Use of Weapons (53 page)

They
left him alone for a couple of hours after they'd run the medical checks and
pronounced him fit and well. He sat, wrapped in a big thick towel, on the bed,
and - like somebody probing a diseased tooth with tongue or finger, unable to
stop checking that it really does hurt every now and again - he called up his
memories, going through the roll-call of those old and recent adversaries he'd
hoped he might have lost somewhere in the darkness and the cold of space.

All
his past was indeed present, and everything that had been wrong present too,
and correct.

The
ship was called the
Absent Friends;
its journey would take it over a century. It was a mercy voyage, in a way; its
services donated by its alien owners to help assuage the after-effects of a
terrible war. He had not really deserved his place, and had used false papers
and a false name to secure his escape. He'd volunteered to be woken up near the
middle of the journey to provide part of the human crew because he thought it
would be a shame to travel in space and never really know it, never appreciate
it, never look out into that void. Those who did not choose to do crew duty
would be drugged on planet, taken into space unconscious, frozen out there, and
then wake up on another planet.

This
seemed undignified, to him. To be treated so was to become cargo.

The
two other people on duty when he was woken were Ky and Erens. Erens had been
supposed to return to the ranks of the frozen people five years earlier, after
a few months of duty on the ship, but had decided to stay awake until they
arrived at their destination. Ky had been revived three years later and should
also have gone back to sleep, to be replaced after a few months by the next
person on the crew rota, but by then Erens and Ky had started to argue, and
neither wanted to be the first to return to the stasis of the freeze; there had
been stalemate for two and a half years while the great slow ship moved, quiet
and cold, past the distant pinprick lights that were the stars. Finally they'd
woken him up, at last, because he was next on the rota and they wanted somebody
else to talk to. As a rule, however, he just sat in the crew section and
listened to the two of them argue.

'There's
still
fifty years
to go,' Ky reminded
Erens.

Eren
waved a bottle. 'I can wait. It isn't forever.'

Ky
nodded at the bottle. 'You'll kill yourself with that stuff, and all the other
junk you take. You'll never make it. You'll never see real sunlight again, or
taste rain. You won't last one year let alone fifty; you should go back to
sleep.'

'It
isn't sleep.'

'You
should go back to it, whatever you want to call it; you should let yourself be
frozen again.'

'And
it isn't literally frozen... freezing, either.' Erens looked annoyed and
puzzled at the same time.

The
man they'd woken up wondered how many hundreds of times the two had been
through this argument.

'You
should go back into your little cold cubicle like you were supposed to, five
years ago, and get them to treat you for your addictions when they revive you,'
Ky said.

'The
ship already treats me,' Erens told Ky, with a kind of slow drunken dignity. 'I
am in a state of grace with my enthusiasms; sublimely tensioned grace.' So
saying, Erens tipped the bottle back and drained it.

'You'll
kill yourself.'

'It's
my life.'

'You
might kill us all; everybody on the whole ship, sleepers too.'

'The
ship looks after itself,' Erens sighed, looking round the Crew Lounge. It was
the only dirty place on the ship. Everywhere else, the ship's robots tidied,
but Erens had worked out how to delete the Crew Lounge from the craft's memory,
and so the place could look good and scruffy. Erens stretched, kicking a couple
of small recyclable cups off the table.

'Huh,'
Ky said. 'What if you've damaged it with all your messing around?'

'I
have not been "messing around" with it,' Erens said, with a small
sneer. 'I have altered a few of the more basic housekeeping programs; it
doesn't talk to us anymore, and it lets us keep this place looking lived-in;
that's about it. Nothing that's going to make the ship wander into a star or
start thinking it's human and what are these intestinal parasites doing in
there. But you wouldn't understand. No technical background. Livu, here; he
might understand, eh?' Erens stretched out further, sliding down the grubby
seat, boots scraping on the filthy surface of the table. 'You understand, don't
you, Darac?'

'I
don't know,' he admitted (he was used to answering to Darac, or Mr Livu, or
just Livu, by now). 'I suppose if you know what you're doing, there's no real
harm.' Erens looked pleased. 'On the other hand, a lot of disasters have been
caused by people who thought they knew what they were doing.'

'Amen,'
Ky said, looking triumphant, and leant aggressively-towards Erens. 'See?'

'As
our friend said,' Erens pointed out, reaching for another bottle. 'He doesn't
know.'

'You
should go back with the sleepers,' Ky said.

'They're
not sleeping.'

'You're
not supposed to be up right now; there's only supposed to be two people up at
any point.'

'You
go back then.'

'It
isn't my turn. You were up first.'

He
left them to argue.

Sometimes
he would put a spacesuit on and go through the airlock into the storage sections,
which were in vacuum. The storage sections made up most of the ship; over
ninety-nine per cent of it. There was a tiny drive unit at one end of the
craft, an even tinier living unit at the other, and - in between - the bulging
bulk of the ship, packed with the un-dead.

He
walked the cold, dark corridors, looking from side to side at the sleeper
units. They looked like drawers in a filing cabinet; each was the head-end of
something very like a coffin. A little red light glowed faintly on each one, so
that standing in one of the gently spiralling corridors, with his own suit
lights switched off, those small and steady sparks curved away in a ruby
lattice folded over the darkness, like some infinite corridor of red giant suns
set up by some obsessively tidy-minded god.

Spiralling
gradually upwards, moving away from the living unit at what he always thought
of as the head of the ship, he walked up through its quiet, dark body. Usually
he took the outermost corridor, just to appreciate the scale of the vessel. As
he ascended, the pull of the ship's fake gravity gradually decreased.
Eventually, walking became a series of skidding leaps in which it was always
easier to hit the ceiling than make any forward progress. There were handles on
the coffin-drawers; he used them once walking became too inefficient, pulling
himself along towards the waist of the ship, which - as he approached it -
turned one wall of coffin-drawers to a floor and the other to a ceiling, in
places. Standing under a radial corridor, he leapt up, floated towards what was
now the ceiling with the radial corridor a chimney up through it. He caught a
coffin-drawer handle, and used a succession of them as rungs, climbing into the
centre of the ship.

Running
through the centre of the
Absent Friends
there was an elevator shaft that extended from living unit to drive unit. In
the very centre of the whole ship, he would summon the elevator, if it wasn't
already waiting there from last time.

When
it came, he would enter it, floating inside the squat, yellow-lit cylinder. He
would take out a pen, or a small torch, and place it in the centre of the
elevator car, and just float there, watching the pen or torch, waiting to see
if he had stationed it so exactly in the centre of the whole slowly spinning
mass of the ship that it would stay where he'd left it.

He
got very good at doing this, eventually, and could spend hours sitting there,
with the suit lights and the elevator lights on sometimes (if it was a pen) or
off (if it was a torch), watching the little object, waiting for his own
dexterity to prove greater than his patience, waiting for - in other words, he
could admit to himself - one part of his obsession to win over the other.

If
the pen or torch moved and eventually connected with the walls or floor or ceiling
of the elevator car, or drifted through the open door, then he had to float,
climb (down) and then pull and walk back the way he had come. If it stayed
still in the centre of the car, he was allowed to take the elevator back to the
living unit.

'Come
on, Darac,' Erens said, lighting up a pipe. 'What brought you along on this
one-way ride, eh?'

'I
don't want to talk about it.' He turned up the ventilation to get rid of Eren's
drug fumes. They were in the viewing carousel, the one place in the ship where
you could get a direct view of the stars. He came up here every now and again,
opened the shutters and watched the stars spin slowly overhead. Sometimes he
tried to read poetry.

Erens
still visited the carousel alone as well, but Ky no longer did; Erens reckoned
Ky got homesick, seeing the silent nothingness out there, and the lonely specks
that were other suns.

'Why
not?' Erens said.

He
shook his head and sat back in the couch, looking out into the darkness. 'It
isn't any of your business.'

'I'll
tell you why I came along if you tell me why you did,' Erens grinned, making
the words sound childish, conspiratorial.

'Get
lost, Erens.'

'Mine
is an interesting story; you'd be fascinated.'

'I'm
sure,' he sighed.

'But
I won't tell you unless you tell me first. You're missing a lot; mm-hmm.'

'Well,
I'll just have to live with that,' he said. He turned down the lighting in the
carousel until the brightest thing in it was Erens' face, glowing red with
reflected light on each draw of the pipe. He shook his head when Erens offered
him the drug.

'You
need to loosen up, my friend,' Erens told him, slumping back in the other seat.
'Get high; share your problems.'

'What
problems?'

He
saw Erens' head shake in the darkness. 'Nobody on this ship hasn't got
problems, friend. Nobody out here not running away from something.'

'Ah;
ship psychiatrist now are we?'

'Hey,
come on; nobody's going back, are they? Nobody on here's ever going back home.
Half the people we know are probably dead already, and the ones that aren't
will be, by the time we get where we're going. So if we can't ever see the
people we used to know again, and probably never see home again, it has to be
something pretty damn important and pretty damn bad, pretty damn
evil
to make a body up and leave like
that. We all
got
to be running from
something, whether it's something we did or something we had done to us.'

'Maybe
some people just like travelling.'

'That's
crap; nobody likes travelling that much.'

He
shrugged. 'Whatever.'

'Aw,
Darac, come on; argue, dammit.'

'I
don't believe in argument,' he said, looking out into the darkness (and saw a
towering ship, a capital ship, ringed with its layers and levels of armament
and armour, dark against the dusk light, but not dead).

'You
don't?' Erens said, genuinely surprised. 'Shit, and I thought I was the cynical
one.'

'It's
not cynicism,' he said flatly. 'I just think people overvalue argument because
they like to hear themselves talk.'

'Oh
well, thank
you
.'

'It's
comforting, I suppose.' He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells
seen at night; rising, peaking, falling... (And reminded himself that the stars
too would explode, perhaps, one day.) 'Most people are not prepared to have
their minds changed,' he said. 'And I think they know in their hearts that other
people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they
argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses.'

'
Excuses
, eh? Well, if this ain't
cynicism, what is?' Erens snorted.

'Yes,
excuses,' he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of
bitterness. 'I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just
what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the
things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important
part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the
other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.'
He looked at Erens. 'You've attacked the wrong thing.'

'So
what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this
futile... arguing stuff?'

'Agree
to disagree,' he said. 'Or fight.'

'
Fight
?'

He
shrugged. 'What else is left?'

'Negotiate?'

'Negotiation
is a way to come to a conclusion; it's the type of conclusion that I'm talking
about.'

'Which
basically is disagree or fight?'