Use of Weapons (39 page)

Let
her dream. He relaxed into the calm frenzy of the drug.

There
was a nexus where the vanishing-point of memory met the time-light from another
place, and he was not yet sure he had out-run it.

He
tried to see the great house again, but it was obscured by smoke and
star-shell. He looked to the great battleship, confined within its dry-land
dock, but it would not grow any larger. It was a capital ship, no more, no
less, and he could not access the depths of meaning that it really held for
him.

All
he'd done was take the Chosen across the wastes to the Palace. Why had they
wanted the Chosen to get to the court? It seemed absurd. The Culture did not
believe in such supernatural, superstitious nonsense. But the Culture required
him to make sure the Chosen got to the Court, despite all sorts of nastiness
getting in his way.

To
perpetuate a corrupt line. To carry on a reign of stupidness.

Well,
they had their own reasons. You took the money and ran. Except there was no
money, as such. What was a boy to do?

Believe.
Though they scorned belief. Do. Act, though they were wary of action. He was
their whipper boy, he realised. A borrowed hero. They thought little enough of
heroes for this to be a boost to one's own self-belief.

Come
with us, do these things, that you would like to do anyway, except more so, and
we will give you what you could never really have anywhere or anytime else;
real proof that you are doing the right thing; that not only are you having
immense
fun
, it is also for the
common good. So enjoy.

And
he
did
, and he enjoyed, though he was
not always sure it was for the right reasons. But that did not matter to them.

The
Chosen to the Palace.

He
stood back from his life and was not ashamed. All he'd ever done was because
there was something to be done. You used those weapons, whatever they might
happen to be. Given a goal, or having thought up a goal, you had to aim for it,
no matter what stood in your way. Even the Culture recognised that. They
couched it in terms of what could be done at a specific time and level of
technological capability, but they recognised that all was relative, everything
was in flux...

He
tried, all of a sudden - hoping to take it by surprise - to sweep and crash
back down to that place with the war-shelled mansion and the burned-out
summerhouse and the foundering boat made of stone... but the memory would not
bear the weight of it, and he was flung out again, swirled away, cast into the
nothingness, consigned to the oblivion of the deliberately not-thought
thoughts.

The
tent stood at the focus of the desert trails. White without, black within, it
seemed to image his crossroad imaginings.

Hey
hey hey. It's only a dream.

Except
it wasn't a dream, and he was in complete control, and if he opened his eyes he
could see the girl sitting there in front of him, staring at him, wondering,
and there was never any doubt about who was where and what was when, and in a
way that was the worst thing about this drug; that it let you go anywhere,
anytime - as not a few drugs did - but it still let you connect back to reality
whenever you really wanted to.

Cruel,
he thought.

The
Culture might just have it right after all; being able to call up almost any
drug or combinations of drugs seemed suddenly less indulgent and decadent than
he'd imagined, before.

The
girl, he saw, in one awful instant, would do great things. She would be famous
and important, and the tribe around her would do great - and terrible - things,
and it would all be for nothing, because whatever terrible train of events he
had set in motion by taking the Chosen to the Palace, this tribe would not
survive; they were the dead. Their mark upon the desert of life was already
being obscured, sands blowing over, grain by grain by grain... He had already
helped to scuff it out, no matter that they hadn't realised this yet. They
would, after he was gone. The Culture would take him away from here, and put
him down somewhere else, and this adventure would collapse with the rest into
meaninglessness, and nothing very much would be left, as he went on to do
roughly the same thing somewhere else.

Actually,
he could happily have killed the Chosen, because the boy was a fool, and he had
seldom been in the company of anybody quite so stupid. The youth was a cretin,
and didn't even realise that he was.

He
could think of no more disastrous combination.

He
swept back towards the planet he had once abandoned.

Came
in so far, was forced away. He tried again, but without any real self-belief.

Was
rejected. Well, he'd expected no more.

The
Chairmaker was not the person who made the chair, he thought, immediately
lucid. It was and was not him. There are no Gods, we are told, so I must make
my own salvation.

His
eyes were already closed, but he closed them again.

He
swayed in a circle, unknowing.

Lies;
he wept and screamed, fell at the scornful feet of the girl.

Lies;
he circled on.

Lies;
he fell to the girl, hands out, grasping for a mother that was not there.

Lies.

Lies.

Lies;
he circled on, tracing his own private symbol in the air between the crown of
his head and the day-bright hole that was the tent's smoke-hole.

He
sank towards the planet again, but the girl in the black/white tent reached out
and wiped his brow and, in that tiny movement, seemed to wipe his being away...

(Lies.)

...
It was a long time later he found out he'd only taken the Chosen to the Palace
because the brat was to be the last of the line. Not merely stupid, but also
impotent, the Chosen fathered no strong sons and no cunning daughters (as the
Culture had known all along), and the fractious desert tribes swept in a decade
later led by a Matriarch who had guided most of the warriors under her command
through the dream-leaf time, and had seen one stronger and stranger than all of
them suffer its effects and come through unscathed but still unfulfilled, and
known through that very experience that there was more to their desert
existence than had been guessed at by the myths and elders of her nomad tribe.

3: Remembrance

Ten

He
loved the plasma rifle. He was an artist with it; he could paint pictures of
destruction, compose symphonies of demolition, write elegies of annihilation,
using that weapon.

He
stood, thinking about it, while the wind moved dead leaves round his feet and
the ancient stones faced into the wind.

They
hadn't made it off the planet. The capsule had been attacked by... something.
He couldn't tell from the damage whether it had been a beam weapon or some sort
of warhead going off nearby. Whatever it had been, it had disabled them.
Clamped to the outside of the capsule, he'd been lucky to be on the side that
shielded him from whatever had hit it. Had he been on the other side, facing
the beam or the warhead, he'd be dead.

They
must have been hit by some crude effector weapon as well, because the plasma
rifle seemed to have fused. It had been cradled between his suit and the
capsule skin and couldn't have been affected by whatever wrecked the capsule
itself, but the weapon had smoked and got hot, and when they'd finally landed -
Beychae shaken but unhurt - and opened up the gun's inspection panels, it was
to find a melted, still-warm mess inside.

Maybe
if he'd taken just a little less time to convince Beychae; maybe if he'd just
knocked the old guy out and left the talking for later. He'd taken too much
time, given them too much time. Seconds counted. Dammit, milliseconds,
nanoseconds counted. Too much time.

'They're
going to kill you!' he'd shouted. 'They want you on their side or they want you
dead. The war's going to start soon, Tsoldrin; you support them or you'll have
an accident. They won't
let
you stay
neutral!'

'Insane,'
Beychae repeated, cradling Ubrel Shiol's head in his hands. Saliva trickled
from the woman's mouth. 'You're insane, Zakalwe; insane.' He started to cry.

He
went over to the old man, knelt on one knee, holding the gun he'd taken from
Shiol. 'Tsoldrin; what do you think she had this for?' He put his hand on the
old man's shoulder. 'Didn't you see the way she moved when she tried to kick
me? Tsoldrin; librarians... research assistants... they just don't move like
that.' He reached out and patted the unconscious woman's collar flat and tidy
again. 'She was one of your jailers, Tsoldrin; she would probably have been you
executioner.' He reached under the car, pulled out the bouquet of flowers, and
placed them gently under her blonde head, removing Beychae's hands.

'Tsoldrin,'
he said. 'We have to go. She'll be all right.' He arranged Shiol's arms in a
less awkward position. She was already on her side, so she wouldn't choke. He
reached carefully under Beychae's arms and slowly drew the old man up to his
feet. Ubrel Shiol's eyes flickered open; she saw the two men in front of her;
she muttered something, and one hand went to the back of her neck. She started
to roll over, unbalanced in her grogginess; the hand that had gone to her neck
came away clutching a tiny cylinder like a pen; he felt Beychae stiffen as the girl
looked up and, as she fell forward, tried to point the little laser at
Beychae's head.

Beychae
looked into her dark, half-unfocused eyes, over the top of the pen laser, and
felt a sort of appalled disconnectedness. The girl tried hard to steady herself,
aiming at him. Not Zakalwe, he thought; at
me
.
Me!

'Ubrel...'
he began.

The
girl fell back in a dead faint.

Beychae
stared down at her body lying limp on the road. Then he heard somebody saying
his name and tugging his arm.

'Tsoldrin...
Tsoldrin... Come on, Tsoldrin.'

'Zakalwe;
she was aiming at
me
, not you!'

'I
know, Tsoldrin.'

'She
was aiming at me!'

'I
know. Come on; here's the capsule.'

'At
me...'

'I
know, I know. Get in here.'

He
watched the grey clouds move overhead. He stood on the flat stone summit of a
high hill, surrounded by other hilltops almost as high, all wooded. He looked
resentfully around the forested slopes and the curious, truncated stone pillars
and plinths that covered the platform peak. He felt a sense of vertigo, exposed
to such wide horizons again after so long spent in the cleft city. He left the
view, kicked his way through some wind-piled leaves, back to where Beychae sat
and the plasma rifle rested against a great round stone. The capsule was a
hundred metres away, down in the trees.

He
picked up the plasma rifle for the fifth or sixth time and inspected it.

It
made him want to cry; it was such a beautiful weapon. Every time he picked it
up he half hoped that it would be all right, that the Culture had fitted it
with some self-repair facility without telling him, that the damage would be no
more...