‘I thought if I told you, you wouldn’t come.’
‘Drone; this is my job.’
‘I know, but you were so reluctant to leave…’
‘After three years, with no warning, what do you expect? But how long did I actually hold out? Even knowing about the stand-in? Come on, drone; you told me what the situation was and I accepted. There was no need to keep quiet about Zakalwe giving us the slip.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the drone said, very quietly. ‘This is inadequate, I know, but I really am sorry. Please say you might be able to forgive me one day.’
‘Oh, don’t take the contrition bit too far. Just tell me things in future.’
‘All right.’
Sma let her head drop for a moment, then brought it back up. ‘You can start by telling me how Zakalwe got away. What did we have trailing him?’
‘A knife missile.’
‘A knife missile?’ Sma looked suitably amazed. She rubbed her chin with one hand.
‘Quite a late model, too,’ the drone said. ‘Nanoguns, mono-filament warps, effector; point seven value brain.’
‘And Zakalwe got away from this beast?’ Sma was almost laughing.
‘Not just away; he wasted it.’
‘Shee-it,’ Sma breathed. ‘I didn’t think Zakalwe was that smart. Was he smart, or just incredibly lucky? What happened? How did he do it?’
‘Well, it’s very secret,’ the drone said. ‘So please don’t tell anybody at all.’
‘My honour,’ Sma said ironically, palm on chest.
‘Well,’ the drone said, making a sighing noise. ‘It took him a year to set up but, on the place where we dropped him – after his last job for us – the local humanoids shared their planet with large sea-going mammals of about equivalent intelligence; quite a viable symbiotic relationship, with much cross-cultural contact. Zakalwe – using the exchange we’d given him as payment for his work – bought a company which made medical and signalling lasers. His trap involved a hospital facility the humanoids were setting up on the coast of an ocean to treat these sea-going mammals. One of the pieces of medical equipment being tested was a very large Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Scanner.’
‘A what?’
‘Fourth most primitive way of looking inside your average water-based living being.’
‘Go on.’
The process involves the use of extremely strong magnetic fields. Zakalwe was supposedly testing a laser attached to the machine – on a holiday, when there was nobody else around – when he somehow got the knife missile to enter the scanning machine, and then turned on the power.’
‘I thought knife missiles weren’t magnetic.’
‘They’re not, but there was just enough metal in it to set up crippling eddy currents if it tried to move too fast.’
‘But it could still move.’
‘Not fast enough to get out of the way of the laser Zakalwe had set up at one end of the scanner. It was only supposed to illuminate, to help produce holos of the mammals, but Zakalwe had in fact installed a military strength device; it grilled the knife missile.’
‘Wow.’ Sma nodded, staring down at the floor. ‘The man never ceases to amaze.’ She looked at the drone. ‘Zakalwe must have wanted away from us awful bad.’
‘It looks that way,’ agreed the drone.
‘So maybe there’s no way he’ll want to work for us again. Maybe he never wants even to hear from us again.’
‘I’m afraid that must be a possibility.’
‘Even if we can find him.’
‘Quite.’
‘And all we know is that he’s somewhere in an Open Cluster called Crastalier?’ Sma’s voice sounded tinged with disbelief.
‘It’s a bit more focused than that,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. ‘There are maybe ten or twelve systems he could be in by now, if he left immediately after stiffing the knife missile, and took the fastest ships available. Thankfully, the tech level in the meta-civilisation isn’t that high.’ The drone hesitated, then said. ‘To be honest, we might have been able to catch up with him, if we’d gone in fast and strong immediately… But I think the controlling Minds were so impressed with Zakalwe’s trick they thought he deserved to get away. We kept a very general watch on the volume, but it’s only in the last ten days the search has become serious. We’re bringing in ships and people from wherever we can now; I’m sure we’ll find him.’
‘Ten or twelve systems, drone?’ Sma said shaking her head.
‘Twenty-plus planets; maybe three hundred sizeable space habitats… not including ships, of course.’
Sma closed her eyes. Her head shook. ‘I don’t believe this.’
Skaffen-Amtiskaw thought the better of saying anything.
The woman’s eyes opened. ‘Want to pass on a suggestion or two?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Forget the habitats. And forget any planets that aren’t fairly Standard; check out… deserts, temperate zones; forests but not jungles… and no cities.’ She shrugged, rubbed her mouth with her hand. ‘If he’s still trying hard to stay hidden, we’ll never find him. If he only wanted to get away to live his own life without being watched, we have a chance. Oh, and look for wars, of course. Especially wars that aren’t too big… and interesting wars, know what I mean?’
‘Right. Transmitted.’ Normally the drone would have poured scorn on this bit of amateur psychological sleuthing, but this time it decided to bite its metaphorical tongue, and relayed Sma’s remarks to the unresponding ship for transmission to the search fleet ahead of them.
Sma took a deep breath, shoulders rising and falling. ‘Party still going on?’
‘Yes,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, surprised.
Sma jumped off the bed and stepped into the Xeny suit. ‘Well; let’s not be party poopers.’
She fastened the suit, scooped up the brown and yellow head and walked for the door.
‘Sma,’ the drone said, following. ‘I thought you’d be mad.’
‘Maybe I will be, once the calm wears off,’ she admitted, opening the door and putting the suit head on. ‘But just right now, I really can’t be bothered.’
They went down the corridor. She looked back at the clear-fielded machine behind her; ‘Come on, drone; it’s meant to be fancy dress. But try something a little more imaginative than a warship this time.’
‘Hmm,’ the machine said. ‘Any suggestions?’
‘I don’t know,’ Sma sighed, ‘What would suit you? I mean, what is the perfect role-model for a cowardly lying patronising hypocritical bastard with no trust in or respect for another person?’
There was silence from behind as they approached the noise and light of the party. So she turned round and, instead of the drone, saw a classically proportioned, handsome, but somehow anonymous-looking young man following her down the corridor, his gaze just moving up from her behind to her eyes.
Sma laughed. ‘Yes; very good.’ She walked a few more steps. ‘On second thoughts, I think I preferred the warship.’
* * *
XI
He never wrote things in the sand. He resented even leaving footprints. He saw it as a one-way commerce; he did the beachcombing, and the sea provided the materials. The sand was the middle-man, displaying the goods as though it was a long, soggy shop counter. He liked the simplicity of this arrangement.
Sometimes he watched the ships passing, far out to sea. Now and again he’d wish that he was on one of the tiny dark shapes, on his way to some bright and strange place, or on his way – imagining harder – to a quiet home port, to twinkling lights, amiable laughter, friends and welcome. But usually he ignored the slow specks, and got on with his walking and gathering, and kept his eyes on the grey-brown wash of the beach’s slope. The horizon was clear and far and empty, the wind sang low in the dunes, and the seabirds wheeled and cried, comfortingly random and argumentative in the cold skies above.
The brash, noisy home-cars came sometimes, from the interior. The home-cars were loaded with shining metal and flashing lights, they had multi-coloured windows and highly ornamental grilles, they fluttered with flags and dripped with enthusiastically imagined but sloppily executed paint-jobs, and they groaned and flexed, over-loaded, as they came coughing and spluttering and belching fumes down the sandy track from the parktown. Adults leaned out of windows or stood one-legged on running boards; children ran alongside, or clung to the ladders and straps that covered their sides, or sat squealing and shouting on the roof.
They came to see the strange man who lived in a funny wooden shack in the dunes. They were fascinated, if also slightly repelled, by the strangeness of living in something that was dug into the ground, something that did not – could not – move. They would stare at the line where the wood and tar-paper met the sand, and shake their heads, walking right round the small, skewed hut, as if looking for the wheels. They talked amongst themselves, trying to imagine what it must be like to have the same view and the same sort of weather all the time. They opened the rickety door and sniffed the dark, smoky, man-scented air inside the hut, and shut the door quickly, declaring that it must be unhealthy to live in the same place, joined to the earth. Insects. Rot. Stale air.