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?’
* * *
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.