Use of Weapons

IV

The ship was over eighty kilometres long and it was called the Size Isn't Everything. The last thing he'd been on for any length of time had actually been bigger, but then that had been a tabular iceberg big enough to hide two armies on, and it didn't beat the General Systems Vehicle by much.

'How do these things hold together?' He stood on a balcony, looking out over a sort of miniature valley composed of accommodation units; each stepped terrace was smothered in foliage, the space was criss-crossed by walk-ways and slender bridges, and a small stream ran through the bottom of the V. People sat at tables in little courtyards, lounged on the grass by the stream side or amongst the cushions and couches of cafes and bars on the terraces. Hanging above the centre of the valley, beneath a ceiling of glowing blue, a travel-tube snaked away into the distance on either side, following the wavy line of the valley. Under the tube, a line of fake sunlight burned, like some enormous strip light.

'Hmm?' Diziet Sma said, arriving at his elbow with two drinks; she handed one to him.

'They're too big,' he said. He turned to face the woman. He'd seen the things they called bays, where they built smaller space ships (smaller in this case meant over three kilometres long); vast unsupported hangars with thin walls. He'd been near the immense engines, which as far as he could gather were solid, and inaccessible (how?), and obviously extremely massive; he'd felt oddly threatened on discovering that there was no control room, no bridge, no flight deck anywhere in the vast vessel, just three Minds — fancy computers, apparently — controlling everything (what!?)

And now he was finding out where the people lived, but it was all too big, too much, too flimsy somehow, especially if the ship was supposed to accelerate as smartly as Sma claimed. He shook his head. 'I don't understand; how does it hold together?'

Sma smiled. 'Just think; fields, Cheradenine. It's all done with force fields.' She put one hand out to his troubled face, patted one cheek. 'Don't look so confused. And don't try to understand it all too quickly. Let it soak in. Just wander around; lose yourself in it for a few days. Come back whenever.'

Later, he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then the people who had built it.

He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while.

'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. 'But look; this table's clean.'

He agreed that the table was clean.

'Usually,' the man said. 'I work on alien — no offence — alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my speciality… like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But… the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled… but,' he slapped the table, 'when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement.'

'But in the end, it's still just cleaning a table.'

'And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested.

He smiled in response to the man's grin, 'Well, yes.'

'But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway,' the man laughed, 'people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,' the man said with a smile, 'it's a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from, anyway?'

He talked to people all the time; in bars and cafes, mostly. The GSV's accommodation seemed to be divided into various different types of lay-out; valleys (or ziggurats, if you wanted to look at them like that) seemed to be the most common, though there were different configurations.

He ate when he was hungry and drank when he was thirsty, every time trying a different dish or drink from the stunningly complicated menus, and when he wanted to sleep — as the whole vessel gradually cycled into a red-tinged dusk, the ceiling light-bars dimming — he just asked a drone, and was directed to the nearest unoccupied room. The rooms were all roughly the same size, and yet all slightly different; some were very plain, some were highly decorated. The basics were always there; bed — sometimes a real, physical bed, sometimes one of their weird field-beds — somewhere to wash and defaecate, cupboards, places for personal effects, a fake window, a holo screen of some sort, and a link up to the rest of the communications net, both aboard and off-ship. The first night away, he linked into one of their direct-link sensory entertainments, lying on the bed with some sort of device activated under the pillow.

He did not actually sleep that night; instead he was a bold pirate prince who'd renounced his nobility to lead a brave crew against the slaver ships of a terrible empire amongst the spice and treasure isles; their quick little ships darted amongst the lumbering galleons, picking away the rigging with chain shot. They came ashore on moonless nights, attacking the great prison castles, releasing joyous captives; he personally fought the wicked governor's chief torturer, sword against sword; the man finally fell from a high tower. An alliance with a beautiful lady pirate begot a more personal liaison, and a daring rescue from a mountain monastery when she was captured…

He pulled away from it, after what had been weeks of compressed time. He knew (somewhere at the back of his mind) even as it happened that none of it was real, but that seemed like the least important property of the adventure. When he came out of it — surprised to discover that he had not actually ejaculated during some of the profoundly convincing erotic episodes — he discovered that only a night had passed, and it was morning, and he had, somehow, shared the strange story with others; it had been a game, apparently. People had left messages for him to get in touch, they had enjoyed playing the game with him so much. He felt oddly ashamed, and did not reply.

The rooms he slept in always contained places to sit; field extensions, mouldable wall units, real couches, and — sometimes — ordinary chairs. Whenever the rooms held chairs, he moved them outside, into the corridor or onto the terrace.

It was all he could do to keep the memories at bay.

'Na,' the woman said in the Mainbay. 'It doesn't really work that way.' They stood on a half-constructed starship, on what would eventually be the middle of the engines, watching a huge field-unit swing through the air, out of the engineering space behind the bay proper and up towards the skeletal body of the General Contact Unit. Little lifter tugs manoeuvred the field unit down towards them.

'You mean it makes no difference?'

'Not much,' the woman said. She pressed on a little studded lanyard she held in one hand, spoke as though to her shoulder. 'I'll take it.' The field-unit put them in shadow as it hovered above them. Just another solid slab, as far as he could see. It was red; a different colour from the black slickness of the starboard Main Engine Block Lower under their feet. She manipulated the lanyard, guiding the huge red block down; two other people standing twenty metres away watched the far end of the unit.

'The trouble is,' the woman said, watching the vast red building-brick come slowly down, 'that even when people do get sick and die young, they're always surprised when they get sick. How many healthy people do you think actually say to themselves, 'Hey, I'm healthy today!', unless they've just had a serious illness?' She shrugged, pressed the lanyard again as the field-unit lowered to a couple of centimetres off the engine surface. 'Stop,' she said quietly. 'Inertia down five. Check.' A line of light flashed on the surface of the engine block. She put one hand on the block, and pressed it again. It moved. 'Down dead slow,' she said. She pressed the block into place. 'Sorzh; all right?' she asked. He didn't hear the reply, but the woman obviously did.