"Eighty, relative," the drone said.
"You think he'll want to come out of retirement? Just because I ask him to?" He looked sceptical.
"You're all we could think of," Sma told him.
"Can't you just let the old guy grow old in peace?"
"There's a little more at stake than the happy retirement of one ageing politico, Zakalwe."
"What? The universe? Life as we know it?"
"Yes; tens, maybe hundreds of millions of times over."
"Very philosophical."
"And you didn't let the Ethnarch Kerian grow old in peace, did you?"
"Damn right," he said, and wandered a little further into the armoury. "That old pisshead deserved to die a million times."
The converted minibay engineering space housed a dazzling array of Culture and other weaponry. Zakalwe, Sma thought, was like a kid in a toy store. He was selecting gear and loading it onto a pallet which Skaffen-Amtiskaw was guiding after the man, down the aisles of racks and drawers and shelves all stuffed and packed with projectile weapons, line guns, laser rifles, plasma projectors, multitudinous grenades, effectors, plane charges, passive and reactive armour, sensory and guard devices, full combat suits, missile packs, and at least a dozen other distinctly different types of device Sma didn't recognize.
"You'll never be able to carry this lot, Zakalwe. "This is just the shortlist," he told her. He took a stocky, boxy-looking gun with no appreciable barrel from a shelf. He held it out to the drone, "What's this?"
"CREWS; assault rifle," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said. "Seven fourteen tonne batteries; seven-element single shot to forty-four point eight kilorounds a second (minimum firing time eight point seven five seconds), maximum single burst; seven times two-fifty kilogrammes; frequency from mid-visible to high X-ray."
He hefted it. "Not very well balanced."
"That's its stowed configuration. Slide the whole top back."
"Hmm." He pretended to aim the readied gun. "Now, what's to stop you putting your supporting hand over here, where the beams are going?"
"Common sense?" suggested the drone.
"Uh-huh. I'll stick with my obsolete plasma rifle." He put the gun back. "Anyway, Sma; you should be pleased old men do want to come out of retirement for you. Dammit, I should be devoting myself to gardening or something, not storming off to the galactic backwoods doing your dirty work."
"Oh, yeah," Sma said. "And a big struggle I had too, convincing you to quit your «gardening» and come back to us. Shit, Zakalwe; your bags were packed."
"I must have telepathically already have realized the urgency of the situation." He heaved a massive black gun from a rack, swung it with both hands, grunting with the effort. "Holy shit. Do you fire this mother or just use it as a battering ram?"
"Idiran hand cannon," Skaffen-Amtiskaw sighed. "Don't wave it around like that; it's very old and quite rare."
"No fucking wonder." He struggled to lift the gun back into its rack, then continued down the aisle. "Come to think of it, Sma, I'm so old my whole life ought to be on triple time or something; I'm probably grossly undercharging you for this whole sorry escapade."
"Well, if you're going to look at it that way, we should be charging you for… patent infringement? Giving those old guys their youth back using our technology."
"Don't knock it. You don't know what it's like getting that old that early."
"Yeah, but it applies to everybody; you were giving it only to the most evil, power-mad bastards on the planet."
"They were top-down societies! What do you expect? Anyway; if I'd given it to everybody… think of the population explosion!"
"Zakalwe, I thought about that when I was about fifteen; they teach you that sort of stuff in early school, in the Culture. It was all thought through long ago; it's part of our history, part of our upbringing. That's why what you did would look insane to a school-kid. You are like a school-kid, to us. You don't even want to get old. Nothing more immature than that."
"Whoo!" he said, stopping suddenly and taking something from an open shelf. "What's this?"
"Beyond your ken," Skaffen-Amtiskaw said.
"What a beauty!" He gripped the stunningly complicated weapon and twirled it. "What is this?" he breathed.
"Micro Armaments System, Rifle," the drone narrated. "It's… oh, look, Zakalwe; it has ten separate weapon systems, not including the semi-sentient guard facility, the reactive shield components, the IFF-set quick-reaction swing-packs or the AG unit, and before you ask, the controls are all on the wrong side because that's the left-hand bias version, and the balance — like the weight and the independently variable inertia — are fully adjustable. It also takes about half a year's training just to learn how to use it safely, let alone competently, so you can't have one."
"I don't want one," he said, stroking the weapon. "But what a device!" He put it back with the rest. He glanced at Sma. "Dizzy; I know the way you people think; I respect it, I guess… but your life isn't my life. I live in unsafe ways in dangerous places; always have done, always will do. I'll die soon enough anyway, so why should I suffer the additional burden of getting old, even slowly?"
"Don't try and hide behind necessity, Zakalwe. You could have changed your life; you don't have to live the way you do; you could have joined the Culture, become one of us; at least lived the way we do, but —»
"Sma!" he exclaimed, turning to her. "That's for you; it isn't for me. You think I'm wrong to have my age stabilised; even the chance of immortality is… wrong, to you. Okay; I can see that. In your society, the way you live your lives, of course it is. You have your three-fifty, four hundred years, and know you'll get right to the end of them; die with your boots off. For me… that won't work. I don't have that certainty. I enjoy the perspective from the edge, Sma; I like to feel that up-draft on my face. So sooner or later I'll die; violently, probably. Maybe even foolishly, because that's often the way of it; you avoid nukes and determined assassins… and then choke on a fish bone… but who cares? So; your stasis is your society, and mine… is my age. But we are both assured of death."
Sma looked at the floor, hands clasped behind her back. "All right," she said. "But don't forget who gave you that perspective from the edge."
He smiled sadly. "Yes; you saved me. But you've also lied to me; sent — no, listen — sent me on damn fool missions where I was on the opposite side from the one I thought I was on, had me fight for incompetent aristos I'd gladly have strangled, in wars where I didn't know you were backing both sides, filled my balls full of alien seed I was supposed to inject into some poor damn female… nearly got me killed… very nearly got me killed a dozen times or more…"
"You've never forgotten me for that hat, have you?" Skaffen-Amtiskaw said, with fake bitterness.
"Oh, Cheradenine," Sma said. "Don't pretend it hasn't been fun, too."
"Sma, believe me; it has not all been "fun"." He leant against a cabinet full of ancient projectile weapons. "And, worse than all that," he insisted, "is when you turn the goddamn maps upside-down."
"What?" Sma said, puzzled.
"Turning the maps upside down," he repeated. "Have you any idea how annoying and inconvenient it is when you get to a place and find that they map the place the other way up compared to the maps you've got? Because of something stupid like some people think a magnetic needle is pointing up to heaven, when other people think it's just heavier and pointing down? Or because it's done according to the galactic plane or something? I mean, this might sound trivial, but it's very upsetting."