Use of Weapons

missile to enter the scanning machine, and then turned on the power.'

'I thought knife missiles weren't magnetic.'

'They're not, but there was just enough metal in it to set up crippling eddy currents if it tried to move too fast.'

'But it could still move.'

'Not fast enough to get out of the way of the laser Zakalwe had set up at one end of the scanner. It was only supposed to illuminate, to help produce holos of the mammals, but Zakalwe had in fact installed a military strength device; it grilled the knife missile.'

'Wow.' Sma nodded, staring down at the floor. 'The man never ceases to amaze.' She looked at the drone. 'Zakalwe must have wanted away from us awful bad.'

'It looks that way,' agreed the drone.

'So maybe there's no way he'll want to work for us again. Maybe he never wants even to hear from us again.'

'I'm afraid that must be a possibility.'

'Even if we can find him.'

'Quite.'

'And all we know is that he's somewhere in an Open Cluster called Crastalier?' Sma's voice sounded tinged with disbelief.

'It's a bit more focused than that,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. 'There are maybe ten or twelve systems he could be in by now, if he left immediately after stiffing the knife missile, and took the fastest ships available. Thankfully, the tech level in the meta-civilisation isn't that high.' The drone hesitated, then said. 'To be honest, we might have been able to catch up with him, if we'd gone in fast and strong immediately… But I think the controlling Minds were so impressed with Zakalwe's trick they thought he deserved to get away. We kept a very general watch on the volume, but it's only in the last ten days the search has become serious. We're bringing in ships and people from wherever we can now; I'm sure we'll find him.'

'Ten or twelve systems, drone?' Sma said shaking her head.

'Twenty-plus planets; maybe three hundred sizeable space habitats… not including ships, of course.'

Sma closed her eyes. Her head shook. 'I don't believe this.'

Skaffen-Amtiskaw thought the better of saying anything.

The woman's eyes opened. 'Want to pass on a suggestion or two?'

'Certainly.'

'Forget the habitats. And forget any planets that aren't fairly Standard; check out… deserts, temperate zones; forests but not jungles… and no cities.' She shrugged, rubbed her mouth with her hand. 'If he's still trying hard to stay hidden, we'll never find him. If he only wanted to get away to live his own life without being watched, we have a chance. Oh, and look for wars, of course. Especially wars that aren't too big… and interesting wars, know what I mean?'

'Right. Transmitted.' Normally the drone would have poured scorn on this bit of amateur psychological sleuthing, but this time it decided to bite its metaphorical tongue, and relayed Sma's remarks to the unresponding ship for transmission to the search fleet ahead of them.

Sma took a deep breath, shoulders rising and falling. 'Party still going on?'

'Yes,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, surprised.

Sma jumped off the bed and stepped into the Xeny suit. 'Well; let's not be party poopers.'

She fastened the suit, scooped up the brown and yellow head and walked for the door.

'Sma,' the drone said, following. 'I thought you'd be mad.'

'Maybe I will be, once the calm wears off,' she admitted, opening the door and putting the suit head on. 'But just right now, I really can't be bothered.'

They went down the corridor. She looked back at the clear-fielded machine behind her; 'Come on, drone; it's meant to be fancy dress. But try something a little more imaginative than a warship this time.'

'Hmm,' the machine said. 'Any suggestions?'

'I don't know,' Sma sighed, 'What would suit you? I mean, what is the perfect role-model for a cowardly lying patronising hypocritical bastard with no trust in or respect for another person?'

There was silence from behind as they approached the noise and light of the party. So she turned round and, instead of the drone, saw a classically proportioned, handsome, but somehow anonymous-looking young man following her down the corridor, his gaze just moving up from her behind to her eyes.

Sma laughed. 'Yes; very good.' She walked a few more steps. 'On second thoughts, I think I preferred the warship.'

XI

He never wrote things in the sand. He resented even leaving footprints. He saw it as a one-way commerce; he did the beachcombing, and the sea provided the materials. The sand was the middle-man, displaying the goods as though it was a long, soggy shop counter. He liked the simplicity of this arrangement.

Sometimes he watched the ships passing, far out to sea. Now and again he'd wish that he was on one of the tiny dark shapes, on his way to some bright and strange place, or on his way — imagining harder — to a quiet home port, to twinkling lights, amiable laughter, friends and welcome. But usually he ignored the slow specks, and got on with his walking and gathering, and kept his eyes on the grey-brown wash of the beach's slope. The horizon was clear and far and empty, the wind sang low in the dunes, and the seabirds wheeled and cried, comfortingly random and argumentative in the cold skies above.

The brash, noisy home-cars came sometimes, from the interior. The home-cars were loaded with shining metal and flashing lights, they had multi-coloured windows and highly ornamental grilles, they fluttered with flags and dripped with enthusiastically imagined but sloppily executed paint-jobs, and they groaned and flexed, over- loaded, as they came coughing and spluttering and belching fumes down the sandy track from the parktown. Adults leaned out of windows or stood one-legged on running boards; children ran alongside, or clung to the ladders and straps that covered their sides, or sat squealing and shouting on the roof.

They came to see the strange man who lived in a funny wooden shack in the dunes. They were fascinated, if also slightly repelled, by the strangeness of living in something that was dug into the ground, something that did not — could not — move. They would stare at the line where the wood and tar-paper met the sand, and shake their heads, walking right round the small, skewed hut, as if looking for the wheels. They talked amongst themselves, trying to imagine what it must be like to have the same view and the same sort of weather all the time. They opened the rickety door and sniffed the dark, smoky, man-scented air inside the hut, and shut the door quickly, declaring that it must be unhealthy to live in the same place, joined to the earth. Insects. Rot. Stale air.

He ignored them. He could understand their language, but he pretended not to. He knew that the ever- changing population of the parktown inland called him the tree-man, because they liked to imagine he had put down roots like his wheel-less shack had. He was usually out when they came to the shack, anyway. They lost interest in it fairly quickly, he found; they went to the shore line to shriek when they got their feet wet, and throw stones at the waves, and build little cars in the sand; then they climbed back into their home-cars, and went sputtering and creaking back inland, lights flashing, horns honking, leaving him alone again.

He found dead seabirds all the time, and the washed-up carcases of sea mammals every few days. Beachweed and sea-flowers lay strewn like party streamers over the sands, and — when they dried — rippled in the wind and slowly unravelled, finally disintegrating to be blown out to sea or far inland in bright clouds of colour and decay.

Once he found a dead sailor, lying washed and bloated by the ocean, extremities nibbled, one leg moving to the slow foamy beat of the sea. He stood and looked at the man for a while, then emptied his canvas bag of its flotsam booty, tore it flat, and gently covered the man's head and upper torso with it. The tide was ebbing, so he did not drag the body further up the beach. He walked to the parktown, for once not pushing his little wooden cart of tide treasure before him, and told the sheriff there.

The day he found the little chair he ignored it, but it was still there when he walked back past that stretch of