Use of Weapons (59 page)

A
little awning-covered stairway led up to the ship's main deck; they followed a
couple with two young children. Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated, almost invisible, ten
metres away, rising slowly with them. One of the toddlers cried when she saw
the hobbling, bald-headed man with the staring eyes behind her. Her mother
lifted her up and carried her.

He
had to stop and rest when they got to the deck. Sma guided him to a bench. He
sat doubled up for a while, then looked at the ship above, taking in the
blackened rusted wreckage all around. He shook his shaven head, muttered to
himself once, then ended up laughing quietly, holding his chest and coughing.

'Museum,'
he said. 'A museum...' Sma put her hand on his damp brow. She thought he looked
terrible, and the baldness didn't suit him. The simple dark clothes they'd
found him wearing when they picked him up from the citadel's curtain wall had
been torn and crusted with blood; they'd been cleaned and repaired on the
Xenophobe
but they looked out of place
here, where everybody seemed to be dressed in bright colours. Even Sma's
culottes and jacket were sombre compared to the gaily decorated dresses and
smocks most of the people were wearing.

'This
an old haunt of yours, Cheradenine?' she asked him.

He
nodded. 'Yes,' he breathed, looking up at a last few tendrils of mist flowing
and disappearing like gaseous pennants from the tilted main mast. 'Yes,' he
repeated.

Sma
looked round at the park behind and the city off to one side. 'This where you
came from?'

He
seemed not to hear. After a while, he stood slowly, and looked, distracted,
into Sma's eyes. She felt herself shiver, and tried to remember exactly how old
Zakalwe was. 'Let's go, Da -... Diziet.' He smiled a watery sort of smile.
'Take me to her, please?'

Sma
shrugged and supported the man by one shoulder. They went back to the steps
that led back down to the ground.

'Drone?'
Sma said to a brooch on her lapel.

'Yep?'

'Our
lady still where we last heard?'

'Indeed,'
said the drone's voice. 'Want to take the module?'

'No,'
he said, stumbling down a stair, until Sma caught him. 'Not the module.
Let's... take a train, or a cab or...'

'You
sure?' Sma said.

'Yes;
sure.'

'Zakalwe,'
Sma sighed. '
Please
accept some
treatment.'

'No,'
the man said, as they reached the ground.

'There's
an underground station right and right again,' the drone told Sma. 'Alight
Central Station; platform eight for trains to Couraz.'

'Okay,'
Sma said reluctantly, glancing at him. He was looking down at the gravel path
as though concentrating on working out which foot to put in front of another.
He swung his head as they passed under the stem of the ruined battleship, squinting
up at the tall curving V of the bows. Sma watched the expression on his
sweating face, and could not decide whether it was awe, disbelief, or something
like terror.

The
underground train whisked them into the city centre down concrete-lined
tunnels; the main station was crowded, tall, echoing and clean. Sunlight
sparkled on the vault of the arched glass roof. Skaffen-Amtiskaw had done its
suitcase impression, and sat lightly in Sma's hand. The wounded man was a
heavier weight on her other arm.

The
Maglev train drew in, disgorged its passengers; they boarded with a few other
people.

'You
going to make it, Cheradenine?' Sma asked him. He was slumped in the seat,
resting his arms on the table in a way that somehow made them look as though
they were broken, or paralysed. He stared at the seat across from him, ignoring
the cityscape as it slid by, the train accelerating along viaducts towards the
suburbs and the countryside.

He
nodded. 'I'll survive.'

'Yes,
but for how much longer?' said the drone, sitting on the table in front of Sma.
'You are in terrible shape, Zakalwe.'

'Better
than looking like a suitcase,' he said, glancing at the machine.

'Oh,
how droll,' the machine said.

-
You finished drawing things yet? it asked the
Xenophobe.

-
No.

-
Can't you devote just a
little
of
your supposedly bogglingly fast Mind to finding out why he was so interested in
that ship?

-
Oh, I suppose so, but -

-
Wait a minute; what have we here? Listen to this:

'...
You'll find out, I suppose. Past time I told you,' he said, looking out of the
window but talking to Sma. The city slid by beyond, bright in the sunlight. His
eyes were wide, pupils dilated, and somehow Sma got the impression he was
looking at one city, but seeing another, or seeing the same one but long ago,
as though in some time-polarised light only his distressed, enfevered eyes
could see.

'This
is where you come from?'

'Long
time ago, now,' he said, coughing, doubling up, holding one arm tight to his
side. He took a long slow breath. 'I was born here...'

The
woman listened. The drone listened. The ship listened.

While
he told them the story, of the great house that lay halfway between the
mountains and the sea, upstream from the great city. He told them about the
estate surrounding the house, and the beautiful gardens, and about the three,
later four, children who were brought up in the house, and who played in the
garden. He told them about the summerhouses and the stone boat and the maze and
the fountains and the lawns and the ruins and the animals in the woods. He told
them about the two boys and the two girls, and the two mothers, and the one
strict father and the one unseen father, imprisoned in the city. He told them
about the visits to the city, which the children always thought lasted too
long, and about the time when they were no longer allowed to go into the garden
without guards to escort them, and about how they stole a gun, one day, and
were going to take it out into the estate to shoot it, but only got as far as
the stone boat, and surprised an assassination squad come to kill the family,
and saved the day by alerting the house. He told them about the bullet that hit
Darckense, and the sliver of her bone that

pierced
him almost to his heart.

He
started to dry up, voice croaking. Sma saw a waiter pushing a trolley into the
far end of the coach. She bought a couple of soft drinks; he gulped at first,
but coughed painfully, and then just sipped his.

'And
the war did start,' he said, looking at but not seeing the last of the suburbs
flow past; the countryside was a green blur as they accelerated again. 'And the
two boys, that had become men... ended up on different sides.'

-
Fascinating, the
Xenophobe
communicated to Skaffen-Amtiskaw. I think I will do a little quick research.

-
About time too, the drone sent back, listening to the man talk at the same
time.

He
told them about the war, and the siege that involved the
Staberinde
, and the besieged forces breaking out... and he told
them about the man, the boy who'd played in the garden who, in the depths of
one terrible night, had caused the thing to be done which led to him being
called the Chairmaker, and the dawn when Darckense's sister and brother had
found what Elethiomel had done, and the brother trying to take his own life,
giving up his generalship, abandoning the armies and his sister in the
selfishness of despair.

And
he told them about Livueta, who had never forgiven, and had followed him -
though he did not know it at the time - on another cold ship, for a century
through the intractable calm slowness of real space, to a place where the
icebergs swirled round a continental pole, forever calving and crashing and
shrinking... But then she had lost him, the trail gone appropriately cold, and
she had stayed there, searching, for years, and could not have known that he
had left for another life entirely, taken away by the tall lady who walked
through the blizzard as though it wasn't there, a small space ship at her back
like a faithful pet.

And
so Livueta Zakalwe gave up, and took another long journey, to get away from the
burden of her memories, and where she had ended up - (the ship quizzed the
drone for the location; Skaffen-Amtiskaw gave it the name of the planet and the
system, a few decades away) - that had been where she'd finally been tracked
down, after his last job for them.

Skaffen-Amtiskaw
remembered. The grey-haired woman, in her early late-years, working in a clinic
in the slums, a delicate shanty town strewn like trash across the mud and
tree-lined slopes above a tropical city looking out across sparkling lagoons
and golden sandbars to the rollers of a vast ocean. Thin, marks under her eyes,
a pot-bellied child on each hip when they first went to see her, standing in
the middle of the crowded room, wailing children tugging at her hems.

The
drone had learned to appreciate the full range of pan-human facial expression,
and thought that, in witnessing the one that appeared on Livueta Zakalwe's face
when she saw Zakalwe, it had experienced something close to unique. Such
surprise; but such hatred!

'Cheradenine...'
Sma said tenderly, gently laying one hand on his. She put her other hand to the
nape of his neck, stroking him there as his head bent lower to the table. He
turned and watched the prairie stream past like a sea of gold.

He
put one hand up, smoothing it slowly over his brow and shaved scalp, as though
through long hair.

Couraz
had been everything; ice and fire, land and water. Once, the broad isthmus had
been a place of rock and glaciers, then a land of forests as the world and its
continents shifted and the climate altered. Later it became a desert, but then
suffered something beyond the capacity of the globe itself to provide. An
asteroid the size of a mountain hit the isthmus, like a bullet striking flesh.

It
burst into the granite heart of the land, ringing the planet like a bell. Two
oceans met for the first time; the dust of the immense explosion blocked out
the sun, started a small ice age, wiped out thousands of species. The ancestors
of the species that later came to rule the planet took their initial
opportunity from that cataclysm.

The
crater became a dome as the planet reacted over the millennia; the oceans were
separated again when the rocks - even the seemingly solid layers flowing and
warping, over those great scales of time and distance - pushed back, like an
aeons late bruise forming on the skin of the world.

Sma
had found the information brochure in a seat pocket. She looked up from it for
a moment at the man in the seat beside her. He'd fallen asleep. His face looked
drawn and grey and old. She could not remember ever having seen him look so
ancient and ill. Dammit, he'd looked healthier when he'd been beheaded.
'Zakalwe,' she whispered, shaking her head. 'What's wrong with you?'

'Death-wish,'
the drone muttered, quietly. 'With extrovert complications.'

Sma
shook her head and went back to the brochure. The man slept fitfully and the
drone monitored him.

Reading
about Couraz, Sma suddenly recalled the great fortress she had been picked up
from by the
Xenophobe's
module, on a
sunny day that now seemed as long ago as it was far away. She looked up,
sighing, from a photograph of the isthmus taken from space, and thought back to
the house under the dam, and felt home-sick... Couraz had been a fortified
town, a prison, a fortress, a city, a target. Now - perhaps appropriately, Sma
thought, looking at the injured, shivering man at her side - the great dome of
rock held a small city that was mostly taken up with the biggest hospital in
the world.

The
train hurtled into a tunnel carved from naked rock.

They
passed through the station, took an elevator to one of the hospital reception
levels. They sat on a couch, surrounded by potted plants and soft music, while
the drone, sitting on the floor at their feet, plundered the nearest computer
work station for information.

'Got
her,' it announced quietly. 'Go to the receptionist and tell her your name;
I've ordered you a pass; no verification required.'

'Come
on, Zakalwe.' Sma rose, collected her pass, and helped him to his feet. He
staggered. 'Look,' she said, 'Cheradenine, let me at -'

'Just
take me to her.'

'Let
me talk to her first.'

'No;
take me to her. Now.'

The
ward was up another few levels, in the sunlight. The light came through clear,
high windows. The sky was white with scudding cloud outside, and way in the
distance, beyond the dappkd fields and woodland, the ocean was a line of blue
haze beneath the sky.

Old
men lay quietly in the broad, partitioned ward. Sma helped him towards the far
end, where the drone said Livueta must be. They entered a short, broad
corridor. Livueta came out of a side room. She stopped when she saw them.

Livueta
Zakalwe looked older; white-haired, skin soft and lined with age. Her eyes were
undulled. She drew herself up a little. She was holding a deep-sided tray full
of little boxes and bottles.