‘Quite clever,’ he said, mildly disappointed.
‘You’re not looking at it properly, Cheradenine,’ Beychae told him. ‘Look closer.’
He looked closer.
‘I don’t suppose you have anything very small and spherical, do you?’ Beychae said, ‘Like a… ball-bearing.’
‘A ball-bearing?’ he said, a pained expression on his face.
‘You don’t have such things?’
‘I think you’ll find in most societies ball-bearings don’t last much beyond room-temperature superconductivity, let alone field technology. Unless you’re into industrial archeology and trying to keep some ancient machine running. No, I don’t have any ball…’ he peered closer at the centre of the shallow rock cone. ‘Notches.’
‘Exactly.’ Beychae smiled.
He stood back, looking at the ridged cone as a whole. ‘It’s a maze!’
Maze. There had been a maze in the garden. They outgrew it, became too familiar with it, eventually only used it when other children they didn’t like came for the day to the great house; they could lose them in the maze for a few hours.
‘Yes,’ Beychae nodded. ‘They would start out with small coloured beads or pebbles, and try to work their way to the rim.’ He looked closer. ‘They say there might have been a way to turn it into a game, by painting lines that divided each ring into segments; little wooden bridges and blocking pieces like walls could be used to facilitate one’s own progress or prevent that of one’s rivals.’ Beychae squinted closer in the fading light. ‘Hmm. Paint must have faded.’
He looked down at the hundreds of tiny ridges on the surface of the shallow cone – like a model of a huge volcano, he thought – and smiled. He sighed, looked at the screen set into the wrist of the suit, tried the emergency signal button again. No reply.
‘Trying to contact the Culture?’
‘Mmm,’ he said, gazing again at the petrified maze.
‘What will happen to you if Governance find us?’ Beychae asked.
‘Oh,’ he shrugged, walking back to the balustrade they had stood at earlier. ‘Probably not much. Not very likely they’ll just blow my brains out; they’ll want to question me. Should give the Culture plenty of time to get me out; either negotiated or just snapped away. Don’t worry about me.’ He smiled at Beychae. ‘Tell them I took you by force. I’ll say I stunned you and stuffed you into the capsule. So don’t worry; they’ll probably let you go straight back to your studies.’
‘Well,’ Beychae said, rejoining the other man at the balustrade. ‘My studies were a delicate construction, Zakalwe; they maintained my carefully developed disinterest. They may not be so easy to resume, after your… exuberantly violent interruption.’
‘Ah.’ He tried not to smile. He looked down at the trees, then at the suit gloves, as though checking all the fingers were there. ‘Yeah. Look, Tsoldrin… I’m sorry… I mean about your friend, Ms Shiol.’
‘As am I,’ Beychae said quietly. He smiled uncertainly. ‘I felt happy, Cheradenine. I hadn’t felt like that for… well, long enough.’ They stood watching the sun sink behind the clouds. ‘You are certain she was one of theirs? I mean, absolutely?’
‘Beyond any reasonable doubt, Tsoldrin.’ He thought he saw tears in the old man’s eyes. He looked away. ‘Like I said; I’m sorry.’
‘I hope,’ Beychae said, ‘that is not the only way the old can be made happy… can be happy. Through deceit.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t all deceit,’ he said. ‘And anyway, being old isn’t what it used to be; I’m old,’ he reminded Beychae, who nodded, took out a kerchief and sniffed.
‘Of course; so you are. I forgot. Strange, isn’t it? Whenever we see people after a long time we are always surprised how they’ve grown or aged. But when I see you, well, you haven’t changed a bit, and instead I feel very old – unfairly, unjustifiably old – beside you, Cheradenine.’
‘Actually I have changed, Tsoldrin.’ He grinned. ‘But no, I haven’t got any older.’ He looked Beychae in the eye. ‘They’d give you this, too, if you asked them. The Culture would let you grow younger, then stabilise your age, or let you grow old again, but very slowly.’
‘Bribery, Zakalwe?’ Beychae said, smiling.
‘Hey, it was just a thought. And it’d be a payment, not a bribe. And they wouldn’t force it on you. But it’s academic, anyway.’ He paused, nodding into the sky. ‘Completely academic; now. Here comes a plane.’
Tsoldrin looked out to the red clouds of sunset. He couldn’t see any aircraft.
‘A Culture one?’ Beychae asked cautiously.
He smiled. ‘In the circumstances, Tsoldrin, if you can see it, it isn’t a Culture one.’ He turned and walked quickly, picking up the suit helmet and putting it on. Suddenly the dark figure became inhuman, behind the armoured, sensor-studded faceplate of the suit. He took a large pistol from the suit holster.
‘Tsoldrin,’ his voice came booming from speakers set in the suit chest as he checked the settings on the gun. ‘If I were you I’d get back to the capsule, or just plain run away and hide.’ The figure turned to face Beychae, the helmet like the head of some gigantic, fearsome insect. ‘I’m fixing to give these assholes a fight, just for the sheer hell of it, and it might be best for you if you weren’t nearby.’
* * *
IV
The ship was over eighty kilometres long and it was called the Size Isn’t Everything. The last thing he’d been on for any length of time had actually been bigger, but then that had been a tabular iceberg big enough to hide two armies on, and it didn’t beat the General Systems Vehicle by much.
‘How do these things hold together?’ He stood on a balcony, looking out over a sort of miniature valley composed of accommodation units; each stepped terrace was smothered in foliage, the space was criss-crossed by walk-ways and slender bridges, and a small stream ran through the bottom of the V. People sat at tables in little courtyards, lounged on the grass by the stream side or amongst the cushions and couches of cafes and bars on the terraces. Hanging above the centre of the valley, beneath a ceiling of glowing blue, a travel-tube snaked away into the distance on either side, following the wavy line of the valley. Under the tube, a line of fake sunlight burned, like some enormous strip light.
‘Hmm?’ Diziet Sma said, arriving at his elbow with two drinks; she handed one to him.
‘They’re too big,’ he said. He turned to face the woman. He’d seen the things they called bays, where they built smaller space ships (smaller in this case meant over three kilometres long); vast unsupported hangars with thin walls. He’d been near the immense engines, which as far as he could gather were solid, and inaccessible (how?), and obviously extremely massive; he’d felt oddly threatened on discovering that there was no control room, no bridge, no flight deck anywhere in the vast vessel, just three Minds – fancy computers, apparently – controlling everything (what!?)
And now he was finding out where the people lived, but it was all too big, too much, too flimsy somehow, especially if the ship was supposed to accelerate as smartly as Sma claimed. He shook his head. ‘I don’t understand; how does it hold together?’
Sma smiled. ‘Just think; fields, Cheradenine. It’s all done with force fields.’ She put one hand out to his troubled face, patted one cheek. ‘Don’t look so confused. And don’t try to understand it all too quickly. Let it soak in. Just wander around; lose yourself in it for a few days. Come back whenever.’
Later, he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then the people who had built it.
He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while.
‘Of course I don’t have to do this,’ one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. ‘But look; this table’s clean.’
He agreed that the table was clean.
‘Usually,’ the man said. ‘I work on alien – no offence – alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my speciality… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but,’ he slapped the table, ‘when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.’