Use of Weapons (22 page)

And
in two hundred days he would have a new body. And (
And this?... I'm sorry. Still fresh, that one
?)... the wound over
his heart would be gone forever, and the heart beneath his chest would not be
the same one.

And
he realised he had lost her.

Not
Shias Engin, whom he'd loved, or thought he had, and certainly lost... but her;
the other one, the real one, the one who'd lived within him through a century
of icy sleep.

He
had thought he would not lose her until the day he died.

Now
he knew differently, and felt broken by the knowledge and the loss.

He
whispered her name to the quiet red night.

Overhead,
the ever-watchful medical monitoring unit saw some fluid seep from the bodiless
human's tear ducts, and wondered dumbly at it.

'How
old is old Tsoldrin, now?'

'Eighty,
relative,' the drone said.

'You
think he'll want to come out of retirement? Just because I ask him to?' He
looked sceptical.

'You're
all we could think of,' Sma told him.

'Can't
you just let the old guy grow old in peace?'

'There's
a little more at stake than the happy retirement of one ageing politico,
Zakalwe.'

'What?
The universe? Life as we know it?'

'Yes;
tens, maybe hundreds of millions of times over.'

'Very
philosophical.'

'And
you didn't let the Ethnarch Kerian grow old in peace, did you?'

'Damn
right,' he said, and wandered a little further into the armoury. 'That old
pisshead deserved to die a million times.'

The
converted minibay engineering space housed a dazzling array of Culture and
other weaponry. Zakalwe, Sma thought, was like a kid in a toy store. He was
selecting gear and loading it onto a pallet which Skaffen-Amtiskaw was guiding
after the man, down the aisles of racks and drawers and shelves all stuffed and
packed with projectile weapons, line guns, laser rifles, plasma projectors,
multitudinous grenades, effectors, plane charges, passive and reactive armour,
sensory and guard devices, full combat suits, missile packs, and at least a
dozen other distinctly different types of device Sma didn't recognize.

'You'll
never be able to carry this lot, Zakalwe. 'This is just the shortlist,' he told
her. He took a stocky, boxy-looking gun with no appreciable barrel from a
shelf. He held it out to the drone, 'What's this?'

'CREWS;
assault rifle,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. 'Seven fourteen tonne batteries;
seven-element single shot to forty-four point eight kilorounds a second
(minimum firing time eight point seven five seconds), maximum single burst;
seven times two-fifty kilogrammes; frequency from mid-visible to high X-ray.'

He
hefted it. 'Not very well balanced.'

'That's
its stowed configuration. Slide the whole top back.'

'Hmm.'
He pretended to aim the readied gun. 'Now, what's to stop you putting your
supporting hand over here, where the beams are going?'

'Common
sense?' suggested the drone.

'Uh-huh.
I'll stick with my obsolete plasma rifle.' He put the gun back. 'Anyway, Sma;
you should be pleased old men do want to come out of retirement for you.
Dammit, I should be devoting myself to gardening or something, not storming off
to the galactic backwoods doing your dirty work.'

'Oh,
yeah,' Sma said. 'And a big struggle I had too, convincing you to quit your
"gardening" and come back to us. Shit, Zakalwe; your bags were
packed.'

'I
must have telepathically already have realized the urgency of the situation.'
He heaved a massive black gun from a rack, swung it with both hands, grunting
with the effort. 'Holy shit. Do you fire this mother or just use it as a
battering ram?'

'Idiran
hand cannon,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw sighed. 'Don't wave it around like that; it's
very old and quite rare.'

'No
fucking wonder.' He struggled to lift the gun back into its rack, then
continued down the aisle. 'Come to think of it, Sma, I'm so old my whole life
ought to be on triple time or something; I'm probably grossly undercharging you
for this whole sorry escapade.'

'Well,
if you're going to look at it that way, we should be charging you for... patent
infringement? Giving those old guys their youth back using our technology.'

'Don't
knock it. You don't know what it's like getting that old that early.'

'Yeah,
but it applies to everybody; you were giving it only to the most evil,
power-mad bastards on the planet.'

'They
were top-down societies! What do you expect? Anyway; if I'd given it to
everybody... think of the population explosion!'

'Zakalwe,
I thought about that when I was about fifteen; they teach you that sort of
stuff in early school, in the Culture. It was all thought through long ago;
it's part of our history, part of our upbringing. That's why what you did would
look insane to a school-kid.
You
are
like a school-kid, to us. You don't even want to get old. Nothing more immature
than that.'

'Whoo!'
he said, stopping suddenly and taking something from an open shelf. 'What's
this
?'

'Beyond
your ken,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.

'What
a beauty!' He gripped the stunningly complicated weapon and twirled it. 'What
is
this?' he breathed.

'Micro
Armaments System, Rifle,' the drone narrated. 'It's... oh, look, Zakalwe; it
has ten separate weapon systems, not including the semi-sentient guard
facility, the reactive shield components, the IFF-set quick-reaction
swing-packs or the AG unit, and before you ask, the controls are all on the
wrong side because that's the left-hand bias version, and the balance - like
the weight and the independently variable inertia - are fully adjustable. It
also takes about half a year's training just to learn how to use it
safely
, let alone competently, so you
can't have one.'

'I
don't
want
one,' he said, stroking
the weapon. 'But what a
device
!' He
put it back with the rest. He glanced at Sma. 'Dizzy; I know the way you people
think; I respect it, I guess... but your life isn't my life. I live in unsafe
ways in dangerous places; always have done, always will do. I'll die soon
enough anyway, so why should I suffer the additional burden of getting old, even
slowly?'

'Don't
try and hide behind necessity, Zakalwe. You could have changed your life; you
don't have to live the way you do; you could have joined the Culture, become
one of us; at least lived the way we do, but -'

'Sma!'
he exclaimed, turning to her. 'That's for you; it isn't for me. You think I'm
wrong to have my age stabilised; even the chance of immortality is... wrong, to
you. Okay; I can see that. In your society, the way you live your lives, of
course it is. You have your three-fifty, four hundred years, and know you'll
get right to the end of them; die with your boots off. For me... that won't
work. I don't have that certainty. I enjoy the perspective from the edge, Sma;
I like to feel that up-draft on my face. So sooner or later I'll die; violently,
probably. Maybe even foolishly, because that's often the way of it; you avoid
nukes and determined assassins... and then choke on a fish bone... but who
cares? So; your stasis is your society, and mine... is my age. But we are both
assured of death.'

Sma
looked at the floor, hands clasped behind her back. 'All right,' she said. 'But
don't forget who gave you that perspective from the edge.'

He
smiled sadly. 'Yes; you saved me. But you've also lied to me; sent - no, listen
- sent me on damn fool missions where I was on the opposite side from the one I
thought I was on, had me fight for incompetent aristos I'd gladly have
strangled, in wars where I didn't know you were backing both sides, filled my
balls full of alien seed I was supposed to inject into some poor damn female...
nearly got me killed...
very
nearly
got me killed a dozen times or more...'

'You've
never forgotten me for that hat, have you?' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, with fake
bitterness.

'Oh,
Cheradenine,' Sma said. 'Don't pretend it hasn't been fun, too.'

'Sma,
believe me; it has not all been "fun".' He leant against a cabinet
full of ancient projectile weapons. 'And, worse than all that,' he insisted,
'is when you turn the goddamn maps upside-down.'

'What?'
Sma said, puzzled.

'Turning
the maps upside down,' he repeated. 'Have you any
idea
how annoying and inconvenient it is when you get to a place
and find that they map the place the other way up compared to the maps you've
got? Because of something stupid like some people think a magnetic needle is
pointing up to heaven, when other people think it's just heavier and pointing
down
? Or because it's done according to
the galactic plane or something? I mean, this might sound trivial, but it's
very
upsetting.'

'Zakalwe,
I had no idea. Let me offer you my apologies and those of the entire Special
Circumstances Section; no, all of Contact; no: the entire Culture; no: all
intelligent species.'

'Sma,
you remorseless bitch, I'm trying to be serious.'

'No,
I don't think you are. Maps...'

'But
it's true! They turn them the wrong way up!'

'Then
there must,' Diziet Sma said, 'be a reason for it.'

'What?'
he demanded.

'Psychology,'
Sma and the drone said at the same time.

'Two
suits?' Sma said later, when he was making his final equipment selection. They
were still in the armoury mini-bay, but Skaffen-Amtiskaw had gone off to do
something more interesting than watch a kid shop for toys.

He
heard the accusatory tone in Sma's voice, and looked up. 'Yes; two suits. So
what?'

'Those
can be used to imprison somebody, Zakalwe; I know that. They're not just for
protection.'

'Sma;
if I'm lifting this guy out of a hostile environment, with no immediate help
from you guys because you have to stand off and be seen to be pure - fake
though that might be - I have to have the tools to do the job. Serious FYT
suits are numbered among those tools.'

'One,'
Sma said.

'Sma,
don't you trust me?'

'One,'
Sma repeated.

'Goddamn
it! All right!' He dragged the suit away from the pile of equipment.

'Cheradenine,'
Sma said, suddenly conciliatory. 'Remember; we need Beychae's... commitment,
not just his presence. That's why we couldn't impersonate him; that's why we
couldn't tamper with his mind...'

'Sma,
you're sending
me to
tamper with his
mind.'

'All
right,' Sma said, suddenly nervous-looking. She clapped her hands once softly,
looked a little embarrassed. 'By the way, Cheradenine, ah... what exactly are
your plans? I know better than to ask for a mission profile or anything formal,
but how
do
you mean to get to
Beychae?'

He
sighed. 'I'm going to make him want to come to me.'

'How?'

'Just
one word.'

'A
word
?'

'A
name.'

'What,
yours?'

'No;
mine was supposed to be kept a secret when I was advisor to Beychae, but it
must have leaked out by now. Too dangerous. I'll use another name.'

'Ah
hah.' Sma looked expectantly at him, but he went back to choosing between the
various bits of equipment he'd picked out.

'Beychae's
in this university, right?' he said, not turning to look at Sma.

'Yes;
in the archives, almost permanently. But there are a lot of archives and he
moves around a lot, and there are always guards.'

'Okay,'
he told her. 'If you want to do something useful, try finding something that
the university might want.'

Sma
shrugged. 'It's a capitalist society. How about money?'

'I'll
be doing that myself...' he paused, looked suspicious. 'I will be allowed
plenty of discretion in that area, won't I?'

'Unlimited
expenses,' Sma nodded.

He
smiled. 'Wonderful.' He paused. 'What source? A tonne of platinum? Sack of
diamonds? My own bank?'

'Well,
more or less your own bank, yes,' Sma said. 'We've beea building up something
called the Vanguard Foundation since the last war; commercial empire,
comparatively ethical, expanding quietly. That's where your unlimited expenses
will come from.'

'Well,
with my unlimited expenses I'll probably try offering this university lots of
money; but it would be better if there was some actual
thing
we could tempt them with.'

'All
right,' she said, nodding. Then her brow wrinkled. She indicated the combat
suit.'
What
did you call that thing?'

He
looked puzzled, then said, 'Oh; it's an FYT suit.'

'Yes;
a serious FYT suit; that's what you said. But I thought I knew all the
nomenclature; I've never heard that acronym before. What does it stand for?'