Cruel, he thought.
The Culture might just have it right after all; being able to call up almost any drug or combinations of drugs seemed suddenly less indulgent and decadent than he'd imagined, before.
The girl, he saw, in one awful instant, would do great things. She would be famous and important, and the tribe around her would do great - and terrible - things, and it would all be for nothing, because whatever terrible train of events he had set in motion by taking the Chosen to the Palace, this tribe would not survive; they were the dead. Their mark upon the desert of life was already being obscured, sands blowing over, grain by grain by grain... He had already helped to scuff it out, no matter that they hadn't realised this yet. They would, after he was gone. The Culture would take him away from here, and put him down somewhere else, and this adventure would collapse with the rest into meaninglessness, and nothing very much would be left, as he went on to do roughly the same thing somewhere else.
Actually, he could happily have killed the Chosen, because the boy was a fool, and he had seldom been in the company of anybody quite so stupid. The youth was a cretin, and didn't even realise that he was.
He could think of no more disastrous combination.
He swept back towards the planet he had once abandoned.
Came in so far, was forced away. He tried again, but without any real self-belief.
Was rejected. Well, he'd expected no more.
The Chairmaker was not the person who made the chair, he thought, immediately lucid. It was and was not him. There are no Gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
His eyes were already closed, but he closed them again.
He swayed in a circle, unknowing.
Lies; he wept and screamed, fell at the scornful feet of the girl.
Lies; he circled on.
Lies; he fell to the girl, hands out, grasping for a mother that was not there.
Lies.
Lies.
Lies; he circled on, tracing his own private symbol in the air between the crown of his head and the day-bright hole that was the tent's smoke-hole.
He sank towards the planet again, but the girl in the black/white tent reached out and wiped his brow and, in that tiny movement, seemed to wipe his being away...
(Lies.)
... It was a long time later he found out he'd only taken the Chosen to the Palace because the brat was to be the last of the line. Not merely stupid, but also impotent, the Chosen fathered no strong sons and no cunning daughters (as the Culture had known all along), and the fractious desert tribes swept in a decade later led by a Matriarch who had guided most of the warriors under her command through the dream-leaf time, and had seen one stronger and stranger than all of them suffer its effects and come through unscathed but still unfulfilled, and known through that very experience that there was more to their desert existence than had been guessed at by the myths and elders of her nomad tribe.
3: Remembrance
Ten
He loved the plasma rifle. He was an artist with it; he could paint pictures of destruction, compose symphonies of demolition, write elegies of annihilation, using that weapon.
He stood, thinking about it, while the wind moved dead leaves round his feet and the ancient stones faced into the wind.
They hadn't made it off the planet. The capsule had been attacked by... something. He couldn't tell from the damage whether it had been a beam weapon or some sort of warhead going off nearby. Whatever it had been, it had disabled them. Clamped to the outside of the capsule, he'd been lucky to be on the side that shielded him from whatever had hit it. Had he been on the other side, facing the beam or the warhead, he'd be dead.
They must have been hit by some crude effector weapon as well, because the plasma rifle seemed to have fused. It had been cradled between his suit and the capsule skin and couldn't have been affected by whatever wrecked the capsule itself, but the weapon had smoked and got hot, and when they'd finally landed - Beychae shaken but unhurt - and opened up the gun's inspection panels, it was to find a melted, still-warm mess inside.
Maybe if he'd taken just a little less time to convince Beychae; maybe if he'd just knocked the old guy out and left the talking for later. He'd taken too much time, given them too much time. Seconds counted. Dammit, milliseconds, nanoseconds counted. Too much time.
'They're going to kill you!' he'd shouted. 'They want you on their side or they want you dead. The war's going to start soon, Tsoldrin; you support them or you'll have an accident. They won't let you stay neutral!'
'Insane,' Beychae repeated, cradling Ubrel Shiol's head in his hands. Saliva trickled from the woman's mouth. 'You're insane, Zakalwe; insane.' He started to cry.
He went over to the old man, knelt on one knee, holding the gun he'd taken from Shiol. 'Tsoldrin; what do you think she had this for?' He put his hand on the old man's shoulder. 'Didn't you see the way she moved when she tried to kick me? Tsoldrin; librarians... research assistants... they just don't move like that.' He reached out and patted the unconscious woman's collar flat and tidy again. 'She was one of your jailers, Tsoldrin; she would probably have been you executioner.' He reached under the car, pulled out the bouquet of flowers, and placed them gently under her blonde head, removing Beychae's hands.
'Tsoldrin,' he said. 'We have to go. She'll be all right.' He arranged Shiol's arms in a less awkward position. She was already on her side, so she wouldn't choke. He reached carefully under Beychae's arms and slowly drew the old man up to his feet. Ubrel Shiol's eyes flickered open; she saw the two men in front of her; she muttered something, and one hand went to the back of her neck. She started to roll over, unbalanced in her grogginess; the hand that had gone to her neck came away clutching a tiny cylinder like a pen; he felt Beychae stiffen as the girl looked up and, as she fell forward, tried to point the little laser at Beychae's head.
Beychae looked into her dark, half-unfocused eyes, over the top of the pen laser, and felt a sort of appalled disconnectedness. The girl tried hard to steady herself, aiming at him. Not Zakalwe, he thought; at me. Me!
'Ubrel...' he began.
The girl fell back in a dead faint.
Beychae stared down at her body lying limp on the road. Then he heard somebody saying his name and tugging his arm.
'Tsoldrin... Tsoldrin... Come on, Tsoldrin.'
'Zakalwe; she was aiming at me, not you!'
'I know, Tsoldrin.'
'She was aiming at me!'
'I know. Come on; here's the capsule.'
'At me...'
'I know, I know. Get in here.'
He watched the grey clouds move overhead. He stood on the flat stone summit of a high hill, surrounded by other hilltops almost as high, all wooded. He looked resentfully around the forested slopes and the curious, truncated stone pillars and plinths that covered the platform peak. He felt a sense of vertigo, exposed to such wide horizons again after so long spent in the cleft city. He left the view, kicked his way through some wind-piled leaves, back to where Beychae sat and the plasma rifle rested against a great round stone. The capsule was a hundred metres away, down in the trees.
He picked up the plasma rifle for the fifth or sixth time and inspected it.
It made him want to cry; it was such a beautiful weapon. Every time he picked it up he half hoped that it would be all right, that the Culture had fitted it with some self-repair facility without telling him, that the damage would be no more...
The wind blew; the leaves scattered. He shook his head, exasperated. Beychae, sitting in his thickly padded trousers and long jacket, turned to look at him.
'Broken?' the old man asked.
'Broken,' he said. His face took on an expression of annoyance; he gripped the weapon round the muzzle with both hands and swung it round his head, then let it go and sent it whirling away into the trees below; it disappeared in a flurry of dislodged leaves.
He sat down beside Beychae.
Plasma rifle gone, just a pistol left; only on
e suit; probably no way he could use the suit's AG without giving away their position; capsule wrecked; module nowhere to be seen; no word from the terminal earring or the suit itself... it was a sorry mess. He checked the suit for whatever broadcast signals it was picking up; the wrist screen displayed some news headlines programme; nothing about Solotol was mentioned. A few of the Cluster's brush-fire wars were.
Beychae looked at the small screen too. 'Can you tell from that whether they are looking for us?' he asked.
'Only if we see it on the news. Military stuff will be tight-beamed; slim chance we'll pick up a transmission.' He looked at the clouds. 'We'll probably find out more directly, soon enough.'
'Hmm,' Beychae said. He frowned at the flagstones, then said, 'I think I might know where this place is, Zakalwe.'
'Yeah?' he said, unenthusiastically. He put his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, and looked out over the wooded plains to the low hills on the horizon.
Beychae nodded. 'I've been thinking about it. I believe this is the Srometren Observatory, in Deshal Forest.'
'How far is that from Solotol?'
'Oh; different continent. Good two thousand kilometres.'
'Same latitude,' he said glumly, looking up at the chill grey skies.
'Approximately, if this is the place I think it is.'
'Who's in charge here?' he asked. 'Whose jurisdiction? Same lot as in Solotol; the Humanists?'
'The same.' Beychae said, and got up, brushing the seat of his pants and looking around the flattened hill-top at the curious stone instruments that covered its flagstones. 'Srometren Observatory!' he said. 'How ironic we should happen to come down here, on our way to the stars!'
'Probably not just chance,' he said, picking up a twig and brushing a few random shapes in the dust at his feet. 'This place famous?'
'Of course,' Beychae said. 'It was the centre of astronomical research for the old Vrehid Empire for five hundred years.'
'On any tourist routes?'
'Certainly.'
'Then it probably has a beacon nearby, to guide aircraft in. Capsule may have made for it when it knew it was crippled. Makes us easier to find.' He gazed up at the sky. 'For everybody, unfortunately.' He shook his head, went back to scratching in the dust with the twig.
'What happens now?' Beychae said.
He shrugged. 'We wait and see who turns up. I can't get any of the communication gear to work, so we don't know if the Culture knows all that's happened or not... for all I know the Module's still coming for us, or a whole Culture starship's on its way, or - probably more likely - your pals from Solotol...' He shrugged, threw down the twig and sat back against the stonework behind him, glancing skyward. They might be watching us right now.'
Beychae looked up too. 'Through the clouds?'
'Through the clouds.'
'Shouldn't you be hiding, then? Running off through the woods?'
'Maybe,' he said.
Beychae stood looking down at the other man. 'Where were you thinking of taking me, if we'd got away?'
'The Impren System. There are space Habitats there,' he said. 'They're neutral, or at least not as pro-war as this place.'
'Do your... superiors really think war is so close, Zakalwe?'
'Yes,' he sighed. He already had the suit's face-plate hinged up; now, with another look at the sky, he took the whole helmet off. He put one hand up over his forehead and through his drawn-back hair, then reached back and took the pony-tail out of its little ring, shaking his long black hair down. 'It might take ten days, might take a hundred, but it's coming.' He smiled thinly at Beychae. 'For the same reasons as last time.'
'I thought we'd won the ecological argument against terra-forming,' said Beychae.
'We did, but times change; people change, generations change. We won the battles for the acknowledgement of machine sentience, but by all accounts the issue was fudged after that. Now people are saying, yes, they're sentient, but it's only human sentience that counts. Plus, people never need too much of an excuse to see other species as inferior.'
Beychae was silent for a while, then said, 'Zakalwe, has it ever occurred to you that in all these things the Culture may not be as disinterested as you imagine, and it claims?'
'No, it never occurred to me,' he said, though Beychae got the impression the man hadn't really thought first before answering.
'They want other people to be like them, Cheradenine. They don't terraform, so they don't want others to either. There are arguments for it as well, you know; increasing species diversity often seems more important to people than preserving a wilderness, even without the provision of extra living space. The Culture believes profoundly in machine sentience, so it thinks everybody ought to, but I think it also believes every civilisation should be run by its machines. Fewer people want that. The issue of cross-species tolerance is, I'll grant, of a different nature, but even there the Culture can sometimes appear to be insistent that deliberate inter-mixing is not just permissible but desirable; almost a duty. Again, who is to say that is correct?'
'So you should have a war to... what? Clear the air?' He inspected the suit helmet.
'No, Cheradenine, I'm just trying to suggest to you that the Culture may not be as objective as it thinks it is, and, that being the case, its estimation concerning the likelihood of war may be equally untrustworthy.'
'There are small wars on a dozen planets right now, Tsoldrin. People are talking war in public; either about how to avoid it, or how it might be limited, or how it can't possibly happen... but it's coming; you can smell it. You should catch the newscasts, Tsoldrin. Then you'd know.'
'Well then, perhaps war is inevitable,' Beychae said, looking away over the wooded plains and hills beyond the observatory. 'Maybe it's just... time.'
'Crap,' he said. Beychae looked at him, surprised. 'There's a saying: "War is a long cliff." You can avoid the cliff completely, you can walk along the top for as long as you have the nerve, you can even choose to leap off, and if you only fall a short way before you hit a ledge you can always scramble back up again. Unless you're just plain invaded, there are always choices, and even then, there's usually something you've missed - a choice you didn't make - that could have avoided invasion in the first place. You people still have your choices. There's nothing inevitable about it.'
'Zakalwe,' Beychae said. 'You surprise me. I'd have thought you -'
'You'd have thought I'd be in favour of war?' he said, standing, a sad small smile on his lips. He put one hand on the other man's shoulder. 'You've had your nose buried in books for too long, Tsoldrin.' He walked away past the stone instruments. Beychae looked down at the suit helmet, lying on the flagstones. He followed the other man.
'You're right, Zakalwe. I have been out of the flow of things for a long time. I probably don't know who half the people in power are these days, or exactly what the issues are, or the precise balance of the various alliances... so the Culture cannot be so... desperate they think I can alter whatever's going to happen. Can they?'
He turned round. He looked into Beychae's face. 'Tsoldrin, the truth is I don't know. Don't think I haven't thought about this. It might be just that you, as a symbol, really,.would make all the difference, and maybe everybody is desperate to find an excuse not to have to fight; you could be that excuse if you come along, uncontaminated by recent events, as though from the dead, and provide a face-saving compromise.
'Or maybe the Culture secretly thinks a small short war is a good idea, or even knows there's nothing it can do to stop a full-scale one, but has to be seen to be doing something, no matter how long a shot it might be, so that people can't say later "Why didn't you try this?"' He shrugged. 'I never try to second-guess the Culture, Tsoldrin, let alone Contact, and certainly not Special Circumstances.'
'You just do their bidding.'
'And get well paid for it.'
'But you see yourself on the side of good, do you, Cheradenine?'
He smiled and sat on the stone pli
nth, legs swinging. 'I have no idea whether they're the good guys or not, Tsoldrin. They certainly seem to be, but then who knows that seeming is being?' He frowned, looked away. 'I have never seen them be cruel, even when they might have claimed they had an excuse to be so. It can make them seem cold, sometimes.' He shrugged again. 'But there are folks that'll tell you it's the bad gods that always have the most beautiful faces and the softest voices. Shit,' he said, and jumped off the stone table. He went to stand by the balustrade which marked one edge of the old observatory, looking to where the sky was starting to redden above the horizon. It would be dark in an hour. 'They keep their promises and they pay top rates. They make good employers, Tsoldrin.'
'That does not mean we ought to let them decide our fate.'
'You'd rather let those decadent dickheads in Governance do it instead?'
'At least they're involved, Zakalwe; it isn't just a game to them.'
'Oh, I think it is. I think that's exactly what it is to them. The difference is that unlike the Culture's Minds, they don't know enough to take games seriously.' He took a deep breath and watched the wind stir the branches beneath them; leaves fell away. 'Tsoldrin; don't say you're on their side.'
'The sides were always strange,' Beychae said. 'We all said that all we wanted was the best for the Cluster, and I think we all meant it, mostly. We all still want that. But I don't know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I know too much, I've studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that settles over... whatever machinery we carry inside us that leads us to act, and puts the same weight everywhere, so that always you can see good and bad on each side, and always there are arguments, precedents for every possible course of action... so of course one ends up doing nothing. Perhaps that's only right; perhaps that's what evolution requires, to leave the field free for younger, unencumbered minds, and those not afraid to act.'
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