He accepted the gun from the drone, looking disdainful. 'All right,' he said slowly. He looked about to say something else, talking into mid-air, then looked uncertain. He scratched his head, glanced at the drone and appeared to be about to talk to it, then looked away again. Finally he jabbed a finger at Skaffen-Amtiskaw. 'You... you ask for... all that. It'll sound better coming from another machine.'
'Very well. It's done,' the drone said. 'You only had to ask.'
'Hmm,' he said. He switched his suspicious look from the drone to the distant black cube. He lifted the gun and aimed at the icy mass.
He fired.
The gun rammed back against his shoulder, and a blinding flash of light threw his shadow behind him. The sound was like a grenade going off. A pencil-thin white line seared the length of the smallbay and joined the gun to the fifteen metre cube of ice, which shattered into a million fragments in a floor-thumping detonation of light and steam and a furiously blossoming cloud of black vapour.
Sma stood, her hands clasped behind her back, and watched debris fountain fifty metres to the top of the bay, where it ricocheted off the roof. More black shrapnel flew the same distance to crash into the bay's side walls... and tumbling, glittering black shards slithered across the floor towards them. Most skidded to a stop on the ridged surface of the bay, though a few small pieces - blown a long way through the air before thumping into the deck - did actually slide past the two humans and the watching drone, and clunk into the rear wall of the bay. Skaffen-Amtiskaw picked up a fist-size piece from near Sma's feet. The sound of the explosion echoed clangingly back off the walls a few times, gradually fading.
Sma felt her ears relax. 'Happy, Zakalwe?' she asked.
He blinked, then switched the gun off and turned to Sma. 'Seems to be working all right now,' he shouted.
Sma nodded. 'Mm-hmm.'
He motioned with his head. 'Let's go get a drink.' He took up the goblet, and drank as he walked towards the traveltube port.
'A drink?' Sma said, falling into step with the man and nodding at the glass he was drinking from. 'Why; what's that?'
'Nearly finished, that's what this is,' he told her, loudly. He poured a last half-glass from the metal jug into the goblet.
'Ice?' the drone offered, holding up the dripping black lump.
'No thanks.'
Something flickered in the traveltube, and a capsule was suddenly there, door rolling open. 'What's this... trapdoor coverage, anyway?' he asked the machine.
'General Systems Vehicle internal explosion protection,' the drone explained, letting the humans board the capsule first. 'Snaps anything significantly more powerful than a fart straight into hyperspace; blast, radiation; the lot.'
'Shit,' he said, disgusted. 'You mean you can let nukes off in these fuckers and they don't even notice?'
The drone wobbled. 'They notice; probably nobody else does.'
The man stood swaying in the capsule, watching the door roll back into place, shaking his head sorrily. 'You people just have no idea of fair play, do you?'
The last time he had been on a GSV had been ten years earlier, after he'd almost died on Fohls.
'Cheradenine?... Cheradenine?'
He heard the voice, but wasn't sure the woman was really talking to him. It was a beautiful voice. He wanted to reply to it. But he couldn't work out how to. It was very dark.
'Cheradenine?'
A very patient voice. Concerned, somehow, but a hopeful voice; a cheerful, even loving voice. He tried to remember his mother.
'Cheradenine?' the voice said again. Trying to get him to wake up. But he was awake. He tried moving his lips.
'Cheradenine... can you hear me?'
He moved his lips, exhaled at the same time, and thought he might have produced a noise. He tried to open his eyes. The darkness wavered.
'Cheradenine...?' There was a hand at his face, gently stroking his cheek. Shias! he thought for a second, then swept that memory away to where he kept all the others.
'H...' he managed. Just the start of a sound.
'Cheradenine...' the voice said, close to his ear now. 'It's Diziet here. Diziet Sma. Remember me?'
'Diz...' he succeeded in saying, after a couple of failures.
'Cheradenine?'
'Yeah...' he heard himself breathe.
'Try to open your eyes, will you?'
'Try'n...' he said. Then light came, as though it had had nothing to do with him trying to open his eyes. Things took a while to gel, but eventually he saw a restful green ceiling, illuminated from the sides by a fan-shaped glow of concealed lighting, and Diziet Sma's face looking down at him.
'Well done, Cheradenine.' She smiled at him. 'How are you feeling?'
He thought about this. 'Weird,' he said. He was thinking hard now, trying to remember how he'd got here. Was this some sort of hospital? How had he got here?
'Where is this?' he said. Might as well try the direct approach. He tried shifting his hands, but without success. Sma glanced somewhere over his head as he did so.
'The GSV Congenital Optimist You're all right... you're going to be all right.'
'If I'm all right, why can't I move my hands or fee... shit.'
Suddenly he was tied to the wooden frame again; the girl was in front of him. He opened his eyes and saw her; Sma. A misty, uncertain light glowed all around. He wrenched at his bonds, but there was no sign of give, no hope... he felt the tug on his hair, then the thudding cut of the blade, and saw the girl in the red robe looking at him from somewhere over his be-bodied head.
Everything revolved. He closed his eyes.
The moment passed. He swallowed. He took a breath and opened his eyes again; at least these things seemed to be working. Sma looked down, relieved. 'You just remembered?'
'Yeah. I just remembered.'
'You going to be okay?' She sounded serious, but still reassuring.
'I'll be all right,' he said. Then; 'it's just a scratch.'
She laughed, looked away for a bit, and when she looked to him again, she was biting her lip.
'Hey,' he said. 'Narrow one, this time, huh?' he smiled.
Sma nodded. 'You could say that. Another few seconds and you'd have suffered brain damage; another few minutes and you'd have been dead. If only you'd had a homing implant; we could have picked you up days...'
'Oh now, Sma,' he said gently. 'You know I can't be bothered with all that stuff.'
'Yeah, I know,' she said. 'Well, whatever; you're going to have to stay like this for a while.' Sma smoothed hair from his forehead. 'It'll take about two hundred days or so to grow a new body. They want me to ask you; do you want to sleep through the whole thing, or do you want to stay awake as normal... or anything in between? It's up to you. Makes no difference to the process.'
'Hmm.' He thought about this. 'I suppose I get to do lots of improving things, like listen to music and watch films or whatever, and read?'
'If you want,' Sma shrugged. 'You can go the whole hog and spool fantasy head-tapes if you want.'
'Drink?'
'Drink?'
'Yeah; can I get drunk?'
'I don't know,' Sma said, looking above and to one side. A voice muttered something.
'Who's that?' he asked.
'Stod Perice.' A young man nodded, coming into view, upside down. 'Medic. Hello there, Mr Zakalwe. I'll be looking after you, however you decide to spend the time.'
'D'you dream when you're under, if you do it that way?' he asked the medic.
'Depends how deep you want to go. We can send you so far down you think no more than a second's passed during those two hundred days, or you can lucid dream every second of them. Whatever you want.'
'What do most people do?'
'Switch right off; wake up with a new body after no appreciable time.'
'Thought so. Can I get drunk while I'm hooked up to whatever the hell it is I'm hooked up to?'
Stod Perice grinned. 'I'm sure we could arrange it. If you want, we could give you
drug-glands; ideal opportunity, just...'
'No thanks.' He closed his eyes briefly and tried to shake his head. 'Occasional inebriety will be quite sufficient.'
Stod Perice nodded. 'Well, I think we can rig you for that.'
'Great. Sma?' he looked at her. She raised her eyebrows. 'I'll stay awake,' he told her.
Sma smiled slowly. 'I had a feeling you might.'
'You sticking around?'
'Could do,' the woman said. 'Would you like me to?'
'I'd appreciate it.'
'And I'd like to.' She nodded thoughtfully. 'Okay. I'll watch you put on weight.'
'Thanks. And thanks for not bringing that goddamn drone. I can imagine the jokes.'
'... Yes,' Sma said, hesitantly, so that he said:
'Sma? What is it?'
'Well...' The woman looked uncomfortable.
'Tell me.'
'Skaffen-Amtiskaw,' she said, awkwardly. 'It sent you a present.' She fished a small package from her pocket, flourished it, embarrassed. 'I... I don't know what it is, but...'
'Well I can't open it. Come on, Sma.'
Sma opened the package. She looked at the contents. Stod Perice leant over, and then turned quickly away, holding one hand at his mouth, coughing.
Sma pursed her lips. 'I may ask for a new escort drone.'
He closed his eyes. 'What is it?'
'It's a hat.'
He laughed at that. Sma did too, eventually (though she threw things at the drone, later). Stod Perice accepted the hat as an onward-gift.
It was only later, in the dim red of the hospital section light, while Sma danced slowly with some new conquest, and Stod Perice was dining out with friends and telling them the story of the hat, and life went on throughout the rest of the great ship, that he remembered how, a few years earlier, and very far away, Shias Engin had traced the wounds on his body (cool slim fingers on the puckered new-looking flesh, the smell of her skin and the tingling sweep of her hair).
And in two hundred days he would have a new body. And (And this?... I'm sorry. Still fresh, that one?)... the wound over his heart would be gone forever, and the heart beneath his chest would not be the same one.
And he realised he had lost her.
Not Shias Engin, whom he'd loved, or thought he had, and certainly lost... but her; the other one, the real one, the one who'd lived within him through a century of icy sleep.
He had thought he would not lose her until the day he died.
Now he knew differently, and felt broken by the knowledge and the loss.
He whispered her name to the quiet red night.
Overhead, the ever-watchful medical monitoring unit saw some fluid seep from the bodiless human's tear ducts, and wondered dumbly at it.
'How old is old Tsoldrin, now?'
'Eighty, relative,' the drone said.
'You think he'll want to come out of retirement? Just because I ask him to?' He looked sceptical.
'You're all we could think of,' Sma told him.
'Can't you just let the old guy grow old in peace?'
'There's a little more at stake than the happy retirement of one ageing politico, Zakalwe.'
'What? The universe? Life as we know it?'
'Yes; tens, maybe hundreds of millions of times over.'
'Very philosophical.'
'And you didn't let the Ethnarch Kerian grow old in peace, did you?'
'Damn right,' he said, and wandered a little further into the armoury. 'That old pisshead deserved to die a million times.'
The converted minibay engineering space housed a dazzling array of Culture and other weaponry. Zakalwe, Sma thought, was like a kid in a toy store. He was selecting gear and loading it onto a pallet which Skaffen-Amtiskaw was guiding after the man, down the aisles of racks and drawers and shelves all stuffed and packed with projectile weapons, line guns, laser rifles, plasma projectors, multitudinous grenades, effectors, plane charges, passive and reactive armour, sensory and guard devices, full combat suits, missile packs, and at least a dozen other distinctly different types of device Sma didn't recognize.
'You'll never be able to carry this lot, Zakalwe. 'This is just the shortlist,' he told her. He took a stocky, boxy-looking gun with no appreciable barrel from a shelf. He held it out to the drone, 'What's this?'
'CREWS; assault rifle,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. 'Seven fourteen tonne batteries; seven-element single shot to forty-four point eight kilorounds a second (minimum firing time eight point seven five seconds), maximum single burst; seven times two-fifty kilogrammes; frequency from mid-visible to high X-ray.'
He hefted it. 'Not very well balanced.'
'That's its stowed configuration. Slide the whole top back.'
'Hmm.' He pretended to aim the readied gun. 'Now, what's to stop you putting your supporting hand over here, where the beams are going?'
'Common sense?' suggested the drone.
'Uh-huh. I'll stick with my obsolete plasma rifle.' He put the gun back. 'Anyway, Sma; you should be pleased old men do want to come out of retirement for you. Dammit, I should be devoting myself to gardening or something, not storming off to the galactic backwoods doing your dirty work.'
'Oh, yeah,' Sma said. 'And a big struggle I had too, convincing you to quit your "gardening" and come back to us. Shit, Zakalwe; your bags were packed.'
'I must have telepathically already have realized the urgency of the situation.' He heaved a massive black gun from a rack, swung it with both hands, grunting with the effort. 'Holy shit. Do you fire this mother or just use it as a battering ram?'
'Idiran hand cannon,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw sighed. 'Don't wave it around like that; it's very old and quite rare.'
'No fucking wonder.' He struggled to lift the gun back into its rack, then continued down the aisle. 'Come to think of it, Sma, I'm so old my whole life ought to be on triple time or something; I'm probably grossly undercharging you for this whole sorry escapade.'
'Well, if you're going to look at it that way, we should be charging you for... patent infringement? Giving those old guys their youth back using our technology.'
'Don't knock it. You don't know what it's like getting that old that early.'
'Yeah, but it applies to everybody; you were giving it only to the most evil, power-mad bastards on the planet.'
'They were top-down societies! What do you expect? Anyway; if I'd given it to everybody... think of the population explosion!'
'Zakalwe, I thought about that when I was about fifteen; they teach you that sort of stuff in early school, in the Culture. It was all thought through long ago; it's part of our history, part of our upbringing. That's why what you did would look insane to a school-kid. You are like a school-kid, to us. You don't even want to get old. Nothing more immature than that.'
'Whoo!' he said, stopping suddenly and taking something from an open shelf. 'What's this?'
'Beyond your ken,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.
'What a beauty!' He gripped the stunningly complicated weapon and twirled it. 'What is this?' he breathed.
'Micro Armaments System, Rifle,' the drone narrated. 'It's... oh, look, Zakalwe; it has ten separate weapon systems, not including the semi-sentient guard facility, the reactive shield components, the IFF-set quick-reaction swing-packs or the AG unit, and before you ask, the controls are all on the wrong side because that's the left-hand bias version, and the balance - like the weight and the independently variable inertia - are fully adjustable. It also takes about half a year's training just to learn how to use it safely, let alone competently, so you can't have one.'
'I don't want one,' he said, stroking the weapon. 'But what a device!' He put it back with the rest. He glanced at Sma. 'Dizzy; I know the way you people think; I respect it, I guess... but your life isn't my life. I live in unsafe ways in dangerous places; always have done, always will do. I'll die soon enough anyway, so why should I suffer the additional burden of getting old, even slowly?'
'Don't try and hide behind necessity, Zakalwe. You coul
d have changed your life; you don't have to live the way you do; you could have joined the Culture, become one of us; at least lived the way we do, but -'
'Sma!' he exclaimed, turning to her. 'That's for you; it isn't for me. You think I'm wrong to have my age stabilised; even the chance of immortality is... wrong, to you. Okay; I can see that. In your society, the way you live your lives, of course it is. You have your three-fifty, four hundred years, and know you'll get right to the end of them; die with your boots off. For me... that won't work. I don't have that certainty. I enjoy the perspective from the edge, Sma; I like to feel that up-draft on my face. So sooner or later I'll die; violently, probably. Maybe even foolishly, because that's often the way of it; you avoid nukes and determined assassins... and then choke on a fish bone... but who cares? So; your stasis is your society, and mine... is my age. But we are both assured of death.'
Sma looked at the floor, hands clasped behind her back. 'All right,' she said. 'But don't forget who gave you that perspective from the edge.'
He smiled sadly. 'Yes; you saved me. But you've also lied to me; sent - no, listen - sent me on damn fool missions where I was on the opposite side from the one I thought I was on, had me fight for incompetent aristos I'd gladly have strangled, in wars where I didn't know you were backing both sides, filled my balls full of alien seed I was supposed to inject into some poor damn female... nearly got me killed... very nearly got me killed a dozen times or more...'
'You've never forgotten me for that hat, have you?' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, with fake bitterness.
'Oh, Cheradenine,' Sma said. 'Don't pretend it hasn't been fun, too.'
'Sma, believe me; it has not all been "fun".' He leant against a cabinet full of ancient projectile weapons. 'And, worse than all that,' he insisted, 'is when you turn the goddamn maps upside-down.'
'What?' Sma said, puzzled.
'Turning the maps upside down,' he repeated. 'Have you any idea how annoying and inconvenient it is when you get to a place and find that they map the place the other way up compared to the maps you've got? Because of something stupid like some people think a magnetic needle is pointing up to heaven, when other people think it's just heavier and pointing down? Or because it's done according to the galactic plane or something? I mean, this might sound trivial, but it's very upsetting.'
Use of Weapons Page 14
