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.

She looked up. "What?"

"Do you know who I am? Do you know my name or rank?"

"No," she spat. "Should I?"

"No, no," he laughed, and turned away.

He looked briefly out at the grey wall of rain, as though it was an old friend, then turned, went back to the bed and fell onto it again.

The government wouldn't like it either. Oh, the things he'd promised them, the riches, the lands, the gains of wealth, prestige and power. They'd have him shot if the Culture didn't pull him out; they'd see him dead for this defeat. It would have been their victory but it would be his defeat. Standard complaint.

He tried to tell himself that, mostly, he'd won. He knew he had, but it was only the moments of defeat, the instants of paralysis that made him really think, and try to join up the weave of his life into a whole. That was when his thoughts returned to the battleship Staberinde and what it represented; that was when he thought about the Chairmaker, and the reverberating guilt behind that banal description…

It was a better sort of defeat this time, it was more impersonal. He was the commander of the army, he was responsible to the government, and they could remove him; in the final reckoning, then, he was not responsible; they were. And there was nothing personal in the conflict. He'd never met the leaders of the enemy; they were strangers to him; only their military habits and their patterns of favoured troop movements and types of build-up were familiar. The cleanness of that schism seemed to soften the rain of blows. A little.

He envied people who could be born, be raised, mature with those around them, have friends, and then settle down in one place with one set of acquaintances, live ordinary and unspectacular, unrisky lives and grow old and be replaced, their children coming to see them… and die old and senile, content with all that had gone before.

He could never have believed he would ever feel like this, that he would so ache to be like that, to have despairs just so deep, joys just so great; to never strain the fabric of life or fate, but to be minor, unimportant, uninfluential.

It seemed utterly sweet, infinitely desirable, now and forever, because once in that situation, once you were there… would you ever feel the awful need to do as he had done, and try for those heights? He doubted it. He turned back to look at the woman in the chair.

But it was pointless, it was stupid; he thought about thoughtless things. If I were a seabird… but how could you be a seabird? If you were a seabird your brain would be tiny and stupid and you would love half-rotted fish guts and tweaking the eyes out of little grazing animals; you would know no poetry and you could never appreciate flying as fully as the human on the ground yearning to be you.

If you wanted to be a seabird you deserved to be one.