she did not know.
Perhaps soon she would be back in the house below the grey-white dam.
What an asshole you are, Zakalwe, she thought. I could have stayed home; they could have sent the stand- in… dammit, they could probably have just sent the drone, and you'd still have come…
He appeared looking bright and fresh and carrying a jacket. A different servant carried some bags. 'Okay; let's go,' he said.
They walked to the pier while the drone tracked them, overhead.
'By the way,' she said. 'Why ten per cent more money?'
He shrugged as they walked onto the wooden pier. 'Inflation.'
Sma frowned. 'What's that?'
2: An Outing
IX
When you sleep beside a head full of images, there is an osmosis, a certain sharing in the night. So he thought. He thought a lot then; more than he ever had, perhaps. Or maybe he was just more aware of the process, and the identity of thought and passing time. Sometimes he felt as though every instant he spent with her was a precious capsule of sensation to be lovingly wrapped and carefully placed somewhere inviolable, away from harm.
But he only fully realised that later; it wasn't something he was fully aware of at the time. At the time, it seemed to him that the only thing he was fully aware of, was her.
He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fact of her existence as though she was some careless star-thing that slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness and ease with which she slept there amazed him; he couldn't believe that such beauty could survive without some superhumanly intense conscious effort.
On such mornings he would lie and look at her and listen to the sounds that the house made in the breeze. He liked the house; it seemed… fit. Normally, he'd have hated it.
Here and now, though, he could appreciate it, and happily see it as a symbol; open and closed, weak and strong, outside and inside. When he'd first seen it, he'd thought it would blow away in the first serious gale, but it seemed these houses rarely collapsed; in the very rare storms, people would retreat to the centre of the structures, and huddle round the central fire, letting the various layers and thicknesses of covering shake and sway on their posts, gradually sapping the force of the wind, and providing a core of shelter.
Still — as he'd pointed out to her when he first saw it from the lonely ocean road — it would be easy to torch and simple to rob, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. (She'd looked at him as though he were mad, but then kissed him.)
That vulnerability intrigued and troubled him. There was a likeness to her there; to her as a poet and as a woman. It was similar, he suspected, to one of her images; the symbols and metaphors she used in the poems he loved to hear her read out loud but could never quite understand (too many cultural allusions, and this baffling language he had not yet fully understood, and still sometimes made her laugh with). Their physical relationship seemed to him at once more whole and complete, and more defyingly complex than anything similar he had known. The paradox of love physically incarnate and the most personal attack being the same thing tied knots in him, sometimes sickened him, as in the midst of this joy he fought to understand the statements and promises that might be being implied.
Sex was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her. He was aware of the absurdity of trying too hard to develop the comparison between sex and war; he had been laughed out of several embarrassing situations trying to do so ('Zakalwe,' she would say, when he tried to explain some of this, and she would put her cool slim fingers behind his neck, and stare out from the rumbustious black tangle of her hair, 'You have serious problems.' She would smile), but the feelings, the acts, the structure of the two were to him so close, so self-evidently akin, that such a reaction only forced him deeper into his confusion.
But he tried not to let it bother him; at any time he could simply look at her and wrap his adoration for her around himself like a coat on a cold day, and see her life and body, moods and expressions and speech and movements as a whole enthralling field of study that he could submerge himself in like a scholar finding his life's work.
(This was more like it, some small, remindful voice inside him said. This is more like the way it's suppose to be; with this, you can leave all that other stuff behind, the guilt and the secrecy and the lies; the ship and the chair and the other man… But he tried not listen to that voice.)
They'd met in a port bar. He'd just arrived and thought he'd make sure their alcohol was as good as people had said. It was. She was in the next dark booth, trying to get rid of a man.
You're saying nothing lasts forever, he heard the fellow whine. (Well, pretty trite, he thought.)
No, he heard her say. I'm saying with very few exceptions nothing lasts forever, and amongst those exceptions, no work or thought of man is numbered.
She went on talking after this, but he homed in on that. That was better, he thought. I liked that. She sounds interesting. Wonder what she looks like?
He stuck his head round the corner of the booth and looked in at them. The man was in tears; the woman was… well, lots of hair…
'Sorry,' he told them. 'But I just wanted to point out that 'Nothing lasts forever' can be a positive statement… well, in some languages…' Having said it, it did occur to him that in this language it wasn't; they had different words for different sorts of nothing. He smiled, ducked back into his own booth, suddenly embarrassed. He stared accusatorily at the drink in front of him. Then he shrugged, and pressed the bell to attract a waiter.
Shouts from the next booth. A clatter and a little shriek. He looked round to see the man storming off through the bar, heading for the door.
The girl appeared at his elbow. She was dripping.
He looked up into her face; it was damp; she wiped it with a handkerchief.
'Thank you for your contribution,' she said icily. 'I was bringing things to a conclusion quite smoothly there until you stepped in.'
'I'm very sorry,' he said, not at all.
She took her handkerchief and wrung it out over his glass, dribbling. 'Hmm,' he said, 'too kind.' He nodded at the dark spots on her grey coat. 'Your drink or his?'
'Both,' she said, folding the kerchief and starting to turn away.
'Please; let me buy you a replacement.'
She hesitated. The waiter arrived at the same moment.
She looked at his glass. 'The same,' she said. She sat down across the table.
'Think of it as… reparations,' he said, digging the word out of the implanted vocabulary he'd been given for his visit.
She looked puzzled. ''Reparations'… that's one I'd forgotten; something to do with war, isn't it?'
'Yep,' he said, smothering a belch with one hand. 'Sort of like… damages?'
She shook her head. 'Wonderfully obscure vocabulary, but totally bizarre grammar.'
'I'm from out of town,' he said breezily. This was true. He'd never been within a hundred light years of the
