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deliberately and steadily for the grey 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
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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 kilometres. 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 towards 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 held on their waists, gathering things from the
sea as they waded through it, putting what they collected in their baskets.
They hadn't seen him, so he swam on, making a slow, crawling motion with his
arms and kicking feebly with his legs.
The people harvesting the sea didn't appear to notice him; they kept on wading
through the surf, stooping occasionally to pick from the sands underneath,
their eyes sweeping and probing, scanning and searching, but too close in; not
seeing him. His stroke slowed to a gasping, dying crawl. He could not lift his
hands free of the water, and his legs stayed paralysed . . .
Then through the surf noise, like something from a dream, he heard several
people shouting nearby, and splashes coming close. He was still swimming
weakly when another wave lifted him, and he saw several of the skinny people
clad in loincloths and tattered tunics, wading through the water towards him.
They helped Horza in through the breaking waves, over sun-streaked shallows
and onto the golden sands. He lay there while the thin and haggard people
crowded round. They talked quietly to each other in a language he hadn't heard
before. He tried to move but couldn't. His muscles felt like lengths of limp
rag.
'Hello,' he croaked. He tried it in all the languages he knew, but none seemed
to work. He looked into the faces of the people around him. They were human,
but that word covered so many different species throughout the galaxy it was a
continuing subject for debate who was and who wasn't human. As in all too many
matters, the consensus of opinion was starting to resemble what the Culture
had to say on the subject. The Culture would lay down the law (except, of
course, that the Culture didn't have any real laws) about what being human
was, or how intelligent a particular species was (while at the same time
making clear that pure intelligence didn't really mean much on its own), or on
how long people should live (though only as a rough guide, naturally), and
people would accept these things without question, because everybody believed
the Culture's own propaganda, that it was fair, unbiased, disinterested,
concerned only with absolute truth . . .
and so on.
So were these people around him really human? They were about Horza's height,
they seemed to have roughly the same bone structure, bilateral symmetry and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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