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

2: An Outing

IX

When you sleep beside a head full of images, there is an osmosis, a certain sharing in the night. So he thought. He thought a lot then; more than he ever had, perhaps. Or maybe he was just more aware of the process, and the identity of thought and passing time. Sometimes he felt as though every instant he spent with her was a precious capsule of sensation to be lovingly wrapped and carefully placed somewhere inviolable, away from harm.

But he only fully realised that later; it wasn't something he was fully aware of at the time. At the time, it seemed to him that the only thing he was fully aware of, was her.

He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fact of her existence as though she was some careless star-thing that slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness and ease with which she slept there amazed him; he couldn't believe that such beauty could survive without some superhumanly intense conscious effort.

On such mornings he would lie and look at her and listen to the sounds that the house made in the breeze. He liked the house; it seemed… fit. Normally, he'd have hated it.

Here and now, though, he could appreciate it, and happily see it as a symbol; open and closed, weak and strong, outside and inside. When he'd first seen it, he'd thought it would blow away in the first serious gale, but it seemed these houses rarely collapsed; in the very rare storms, people would retreat to the centre of the structures, and huddle round the central fire, letting the various layers and thicknesses of covering shake and sway on their posts, gradually sapping the force of the wind, and providing a core of shelter.

Still — as he'd pointed out to her when he first saw it from the lonely ocean road — it would be easy to torch and simple to rob, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. (She'd looked at him as though he were mad, but then kissed him.)

That vulnerability intrigued and troubled him. There was a likeness to her there; to her as a poet and as a woman. It was similar, he suspected, to one of her images; the symbols and metaphors she used in the poems he loved to hear her read out loud but could never quite understand (too many cultural allusions, and this baffling language he had not yet fully understood, and still sometimes made her laugh with). Their physical relationship seemed to him at once more whole and complete, and more defyingly complex than anything similar he had known. The paradox of love physically incarnate and the most personal attack being the same thing tied knots in him, sometimes sickened him, as in the midst of this joy he fought to understand the statements and promises that might be being implied.

Sex was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her. He was aware of the absurdity of trying too hard to develop the comparison between sex and war; he had been laughed out of several embarrassing situations trying to do so ('Zakalwe," she would say, when he tried to explain some of this, and she would put her cool slim fingers behind his neck, and stare out from the rumbustious black tangle of her hair, "You have serious problems." She would smile), but the feelings, the acts, the structure of the two were to him so close, so self-evidently akin, that such a reaction only forced him deeper into his confusion.

But he tried not to let it bother him; at any time he could simply look at her and wrap his adoration for her around himself like a coat on a cold day, and see her life and body, moods and expressions and speech and movements as a whole enthralling field of study that he could submerge himself in like a scholar finding his life's work.

(This was more like it, some small, remindful voice inside him said. This is more like the way it's suppose to be; with this, you can leave all that other stuff behind, the guilt and the secrecy and the lies; the ship and the chair and the other man… But he tried not listen to that voice.)

They'd met in a port bar. He'd just arrived and thought he'd make sure their alcohol was as good as people had said. It was. She was in the next dark booth, trying to get rid of a man.

You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.)

No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.

She went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he thought. I liked that. She sounds interesting. Wonder what she looks like?

He stuck his head round the corner of the booth and looked in at them. The man was in tears; the woman was… well, lots of hair… very striking face; sharp and almost aggressive. Tidy body.

"Sorry," he told them. "But I just wanted to point out that "Nothing lasts forever" can be a positive statement… well, in some languages…" Having said it, it did occur to him that in this language it wasn't; they had different words for different sorts of nothing. He smiled, ducked back into his own booth, suddenly embarrassed. He stared accusatorily at the drink in front of him. Then he shrugged, and pressed the bell to attract a waiter.

Shouts from the next booth. A clatter and a little shriek. He looked round to see the man storming off through the bar, heading for the door.

The girl appeared at his elbow. She was dripping.

He looked up into her face; it was damp; she wiped it with a handkerchief.

"Thank you for your contribution," she said icily. "I was bringing things to a conclusion quite smoothly there until you stepped in."

"I'm very sorry," he said, not at all.

She took her handkerchief and wrung it out over his glass, dribbling. "Hmm," he said, "too kind." He nodded at the dark spots on her grey coat. "Your drink or his?"

"Both," she said, folding the kerchief and starting to turn away.

"Please; let me buy you a replacement."

She hesitated. The waiter arrived at the same moment. Good omen, he thought. "Ah," he said to the man. "I'll have another… whatever it is I've been drinking, and for this lady…"

She looked at his glass. "The same," she said. She sat down across the table.

"Think of it as… reparations," he said, digging the word out of the implanted vocabulary he'd been given for his visit.

She looked puzzled. ""Reparations"… that's one I'd forgotten; something to do with war, isn't it?"

"Yep," he said, smothering a belch with one hand. "Sort of like… damages?"

She shook her head. "Wonderfully obscure vocabulary, but totally bizarre grammar."

"I'm from out of town," he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light years of the place.

"Shias Engin," she nodded. "I write poems."

"You're a poet?" he said, delighted. "I've always been fascinated by poets. I tried writing poems, once."

"Yes," she sighed and looked wary. "I suspect everyone does, and you are…?"

"Cheradenine Zakalwe; I fight wars."

She smiled. "I thought there hadn't been a war for three hundred years; aren't you getting a little out of practice?"

"Yeah; boring, isn't it?"

She sat back in the seat, took off her coat. "From just how far out of town have you come, Mr Zakalwe?"

"Aw heck, you've guessed," he looked downcast. "Yeah; I'm an alien. Oh. Thank you." The drinks arrived; he passed one to her.

"You do look funny," she said, inspecting him.

" "Funny"?" he said indignantly.

She shrugged. "Different." She drank. "But not all that different." She leaned forward on the table. "Why do you look so similar to us? I know all the outworlders aren't humanoid, but a lot are. How come?"

"Well," he said, hand at his mouth again, "It's like this; the…" he belched."… the dustclouds and stuff in the galaxy are… its food, and its food keeps speaking back to it. That's why there are so many humanoid species; nebulae's last meals repeating on them."

She grinned. "That simple, is it?"

He shook his head. "Na; not at all. Very complicated. But," he held up one finger. "I think I know the real reason."

"Which is?"

"Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?" He knocked the glass on the table. "Loads of stuff; but much of it alcohol." He drank from the glass. "Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol."

"It's all starting to make sense now," she agreed, nodding her head and looking serious. She looked inquisitively at him. "So, why are you here? Not come to start a war. I hope."

"No, I'm on leave; come to get away from them. That's why I chose this place."

"How long you here for?"

"Till I get bored."

She smiled at him. "And how long do you think that will take?"

"Well, he smiled back, "I don't know." He put his glass down. She drained hers. He reached out for the button to call the waiter, but her finger was already there.

"My turn," she said. "Same again?"

"No," he said. "Something quite different, this time, I feel."

When he tried to tabulate his love, list all the things about her that drew him to her, he found himself starting at the larger facts — her beauty, her attitude to life, her creativity — but as he thought over the day that had just passed, or just watched her, he found individual gestures, single words, certain steps, a single movement of her eyes or a hand starting to claim equal attention. He would give up then, and console himself with something she'd said; that you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process; not a state. Held still, it withered. He wasn't too sure about all that; he seemed to have found a calm clear serenity in himself he hadn't even known was there, thanks to her.

The fact of her talent — maybe her genius — played a role, too. It added to the extent of his disbelief, this ability to be more than the thing he loved, and to present to the outside world an entirely different aspect. She was what he knew here and now, complete and rich and measureless, and yet when both of them were dead (and he found he could think about his own death again now, without fear), a world at least — many cultures, perhaps — would know her as something utterly dissimilar, a poet; a fabricator of sets of meanings that to him were just words on a page or titles that she sometimes mentioned.

One day, she said, she would write a poem about him, but not yet. He thought what she wanted was for him to tell her the story of his life, but he had already told her he could never do that. He didn't need to confess to her; there was no need. She had already unburdened him, even if he did not know quite how. Memories are interpretations, not truth, she insisted, and rational thought was just another instinctive power.

He felt the slowly healing polarisation of his mind, matching his to hers, the alignment of all his prejudices and conceits to the lodestone of the image she represented for him.

She helped him, and without knowing it. She mended him, reaching back to something so buried he'd thought it inaccessible forever, and drawing its sting. So perhaps it was also that which stunned him; the effect this one person was having on memories so terrible to him that he had long ago resigned himself to them only growing more potent with age. But she just ringed them off, cut them out, parcelled them up and threw them away, and she didn't even realise she was doing it, had no idea of the extent of her influence.

He held her in his arms.

"How old are you?" she'd asked, near dawn on that first night.

"Older and younger than you."

"Cryptic crap; answer the question."

He grimaced into the darkness. "Well… how long do you people live?"

"I don't know. Eighty, ninety years?"

He had to remember the length of the year, here. Close enough. "Then I'm… about two hundred and twenty; a hundred and ten; and thirty."

She whistled, moved her head on his shoulder. "A choice."

"Sort of. I was born two hundred and twenty years ago, I have lived for a hundred and ten of them, and physically I'm about thirty."

The laughter was deep in her throat. He felt her breasts sweep across his chest as she swung on top of him. "I'm fucking a hundred-and-ten year old?" she sounded amused.

He laid his hands on the small of her back, smooth and cool. "Yeah; great, isn't it? All the benefits of experience without the con —»

She came down kissing him.

He put his head to her shoulder, drew her tighter. She stirred in her sleep, moved too, her arms around him, drawing him to her. He smelled the skin of her shoulder, breathing in the air that had been on her flesh, was scented by her, perfumed by no perfume, carrying her own smell only. He closed his eyes, to concentrate on this sensation. He opened them, drew in her sleeping look again, moved his head to hers, his tongue out flickering under her nose to feel the flow of breath, anxious to touch the thread of her life. The tip of his tongue, and the tiny hollow between her lips and her nose, vexed and caved, as if designed.

Her lips parted, closed again; her lips rubbed against each other, side to side, and her nose wrinkled. He watched these things with a secret delight, as fascinated as a child playing boo with an adult who kept disappearing round the side of a cot.

She slept on. He rested his head again.

That first morning, in the grey dawn, he had lain there while she inspected his body minutely.

"So many scars, Zakalwe," she said, shaking her head, tracing lines across his chest.

"I keep getting into scraps," he admitted. "I could have all these heal completely, but… they're good for… remembering."

She put her chin on her chest. "Come on; admit you just like showing them off to the girls."

"There is that, too."

"This one looks nasty, if your heart's in the same place as ours… given that everything else seems to be." She ran her finger round a little puckered mark near one nipple. She felt him tense, and looked up. There was a look in the man's eyes that made her shiver. Suddenly he seemed all the years he'd claimed, and more. She drew herself up, ran her hand through her hair. "That one still a bit fresh, huh?"

"That's…" he made the effort of trying to smile, and ran his own finger over the tiny dimpled crease on his flesh."… that's one of the oldest, funnily enough." The look faded from his eyes.

"This one?" she said brightly, touching one side of his head.

"Bullet."

"In a big battle?"

"Well, sort of. In a car, to be precise. A woman."

"Oh no!" she clapped a hand to her mouth, mimicking horror.

"It was very embarrassing."

"Well, we won't go into that one… what about this?"

"Laser… very strong light," he explained, when she looked puzzled. "Much longer ago."

"This one?"

"Ahm… combination of things; insects, in the end."

" Insects?" She quivered.

(And he was back there; in the drowned volcano. A long time ago, now, but still there, still within him… and still safer to think about than that crater over his heart, where another, even more ancient memory dwelt. He remembered the caldera, and saw again the pool of stagnant water, the stone at its centre and the surrounding walls of the poisoned lake. He felt once more the long slow scrape his body had made, and the intimacy of insects… But that remorseless concentricity didn't matter any more; here was here and now was now.)

"You don't want to know," he grinned.

"I think I'll take your word for that," she agreed, nodding slowly, the long black hair swinging heavily. "I know; I'll kiss them all better."

"Could be a long job," he told her as she swivelled and moved to his feet.

"You in a hurry?" she asked him, kissing a toe.

"Not at all," he smiled, lying back. "Take all the time you want. Take forever."

He felt her move, and looked down. Her knuckles rubbed her eyes, her hair spilled, she patted her nose and cheeks and smiled at him. He looked at her smile. He had seen a few smiles he might have killed for, but never one he'd have died for. What else could he do but smile back?

"Why do you always wake before me?"

"I don't know," he sighed. So did the house, as the breeze moved its equivocal walls. "I like watching you sleep."

"Why?" She rolled and lay on her back, turning her head to him, the hair rolling bounteously to him. He laid his head on that dark fragrant field, remembering the smell of her shoulder, stupidly wondering if she smelt different awake than asleep.

He nuzzled her shoulder and she laughed a little, shrugging that shoulder and pressing her head against his. He kissed her neck and answered before he forgot the question completely

"When you're awake you move, and I miss things."

"What things?" He felt her kissing his head.

"Everything you do. When you're asleep you hardly move, and I can take it all in. There's enough time."

"Strange." Her voice was slow.

"You smell the same awake as you do asleep, did you know that?" He propped up his head and looked into her face, grinning.

"You…" she started, then looked down. Her smile looked very sad when she looked back up. "I love hearing that sort of nonsense," she said.

He heard the unsaid part. "You mean; you love hearing that sort of nonsense now, but won't at some indeterminate point in the future." (He hated the awful triteness of it, but she had her own scars.)

"I suppose," she said, holding one of his hands.

"You think too much about the future."

"Maybe we cancel out each other's obsessions, then."

He laughed. "I suppose I walked into that one."

She touched his face, studied his eyes. "I really shouldn't fall in love with you, Zakalwe."

"Why not?"

"Lots of reasons. All the past and all the future; because you are who you are, and I am who I am. Just everything."

"Details," he said, waving one hand.

She laughed, shaking her head and burying it in her own hair. She surfaced and gazed up at him.

"I just worry it won't last."

"Nothing lasts, remember?"

"I remember," she nodded slowly.

"You think this won't last?"

"Right now… it feels… I don't know. But if we ever want to hurt each other…"

"Then let's not do that," he said.

She lowered her eyelids, bent her head to him, and he put out his hand and cradled her head.

"Maybe it is that simple," she said. "Perhaps I like to dwell on what might happen so as never to be surprised." She brought her face up to his. "Does that worry you?" she said, her head shaking, an expression very like pain around here eyes.

"What?" He leant forward to kiss her, smiling, but she moved her head to indicate she did not want to, and he drew back while she said:

"That I… can't believe enough not have doubts."

"No. I don't worry about that." He did kiss her.

"Strange that taste-buds have no taste," she murmured into his neck. They laughed together.

Sometimes, at night, lying there in the dark when she was asleep or silent, he thought he saw the real ghost of Cheradenine Zakalwe come walking through the curtain walls, dark and hard and holding some huge deadly gun, loaded and set; the figure would look at him, and the air around him seemed to drip with… worse than hate; derision. At such moments, he was conscious of himself lying there with her, lying as love-struck and besotted as any youth, lying there wrapping his arms around a beautiful girl, talented and young, for whom there was nothing he wouldn't do, and he knew perfectly and completely that to what he had been — to what he had become or always was — that sort of unequivocal, selfless, retreating devotion was an act of shame, something that had to be wiped out. And the real Zakalwe would raise his gun, look him in the eye through the sights and fire, calmly and unhesitatingly.

But then he would laugh and turn to her, kiss her or be kissed, and there was no threat and no danger under this sun or any other that could take him from her then.

"Don't forget we've got to go up to that krih today. This morning, in fact."

"Oh yes," he said. He rolled onto his back, she sat up and stretched her arms out, yawning, forcing her eyes wide and glaring up at the fabric roof. Her eyes relaxed, her mouth closed, she looked at him, rested her elbow on the head of the bed, and combed his hair with her fingers. "It probably isn't stuck though."

"Mmm, maybe not," he agreed.

"It might not be there when we look today."

"Indeed."

"If it is still there we'll go up, though."

He nodded, reached up, took her hand, clasped.

She smiled, quickly kissed him and then sprang out of the bed and walked to the far level. She opened the waving translucent drapes and unslung a pair of field glasses from a hook on a frame-pole. He lay and watched her as she brought the glasses to her eyes, surveyed the hillside above.

"Still there," she said. Her voice was far away. He closed his eyes.

"We'll go up today. Maybe in the afternoon."

"We should." Far away.

"All right."

Probably the stupid animal hadn't got stuck at all; more than likely it had dozed off into an absent-minded hibernation. They did that, so he heard; they just stopped eating and looked ahead and stared with their big dumb eyes at something, and closed them sleepily and went into a coma, purely by accident. The first rain, or a bird landing on it would probably wake it. Perhaps it was stuck though; the krih had thick coats and they got entangled with the bushes and tree branches sometimes, and couldn't move. They would go up today; the view was pleasant, and anyway he could do with some exercise that wasn't mostly horizontal. They would lie on the grass and talk, and look out to the sea sparkling in the haze, and maybe they would have to free the animal, or wake it up, and she would look after it with a look he knew not to disturb, and in the evening she would write, and that would be another poem.

As a nameless lover, he had appeared in many of her recent works, though as usual she would throw the bulk of them away. She said she would write a poem specifically about him, one day, maybe when he had told her more about his life.

The house whispered, moved in its parts, waving and flowing, spreading light and dimming it; the varying thicknesses and strengths of drape and curtain that formed the walls and divisions of the place rustled against each other secretly, like half-heard conversations.

Far away, she put her hand to her hair, pulled one side absently as she moved papers on the desk around with one finger. He watched. Her finger stirred through what she'd written yesterday, toying with the parchments; circling them around slowly; slowly flexing and turning, watched by her, watched by him.

The glasses hung from her other hand, straps down, forgotten, and he wandered a long slow gaze over her as she stood against the light; feet, legs, behind, belly, chest, breasts, shoulders, neck; face and head and hair.

The finger moved on the desk top where she would write a short poem about him in the evening, one he would copy secretly in case she wasn't happy with it and threw it out, and as his desire grew and her calm face saw no finger move, one of them was just a passing thing, just a leaf pressed between the pages of the other's diary, and what they had talked themselves into, they could be silent out of.

"I must do some work today," she said to herself.

There was a pause.

"Hey?" he said.

"Hmm?" Her voice was far away.

"Let's waste a little time, hmm?"

"A nice euphemism, sir," she mused, distantly.

He smiled. "Come and help me think of better ones."

She smiled, and they both looked at each other.

There was a long pause.