She had feared the power of the drug would be too much for him, and that he would shatter like a red-glowing cooking pot dropped into water, the way she had heard other strangers had, vainly thinking the dream-leaf was just another dalliance in their self-indulgent lives. But he had not fought it. For one who was a soldier, used to fighting, he had displayed a rare insight in just giving in without a struggle, and accepting the prescriptions of the drug. She admired this in an outsider. She doubted the conquerors would be so pliably strong. Even some of their own young men — often the most impressive, in every other way — could not accept the crushing gifts the dream-leaf brought, and yelped and gibbered through an abbreviated nightmare, mewling for their mother's breast, pissing and shitting and crying and screaming their most shaming fears to the desert winds. The drug was rarely fatal, in the supervised quantities that had become ritual, but the after-effects could be; more than one young brave had chosen the blade in the belly to the disgrace of knowing a leaf had been stronger than he.

It was, she reflected, a pity that this man was not one of their own kind; he might have made a good husband, and sired many strong sons and cunning daughters. Many marriages were made in dream-leaf tents, and she had at first taken it as an insult that she had been asked to shepherd the stranger through his leaf-days, until she'd been convinced it was an honour, that he had done their people a great service, and she would be allowed her pick of the tribe's young novitiates, when their testing time came.

And, when he took the dream-leaf, he had insisted on the stage that they normally reserved for their elder soldiers and matriarchs; no child's dose for him. She watched him circle, flexing continually from the waist, as though he sought to stir something in his brain.

By the roads, by the crossed signs of those single lines, worn by trade, commerce and passing knowledge; thin trails in the dust, pale marks in the brown page of the desert. The tent stood in Summer, when the white side was turned out and the black side in. In Winter it was outside-in.

He imagined that he felt his brain revolve inside his skull.

In the white tent that was black, and both at once, by the crossroads on the desert, a white/black impermanence like a fallen leaf before the winds blow, trembling in the breeze beneath the poised wave that was the stone circumference of mountains, capped by snow and ice like foam frozen in the high thin air.

He swept away, leaving the tent, so that it fell away beneath him, became a speck beside the thin trails in the dust, and the mountains swam past, white capping ochre, and the trails and the tent disappeared, and the mountains shrank, and the glaciers and the starveling snows of summer became white claws on the rock, and the curved edge pressed in, compressing the view, so that the globe beneath became a coloured boulder, stone, pebble, gravel, grain of sand, speck of silt-dust, then was lost in the sandstorm whirl of the great revolving lens that was the home of all of them, which itself became a fleck on a thin bubble surrounding emptiness, skeined to its lonely siblings by the fabric that was only a slimly different articulation of nothingness.

More specks. All vanished. Darkness reigned.

He was still there.

Beneath it all, he'd been told, was more. All you had to do, Sma said, was think in seven dimensions and see the whole universe as a line on the surface of a torus, starting at a point, becoming a circle as it was born, then expanding, moving up the inside of the torus, over the top, to the outside, then relapsing, falling back in, shrinking. Others had gone before it, others came after it (the greater/smaller spheres outside of/inside their own universe, seen in four dimensions). Different time-scales lived outside and inside the torus; some universes expanding forever, others living less than a blink of an eye.

But it was too much. It all meant too much to matter. He had to concentrate on what he knew and what he was and what he had become, for the moment at least.

He found a sun, a planet, out of all that existence, and fell towards it, knowing this was the place, the font of all his dreams and memories.

He searched for meaning, found ashes. Where does it hurt? Well, just here, actually. A wrecked summerhouse, smashed and burned. No sign of a chair.

Sometimes, like now, the banality of it all quite took his breath away. He stopped and checked, for there were drugs that did that; took your breath away. He was still breathing. Probably his body was already set up to ensure that anyway, but the Culture — Chaos bless it twice — had set up a further program in him, to make certain. Cheating, as far as these people were concerned (he saw the girl in front of him, and watched her, through mostly-closed eyes, then closed again), but that was just too bad; he'd done something for them, little though they really knew it, and now they could do something for him.

But the throne, Sma had said once, is the ultimate symbol for many cultures. To sit, in splendour, is the highest articulation of power. The rest come to you; lower, often bowing, frequently backing off, sometimes prostrate (though that is always a bad sign, said the Culture's blessed statistics), and to sit, to be made less animal by that evolutionarily uncalled-for posture, signified the ability to use.

There were some small civilisations — barely more than tribes, Sma had said — where they slept sitting, in special sleep chairs, because they believed that to lie down was to die (did they not always find the dead lying down?).

Zakalwe (was that really his name? It suddenly sounded strange and alien in his remembrance), Zakalwe, Sma said, I visited a place (how had they come to this? What had made him mention anything about this? Had he been drunk? Guard down again? Probably trying to seduce Sma, but ended up under the table again), Zakalwe I once visited a place where they killed people by putting them in a chair. Not torture — that was common enough; beds and chairs were very much the par when it came to getting people helpless and confined, to inflict pain upon them — but actually set it up to kill them while they sat. They — get this — they either gassed them or they passed very high electric currents through them. A pellet dropped into a container beneath the seat, like some obscene image of a commode, producing a fatal gas; or a cap over their head, and their hands dipped in some conducting fluid, to fry their brains.

You want to know the punch-line? Yeah, Sma, give us the punch-line. This same state had a law that forbade — and I quote — "cruel and unusual punishments!" Can you believe that?

He circled around the planet, so far away.

Then fell towards it, through the air to the ground.

He found the shell of the mansion, like a forgotten skull; he found the wrecked summerhouse, like a shattered skull; he found the stone boat, like a deserted image of a skull. Fake. It was never floating.

He saw another boat; a ship; a hundred thousand tonnes of destruction, sitting in its own dry image of desuetude, its layers bristling outwards. Primary, secondary, tertiary, anti-aircraft, small…

He circled, then tried to approach, zeroing in…

But there were too many layers, and they defeated him.

He was thrown out again, and had to circle the planet once more, and as he did so, saw the Chair, and saw the Chairmaker — not the one he'd thought of, before; the other Chairmaker, the real one, and one that he had to keep returning to, through all the memories — in all his ghastly glory.

But some things were too much.

Some things were too much to bear.

Damn people. Damn others. Damn there being other people.

Back to the girl. (Why did there have to be other people?)