Use of Weapons

He walked the cold, dark corridors, looking from side to side at the sleeper units. They looked like drawers in a filing cabinet; each was the head-end of something very like a coffin. A little red light glowed faintly on each one, so that standing in one of the gently spiralling corridors, with his own suit lights switched off, those small and steady sparks curved away in a ruby lattice folded over the darkness, like some infinite corridor of red giant suns set up by some obsessively tidy-minded god.

Spiralling gradually upwards, moving away from the living unit at what he always thought of as the head of the ship, he walked up through its quiet, dark body. Usually he took the outermost corridor, just to appreciate the scale of the vessel. As he ascended, the pull of the ship's fake gravity gradually decreased. Eventually, walking became a series of skidding leaps in which it was always easier to hit the ceiling than make any forward progress. There were handles on the coffin-drawers; he used them once walking became too inefficient, pulling himself along towards the waist of the ship, which — as he approached it — turned one wall of coffin-drawers to a floor and the other to a ceiling, in places. Standing under a radial corridor, he leapt up, floated towards what was now the ceiling with the radial corridor a chimney up through it. He caught a coffin-drawer handle, and used a succession of them as rungs, climbing into the centre of the ship.

Running through the centre of the Absent Friends there was an elevator shaft that extended from living unit to drive unit. In the very centre of the whole ship, he would summon the elevator, if it wasn't already waiting there from last time.

When it came, he would enter it, floating inside the squat, yellow-lit cylinder. He would take out a pen, or a small torch, and place it in the centre of the elevator car, and just float there, watching the pen or torch, waiting to see if he had stationed it so exactly in the centre of the whole slowly spinning mass of the ship that it would stay where he'd left it.

He got very good at doing this, eventually, and could spend hours sitting there, with the suit lights and the elevator lights on sometimes (if it was a pen) or off (if it was a torch), watching the little object, waiting for his own dexterity to prove greater than his patience, waiting for — in other words, he could admit to himself — one part of his obsession to win over the other.

If the pen or torch moved and eventually connected with the walls or floor or ceiling of the elevator car, or drifted through the open door, then he had to float, climb (down) and then pull and walk back the way he had come. If it stayed still in the centre of the car, he was allowed to take the elevator back to the living unit.

'Come on, Darac,' Erens said, lighting up a pipe. 'What brought you along on this one-way ride, eh?'

'I don't want to talk about it.' He turned up the ventilation to get rid of Eren's drug fumes. They were in the viewing carousel, the one place in the ship where you could get a direct view of the stars. He came up here every now and again, opened the shutters and watched the stars spin slowly overhead. Sometimes he tried to read poetry.

Erens still visited the carousel alone as well, but Ky no longer did; Erens reckoned Ky got homesick, seeing the silent nothingness out there, and the lonely specks that were other suns.

'Why not?' Erens said.

He shook his head and sat back in the couch, looking out into the darkness. 'It isn't any of your business.'

'I'll tell you why I came along if you tell me why you did,' Erens grinned, making the words sound childish, conspiratorial.

'Get lost, Erens.'

'Mine is an interesting story; you'd be fascinated.'

'I'm sure,' he sighed.

'But I won't tell you unless you tell me first. You're missing a lot; mm-hmm.'

'Well, I'll just have to live with that,' he said. He turned down the lighting in the carousel until the brightest thing in it was Erens' face, glowing red with reflected light on each draw of the pipe. He shook his head when Erens offered him the drug.

'You need to loosen up, my friend,' Erens told him, slumping back in the other seat. 'Get high; share your problems.'

'What problems?'

He saw Erens' head shake in the darkness. 'Nobody on this ship hasn't got problems, friend. Nobody out here not running away from something.'

'Ah; ship psychiatrist now are we?'

'Hey, come on; nobody's going back, are they? Nobody on here's ever going back home. Half the people we know are probably dead already, and the ones that aren't will be, by the time we get where we're going. So if we can't ever see the people we used to know again, and probably never see home again, it has to be something pretty damn important and pretty damn bad, pretty damn evil to make a body up and leave like that. We all got to be running from something, whether it's something we did or something we had done to us.'

'Maybe some people just like travelling.'

'That's crap; nobody likes travelling that much.'

He shrugged. 'Whatever.'

'Aw, Darac, come on; argue, dammit.'

'I don't believe in argument,' he said, looking out into the darkness (and saw a towering ship, a capital ship, ringed with its layers and levels of armament and armour, dark against the dusk light, but not dead).

'You don't?' Erens said, genuinely surprised. 'Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.'

'It's not cynicism,' he said flatly. 'I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.'

'Oh well, thank you.'

'It's comforting, I suppose.' He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night; rising, peaking, falling… (And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) 'Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed,' he said. 'And I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses.'

' Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain't cynicism, what is?' Erens snorted.

'Yes, excuses,' he said, with what Erens thought might just have been a trace of bitterness. 'I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you're supposed to argue about, come later. They're the least important part of the belief. That's why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place.' He looked at Erens. 'You've attacked the wrong thing.'

'So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile… arguing stuff?'

'Agree to disagree,' he said. 'Or fight.'

' Fight?'

He shrugged. 'What else is left?'

'Negotiate?'

'Negotiation is a way to come to a conclusion; it's the type of conclusion that I'm talking about.'

'Which basically is disagree or fight?'

'If it comes to it.'

Erens was silent for a while, drawing on the pipe until its red glow faded, then saying, 'You have a military background, at all, yeah?'

He sat and watched the stars. Eventually he turned his head and looked at Erens. 'I think the war gave us all a military background, don't you?'

'Hmm,' Erens said. They both studied the slowly moving star-field.

Twice, in the depths of the sleeping ship, he almost killed somebody. One of those times, it was somebody else.

He stopped on the long, spiralling outer corridor, about halfway to the waist of the ship, where he felt very light on his feet, and his face was a little flushed with effects of normal blood pressure working against the reduced pull. He hadn't intended to look at any of the stored people — the truth was, he never really thought about them in any but the most abstract way — but suddenly he wanted to see something more of a sleeper than just a little red