– You finished drawing things yet? it asked the Xenophobe.
– No.
– Can’t you devote just a little of your supposedly bogglingly fast Mind to finding out why he was so interested in that ship?
– Oh, I suppose so, but –
– Wait a minute; what have we here? Listen to this:
‘… You’ll find out, I suppose. Past time I told you,’ he said, looking out of the window but talking to Sma. The city slid by beyond, bright in the sunlight. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated, and somehow Sma got the impression he was looking at one city, but seeing another, or seeing the same one but long ago, as though in some time-polarised light only his distressed, enfevered eyes could see.
‘This is where you come from?’
‘Long time ago, now,’ he said, coughing, doubling up, holding one arm tight to his side. He took a long slow breath. ‘I was born here…’
The woman listened. The drone listened. The ship listened.
While he told them the story, of the great house that lay halfway between the mountains and the sea, upstream from the great city. He told them about the estate surrounding the house, and the beautiful gardens, and about the three, later four, children who were brought up in the house, and who played in the garden. He told them about the summerhouses and the stone boat and the maze and the fountains and the lawns and the ruins and the animals in the woods. He told them about the two boys and the two girls, and the two mothers, and the one strict father and the one unseen father, imprisoned in the city. He told them about the visits to the city, which the children always thought lasted too long, and about the time when they were no longer allowed to go into the garden without guards to escort them, and about how they stole a gun, one day, and were going to take it out into the estate to shoot it, but only got as far as the stone boat, and surprised an assassination squad come to kill the family, and saved the day by alerting the house. He told them about the bullet that hit Darckense, and the sliver of her bone that
pierced him almost to his heart.
He started to dry up, voice croaking. Sma saw a waiter pushing a trolley into the far end of the coach. She bought a couple of soft drinks; he gulped at first, but coughed painfully, and then just sipped his.
‘And the war did start,’ he said, looking at but not seeing the last of the suburbs flow past; the countryside was a green blur as they accelerated again. ‘And the two boys, that had become men… ended up on different sides.’
– Fascinating, the Xenophobe communicated to Skaffen-Amtiskaw. I think I will do a little quick research.
– About time too, the drone sent back, listening to the man talk at the same time.
He told them about the war, and the siege that involved the Staberinde, and the besieged forces breaking out… and he told them about the man, the boy who’d played in the garden who, in the depths of one terrible night, had caused the thing to be done which led to him being called the Chairmaker, and the dawn when Darckense’s sister and brother had found what Elethiomel had done, and the brother trying to take his own life, giving up his generalship, abandoning the armies and his sister in the selfishness of despair.
And he told them about Livueta, who had never forgiven, and had followed him – though he did not know it at the time – on another cold ship, for a century through the intractable calm slowness of real space, to a place where the icebergs swirled round a continental pole, forever calving and crashing and shrinking… But then she had lost him, the trail gone appropriately cold, and she had stayed there, searching, for years, and could not have known that he had left for another life entirely, taken away by the tall lady who walked through the blizzard as though it wasn’t there, a small space ship at her back like a faithful pet.
And so Livueta Zakalwe gave up, and took another long journey, to get away from the burden of her memories, and where she had ended up – (the ship quizzed the drone for the location; Skaffen-Amtiskaw gave it the name of the planet and the system, a few decades away) – that had been where she’d finally been tracked down, after his last job for them.
Skaffen-Amtiskaw remembered. The grey-haired woman, in her early late-years, working in a clinic in the slums, a delicate shanty town strewn like trash across the mud and tree-lined slopes above a tropical city looking out across sparkling lagoons and golden sandbars to the rollers of a vast ocean. Thin, marks under her eyes, a pot-bellied child on each hip when they first went to see her, standing in the middle of the crowded room, wailing children tugging at her hems.
The drone had learned to appreciate the full range of pan-human facial expression, and thought that, in witnessing the one that appeared on Livueta Zakalwe’s face when she saw Zakalwe, it had experienced something close to unique. Such surprise; but such hatred!
‘Cheradenine…’ Sma said tenderly, gently laying one hand on his. She put her other hand to the nape of his neck, stroking him there as his head bent lower to the table. He turned and watched the prairie stream past like a sea of gold.
He put one hand up, smoothing it slowly over his brow and shaved scalp, as though through long hair.
Couraz had been everything; ice and fire, land and water. Once, the broad isthmus had been a place of rock and glaciers, then a land of forests as the world and its continents shifted and the climate altered. Later it became a desert, but then suffered something beyond the capacity of the globe itself to provide. An asteroid the size of a mountain hit the isthmus, like a bullet striking flesh.
It burst into the granite heart of the land, ringing the planet like a bell. Two oceans met for the first time; the dust of the immense explosion blocked out the sun, started a small ice age, wiped out thousands of species. The ancestors of the species that later came to rule the planet took their initial opportunity from that cataclysm.
The crater became a dome as the planet reacted over the millennia; the oceans were separated again when the rocks – even the seemingly solid layers flowing and warping, over those great scales of time and distance – pushed back, like an aeons late bruise forming on the skin of the world.
Sma had found the information brochure in a seat pocket. She looked up from it for a moment at the man in the seat beside her. He’d fallen asleep. His face looked drawn and grey and old. She could not remember ever having seen him look so ancient and ill. Dammit, he’d looked healthier when he’d been beheaded. ‘Zakalwe,’ she whispered, shaking her head. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘Death-wish,’ the drone muttered, quietly. ‘With extrovert complications.’
Sma shook her head and went back to the brochure. The man slept fitfully and the drone monitored him.
Reading about Couraz, Sma suddenly recalled the great fortress she had been picked up from by the Xenophobe’s module, on a sunny day that now seemed as long ago as it was far away. She looked up, sighing, from a photograph of the isthmus taken from space, and thought back to the house under the dam, and felt home-sick… Couraz had been a fortified town, a prison, a fortress, a city, a target. Now – perhaps appropriately, Sma thought, looking at the injured, shivering man at her side – the great dome of rock held a small city that was mostly taken up with the biggest hospital in the world.
The train hurtled into a tunnel carved from naked rock.
They passed through the station, took an elevator to one of the hospital reception levels. They sat on a couch, surrounded by potted plants and soft music, while the drone, sitting on the floor at their feet, plundered the nearest computer work station for information.
‘Got her,’ it announced quietly. ‘Go to the receptionist and tell her your name; I’ve ordered you a pass; no verification required.’
‘Come on, Zakalwe.’ Sma rose, collected her pass, and helped him to his feet. He staggered. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘Cheradenine, let me at -‘
‘Just take me to her.’
‘Let me talk to her first.’
‘No; take me to her. Now.’
The ward was up another few levels, in the sunlight. The light came through clear, high windows. The sky was white with scudding cloud outside, and way in the distance, beyond the dappkd fields and woodland, the ocean was a line of blue haze beneath the sky.