Yes she still had little experience as a guider-through, but as a stranger the man had been given to her, because they thought she was the best of the untried. But she would show them. Perhaps, through this, they were already considering her for the Matriarchs.

She would lead them one day. She felt this in her bones. The same bones that ached when she saw a child fall; the same ache in her cupped child-bones that came when she saw someone fall hard to the ground, would be her guide through the politics and tribulations of the tribe. She would prevail. Like this man here in front of her, but different. She had that inner strength, too. She would lead her people; it was like a child inside her, growing, that certainty. She would stir her people against the conquerors; she would show their brief hegemony for what it was; a side-track on the desert trail that was their destiny. The people beyond the plains, in their corrupt perfumed palace on the cliff, would fall beneath them. The power and thought of the women, and the power and bravery of their men — desert thorns — would crush the decadent petal-people of the cliffs. The sands would be theirs again. Temples would be carved in her name.

Lies. The girl was young and knew nothing of the tribes" thoughts or destiny. She was a scrap thrown to him, to ease his passage into what they imagined would be his death-dream. Her vanquished people's fate scarcely mattered to her; they had replaced that ancient heritage with thoughts of prestige and gadgets.

Let her dream. He relaxed into the calm frenzy of the drug.

There was a nexus where the vanishing-point of memory met the time-light from another place, and he was not yet sure he had out-run it.

He tried to see the great house again, but it was obscured by smoke and star-shell. He looked to the great battleship, confined within its dry-land dock, but it would not grow any larger. It was a capital ship, no more, no less, and he could not access the depths of meaning that it really held for him.

All he'd done was take the Chosen across the wastes to the Palace. Why had they wanted the Chosen to get to the court? It seemed absurd. The Culture did not believe in such supernatural, superstitious nonsense. But the Culture required him to make sure the Chosen got to the Court, despite all sorts of nastiness getting in his way.

To perpetuate a corrupt line. To carry on a reign of stupidness.

Well, they had their own reasons. You took the money and ran. Except there was no money, as such. What was a boy to do?

Believe. Though they scorned belief. Do. Act, though they were wary of action. He was their whipper boy, he realised. A borrowed hero. They thought little enough of heroes for this to be a boost to one's own self-belief.

Come with us, do these things, that you would like to do anyway, except more so, and we will give you what you could never really have anywhere or anytime else; real proof that you are doing the right thing; that not only are you having immense fun, it is also for the common good. So enjoy.

And he did, and he enjoyed, though he was not always sure it was for the right reasons. But that did not matter to them.

The Chosen to the Palace.

He stood back from his life and was not ashamed. All he'd ever done was because there was something to be done. You used those weapons, whatever they might happen to be. Given a goal, or having thought up a goal, you had to aim for it, no matter what stood in your way. Even the Culture recognised that. They couched it in terms of what could be done at a specific time and level of technological capability, but they recognised that all was relative, everything was in flux…

He tried, all of a sudden — hoping to take it by surprise — to sweep and crash back down to that place with the war-shelled mansion and the burned-out summerhouse and the foundering boat made of stone… but the memory would not bear the weight of it, and he was flung out again, swirled away, cast into the nothingness, consigned to the oblivion of the deliberately not-thought thoughts.

The tent stood at the focus of the desert trails. White without, black within, it seemed to image his crossroad imaginings.

Hey hey hey. It's only a dream.

Except it wasn't a dream, and he was in complete control, and if he opened his eyes he could see the girl sitting there in front of him, staring at him, wondering, and there was never any doubt about who was where and what was when, and in a way that was the worst thing about this drug; that it let you go anywhere, anytime — as not a few drugs did — but it still let you connect back to reality whenever you really wanted to.

Cruel, he thought.

The Culture might just have it right after all; being able to call up almost any drug or combinations of drugs seemed suddenly less indulgent and decadent than he'd imagined, before.

The girl, he saw, in one awful instant, would do great things. She would be famous and important, and the tribe around her would do great — and terrible — things, and it would all be for nothing, because whatever terrible train of events he had set in motion by taking the Chosen to the Palace, this tribe would not survive; they were the dead. Their mark upon the desert of life was already being obscured, sands blowing over, grain by grain by grain… He had already helped to scuff it out, no matter that they hadn't realised this yet. They would, after he was gone. The Culture would take him away from here, and put him down somewhere else, and this adventure would collapse with the rest into meaninglessness, and nothing very much would be left, as he went on to do roughly the same thing somewhere else.

Actually, he could happily have killed the Chosen, because the boy was a fool, and he had seldom been in the company of anybody quite so stupid. The youth was a cretin, and didn't even realise that he was.

He could think of no more disastrous combination.

He swept back towards the planet he had once abandoned.

Came in so far, was forced away. He tried again, but without any real self-belief.

Was rejected. Well, he'd expected no more.

The Chairmaker was not the person who made the chair, he thought, immediately lucid. It was and was not him. There are no Gods, we are told, so I must make my own salvation.

His eyes were already closed, but he closed them again.

He swayed in a circle, unknowing.

Lies; he wept and screamed, fell at the scornful feet of the girl.

Lies; he circled on.

Lies; he fell to the girl, hands out, grasping for a mother that was not there.

Lies.

Lies.

Lies; he circled on, tracing his own private symbol in the air between the crown of his head and the day-bright hole that was the tent's smoke-hole.

He sank towards the planet again, but the girl in the black/white tent reached out and wiped his brow and, in that tiny movement, seemed to wipe his being away…

(Lies.)

… It was a long time later he found out he'd only taken the Chosen to the Palace because the brat was to be the last of the line. Not merely stupid, but also impotent, the Chosen fathered no strong sons and no cunning daughters (as the Culture had known all along), and the fractious desert tribes swept in a decade later led by a Matriarch who had guided most of the warriors under her command through the dream-leaf time, and had seen one stronger and stranger than all of them suffer its effects and come through unscathed but still unfulfilled, and known through that very experience that there was more to their desert existence than had been guessed at by the myths and elders of her nomad tribe.