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hem of the mate-rial and peered into the darkened room beyond.
'You missed it.' Sma said with quiet scorn, happening to pad past the window
just at that moment. She sipped from a glass of water she held. Droplets from
her shower beaded her tawny body.
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Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
The bird's head swivelled, following her as she crossed to the closet and
commenced to dress. Swivelling back, the bird's gaze shifted to the male body
lying in the air a little less than a metre above the floor-mounted bed-base.
Inside the dim haze of the bed's AG field, the pale figure of Relstoch
Sussepin stirred, and rolled over in mid-air. His arms floated out to either
side, until the weak centering field on his side of the bed brought them
slowly back in towards his body again. In the dressing room, Sma gargled with
some water, then swallowed it.
Fifty metres east, Skaffen-Amtiskaw floated high in the air above the floor of
the turbine hall, surveying the wreckage of the party. The section of the
drone's mind that was controlling the guard-drone disguised as a bird took a
last look at the fili-gree of scratches on Sussepin's buttocks, and the
already fading bite-marks on
Sma's shoulders (as she covered them with a gauzy shirt), and then released
the guard-drone from its control.
The bird squawked, jumped back from the curtain, and fell fluttering and
frenzied off the ledge, before opening its wings and beating back up past the
gleaming face of the dam, its shrill alarm-cries echoing back from the
concrete slopes and disturbing it further. Sma heard the distant feedback of
commotion as she buttoned her waistcoat, and smiled.
'Good night's sleep?' Skaffen-Amtiskaw inquired as it met her at the portico
of the old admin block.
'Good night, no sleep,' Sma yawned, shooing the whining hralzs back into the
building's marble hall, where Maikril the major-domo stood unhappily with a
bunch of leads. She stepped out into the sunlight, pulling on gloves. The
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drone held the car door open for her. She filled her lungs with the fresh
morning air and ran down the steps, boot heels clattering. She jumped into the
car, winced a little as she settled in the driver's seat, then flicked a
switch that started the roof folding back, while the drone loaded her luggage
into the trunk. She tapped the battery gauges on the vehicle's dash and
blipped the accelerator, just to feel the wheel motors strain against the
brakes. The drone secured the trunk and floated into the rear seats. She waved
to Maikril, who was chasing one of the hralzs along the steps outside the
turbine hall, and didn't notice. Sma laughed, stood on the throttle and
slipped the brakes.
The car leapt off in a spray of gravel, took the right-hander beneath the
trees with centimetres to spare, shot out through the station's granite gates
with a farewell
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Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons shimmy of its rear end, and accelerated hard
down Riverside Drive.
'We could have flown,' the drone pointed out, over the rush of air.
But it suspected Sma wasn't listening.
The semantics of fortification were pan-cultural, she thought, as she
descended the stone steps from the curtain wall of the castle, gazing up at
the drum-shaped keep, hazy in the distance on its hill behind several more
layers of walls. She walked across the grass, Skaffen-Amtiskaw at her
shoulder, and exited the fort through a postern.
The view led down to the new port and the straits, where seaships passed
smoothly in the late morning sunlight, heading for ocean or inland sea,
according to their lanes. From the other side of the castle complex, the city
revealed its presence with a distant rumble and - because the light wind came
from that direction - the smell of... well, she just thought of it as City,
after three years here. She supposed all cities smelled different, though.
Diziet Sma sat on the grass with her legs drawn up to her chin, and looked out
across the straits and their arching suspension bridges to the sub-continent
on the far shore.
'Anything else?' the drone asked.
'Yeah; take my name off the judging panel for the Academy show... and send a
stalling letter to that Petrain guy.' She frowned in the sunlight, shading her
eyes.
'Can't think of anything else.'
The drone moved in front of her, teasing a small flower from the grass in
front of her and playing with it. '
Xenophobe
's just entered the system,' it told her.
'Well happy day,' Sma said sourly. She wetted one finger and rubbed a little
speck of dirt from the toe of one boot.
'And that young man in your bed just surfaced; asking Maikril where you've got
to.'
Sma said nothing, though her shoulders shook once and she smiled. She lay back
on the grass, one arm behind her.
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Iain M. Banks - Use of Weapons
The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass, and
taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her
forehead at the grey-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the
castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so
limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright
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and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and
watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes
to cover the shame of battle.
She stretched, suddenly tired, and shivered with a little flashback of the
night's exertions. And, like somebody holding something precious, and it
slipping from their fingers, but them having the speed and the skill to catch
it again before it hit the floor, she was able - somewhere inside herself - to
dip down and retrieve the vanishing memory as it slipped back into the clutter
and noise of her mind, and glanding recall she held it, savoured it,
re-experienced it, until she felt herself shiver again in the sunlight, and
came close to making a little moaning noise.
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