Old men lay quietly in the broad, partitioned ward. Sma helped him towards the far end, where the drone said Livueta must be. They entered a short, broad corridor. Livueta came out of a side room. She stopped when she saw them.
Livueta Zakalwe looked older; white-haired, skin soft and lined with age. Her eyes were undulled. She drew herself up a little. She was holding a deep-sided tray full of little boxes and bottles.
Livueta looked at them; the man, the woman, the little pale suitcase that was the drone.
Sma glanced to one side, hissed, ‘Zakalwe!’ She hauled him more upright.
His eyes had been shut. They blinked open and he squinted uncertainly at the woman standing in front of them. He appeared not to recognise her at first, then, slowly, understanding seemed to filter through.
‘Livvy?’ he said, blinking quickly, squinting at her. ‘Livvy?’
‘Hello, Ms Zakalwe,’ Sma said, when the woman did not reply.
Livueta Zakalwe turned contemptuous eyes from the man half-hanging from Sma’s right arm. She looked at Sma and shook her head, so that just for an instant, Sma thought she was going to say no, she wasn’t Livueta.
‘Why do you keep doing this?’ Livueta Zakalwe said softly. Her voice was still young, the drone thought, just as the Xenophobe came back with some fascinating information it had gleaned from historical records.
(- Really? the drone signalled. Dead?)
‘Why do you do this?’ she said. ‘Why do you do this… to him; to me… why? Can’t you just leave us all alone?’
Sma shrugged, a little awkwardly.
‘Livvy…’ he said.
‘I’m sorry, Ms Zakalwe,’ Sma said. ‘It’s what he wanted; we promised.’
‘Livvy; please; talk to me; let me ex -‘
‘You shouldn’t do this,’ Livueta told Sma. Then she turned her gaze to the man, who was rubbing one hand over his shaved scalp, grinning inanely at her, blinking. ‘He looks sick,’ she said flatly.
‘He is,’ Sma said.
‘Bring him in here.’ Livueta Zakalwe opened another door; a room with a bed. Skaffen-Amtiskaw, still wondering exactly what was going on in the light of the information it had just received from the ship, still found the time to be mildly surprised that the woman was taking it all so calmly this time. Last time she’d tried to kill the fellow and it had had to move in smartly.
‘I don’t want to lie down,’ he protested, when he saw the bed.
‘Then just sit, Cheradenine,’ Sma said. Livueta Zakalwe made a snaking motion with her head, muttered something even the drone could not make out. She placed the tray of drugs down on a table, stood in one corner of the room, arms crossed, while the man sat down on the bed.
‘I’ll leave you alone,’ Sma said to the woman. ‘We’ll be just outside.’
Close enough for me to hear, thought the drone, and to stop her trying to murder you again, if that’s what she decides to do.
‘No,’ the woman said, shaking her head, looking with an odd dispassion at the man on the bed. ‘No; don’t leave. There’s nothing -‘
‘But I want them to leave,’ he said, and coughed, doubling over and almost falling off the bed. Sma went to help him, and pulled him a little further on to the bed.
‘What can’t you say in front of them?’ Livueta Zakalwe asked. ‘What don’t they know?’
‘I just want to have a… a talk in private, Livvy, please,’ he said, looking up at her. ‘Please…’
‘I have nothing to say to you. And there is nothing you can say to me.’
The drone heard somebody in the corridor outside; there was a knock at the door. Livueta opened it. A young female nurse, who called Livueta Sister, told her that it was time to prepare one of the patients.
Livueta Zakalwe looked at her watch. ‘I have to go,’ she told them.
‘Livvy! Livvy, please!’ He leant forward on the bed, both elbows tight by his sides, both hands clawed out, palm up, in front of him. ‘Please!’ There were tears in his eyes.
‘This is pointless,’ the old woman shook her head. ‘And you are a fool.’ She looked at Sma. ‘Don’t bring him to me again.’
‘LIVVY!’ He collapsed on the bed, curled up and quivering. The drone sensed heat from the shaven head, could see blood vessels throb on his neck and hands.
‘Cheradenine, it’s all right,’ Sma said, going to the bed and down on one knee, taking his shoulders in her hands.
There was a crack as one of Livueta Zakalwe’s hands thumped down into the top of a table she stood beside. The man wept, shaking. The drone sensed odd brain-wave patterns. Sma looked up at the woman.
‘Don’t call him that,’ Livueta Zakalwe said.
‘Don’t call him what?’ Sma said.
Sma could be pretty thick, the drone thought.
‘Don’t call him Cheradenine.’
‘Why not?’
‘It isn’t his name.’
‘It isn’t?’ Sma looked mystified. The drone monitored the man’s brain activity and blood flow and thought there was trouble coming.
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘But…’ Sma began. She shook her head suddenly. ‘He’s your brother; he’s Cheradenine Zakalwe.’
‘No, Ms Sma,’ Livueta Zakalwe said, taking the drug-tray up again and opening the door with one hand. ‘No, he isn’t.’
‘Aneurysm!’ the drone said quickly, and slipped through the air, past Sma to the bed, where the man was shaking spastically. It scanned him more thoroughly; found a massive blood vessel leakage pouring into the man’s brain.
It whirled him round, straightened him out, using its effector to make him unconscious. Inside his brain, the blood continued to pump through the tear into the surrounding tissue, invading the cortex.
‘Sorry about this, ladies,’ the drone said. It produced a cutting field and sliced through his skull. He stopped breathing. Skaffen-Amtiskaw used another aspect of its force field to keep his chest moving in and out, while its effector gently persuaded the muscles that opened his lungs to work again. It took the top of his skull off; a quick low-powered CREW blast, mirrored off another field component, cauterised all the appropriate blood vessels. It held his skull to one side. Blood was already visible, welling through the folded grey geography of the man’s brain tissue. His heart stopped; the drone kept it going with its effector.
Both women had stopped, fascinated and appalled at the actions of the machine.
It stripped away the layers of the man’s brain with its own senses; cortex, limbic, thalamus/cerebellum, it moved through his defences and armaments, down his thoroughfares and ways, through the stores and the lands of his memories, searching and mapping and tapping and searing.
‘What do you mean?’ Sma said, in an almost dream-like way to the elderly woman just about to quit the room. ‘What do you mean, “no”? What do you mean he isn’t your brother?’
‘I mean he is not Cheradenine Zakalwe,’ Livueta sighed, watching the drone’s bizarre operation upon the man.
She was… She was… She was…
Sma found herself frowning into the woman’s face. ‘What? Then…’
Go back; go right back. What was I to do? Go back. The point is to win. Go back! Everything must bend to that truth.
‘Cheradenine Zakalwe, my brother,’ Livueta Zakalwe said, ‘died nearly two hundred years ago. Died not long after he received the bones of our sister made into a chair.’
The drone sucked the blood from the man’s brain, teasing a hollow field-filament through the broken tissue, collecting the red fluid in a little transparent bulb. A second filament tube spun-knit the torn tissue back together. It sucked more blood to decrease the man’s blood pressure, used its effector to alter the settings in the appropriate glands, so that the pressure would not grow so great again for a while. It sent a narrow tube of field over to a small sink under the window, jetting the excess blood down the drain hole, then briefly turning on the tap. The blood flushed away, gurgling.
‘The man you know as Cheradenine Zakalwe -‘
Facing it by facing it, that’s all I ever did; Staberinde, Zakalwe; the names hurt, but how else could I-
‘- is the man who took my brother’s name just as he took my brother’s life, just as he took my sister’s life -‘
But she-
‘- He was the commander of the Staberinde. He is the Chairmaker. He is Elethiomel.’
Livueta Zakalwe walked out, closing the door behind her.
Sma turned, face almost bloodless, to look at the body of the man lying on the bed… while Skaffen-Amtiskaw worked on, engrossed in its struggle to make good.
* * *
Epilogue
* * *
Dust, as usual, followed them, though the young man said several times he thought it might rain. The old man disagreed and said the clouds over the mountains were deceptive. They drove on through the deserted lands, past blackened fields and the shells of cottages and the ruins of farms and the burned villages and the still smoking towns, until they came to the abandoned city. In the city they drove resoundingly through the wide empty streets, and once took the vehicle crashing and careering up a narrow alley crammed with bare market stalls and rickety poles supporting tattered shade-cloths, demolishing it all in a fine welter of splintering wood and wildly flapping fabric.