'And Zakalwe?'
'Basically, it's an Out. Down to the planet, convince Beychae he's needed, and at the very least get him to declare an interest. But it may mean a physical spring, and the added complication is Beychae may require a lot of convincing.'
Sma thought it through, still regarding the night. 'No tricks we can play?'
'The two men know each other too well for anything other than the real Zakalwe to work... likewise Tsoldrin Beychae and the political machine throughout the entire system. Too many memories involved altogether.'
'Yeah,' Sma said quietly. 'Too many memories.' She rubbed her bare shoulders, as though she was cold. 'What about big guns?'
'We've a nebula fleet assembling; a core of one Limited System Vehicle and three General Contact Units stationed around the cluster itself, plus eighty or so GCUs keeping their tracks within a month's rush-in distance. There ought to be four or five GSVs within a two-to-three-months dash for the next year or so. But that's very, very much a last resort.'
'Megadeath figures looking a bit equivocal are they?' Sma sounded bitter.
'If you want to put it that way,' Skaffen Amtiskaw said.
'Oh goddamn,' Sma said quietly, closing her eyes. 'So; how far away is Voerenhutz? I've forgotten.'
'Only about forty days, but we have to pick Zakalwe up first; say... ninety for the whole outward journey.'
She turned around. 'Who's going to control the stand-in if the ship's taking me?' Her gaze flicked skyward.
'The Just Testing will remain here in any event,' the drone said. 'The very fast picket Xenophobe has been put at your disposal. It can uplift tomorrow, a little after noon, earliest... should you wish.'
Sma stood still for a moment, feet together and arms crossed, her lips pursed and face pinched. Skaffen-Amtiskaw introspected for a moment, and decided it felt sorry for her.
The woman was immobile and silent for a few seconds; then, abruptly, she was striding towards the turbine hall doors, heels clattering on the brick pathway.
The drone swooped after her, falling in at her shoulder. 'What I wish,' Sma said, 'is that you had a better sense of timing.'
'I'm sorry. Did I interrupt something?'
'Not at all. And what the hell's a "very fast picket" anyway?'
'New name for a (Demilitarised) Rapid Offensive Unit,' the drone said.
She glanced at it. It wobbled, shrugging.
'It's supposed to sound better.'
'And it's called the Xenophobe. Well that's just fine. Can the stand-in pick up immediately?'
'Noon tomorrow; can you de-brief up to...?'
'Tomorrow morning.' Sma said, as the drone flicked round in front of her and sucked the tall doors open; she strode through and leapt up the steps into the turbine hall, skirts gathered in front her her. The hralzs came skidding round the corner from the hall and gathered yelping and bouncing around her. Sma stopped, while they milled around her, sniffing her hems and trying to lick her hands.
'No,' she told the drone. 'On second thoughts, scan me tonight, when I tell you. I'll get rid of this lot early if I can. I'm going to find Ambassador Onitnert now, have Maikril tell Chuzleis she's to get the minister over to the bar at turbine one in ten minutes. Make my apologies to the System Times hacks, have them taken back to the city and released; give them a bottle of nightflor each. Cancel the photographer, give him one still camera and let him take... sixty-four snaps, strictly full permission required. Have one of the male staff find Relstoch Sussepin and invite him to my apartments in two hours. Oh, and-'
Sma broke off suddenly and went down on her haunches to cradle the long snout of one of the whimpering hralzs in her hands. 'Gainly, Gainly, I know, I know,' she said, as the big-bellied animal keened and licked at her face. 'I wanted to be here to see your babies born, but I can't...' she sighed, hugged the beast, then held its chin in one hand. 'What am I to do, Gainly? I could have you put to sleep until I come back, and you'd never know... but all your friends would miss you.'
'Have them all put to sleep,' the drone suggested.
Sma shook her head. 'You take care of them till I get back,' she told the other hralz. 'All right?' She kissed the animal's nose and got up. Gainly sneezed.
'Two other things, drone,' Sma said, walking through the excited pack.
'What?'
'Don't call me "Toots" again, all right?'
'All right. What else?'
They rounded the gleaming bulk of the long-stilled number six turbine, and Sma stopped for a moment, surveying the busy crowd in front of her, taking a deep breath and straightening her shoulders. She was already smiling as she started forward and said quietly to the drone, 'I don't want the stand-in screwing anybody.'
'Okay,' the drone said as they went towards the partying people. 'It is, after all, in a sense, your body.'
'That's just it, drone,' Sma said, nodding to a waiter, who scurried forward, drinks tray proffered. 'It isn't my body.'
Aircraft and ground vehicles floated and wound away from the old power station. The important people had departed. There were a few stragglers left in the hall, but they didn't need her. She felt weary, and glanded a little snap to lift the mood.
From the south balcony of the apartments fashioned from the station's admin block, she looked down to the deep valley and the line of tail lights strung out along Riverside Drive. An aircraft whistled overhead, banking and disappearing over the tall curved lip of the old dam. She watched the plane go, then turned towards the penthouse doors, taking off the small formal jacket and slinging it over her shoulder.
Music was playing, deep inside the sumptuous suite beneath the roof garden. She headed instead for the study, where Skaffen-Amtiskaw was waiting.
The scan to update the stand-in took only a couple of minutes. She came round with the usual feeling of dislocation, but it passed quickly enough. She kicked off her shoes and padded through the soft dark corridors towards the music.
Relstoch Sussepin drew himself out of the seat he'd been occupying, still holding a softly glowing glass of nightflor. Sma stopped in the doorway.
'Thank you for staying,' she said, dropping the little jacket onto a couch.
'That's all right.' He brought the glass of glowing drink towards his lips, then seemed to think the better of it, and cradled it in both hands instead. 'What, ah... was there anything, in particular you...?'
Sma smiled, somehow sadly, and put both hands on the wings of a big revolving chair, which she stood behind. She looked down at the hide cushion. 'Perhaps, now, I'm flattering myself,' she said. 'But, not to put too fine a point on it...' She looked up at him. 'Would you like to fuck?'
Relstoch Sussepin stood stock still. After a while he raised the glass to his lips and took a long slow drink, then brought the glass slowly back down again. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, I wanted to... instantly.'
'There's only tonight,' she said, holding up one hand. 'Just tonight. It's difficult to explain, but from tomorrow onwards... for maybe half a year or more, I'm going to be incredibly busy; two-places-at-once sort of busy, you know?'
He shrugged. 'Sure. Anything you say.'
Sma relaxed then, and a smile grew gradually on her face. She pushed the big chair round and slid the bracelet from her wrist to let it fall into the seat. Then she gently unbuttoned the top of her gown, and stood there.
Sussepin drained his glass, placed it on a shelf, and walked towards her.
'Lights,' she whispered.
The lights slowly dimmed, right down, until eventually the softly glowing dregs of the finished drink made the glass on the shelf the brightest thing in the room.
XIII
'Wake up.'
He woke up.
Dark. He straightened, beneath the covers, wondering who had talked to him like that. Nobody talked to him in that tone, not any more; even half asleep, coming unexpectedly awake in what must be the middle of the night, he heard something in that tone he hadn't heard for two, maybe three decades. Impertinence. L
ack of respect.
He brought his head out of the sheltering cover, into the warm air of the room, and looked round in the one-light gloom, to see who had dared address him like that. An instant of fear - had somebody got past the guards and security screens? - was replaced by a furious hunger to see who had the effrontery to speak like that to him.
The intruder sat in a chair just beyond the end of the bed. He looked odd in a way which was itself odd; a very new sort of unusualness, unplaceable, even alien. He gave the impression of being a slightly skewed projection. The clothes looked strange too; baggy, brightly coloured, even in the dim light of the bedside lamp. The man was dressed like a clown or a jester, but his somehow too symmetrical face looked... grim? Contemptuous? That... foreignness made it difficult to tell.
He started to grope for his glasses, but it was just sleep in his eyes. The surgeons had given him new eyes five years ago, but sixty years of short-sightedness had left him with an ingrained reaction to reach for glasses which were not there, whenever he first woke up. A small price to pay, he had always thought, and now, with the new retro-ageing treatment... The sleep cleared from his eyes. He sat up, looking at the man in the chair, and began to think he was having a dream, or seeing a ghost.
The man looked young; he had a broad, tanned face and black hair tied back behind his head, but thoughts of spirits and the dead came into his head not because of that. It was something about the dark, pit-like eyes, and the alien set of that face.
'Good evening, Ethnarch.' The young man's voice was slow and measured. It sounded, somehow, like the voice of someone much older; old enough to make the Ethnarch feel suddenly young in comparison. It chilled him. He looked around the room. Who was this man? How had he got in here? The palace was meant to be impregnable. There were guards everywhere. What was going on? The fear came back.
The girl from the previous evening lay still on the far side of the wide bed, just a lump under the covers. A couple of dormant screens on the wall to the Ethnarch's left reflected the bedside light's weak glow.
He was frightened, but fully awake now and thinking quickly. There was a gun concealed in the bed's headboard; the man at the end of the bed didn't seem to be armed (but then why was he here?). But the gun represented a desperate last resort. The voice code was the thing. The mikes and cameras in the room were on standby, their automatic circuits waiting for a specific sentence to activate them; sometimes he wanted privacy in here, other times he wanted to record something only for himself, and of course he'd always known there was a possibility that somebody unauthorised might get in here, no matter how tight the security was.
He cleared his throat. 'Well well, this is a surprise.' His voice was even, he sounded calm.
He smiled thinly, pleased with himself. His heart - the heart of an athletic young anarchist woman up until eleven years ago - was beating quickly, but not worryingly so. He nodded. 'This is a surprise,' he repeated. There; it was done. An alarm would already be ringing in the basement control room; the guards would come piling through the door in a few seconds. Or they might not risk that, and instead release the ceiling gas cylinders, blasting them both into unconsciousness in a blinding fog. There was a danger that would rupture his eardrums (he thought, swallowing), but he could always take a new pair from a healthy dissident. Maybe he wouldn't even have to do that; the rumour was that the retro-ageing might include the possibility of body-parts regrowing. Well, nothing wrong with strength in depth; back-ups. He liked the feeling of security that gave one. 'Well, well,' he heard himself say, just in case the circuits hadn't picked up the code first or second time round, 'this is indeed a surprise.' The guards should be here any second...
The brightly dressed young man smiled. He flexed oddly, and leant forward until his elbows rested on the top of the bed's ornate footboard. His lips moved, to produce what might have been a smile. He reached into one pocket of the baggy pantaloons and produced a small black gun. He pointed it straight at the Ethnarch and said. 'Your code won't work, Ethnarch Kerian. There won't be any more surprises that you're expecting and I'm not. The basement security centre is as dead as everything else.'
The Ethnarch Kerian stared at the little gun. He'd seen water pistols that looked more impressive. What is going on? Can he really have come to kill me? The man certainly didn't dress like an assassin, and surely any serious assassin would just have killed him in his sleep. The longer this fellow sat here, talking, the more danger he was in, whether he had knocked out the links to the security centre or not. So he might be mad, but he probably wasn't an assassin. It was simply ludicrous that a real, professional assassin would behave like this, and only an extremely able and completely professional assassin could have penetrated the palace security... Thus, the Ethnarch Kerian tried to convince his suddenly wildly beating, mutinous heart. Where were the damn guards? He thought again about the gun hidden in the ornamental headboard behind him.
The young man folded his arms, so that the little gun was no longer pointing at the Ethnarch. 'Mind if I tell you a little story?'
He must be mad. 'No; no; why don't you tell me a story?' the Ethnarch said, in his most friendly and avuncular voice. 'What's your name, by the way; you appear to have the advantage over me.'
'Yes, I do, don't I?' the old voice from the young lips said. 'Actually there are two stories, but you know most of one of them. I'll tell them at the same time; see if you can tell which is which.'
'I-'
'Ssh,' the man said, putting the little gun to his lips. The Ethnarch half glanced at the girl on the other side of the bed. He realised he and the intruder had been talking in quite low tones. Maybe if he could get the girl to wake, she might draw his fire, or at least distract him while he grabbed for the gun in the headboard; he was faster than he had been for twenty years, thanks to the new treatment... where the hell were those guards ?
'Now look here, young man!' he roared. 'I just want to know what you think you're doing here! Eh?'
His voice - a voice that had filled halls and squares, without amplification - echoed through the room. Dammit, the guards in the basement security centre ought to be able to hear it without any microphones. The girl on the other side of the bed didn't even stir.
The young man was smirking. 'They're all asleep, Ethnarch. There's just you and me. Now; this story...'
'What...' the Ethnarch Kerian gulped, drawing his legs up under the covers. 'What are you here for?'
The intruder looked mildly surprised. 'Oh, I'm here to take you out, Ethnarch. You are going to be removed. Now...' he laid the gun on the broad top of the bed footboard. The Ethnarch stared at it. It was too far away for him to grab, but...
'The story,' the intruder said, settling back in the chair. 'Once upon a time, over the gravity well and far away, there was a magical land where they had no kings, no laws, no money and no property, but where everybody lived like a prince, was very well-behaved and lacked for nothing. And these people lived in peace, but they were bored, because paradise can get that way after a time, and so they started to carry out missions of good works; charitable visits upon the less well-off, you might say; and they always tried to bring with them the thing that they saw as the most precious gift of all; knowledge; information; and as wide a spread of that information as possible, because these people were strange, in that they despised rank, and hated kings... and all things hierarchic... even Ethnarchs.' The young man smiled thinly. So did the Ethnarch. He wiped his brow and shifted back a little in the bed, as though getting more comfortable. Heart still pounding.
'Well, for a time, a terrible force threatened to take away their good works, but they resisted it, and they won, and came out of the conflict stronger then before, and if they had not been so unconcerned with power for its own sake, they would have been terribly feared, but as it was they were only slightly feared, just as a matter of course given the scale of their power. And one of the ways it amused them to wield that power was to interfere in societies they thought migh
t benefit from the experience, and one of the most efficient ways of doing that in a lot of societies is to get to the people at the top.
'Many of their people become physicians to great leaders, and with medicines and treatments that seem like magic to the comparatively primitive people they're dealing with, ensure that a great and good leader has a better chance of surviving. That's the way they prefer to work; offering life, you see, rather than dealing death. You might call them soft, because they're very reluctant to kill, and they might agree with you, but they're soft the way the ocean is soft, and, well; ask any sea captain how harmless and puny the ocean can be.'
'Yes, I see,' the Ethnarch said, sitting back a little further shifting a pillow into place behind his back, and checking just where he was in relation to the section of headboard that concealed the gun. His heart was thrashing in his chest.
'Another thing they do, these people, another way they deal in life rather than death, is they offer leaders of certain societies below a certain technological level the one thing all the wealth and power those leaders command cannot buy them; a cure for death. A return to youth.'
The Ethnarch stared at the young man, suddenly more intrigued than terrified. Did he mean the retro-ageing?
'Ah; it's starting to click into place now, isn't it?' the young man smiled. 'Well, you're right. Just that process that you've been going through, Ethnarch Kerian. Which you've been paying for, this last year. Which you did - if you remember - promise to pay for with more than just platinum. Do you remember, hmmm?'
'I... I'm not sure.' The Ethnarch Kerian stalled. He could see the panel in the headboard where the gun was from the corner of his eye.