Use of Weapons (5 page)

XIII

'Wake
up.'

He
woke up.

Dark.
He straightened, beneath the covers, wondering who had talked to him like that.
Nobody talked to him in that tone, not any more; even half asleep, coming
unexpectedly awake in what must be the middle of the night, he heard something
in that tone he hadn't heard for two, maybe three decades. Impertinence. Lack
of respect.

He
brought his head out of the sheltering cover, into the warm air of the room,
and looked round in the one-light gloom, to see who had dared address him like
that. An instant of fear - had somebody got past the guards and security
screens? - was replaced by a furious hunger to see who had the effrontery to
speak like that to him.

The
intruder sat in a chair just beyond the end of the bed. He looked odd in a way
which was itself odd; a very new sort of unusualness, unplaceable, even alien.
He gave the impression of being a slightly skewed projection. The clothes
looked strange too; baggy, brightly coloured, even in the dim light of the
bedside lamp. The man was dressed like a clown or a jester, but his somehow too
symmetrical face looked... grim? Contemptuous? That...
foreignness
made it difficult to tell.

He
started to grope for his glasses, but it was just sleep in his eyes. The
surgeons had given him new eyes five years ago, but sixty years of
short-sightedness had left him with an ingrained reaction to reach for glasses
which were not there, whenever he first woke up. A small price to pay, he had
always thought, and now, with the new retro-ageing treatment... The sleep
cleared from his eyes. He sat up, looking at the man in the chair, and began to
think he was having a dream, or seeing a ghost.

The
man looked young; he had a broad, tanned face and black hair tied back behind
his head, but thoughts of spirits and the dead came into his head not because
of that. It was something about the dark, pit-like eyes, and the alien set of
that face.

'Good
evening, Ethnarch.' The young man's voice was slow and measured. It sounded,
somehow, like the voice of someone much older; old enough to make the Ethnarch
feel suddenly young in comparison. It chilled him. He looked around the room.
Who was this man? How had he got in here? The palace was meant to be
impregnable. There were guards everywhere. What was going on? The fear came
back.

The
girl from the previous evening lay still on the far side of the wide bed, just
a lump under the covers. A couple of dormant screens on the wall to the
Ethnarch's left reflected the bedside light's weak glow.

He
was frightened, but fully awake now and thinking quickly. There was a gun
concealed in the bed's headboard; the man at the end of the bed didn't seem to
be armed (but then why was he here?). But the gun represented a desperate last
resort. The voice code was the thing. The mikes and cameras in the room were on
standby, their automatic circuits waiting for a specific sentence to activate
them; sometimes he wanted privacy in here, other times he wanted to record something
only for himself, and of course he'd always known there was a possibility that
somebody unauthorised might get in here, no matter how tight the security was.

He
cleared his throat. 'Well well, this is a surprise.' His voice was even, he
sounded calm.

He
smiled thinly, pleased with himself. His heart - the heart of an athletic young
anarchist woman up until eleven years ago - was beating quickly, but not
worryingly so. He nodded. 'This
is
a
surprise,' he repeated. There; it was done. An alarm would already be ringing
in the basement control room; the guards would come piling through the door in
a few seconds. Or they might not risk that, and instead release the ceiling gas
cylinders, blasting them both into unconsciousness in a blinding fog. There
was a danger that would rupture his eardrums (he thought, swallowing), but he
could always take a new pair from a healthy dissident. Maybe he wouldn't even
have to do that; the rumour was that the retro-ageing might include the
possibility of body-parts regrowing. Well, nothing wrong with strength in
depth; back-ups. He liked the feeling of security that gave one. 'Well, well,'
he heard himself say, just in case the circuits hadn't picked up the code first
or second time round, 'this is indeed a surprise.' The guards should be here
any second...

The
brightly dressed young man smiled. He flexed oddly, and leant forward until his
elbows rested on the top of the bed's ornate footboard. His lips moved, to
produce what might have been a smile. He reached into one pocket of the baggy
pantaloons and produced a small black gun. He pointed it straight at the
Ethnarch and said. 'Your code won't work, Ethnarch Kerian. There won't be any
more surprises that you're expecting and I'm not. The basement security centre
is as dead as everything else.'

The
Ethnarch Kerian stared at the little gun. He'd seen water pistols that looked
more impressive.
What is going on? Can he
really have come to kill me
? The man certainly didn't dress like an
assassin, and surely any serious assassin would just have killed him in his
sleep. The longer this fellow sat here, talking, the more danger he was in,
whether he had knocked out the links to the security centre or not. So he might
be mad, but he probably wasn't an assassin. It was simply ludicrous that a
real, professional assassin would behave like this, and only an extremely able
and completely professional assassin could have penetrated the palace
security... Thus, the Ethnarch Kerian tried to convince his suddenly wildly
beating, mutinous heart. Where
were
the
damn guards? He thought again about the gun hidden in the ornamental headboard
behind him.

The
young man folded his arms, so that the little gun was no longer pointing at the
Ethnarch. 'Mind if I tell you a little story?'

He must be mad.
'No;
no; why don't you tell me a story?' the Ethnarch said, in his most friendly and
avuncular voice. 'What's your name, by the way; you appear to have the
advantage over me.'

'Yes,
I do, don't I?' the old voice from the young lips said. 'Actually there are two
stories, but you know most of one of them. I'll tell them at the same time; see
if you can tell which is which.'

'I-'

'Ssh,'
the man said, putting the little gun to his lips. The Ethnarch half glanced at
the girl on the other side of the bed. He realised he and the intruder had been
talking in quite low tones. Maybe if he could get the girl to wake, she might
draw his fire, or at least distract him while he grabbed for the gun in the
headboard; he was faster than he had been for twenty years, thanks to the new
treatment...
where the hell were those
guards
?

'Now
look here, young man!' he roared. 'I just want to know what you think you're
doing here! Eh?'

His
voice - a voice that had filled halls and squares, without amplification -
echoed through the room. Dammit, the guards in the basement security centre
ought to be able to hear it without any microphones. The girl on the other side
of the bed didn't even stir.

The
young man was smirking. 'They're all asleep, Ethnarch. There's just you and me.
Now; this story...'

'What...'
the Ethnarch Kerian gulped, drawing his legs up under the covers. 'What
are
you here for?'

The
intruder looked mildly surprised. 'Oh, I'm here to take you out, Ethnarch. You
are going to be removed. Now...' he laid the gun on the broad top of the bed
footboard. The Ethnarch stared at it. It was too far away for him to grab,
but...

'The
story,' the intruder said, settling back in the chair. 'Once upon a time, over
the gravity well and far away, there was a magical land where they had no
kings, no laws, no money and no property, but where everybody lived like a
prince, was very well-behaved and lacked for nothing. And these people lived in
peace, but they were bored, because paradise can get that way after a time,
and so they started to carry out missions of good works; charitable visits upon
the less well-off, you might say; and they always tried to bring with them the
thing that they saw as the most precious gift of all; knowledge; information;
and as wide a spread of that information as possible, because these people were
strange, in that they despised rank, and hated kings... and all things
hierarchic... even Ethnarchs.' The young man smiled thinly. So did the
Ethnarch. He wiped his brow and shifted back a little in the bed, as though
getting more comfortable. Heart still pounding.

'Well,
for a time, a terrible force threatened to take away their good works, but they
resisted it, and they won, and came out of the conflict stronger then before,
and if they had not been so unconcerned with power for its own sake, they would
have been terribly feared, but as it was they were only slightly feared, just
as a matter of course given the scale of their power. And one of the ways it
amused them to wield that power was to interfere in societies they thought
might benefit from the experience, and one of the most efficient ways of doing
that in a lot of societies is to get to the people at the top.

'Many
of their people become physicians to great leaders, and with medicines and
treatments that seem like magic to the comparatively primitive people they're
dealing with, ensure that a great and good leader has a better chance of
surviving. That's the way they prefer to work; offering life, you see, rather
than dealing death. You might call them soft, because they're very reluctant to
kill, and they might agree with you, but they're soft the way the ocean is
soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be.'

'Yes,
I see,' the Ethnarch said, sitting back a little further shifting a pillow into
place behind his back, and checking just where he was in relation to the
section of headboard that concealed the gun. His heart was thrashing in his
chest.

'Another
thing they do, these people, another way they deal in life rather than death,
is they offer leaders of certain societies below a certain technological level
the one thing all the wealth and power those leaders command cannot buy them; a
cure for death. A return to youth.'

The
Ethnarch stared at the young man, suddenly more intrigued than terrified. Did
he mean the retro-ageing?

'Ah;
it's starting to click into place now, isn't it?' the young man smiled. 'Well,
you're right. Just that process that you've been going through, Ethnarch
Kerian. Which you've been paying for, this last year. Which you did - if you
remember - promise to pay for with more than just platinum.
Do
you remember, hmmm?'

'I...
I'm not sure.' The Ethnarch Kerian stalled. He could see the panel in the
headboard where the gun was from the corner of his eye.

'You
promised to stop the killings in Youricam, remember?'

'I
may have said I'd review our segregation and resettlement policy in the -'

'No,'
the young man waved his hand, 'I mean the killings, Ethnarch; the death trains,
remember? The trains where the exhaust comes out of the rear carriage,
eventually.' The young man made a sort of sneer with his mouth, shook his head.
'Trigger any memories, that? No?'

'I
have no idea what you're talking about,' the Ethnarch said. His palms were
sweating, cold and slick. He rubbed them on the bedclothes; the gun mustn't
slip, if he got to it. The intruder's gun was still lying on the bed's
footboard.

'Oh,
I think you do. In fact, I know you do.'

'If
there have been any excesses by any members of the security forces, they will be
thoroughly -'

'This
isn't a press conference, Ethnarch.' The man tipped slightly back in his seat,
away from the gun on the footboard. The Ethnarch tensed, quivering.

'The
point is, you made a deal and then didn't stick to it. And I'm here to collect
on the penalty clause. You were warned, Ethnarch. That which is given can also
be taken away.' The intruder tipped further back in his seat, glanced round the
dark suite, and nodded at the Ethnarch, while putting his hands clasped behind
his head. 'Say goodbye to all this, Ethnarch Kerian. You're -'

The
Ethnarch turned, banged the hidden panel with his elbow, and the section of
headboard flicked round; he tore the gun from its clips and swung it at the
man, finding the trigger and pulling.