A Talent for War

XV.

To ME, ILYANDA has always seemed haunted.

There is something that broods over its misty seas and broken archipelagos, that breathes within its continental forests. You can feel it in the curious ruins that may, or may not, have been left by men. Or in the pungent ozone of the thunderstorms that strike Point Edward each night with a clocklike regularity that no one has yet explained. It is no accident that so many modern writers of supernatural fiction have set their stories on Ilyanda, beneath its cold hard stars and racing moons.

To the planet’s several thousand inhabitants, most of whom live at Point Edward on the northern tip of the smallest of that world’s three continents, such notions are exaggerated. But to those of us who have traveled in more mundane locations, it is a place of fragile beauty, of voices not quite heard, of dark rivers draining the unknown.

I was never more aware of its supernatural qualities than during the weeks following Gage’s death. Against the advice of friends, I took the Meredith to sea, determined in the perverse way of people at such a time to touch once again a few of the things we’d shared in our first year, thereby sharpening the knife-edge of grief. And if, in some indefinable way, I expected to recapture a part of those lost days, it might have been from a sense that, in those phantom oceans, all things seemed possible.

I sailed into the southern hemisphere, and quickly lost myself among the Ten Thousand Islands.

While Kindrel Lee tacked through warm seas, the war was getting close. And when she returned to Point Edward, she was mystified— and frightened—to find it deserted. Sim’s evacuation fleet, unknown to her, had come and gone.

She describes her initial shock, her increasingly frenzied attempts to find another human being in the broad avenues and shopping areas. No one’s ever accused me of having an active imagination, but I stood puzzled out there, listening to the city: the wind and the rain and the buoys and the water sucking at the piers and the sudden, audible hum of power beneath the pavement and the distant banging of a door swinging on its hinges and the Carolian beat of the automated electronic piano in the Edwardian. Something walked through it all on invisible feet.

The city’s lights burned brightly. The air was filled with radio signals. She even listened to a conversation between an approaching shuttle and the orbiting space station, indicating that the regular early morning flight into the Captain William E. Richardson Spaceport would take place as scheduled.

Ultimately, she was drawn to Richardson, which was located twenty-two kilometers outside the city. Midway to her destination, she began seeing evidence of the withdrawal. In fact, she literally ran into some of it: at a place called Walhalla, she rounded a curve too fast and crashed into a city carrier that had run off the road and been abandoned.

The shuttle that she’d expected never came. Still unaware of what was happening, and by now in a state of near-panic, Kindrel raided a security office—in fact, the one in which her husband had worked— and armed herself with a laser. Shortly after that, high in the main terminal building, she encountered Matt Olander.

I’m not sure precisely when I realized I wasn’t alone. A footstep somewhere, perhaps. The sound of running water, possibly a subtle swirling of air currents. But I was suddenly alert, and conscious of my own breathing.

My first impulse was to get out of the building. To get back to the car, and maybe back to the boat. But I held on, feeling the sweat trickle down my ribs.

I moved through the offices one by one, conscious of the weapon in my boot, but deliberately keeping my hands away from it. I was close to panic.

I’d stopped in a conference room dominated by a sculpted freediver. A holograph unit which someone had neglected to turn off blinked sporadically at the head of a carved table. A half-dozen chairs were in some disorder, and several abandoned coffee cups and light pads were scattered about. One would have thought the meeting had recently adjourned, and that the conferees would shortly return.

I activated the holo and some of the light pads. They’d been discussing motivational techniques.

As I turned away, somewhere, far off, glass shattered!

It was a sudden sharp report. Echoes rattled through the room, short pulses what gradually lengthened into each other, merged with the barely audible hum of power in the walls, and subsided at last into a petulant whisper.

Somewhere above. In the Tower Room, the rooftop restaurant I rode the elevator up one floor to the penthouse, stepped out into the gray night and walked quickly across an open patio.

In the fog, the Tower Room was little more than a gloomy presence:

yellow-smeared, round crossbarred windows punched into a shadowy stone exterior; rock columns supporting an arched doorway; a water-wheel; and an antique brass menu board whose lighting no longer worked.

Soft music leaked through the doors. I pulled one partway open and peered in at an interior illuminated by computerized candles flickering in smoked jars. The Tower Room looked, and felt, like a sunken grotto. It was a hive of rocky vaults and dens, divided by watercourses, salad dispensers, mock boulders and shafts, and a long polished bar. Blue and white light sparkled against sandstone and silverware. Crystal streams poured from the mouths of stone nymphs and raced through narrow channels between rough-hewn bridges. Possibly, in another time, it might have been a relatively pedestrian place, one more restaurant in which the clientele and conversation were too heavy to sustain an architect’s illusion. But on that evening, in the stillness that gripped the Blue Tower, the empty tables retreated into a void, until the glimmering lights in the smoked jars burned with the steady radiance of stars.

It was sufficiently cool that I had to pull my jacket about my shoulders. I wondered whether the heating system had given out.

I crossed a bridge, proceeded along the bar, and stopped to survey the lower level. Everything was neatly arranged, chairs in place, silver laid out on red cloth napkins, condiments and sauce bottles stacked side by side on the tables.

I could feel tears coming. I hooked my foot around a chair, dragged it away from the table, and sank into it.

There was an answering clatter, and a voice: "Who’s there?"

I froze.

Footsteps. In back somewhere. And then a man in a uniform.

"Hello," he called cheerfully. "Are you all right?"

I shook my head uncertainly. "Of course," I said. "What’s going on? Where is everybody?"

"I’m back near the window." he said, turning away from me. "Have to stay there." He paused to be sure I was following, and then retreated the way he’d come.

His clothing was strange, but not unfamiliar. By the time I rejoined him, I’d placed it: it was the light and dark blue uniform of the Confederacy.

He’d piled his table high with electronic equipment. A tangle of cables joined two or three computers, a bank of monitors, a generator, and God knew what else. He stood over it, a headphone clasped to one ear, apparently absorbed in the displays: schematics, trace scans, columns of digits and symbols.

He glanced in my direction without quite seeing me, pointed to a bottle of dark wine, produced a glass, and gestured for me to help myself. Then he smiled at something he had seen, laid the headset on the table, and dropped into a chair, "I’m Matt Olander," he said. "What the hell are you doing here?"

He was middle-aged, a thin blade of a man whose gray skin almost matched the color of the walls, marking him as an offworlder. "I don’t think I understand the question," I said.

"Why didn’t you leave with everyone else?" He watched me intently, and I guess he saw that I was puzzled, and then he started to look puzzled. "They took everybody out," he said.

"Who?" I demanded. My voice went off the edge of the register. "Who took everybody where?"

He reacted as if it was a dumb question and reached for the bottle. "I guess we couldn’t really expect to get one hundred percent. Where were you? In a mine somewhere? Out in the hills with no commlink?"

I told him and he signed in a way that suggested I had committed an indiscretion. His uniform was open at the throat, and a light jacket that must have been non-regulation protected him from the chill His hair was thin, and his features suggested more of the tradesman than the warrior. His voice turned soft. "What’s your name?"

"Lee," I said. "Kindrel Lee."

"Well, Kindrel, we spent most of these two weeks evacuating Ilyanda. The last of them went up to the Station during the late morning yesterday. Far as I know, you and I are all that’s left."

His attention returned to the monitor.

"Why?" I asked. I was feeling a mixture of relief and fear.

His expression wished me away. After a moment, he touched his keyboard. "I’ll show you," he said.

One of the screens—I had to move the bottle to get a good look— dissolved to a concentric ring display, across which eight or nine trace lights blinked. "Ilyanda is at the center. Or, rather the Station is. The range runs out to about a half billion kilometers. You’re looking at a mute fleet. Capital ships and battle cruisers." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

"What’s happening, Miss Lee," he continued, "is that the Navy is about to blow hell out of the sons of bitches." His jaw tightened, and a splinter of light appeared in his eyes. "At last.

"It’s been a long time coming. They’ve been driving us before them for three years. But today belongs to us." He raised his empty glass in a jeering salute toward the ceiling.

"I’m glad you were able to get people away," I said into the stillness.

He tilted his head in my direction. "Sim wouldn’t have had it any other way."

"I never thought the war would come here." Another blip appeared on the screen. "I don’t understand it," I said. "Ilyanda 's neutral. And I didn’t think we were near the fighting."

"Kindrel there are no neutrals in this war. You’ve just been letting others do your fighting for you." His voice was not entirely devoid of contempt.

"Ilyanda’s at peace!" I shot back, though it seemed rather academic just then. I stared at him, into his eyes, expecting him to flinch. But I saw only hatred. "Or at least it was," I continued.

"No one’s at peace," he said. "No one’s been at peace for a long time." His voice was very cold, and he bit the words off.

"They’re only here," I said, "because you are, aren’t they?"

He smiled. "Yes," he said. "They want us," He gripped the edges of his chair, propped his chin on his fist, and laughed at me. "You’re judging us! You know, you people are really impossible. The only reason you’re not dead or in chains is because we’ve been dying to give you a chance to ride around in your goddam boat I"

"My God," I gasped, remembering the missing shuttle. "Is that why the redeye never got here?"

"Don’t worry about it," he said. "It was never coming."

I shook my head. "You’re wrong. I overheard some radio traffic shortly after midnight. They were still on schedule then."

"They were never coming," he repeated. "We’ve done everything we could to make this place, this entire world, appear normal."

"Why?" I asked.

"You have the consolation of knowing we are about to turn the war around. The mutes are finally going to get hurt!" His eyes glowed, and I shuddered.

"You led them here," I said.

"Yes." He was on his feet now. "We led them here. We’ve led them into hell. They think Christopher Sim is on the space station. And they want him very badly." He refilled his glass. "Sim has never had the firepower to fight this war. He’s been trying to hold off an armada with a few dozen light frigates." Olander’s face twisted. It was a frightening aspect. "But he’s done a job on the bastards. Anyone else would have been overwhelmed right at the start. But Sim: sometimes I wonder whether he’s human."

Or you, I thought. My fingers brushed the laser.

"Maybe it would be best if you left," he said tonelessly.

I made no move to go. "Why here? Why Ilyanda?"

"We tried to pick a system where the population was small enough to be moved."

I smothered an obscenity. "Did we get to vote on this? Or did Sim just ride in and issue orders?"

"Damn you," he whispered. "You haven’t any idea at all what this is about, do you? A million people have died in this war so far. The mutes have burned Cormoral and taken the City on the Crag and Far Mordaigne. They’ve overrun a dozen systems, and the entire frontier is on the edge of collapse." He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. "They don’t like human beings very much, Miss Lee. And I don’t think they plan for any of us to be around when it’s over."

"We started the war," I objected.

"That’s easy to say. You don’t know what was going on. But it doesn’t matter now anyway. We’re long past drawing fine lines. The killing won’t stop until we’ve driven the bastards back where they came from." He switched displays to a status report. "They’re closing on the Station now." His lips curled into a vindictive leer. "A sizable chunk of their fleet is already within range. And more arriving all the time." He smiled malevolently, and I can remember thinking that I had never before come face to face with anyone so completely evil He was really enjoying himself.

"You said Sim doesn’t have much firepower—"

"He doesn’t."

"Then how—?"

A shadow crossed his face. He hesitated, and looked away toward the monitors. "The Station’s shields have gone up," he said. "No, there’s nothing up there of ours except a couple of destroyers. They’re automated, and the Station’s abandoned." The blinking lights on the battle display had increased to a dozen. Some had moved within the inner ring. "All they can see are the destroyers, and something they think is Corsarius in dock with its hull laid open. And the bastards are still keeping their distance. But it won’t make any difference!"

"Corsarius!" I said. "Sim’s ship?"

"It’s a big moment for them. They’re thinking right now they’re going to take him and end the war." He squinted at the graphics.

I was beginning to suspect it was time to take his advice and make for the wharf, get the Meredith, and head back to the southern hemisphere. Until everything settled down.

"The destroyers are opening up," he said. "But they won’t even slow the mutes down."

"Why bother?"

"We had to give them some opposition. Keep them from thinking too much."

"Olander," I asked, "if you have no ships up there, what’s this all about? How does Sim expect to destroy anything?"

"He won V. But you and I will Kindrel. You and I will inflict such a wound on the mutes tonight that the sons of bitches will never forget!"

Two monitors went suddenly blank. The images returned, swirls of characters blinking frantically. He leaned forward and frowned. "The Station’s taken a hit." He reached toward me, a friendly, soothing gesture, but I stayed away from him.

"And what are you and I going to do to them?" I asked.

"Kindrel, we are going to stop the sunrise."

I found that remark a bit murky, and I said so.

"We’re going to catch them all," he said. "Everything they’ve got here, everything out to the half-billion-kilometer ring, will be incinerated. Beyond that, if they see right away what’s happening and get a running start, they have a chance." He glanced toward the computer. A red lamp glowed on the keyboard. "We have an old Tyrolean freighter, loaded with antimatter. It’s waiting for a command from me."

"To do what?"

His eyes slid shut, and I could no longer read his expression. "To materialize inside your sun." He hung each word in the still air. "We are going to insert it at the sun’s core." A bead of sweat rolled down his chin. "The result, we think, will be—" he paused and grinned, "— moderately explosive."

I could almost have believed there was no world beyond that bar. We’d retreated into the dark, Olander and I and the monitors and the background music and the stone nymphs. All of us.

"A nova?" I asked. My voice must have been barely audible. "You’re trying to induce a nova?"

"No. Not a true nova."

"But the effect—"

"—will be the same." He looked eminently satisfied. "It’s a revolutionary technique. Involves some major breakthroughs in navigation. It isn’t easy, you know, to bring this off. Never been done before."

"Come on, Olander," I exploded, "you can’t expect me to believe that a guy sitting in a bar can blow up a sun!"

"I’m sorry." His eyes changed, and he looked startled, as though he’d forgotten where he was. "You may be right," he said. "It hasn’t been tested, so they really don’t know. Too expensive to run a test."

I tried to imagine Point Edward engulfed in fire, amid boiling seas and burning forests. It was Gage’s city, where we’d explored narrow streets and old bookstores, and pursued each other across rainswept beaches and through candle-lit pubs. And from where we’d first gone to sea. I’d never forgot how it had looked the first time we’d come home, bright and diamond-hard against the horizon. Home. Always it would be home.

And I watched Olander through eyes grown suddenly damp, perhaps conscious for the first time that I had come back to Point Edward with the intention to leave Ilyanda.

"Olander, they left you to do this?"

"No." He shook his head vigorously. "It was supposed to happen automatically when the mutes got close. The trigger was tied in to the sensors on the Station. But the mutes have had some success at disrupting command and control functions. We couldn’t be sure…"

"Then they did leave you!"

"No! Sim would never have allowed it if he’d known. He has confidence in the scanners and computers. Those of us who know a little more about such things do not. So I stayed, and disconnected the trigger, and brought it down here."

"My God, and you’re really going to do it?"

"It works out better this way. We can catch the bastards at the most opportune moment. You need a human to make that judgment. A machine isn’t good enough to do it right."

"Olander, you’re talking about destroying a world!"

"I know." His voice shook. "I know." His eyes found mine at last. The irises were blue, and I could see white all round their edges. "No one wanted this to happen. But we’re driven to the wall If we can’t make this work, here, there may be no future for anyone."

I kept talking, but my attention was riveted to the computer keyboard, to the EXECUTE key, which was longer than the others, and slightly concave.

The laser was cool and hard against my leg.

He drained the last of his wine, and flung the glass out into the dark. It shattered. "Ciao," he said.

"The nova," I murmured, thinking about the broad southern seas and the trackless forests that no one would ever penetrate and the enigmatic ruins. And the thousands of people to whom, like me, Ilyanda was home. Who would remember when it was gone? "What’s the difference between you and the mutes?"

"I know how you feel, Kindrel."

"You have no idea how I feel—"

"I know exactly how you feel. I was on Melisandra when the mutes burned Cormoral. I watched them seize the Pelian worlds. They were irritated with the Pelians so they shot a few people. People who were like you, just minding their business. Do you know what Cormoral looks like now? Nothing will live there for ten thousand years."

Somebody’s chair, his, mine, I don’t know, scraped the floor, and the sound echoed round the bar.

"Cormoral and the Pelians were assaulted by their enemies!" I was enraged, frightened, terrified. Out of sight under the table, my fingers traced the outline of the weapon. "Has it occurred to you," I asked, as reasonably as I could, "what’s going to happen when the mutes go home, and we go back to squabbling among ourselves?"

He nodded. "I know. There’s a lot of risk involved."

"Risk?" I pointed a trembling finger at the stack of equipment. "That thing is more dangerous than a half-dozen invasions. For God’s sake, we’ll survive the mutes. We survived the ice ages and the nuclear age and the colonial wars and we will sure as hell take care of those sons of bitches if there’s no other way.

"But that thing you have in front of you—Matt, don’t do this. Whatever you hope to accomplish, the price is too high."

I listened to him breathe. An old love song was running on the sound system. "I have no choice," he said in a dull monotone. He glanced at his display. "They’ve begun to withdraw. That means they know the Station’s empty, and they suspect either a diversion or a trap."

"You do have a choice!" I screamed at him.

"No!" He pushed his hands into his jacket pockets as though to keep them away from the keyboard. "I do not."

Suddenly I was holding the laser, pointing it at the computers. "I’m not going to allow it."

"There’s no way you can stop it." He stepped out of the line of fire. "But you’re welcome to try."

I backed up a few paces and held the weapon straight out. It was a curious remark, and I played it again. Olander’s face was awash with emotions I couldn’t begin to put a name to. And I realized what was happening. "If I interrupt the power supply," I said, "It’ll trigger. Right?"

His face gave him away.

"Get well away from it." I swung the weapon toward him. "We’ll just sit here awhile."

He didn’t move.

"Back off," I said.

"For God’s sake, Kindrel." He held out his hands. "Don’t do this. There’s no one here but you and me."

"There’s a living world here, Matt. And if that’s not enough, there’s a precedent to be set."

He took a step toward the trigger.

"Don’t, Matt," I said. "I’ll kill you if I have to."

The moment stretched out. "Please, Kindrel," he said at last.

So we remained, facing each other. He read my eyes, and his color drained. I held the laser well out where he could see it, aimed at his chest.

The eastern sky was beginning to lighten.

A nerve quivered in his throat. "I should have left it alone," he said, measuring the distance to the keyboard.

Tears were running down my cheeks, and I could hear my voice loud and afraid as though it were coming from outside me. And the entire world squeezed down to the pressure of the trigger against my right index finger. "You didn’t have to stay," I cried at him. "It has nothing to do with heroics. You’ve been in the war too long, Matt. You hate too well."

He took a second step, tentatively, gradually transferring his weight from one foot to the other, watching me, his eyes pleading.

"You were enjoying this, until I came by."

"No," he said. "That’s not so."

His muscles tensed. And I saw what he was going to do and I shook my head no and whimpered and he told me to just put the gun down and I stood there looking at the little bead of light at the base of his throat where the bolt would hit and saying no no no…

When at last he moved, not toward the computer but toward me, he was far too slow and I killed him.

My first reaction was to get out of there, to leave the body where it had dropped and take the elevator down and run—

I wish to God I had.

The sun was on the horizon. The clouds scattered into the west, and another cool autumn day began.

Matt Olander’s body lay twisted beneath the table, a tiny black hole burned through the throat, and a trickle of blood welling out onto the stone floor. His chair lay on its side, and his jacket was open. A pistol, black and lethal and easy to hand, jutted from an inside pocket.

I had never considered the possibility he might be armed. He could have killed me at any time.

What kind of men fight for this Christopher Sim?

This one would have burned Ilyanda, but he could not bring himself to take my life.

What kind of men? I have no answer to that question. Then or now.

I stood a long time over him, staring at him, and at the silently blinking transmitter, with its cold red eye, while the white lights fled toward the outer ring.

And a terrible fear crept through me: I could still carry out his intention, and I wondered whether I didn’t owe it to him, to someone, to reach out and strike the blow they had prepared. But in the end I walked away from it, into the dawn.

The black ships that escaped at Ilyanda went on to take a heavy toll For almost three more years, men and ships died. Christopher Sim continued to perform legendary exploits. His Dellacondans held on until Rimway and Earth intervened, and, in the heat of battle, the modern Confederacy was born.

The sun weapon itself was never heard from. Whether, in the end, it wouldn’t work, or Sim was unable afterward to lure a large enough force within range of a suitable target, I don’t know.

For most, the war is now something remote, a subject for debate by historians, a thing of vivid memories only for the relatively old. The mutes have long since retreated into their sullen worlds. Sim rests with his heroes, and his secrets, lost off Rigel. And Ilyanda still entrances tourists with her misty seas, and researchers with her curious ruins.

Matt Olander lies in a hero’s grave at Richardson. I cut his name into the stone with the same weapon I used to kill him.

And I: to my sorrow, I survived. I survived the attack on the city, I survived the just anger of the Dellacondans, I survived my own black guilt.

The Dellacondans: they came twice following the murder. There were four of them the first time, two men and two women. I hid from them, and they left. Later, when I’d begun to suspect they would not come again, a lone woman landed on one of the Richardson pads, and I went out in the sunlight and told her everything.

I expected to be killed; but she said little, and wanted to take me to Millennium. But I couldn’t face that, so I walked away from her. And I lived outside the ruined city, in Walhalla where perhaps I should have died, pursued by an army of ghosts which grew daily in number. All slain by my hand. And when the Ilyandans returned at the end of the war, I was waiting.

They chose not to believe me. It may have been politics. They may have preferred to forget. And so I am denied even the consolation of public judgment. There is none to damn me. Or to forgive.

I have no doubt I did the right thing.

Despite the carnage, and the fire, I was right.

In my more objective moments, in the daylight, I know that. But I know also that whoever reads this document, after my death, will understand that I need more than a correct philosophical stance.

For now, for me, in the dark of Ilyanda’s hurtling moons, the war never ends.