She whacked the machine with one fist. 'Calm down, dammit.'
'Sma,' the drone said, voice almost languid, 'I am calm. I'm just trying to communicate to you the enormity of the planetary cock-up Zakalwe has managed to concoct here. The Very Little Gravitas Indeed has blown a fuse; even as we talk, Contact Minds in an ever-expanding sphere centred right here are clearing their intellectual decks and trying to work out what the hell to do to tidy this stunningly ghastly mess. If that GSV hadn't been on its way here anyway, they'd have diverted it because of this. An asteroid belt-sized pile of shit is about to hit a fan exactly the size of this planet, thanks to Zakalwe's ludicrous good-guy schemes, and Contact is going to have to try and field all of it.' It hesitated. 'Yeah; I just got the word.' It sounded relieved. 'You have a day to haul Zakalwe's loop-eyed ass out of here, otherwise we snatch him; emergency displace, no holds barred.'
Sma took a very deep breath. 'Apart from that... everything all right?'
'This, Ms Sma, is no time for levity,' the drone said, soberly. Then; 'Shit!'
'What now?'
'Meeting's over, but Zakalwe the Insane isn't taking his car; he's heading for the elevator down to the tube system. Destination... naval base. There's a submarine waiting for him.'
Sma stood. 'Submarine, eh?' She smoothed the culottes. 'Back to the docks, agree?'
'Agreed.'
She hefted the drone, started walking, looking for a cab. 'I've asked the Very Little Gravitas Indeed to fake a radio message,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw told her. 'A cab should pull up here momentarily.'
'And they say there's never one around when you need one.'
'You're worrying me, Sma. You're taking all this far too calmly.'
'Oh, I'll panic later.' Sma took a deep breath and let it out slowly. 'Could that be the cab?'
'I believe it is.'
'What's "To the docks"?'
The drone told her, and she said it. The cab sped off through the largely military traffic.
Six hours later they were still following the submarine, as it whined and whirred and gurgled its way through the layers of ocean, heading for the equatorial sea.
'Sixty klicks an hour,' fumed the drone. 'Sixty klicks an hour!'
'To them it's fast; don't be so unsympathetic to your fellow machines.' Sma watched the screen as the vessel a kilometre in front of them burrowed its way through the ocean. The abyssal plain was kilometres below.
'It isn't one of us, Sma,' the drone said wearily. 'It's just a submarine; the smartest thing inside it is the human captain. I rest my case.'
'Any idea where it's heading yet?'
'No. The captain's orders are to take Zakalwe wherever he wants to go, and after giving him this general heading, Zakalwe's kept quiet. There's a whole heap of islands and atolls he could be making for, or - several days travel away at this crawl - thousands of kilometres of coastline, on another continent.'
'Check out the islands, and that coastline. There must be a reason he's heading this way.'
'It's being checked out!' the drone snapped.
Sma looked at it. Skaffen-Amtiskaw flashed a delicate shade of purple, intimating contrition. 'Sma; this... man... totally blew it the last time; we're five or six million down on that last job, all because he wouldn't break out of the Winter Palace and balance things out. I could show you scenes of the terror there that would blanch your hair. Now he's come very close indeed to instigating a global catastrophe here. Since the guy suffered what happened to him on Fohls - since he started trying to be a good guy in his own right - he's been a disaster. If we do get him, and can get him to Voerenhutz, I just worry what sort of chaos he'll engender there. The man's bad news. Never mind outing Beychae; offing Zakalwe would be doing everybody a favour.'
Sma looked into the centre of the drone's sensory band. 'One;' she said, 'don't talk about human lives as though they're just collateral.' She breathed deeply. 'Two; remember the massacre, in the courtyard of that inn?' she asked calmly. 'The guys through the walls, and your knife missile let off the leash?'
'One; sorry to have offended your mammalian sensibilities. Two; Sma, will you ever let me forget it?'
'Remember what I said would happen if you ever tried anything like that again?'
'Sma,' the drone said tiredly, 'if you are seriously trying to imply that I might kill Zakalwe, all I can say is; don't be ridiculous.'
'Just remember.' She watched the slowly scrolling screen. 'We have our orders.'
'Agreed on courses of action, Sma. We don't have orders, remember?'
Sma nodded. 'We have our agreed on courses of action. We lift Mr Zakalwe and take him to Voerenhutz. If at any stage you disagree, you can always butt out. I'll be given another offensive drone.'
Skaffen-Amtiskaw was silent for a second, then said, 'Sma, that is probably the most hurtful thing you have ever said to me - which is saying a lot - but I'll ignore it, I think, because we are both under a lot of stress at the moment. Let my actions speak. As you say; we lift the planetfucker and drop him in Voerenhutz. Though, if this voyage goes on too much longer, it'll all be taken out of our hands - or fields, as the case may be - and Zakalwe will wake up on Xenophobe or the GCU, wondering what happened. All we can do is wait and see.'
The drone paused then. 'Looks like it could be those equatorial islands we're heading for,' it told her. 'Zakalwe owns half of them.'
Sma nodded silently, watching the distant submarine creep through the ocean. She scratched at her lower abdomen after a while, and turned to the drone. 'You sure you didn't record anything from that, umm, sort of orgy, first night on the Xenophobe?
'Positive.'
She frowned back at the screen. 'Huh. Pity.'
The submarine spent nine hours underwater, then surfaced near an atoll; an inflatable went ashore. Sma and the drone watched the single figure walk up the golden, sunlit beach towards a complex of low buildings; an exclusive hotel for the ruling class of the country he'd left.
'What's Zakalwe doing?' Sma said, after he'd been ashore for ten minutes or so. The submarine had dived again as soon as it recovered its inflatable, and taken a course back to the port it had departed from.
'He's saying goodbye to a girl,' sighed the drone.
'Is that it?'
'That would appear to be the only thing to draw him here.'
'Shit! Couldn't he have taken a plane?'
'Hmm. No; no airstrip, but anyway, this is a fairly sensitive demilitarised zone; no unexpected flights of any sort allowed, and the next seaplane isn't for a couple of days. The sub was actually the fastest way of...'
The drone fell silent.
'Skaffen-Amtiskaw?' Sma said.
'Well,' the drone said slowly, 'the doxy just smashed a lot of ornaments and a couple of pieces of very valuable furniture, and then ran off and buried herself in her bed, weeping... but apart from that, Zakalwe just sat down in the middle of the lounge with a large drink and said (and I quote), "Okay; if that's you, Sma, come and talk to me."'
Sma looked at the view on the screen. It showed the small atoll, the central island lying green and squashed looking between the vibrant blues and greens of ocean and sky.
'You know,' she said, 'I think I would like to kill Zakalwe.'
'There's a queue. Surface?'
'Surface. Let's go see the asshole.'
X
Light. Some light. Not very much. Air foul and everywhere pain. He wanted to scream and writhe, but could find no breath and make nothing move. A dark destroying shadow welled up inside him, exterminating thought, and he lost consciousness.
Light. Some light. Not very much. He knew there was pain, too, but somehow it did not seem so important. He was looking at it differently now. That was all you had to do; just think about it differently. He wondered where that idea had come from, and seemed to remember he'd been taught how to do this.
Everything was metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The pain, for example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it
. His body was a city and his mind a citadel. All communications between the two seemed to have been cut, but within the keep that was his mind he still had power. The part of his consciousness that was telling him the pain did not hurt, and that all things were like other things, was like... like... he found it hard to think of a comparison. A magic mirror, maybe.
Still thinking about that, the light faded, and he slipped away again, into the darkness.
Light. Some light (he'd been here before, hadn't he?). Not very much. He seemed to have left the keep that was his mind, and now he was in a storm-struck leaking boat, images dancing before him.
The light grew slowly in strength until it was almost painful. He felt suddenly terrified, because it seemed to him that he really was on a tiny creaking leaking boat, tossed scudding across a seething black ocean, in the teeth of a howling gale, but now there was light, and it appeared to come from somewhere above him, but when he tried to look at his hand, or the tiny boat, he still couldn't see anything. The light shone into his eyes, but it failed to illuminate anything else. The idea terrified him; the tiny boat was swamped by a wave and he was submerged again in the ocean of pain, burning through every pore of his body. Somewhere, thankfully, somebody threw a switch, and he slipped underneath to darkness, silence and... no pain.
Light. Some light. He remembered this. The light showed a small boat assaulted by waves on a broad dark ocean. Beyond, unreachable for now, there was a great citadel on a small island. And there was sound. Sound... That was new. Been here before, but not with sound. He tried to listen, very hard, but could not make out the words. Still, he formed the impression that maybe somebody was asking questions.
Somebody was asking questions... Who...? He waited for a reply, from outside or from within himself, but nothing came from anywhere; he felt lost and abandoned, and the worst of it was that he felt abandoned by himself.
He decided to ask himself some questions. What was the citadel? That was his mind. The citadel was supposed to come with a city attached, which was his body, but it looked like something else had taken over the city, and there was just the castle, just the keep left. What was the boat, and the ocean? The ocean was pain. He was in the boat now, but before that he'd been in the ocean, up to his neck, waves breaking over him. The boat was... some learned technique which was protecting him from the pain, not letting him forget it was there, but keeping its debilitating effects away from him, letting him think.
So far so good, he thought. Now, what is the light?
He might have to come back to that one. Same with: What is the sound?
He tried another question: Where is this happening?
He searched his sodden clothes but found nothing in any of the pockets. He looked for a name tag that he felt ought to be sewn on to his collar, but it seemed to have been ripped off. He searched the small boat, but still found no answers. So he tried to imagine being in the distant keep over the towering waves, and visualised himself walking into a cavernous store room of jumble and nonsense and memories buried deep in the castle... but could see nothing in detail. His eyes closed and he wept with frustration, while the small boat juddered and tipped underneath him.
When he opened his eyes, he was holding a little clip of paper with the word FOHLS printed on it. He was so surprised he let the slip of paper go; the wind whipped it away into the dark sky over the black waves. But he had remembered. Fohls was the answer. The planet of Fohls.
He felt relieved, and a little proud. He'd discovered something.
What was he doing here?
Funeral. He seemed to remember something about a funeral. Surely it had not been his own.
Was he dead? He thought about this question for a while. He supposed it was possible. Maybe there was an afterlife, after all. Well, if there was life after death, that would teach him. Was this sea of pain a divine punishment? Was the light a god? He dipped his hand over the side of the boat, into the pain; it filled him, and he withdrew. Cruel god if that really was the case. What about all the stuff I did for the Culture? he wanted to ask. Doesn't that cancel some of the bad out? Or were those smug self-satisfied bastards wrong all along? God, he'd love to be able to go back and tell them. Imagine the look on Sma's face!
But he didn't think he was dead. It hadn't been his funeral. He could remember the flat-topped tower by the cliffs looking out over the sea, and helping to carry some old warrior's body there. Yes, somebody had died and they were being ceremonially disposed of.
Something was nagging at him.
Suddenly he clutched at the boat's rotten timbers and stared out over the heaving ocean.
There was a ship. Every now and again he could see a ship, far in the distance. Barely more than a dot, and mostly the waves were in the way, but it was a ship. A hole seemed to open somewhere inside him; his guts fell through it.
He thought he recognised the ship.
Then the boat split apart, and he dropped through it, through the water underneath, then splashed out of the underside of the water, into air again, and saw the ocean beneath him, and a tiny speck of its surface, which he was falling towards. It was another small boat; he crashed through it, through more water, through more air, through the wreckage of a boat, through another layer of water and another level of air...
Hey - one part of his mind thought, as he fell - this is like how Sma described the Reality... splashed through more waves, through the water, out into air, heading for more waves...
This wasn't going to stop. He remembered that the Reality Sma had described was expanding all the time; you could fall through forever; really forever, not until the end of the universe; literally forever.
That won't do, he thought to himself. He'd have to face the ship.
He landed in a little creaking, leaking boat.
The ship was much closer now. The ship was huge and dark and bristled with guns and it was heading straight for him, bow wave a huge white V of foam bisected by its stem.
Shit, he wasn't going to be able to get away from it. The cruel curves of the bows raced slicing towards him. He closed his eyes.
Once upon a time there was... a ship. A great ship. A ship for destroying things with; other ships, people, cities... It was very big and it was designed to kill people and to keep people inside it from being killed.
He tried not to remember what the great ship was called. Instead he saw the ship somehow installed near the middle of a city, and felt confused, and could not work out how it got there. The ship started to look like a castle, for some reason, and that did, and did not, make sense. He began to feel frightened. The ship's name was like some huge sea creature, bumping into the hull of his boat; like a battering-ram thudding into the walls of the castle keep. He tried to block it out, knowing it was just a name but not wanting to hear it because it always made him feel bad.
He put his hands over his ears. That worked for a moment. But then the ship, set in stone, near the centre of the battered city, fired its great guns, gouting black and flashing yellow-white, and he knew what was coming, and tried to scream to cover the noise, but when it arrived it was the name of the ship that the guns had spoken, and it shattered the boat, demolished the castle, and resounded through the bones and spaces of his skull, like the laughter of an insane god, forever.
The light went out then, and he sank gratefully away from the awful, accusing sound.
Light. Staberinde said a calm voice from somewhere inside. Staberinde. It's only a word.
The Staberinde. The ship. He turned away from the light, back into the darkness.
Light. Sounds, too; a voice. What was I thinking about, earlier? (He recalled something about a name, but ignored that.) Funeral. Pains. And the ship. There was a ship. Or there had been. Maybe still is, for all... but there was something about a funeral. The funeral is why you are here. That was what confused you before. You thought you were dead, in fact you were only living. He remembered something about boats and oceans and castles and cities, but could not actual
ly see them any more.
Now, from somewhere, comes touch, touch coming in from out there. Not pain but touch. Two different things...
The touch, again. It feels like the touch of a hand; a hand touching his face, causing more pain, but still a touch, and distinguishably a hand. His face felt terrible. He must look terrible.
Where am I again? Crash. Funeral. Fohls.
Crash. Of course; my name is...
Too hard.
What do I do, then?
That's easier. You are a paid agent of the most advanced - well, certainly the most energetic - humanoid civilisation in the... Reality? (No.) Universe? (No.) Galaxy? Yes, galaxy... and you were representing them at a... a... funeral, and you were coming back on some stupid aircraft to be picked up and taken away from all this, when something happened on board the aircraft and it went... and he'd seen flames and... and there had been that old jungle floating right... then nothing and pain, and nothing but pain. Then drifting and floating in and out of it.
The hand touched his face again. And this time there was something to see. He thought it looked like a cloud, or like a moon through a cloud, itself unseen but shining through.
Possibly the two were connected, he thought. Yes; here it comes again, and yes, there we are; sensation, feeling; the hand on the face again. Throat, swallowing, water or some liquid. You are being given something to drink. From the way it goes down there seems to be... yes, upright, we are upright, not on our back. The hands, own hands, they are... an open feeling, feeling very open, very vulnerable, naked.
Thinking about his body was bringing the pain back again. He decided to give up on that. Try something else.
Try the crash again. Back from the funeral and the desert coming right up... no, mountains. Or was it jungle? He couldn't remember. Where are we? Jungle, no... desert, no... what then? Don't know.
Asleep, he thought suddenly; you were asleep in the aircraft in the night, and had just enough time to wake up in the darkness and see flames and begin to realise before light detonated inside your head. After that, pain. But you didn't see any sort of terrain floating/rushing up to meet you, because it was very dark.
Use of Weapons Page 10
