Use of Weapons (28 page)

'Said
an official spokesperson... Do you think we should get rid of him?'

'It
may be the wisest course. One might feel better with him out of the way... I
have a horrible feeling he must be here for a purpose. He has been given full
use of the Vanguard Foundation's monies, and that... wilfully mysterious
organisation has opposed us every step along the road for thirty years. The
identity and location of its owners and executives have been one of the
cluster's best-kept secrets; unparalleled reserve. Now - suddenly - this man
appears, spending with a quite vulgar profligacy and maintaining a high, if
still coquettishly shy, profile... just when it might prove extremely awkward.'

'Perhaps
he is the Vanguard Foundation.'

'Nonsense.
If it's anything appreciable at all, it's some interfering aliens, or a
do-good machine, either running on some dead magnate's conscience will - or
even running with a transcription of a human personality - or it's a rogue
machine, accidentally conscious with no-one to oversee it. I think every other
possibility has been discounted over the years. This man Staberinde is a
puppet; he spends money with the desperation of an indulged child worried such
generosity will not last. He's like a peasant winning a lottery. Revolting. But
he must - I repeat - be here for a purpose.'

'If
we kill him, and he turns out to have been important, then we might start a
war, and too early.'

'Perhaps,
but I feel we must do what is not expected. To prove our humanity, to exploit
our intrinsic advantage over the machines, if for no other reason.'

'Indeed,
but isn't it possible he could be of use to us?'

'Yes.'

The
man at the window smiled at his reflection in the glass and tapped out a little
rhythm on the inside sill.

The
woman on the couch kept her eyes closed, her body moving to the steady beat of
the hands that plied her waist and flanks.

'But
wait. There were links between Beychae and the Vanguard Foundation. If this is
so...'

'If
this is so... then perhaps we can persuade Beychae to our side, using this
person, this Staberinde.' The man put his finger to the glass and traced the
path of a snowflake, drifting down the other side. His eyes crossed as he
watched it.

'We
could...'

'What?'

'Adopt
the Dehewwoff system.'

'The...?
Need to know more.'

The
Dehewwoff system of punishing by disease; graded capital punishment; the more
serious the crime the more serious the disease the culprit is infected with.
For minor crimes a mere fever, loss of livelihood and medical expenses; for
more damaging misdeeds a bout of something lasting perhaps months, with pain
and a long convalescence, bills and no sympathy, sometimes marks to show later
on. For really ghastly crimes, infection with diseases rarely survived; near
certain death but possible divine intervention and miracle cure. Of course, the
lower one's class, the more virulent one's punishment, to allow for the hardier
constitutions of the toilers. Combinations, and recurring strains, provide
sophistications to the basic idea.'

'Back
to the problem.'

'And
I
hate
those dark glasses.'

'I
repeat; back to the problem.'

'...
we need to know more.'

'So
they all say.'

'And
I think we should speak to him.'

'Yes.
Then
we kill him.'

'Restraint.
We speak to him. We shall find him again and ask him what he wants and perhaps
who he is. We shall keep quiet and be thoughtful and we shall not kill him
unless he needs to be killed.'

'We
nearly spoke to him.'

'No
sulking. It was preposterous. We are not here to chase cars and run after idiot
recluses. We plan. We think. We shall send a note to the gentleman's hotel...'

'The
Excelsior. Really, one would have hoped such a respected establishment might
not have been so easily seduced by mere money.'

'Indeed;
and then we shall go to him, or have him come to us.'

'Well,
we certainly ought
not
to go to him.
And as for him coming to us, he may refuse. Regret that... Due to an
unforeseen... A previous commitment prevents... Feel it would be unwise at
this juncture, perhaps another... Can you imagine how humiliating that would
be?'

'Oh,
all right. We'll kill him.'

'All
right we'll
try
to kill him. If he
survives we shall talk to him. If he survives he will want to talk to us.
Commendable plan. Must agree. No question, left no choice; mere formality.'

The
woman fell silent. The grey-haired man heaved at her hips with his great hands,
and strange patterns of sweat broke from the unscarred areas of his face; the
hands swirled and swept over the woman's rump, and she bit her bottom lip just
a little as her body moved in a sweet impersonation, flat beat on a white
plain. Snow was falling.

VII

'You
know,' he told the rock, 'I've got this really nasty feeling that I'm dying...
but then all my feelings are pretty nasty at the moment, come to think of it.
What do you think?'

The
rock didn't say anything.

He
had decided that the rock was the centre of the universe, and he could prove
it, but the rock just didn't want to accept its obviously important place in
the overall scheme of things, at least not yet anyway, so he was left talking
to himself. Or he could talk to the birds and the insects.

Everything
wavered again. Things like waves, like clouds of carrion birds, closed in on
him, centring, zeroing, trapping his mind and picking it off like a rotten
fruit under a machine-gun.

He
tried to crawl away unobtrusively; he could see what was coming next; his life
was going to flash before him. What an appalling thought.

Mercifully,
only bits of it came back to him, as if the images mirrored his smashed body,
and he remembered things like sitting in a bar on a little planet, his dark
glasses making strange patterns with the darkened window; he remembered a place
where the wind was so bad they used to judge its severity by the number of
trucks that got blown over each night; he remembered a tank battle in the great
monoculture fields like seas of grass, all madness and submerged desperation
and commanders standing on the tanks and the areas of burning crop, slowly
spreading, burning through the night, spreading darkness ringed by fire... the
cultivated grassland was the reason for and prize of that war, and was
destroyed by it; he remembered a hose playing under searchlit water, its silent
coils writhing; he remembered the never-ending whiteness and the attritional
tectonics of the crashing tabular bergs, the bitter end of a century's slow
sleep.

And
a garden. He remembered the garden. And a chair.

'Scream!'
he screamed, and started flapping his arms about, trying to work up enough of a
run to get into the air and away from... from... he hardly knew. He hardly
moved, either; his arms flapped a little and scraped a few more guano pellets
away, but the ring of patient birds clustered around him, waiting for him to
die, just looked on, unfooled, at this display of inadequately avian behaviour.

'Oh
all right,' he mumbled, and collapsed back, clutching his chest and staring
into the bland blue sky. What was so terrible about a chair, anyway? He started
crawling again.

He
hauled himself around the little puddle, scraping his way through the dark
pellets the birds had left, then at a certain point set off towards the waters
of the lake. He got only so far, then stopped, turned back, and went on round
the puddle again, scraping aside the black bird-shit pellets, apologising to
the little insects he disturbed as he did so. When he got back to the place
where he'd been earlier, he stopped and took stock.

The
warm breeze brought the smell of sulphur from the lake to him... And he was
back in the garden again, remembering the smell of flowers.

Once
there had been a great house which stood in an estate bordered on three sides
by a broad river, mid-way between the mountains and the sea. The grounds were
full of old woods and well-grazed pasture land; there were rolling hills full
of shy, wild animals, and winding paths and winding streams crossed by little
bridges; there were follies and pergolas and ha-has, ornamental lakes and
quiet, rustic summerhouses.

Over
the years and the generations, many children were born and brought up in the
great house, and played in the wonderful gardens that surrounded it, but there
were four in particular whose story became important for people who had never
seen the house, or heard of the family's name. Two of the children were
sisters, called Darckense and Livueta; one of the boys was their elder brother,
called Cheradenine, and they all shared the family name; Zakalwe. The last
child was not related to them, but came from a family that had long been allied
to theirs; he was called Elethiomel.

Cheradenine
was the older boy; he could just remember the fuss when Elethiomel's mother
came to the great house, large with child, in tears, and surrounded by fussing
servants and huge guards and weeping maids. For a few days the attention of the
whole house seemed to be centred on the woman with the child in her womb, and -
though his sisters played happily on, glad of the lessened watchfulness of
their nannies and guards - he already resented the unborn infant.

The
troop of royal cavalry came to the house a week later, and he remembered his
father out on the broad steps leading down into the courtyard, talking calmly,
his own men running quietly through the house, taking up positions at every
window. Cheradenine ran to find his mother; as he ran through the corridors, he
put one hand out in front of him, as though holding reins, and with his other
hand slapped one hip, making a one-two-three, one-two-three clopping noise,
pretending he was a cavalryman. He discovered his mother with the woman who had
the child inside her; the woman was crying and he was told to go away.

The
boy was born that night, to the sound of screams.

Cheradenine
noticed that the atmosphere in the house changed greatly after that, and
everyone was at once even more busy than before but less worried.

For
a few years he could torment the younger boy, but then Elethiomel, who grew
faster than he did, started to retaliate, and an uneasy truce developed between
the two boys. Tutors taught them, and Cheradenine gradually came to realise
that Elethiomel was their favourite, always learning things more quickly than
he did, always being praised for his abilities developing so early, always
being called advanced and bright and clever. Cheradenine tried hard to match
him, and gleaned a little recognition for not just giving up, but it never
seemed that he was really appreciated. Their martial instructors were more
evenly divided on their merits; Cheradenine was better at wrestling and
strike-fighting; Elethiomel the more accomplished with gun and blade (under
proper supervision; the boy could get carried away sometimes), though
Cheradenine was perhaps his equal with a knife.

The
two sisters loved them both, regardless, and they played through the long
summers and the brief, cold winters, and - apart from the first year, after
Elethiomel was born - spent a little of each spring and autumn in the big city,
far down the river, where the parents of Darckense, Livueta and Cheradenine
kept a tall town house. None of the children liked the place, though; its
garden was so small and the public parks so crowded. Elethiomel's mother was
always quieter when they went to the city, and cried more often, and went away
for a few days every so often, all excited before she went, then sobbing when
she returned.

They
were in the city once, one fall, and the four children were keeping out of the
way of the short-tempered adults when a messenger came to the house.

They
couldn't help but hear the screams, and so abandoned their toy war and ran out
of the nursery onto the landing to peer through the railings down into the
great hall, where the messenger stood, head down, and Elethiomel's mother screamed
and shrieked. Cheradenine, Livueta and Darckense's mother and father both held
onto her, talking calmly. Finally, their father motioned the messenger away,
and the hysterical woman slumped silent to the floor, a piece of paper crumpled
in her hand.