Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks

drinking binge. He paid her
in the mornings, always more than he thought she expected, because he knew she
was frightened by the strange, unmoving shack,
    She'd
talk to him about her old loves and old hopes and new hopes and he half
listened, knowing she thought he didn't really understand what she was saying.
When he talked it was in another language, and the story was even less
believeable. The woman would lie close to him, her head on his smooth and
unscarred chest, while he talked into the dark air above the bed, his voice not
echoing in the wood-flimsy space of the shack, and he'd tell her, in words she
would never understand, about the magic land where everyone was a wizard and
nobody ever had terrible choices to make, and guilt was almost unknown, and
poverty and degradation were things you had to teach children about to let them
understand how fortunate they were, and where no hearts broke.
    He
told her about a man, a warrior, who'd worked for the wizard doing things they
could or would not bring themselves to do, and who eventually could work for
them no more, because in the course of some driven, personal campaign to rid
himself of a burden he would not admit to - and even the wizards had not
discovered - he found, in the end, that he had only added to that weight, and
his ability to bear was not without limit after all.
    And
he told her, sometimes, about another time and another place, far away in space
and far away in time and even further away in history, where four children had
played together in a huge and wonderful garden, but seen their idyll destroyed
with gunfire, and of the boy who became a youth and then a man, but who for
ever after carried more than love for a girl in his heart. Years later, he
would tell her, a small but terrible war was waged in this faraway place, and
the garden itself laid waste. (And, eventually, the man did lose the girl from
his heart.) Finally, when he had almost talked himself to sleep, and the night
was at its darkest, and the girl was long since gone to the land of dreams,
sometimes he would whisper to her about a great warship, a great metal warship,
becalmed in stone but still dreadful and awful and potent, and about the two
sisters who were the balance of that warship's fate, and about their own fates,
and about the Chair, and the Chairmaker.
    Then
he would sleep, and when he woke, each time, the girl and the money would be
gone.
    He
would turn back to the dark tar-paper walls then, and seek sleep, but not find
it, and so rise and dress and go out, and comb the horizon-wide beach again,
under the blue skies or the black skies, beneath the wheeling seabirds
screaming their meaningless songs to the sea and the brine-charged breeze.
    The
weather varied, and because he'd never bothered to find out, he never knew what
season it was, but the weather swung between warm and bright and cold and dull,
and sometimes sleet came, chilling him, and winds blew around the dark hut,
keening through the gaps in the planks and the tar-paper, and stirring the
slack disturbances of sand on the floor inside the shack like abraded memories.
    Sand
would build up inside the hut, blown in from one direction or another, and he
would scoop it carefully, throw it out the door to the wind like an offering,
and wait for the next storm.
    He
always suspected there was a pattern to these slow sandy inundations, but he
could not bring himself to try to work out what that pattern was. Anyway, every
few days he had to trundle his little wooden cart into the parktown, and sell
his sea-begotten wares, and collect money, and so food, and so the girl that
came to the shack every five days or six.
    The
parktown changed every time he went there, streets being created or evaporating
as the home cars arrived or departed; it all depended where people chose to
park. There were some fairly static landmarks, like the sheriff's compound and
the fuel stockade and the smithy wagon and the area where the