Use of Weapons

by Iain M. Banks

  'They've made a fucking park out of it,' he breathed, and stood, swaying, bent slightly at the waist, looking at the battered silhouette of the old warship. Sma walked to his side. He seemed to sag a little, and she put her arm round his waist again. He grimaced with pain; they walked on, down towards a path which led to the ship.

  'Why did you want to see this, Cheradenine?' Sma said quietly as they crunched along the gravel. The drone floated behind and above.

  'Hmm?' the man said, taking his eyes off the ship for a second.

  'Why did you want to come here, Cheradenine?' Sma asked. 'She isn't here. This isn't where she is.'

  'I know,' he breathed. 'I know that.'

  'So why do you want to see this wreck?'

  He was silent for a little while. It was as though he hadn't heard, but then he took a deep breath - flinching with pain as he did so - and shook his sweat-sheened head as he said, 'Oh; just for... old times' sake...' They passed through another copse of trees. He shook his shaved head again as they came out of the grove, and saw the ship better. 'I just didn't think... they'd do this to it,' he said.

  'Do what?' Sma asked.

  'This.' He nodded at the blackened hulk.

  'What have they done, Cheradenine?' Sma said patiently.

  'Made it.' He began, then stopped, coughed, body tense with pain. 'Made the damn thing... an ornament. Preserved it.'

  'What, the ship?'

  He looked at her as though she were crazy. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes; the ship.'

  Just a big old battleship hulk cemented into a dock, as far as Skaffen-Amtiskaw could see. It contacted the Xenophobe, which was passing the time by making a detailed map of the planet.

  - Hello, ship. This ship-ruin in the park; Zakalwe seems very interested. Just wondering why. Care to do some research?

  - In a while; I've still got one continent, the deep sea beds and the sub-surface to do.

  - They'll still be there later; this could prove interesting now.

  - Patience, Skaffen-Amtiskaw.

  Pedant, thought the drone, breaking off.

  The two humans walked down twisty paths past litter bins and benches, picnic tables and information points. Skaffen-Amtiskaw activated one of the old information points as it passed. A slow and crackly tape started up; "The vessel you see before you..." This was going to take ages, Skaffen-Amtiksaw thought. It used its effector to speed the machine up, winding the voice up into a high-pitched warble. The tape broke. Skaffen-Amtiskaw delivered the effector equivalent of an annoyed slap, and left the information machine smoking and dripping burning plastic onto the gravel beneath, as the two humans walked into the shadow of the battered ship.

  The ship had been left as it was; bombed, shelled, strafed, blasted and ripped but not destroyed. Where hands could not reach and rain did not strike, traces of the original soot from flames two centuries old still marked the armour plate. Gun turrets lay peeled open like tin cans; gun barrels and range-finders bristled askew all over the mounting levels of deck; tangled stays and fallen aeriels lay strewn over shattered search lights and lop-sided radar dishes; the single great funnel looked tipped and subsided, metal pitted and flayed.

  A little awning-covered stairway led up to the ship's main deck; they followed a couple with two young children. Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated, almost invisible, ten metres away, rising slowly with them. One of the toddlers cried when she saw the hobbling, bald-headed man with the staring eyes behind her. Her mother lifted her up and carried her.

  He had to stop and rest when they got to the deck. Sma guided him to a bench. He sat doubled up for a while, then looked at the ship above, taking in the blackened rusted wreckage all around. He shook his shaven head, muttered to himself once, then ended up laughing quietly, holding his chest and coughing.

  'Museum,' he said. 'A museum...' Sma put her hand on his damp brow. She thought he looked terrible, and the baldness didn't suit him. The simple dark clothes they'd found him wearing when they picked him up from the citadel's curtain wall had been torn and crusted with blood; they'd been cleaned and repaired on the Xenophobe but they looked out of place here, where everybody seemed to be dressed in bright colours. Even Sma's culottes and jacket were sombre compared to the gaily decorated dresses and smocks most of the people were wearing.

  'This an old haunt of yours, Cheradenine?' she asked him.

  He nodded. 'Yes,' he breathed, looking up at a last few tendrils of mist flowing and disappearing like gaseous pennants from the tilted main mast. 'Yes,' he repeated.

  Sma looked round at the park behind and the city off to one side. 'This where you came from?'

  He seemed not to hear. After a while, he stood slowly, and looked, distracted, into Sma's eyes. She felt herself shiver, and tried to remember exactly how old Zakalwe was. 'Let's go, Da -... Diziet.' He smiled a watery sort of smile. 'Take me to her, please?'

  Sma shrugged and supported the man by one shoulder. They went back to the steps that led back down to the ground.

  'Drone?' Sma said to a brooch on her lapel.

  'Yep?'

  'Our lady still where we last heard?'

  'Indeed,' said the drone's voice. 'Want to take the module?'

  'No,' he said, stumbling down a stair, until Sma caught him. 'Not the module. Let's... take a train, or a cab or...'

  'You sure?' Sma said.

  'Yes; sure.'

  'Zakalwe,' Sma sighed. 'Please accept some treatment.'

  'No,' the man said, as they reached the ground.

  'There's an underground station right and right again,' the drone told Sma. 'Alight Central Station; platform eight for trains to Couraz.'

  'Okay,' Sma said reluctantly, glancing at him. He was looking down at the gravel path as though concentrating on working out which foot to put in front of another. He swung his head as they passed under the stem of the ruined battleship, squinting up at the tall curving V of the bows. Sma watched the expression on his sweating face, and could not decide whether it was awe, disbelief, or something like terror.

  The underground train whisked them into the city centre down concrete-lined tunnels; the main station was crowded, tall, echoing and clean. Sunlight sparkled on the vault of the arched glass roof. Skaffen-Amtiskaw had done its suitcase impression, and sat lightly in Sma's hand. The wounded man was a heavier weight on her other arm.

  The Maglev train drew in, disgorged its passengers; they boarded with a few other people.

  'You going to make it, Cheradenine?' Sma asked him. He was slumped in the seat, resting his arms on the table in a way that somehow made them look as though they were broken, or paralysed. He stared at the seat across from him, ignoring the cityscape as it slid by, the train accelerating along viaducts towards the suburbs and the countryside.

  He nodded. 'I'll survive.'

  'Yes, but for how much longer?' said the drone, sitting on the table in front of Sma. 'You are in terrible shape, Zakalwe.'

  'Better than looking like a suitcase,' he said, glancing at the machine.

  'Oh, how droll,' the machine said.

  - You finished drawing things yet? it asked the Xenophobe.

  - No.

  - Can't you devote just a little of your supposedly bogglingly fast Mind to finding out why he was so interested in that ship?

  - Oh, I suppose so, but -

  - Wait a minute; what have we here? Listen to this:

  '... You'll find out, I suppose. Past time I told you,' he said, looking out of the window but talking to Sma. The city slid by beyond, bright in the sunlight. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated, and somehow Sma got the impression he was looking at one city, but seeing another, or seeing the same one but long ago, as though in some time-polarised light only his distressed, enfevered eyes could see.

  'This is where you come from?'

  'Long time ago, now,' he said, coughing, doubling up, holding one arm tight to his side. He took a long slow breath. 'I was born here...'

  The woman listened. The drone listened. The ship l
istened.

  While he told them the story, of the great house that lay halfway between the mountains and the sea, upstream from the great city. He told them about the estate surrounding the house, and the beautiful gardens, and about the three, later four, children who were brought up in the house, and who played in the garden. He told them about the summerhouses and the stone boat and the maze and the fountains and the lawns and the ruins and the animals in the woods. He told them about the two boys and the two girls, and the two mothers, and the one strict father and the one unseen father, imprisoned in the city. He told them about the visits to the city, which the children always thought lasted too long, and about the time when they were no longer allowed to go into the garden without guards to escort them, and about how they stole a gun, one day, and were going to take it out into the estate to shoot it, but only got as far as the stone boat, and surprised an assassination squad come to kill the family, and saved the day by alerting the house. He told them about the bullet that hit Darckense, and the sliver of her bone that

  pierced him almost to his heart.

  He started to dry up, voice croaking. Sma saw a waiter pushing a trolley into the far end of the coach. She bought a couple of soft drinks; he gulped at first, but coughed painfully, and then just sipped his.

  'And the war did start,' he said, looking at but not seeing the last of the suburbs flow past; the countryside was a green blur as they accelerated again. 'And the two boys, that had become men... ended up on different sides.'

  - Fascinating, the Xenophobe communicated to Skaffen-Amtiskaw. I think I will do a little quick research.

  - About time too, the drone sent back, listening to the man talk at the same time.

  He told them about the war, and the siege that involved the Staberinde, and the besieged forces breaking out... and he told them about the man, the boy who'd played in the garden who, in the depths of one terrible night, had caused the thing to be done which led to him being called the Chairmaker, and the dawn when Darckense's sister and brother had found what Elethiomel had done, and the brother trying to take his own life, giving up his generalship, abandoning the armies and his sister in the selfishness of despair.

  And he told them about Livueta, who had never forgiven, and had followed him - though he did not know it at the time - on another cold ship, for a century through the intractable calm slowness of real space, to a place where the icebergs swirled round a continental pole, forever calving and crashing and shrinking... But then she had lost him, the trail gone appropriately cold, and she had stayed there, searching, for years, and could not have known that he had left for another life entirely, taken away by the tall lady who walked through the blizzard as though it wasn't there, a small space ship at her back like a faithful pet.

  And so Livueta Zakalwe gave up, and took another long journey, to get away from the burden of her memories, and where she had ended up - (the ship quizzed the drone for the location; Skaffen-Amtiskaw gave it the name of the planet and the system, a few decades away) - that had been where she'd finally been tracked down, after his last job for them.

  Skaffen-Amtiskaw remembered. The grey-haired woman, in her early late-years, working in a clinic in the slums, a delicate shanty town strewn like trash across the mud and tree-lined slopes above a tropical city looking out across sparkling lagoons and golden sandbars to the rollers of a vast ocean. Thin, marks under her eyes, a pot-bellied child on each hip when they first went to see her, standing in the middle of the crowded room, wailing children tugging at her hems.

  The drone had learned to appreciate the full range of pan-human facial expression, and thought that, in witnessing the one that appeared on Livueta Zakalwe's face when she saw Zakalwe, it had experienced something close to unique. Such surprise; but such hatred!

  'Cheradenine...' Sma said tenderly, gently laying one hand on his. She put her other hand to the nape of his neck, stroking him there as his head bent lower to the table. He turned and watched the prairie stream past like a sea of gold.

  He put one hand up, smoothing it slowly over his brow and shaved scalp, as though through long hair.

  Couraz had been everything; ice and fire, land and water. Once, the broad isthmus had been a place of rock and glaciers, then a land of forests as the world and its continents shifted and the climate altered. Later it became a desert, but then suffered something beyond the capacity of the globe itself to provide. An asteroid the size of a mountain hit the isthmus, like a bullet striking flesh.

  It burst into the granite heart of the land, ringing the planet like a bell. Two oceans met for the first time; the dust of the immense explosion blocked out the sun, started a small ice age, wiped out thousands of species. The ancestors of the species that later came to rule the planet took their initial opportunity from that cataclysm.

  The crater became a dome as the planet reacted over the millennia; the oceans were separated again when the rocks - even the seemingly solid layers flowing and warping, over those great scales of time and distance - pushed back, like an aeons late bruise forming on the skin of the world.

  Sma had found the information brochure in a seat pocket. She looked up from it for a moment at the man in the seat beside her. He'd fallen asleep. His face looked drawn and grey and old. She could not remember ever having seen him look so ancient and ill. Dammit, he'd looked healthier when he'd been beheaded. 'Zakalwe,' she whispered, shaking her head. 'What's wrong with you?'

  'Death-wish,' the drone muttered, quietly. 'With extrovert complications.'

  Sma shook her head and went back to the brochure. The man slept fitfully and the drone monitored him.

  Reading about Couraz, Sma suddenly recalled the great fortress she had been picked up from by the Xenophobe's module, on a sunny day that now seemed as long ago as it was far away. She looked up, sighing, from a photograph of the isthmus taken from space, and thought back to the house under the dam, and felt home-sick... Couraz had been a fortified town, a prison, a fortress, a city, a target. Now - perhaps appropriately, Sma thought, looking at the injured, shivering man at her side - the great dome of rock held a small city that was mostly taken up with the biggest hospital in the world.

  The train hurtled into a tunnel carved from naked rock.

  They passed through the station, took an elevator to one of the hospital reception levels. They sat on a couch, surrounded by potted plants and soft music, while the drone, sitting on the floor at their feet, plundered the nearest computer work station for information.

  'Got her,' it announced quietly. 'Go to the receptionist and tell her your name; I've ordered you a pass; no verification required.'

  'Come on, Zakalwe.' Sma rose, collected her pass, and helped him to his feet. He staggered. 'Look,' she said, 'Cheradenine, let me at -'

  'Just take me to her.'

  'Let me talk to her first.'

  'No; take me to her. Now.'

  The ward was up another few levels, in the sunlight. The light came through clear, high windows. The sky was white with scudding cloud outside, and way in the distance, beyond the dappkd fields and woodland, the ocean was a line of blue haze beneath the sky.

  Old men lay quietly in the broad, partitioned ward. Sma helped him towards the far end, where the drone said Livueta must be. They entered a short, broad corridor. Livueta came out of a side room. She stopped when she saw them.

  Livueta Zakalwe looked older; white-haired, skin soft and lined with age. Her eyes were undulled. She drew herself up a little. She was holding a deep-sided tray full of little boxes and bottles.

  Livueta looked at them; the man, the woman, the little pale suitcase that was the drone.

  Sma glanced to one side, hissed, 'Zakalwe!' She hauled him more upright.

  His eyes had been shut. They blinked open and he squinted uncertainly at the woman standing in front of them. He appeared not to recognise her at first, then, slowly, understanding seemed to filter through.

  'Livvy?' he said, blinking quickly, squinting at her. 'Livvy?
'

  'Hello, Ms Zakalwe,' Sma said, when the woman did not reply.

  Livueta Zakalwe turned contemptuous eyes from the man half-hanging from Sma's right arm. She looked at Sma and shook her head, so that just for an instant, Sma thought she was going to say no, she wasn't Livueta.

  'Why do you keep doing this?' Livueta Zakalwe said softly. Her voice was still young, the drone thought, just as the Xenophobe came back with some fascinating information it had gleaned from historical records.

  (- Really? the drone signalled. Dead?)

  'Why do you do this?' she said. 'Why do you do this... to him; to me... why? Can't you just leave us all alone?'

  Sma shrugged, a little awkwardly.

  'Livvy...' he said.

  'I'm sorry, Ms Zakalwe,' Sma said. 'It's what he wanted; we promised.'

  'Livvy; please; talk to me; let me ex -'

  'You shouldn't do this,' Livueta told Sma. Then she turned her gaze to the man, who was rubbing one hand over his shaved scalp, grinning inanely at her, blinking. 'He looks sick,' she said flatly.

  'He is,' Sma said.

  'Bring him in here.' Livueta Zakalwe opened another door; a room with a bed. Skaffen-Amtiskaw, still wondering exactly what was going on in the light of the information it had just received from the ship, still found the time to be mildly surprised that the woman was taking it all so calmly this time. Last time she'd tried to kill the fellow and it had had to move in smartly.

  'I don't want to lie down,' he protested, when he saw the bed.

  'Then just sit, Cheradenine,' Sma said. Livueta Zakalwe made a snaking motion with her head, muttered something even the drone could not make out. She placed the tray of drugs down on a table, stood in one corner of the room, arms crossed, while the man sat down on the bed.

  'I'll leave you alone,' Sma said to the woman. 'We'll be just outside.'

  Close enough for me to hear, thought the drone, and to stop her trying to murder you again, if that's what she decides to do.

  'No,' the woman said, shaking her head, looking with an odd dispassion at the man on the bed. 'No; don't leave. There's nothing -'