He stared at the frozen clouds beyond the window, the amorphous frenzy of the snow. Its meaningless mocked him.

He slumped down in the bed, letting the piled bedclothes submerge him, like some drift, and slept, his right hand under the pillow, curled round one leg of the scissors he'd taken from Talibe's tray the day before.

"How's the head, old buddy-pal?" Saaz Insile tossed him a fruit which he failed to catch. He picked it up off his lap, where it had landed after hitting his chest.

"Getting better," he told the other man.

Insile sat on the nearest bed, threw his cap on the pillow, unfastened the top button of his uniform. His short, spiky black hair made his pale face look white as the blankness still filling the world beyond the ward windows. "How they treating you?"

"Fine."

"Damn good-looking nurse you've got out there."

"Talibe." He smiled. "Yes; she's okay."

Insile laughed and set back on the bed, supporting himself with his arms splayed out behind. "Only «okay»? Zakalwe, she's gorgeous. You get bed-baths?"

"No; I'm able to walk to the bathroom."

"Want me to break your legs?"

"Perhaps later." He laughed.

Insile laughed a little too, then looked at the storm beyond the windows. "How about your memory? Getting any better?" He picked at the doubled-over white sheet near where his cap lay.

"No," he said. In fact he thought it might be, but somehow he didn't want to tell people; maybe he thought it would be bad luck. "I remember being in the mess, and that card game… then…" Then he remembered seeing the white chair at his bedside and filling his lungs with all the air in the world and screaming like a hurricane until the end of time, or at least until Talibe came and calmed him (Livueta? he'd whispered; Dar… Livueta?). He shrugged. … then I was here."

"Well," Saaz said, straightening the crease on his uniform trousers, "the good news is, we managed to get the blood off the hangar floor."

"I expect it to be returned."

"Deal, but we're not cleaning it."

"How are the others?"

Saaz sighed, shook his head, smoothed the hair at the back of his neck. "Oh, just the same dear lovable fine bunch of lads they ever were." He shrugged. "The rest of the squadron… said to send their best wishes for a rapid recovery. But you pissed them off that night." He looked sadly at the man in the bed. "Cheri, old pal, nobody likes the war, but there are ways of saying so… You just did it wrong. I mean, we all appreciate what you've done; we know this isn't really your battle, but I think… I think some of the guys… even feel bad about that. I hear them sometimes; you must have; at night, having nightmares. You can see that look in their eyes sometimes, like they know how bad the odds are, and they just aren't going to come through all this. They're scared; they might try to put a bullet through my head if I said so to their face, but scared is what they are. They'd love a way out of this war. They're brave men, and they want to fight for their country, but they want out, and nobody who knew the odds would blame them. Any honourable excuse. They wouldn't shoot themselves in the foot, and nowadays they won't go for a walk outside in ordinary shoes and come back with frostbite because too many did that early on; but they'd love a way out of this. You don't have to be here, but you are; you choose to fight, and a lot of them resent you for it; it makes them feel like cowards, because they know that if they were in your boots they'd be on land, telling the girls what a brave pilot they have the chance to dance with."

"I'm sorry I upset them." He touched the bandages on his head. "I'd no idea they felt this strongly though."

"They don't." Insile frowned. "That's what's weird." He got up and walked over to the nearest window, looking out at the blizzard.

"Shit, Cheri, half those guys would've gladly invited you into the hangar and done their best to lose you a couple of teeth, but a gun?" He shook his head. "There's not one of those guys I'd trust behind me with a bread roll or a handful of ice-cubes, but if it was a gun…" He shook his head again. "I wouldn't think twice. They just aren't like that."

"Maybe I imagined it all, Saaz," he said.

Saaz looked round, a worried expression on his face. It melted a little when he saw his friend was smiling. "Cheri; I admit I don't want to imagine I'm wrong about one of them, but the alternative is… just somebody else. I don't know who. The military police don't know either."

"I don't think I was much help to them," he confessed.

Saaz came back, sat down on the other bed again. "You really have no idea who you talked to afterwards? Where you went?"

"None."

"You told me you were going to the briefing room, to check out the latest targets."

"Yes, so I've heard."

"But when Jine went there — to invite you to step into the hangar for saying such terrible things about our high command and our low tactics — you weren't there."

"I don't know what happened, Saaz; I'm sorry, but I just…" He felt tears prick behind his eyes. The suddenness surprised him. He put the fruit back down in his lap. He made a very large sniffing noise, rubbed his nose, and coughed, patted his chest. "I'm sorry," he repeated.

Insile watched the other man for a moment as he reached for a handkerchief from the bedside table.

Saaz shrugged, grinned broadly. "Hey; never mind. It'll come back to you. Maybe it was just some loony ground-crewman pissed off because you'd stepped on his fingers once too often. If you want to remember, don't try too hard."

"Yeah; "Get some rest", I've heard that before, Saaz." He picked the fruit from his lap, placed it on the bedside cabinet.

"Can I get you anything, for next time?" Insile asked. "Apart from Talibe, on whom I may have designs myself if you refuse to rise to the occasion."

"No, thanks."

"Booze?"

"No, I'm saving myself for the mess-room bar."

"Books?"

"Really, Saaz; nothing."

"Zakalwe," Saaz laughed. "There isn't even anybody else here for you to talk to; what do you do all day?"

He looked at the window, then back at Saaz. "I think, quite a lot," he said. "I try to remember."

Saaz came over to the bed. He looked very young. He hesitated, then punched him gently in the chest. He glanced at the bandages. "Don't get lost in there, old buddy-pal."

He was expressionless for a moment. "Yeah; don't worry. But anyway, I'm a good navigator."

There was something he'd meant to tell Saaz Insile, but he couldn't remember what that was either. Something that would warn him, because there was something that he knew about that he hadn't known about before, and something that required… warning.

The frustration of it made him want to scream sometimes; to tear the white plump pillows in half and pick up the white chair and smash it through the windows to let the mad white fury out there inside.

He wondered how quickly he'd freeze if the windows were open.

Well, at least it would be appropriate; he'd arrived here frozen, so why not leave the same way? He entertained the thought that some cell-memory, some bone-remembered affinity had drawn him here, of all places, where the great battles were fought on the titanic crashing tabular bergs, calved from their vast glaciers and swirling like ice-cubes in some planet-sized cocktail glass, a scatter of ever-shifting frozen islands, some of them hundreds of kilometres long, circling the world between pole and tropic, their broad backs a white wasteland spattered with blood and bodies, and the wrecks of tanks and planes.

To fight for what would inevitably melt and could never provide food or minerals or a permanent place to live, seemed an almost deliberate caricature of the conventional folly of war. He enjoyed the fight, but even the way the war was fought disturbed him, and he had made enemies amongst the other pilots, and his superiors, by speaking his mind.