Horza finally splashed out of the water and ran after the man, following the wetly flapping gray cloak.
The man stumbled, fell and rolled. As he started to rise Horza slammed into him, bowling them both over. He lashed out at
the man’s face,
shadowed in the light coming from behind him, but missed. The man kicked out at Horza, then tried to get away
again. Horza threw himself at
the man’s legs, bringing him down once more, the wet cloak flopping over his head. Horza scrambled
over on all fours and rolled him over face
up. It
was
Kraiklyn. He drew his hand back for a punch. The pale, shaved face underneath him was twisted in terror, put in shadow by
some
lights coming from behind Horza, where another great roaring noise was…. Kraiklyn screamed, looking not at the man wearing
his own real
face, but behind him, above him. Horza whirled round.
A black mass blowing spray rushed toward him; lights blazed high above. A siren sounded, then the crushing black bulk was
over him,
hitting him, knocking him flat, pounding at his eardrums with noise and pressure, pressing, pressing, pressing….
Horza heard a gurgling sound;
he was being rammed into Kraiklyn’s chest; they were both being rubbed into the concrete as
though by an immense thumb.
Another hovercraft; the second one in the line he’d seen.
Abruptly, with a single sweeping stroke of pain bruising him from feet to head, as if a giant was trying to sweep him up off
the floor with a
huge hard brush, the weight was lifted off. In its place was utter darkness, noise fit to burst skulls, and
violent, turbulent, crushing air pressure.
They were under the skirts of the big vehicle. It was right above them, moving slowly forward or maybe—it was too dark to
see anything—
stationary over the concrete apron, perhaps about to settle on the concrete, crushing them.
As though it was just another part of the maelstrom of battering pain, a blow thudded into Horza’s ear, knocking him sideways
in the
darkness. He rolled on the rough concrete, pivoting on one elbow as soon as he could and bracing one leg while he struck
out with the other in
the direction the punch had come from; he felt his foot hit something yielding.
He got to his feet, ducking as he thought of whirling impeller blades just overhead. The eddies and vortices of hot oil-filled
air rocked him
like a small boat bobbing in a chopping sea. He felt like a puppet controlled by a drunk. He staggered forward,
his arms out, and hit Kraiklyn.
They started to fall again, and Horza let go, punching with all his might at the place he
guessed the man’s head was. His fist crashed into bone,
but he didn’t know where. He skipped back, in case there was a retaliatory
kick or punch on its way. His ears were popping; his head felt tight.
He could feel his eyes vibrating in their sockets; he
thought he was deaf but he could feel a thudding in his chest and throat, making him
breathless, making him choke and gasp.
He could make out just a hint of a border of light all around them, as though they were under the
middle of the hovercraft.
He saw something, just an area of darkness, on that border, and lunged at it, swinging his foot from low down. Again
he connected,
and the dark part of the border disappeared.
He was blown off his feet by a crushing down-draft of air and tumbled bodily along the concrete, thumping into Kraiklyn where
he lay on the
ground after Horza’s last kick. Another punch hit Horza on the head, but it was weak and hardly hurt. Horza
felt for and found Kraiklyn’s head. He
lifted it and banged it off the concrete, then did it again. Kraiklyn struggled, but
his hands beat uselessly off Horza’s shoulders and chest. The
area of lightness beyond the dim shape on the ground was enlarging,
coming closer. Horza banged Kraiklyn’s head against the concrete one
more time, then threw himself flat. The rear edge of
the skirt scrubbed over him; his ribs ached and his skull felt as though somebody was
standing on it. Then it was over, and
they were in the open air.
The big craft thundered on, trailing remnants of spray. There was another one fifty meters down the dock and heading toward
him.
Kraiklyn was lying still, a couple of meters away.
Horza got up onto all fours and crawled over to the other man. He looked down into his eyes, which moved a little.
“I’m Horza!
Horza!
" he screamed, but couldn’t even hear anything himself.
He shook his head, and with a grimace of frustration on the face that was not really his own and which was the last thing
the real Kraiklyn
ever saw, he gripped the head of the man lying on the concrete and twisted it sharply, breaking the neck,
just as he had broken Zallin’s.
He managed to drag the body to the side of the dock just in time to get out of the way of the third and last hovercraft. Its
towering skirt
bulged past two meters away from where he half lay, half sat, panting and sweating, his back against the cold
wet concrete of the dock, his
mouth open and his heart thudding.
He undressed Kraiklyn, took off the cloak and the light-colored onepiece daysuit he wore, then climbed out of his own torn
blouse and bloody
pantaloons and put on what Kraiklyn had been wearing. He took the ring Kraiklyn wore on the small finger
of his right hand. He picked at his
own hands, at the skin where palm became wrist. It came away cleanly, a layer of skin
sloughing off his right hand from wrist to fingertips. He
wiped Kraiklyn’s limp, pale right palm on a damp bit of clothing,
then put the skin over it, pressing it down hard. He lifted the skin off carefully
and positioned it back on his own hand.
Then he repeated the operation using his left hand.
It was cold and it seemed to take a very long time and a lot of effort. Eventually, while the three big air-cushion vehicles
were stopping and
letting passengers off half a kilometer down the dock, Horza finally staggered to a ladder of metal rungs
set into the concrete wall of the dock,
and with shaking hands and quivering feet hauled himself to the top.
He lay for a while, then got up, climbed the spiral stairs to the small footbridge, staggered across it and down the other
side, and entered
the circular access building. Brightly dressed and excited people, just off the big hovers and still in
a party mood, quietened when they saw him
wait near the elevator doors for the capsule which would take them down to the spaceport
area half a kilometer under their feet. Horza couldn’t
hear very much, but he could see their anxious looks, sense the awkwardness
he was causing with his battered, bloody face and his ripped,
soaking clothes.
At last the elevator appeared. The party goers piled in, and Horza, supporting himself on the wall, stumbled in too. Somebody
held his arm,
helping him, and he nodded thanks. They said something which he heard as a distant rumble; he tried to smile
and nod again. The elevator
dropped.
The underside greeted them with an expanse of what looked like stars. Gradually, Horza realized it was the light-speckled
top of a
spacecraft larger than anything he’d ever seen or even heard about before; it had to be the demilitarized Culture
ship,
The Ends of Invention.
He didn’t care what it was called, as long as he could get aboard and find the
CAT.
The elevator had come to a halt in a transparent tube above a spherical reception area hanging in hard vacuum a hundred meters
under the
base of the Orbital. From the sphere, walkways and tube tunnels spread out in all directions, heading for the access
gantries and open and
closed docks of the port area itself. The doors to the closed docks, where ships could be worked on
in pressurized conditions, were all open.
The open docks themselves, where ships simply moored and airlocks were required,
were empty. Replacing them all, directly underneath the
spherical reception area, just as it was directly underneath almost
the entire port area, was the ex-Culture General Systems Vehicle
The Ends
of Invention.
Its broad, flat top stretched for kilometer after kilometer in all directions, almost totally blocking out the view of space
and stars
beyond. Instead its top surface glittered with its own lights where various connections had been made with the access
tubes and tunnels of the
port.
He felt dizzy again, registering the sheer scale of the vast craft. He hadn’t seen a GSV before, far less been inside one.
He knew of them
and what they were for, but only now did he appreciate what an achievement they represented. This one was
theoretically no longer part of the
Culture; he knew it was demilitarized, stripped bare of most equipment, and without the
Mind or Minds which would normally run it; but just the
structure alone was enough to impress.
