"What a penetrating insight," he sighed. "You remind me of some of the people who planned this war. Cross-eyed, stupid and static."
"I'm not cross-eyed!" she screamed, and instantly started crying, her head forced down by the weight of huge sobs that shook her body and waved the folds of the coat, making the chair creak.
Her dirty long hair hid her face, falling from her head over the wide lapels of the greatcoat; her arms were almost level with the ground, so far forward had she slumped in her crying. He wanted the strength to go over and cuddle her, or bash her brains out; anything to stop her making that unnecessary noise.
"All right, all right, you haven't got cross-eyes, I'm sorry."
He lay back with one arm thrown across his eyes, hoping he sounded convincing, but sure he sounded as insincere as he was.
"I don't want your sympathy!"
"Sorry again; I retract the retraction."
"Well… I haven't… It's just a… a slight defect, and it didn't stop the army board from taking me."
(They were also, he recalled, taking children and pensioners, but he didn't say that to the woman.) She was trying to wipe her face on the lapels of the greatcoat.
She sniffed heavily, and when she brought her head back and her hair swung away, he saw there was a large dew-drop on the tip of her nose. He got up without thinking — the tiredness shrieking in indignation — and tore a portion of the thin curtain over the bed-alcove off as he went over to her.
She saw him coming with the ragged scrap and screamed with all her might; she emptied her lungs with the effort of announcing to the rainy world outside that she was about to be murdered. She was rocking the chair, and he had to jump at it and land with one boot on one of the cross-members between the legs to stop it from tipping over.
He put the rag over her face.
She stopped struggling. She went limp, not fighting or squirming but knowing it was utterly pointless to go on doing anything.
"Good," he said, relieved, "Now, blow."
She blew.
He withdrew the rag, folded it over, put it back over her face and told her to blow again. She blew again. He folded it over again and wiped her nose, hard. She squealed; it was sore. He sighed again and threw the rag away.
He didn't lie down again because it only made him sleepy and thoughtful, and he didn't want to sleep because he felt he might never wake up, and he didn't want to think because it wasn't getting him anywhere.
He turned away and stood at the door, which was as close anywhere as it could be and still half open. Rain spattered in.
He thought of the others; the other commanders. Damn; the only other one he trusted was Rogtam-Bar, and he was too junior to take charge. He hated being put into positions like this, coming in on an already established command structure, usually corrupt, usually nepotistic, and having to take so much on himself that any absence, any hesitation, even any rest, gave the clueless froth-heads around him a chance to fuck things up even further. But then, he told himself, what General was ever totally happy with the command he took over?
Anyway, he hadn't left them enough: a few crazy plans that would almost certainly never come off; his attempts to use the weapons that were not obvious. Too much of it was still inside his own head. That one private place, where he knew even the Culture did not look, though through their own warped fastidiousness, not through inability…
He forgot all about the woman. It was as if she didn't exist when he wasn't looking at her, and her voice and her attempt to cut herself free were the results of some absurd supernatural manifestation.
He opened the cottage door wide. You could see anything in the rain. The individual drops became streaks with the slowness of the eye; they merged and re-emerged as cyphers for the shapes you carried inside you; they lasted less than a heartbeat in your sight and they went on for ever.
He saw a chair, and a ship that was not a ship; he saw a man with two shadows, and he saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing that — if nothing else — at least it lives.
And it had two shadows, it was two things; it was the need and it was the method. The need was obvious; to defeat what opposed its life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.
A chair, and a ship that was not a ship, a man with two shadows, and…
"What are you going to do with me?" The woman's voice was quivering. He looked round at her.
"I don't know; what do you think?"
She looked at him with her eyes widening, horrified. She seemed to be gathering her breath for another scream. He didn't understand it; he'd asked her a perfectly normal, pertinent question and she acted as if he'd said he was going to kill her.
"Please don't. Oh please don't, oh please please don't," she sobbed again, dryly. Then her back seemed to break, and her imploring face bowed almost to her knees as she drooped again.
"Do what?" He was mystified.
She didn't appear to hear him; she just hung there, her slack body jerked by her sobs.
It was at moments like this he stopped understanding people; he just had no comprehension of what was going on in their minds; they were denied, unfathomable. He shook his head and started walking round the room. It was smelly and damp, and it carried this atmosphere as though this was no innovation. This had always been a hole. Probably some illiterate had lived here, custodian of the derelict machines from another, more fabulous age, long-shattered by the conspicuous love of war these people exhibited; a mean life in an ugly place.
When would they come? Would they find him? Would they think he was dead? Had they heard his message on the radio, after the landslide had cut them off from the rest of the command convoy?
Had he worked the damn thing right?
Maybe he hadn't. Maybe he would be left behind; they might think a search was useless. He hardly cared. It would be no additional pain to be captured; he'd drowned in that already, in his mind. He could almost welcome it, if he set his mind to it; he knew he could. All he needed was the strength to be bothered.
"If you're going to kill me, please will you do it quickly?"
He was getting annoyed at these constant interruptions.
"Well, I wasn't going to kill you, but keep on whining like this and I may change my mind."
"I hate you." It seemed to be all she could think of.
"And I hate you too."
She started crying again, loudly.
He looked out into the rain again, and saw the Staberinde.
Defeat, defeat, the rain whispered; tanks foundering in the mud, the men giving up under the torrential rain, everything coming to bits.
And a stupid woman, and a runny nose… He could laugh at it, at the sharing of time and place between the grand and the petty, the magnificently vast and the shoddily absurd, like horrified nobility having to share a carriage with drunk and dirty peasants being sick over them and copulating under them; the finery and fleas.
Laugh, that was the only answer, the only reply that couldn't be bettered or itself laughed down; the lowest of the low of common denominators.
"Do you know who I am?" he said, turning suddenly. The thought had just occurred to him that maybe she didn't realise who he was, and he wouldn't have been in the least surprised to find out that she had tried to kill him just because he was in a big car, and not because she had recognised the Commander-in-Chief of the entire army. He wouldn't be at all surprised to find that; he almost expected it.