He shook his head, put his dark glasses on, and turned the screen off.
When the wind was in the right direction he blasted huge netted balls of paper money into the air from an old firework mortar mounted in a high roof garden; the notes drifted down like early snowflakes. He'd had the street decorated with bunting, streamers and balloons and filled with tables and chairs and bars serving free drink; covered ways extended the length of it and music played; there were brightly coloured canopies over the important areas, such as the bandstands and the bars, but they were not needed; the day was bright, and unseasonably warm. He looked out of one of the highest windows in one of the tallest buildings in the street, and smiled at the sight of all the folk.
So little happened in the city during the off season that the carnival had attracted instant attention. He had hired people to serve the drugs and food and drink he had laid on; he had banned cars and unhappy faces, and people who didn't smile when they tried to get into the street were made to wear funny masks until they had livened up a bit. He breathed in deeply from where he leaned on the high window, and his lungs soaked up the heady fumes of a very busy bar just below; the drug smoke made it just this far up and hung in a cloud. He smiled, found it very heartening; it was all perfect.
People walked around and talked together or in groups, exchanging their smoky bowls, laughing and smiling. They listened to the band and watched people dancing. They gave a great cheer each time the mortar fired. Many of them laughed at the leaflets full of political jokes that were given out with every bowl of drugs or food and every mask and novelty; they laughed too at the big, guady banners that were strung across the fronts of the dilapidated old buildings and across the street itself. The banners were either absurd or humorous, too. PACIFISTS AGAINST WALLS! and, EXPERTS? WHAT DO THEY KNOW? were two of the more translatable examples.
There were games and trials of wit or strength, there were free flowers and party hats and a much frequented Compliments stall where one paid a little money, or gave a paper hat or whatever, and was told what a nice, pleasant, good, unshowy, quiet-tempered, undemonstrative, restrained, sincere, respectful, handsome, cheerful, good-willed person one was.
He looked down on all of this, shades pushed up onto the tied-back hair above his forehead. Down there, submerged in it, he knew he would feel somehow apart from it all. But from his high vantage point he could look down and see the people as a mass with different faces; they were far enough away to present a single theme, close enough to introduce their own harmonious variations. They enjoyed themselves, were made to laugh or to giggle, encouraged to get drugged and silly, captivated by the music, slightly deranged by the atmosphere.
He watched two people in particular.
They were a man and a woman, walking slowly through the street, looking all around. The man was tall and had dark hair cut short and kept artificially unkempt and curly; he was smartly dressed and carried a small dark beret in one hand; a mask dangled from the other.
The woman was almost as tall, and slimmer. She was dressed like the man, in unfussy dark grey-black, with a mandala of pleated white at her neck. Her hair was black, shoulder-length, and quite straight. She walked as though there were many admiring people watching her.
They walked side by side, without touching each other; they spoke now and again, merely tipping their heads in the direction of their companion and looking to the other side, perhaps at what they were talking about, as they spoke.
He thought he remembered their photographs from one of the briefings on the GSV. He moved his head a little to one side, to make sure the earring terminal had a good shot of them, then told the tiny machine to record the view.
A few moments later, the two people disappeared beneath the banners at the far end of the street; they'd walked through the carnival without taking part in anything.
The street party went on; a small shower came and drove people under the awnings and covers and into some of the small houses, but it was short, and more people were coming all the time; small children ran with bright streamers of paper, winding coloured trails round posts and people and stalls and tables. Puff-bombs exploded in smoky balls of coloured incense, and laughing, choking people staggered about, thumping each others' backs and shouting at the laughing children who threw the things.
He drew away from the window, losing interest. He sat in the room for a little, squatting on an old chest in the dust, hand rubbing his chin, thoughtful, only raising his eyes when an upward landslide of balloons jostled up past the casement. He brought the dark glasses down. From inside, the balloons looked just the same.
He walked down the narrow stairs, his boots clacking on the old wood; he took the old raincoat up from the rail at the bottom, and let himself out of the rear door into another street.
The driver pulled the car away and he sat in the back as they rolled past the rows of old buildings. They came to the end of the street and turned into the steep road that ran at right-angles to it and the street the party was in. They slid past a long dark car with the man and the woman in it.
He looked round. The dark car followed them.
He told the driver to exceed the speed limit. They sped, and the car following them kept pace. He hung on and watched the city slithering past. They raced through some of the old government areas; the grand buildings were grey, and heavily decorated with wall founts and water channels; elaborate patterns of water ran down their walls in vertical waves, dropping like theatre curtains. There were some weeds, but less than he would have expected. He couldn't remember if they let the water-walls ice up, turned them off, or added antifreeze. Scaffolding hung from many of the buildings. Workmen scratched and scraped at the worn stones, and turned to watch the two big cars go tearing through the squares and plazas.
He clung on to a grab handle in the rear of the car, and sorted through a large collection of keys.
They stopped in an old narrow street, down near the banks of the great river itself. He got out smartly and hurried into a small entrance under a tall building. The following car roared into the street as he closed but did not lock the door. He went down some steps, unlocking several rusting sets of gates. When he got down to the bottom of the building he found the funicular car waiting on the platform. He opened the door, got in and pulled the lever.
There was a slight jerk as the car started off up the incline, but it ran smoothly enough. He watched through the back windows as the man and then the woman came out onto the platform. He smiled as they looked up and saw the car disappearing into the tunnel. The little coach struggled up the smooth slope into the daylight.
At the point where the uphill and the downhill coach passed each other, he got out onto the outer platform of the car and stepped over onto the downhill coach. It ran on, propelled by the extra weight of water that it carried in its tanks, picked up from the stream at the high terminal of the old line. He waited a bit, then jumped out of that car about a quarter of the way down, onto the step? at the side of the track. He climbed up a long metal ladder, into another building.
He was sweating slightly by the time he got to the top. He took off the old raincoat and walked back to the hotel with it over his arm.
The room was very white and modern-looking, with large windows. The furniture was integrated with the plasticised walls, and light came from bulges in the one-piece roof. A man stood watching the first snow of winter as it fell softly over the grey city; it was late afternoon, and getting dark quickly. On a white couch a woman lay face-down, her elbows spread out, but her hands together under her side-turned face. Her eyes were closed and her pale, oiled body was massaged with apparent roughness by a powerfully-built man with grey hair and facial scars.
The man at the window watched the falling snow in two ways. First as a mass, with his eyes on one static point, so that the snowflakes became a mere swirl and the currents of air and gusts of light wind that moved them became manifest in patterns of circling, spiralling, falling. Then, by looki
ng at the snow as individual flakes, selecting one high in the indeterminate galaxy of grey on grey, he saw one path, one separate way down through all the quiet hurry of the fall.
He watched them as they hit the black sill outside, where they grew steadily but imperceptibly to form a soft white ledge. Others struck the window itself, sticking there briefly, then falling away, blown off.
The woman seemed asleep. She smiled slightly, and the exact geography of her face was altered by the forces that the grey-haired man exerted on her back, shoulders and flanks. Her oiled flesh moved this way and that, and the gliding fingers seemed to provide force without causing friction, ribbing and creasing the skin like the smooth action of the sea on underwater grass. Her buttocks were covered by a black towel, her hair was loose and spilling over pan of her face, and her pale breasts were long ovals squashed beneath her trim body.
'What is to be done, then?'
'We need to know more.'
'That is always true. Back to the problem.'
'We could have him deported.'
'For what?'
'We need to give no reason, though we could invent one easily enough.'
'That might start the war before we are ready for it.'
'Shush now; we must not talk of this "war" thing. We are officially on the best of terms with all our Federation members; there is no need for worry. Everything is under control.'
'Said an official spokesperson... Do you think we should get rid of him?'
'It may be the wisest course. One might feel better with him out of the way... I have a horrible feeling he must be here for a purpose. He has been given full use of the Vanguard Foundation's monies, and that... wilfully mysterious organisation has opposed us every step along the road for thirty years. The identity and location of its owners and executives have been one of the cluster's best-kept secrets; unparalleled reserve. Now - suddenly - this man appears, spending with a quite vulgar profligacy and maintaining a high, if still coquettishly shy, profile... just when it might prove extremely awkward.'
'Perhaps he is the Vanguard Foundation.'
'Nonsense. If it's anything appreciable at all, it's some interfering aliens, or a do-good machine, either running on some dead magnate's conscience will - or even running with a transcription of a human personality - or it's a rogue machine, accidentally conscious with no-one to oversee it. I think every other possibility has been discounted over the years. This man Staberinde is a puppet; he spends money with the desperation of an indulged child worried such generosity will not last. He's like a peasant winning a lottery. Revolting. But he must - I repeat - be here for a purpose.'
'If we kill him, and he turns out to have been important, then we might start a war, and too early.'
'Perhaps, but I feel we must do what is not expected. To prove our humanity, to exploit our intrinsic advantage over the machines, if for no other reason.'
'Indeed, but isn't it possible he could be of use to us?'
'Yes.'
The man at the window smiled at his reflection in the glass and tapped out a little rhythm on the inside sill.
The woman on the couch kept her eyes closed, her body moving to the steady beat of the hands that plied her waist and flanks.
'But wait. There were links between Beychae and the Vanguard Foundation. If this is so...'
'If this is so... then perhaps we can persuade Beychae to our side, using this person, this Staberinde.' The man put his finger to the glass and traced the path of a snowflake, drifting down the other side. His eyes crossed as he watched it.
'We could...'
'What?'
'Adopt the Dehewwoff system.'
'The...? Need to know more.'
The Dehewwoff system of punishing by disease; graded capital punishment; the more serious the crime the more serious the disease the culprit is infected with. For minor crimes a mere fever, loss of livelihood and medical expenses; for more damaging misdeeds a bout of something lasting perhaps months, with pain and a long convalescence, bills and no sympathy, sometimes marks to show later on. For really ghastly crimes, infection with diseases rarely survived; near certain death but possible divine intervention and miracle cure. Of course, the lower one's class, the more virulent one's punishment, to allow for the hardier constitutions of the toilers. Combinations, and recurring strains, provide sophistications to the basic idea.'
'Back to the problem.'
'And I hate those dark glasses.'
'I repeat; back to the problem.'
'... we need to know more.'
'So they all say.'
'And I think we should speak to him.'
'Yes. Then we kill him.'
'Restraint. We speak to him. We shall find him again and ask him what he wants and perhaps who he is. We shall keep quiet and be thoughtful and we shall not kill him unless he needs to be killed.'
'We nearly spoke to him.'
'No sulking. It was preposterous. We are not here to chase cars and run after idiot recluses. We plan. We think. We shall send a note to the gentleman's hotel...'
'The Excelsior. Really, one would have hoped such a respected establishment might not have been so easily seduced by mere money.'
'Indeed; and then we shall go to him, or have him come to us.'
'Well, we certainly ought not to go to him. And as for him coming to us, he may refuse. Regret that... Due to an unforeseen... A previous commitment prevents... Feel it would be unwise at this juncture, perhaps another... Can you imagine how humiliating that would be?'
'Oh, all right. We'll kill him.'
'All right we'll try to kill him. If he survives we shall talk to him. If he survives he will want to talk to us. Commendable plan. Must agree. No question, left no choice; mere formality.'
The woman fell silent. The grey-haired man heaved at her hips with his great hands, and strange patterns of sweat broke from the unscarred areas of his face; the hands swirled and swept over the woman's rump, and she bit her bottom lip just a little as her body moved in a sweet impersonation, flat beat on a white plain. Snow was falling.
VII
'You know,' he told the rock, 'I've got this really nasty feeling that I'm dying... but then all my feelings are pretty nasty at the moment, come to think of it. What do you think?'
The rock didn't say anything.
He had decided that the rock was the centre of the universe, and he could prove it, but the rock just didn't want to accept its obviously important place in the overall scheme of things, at least not yet anyway, so he was left talking to himself. Or he could talk to the birds and the insects.
Everything wavered again. Things like waves, like clouds of carrion birds, closed in on him, centring, zeroing, trapping his mind and picking it off like a rotten fruit under a machine-gun.
He tried to crawl away unobtrusively; he could see what was coming next; his life was going to flash before him. What an appalling thought.
Mercifully, only bits of it came back to him, as if the images mirrored his smashed body, and he remembered things like sitting in a bar on a little planet, his dark glasses making strange patterns with the darkened window; he remembered a place where the wind was so bad they used to judge its severity by the number of trucks that got blown over each night; he remembered a tank battle in the great monoculture fields like seas of grass, all madness and submerged desperation and commanders standing on the tanks and the areas of burning crop, slowly spreading, burning through the night, spreading darkness ringed by fire... the cultivated grassland was the reason for and prize of that war, and was destroyed by it; he remembered a hose playing under searchlit water, its silent coils writhing; he remembered the never-ending whiteness and the attritional tectonics of the crashing tabular bergs, the bitter end of a century's slow sleep.
And a garden. He remembered the garden. And a chair.
'Scream!' he screamed, and started flapping his arms about, trying to work up enough of a run to get into the air and away from... from... he hardly knew. He
hardly moved, either; his arms flapped a little and scraped a few more guano pellets away, but the ring of patient birds clustered around him, waiting for him to die, just looked on, unfooled, at this display of inadequately avian behaviour.
'Oh all right,' he mumbled, and collapsed back, clutching his chest and staring into the bland blue sky. What was so terrible about a chair, anyway? He started crawling again.
He hauled himself around the little puddle, scraping his way through the dark pellets the birds had left, then at a certain point set off towards the waters of the lake. He got only so far, then stopped, turned back, and went on round the puddle again, scraping aside the black bird-shit pellets, apologising to the little insects he disturbed as he did so. When he got back to the place where he'd been earlier, he stopped and took stock.
The warm breeze brought the smell of sulphur from the lake to him... And he was back in the garden again, remembering the smell of flowers.
Once there had been a great house which stood in an estate bordered on three sides by a broad river, mid-way between the mountains and the sea. The grounds were full of old woods and well-grazed pasture land; there were rolling hills full of shy, wild animals, and winding paths and winding streams crossed by little bridges; there were follies and pergolas and ha-has, ornamental lakes and quiet, rustic summerhouses.
Over the years and the generations, many children were born and brought up in the great house, and played in the wonderful gardens that surrounded it, but there were four in particular whose story became important for people who had never seen the house, or heard of the family's name. Two of the children were sisters, called Darckense and Livueta; one of the boys was their elder brother, called Cheradenine, and they all shared the family name; Zakalwe. The last child was not related to them, but came from a family that had long been allied to theirs; he was called Elethiomel.
Cheradenine was the older boy; he could just remember the fuss when Elethiomel's mother came to the great house, large with child, in tears, and surrounded by fussing servants and huge guards and weeping maids. For a few days the attention of the whole house seemed to be centred on the woman with the child in her womb, and - though his sisters played happily on, glad of the lessened watchfulness of their nannies and guards - he already resented the unborn infant.
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