And he did, and he enjoyed, though he was not always sure it was for the right reasons. But that did not matter to them.
The Chosen to the Palace.
He stood back from his life and was not ashamed. All he’d ever done was because there was something to be done. You used those weapons, whatever they might happen to be. Given a goal, or having thought up a goal, you had to aim for it, no matter what stood in your way. Even the Culture recognised that. They couched it in terms of what could be done at a specific time and level of technological capability, but they recognised that all was relative, everything was in flux…
He tried, all of a sudden – hoping to take it by surprise – to sweep and crash back down to that place with the war-shelled mansion and the burned-out summerhouse and the foundering boat made of stone… but the memory would not bear the weight of it, and he was flung out again, swirled away, cast into the nothingness, consigned to the oblivion of the deliberately not-thought thoughts.
The tent stood at the focus of the desert trails. White without, black within, it seemed to image his crossroad imaginings.
Hey hey hey. It’s only a dream.
Except it wasn’t a dream, and he was in complete control, and if he opened his eyes he could see the girl sitting there in front of him, staring at him, wondering, and there was never any doubt about who was where and what was when, and in a way that was the worst thing about this drug; that it let you go anywhere, anytime – as not a few drugs did – but it still let you connect back to reality whenever you really wanted to.
Cruel, he thought.
The Culture might just have it right after all; being able to call up almost any drug or combinations of drugs seemed suddenly less indulgent and decadent than he’d imagined, before.
The girl, he saw, in one awful instant, would do great things. She would be famous and important, and the tribe around her would do great – and terrible – things, and it would all be for nothing, because whatever terrible train of events he had set in motion by taking the Chosen to the Palace, this tribe would not survive; they were the dead. Their mark upon the desert of life was already being obscured, sands blowing over, grain by grain by grain… He had already helped to scuff it out, no matter that they hadn’t realised this yet. They would, after he was gone. The Culture would take him away from here, and put him down somewhere else, and this adventure would collapse with the rest into meaninglessness, and nothing very much would be left, as he went on to do roughly the same thing somewhere else.
Actually, he could happily have killed the Chosen, because the boy was a fool, and he had seldom been in the company of anybody quite so stupid. The youth was a cretin, and didn’t even realise that he was.
He could think of no more disastrous combination.
He swept back towards the planet he had once abandoned.
Came in so far, was forced away. He tried again, but without any real self-belief.
Was rejected. Well, he’d expected no more.
The Chairmaker was not the person who made the chair, he thought, immediately lucid. It was and was not him. There are no Gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.
His eyes were already closed, but he closed them again.
He swayed in a circle, unknowing.
Lies; he wept and screamed, fell at the scornful feet of the girl.
Lies; he circled on.
Lies; he fell to the girl, hands out, grasping for a mother that was not there.
Lies.
Lies.
Lies; he circled on, tracing his own private symbol in the air between the crown of his head and the day-bright hole that was the tent’s smoke-hole.
He sank towards the planet again, but the girl in the black/white tent reached out and wiped his brow and, in that tiny movement, seemed to wipe his being away…
(Lies.)
… It was a long time later he found out he’d only taken the Chosen to the Palace because the brat was to be the last of the line. Not merely stupid, but also impotent, the Chosen fathered no strong sons and no cunning daughters (as the Culture had known all along), and the fractious desert tribes swept in a decade later led by a Matriarch who had guided most of the warriors under her command through the dream-leaf time, and had seen one stronger and stranger than all of them suffer its effects and come through unscathed but still unfulfilled, and known through that very experience that there was more to their desert existence than had been guessed at by the myths and elders of her nomad tribe.
* * *
3: Remembrance
* * *
Ten
He loved the plasma rifle. He was an artist with it; he could paint pictures of destruction, compose symphonies of demolition, write elegies of annihilation, using that weapon.
He stood, thinking about it, while the wind moved dead leaves round his feet and the ancient stones faced into the wind.
They hadn’t made it off the planet. The capsule had been attacked by… something. He couldn’t tell from the damage whether it had been a beam weapon or some sort of warhead going off nearby. Whatever it had been, it had disabled them. Clamped to the outside of the capsule, he’d been lucky to be on the side that shielded him from whatever had hit it. Had he been on the other side, facing the beam or the warhead, he’d be dead.
They must have been hit by some crude effector weapon as well, because the plasma rifle seemed to have fused. It had been cradled between his suit and the capsule skin and couldn’t have been affected by whatever wrecked the capsule itself, but the weapon had smoked and got hot, and when they’d finally landed – Beychae shaken but unhurt – and opened up the gun’s inspection panels, it was to find a melted, still-warm mess inside.
Maybe if he’d taken just a little less time to convince Beychae; maybe if he’d just knocked the old guy out and left the talking for later. He’d taken too much time, given them too much time. Seconds counted. Dammit, milliseconds, nanoseconds counted. Too much time.
‘They’re going to kill you!’ he’d shouted. ‘They want you on their side or they want you dead. The war’s going to start soon, Tsoldrin; you support them or you’ll have an accident. They won’t let you stay neutral!’
‘Insane,’ Beychae repeated, cradling Ubrel Shiol’s head in his hands. Saliva trickled from the woman’s mouth. ‘You’re insane, Zakalwe; insane.’ He started to cry.
He went over to the old man, knelt on one knee, holding the gun he’d taken from Shiol. ‘Tsoldrin; what do you think she had this for?’ He put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. ‘Didn’t you see the way she moved when she tried to kick me? Tsoldrin; librarians… research assistants… they just don’t move like that.’ He reached out and patted the unconscious woman’s collar flat and tidy again. ‘She was one of your jailers, Tsoldrin; she would probably have been you executioner.’ He reached under the car, pulled out the bouquet of flowers, and placed them gently under her blonde head, removing Beychae’s hands.
‘Tsoldrin,’ he said. ‘We have to go. She’ll be all right.’ He arranged Shiol’s arms in a less awkward position. She was already on her side, so she wouldn’t choke. He reached carefully under Beychae’s arms and slowly drew the old man up to his feet. Ubrel Shiol’s eyes flickered open; she saw the two men in front of her; she muttered something, and one hand went to the back of her neck. She started to roll over, unbalanced in her grogginess; the hand that had gone to her neck came away clutching a tiny cylinder like a pen; he felt Beychae stiffen as the girl looked up and, as she fell forward, tried to point the little laser at Beychae’s head.
Beychae looked into her dark, half-unfocused eyes, over the top of the pen laser, and felt a sort of appalled disconnectedness. The girl tried hard to steady herself, aiming at him. Not Zakalwe, he thought; at me. Me!
‘Ubrel…’ he began.
The girl fell back in a dead faint.
Beychae stared down at her body lying limp on the road. Then he heard somebody saying his name and tugging his arm.
‘Tsoldrin… Tsoldrin… Come on, Tsoldrin.’
‘Zakalwe; she was aiming at me, not you!’
‘I know, Tsoldrin.’
‘She was aiming at me!’
‘I know. Come on; here’s the capsule.’
‘At me…’
‘I know, I know. Get in here.’