‘What is to be done, then?’
‘We need to know more.’
‘That is always true. Back to the problem.’
‘We could have him deported.’
‘For what?’
‘We need to give no reason, though we could invent one easily enough.’
‘That might start the war before we are ready for it.’
‘Shush now; we must not talk of this “war” thing. We are officially on the best of terms with all our Federation members; there is no need for worry. Everything is under control.’
‘Said an official spokesperson… Do you think we should get rid of him?’
‘It may be the wisest course. One might feel better with him out of the way… I have a horrible feeling he must be here for a purpose. He has been given full use of the Vanguard Foundation’s monies, and that… wilfully mysterious organisation has opposed us every step along the road for thirty years. The identity and location of its owners and executives have been one of the cluster’s best-kept secrets; unparalleled reserve. Now – suddenly – this man appears, spending with a quite vulgar profligacy and maintaining a high, if still coquettishly shy, profile… just when it might prove extremely awkward.’
‘Perhaps he is the Vanguard Foundation.’
‘Nonsense. If it’s anything appreciable at all, it’s some interfering aliens, or a do-good machine, either running on some dead magnate’s conscience will – or even running with a transcription of a human personality – or it’s a rogue machine, accidentally conscious with no-one to oversee it. I think every other possibility has been discounted over the years. This man Staberinde is a puppet; he spends money with the desperation of an indulged child worried such generosity will not last. He’s like a peasant winning a lottery. Revolting. But he must – I repeat – be here for a purpose.’
‘If we kill him, and he turns out to have been important, then we might start a war, and too early.’
‘Perhaps, but I feel we must do what is not expected. To prove our humanity, to exploit our intrinsic advantage over the machines, if for no other reason.’
‘Indeed, but isn’t it possible he could be of use to us?’
‘Yes.’
The man at the window smiled at his reflection in the glass and tapped out a little rhythm on the inside sill.
The woman on the couch kept her eyes closed, her body moving to the steady beat of the hands that plied her waist and flanks.
‘But wait. There were links between Beychae and the Vanguard Foundation. If this is so…’
‘If this is so… then perhaps we can persuade Beychae to our side, using this person, this Staberinde.’ The man put his finger to the glass and traced the path of a snowflake, drifting down the other side. His eyes crossed as he watched it.
‘We could…’
‘What?’
‘Adopt the Dehewwoff system.’
‘The…? Need to know more.’
The Dehewwoff system of punishing by disease; graded capital punishment; the more serious the crime the more serious the disease the culprit is infected with. For minor crimes a mere fever, loss of livelihood and medical expenses; for more damaging misdeeds a bout of something lasting perhaps months, with pain and a long convalescence, bills and no sympathy, sometimes marks to show later on. For really ghastly crimes, infection with diseases rarely survived; near certain death but possible divine intervention and miracle cure. Of course, the lower one’s class, the more virulent one’s punishment, to allow for the hardier constitutions of the toilers. Combinations, and recurring strains, provide sophistications to the basic idea.’
‘Back to the problem.’
‘And I hate those dark glasses.’
‘I repeat; back to the problem.’
‘… we need to know more.’
‘So they all say.’
‘And I think we should speak to him.’
‘Yes. Then we kill him.’
‘Restraint. We speak to him. We shall find him again and ask him what he wants and perhaps who he is. We shall keep quiet and be thoughtful and we shall not kill him unless he needs to be killed.’
‘We nearly spoke to him.’
‘No sulking. It was preposterous. We are not here to chase cars and run after idiot recluses. We plan. We think. We shall send a note to the gentleman’s hotel…’
‘The Excelsior. Really, one would have hoped such a respected establishment might not have been so easily seduced by mere money.’
‘Indeed; and then we shall go to him, or have him come to us.’
‘Well, we certainly ought not to go to him. And as for him coming to us, he may refuse. Regret that… Due to an unforeseen… A previous commitment prevents… Feel it would be unwise at this juncture, perhaps another… Can you imagine how humiliating that would be?’
‘Oh, all right. We’ll kill him.’
‘All right we’ll try to kill him. If he survives we shall talk to him. If he survives he will want to talk to us. Commendable plan. Must agree. No question, left no choice; mere formality.’
The woman fell silent. The grey-haired man heaved at her hips with his great hands, and strange patterns of sweat broke from the unscarred areas of his face; the hands swirled and swept over the woman’s rump, and she bit her bottom lip just a little as her body moved in a sweet impersonation, flat beat on a white plain. Snow was falling.
* * *
VII
‘You know,’ he told the rock, ‘I’ve got this really nasty feeling that I’m dying… but then all my feelings are pretty nasty at the moment, come to think of it. What do you think?’
The rock didn’t say anything.
He had decided that the rock was the centre of the universe, and he could prove it, but the rock just didn’t want to accept its obviously important place in the overall scheme of things, at least not yet anyway, so he was left talking to himself. Or he could talk to the birds and the insects.
Everything wavered again. Things like waves, like clouds of carrion birds, closed in on him, centring, zeroing, trapping his mind and picking it off like a rotten fruit under a machine-gun.
He tried to crawl away unobtrusively; he could see what was coming next; his life was going to flash before him. What an appalling thought.
Mercifully, only bits of it came back to him, as if the images mirrored his smashed body, and he remembered things like sitting in a bar on a little planet, his dark glasses making strange patterns with the darkened window; he remembered a place where the wind was so bad they used to judge its severity by the number of trucks that got blown over each night; he remembered a tank battle in the great monoculture fields like seas of grass, all madness and submerged desperation and commanders standing on the tanks and the areas of burning crop, slowly spreading, burning through the night, spreading darkness ringed by fire… the cultivated grassland was the reason for and prize of that war, and was destroyed by it; he remembered a hose playing under searchlit water, its silent coils writhing; he remembered the never-ending whiteness and the attritional tectonics of the crashing tabular bergs, the bitter end of a century’s slow sleep.
And a garden. He remembered the garden. And a chair.
‘Scream!’ he screamed, and started flapping his arms about, trying to work up enough of a run to get into the air and away from… from… he hardly knew. He hardly moved, either; his arms flapped a little and scraped a few more guano pellets away, but the ring of patient birds clustered around him, waiting for him to die, just looked on, unfooled, at this display of inadequately avian behaviour.
‘Oh all right,’ he mumbled, and collapsed back, clutching his chest and staring into the bland blue sky. What was so terrible about a chair, anyway? He started crawling again.
He hauled himself around the little puddle, scraping his way through the dark pellets the birds had left, then at a certain point set off towards the waters of the lake. He got only so far, then stopped, turned back, and went on round the puddle again, scraping aside the black bird-shit pellets, apologising to the little insects he disturbed as he did so. When he got back to the place where he’d been earlier, he stopped and took stock.
The warm breeze brought the smell of sulphur from the lake to him… And he was back in the garden again, remembering the smell of flowers.
Once there had been a great house which stood in an estate bordered on three sides by a broad river, mid-way between the mountains and the sea. The grounds were full of old woods and well-grazed pasture land; there were rolling hills full of shy, wild animals, and winding paths and winding streams crossed by little bridges; there were follies and pergolas and ha-has, ornamental lakes and quiet, rustic summerhouses.