Use of Weapons (12 page)

'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 children 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.