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'You sure you didn't record anything from that, umm, sort of orgy, first night
on the
Xeno-phobe
?
'Positive.'
She frowned back at the screen. 'Huh. Pity.'
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Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
The submarine spent nine hours underwater, then surfaced near an atoll; an
inflatable went ashore. Sma and the drone watched the single figure walk up
the golden, sunlit beach towards a complex of low buildings; an exclusive
hotel for the ruling class of the country he'd left.
'What's Zakalwe doing?' Sma said, after he'd been ashore for ten minutes or
so.
The submarine had dived again as soon as it recovered its inflatable, and
taken a course back to the port it had departed from.
'He's saying goodbye to a girl,' sighed the drone.
'Is that ?'
it
'That would appear to be the only thing to draw him here.'
'Shit! Couldn't he have taken a plane?'
'Hmm. No; no airstrip, but anyway, this is a fairly sensitive demilitarised
zone; no unexpected flights of any sort allowed, and the next seaplane isn't
for a couple of days. The sub was actually the fastest way of...'
The drone fell silent.
'Skaffen-Amtiskaw?' Sma said.
'Well,' the drone said slowly, 'the doxy just smashed a lot of ornaments and a
couple of pieces of very valuable furniture, and then ran off and buried
herself in her bed, weeping... but apart from that, Zakalwe just sat down in
the middle of the lounge with a large drink and said (and I quote), "Okay; if
that's you, Sma, come and talk to me."'
Sma looked at the view on the screen. It showed the small atoll, the central
island lying green and squashed looking between the vibrant blues and greens
of ocean and sky.
'You know,' she said, 'I think I would like to kill Zakalwe.'
'There's a queue. Surface?'
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Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
'Surface. Let's go see the asshole.'
X
Light. Some light. Not very much. Air foul and everywhere pain. He wanted to
scream and writhe, but could find no breath and make nothing move. A dark
destroying shadow welled up inside him, exterminating thought, and he lost
consciousness.
Light. Some light. Not very much. He knew there was pain, too, but somehow it
did not seem so important. He was looking at it differently now. That was all
you had to do; just think about it differently. He wondered where that idea
had come from, and seemed to remember he'd been taught how to do this.
Everything was metaphor; all things were something other than themselves. The
pain, for example, was an ocean, and he was adrift on it. His body was a city
and his mind a citadel. All communications between the two seemed to have been
cut, but within the keep that was his mind he still had power. The part of his
consciousness that was telling him the pain did not hurt, and that all things
were like other things, was like... like... he found it hard to think of a
comparison. A
magic mirror, maybe.
Still thinking about that, the light faded, and he slipped away again, into
the darkness.
Light. Some light (he'd been here before, hadn't he?). Not very much. He
seemed to have left the keep that was his mind, and now he was in a
storm-struck leaking boat, images dancing before him.
The light grew slowly in strength until it was almost painful. He felt
suddenly terrified, because it seemed to him that he really was on a tiny
creaking leaking boat, tossed scudding across a seething black ocean, in the
teeth of a howling gale, but now there was light, and it appeared to come from
some-where above him, but when he tried to look at his hand, or the tiny boat,
he still couldn't see anything.
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Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
The light shone into his eyes, but it failed to illuminate anything else. The
idea terri-fied him; the tiny boat was swamped by a wave and he was submerged
again in the ocean of pain, burning through every pore of his body. Somewhere,
thankfully, somebody threw a switch, and he slipped underneath to darkness,
silence and... no pain.
Light. Some light. He remembered this. The light showed a small boat assaulted
by waves on a broad dark ocean. Beyond, unreachable for now, there was a great
citadel on a small island. And there was sound. Sound... That was new. Been
here before, but not with sound. He tried to listen, very hard, but could not
make out the words. Still, he formed the impres-sion that maybe somebody was
asking questions.
Somebody was asking questions... Who...? He waited for a reply, from outside
or from within himself, but nothing came from anywhere; he felt lost and
abandoned, and the worst of it was that he felt abandoned by himself.
He decided to ask himself some questions. What was the citadel? That was his
mind. The citadel was supposed to come with a city attached, which was his
body, but it looked like something else had taken over the city, and there was
just the castle, just the keep left. What was the boat, and the ocean? The
ocean was pain.
He was in the boat now, but before that he'd been in the ocean, up to his
neck, waves breaking over him. The boat was... some learned technique which
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was protecting him from the pain, not letting him forget it was there, but
keeping its debilitating effects away from him, letting him think.
So far so good, he thought. Now, what is the light?
He might have to come back to that one. Same with: What is the sound?
He tried another question: Where is this happening?
He searched his sodden clothes but found nothing in any of the pockets. He
looked for a name tag that he felt ought to be sewn on to his collar, but it
seemed to have been ripped off. He searched the small boat, but still found no
answers. So he tried to imagine being in the distant keep over the towering
waves, and visualised himself walking into a cavernous store room of jumble
and nonsense and memories buried deep in the castle... but could see nothing
in detail. His eyes closed and he wept with frustration, while the small boat
juddered and tipped underneath him. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]