"Use of Weapons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Banks Iain)

Five

"Dizzy! How the devil are you?" He took her hand and helped her up onto the wooden pier from the roof of the just-surfaced module. He put his arms round her. "Good to see you again!" he laughed. Sma patted his waist, finding herself unwilling to hug him back. He didn't seem to notice.

He let her go, looked down to see the drone rising up from the module. "And Skaffen-Amtiskaw! They still letting you out without a guard?"

"Hello, Zakalwe," the drone said.

He put his arm round Sma's waist. "Come on up to the shack; we'll have lunch."

"All right," she said.

They walked along the small wooden pier to a stone path laid across the sand, and on into the shade under the trees. The trees were blue or purple; huge puff heads of dark colour standing out against the pale blue sky, and tugged at by a warm, intermittent breeze. They sweated delicate perfumes from the tops of their silver-white trunks. The drone lifted to above tree height a couple of times, when other people passed on the path.

The man and woman walked through the sunlit avenues between the trees until they came to where a wide pool of water trembled reflections of twenty or so white huts; a small, sleek seaplane floated at a wooden jetty. They entered the cluster of buildings and climbed some steps to a balcony that looked over the pool and the narrow channel that led from it to the lagoon on the far side of the island.

The sun was sifted through the tree-heads; shadows moved to and fro along the veranda and over the small table and the two hammocks.

He motioned Sma to sit on the first hammock; a female servant appeared and he ordered lunch for two. When the servant had gone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated down and sat on the parapet of the veranda's wall, overlooking the pool. Sma levered herself into the hammock carefully.

"It true you own this island, Zakalwe?"

"Um…" he looked round, apparently uncertain, then nodded his head. "Oh yes; so I do." He kicked off his sandals and slumped into the other hammock, letting it sway. He picked up a bottle from the floor, and with each sway of the hammock poured a little more from the bottle into two glasses on the small table. He increased the swing when he had finished to be able to hand her drink to her.

"Thank you."

He sipped at his drink and closed his eyes. She watched the glass on his chest where his hands held it, and watched the liquid swill this way, that way, lethargic and eye-brown. She moved her gaze to his face and saw he had not changed; hair a bit darker than she remembered; swept away from his broad, tanned forehead and tied in a pony-tail behind. Fit-looking as ever. No older-looking, of course, because they'd stabilised his age as part of his payment for the last job.

His eyes opened slowly, heavy-lidded, and he looked back at her, smiling slowly. The eyes look older, she thought. But she could have been wrong.

"So," she said, "we playing games here, Zakalwe?"

"What do you mean, Dizzy?"

"I've been sent to get you back again. They want you to do another job. You must have guessed that, so tell me now whether I'm wasting my time here or not. I'm in no mood to try and argue you…"

"Dizzy!" he exclaimed, sounding hurt, pivoting his legs off the hammock and onto the floor, then smiling persuasively, "Don't be like that; of course you're not wasting your time. I've already packed."

He beamed at her like a happy child, his tanned face open and smiling. She looked at him with relief and disbelief.

"So what was all the run-around for?"

"What run-around?" he said innocently, sitting back in the hammock again. "I had to come here to say goodbye to a close friend, that was all. But I'm ready to go. What's the scam?"

Sma stared, open-mouthed. Then she turned to the drone. "Do we just go now?"

"No point," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. "The course the GSV's on, you can have two hours here, then go back to the Xenophobe; it can match with the What in about thirty hours." It swivelled to look at the man. "But we need a definite word. There's a teratonne of GSV with twenty-eight million people on board charging in this direction; if it's to wait here it has to slow down first, so it needs to know for sure. You really are coming? This afternoon?"

"Drone, I just told you. I'll do it." He leaned towards Sma. "What is the job again?"

"Voerenhutz," she told him. "Tsoldrin Beychae."

He beamed, teeth gleaming. "Old Tsoldrin still above ground? Well, it'll be good to see him again."

"You have to talk him back into his working clothes again."

He waved one hand airily. "Easy," he said, drinking.

Sma watched him drink. She shook her head.

"Don't you want to know why, Cheradenine?" she asked.

He started to make a gesture with one hand that meant the same as a shrug, then thought better of it. "Umm; sure. Why, Diziet?" he sighed.

"Voerenhutz is coalescing into two groups; the people gaining the upper hand at the moment want to pursue aggressive terraforming policies…"

"That's sort of…" he burped, "re-decorating a planet, right?"

Sma closed her eyes briefly. "Yes. Sort of. Whatever you choose to call it, it's ecologically insensitive, to put it mildly. These people — they call themselves the Humanists — also want a sliding scale of sentient rights which will have the effect of letting them take over whatever even intelligently inhabited worlds they're militarily able to. There are a dozen brush-fire wars going on right now. Any one of them could spark the big one, and to an extent the Humanists encourage these wars because they appear to prove their case that the Cluster is too crowded and needs to find new planetary habitats."

"They also," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, "refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists."

"I see," he nodded, and looked very serious. "And you want old Beychae to get into harness with these Humanist guys, right?"

"Cheradenine!" Sma scolded, as Skaffen-Amtiskaw's fields went frosty.

He looked hurt. "But they're called the Humanists!"

"That's just their name, Zakalwe."

"Names are important," he said, apparently serious.

"It's still just what they call themselves; it doesn't make them the good guys."

"Okay." He grinned at Sma. "Sorry." He tried to look more business-like. "You want him pulling in the other direction, like last time."

"Yes," Sma said.

"Fine. Sounds almost easy. No soldiering?"

"No soldiering."

"I'll do it." He nodded.

"Do I hear the sound of a barrel-bottom being scraped?" Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered.

"Just send the signal." Sma told it.

"Okay," said the drone. "Signal sent." It made a good impression of glowering at the man with its fields. "But you'd better not change your mind."

"Only the thought of having to spend any time in your company, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, could possibly disinduce me from accompanying the delightful Ms Sma here to Voerenhutz." He glanced concernedly at the woman. "You are coming, I hope."

Sma nodded. She sipped at her drink, while the servant laid some small dishes on the table between the hammocks.

"Just like that, Zakalwe?" she said, once the servant had gone again.

"Just like what, Diziet?" He smiled over his glass.

"You're leaving. After, what… five years? Building up your empire, sorting out your scheme to make the world a safer place, using our technology, trying to use our methods… you're prepared just to walk away from it all, for however long it takes? Dammit, even before you knew it was Voerenhutz you'd said yes; could have been on the other side of the galaxy, for all you knew; could have been the Clouds. You might have been saying yes to a four-year trip."

He shrugged. "I like long voyages."

Sma looked into the man's face for a while. He looked unworried, full of life. Pep and vim were the words that came to mind. She felt vaguely disgusted.

He shrugged, eating some fruit from one of the little dishes, "Besides, I have a trust arrangement set up. It'll all be looked after until I come back."

"If there's anything to come back to," Skaffen-Amtiskaw observed.

"Of course there will be," he said, spitting a pip over the edge of the veranda wall. "These people like to talk about war, but they aren't suicidal."

"Oh, that's all right then," the drone said, turning away.

The man just smiled at it. He nodded at Sma's untouched plate. "You not hungry, Diziet?"

"Lost my appetite," she said.

He swung out of the hammock, brushing his hand together. "Come on," he said, "let's go for a swim."

She watched him trying to catch fish in a small rock pool; paddling around in his long trunks. She had swum in her briefs.

He bent down, engrossed, his earnest face peering into the water, his face reflected there. He seemed to speak to it.

"You still look very good, you know. I hope you feel suitably flattered."

She went on drying herself. "I'm too old for flattery, Zakalwe."

"Rubbish." He laughed, and the water rippled under his mouth. He frowned hard and dipped his hands under, slowly.

She watched the concentration on his face as his arms slid deeper under the water, mirroring themselves.

He smiled again, his eyes narrowing as his hands steadied; his arms were in deep now, and he licked his lips.

He lunged forward, yelled excitedly, then cupped his hands out of the water and came over to her where she sat against some rocks. He was grinning hugely. He held his hands out for her to see. She looked in and saw a small fish, brilliant shimmering blue and green and red and gold, a gaudy splash of rippling light squirming inside the man's cupped hands. She frowned as he leant back against the rock again.

"Now just you put that back where you found it, Cheradenine, and the way you found it."

His face fell and she was about to say something else, kinder, when he grinned again and threw the fish back into the pool.

"As if I'd do anything else." He came and sat beside her on the rock.

She looked out to sea. The drone was further up the beach, ten metres behind them. She carefully smoothed the tiny dark hairs on her forearms until they were lying flat. "Why did you try all that stuff, Zakalwe?"

"Giving the elixir of youth to our glorious leaders?" He shrugged. "Seemed like a good idea at the time," he confessed, lightly. "I don't know; I thought it might be possible. I thought interfering was maybe a lot easier then you lot made it out to be. I thought one man with a strong plan, not interested in his own aggrandisement…" He shrugged, glanced at her. "It might all work out yet. You never know."

"Zakalwe, it isn't going to work out. You're leaving us an incredible mess here."

"Ah," he nodded. "You are coming in, then. Thought you might."

"In some fashion, I think we'll have to."

"Best of luck."

"Luck…" Sma began, but then thought the better of it. She ran her fingers through her damp hair.

"How much trouble am I in, Diziet?)

"For this?"

"Yes, and the knife missile. You heard about that?"

"I heard." She shook her head. "I don't think you're in any more trouble than you're ever in, Cheradenine, just by being you."

He smiled. "I hate the Culture's… tolerance."

"So," she said, slipping her blouse over her head, "what are your terms?"

"Pay as well, eh?" He laughed. "Minus the rejuve… the same as the last time. Plus ten per cent more negotiables."

"Exactly the same?" She looked at him sadly, her wet bedraggled hair hanging down from her shaking head.

He nodded. "Exactly."

"You're a fool, Zakalwe."

"I keep trying."

"It won't be any different."

"You can't know that."

"I can guess."

"And I can hope. Look, Dizzy, it's my business, and if you want me to come with you then you've got to agree to it, all right?"

"All right."

He looked wary. "You still know where she is?"

Sma nodded. "Yes, we know."

"So it's agreed?"

She shrugged and looked out to sea. "Oh; it's agreed. I just think you're wrong. I don't think you should go to her again." She looked him in the eye. "That's my advice."

He stood up and dusted some sand off his legs.

"I'll remember."

They walked back to the huts and the still sea pool in the centre of the island. She sat on a wall, waiting while he made his final goodbyes. She listened for crying, or the sound of breakages, but in vain.

The wind blew her hair gently, and to her surprise, despite it all, she felt warm and well; the scent from the tall trees stretched around her, and their shifting shadows made the ground seem to move in time with the breeze so that air and trees and light and earth swayed and rippled like the bright-dark water in the island's central pool. She closed her eyes and sounds came to her like faithful pets, nuzzling her ear; sounds of the brushing tree-heads, like tired lovers dancing; sounds of the ocean, swirling over rocks, softly stroking the golden sands; sounds of what she did not know.

Perhaps soon she would be back in the house below the grey-white dam.

What an asshole you are, Zakalwe, she thought. I could have stayed home; they could have sent the stand-in… dammit, they could probably have just sent the drone, and you'd still have come…

He appeared looking bright and fresh and carrying a jacket. A different servant carried some bags. "Okay; let's go," he said.

They walked to the pier while the drone tracked them, overhead.

"By the way," she said. "Why ten per cent more money?"

He shrugged as they walked onto the wooden pier. "Inflation."

Sma frowned. "What's that?"