Use of Weapons (40 page)

The
wind blew; the leaves scattered. He shook his head, exasperated. Beychae,
sitting in his thickly padded trousers and long jacket, turned to look at him.

'Broken?'
the old man asked.

'Broken,'
he said. His face took on an expression of annoyance; he gripped the weapon
round the muzzle with both hands and swung it round his head, then let it go
and sent it whirling away into the trees below; it disappeared in a flurry of
dislodged leaves.

He
sat down beside Beychae.

Plasma
rifle gone, just a pistol left; only one suit; probably no way he could use the
suit's AG without giving away their position; capsule wrecked; module nowhere
to be seen; no word from the terminal earring or the suit itself... it was a
sorry mess. He checked the suit for whatever broadcast signals it was picking
up; the wrist screen displayed some news headlines programme; nothing about
Solotol was mentioned. A few of the Cluster's brush-fire wars were.

Beychae
looked at the small screen too. 'Can you tell from that whether they are
looking for us?' he asked.

'Only
if we see it on the news. Military stuff will be tight-beamed; slim chance
we'll pick up a transmission.' He looked at the clouds. 'We'll probably find out
more directly, soon enough.'

'Hmm,'
Beychae said. He frowned at the flagstones, then said, 'I think I might know
where this place is, Zakalwe.'

'Yeah?'
he said, unenthusiastically. He put his elbows on his knees, his chin in his
hands, and looked out over the wooded plains to the low hills on the horizon.

Beychae
nodded. 'I've been thinking about it. I believe this is the Srometren
Observatory, in Deshal Forest.'

'How
far is that from Solotol?'

'Oh;
different continent. Good two thousand kilometres.'

'Same
latitude,' he said glumly, looking up at the chill grey skies.

'Approximately,
if this is the place I think it is.'

'Who's
in charge here?' he asked. 'Whose jurisdiction? Same lot as in Solotol; the
Humanists?'

'The
same.' Beychae said, and got up, brushing the seat of his pants and looking
around the flattened hill-top at the curious stone instruments that covered its
flagstones. 'Srometren Observatory!' he said. 'How ironic we should happen to
come down here, on our way to the stars!'

'Probably
not just chance,' he said, picking up a twig and brushing a few random shapes
in the dust at his feet. 'This place famous?'

'Of
course,' Beychae said. 'It was the centre of astronomical research for the old
Vrehid Empire for five hundred years.'

'On
any tourist routes?'

'Certainly.'

'Then
it probably has a beacon nearby, to guide aircraft in. Capsule may have made
for it when it knew it was crippled. Makes us easier to find.' He gazed up at
the sky. 'For everybody, unfortunately.' He shook his head, went back to
scratching in the dust with the twig.

'What
happens now?' Beychae said.

He
shrugged. 'We wait and see who turns up. I can't get any of the communication
gear to work, so we don't know if the Culture knows all that's happened or
not... for all I know the Module's still coming for us, or a whole Culture
starship's on its way, or - probably more likely - your pals from Solotol...'
He shrugged, threw down the twig and sat back against the stonework behind him,
glancing skyward. They might be watching us right now.'

Beychae
looked up too. 'Through the clouds?'

'Through
the clouds.'

'Shouldn't
you be hiding, then? Running off through the woods?'

'Maybe,'
he said.

Beychae
stood looking down at the other man. 'Where were you thinking of taking me, if
we'd got away?'

'The
Impren System. There are space Habitats there,' he said. 'They're neutral, or
at least not as pro-war as this place.'

'Do
your... superiors really think war is so close, Zakalwe?'

'Yes,'
he sighed. He already had the suit's face-plate hinged up; now, with another
look at the sky, he took the whole helmet off. He put one hand up over his
forehead and through his drawn-back hair, then reached back and took the
pony-tail out of its little ring, shaking his long black hair down. 'It might
take ten days, might take a hundred, but it's coming.' He smiled thinly at
Beychae. 'For the same reasons as last time.'

'I
thought we'd won the ecological argument against terra-forming,' said Beychae.

'We
did, but times change; people change, generations change. We won the battles
for the acknowledgement of machine sentience, but by all accounts the issue was
fudged after that. Now people are saying, yes, they're sentient, but it's only
human sentience that
counts.
Plus,
people never need too much of an excuse to see other species as inferior.'

Beychae
was silent for a while, then said, 'Zakalwe, has it ever occurred to you that
in all these things the Culture may not be as disinterested as you imagine, and
it claims?'

'No,
it never occurred to me,' he said, though Beychae got the impression the man
hadn't really thought first before answering.

'They
want other people to be like them, Cheradenine. They don't terraform, so they
don't want others to either. There are arguments for it as well, you know;
increasing species diversity often seems more important to people than
preserving a wilderness, even without the provision of extra living space. The
Culture believes profoundly in machine sentience, so it thinks everybody ought
to, but I think it also believes every civilisation should be run by its
machines. Fewer people want that. The issue of cross-species tolerance is, I'll
grant, of a different nature, but even there the Culture can sometimes appear
to be insistent that deliberate inter-mixing is not just permissible but
desirable; almost a duty. Again, who is to say that is correct?'

'So
you should have a war to... what? Clear the air?' He inspected the suit helmet.

'No,
Cheradenine, I'm just trying to suggest to you that the Culture may not be as
objective as it thinks it is, and, that being the case, its estimation
concerning the likelihood of war may be equally untrustworthy.'

'There
are small wars on a dozen planets right now, Tsoldrin. People are talking war
in public; either about how to avoid it, or how it might be limited, or how it
can't possibly happen... but it's coming; you can smell it. You should catch
the newscasts, Tsoldrin. Then you'd know.'

'Well
then, perhaps war is inevitable,' Beychae said, looking away over the wooded
plains and hills beyond the observatory. 'Maybe it's just... time.'

'Crap,'
he said. Beychae looked at him, surprised. 'There's a saying: "War is a
long cliff." You can avoid the cliff completely, you can walk along the
top for as long as you have the nerve, you can even choose to leap off, and if
you only fall a short way before you hit a ledge you can always scramble back
up again. Unless you're just plain invaded, there are always choices, and even
then, there's usually something you've missed - a choice you didn't make - that
could have avoided invasion in the first place. You people still have your
choices. There's nothing inevitable about it.'

'Zakalwe,'
Beychae said. 'You surprise me. I'd have thought you -'

'You'd
have thought I'd be in favour of war?' he said, standing, a sad small smile on
his lips. He put one hand on the other man's shoulder. 'You've had your nose
buried in books for too long, Tsoldrin.' He walked away past the stone
instruments. Beychae looked down at the suit helmet, lying on the flagstones.
He followed the other man.

'You're
right, Zakalwe. I have been out of the flow of things for a long time. I
probably don't know who half the people in power are these days, or exactly
what the issues are, or the precise balance of the various alliances... so the
Culture cannot be so... desperate they think I can alter whatever's going to
happen. Can they?'

He
turned round. He looked into Beychae's face. 'Tsoldrin, the truth is I don't
know. Don't think I haven't thought about this. It might be just that you, as a
symbol, really,.would make all the difference, and maybe everybody is desperate
to find an excuse not to have to fight; you could be that excuse if you come
along, uncontaminated by recent events, as though from the dead, and provide a
face-saving compromise.

'Or
maybe the Culture secretly thinks a small short war is a good idea, or even
knows there's nothing it can do to stop a full-scale one, but has to be seen to
be doing something, no matter how long a shot it might be, so that people can't
say later "Why didn't you try
this
?"'
He shrugged. 'I never try to second-guess the Culture, Tsoldrin, let alone
Contact, and certainly not Special Circumstances.'

'You
just do their bidding.'

'And
get well paid for it.'

'But
you see yourself on the side of good, do you, Cheradenine?'

He
smiled and sat on the stone plinth, legs swinging. 'I have no idea whether
they're the good guys or not, Tsoldrin. They certainly
seem
to be, but then who knows that seeming is being?' He frowned,
looked away. 'I have never seen them be cruel, even when they might have
claimed they had an excuse to be so. It can make them seem cold, sometimes.' He
shrugged again. 'But there are folks that'll tell you it's the bad gods that
always have the most beautiful faces and the softest voices. Shit,' he said,
and jumped off the stone table. He went to stand by the balustrade which marked
one edge of the old observatory, looking to where the sky was starting to
redden above the horizon. It would be dark in an hour. 'They keep their
promises and they pay top rates. They make good employers, Tsoldrin.'

'That
does not mean we ought to let them decide our fate.'

'You'd
rather let those decadent dickheads in Governance do it instead?'

'At
least they're
involved
, Zakalwe; it
isn't just a game to them.'

'Oh,
I think it is. I think that's exactly what it is to them. The difference is
that unlike the Culture's Minds, they don't know enough to take games
seriously.' He took a deep breath and watched the wind stir the branches
beneath them; leaves fell away. 'Tsoldrin; don't say you're on their side.'

'The
sides were always strange,' Beychae said. 'We all said that all we wanted was
the best for the Cluster, and I think we all meant it, mostly. We all still
want that. But I don't know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I
know too much, I've studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It
all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that settles over... whatever
machinery we carry inside us that leads us to act, and puts the same weight
everywhere, so that always you can see good and bad on each side, and always
there are arguments, precedents for every possible course of action... so of
course one ends up doing nothing. Perhaps that's only right; perhaps that's
what evolution requires, to leave the field free for younger, unencumbered
minds, and those not afraid to act.'

'Okay,
so it's a balance. All societies are like that; the damping hand of the old and
the firebrand youth together. It works out through generations, or through the
set-up of your institutions, and their change and even replacement; but
Governance, the Humanists, combine the worst of both approaches. Ancient,
vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war-mania. It's a crock of
shit, Tsoldrin, and you know it. You've earned the right to some leisure;
nobody's arguing. But that won't stop you feeling guilty when - not if - the
bad stuff comes. You have the power, Tsoldrin, whether you like it or not; just
doing nothing is a statement, don't you understand that? What is all your
studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn't lead to
wisdom? And what's wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right
thing to do? You're almost a god to some of the people in this civilisation,
Tsoldrin; again, whether you like it or not. If you do nothing... they'll feel
abandoned. They'll feel despair. And who can blame them?'

He
made a resigned sort of gesture with his hands, putting them both down on the
stone parapet, gazing out to the darkening sky. Beychae was silent.

He
gave the old man a while longer to think, then looked round at the flat stone
summit of the hill, at all the strange stone instruments. 'An observatory, eh?'

'Yes,'
Beychae said after a moment's hesitation. He touched one of the stone plinths
with one hand. 'Believed to have been a burial site, four or five thousand
years ago; then to have had some sort of astrological significance; later, they
may have predicted eclipses with readings taken here. Finally, the Vrehids
built this observatory to study the motions of the moons, planets and stars.
There are water-clocks, sundials, sextants, planet-dials... partial orreries...
there are crude seismographs here, too, or at least earthquake direction
indicators.'

'They
have telescopes?'

'Very
poor ones, and only for a decade or so before the Empire fell. The results they
got from the telescopes caused a lot of problems; contradicted what they
already knew, or thought they knew.'