five rather elderly autocrats on this planet, in competing hegemonies. They are all getting healthier. They are all getting, in fact, younger. That oughtn't to be possible for another twenty, thirty years.'
Sma said nothing. There was a funny feeling in her belly.
'Zakalwe's corporation,' the drone said quickly, 'is receiving crazy money from each of those five people. It was on the take from a sixth geezer, but he died about one-twenty days ago; assassinated. The Ethnarch Kerian. He controlled the other half of this continent. It's his demise that has led to all this military activity. Also, with the exception of the Ethnarch Kerian, these suddenly rejuvenated autocrats were showing signs of becoming uncharacteristically benign, from about the time they started getting so suspiciously frisky.'
Sma closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. 'Is it working?' she said, through a dry mouth.
'Like hell; they're all under threat from coups; their own military, as a rule. Worse than that, Kerian's death lit a slow fuse. This whole place is going super-critical! And we are talking tootsies on the event horizon; these meatbrained loonies have thermonukes. He's crazy!' the drone suddenly screeched. Sma hissed to quiet it, even though she knew the drone would be sound-fielding its words so that only she could hear. The drone spluttered on: 'He must have cracked the gene-coding in his own cells; the steady-state retro-ageing that we gave him; he's been selling it! For money and favours, trying to get these monomaniac dictators to behave like nice people. Sma! He's trying to set up his own contact section! And he's fucking it! Completely!'
Use of Weapons Page 9