He turned round. He looked into Beychae’s face. ‘Tsoldrin, the truth is I don’t know. Don’t think I haven’t thought about this. It might be just that you, as a symbol, really,.would make all the difference, and maybe everybody is desperate to find an excuse not to have to fight; you could be that excuse if you come along, uncontaminated by recent events, as though from the dead, and provide a face-saving compromise.
‘Or maybe the Culture secretly thinks a small short war is a good idea, or even knows there’s nothing it can do to stop a full-scale one, but has to be seen to be doing something, no matter how long a shot it might be, so that people can’t say later “Why didn’t you try this?”‘ He shrugged. ‘I never try to second-guess the Culture, Tsoldrin, let alone Contact, and certainly not Special Circumstances.’
‘You just do their bidding.’
‘And get well paid for it.’
‘But you see yourself on the side of good, do you, Cheradenine?’
He smiled and sat on the stone plinth, legs swinging. ‘I have no idea whether they’re the good guys or not, Tsoldrin. They certainly seem to be, but then who knows that seeming is being?’ He frowned, looked away. ‘I have never seen them be cruel, even when they might have claimed they had an excuse to be so. It can make them seem cold, sometimes.’ He shrugged again. ‘But there are folks that’ll tell you it’s the bad gods that always have the most beautiful faces and the softest voices. Shit,’ he said, and jumped off the stone table. He went to stand by the balustrade which marked one edge of the old observatory, looking to where the sky was starting to redden above the horizon. It would be dark in an hour. ‘They keep their promises and they pay top rates. They make good employers, Tsoldrin.’
‘That does not mean we ought to let them decide our fate.’
‘You’d rather let those decadent dickheads in Governance do it instead?’
‘At least they’re involved, Zakalwe; it isn’t just a game to them.’
‘Oh, I think it is. I think that’s exactly what it is to them. The difference is that unlike the Culture’s Minds, they don’t know enough to take games seriously.’ He took a deep breath and watched the wind stir the branches beneath them; leaves fell away. ‘Tsoldrin; don’t say you’re on their side.’
‘The sides were always strange,’ Beychae said. ‘We all said that all we wanted was the best for the Cluster, and I think we all meant it, mostly. We all still want that. But I don’t know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I know too much, I’ve studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that settles over… whatever machinery we carry inside us that leads us to act, and puts the same weight everywhere, so that always you can see good and bad on each side, and always there are arguments, precedents for every possible course of action… so of course one ends up doing nothing. Perhaps that’s only right; perhaps that’s what evolution requires, to leave the field free for younger, unencumbered minds, and those not afraid to act.’
‘Okay, so it’s a balance. All societies are like that; the damping hand of the old and the firebrand youth together. It works out through generations, or through the set-up of your institutions, and their change and even replacement; but Governance, the Humanists, combine the worst of both approaches. Ancient, vicious, discredited ideas backed with adolescent war-mania. It’s a crock of shit, Tsoldrin, and you know it. You’ve earned the right to some leisure; nobody’s arguing. But that won’t stop you feeling guilty when – not if – the bad stuff comes. You have the power, Tsoldrin, whether you like it or not; just doing nothing is a statement, don’t you understand that? What is all your studying worth, all your learning, all your knowledge, if it doesn’t lead to wisdom? And what’s wisdom but knowing what is right, and what is the right thing to do? You’re almost a god to some of the people in this civilisation, Tsoldrin; again, whether you like it or not. If you do nothing… they’ll feel abandoned. They’ll feel despair. And who can blame them?’
He made a resigned sort of gesture with his hands, putting them both down on the stone parapet, gazing out to the darkening sky. Beychae was silent.
He gave the old man a while longer to think, then looked round at the flat stone summit of the hill, at all the strange stone instruments. ‘An observatory, eh?’
‘Yes,’ Beychae said after a moment’s hesitation. He touched one of the stone plinths with one hand. ‘Believed to have been a burial site, four or five thousand years ago; then to have had some sort of astrological significance; later, they may have predicted eclipses with readings taken here. Finally, the Vrehids built this observatory to study the motions of the moons, planets and stars. There are water-clocks, sundials, sextants, planet-dials… partial orreries… there are crude seismographs here, too, or at least earthquake direction indicators.’
‘They have telescopes?’
‘Very poor ones, and only for a decade or so before the Empire fell. The results they got from the telescopes caused a lot of problems; contradicted what they already knew, or thought they knew.’
‘That figures. What’s this?’ One of the plinths held a large, rusty metal bowl with a sharp central spindle.
‘Compass, I think,’ Beychae said. ‘It works by fields,’ he smiled.
‘And this? Looks like a tree stump.’ It was a huge, rough, very slightly fluted cylinder perhaps a metre in height, and twice that across. He tapped the edge. ‘Hmm; stone.’
‘Ah!’ Tsoldrin said, joining him at the stone cylinder. ‘Well, if it’s what I think it is… it was originally just a tree stump, of course…’ He ran his hand over the stone surface, looked round the edge for something. ‘But it was petrified, long ago. Look though; you can still see the rings in the wood.’
He leant closer, looking at the grey stone surface by the fading afternoon light. The growth rings of the long dead tree were indeed visible. He leant forward, taking off one of the suit gloves, and with his fingers stroked the surface of the stone. Some differential weathering of the wood-become-rock had made the rings tangible; his fingers felt the tiny ridges run beneath their surface like the fingerprint of some mighty stone god.
‘So many years,’ he breathed, putting his hand back to the very sapling centre of the stump, and running his hand out again. Beychae said nothing.
Every year a complete ring, signature of bad year and good by the spacing, and every ring complete, sealed, hermetic. Every year like part of a sentence, every ring a shackle, chained and chaining to the past; every ring a wall, a prison. A sentence locked in the wood, now locked in stone, frozen twice, sentenced twice, once for an imaginable time, then for an unimaginable time. His finger ran over the ring walls, dry paper over ridged rock.
‘This is just the cover,’ Beychae said from the other side. He was squatting down, looking for something on the side of the great stone stump. ‘There ought to be… ah. Here we are. Don’t expect we’ll be able to actually lift it, of course…’
‘Cover?’ he said, putting the glove back on and walking round to where Beychae was. ‘Cover for what?’
‘A sort of puzzle the Imperial Astronomers played when the viewing was patchy,’ Beychae said. ‘There; see that handhold?’
‘Just a second,’ he said. ‘Want to stand back a little?’ Beychae stood back. ‘It’s supposed to take four strong men, Zakalwe.’
‘This suit’s more powerful than that, though balancing might be a little…’ He found two hand-holds on the stone. ‘Suit command; strength normal max.’
‘You have to talk to the suit?’ Beychae asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said. He flexed, lifting one edge of the stone cover up; a tiny explosion of dust under the sole of one of the suit’s boots announced a trapped pebble giving up the struggle. ‘This one you do; they have ones you just have to think about something, but…’ he pulled on one edge of the cover, sticking one leg out to shift his centre of gravity as he did so. ‘… but I just never liked the idea of that.’ He held the whole stone top of the petrified stump above his head, then walked awkwardly, to the noise of crunching, popping gravel under his feet, to another stone table; he lowered, shifted the stone cover sidways until it rested on the table, and returned; he made the mistake of clapping his hands together, and produced what sounded like a gunshot. ‘Oops,’ he grinned. ‘Suit command; strength off.’
Revealed by the removal of the stone cap was a shallow cone. It seemed to have been carved from the petrified stump itself. Looking closer, he could see that it was ridged, tree ring by tree ring.