'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?'
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 understan
d (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 t
he 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.'