Use of Weapons (25 page)

She
looked at him with her eyes widening, horrified. She seemed to be gathering her
breath for another scream. He didn't understand it; he'd asked her a perfectly
normal, pertinent question and she acted as if he'd said he was going to kill
her.

'Please
don't. Oh please don't, oh please please don't,' she sobbed again, dryly. Then
her back seemed to break, and her imploring face bowed almost to her knees as
she drooped again.

'Do
what
?' He was mystified.

She
didn't appear to hear him; she just hung there, her slack body jerked by her
sobs.

It
was at moments like this he stopped understanding people; he just had no
comprehension of what was going on in their minds; they were denied,
unfathomable. He shook his head and started walking round the room. It was
smelly and damp, and it carried this atmosphere as though this was no
innovation. This had always been a hole. Probably some illiterate had lived
here, custodian of the derelict machines from another, more fabulous age,
long-shattered by the conspicuous love of war these people exhibited; a mean
life in an ugly place.

When
would they come? Would they find him? Would they think he was dead? Had they
heard his message on the radio, after the landslide had cut them off from the
rest of the command convoy?

Had
he worked the damn thing right?

Maybe
he hadn't. Maybe he would be left behind; they might think a search was
useless. He hardly cared. It would be no additional pain to be captured; he'd
drowned in that already, in his mind. He could almost welcome it, if he set his
mind to it; he knew he could. All he needed was the strength to be bothered.

'If
you're going to kill me, please will you do it quickly?'

He
was getting annoyed at these constant interruptions.

'Well,
I wasn't going to kill you, but keep on whining like this and I may change my mind.'

'I
hate you.' It seemed to be all she could think of.

'And
I hate you too.'

She
started crying again, loudly.

He
looked out into the rain again, and saw the Staberinde.

Defeat,
defeat, the rain whispered; tanks foundering in the mud, the men giving up
under the torrential rain, everything coming to bits.

And
a stupid woman, and a runny nose... He could laugh at it, at the sharing of
time and place between the grand and the petty, the magnificently vast and the
shoddily absurd, like horrified nobility having to share a carriage with drunk
and dirty peasants being sick over them and copulating under them; the finery
and fleas.

Laugh,
that was the only answer, the only reply that couldn't be bettered or itself
laughed down; the lowest of the low of common denominators.

'Do
you know who I am?' he said, turning suddenly. The thought had just occurred to
him that maybe she didn't realise who he was, and he wouldn't have been in the
least surprised to find out that she had tried to kill him just because he was
in a big car, and not because she had recognised the Commander-in-Chief of the
entire army. He wouldn't be at all surprised to find that; he almost expected
it.

She
looked up. 'What?'

'Do
you know who I am? Do you know my name or rank?'

'No,'
she spat. 'Should I?'

'No,
no,' he laughed, and turned away.

He
looked briefly out at the grey wall of rain, as though it was an old friend,
then turned, went back to the bed and fell onto it again.

The
government wouldn't like it either. Oh, the things he'd promised them, the
riches, the lands, the gains of wealth, prestige and power. They'd have him
shot if the Culture didn't pull him out; they'd see him dead for this defeat.
It would have been their victory but it would be his defeat. Standard
complaint.

He
tried to tell himself that, mostly, he'd won. He knew he had, but it was only
the moments of defeat, the instants of paralysis that made him really think,
and try to join up the weave of his life into a whole. That was when his
thoughts returned to the battleship Staberinde and what it represented; that
was when he thought about the Chairmaker, and the reverberating guilt behind
that banal description...

It
was a better sort of defeat this time, it was more impersonal. He was the
commander of the army, he was responsible to the government, and they could
remove him; in the final reckoning, then, he was not responsible; they were.
And there was nothing personal in the conflict. He'd never met the leaders of
the enemy; they were strangers to him; only their military habits and their
patterns of favoured troop movements and types of build-up were familiar. The
cleanness of that schism seemed to soften the rain of blows. A little.

He
envied people who could be born, be raised, mature with those around them, have
friends, and then settle down in one place with one set of acquaintances, live
ordinary and unspectacular, unrisky lives and grow old and be replaced, their
children coming to see them... and die old and senile, content with all that
had gone before.

He
could never have believed he would ever feel like this, that he would so ache
to be like that, to have despairs just so deep, joys just so great; to never
strain the fabric of life or fate, but to be minor, unimportant, uninfluential.

It
seemed utterly sweet, infinitely desirable, now and forever, because once in
that situation, once you were there... would you ever feel the awful need to do
as he had done, and try for those heights? He doubted it. He turned back to
look at the woman in the chair.

But
it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were
a seabird... but how could
you
be a
seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you
would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals;
you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the
human on the ground yearning to be you.

If
you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.

'Ah!
The camp leader and the camp follower. You haven't quite got it right thought,
sir, you're supposed to tie her in the
bed
...'

He
jumped; spun round, hand going to the holster at his waist.

Kirive
Socroft Rogtam-Bar kicked the door shut and stood shaking rain from a large
shiny cape in the doorway, smiling ironically and looking annoyingly fresh and
handsome considering he'd had no sleep for days.

'Bar!'
He almost ran to him, they clapped their arms about each other and laughed.

'The
very same. General Zakalwe; hello there. I wondered if you would like to join
me in a stolen vehicle. I have an Amph outside...'

'What!'
He threw open the door again and looked out onto the waters. There was a large
and battered amphibious truck fifty metres away, near one of the towering
machines.

'That's
one of their trucks,' he laughed.

Rogtam-Bar
nodded unhappily. 'Yes, I'm afraid so. They seem to want it back, too.'

'They
do?' He laughed again.

'Yes.
By the way, I'm afraid the government has fallen. Forced out of office.'

'What?
Because of this?'

'That's
the impression I got, I must say. I think they were so busy blaming you for
losing their idiotic war that they didn't realise people connected them with it
as well. Wide asleep as usual.' Rogtam-Bar smiled. 'Oh; and that manic idea of
yours; the commando squad placing the sink-charges on the Maclin reservoir? It
worked. Sent all that water into the dam and made the thing overflow; didn't
actually break, according to the intelligence reports, but it... over-topped,
is that the expression? Anyway; an awful lot of water went down the valley and
swept away most of the Fifth Army's High Command... not to mention quite a bit
of the Fifth itself, judging from the bods and tents seen floating past our
lines over the last few hours... And there we all were, thinking you were crazy
for dragging that hydrologist around with the general staff for the past week.'
Rogtam-Bar clapped his gloved hands. 'Whatever. Things must be serious; there's
talk of peace, I'm afraid.' He looked the General up and down. 'But you'll have
to present a prettier picture than that, I suspect, if you're to start talking
terms with our pals on the other side. You been mud wrestling, General?'

'Only
with my conscience.'

'Really?
Who won?'

'Well,
it was one of those rare occasions when violence really doesn't solve
anything.'

'I
know the scenario well; usually crops up when one is trying to decide whether
to open the next bottle, or not.' Bar nodded at the door. 'After you.' He
produced a large umbrella from within his cloak, opened it and held it out.
'General; allow me!' Then he looked into the centre of the room. 'And what
about your friend?'

'Oh.'
He looked back at the woman, who had turned herself around and was staring,
horrified, at them. 'Yes, my captive audience.' He shrugged. 'I've seen
stranger mascots; let's take her, too.'

'Never
question the high command,' Bar said. He handed over the umbrella. 'You take
this. I'll take her.' He looked reassuringly at the woman, tipped his cap.
'Only literally, ma'am.'

The
woman let out a piercing shriek.

Rogtam-Bar
winced. 'Does she do that a lot?' he asked.

'Yes;
and watch her head when you pick her up; near busted my nose.'

'When
it's such an attractive shape already. See you in the Amph, sir.'

'Right
you are,' he said, manoeuvering the umbrella through the doorway, and walking
down the concrete slope, whistling.

'Bastard
infidel!' the woman in the chair screamed, as Rogtam-Bar approached her and the
chair from behind, cautiously.

'You're
in luck,' he told her. 'I don't normally stop for hitchers.'

He
picked up the chair with the woman in it and took them both down to the
vehicle, where he dumped them in the back.

She
screamed the whole way.

'Was
she this noisy all the time?' Rogtam-Bar asked, as he reversed the machine back
out into the flood. 'Mostly.'

'I'm
surprised you could hear yourself think.' He looked out into the pouring rain,
smiling ruefully.

In
the ensuing peace, he was demoted, and stripped of several medals. He left
later that year, and the Culture didn't seem in the least displeased with how
he'd done.

Seven

The
city was built inside a canyon two kilometres deep and ten across; the canyon
wound through the desert for eight hundred kilometres, a jagged gash in the
crust of the planet. The city took up only thirty of those kilometres.

He
stood on the rimrock, looking inwards, and was confronted by a staggered
confusion of buildings and houses and streets and steps and storm drains and
railway lines, all grey and misty in filmy layers under a foggy-red setting
sun.

Like
slow waters from a broken dam, nebulous rollers of cloud swung down the canyon;
they foundered persistently among the juts and cracks of the architecture, and
seeped away like tired thoughts.

In
a very few places, the topmost buildings had over-reached the rimrock and
spilled onto the desert, but the rest of the city gave the impression that it
lacked the energy or the momentum to proceed that far, and so had kept within
the canyon, sheltered from the winds and kept temperate by the canyon's own
natural microclimate.

The
city, speckled with dim lights, seemed strangely silent and motionless. He
listened hard, and finally caught what sounded like the high howl of some
animal, from deep inside some misty suburb. Searching the skies, he could see
the far specks of circling birds, wheeling in the still and coldly heavy air.
Gliding in the deep distance over the cluttered terraces, stepped streets and
zig-zagging roads, they were the source of a far, hoarse crying.

Further
down, he saw some silent trains, thin lines of light, slowly crossing between
tunnels. Water showed as black lines, in aqueducts and canals. Roads ran
everywhere, and vehicles crawled along them, lights like sparks as they
scuttled like the tiny prey of the wheeling birds.