She looked out to sea. The drone was further up the beach, ten metres behind them. She carefully smoothed the tiny dark hairs on her forearms until they were lying flat. "Why did you try all that stuff, Zakalwe?"

"Giving the elixir of youth to our glorious leaders?" He shrugged. "Seemed like a good idea at the time," he confessed, lightly. "I don't know; I thought it might be possible. I thought interfering was maybe a lot easier then you lot made it out to be. I thought one man with a strong plan, not interested in his own aggrandisement…" He shrugged, glanced at her. "It might all work out yet. You never know."

"Zakalwe, it isn't going to work out. You're leaving us an incredible mess here."

"Ah," he nodded. "You are coming in, then. Thought you might."

"In some fashion, I think we'll have to."

"Best of luck."

"Luck…" Sma began, but then thought the better of it. She ran her fingers through her damp hair.

"How much trouble am I in, Diziet?)

"For this?"

"Yes, and the knife missile. You heard about that?"

"I heard." She shook her head. "I don't think you're in any more trouble than you're ever in, Cheradenine, just by being you."

He smiled. "I hate the Culture's… tolerance."

"So," she said, slipping her blouse over her head, "what are your terms?"

"Pay as well, eh?" He laughed. "Minus the rejuve… the same as the last time. Plus ten per cent more negotiables."

"Exactly the same?" She looked at him sadly, her wet bedraggled hair hanging down from her shaking head.

He nodded. "Exactly."

"You're a fool, Zakalwe."

"I keep trying."

"It won't be any different."

"You can't know that."

"I can guess."

"And I can hope. Look, Dizzy, it's my business, and if you want me to come with you then you've got to agree to it, all right?"

"All right."

He looked wary. "You still know where she is?"

Sma nodded. "Yes, we know."

"So it's agreed?"

She shrugged and looked out to sea. "Oh; it's agreed. I just think you're wrong. I don't think you should go to her again." She looked him in the eye. "That's my advice."

He stood up and dusted some sand off his legs.

"I'll remember."

They walked back to the huts and the still sea pool in the centre of the island. She sat on a wall, waiting while he made his final goodbyes. She listened for crying, or the sound of breakages, but in vain.

The wind blew her hair gently, and to her surprise, despite it all, she felt warm and well; the scent from the tall trees stretched around her, and their shifting shadows made the ground seem to move in time with the breeze so that air and trees and light and earth swayed and rippled like the bright-dark water in the island's central pool. She closed her eyes and sounds came to her like faithful pets, nuzzling her ear; sounds of the brushing tree-heads, like tired lovers dancing; sounds of the ocean, swirling over rocks, softly stroking the golden sands; sounds of what she did not know.

Perhaps soon she would be back in the house below the grey-white dam.

What an asshole you are, Zakalwe, she thought. I could have stayed home; they could have sent the stand-in… dammit, they could probably have just sent the drone, and you'd still have come…

He appeared looking bright and fresh and carrying a jacket. A different servant carried some bags. "Okay; let's go," he said.

They walked to the pier while the drone tracked them, overhead.

"By the way," she said. "Why ten per cent more money?"

He shrugged as they walked onto the wooden pier. "Inflation."

Sma frowned. "What's that?"

2: An Outing

IX

When you sleep beside a head full of images, there is an osmosis, a certain sharing in the night. So he thought. He thought a lot then; more than he ever had, perhaps. Or maybe he was just more aware of the process, and the identity of thought and passing time. Sometimes he felt as though every instant he spent with her was a precious capsule of sensation to be lovingly wrapped and carefully placed somewhere inviolable, away from harm.

But he only fully realised that later; it wasn't something he was fully aware of at the time. At the time, it seemed to him that the only thing he was fully aware of, was her.

He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fact of her existence as though she was some careless star-thing that slept on quite unaware of its incandescent power; the casualness and ease with which she slept there amazed him; he couldn't believe that such beauty could survive without some superhumanly intense conscious effort.

On such mornings he would lie and look at her and listen to the sounds that the house made in the breeze. He liked the house; it seemed… fit. Normally, he'd have hated it.

Here and now, though, he could appreciate it, and happily see it as a symbol; open and closed, weak and strong, outside and inside. When he'd first seen it, he'd thought it would blow away in the first serious gale, but it seemed these houses rarely collapsed; in the very rare storms, people would retreat to the centre of the structures, and huddle round the central fire, letting the various layers and thicknesses of covering shake and sway on their posts, gradually sapping the force of the wind, and providing a core of shelter.

Still — as he'd pointed out to her when he first saw it from the lonely ocean road — it would be easy to torch and simple to rob, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. (She'd looked at him as though he were mad, but then kissed him.)

That vulnerability intrigued and troubled him. There was a likeness to her there; to her as a poet and as a woman. It was similar, he suspected, to one of her images; the symbols and metaphors she used in the poems he loved to hear her read out loud but could never quite understand (too many cultural allusions, and this baffling language he had not yet fully understood, and still sometimes made her laugh with). Their physical relationship seemed to him at once more whole and complete, and more defyingly complex than anything similar he had known. The paradox of love physically incarnate and the most personal attack being the same thing tied knots in him, sometimes sickened him, as in the midst of this joy he fought to understand the statements and promises that might be being implied.

Sex was an infringement, an attack, an invasion; there was no other way he could see it; every act, however magical and intensely enjoyed, and however willingly conducted, seemed to carry a harmonic of rapacity. He took her, and however much she gained in provoked pleasure and in his own increasing love, she was still the one that suffered the act, had it played out upon her and inside her. He was aware of the absurdity of trying too hard to develop the comparison between sex and war; he had been laughed out of several embarrassing situations trying to do so ('Zakalwe," she would say, when he tried to explain some of this, and she would put her cool slim fingers behind his neck, and stare out from the rumbustious black tangle of her hair, "You have serious problems." She would smile), but the feelings, the acts, the structure of the two were to him so close, so self-evidently akin, that such a reaction only forced him deeper into his confusion.

But he tried not to let it bother him; at any time he could simply look at her and wrap his adoration for her around himself like a coat on a cold day, and see her life and body, moods and expressions and speech and movements as a whole enthralling field of study that he could submerge himself in like a scholar finding his life's work.