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 kilometres 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 kilometres. 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 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 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 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.