A little late… he heard himself think, slipping away.
There was more noise for a second or two – screams, maybe – and something whacked into his head, and he was rolling away, dust in his mouth and eyes… but he was starting to lose interest in all that stuff, and was happy to let the darkness wash over him. Maybe he was picked up again, later.
But that seemed to happen to somebody else.
When the terrible noise came, and the great, carved black rock landed in the middle of the village – just after the sky’s offering had been separated from his body and so joined to the air – everybody ran into the thinning mist, to get away from the screaming light. They gathered, whimpering, at the water hole.
After only fifty heartbeats, the dark shape appeared above the village again, rising hazily into the thinner mists near the sky. It did not roar this time, but moved quickly off with a noise like the wind, and shrank to nothing.
The shaman sent his apprentice back to see how things stood; the quaking youth disappeared into the mist. He returned safely, and the shaman led the still terrified people back to the village.
The body of the sky-offering still hung limply on the wooden frame at the summit of the mound. His head had disappeared.
After much chanting and grinding entrails, spotting shapes in the mists and three trances, the priest and his apprentice decided it was a good omen, and yet a warning at the same time. They sacrificed a meat-animal belonging to the family of the girl who had dropped the sky-offering’s head, and put the beast’s head in the earthenware pot instead.
* * *
Five
‘Dizzy! How the devil are you?’ He took her hand and helped her up onto the wooden pier from the roof of the just-surfaced module. He put his arms round her. ‘Good to see you again!’ he laughed. Sma patted his waist, finding herself unwilling to hug him back. He didn’t seem to notice.
He let her go, looked down to see the drone rising up from the module. ‘And Skaffen-Amtiskaw! They still letting you out without a guard?’
‘Hello, Zakalwe,’ the drone said.
He put his arm round Sma’s waist. ‘Come on up to the shack; we’ll have lunch.’
‘All right,’ she said.
They walked along the small wooden pier to a stone path laid across the sand, and on into the shade under the trees. The trees were blue or purple; huge puff heads of dark colour standing out against the pale blue sky, and tugged at by a warm, intermittent breeze. They sweated delicate perfumes from the tops of their silver-white trunks. The drone lifted to above tree height a couple of times, when other people passed on the path.
The man and woman walked through the sunlit avenues between the trees until they came to where a wide pool of water trembled reflections of twenty or so white huts; a small, sleek seaplane floated at a wooden jetty. They entered the cluster of buildings and climbed some steps to a balcony that looked over the pool and the narrow channel that led from it to the lagoon on the far side of the island.
The sun was sifted through the tree-heads; shadows moved to and fro along the veranda and over the small table and the two hammocks.
He motioned Sma to sit on the first hammock; a female servant appeared and he ordered lunch for two. When the servant had gone, Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated down and sat on the parapet of the veranda’s wall, overlooking the pool. Sma levered herself into the hammock carefully.
‘It true you own this island, Zakalwe?’
‘Um…’ he looked round, apparently uncertain, then nodded his head. ‘Oh yes; so I do.’ He kicked off his sandals and slumped into the other hammock, letting it sway. He picked up a bottle from the floor, and with each sway of the hammock poured a little more from the bottle into two glasses on the small table. He increased the swing when he had finished to be able to hand her drink to her.
‘Thank you.’
He sipped at his drink and closed his eyes. She watched the glass on his chest where his hands held it, and watched the liquid swill this way, that way, lethargic and eye-brown. She moved her gaze to his face and saw he had not changed; hair a bit darker than she remembered; swept away from his broad, tanned forehead and tied in a pony-tail behind. Fit-looking as ever. No older-looking, of course, because they’d stabilised his age as part of his payment for the last job.
His eyes opened slowly, heavy-lidded, and he looked back at her, smiling slowly. The eyes look older, she thought. But she could have been wrong.
‘So,’ she said, ‘we playing games here, Zakalwe?’
‘What do you mean, Dizzy?’
‘I’ve been sent to get you back again. They want you to do another job. You must have guessed that, so tell me now whether I’m wasting my time here or not. I’m in no mood to try and argue you…’
‘Dizzy!’ he exclaimed, sounding hurt, pivoting his legs off the hammock and onto the floor, then smiling persuasively, ‘Don’t be like that; of course you’re not wasting your time. I’ve already packed.’
He beamed at her like a happy child, his tanned face open and smiling. She looked at him with relief and disbelief.
‘So what was all the run-around for?’
‘What run-around?’ he said innocently, sitting back in the hammock again. ‘I had to come here to say goodbye to a close friend, that was all. But I’m ready to go. What’s the scam?’
Sma stared, open-mouthed. Then she turned to the drone. ‘Do we just go now?’
‘No point,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. ‘The course the GSV’s on, you can have two hours here, then go back to the Xenophobe; it can match with the What in about thirty hours.’ It swivelled to look at the man. ‘But we need a definite word. There’s a teratonne of GSV with twenty-eight million people on board charging in this direction; if it’s to wait here it has to slow down first, so it needs to know for sure. You really are coming? This afternoon?’
‘Drone, I just told you. I’ll do it.’ He leaned towards Sma. ‘What is the job again?’
‘Voerenhutz,’ she told him. ‘Tsoldrin Beychae.’
He beamed, teeth gleaming. ‘Old Tsoldrin still above ground? Well, it’ll be good to see him again.’
‘You have to talk him back into his working clothes again.’
He waved one hand airily. ‘Easy,’ he said, drinking.
Sma watched him drink. She shook her head.
‘Don’t you want to know why, Cheradenine?’ she asked.
He started to make a gesture with one hand that meant the same as a shrug, then thought better of it. ‘Umm; sure. Why, Diziet?’ he sighed.
‘Voerenhutz is coalescing into two groups; the people gaining the upper hand at the moment want to pursue aggressive terraforming policies…’
‘That’s sort of…’ he burped, ‘re-decorating a planet, right?’
Sma closed her eyes briefly. ‘Yes. Sort of. Whatever you choose to call it, it’s ecologically insensitive, to put it mildly. These people – they call themselves the Humanists – also want a sliding scale of sentient rights which will have the effect of letting them take over whatever even intelligently inhabited worlds they’re militarily able to. There are a dozen brush-fire wars going on right now. Any one of them could spark the big one, and to an extent the Humanists encourage these wars because they appear to prove their case that the Cluster is too crowded and needs to find new planetary habitats.’
‘They also,’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, ‘refuse to acknowledge machine sentience fully; they exploit proto-conscious computers and claim only human subjective experience has any intrinsic value; carbon fascists.’
‘I see,’ he nodded, and looked very serious. ‘And you want old Beychae to get into harness with these Humanist guys, right?’
‘Cheradenine!’ Sma scolded, as Skaffen-Amtiskaw’s fields went frosty.
He looked hurt. ‘But they’re called the Humanists!’
‘That’s just their name, Zakalwe.’
‘Names are important,’ he said, apparently serious.
‘It’s still just what they call themselves; it doesn’t make them the good guys.’
‘Okay.’ He grinned at Sma. ‘Sorry.’ He tried to look more business-like. ‘You want him pulling in the other direction, like last time.’
‘Yes,’ Sma said.
‘Fine. Sounds almost easy. No soldiering?’
‘No soldiering.’
‘I’ll do it.’ He nodded.
‘Do I hear the sound of a barrel-bottom being scraped?’ Skaffen-Amtiskaw muttered.
‘Just send the signal.’ Sma told it.
‘Okay,’ said the drone. ‘Signal sent.’ It made a good impression of glowering at the man with its fields. ‘But you’d better not change your mind.’
‘Only the thought of having to spend any time in your company, Skaffen-Amtiskaw, could possibly disinduce me from accompanying the delightful Ms Sma here to Voerenhutz.’ He glanced concernedly at the woman. ‘You are coming, I hope.’