The man smiled slowly but broadly. ‘You… believe in keeping machines in their place, yes?’
‘Yeah.’ He nodded vigorously. ‘Yeah, I do.’
‘Hmm. Mr Staberinde, have you heard of Tsoldrin Beychae?’
‘Sure. Hasn’t everybody?’
The man raised his eyebrows liquidly. ‘And you think…?’
‘Could have been a great politician, I suppose.’
‘Most people say he was a great politician,’ the woman said from the chair’s depths.
He shook his head, looking into his drug bowl. ‘He was on the wrong side. It was a shame, but… to be great you have to be on the winning side. Part of greatness is knowing that. He didn’t. Same as my old man.’
‘Ah…’ said the woman.
‘Your father, Mr Staberinde?’ the man said.
‘Yeah,’ he admitted. ‘He and Beychae… well, it’s a long story, but… they knew each other, long ago.’
‘We have time for the story,’ the man said easily.
‘No,’ he said. He stood up, putting down the bowl and glass, and taking up the suit helmet. ‘Look; thanks for the invitation and all, but I think I’ll head back now; I’m a little tired, and I took a bit of a battering in that car, you know?’
‘Yes,’ the man said, standing too. ‘We’re really sorry about that.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
‘Perhaps we can offer something in compensation?’
‘Oh yeah? Like what?’ He fiddled with the suit helmet. ‘I got lots of money.’
‘How would you like to talk to Tsoldrin Beychae?’
He looked up, frowning. ‘I don’t know; should I? Is he here?’ He gestured out towards the party. The woman giggled.
‘No.’ The man laughed. ‘Not here. But in the city. Would you like to talk to him? Fascinating fellow, and no longer actively on the wrong side, as it were. Devoted to a life of study, these days. But still fascinating, as I say.’
He shrugged. ‘Well… maybe. I’ll think about it. It crossed my mind to leave, after the craziness this morning.’
‘Oh, I beg you to reconsider that, Mr Staberinde. Please; sleep on it. You might do a great deal of good, for all of us, if you would talk to the chap. Who knows; you might even help make him great.’ He held out one hand towards the door. ‘But I can tell you want to go. Let me see you to the car.’ They walked to the door. Mollen stood back. ‘Oh. This is Mollen. Say hello, Mollen.’ The grey-haired man touched a small box at his side.
‘Hello,’ it said.
‘Mollen can’t speak, you see. Hasn’t said a word in all the time we’ve known him.’
‘Yes,’ said the woman. She was completely submerged in the chair now. ‘We decided he needed to clear his throat; so we took out his tongue.’ She either giggled or belched.
‘We’ve met.’ He nodded to the big man, whose face contorted strangely under the scars.
The party in the boat-house cellar went on. He almost collided with a woman who had her eyes on the back of her head. Some of the revellers were exchanging limbs now. People sported four arms, or none (begging for drinks to be brought to their mouths), or an extra leg, or had arms or legs of the wrong sex. One woman was parading around with a man in tow who wore a sickly stupid grin; the woman kept lifting her skirt and displaying a complete set of male sexual equipment.
He hoped they all forgot who had what at the end of the evening.
They passed through the tame party, where fireworks were showering everybody with cool sparks; they were all laughing at that and – he could think of no other word – cavorting.
He was wished farewell. It was the same car that took him back, though it had a different driver. He watched the lights and the city’s calm expanses of snow, and thought about people at parties and people at war; he saw the party they had just left, and he saw the grey-green trenches with mud-caked men waiting nervously; he saw people dressed in shiny black, whipping each other and being tied up… and he saw people shackled to bed frames or chairs, shrieking, while the uniformed men applied their particular skills.
He sometimes had to be reminded, he realised, that he still possessed the capacity to despise.
The car powered its way through the silent streets. He took the dark glasses off. The empty city swept past.
* * *
VI
Once – between the time he’d taken the Chosen across the badlands and the time he’d ended up broken like an insect in the flooded caldera, scratching signs in the dirt – he had taken some leave, and for a while had entertained the idea of giving up his work for the Culture, and doing something else instead. It had always seemed to him that the ideal man was either a soldier or a poet, and so, having spent most of his years being one of those – to him – polar opposites, he determined to attempt to turn his life around and become the other.
He lived in a small village, in a small, rural country on a small, undeveloped, unhurried planet. He stayed with an old couple in a cottage in the trees in the dales beneath the high tors. He rose early and went for long walks.
The countryside looked new and green and fresh; it was summer, and the fields and woods, the path sides and river banks were full of unnameable flowers of every colour. The tall trees flexed in the warm summer winds, leaves bright and fluttering like flags, and water ran off the moors and hills and across the bunched stones of sparkling streams like some clarified concentrate of the air itself. He sweated to the crests of the gnarled hills, climbed the outcrop rocks at their summits, and ran whooping and laughing across the broader tops, under the brief shadows of the small high clouds.
On the moors, in the hills, he saw animals. Tiny ones that darted invisibly into thickets from almost under-foot, larger ones that leapt and stopped, looked back, then leapt away again, disappearing into burrows or between rocks; larger ones still that ran flowing off across the ground in herds, watching him, and then became almost invisible when they stopped to graze. Birds mobbed him when he walked too near their nests; others called out from nearby, one-wing fluttering, trying to distract him, when he approached theirs. He was careful not to step on their nests.
He always took a small notebook with him on his walks, and made a point of writing down anything interesting. He tried to describe the feel of the grasses in his fingers, the way the trees sounded, the visual diversity of the flowers, the way the animals and birds moved and reacted, the colour of the rocks and the sky. He kept a proper journal in a larger book, back in his room at the old couple’s cottage. He wrote his notes up in that each evening, as though filling out a report for some higher authority.
In another large journal book, he wrote his notes out again, along with further notes on the notes, and then started to cross words out of the completed, annotated notes, carefully removing word after word until he had something that looked like a poem. This was how he imagined poetry to be made.
He had brought some books of poetry with him, and when the weather was wet, which was only rarely, he stayed in and tried to read them. Usually, though, they sent him to sleep. The books he had brought about poetry and poets confused him even more, and he had to continually re-read passage after passage to retain each word, and even then still felt none the wiser.
He went into the village tavern every few days, and played skittle and pebble games with the locals. The mornings after these evenings he regarded as recovery periods, and left his notebook behind when he walked.
The rest of the time he tired himself out and kept fit; climbing trees to see how high he could get before the branches became too thin, climbing rock faces and old quarries, balancing his way across fallen trees in steep gullies, leaping from rock to rock across rivers, and sometimes stalking and then chasing the animals on the moor, knowing he could never catch up with them, but laughing as he sprinted after them.
The only other people he saw in the hills were farmers and shepherds. Sometimes he saw slaves working in the fields, and very rarely he met other people out walking. He didn’t like to stop and talk to them.
The one other person he ever saw regularly was a man who flew a kite on the high hills. They only saw each other from a distance. At first it just happened that their paths never crossed, but later he made sure that they didn’t meet; he would change direction if he saw the gaunt figure of the man walking towards him, climb up a different hill if he saw the little red kite flying above the summit he’d intended to head for. It had become a sort of tradition, a little private custom.