He watched the grey clouds move overhead. He stood on the flat stone summit of a high hill, surrounded by other hilltops almost as high, all wooded. He looked resentfully around the forested slopes and the curious, truncated stone pillars and plinths that covered the platform peak. He felt a sense of vertigo, exposed to such wide horizons again after so long spent in the cleft city. He left the view, kicked his way through some wind-piled leaves, back to where Beychae sat and the plasma rifle rested against a great round stone. The capsule was a hundred metres away, down in the trees.
He picked up the plasma rifle for the fifth or sixth time and inspected it.
It made him want to cry; it was such a beautiful weapon. Every time he picked it up he half hoped that it would be all right, that the Culture had fitted it with some self-repair facility without telling him, that the damage would be no more…
The wind blew; the leaves scattered. He shook his head, exasperated. Beychae, sitting in his thickly padded trousers and long jacket, turned to look at him.
‘Broken?’ the old man asked.
‘Broken,’ he said. His face took on an expression of annoyance; he gripped the weapon round the muzzle with both hands and swung it round his head, then let it go and sent it whirling away into the trees below; it disappeared in a flurry of dislodged leaves.
He sat down beside Beychae.
Plasma rifle gone, just a pistol left; only one suit; probably no way he could use the suit’s AG without giving away their position; capsule wrecked; module nowhere to be seen; no word from the terminal earring or the suit itself… it was a sorry mess. He checked the suit for whatever broadcast signals it was picking up; the wrist screen displayed some news headlines programme; nothing about Solotol was mentioned. A few of the Cluster’s brush-fire wars were.
Beychae looked at the small screen too. ‘Can you tell from that whether they are looking for us?’ he asked.
‘Only if we see it on the news. Military stuff will be tight-beamed; slim chance we’ll pick up a transmission.’ He looked at the clouds. ‘We’ll probably find out more directly, soon enough.’
‘Hmm,’ Beychae said. He frowned at the flagstones, then said, ‘I think I might know where this place is, Zakalwe.’
‘Yeah?’ he said, unenthusiastically. He put his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands, and looked out over the wooded plains to the low hills on the horizon.
Beychae nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking about it. I believe this is the Srometren Observatory, in Deshal Forest.’
‘How far is that from Solotol?’
‘Oh; different continent. Good two thousand kilometres.’
‘Same latitude,’ he said glumly, looking up at the chill grey skies.
‘Approximately, if this is the place I think it is.’
‘Who’s in charge here?’ he asked. ‘Whose jurisdiction? Same lot as in Solotol; the Humanists?’
‘The same.’ Beychae said, and got up, brushing the seat of his pants and looking around the flattened hill-top at the curious stone instruments that covered its flagstones. ‘Srometren Observatory!’ he said. ‘How ironic we should happen to come down here, on our way to the stars!’
‘Probably not just chance,’ he said, picking up a twig and brushing a few random shapes in the dust at his feet. ‘This place famous?’
‘Of course,’ Beychae said. ‘It was the centre of astronomical research for the old Vrehid Empire for five hundred years.’
‘On any tourist routes?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Then it probably has a beacon nearby, to guide aircraft in. Capsule may have made for it when it knew it was crippled. Makes us easier to find.’ He gazed up at the sky. ‘For everybody, unfortunately.’ He shook his head, went back to scratching in the dust with the twig.
‘What happens now?’ Beychae said.
He shrugged. ‘We wait and see who turns up. I can’t get any of the communication gear to work, so we don’t know if the Culture knows all that’s happened or not… for all I know the Module’s still coming for us, or a whole Culture starship’s on its way, or – probably more likely – your pals from Solotol…’ He shrugged, threw down the twig and sat back against the stonework behind him, glancing skyward. They might be watching us right now.’
Beychae looked up too. ‘Through the clouds?’
‘Through the clouds.’
‘Shouldn’t you be hiding, then? Running off through the woods?’
‘Maybe,’ he said.
Beychae stood looking down at the other man. ‘Where were you thinking of taking me, if we’d got away?’
‘The Impren System. There are space Habitats there,’ he said. ‘They’re neutral, or at least not as pro-war as this place.’
‘Do your… superiors really think war is so close, Zakalwe?’
‘Yes,’ he sighed. He already had the suit’s face-plate hinged up; now, with another look at the sky, he took the whole helmet off. He put one hand up over his forehead and through his drawn-back hair, then reached back and took the pony-tail out of its little ring, shaking his long black hair down. ‘It might take ten days, might take a hundred, but it’s coming.’ He smiled thinly at Beychae. ‘For the same reasons as last time.’
‘I thought we’d won the ecological argument against terra-forming,’ said Beychae.
‘We did, but times change; people change, generations change. We won the battles for the acknowledgement of machine sentience, but by all accounts the issue was fudged after that. Now people are saying, yes, they’re sentient, but it’s only human sentience that counts. Plus, people never need too much of an excuse to see other species as inferior.’
Beychae was silent for a while, then said, ‘Zakalwe, has it ever occurred to you that in all these things the Culture may not be as disinterested as you imagine, and it claims?’
‘No, it never occurred to me,’ he said, though Beychae got the impression the man hadn’t really thought first before answering.
‘They want other people to be like them, Cheradenine. They don’t terraform, so they don’t want others to either. There are arguments for it as well, you know; increasing species diversity often seems more important to people than preserving a wilderness, even without the provision of extra living space. The Culture believes profoundly in machine sentience, so it thinks everybody ought to, but I think it also believes every civilisation should be run by its machines. Fewer people want that. The issue of cross-species tolerance is, I’ll grant, of a different nature, but even there the Culture can sometimes appear to be insistent that deliberate inter-mixing is not just permissible but desirable; almost a duty. Again, who is to say that is correct?’
‘So you should have a war to… what? Clear the air?’ He inspected the suit helmet.
‘No, Cheradenine, I’m just trying to suggest to you that the Culture may not be as objective as it thinks it is, and, that being the case, its estimation concerning the likelihood of war may be equally untrustworthy.’
‘There are small wars on a dozen planets right now, Tsoldrin. People are talking war in public; either about how to avoid it, or how it might be limited, or how it can’t possibly happen… but it’s coming; you can smell it. You should catch the newscasts, Tsoldrin. Then you’d know.’
‘Well then, perhaps war is inevitable,’ Beychae said, looking away over the wooded plains and hills beyond the observatory. ‘Maybe it’s just… time.’
‘Crap,’ he said. Beychae looked at him, surprised. ‘There’s a saying: “War is a long cliff.” You can avoid the cliff completely, you can walk along the top for as long as you have the nerve, you can even choose to leap off, and if you only fall a short way before you hit a ledge you can always scramble back up again. Unless you’re just plain invaded, there are always choices, and even then, there’s usually something you’ve missed – a choice you didn’t make – that could have avoided invasion in the first place. You people still have your choices. There’s nothing inevitable about it.’
‘Zakalwe,’ Beychae said. ‘You surprise me. I’d have thought you -‘
‘You’d have thought I’d be in favour of war?’ he said, standing, a sad small smile on his lips. He put one hand on the other man’s shoulder. ‘You’ve had your nose buried in books for too long, Tsoldrin.’ He walked away past the stone instruments. Beychae looked down at the suit helmet, lying on the flagstones. He followed the other man.
‘You’re right, Zakalwe. I have been out of the flow of things for a long time. I probably don’t know who half the people in power are these days, or exactly what the issues are, or the precise balance of the various alliances… so the Culture cannot be so… desperate they think I can alter whatever’s going to happen. Can they?’