‘I’m sorry I upset them.’ He touched the bandages on his head. ‘I’d no idea they felt this strongly though.’
‘They don’t.’ Insile frowned. ‘That’s what’s weird.’ He got up and walked over to the nearest window, looking out at the blizzard.
‘Shit, Cheri, half those guys would’ve gladly invited you into the hangar and done their best to lose you a couple of teeth, but a gun?’ He shook his head. ‘There’s not one of those guys I’d trust behind me with a bread roll or a handful of ice-cubes, but if it was a gun…’ He shook his head again. ‘I wouldn’t think twice. They just aren’t like that.’
‘Maybe I imagined it all, Saaz,’ he said.
Saaz looked round, a worried expression on his face. It melted a little when he saw his friend was smiling. ‘Cheri; I admit I don’t want to imagine I’m wrong about one of them, but the alternative is… just somebody else. I don’t know who. The military police don’t know either.’
‘I don’t think I was much help to them,’ he confessed.
Saaz came back, sat down on the other bed again. ‘You really have no idea who you talked to afterwards? Where you went?’
‘None.’
‘You told me you were going to the briefing room, to check out the latest targets.’
‘Yes, so I’ve heard.’
‘But when Jine went there – to invite you to step into the hangar for saying such terrible things about our high command and our low tactics – you weren’t there.’
‘I don’t know what happened, Saaz; I’m sorry, but I just…’ He felt tears prick behind his eyes. The suddenness surprised him. He put the fruit back down in his lap. He made a very large sniffing noise, rubbed his nose, and coughed, patted his chest. ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated.
Insile watched the other man for a moment as he reached for a handkerchief from the bedside table.
Saaz shrugged, grinned broadly. ‘Hey; never mind. It’ll come back to you. Maybe it was just some loony ground-crewman pissed off because you’d stepped on his fingers once too often. If you want to remember, don’t try too hard.’
‘Yeah; “Get some rest”, I’ve heard that before, Saaz.’ He picked the fruit from his lap, placed it on the bedside cabinet.
‘Can I get you anything, for next time?’ Insile asked. ‘Apart from Talibe, on whom I may have designs myself if you refuse to rise to the occasion.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Booze?’
‘No, I’m saving myself for the mess-room bar.’
‘Books?’
‘Really, Saaz; nothing.’
‘Zakalwe,’ Saaz laughed. ‘There isn’t even anybody else here for you to talk to; what do you do all day?’
He looked at the window, then back at Saaz. ‘I think, quite a lot,’ he said. ‘I try to remember.’
Saaz came over to the bed. He looked very young. He hesitated, then punched him gently in the chest. He glanced at the bandages. ‘Don’t get lost in there, old buddy-pal.’
He was expressionless for a moment. ‘Yeah; don’t worry. But anyway, I’m a good navigator.’
There was something he’d meant to tell Saaz Insile, but he couldn’t remember what that was either. Something that would warn him, because there was something that he knew about that he hadn’t known about before, and something that required… warning.
The frustration of it made him want to scream sometimes; to tear the white plump pillows in half and pick up the white chair and smash it through the windows to let the mad white fury out there inside.
He wondered how quickly he’d freeze if the windows were open.
Well, at least it would be appropriate; he’d arrived here frozen, so why not leave the same way? He entertained the thought that some cell-memory, some bone-remembered affinity had drawn him here, of all places, where the great battles were fought on the titanic crashing tabular bergs, calved from their vast glaciers and swirling like ice-cubes in some planet-sized cocktail glass, a scatter of ever-shifting frozen islands, some of them hundreds of kilometres long, circling the world between pole and tropic, their broad backs a white wasteland spattered with blood and bodies, and the wrecks of tanks and planes.
To fight for what would inevitably melt and could never provide food or minerals or a permanent place to live, seemed an almost deliberate caricature of the conventional folly of war. He enjoyed the fight, but even the way the war was fought disturbed him, and he had made enemies amongst the other pilots, and his superiors, by speaking his mind.
But somehow he knew that Saaz was right; it had not been what he’d said in the mess that had led to somebody trying to kill him. At least (said something in him), not directly…
Thone, the squadron’s CO, came to see him; no flunkies, for a change.
‘Thank you, Nurse,’ he said at the door, then closed it, smiled, and came over to the bed; he had the white chair. He sat in it and drew himself up, so that his girth was made to look less. ‘Well, Captain Zakalwe, how are we coming along?’
A flowery smell, Thone’s preferred scent, drifted over from the man. ‘I hope to be flying within a couple of weeks, sir,’ he said. He’d never liked the CO, but made the effort of smiling bravely.
‘Do you?’ Thone said. ‘Do you now. That’s not what the doctors say, Captain Zakalwe. Unless they’re saying different things to me than they are to you.’
He frowned. ‘Well, it might be a… few weeks, sir…’
‘It might be we have to send you home, I think, Captain Zakalwe,’ Thone said, with an insincere smiled. ‘… or at least to the mainland, as I’m told your home is further afield, eh?’
‘I’m sure I’ll be able to return to my duties, sir. Of course, I realise there will be a medical, but…’
‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Thone said. ‘Well, we’ll just have to see, won’t we. Hmm. Very good.’ He stood up. ‘Is there anyth -‘
‘There’s nothing you can get -‘ He began, then saw the look on Thone’s face. ‘I beg your pardon, sir.’
‘As I was saying, Captain; is there anything I can get you?’
He looked down at the white sheets. ‘No, sir. Thank you, sir.’
‘A speedy recovery, Captain Zakalwe,’ Thone said frostily.
He saluted Thone, who nodded, turned and left.
He was left looking at the white chair.
Nurse Talibe came in after a few moments, arms crossed, her round, pale face very calm and kind. ‘Try to sleep,’ she told him, and took the chair away.
He woke in the night and saw the lights shining through the snow outside; silhouetted against the floodlights, the falling flakes became translucent shadows, massing soft against the harsh, downward light. The whiteness beyond, in the black night, came compromised as grey.
He woke with the smell of flowers in his nostrils.
He clutched beneath the pillow, felt the single leg of the sharp, long-nosed scissor.
He remembered Thone’s face.
He remembered the briefing room, and the four COs; they’d invited him for a drink, said they wanted a word.
In the room of one of them – he couldn’t remember their names, but he would remember soon, and already he would recognise them – they asked him about what they’d heard he’d said in the mess.
And, a little drunk, and thinking he was very clever, thinking he might find out something interesting, he’d told them what he suspected they wanted to hear, not what he’d said to the other pilots.
And had discovered a plot. He wanted the new government to be true to its populist promises, and end the war. They wanted to stage a coup, and they needed good pilots.
High on the drink and his nerves, he’d left them thinking he was for them, and gone straight to Thone. Thone the hard but fair; Thone the dislikeable and petty, Thone the vain, the perfumed, but Thone the man known to be pro-government. (Though Saaz Insile had once said the man was pro-government with the pilots, and anti-government with their superiors.)
And the look on Thone’s face…
Not then; later. After Thone had told him to say nothing to anybody else, because he thought there might be traitors amongst the pilots too, and told him to go to bed as though nothing had happened, and he’d gone, and because he’d still been drunk, maybe, woken up that second too late as they came for him, shoved some impregnated rag over his face and held it there while he struggled, but eventually had to breathe, and the choking fumes took him.
Dragged through the corridors, socked feet sliding over the tiles; men on either side. They went to one of the hangars, and somebody went to the lift controls, and he still could only dimly see the floor in front of him and could not raise his head. But he could smell flowers, from the man on his right.