He got to his feet again; the shuttle didn’t seem to have sunk any lower in the water. The island was still
far away, but it looked a little nearer
than it had earlier; the currents, or the winds, such as they were, seemed to be carrying
him in roughly the right direction. He sat down again.
The air was still warm. He thought of taking the suit off but decided against it; it was uncomfortable but perhaps he would
get too cold
without it. He lay back again.
He wondered where Yalson was now. Had she survived Lamm’s bomb, and the wreck. He hoped so. He thought she probably had; he
couldn’t imagine her dead, or dying. It was little enough to go on, and he refused to believe he was superstitious, but not
being able to imagine
her dead was somehow comforting. She’d survive. Take more than a tactical nuke and a billion-ton ship
impacting a berg the size of a small
continent to polish that girl off…. He found himself smiling, remembering her.
He would have spent more time thinking about Yalson, but there was something else he had to think about as well.
Tonight he would Change.
It was all he could do. Probably by now it was irrelevant. Kraiklyn was either dead or—if surviving—unlikely ever to meet
Horza again, but
the Changer had prepared for the transformation; his body was waiting for it, and he could think of nothing
better to do.
The situation, he told himself, was far from hopeless. He wasn’t badly injured, he seemed to be heading for the island, where
the shuttle
might still be, and if he could make it in time there was always Evanauth, and that Damage game. Anyway, the Culture
might be looking for him
by now, so it wouldn’t do to keep the same identity for too long. What the hell, he thought; he would
Change. He would go to sleep as the Horza
the others knew him as, and he would wake up as a copy of the captain of the
Clear Air Turbulence.
He prepared his bruised and aching body for the alteration as best he could: relaxing muscles and readying glands and groups
of cells;
sending deliberate signals from brain to body and face through nerves that only Changers possessed.
He watched the sun, dimming through red stages somewhere low over the ocean.
Now he would sleep; sleep, and become Kraiklyn; take on yet another identity, another shape to add to the many he had assumed
already
during his life….
Maybe there was no point, maybe he was only taking this new shape on to die in.
But,
he thought,
what have I got to lose.
Horza watched the falling, darkening red eye of the sun until he entered the sleep of Changing, and in that Changing trance,
though his eyes
were closed, and beneath their lids also altering, he seemed to see that dying glare still….
Animal eyes. Predator’s eyes. Caged behind them, looking out. Never sleeping, being three people. Ownership; rifle and ship
and Company.
Not much yet maybe, but one day… with just a little, little luck, no more than everybody else had a right to…
one day he would show them.
He
knew how good he was,
he
knew what he was fit for, and who was fit for him. The rest were just tokens; they were his because they were under
his command;
it was his ship, after all. The women especially—just game pieces. They could come and go and he didn’t care. All you had
to do
with any of them was share their danger and they thought you were wonderful. They couldn’t see that for him there was
no danger; he had a lot
left to do in life, he
knew
he wasn’t going to die some stupid, squalid little combat death. The galaxy, one day, would know his name, and either
mourn
him or curse him, when eventually he did have to die…. He hadn’t decided yet whether it would be mourn or curse… maybe it
depended
on how the galaxy treated him in the meantime…. All he needed was the tiniest break, just the sort of thing the others
had had, the leaders of
the bigger, more successful, better known, more feared and respected Free Companies. They must have
had them…. They might seem
greater than he was now, but one day they would look up to him; everybody would. All would know
his name:
Kraiklyn!
Horza woke in the dawn light, still lying on the wave-washed shuttle roof, like something washed up and spread upon a table.
He was half
awake, half asleep. It was colder, the light was thinner and more blue, but nothing else had changed. He started
to drift back to sleep again,
away from pain and lost hopes.
Nothing else had changed… only him….
He had to swim for the island.
He had woken for the second time the same morning, feeling different, better, rested. The sun was angling up and out of the
overhead haze.
The island was closer, but he was going past it. The currents were taking him and the shuttle away now, having swept no closer
than two
kilometers to the group of reefs and sandbanks round the isle. He cursed himself for sleeping so long. He got out
of the suit—it was useless
now and deserved to be ditched—and left it lying on the still just-awash shuttle roof. He was hungry,
his stomach rumbled, but he felt fit and
ready for the swim. He estimated it was about three kilometers. He dived in and struck
out powerfully. His right leg hurt where he’d been hit by
Lamm’s laser and his body still ached in places, but he could do
it; he knew he could.
He looked back once, after he’d swum for a few minutes. He could see the suit but not the shuttle. The empty suit was like
the abandoned
cocoon of some metamorphosed animal, riding opened and empty, seeming just above the surface of the waves behind.
He turned away and
kept swimming.
The island came closer, but very slowly. The water was warm at first, but it seemed to get colder, and the aches in his body
increased. He
ignored them, switching them off, but he could feel himself slowing, and he knew that he’d started off too fast.
He paused, treading water for a
moment; then, after drinking a little of the warm fresh water, set off again, stroking more
deliberately and steadily for the gray tower of the
distant island.
He told himself how lucky he’d been. The shuttle crash hadn’t injured him badly—though the aches still plagued him, like noisy
relatives
locked in a distant room, disturbing his concentration. The warm water, though apparently getting colder, was fresh,
so that he could drink from
it and wouldn’t dehydrate; yet it crossed his mind that he would have been more buoyant had it
been salty.
He kept going. It ought to have been easy but it was getting more difficult all the time. He stopped thinking about it; he
concentrated on
moving; the slow, steady, rhythmic beat of arms and legs forcing him through the water; up waves, over, down;
up, over, down.
Under my own power,
he told himself,
under my own power.
The mountain on the island grew larger very slowly. He felt as though he was building it, as though the effort required to
make it appear
larger in his sight was the same as if he was toiling to construct that peak; heap it up rock by rock, with
his own hands…
Two kilometers. Then one.
The sun angled, rose.
Eventually, the outer reefs and shallows; he passed them in a daze, into shallower water.
A sea of aching. An ocean of exhaustion.
He swam toward the beach, through a fan of waves and surf radiating from the reef-gap he’d swum through…
… and felt as though he’d never taken the suit off, as though he wore it still, and it was stiff with rust or age, or filled
with heavy water or wet
sand; dragging, stiffening, pulling him back.
He could hear waves breaking on the beach, and when he looked up he could see people on it: thin dark people, dressed in rags,
gathered
round tents and fires or walking between them. Some were in the water ahead of him, carrying baskets, large open-work
baskets which they