‘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.
* * *
Six
Swaying slightly, scratching his head, he put the gun stock-down on the floor of the smallbay, held the weapon by its barrel, and squinted one-eyed into the muzzle, muttering.
‘Zakalwe,’ Diziet Sma said, ‘we diverted twenty-eight million people and a trillion tonnes of space ship two months off course to get you to Voerenhutz on time; I’d appreciate it if you’d wait until the job is done before you blow your brains out.’
He turned round to see Sma and the drone entering the rear of the smallbay; a traveltube capsule flicked away behind them.
‘Eh?’ he said, then waved. ‘Oh, hi.’ He wore a white shirt – sleeves rolled up – black pantaloons, and nothing on his feet. He picked the plasma rifle up, shook it, banged it on the side with his free hand, and sighted down the length of the smallbay. He steadied, squeezed the trigger.
Light flared briefly, the gun leapt back at him, and there was an echoing snap of noise. He looked down to the far end of the bay, two hundred metres away, where a glittering black cube perhaps fifteen metres to a side sat under the overhead lights. He peered at the distant black object, pointed the gun at it again, and inspected the magnified view on one of the gun’s screens. ‘Weird,’ he muttered, and scratched his head.
There was a small tray floating at his side; it held an ornate metal jug and a crystal goblet. He took a drink from the goblet, staring intently at the gun.
‘Zakalwe,’ Sma said. ‘What, exactly, are you doing?’
‘Target practice,’ he said. He drank from the goblet again. ‘You want a drink, Sma? I’ll order another glass…’
‘No thanks.’ Sma looked down to the far end of the bay, at the strange and gleaming black cube. ‘And what is that?’
‘Ice,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.
‘Yeah,’ he nodded, putting the goblet down to adjust something on the plasma rifle. ‘Ice.’
‘Dyed black ice,’ the drone said.
‘Ice,’ Sma said, nodding, but none the wiser. ‘Why ice?’
‘Because,’ he said, sounding annoyed, ‘this… this ship with the incredibly silly name and its twenty-eight trillion people and its hyper-zillion billion squintillion tonnage hasn’t got any decent rubbish, that’s why.’ He flicked a couple of switches on the side of the rifle, aimed again. ‘Trillion fucking tonnes and it hasn’t got any goddamn garbage; apart from its brain, I suppose.’ He squeezed the trigger again. His shoulder and arm were pushed back once more, while the light flickered from the weapon’s muzzle and sound stuttered. He stared at the view in the sight-screen. ‘This is ridiculous!’ he said.
‘But why are you shooting at ice?’ Sma insisted.
‘Sma,’ he cried, ‘are you deaf? Because this parsimonious pile of junk claims it hasn’t got any rubbish on board it can let me shoot at.’ He shook his head, opened an inspection panel on the side of the weapon.