A Talent for War

VI.

WHO HAD GABE’S traveling companion been on the Capella?

Sixty-three others had boarded the vessel from the Rimway shuttle, of whom twenty were bound for Saraglia Station. (The big interstellars, of course, never actually stop at ports of call. Too much time and energy would be wasted fighting inertia, so they skim planetary systems at high velocity. Passengers and cargo are transferred in flight from local vehicles.) It seemed likely that his companion had been among the twenty.

I scanned their death notices looking for a likely prospect. The group included elderly vacationers, naval personnel on leave, three sets of newlyweds, a sprinkling of businessmen. Four were from Andiquar: a pair of importIexport brokers, a child being shuttled between relatives, and a retired law enforcement officer. Nothing very promising, but I got lucky right away with John Khyber, the law enforcement guy.

I secured the code of his next of kin from the announcement, and linked in. "I’m Alex Benedict," I said. "May I speak with Mrs. Khyber?"

"I’m Jana Khyber." I waited for her to materialize, but nothing happened.

"I’m sorry to bother you. My uncle was on the Capella. I believe he was traveling with your husband."

"Oh?" There was a sea change in the voice: softer, interested, pained. "I’m sorry about your uncle." I heard Jacob’s projector switch on. There was a flutter of color in the air, and she appeared: dignified, a trifle matronly, attentive. Perhaps irritated, though with me, or Gabe, or her husband, I could not tell. "I’m glad to have a chance to talk to someone about it. Where were they going?"

"You don’t know, Jana?"

"How would I know? Trust me, he said."

Son of a bitch. "Did you know Gabe Benedict?"

"No," she said, after a pause. "I didn’t know my husband was traveling with anybody." She frowned, and her bosom, which was substantial, rose and fell. "I didn’t know he was traveling at all. I mean off-world."

"Had he ever been to Saraglia before?"

"No." She crossed her arms. "He’d never been off Rimway before. At least not that I know of. Now I’m not so sure."

"But you knew he was going to be away for a while?"

"Yes. I knew."

"No explanation?"

"None," she said, biting off a sob. "My God, we’ve never had a problem of any kind, Mr. Benedict. Not really. He told me he was sorry, that he couldn’t explain, that he’d be away six months."

"Six months? You must have questioned him."

"Of course I did. They’ve called me back he said. They need me, and I’ve got to go."

"Who were they?"

"The Agency. He was a security officer. Retired, but it didn’t really make any difference. He’s still a consultant." She hesitated over the statement, but didn’t correct herself. "He specialized in commercial fraud, and you know how much of that there is these days." She sounded close to tears. "I just don’t know what it was about, and that’s what hurts so much. He’s dead and I don’t know why."

"Did you check with his agency?"

"They claim they don’t know anything about it." She stared at me. "Mr. Benedict, he never gave me any reason to distrust him. We had a lot of years together, and it’s the only time he’s ever lied to me."

That you know of, I thought. But I said: "Did he have any interest in archaeology?"

"I don’t think so. No. Is this Gabriel an archaeologist?"

"Yes."

"I can’t imagine any kind of connection."

Nor could I.

Her voice quivered. "The truth is," she continued, struggling to maintain her composure, "I don’t know what he was doing on that damned ship, where he was going, or what he planned to do when he got there. And if you have any ideas, I’d be grateful to know what they are. What sort of man was he, your uncle?"

I smiled, to assuage her fears. "One of the best I have ever known, Mrs. Khyber. He would not willingly have led your husband into danger. Or anything else that would have troubled you." Why would a retired police officer have been along? Bodyguard, perhaps? That hardly seemed likely. "Was he a pilot?"

"No."

"Tell me, Mrs. Khyber, did he have any interest in history? In the Resistance, particularly?"

A puzzled expression flickered across her features. "Yes," she said. "He was interested in anything that was old, Mr. Benedict. He collected antique books, was fascinated by old naval vessels, and he belonged to the Talino Society."

Bingo. "And what," I asked eagerly, "is the Talino Society?"

She looked steadily at me. "I don’t think this is getting us anywhere."

"Please," I said. "You’re already been of some help. Tell me about the Talino Society. I’ve never heard of it."

"A drinking club, really. They masquerade as historians, but mostly what they do is go down there—they meet on the final week-night of each month at the Collandium—and they have a good time." She looked very tired. "He was a member for twenty years."

"Did you belong?"

"Yes, I usually went with him."

"Why was it called the Talino' Society?"

She smiled. Finally. "Mr. Benedict, you’ll want to go down there and find out for yourself."

Two other things happened on the day I talked to Jana Khyber. Brimbury & Conn sent a statement of my assets. There was considerably more than I’d suspected, and I realized that I would never have to work again. Not ever. Oddly, I felt guilty about that. It was, after all, Gabe’s money. And I had been less than gentle with him.

The other piece of news was the Jacob discovered a library halfway around the world that had a copy of Leisha Tanner’s Notebooks. He promptly requested a transmission, and it arrived by lunchtime.

I’d been receiving calls all along from assorted thieves and bunkum artists purporting to have been business associates of my uncle, and wanting to "continue" rendering some high-priced service or other. There were wine brokers, realtors, an individual who described himself as a foundation attempting to erect monuments to prominent business executives, and several portfolio managers. And so on. I’d expected them to trail off, but they were becoming more, rather than less, frequent.

"From now on," I told Jacob, "they are yours. Put them off. Discourage them."

"How?"

"Use your imagination. Tell them we’re contributing the money to a worthy cause, make one up, and that I’m retiring to a mountain-top."

Then I settled in with Leisha Tanner.

The Notebooks cover five years during which she was an instructor at the University of Khaja Luan on the world of that name. The first entries are dated from about the time she met the poet Walford Candles, and the last conclude with her resignation, in the third year of the Resistance. They were originally intended to be remarks on the progress of her students; but with the beginnings of tension on Imarios, the subsequent revolt, and Cormorals catastrophic intervention, they widen into a graphic portrayal of social and political upheaval on a small world which was struggling to maintain its neutrality, and thereby its survival, at a time when Christopher Sim and his band of heroes needed every assistance.

Some of the portraits are unsettling. We’re accustomed to thinking of those who actively opposed the onslaught of the Ashiyyur as patriots: valiant men and women who risked life and fortune across a hundred worlds to persuade reluctant governments to intervene during the crisis. But here is Tanner on the reaction to the mute assault against the City on the Crag:

Downtown today, speaker after speaker blasted the government and urged immediate intervention. There were some from the University, even old Angus Markham, whom I’ve never before seen angry. They were joined by some out-of-power politicians, and some entertainers, who seriously believe we ought to send off the entire fleet to make war on the Ashiyyur. I read yesterday that the "fleet" consists of two destroyers and one frigate. One of the destroyers is undergoing major repairs, and all three vessels are obsolete.

There were others present whom I took to be members of the Friends of the Confederacy. They stirred up the mob, which in turn clubbed a few people who didn’t share their point of view, and probably a couple who did but didn’t move quickly enough. Then they set off across town to march on the Council chambers. But Grenville Park is a long walk from Balister Avenue, and along the way they overturned some vehicles, attacked the police, and broke into a few bars.

A patriot is someone who’s prepared to sacrifice anything, even other people’s children, for a just cause.

Damn Sim anyhow! The war goes on and on, and everyone knows it’s futile. There’s a rumor that the Ashiyyur have asked us for the Amorda. For God’s sake, I hope the Council is wise enough to comply.

I looked up Amorda. It was a guarantee of peace and autonomy to anyone who would accept Ashiyyurean suzerainty. I was surprised to discover that, for every human world that joined the Resistance, two remained neutral. A few even threw their support to the invaders.

The Amorda. It was a simple offering: a few cubic centimeters of earth from one’s capital, encased in an urn of pure silver, signifying fidelity.

I scrolled ahead: while the Council debated its action, the hour struck for the City on the Crag. The Ashiyyur destroyed her defenses, and her orbiting factories. That center of culture, the long-time symbol of literature, democracy, and progress along the Frontier, was occupied at leisure. It’s a blunder of incredible dimensions, wrote Tanner. One almost wonders whether the Ashiyyur are deliberately trying to create the conditions for Tarien Sim to complete his alliance against them. In any case, the moment for the government of Khaja Luan to declare its neutrality, if indeed it ever existed at all has passed. We will join the war. The only issue now is when.

The attack is a surprise to no one. The City on the Crag, and her small group of allies, was technically neutral but it was no secret that her volunteers have been fighting actively with the Dellacondans. It’s also common knowledge that Sim has been getting strategic supplies from her orbiting factories. The Ashiyyur were justified; but I wish they could have shown some restraint. This may be enough to bring Earth or Rimway into the war. If that happens, God knows where it will end.

Tanner had been conducting a comparative ethics class when the first reports arrived. Discussing the good and the beautiful she comments sadly, while the children of Plato and Tulisofala cut one another’s throats. The target was assaulted by a force of several hundred ships that swept its hastily constructed defenses aside. Collapse had followed within hours. And that night, while most of us concentrated on our steak and wine, the damned fools compounded the felony by shooting some hostages. How can a race of telepaths misjudge so completely the nature of their enemy?

Tanner’s images of the time are unbearably poignant: an enraged citizenry demanding war; a pompous university president leading a community prayer; an exchange student from the fallen world fighting back tears; and her own pangs of guilt at the perverse way of such things, in which those of us who argue for a rational course, appear so cowardly.

Again and again, she put the question to her journal, and eventually, I suppose, to us: How does one account for the fact that a race can espouse the ideals of a Tulisofala, can compose great music, and create exquisite rock gardens, and still behave like barbarians?

She doesn’t record an answer.

Elsewhere in her journals, on a similar occasion (the collapse of the defenders at Randin’hal, I believe), she refers angrily to the Bogolyubov Principle.

I looked that up too. Andrey Bogolyubov lived a thousand years ago on Toxicon. He was an historian, and he specialized in trying to convert history into an exact science, with the predictability that is the hallmark of all the exact sciences. He never succeeded, of course.

His primary area of interest was the process by which reluctant powers become entangled in conflict. His thesis is that potential antagonists engage in a kind of diplomatic war dance, with specific articulable characteristics. The war dance phase creates a psychology which ultimately guarantees an armed clash, because it tends to take over the momentum of events. This is particularly true, he says, in democracies. This process, once begun, is not easily interrupted. Once the first blood is spilt, it becomes almost impossible to draw back. Original ambitions and objectives get lost, each side comes to believe its own propaganda, economies become dependent on the hostile environment, and political careers are built around the common danger. Consequently the cycle of war-making tightens and will not stop until one side or the other is exhausted.

Unless leaders emerge simultaneously on both sides who recognize the situation for what it is, and possess the character and the internal support to act, there can be no solution other than a military one. Unfortunately, political systems are seldom designed to produce policymakers capable of even conceiving, much less implementing, a strategy of disengagement. The odds against two such persons stepping forward at the moment of crisis are, to say the least, rather high.

It’s hard from this distance to understand the dismay that accompanied the fall of the City on the Crag, which for us is only a symbol of lost greatness, an Atlantis. But among the inhabitants of the Frontier worlds two centuries ago, she was a living force: in a sense they were all her citizens; her music and her artists and her political theorists belonged to everyone; and the blow struck against her was an attack against all. Tanner reports Walford Candles’s remark that we’ve all sat at her sun-splashed tables on wide boulevards sipping expensive wine. It must have been painful to think of that lovely place under the whip of a conqueror.

Several of Tanner’s students announced their intention to leave school, and to join the war. Her friends were deeply divided. He walked out of his class yesterday afternoon, she reports of Matt Olander, a middle-aged physicist, whose wife and daughter had died two years earlier on Cormoral. For several hours, we didn’t know where he was. The security people found him just before midnight, slumped on a bench in Southpool This morning, he told me he’s going to offer his services to the Dellacondans. I think he’ll be okay when he’s had a chance to calm down.

Bannister tried to point out the dangers of intervention yesterday during a meeting of one of the various war committees that we have these days. "Stand firm," he told them. "Give way to mob emotions now, and Khaja Luan will not survive two weeks." They stoned him.

Olander never did calm down. He submitted his resignation, took Tanner to dinner a few nights later, and said goodby. She gives no other details of the departure.

But Khaja Luan, despite everything, held onto its neutrality. Unrest continued, usually intensified by war news or the occasional reports of volunteer citizens who’d died alongside the Dellacondans. It was a wrenching period, and Tanner’s anger mounted against both sides, whose intransigence kills so many, and threatens us all.

The small circle of faculty friends dissolves in bitterness and dispute. Walford Candles wanders the grim nights, a cold, familiar wraith. The others speak and write for or against the war and each other.

Occasionally, there is word from Olander.

He sits atop a rail, somewhere, on a wooden pier, framed against sails and nets. Or he stands beside a vegetative growth that is maybe a tree and maybe not. Always, there is a bottle in his hand, and a woman at his side. It is never the same woman, Tanner observes, with a trace of regret.

(The transmissions from Olander were not, of course, modern interactive sponders. He simply talked, and everyone listened.)

I was sorry she hadn’t preserved some of the Olander holos. I’ve learned since that Walford Candles (who twenty years earlier had fought against Toxicon, and so knew firsthand about combat conditions) was so struck by them, by the contrast between Olander’s cheerful generalities on local liquor, theater, and mating habits, and the grim reality of the war, that he began writing the great poetry of his middle period. That first collection was named for Olander’s dispatches: News from the Front.

His references to the long struggle (Tanner reports), were always vague. "Don’t worry about me," he’d say. "We’re doing all right." Or: "We lost a few people the other day."

Occasionally, he speaks of the ships: of the Straczynski and the Morimar and the Povis and the others: sleek, deadly, remorseless, and the affection in his voice and in his eyes chilled us all. Sometimes I think there’s no hope for any of us.

As time and the war dragged on, and early hopes that the Ashiyyur would bow to the first serious resistance faded, a little reality slipped through the stern brickwork of the warrior he had become: there were bleak portraits of the men and women who fought with him. "When we are gone," Tanner reports his saying, "who will take our place?"

It’s a question to which she responds in a spasm of rage and grief: Nobody I Nobody, because it’s a damn fool war that neither side wants, and the only reason the Ashiyyur are conducting it at all is that we have challenged them!

"She may have been correct," observed Jacob. "After all, we were on Imarios by their leave to begin with; and the revolt by that colony was not really justified. One has to wonder what the course of history would have been had Cormoral not intervened."

There’s no record that any of the witnesses on Khaja Luan responded to Matt Olander. One assumes they must have done so, but there is no direct evidence. It leaves me to wonder whether Leisha Tanner ever voiced those angry sentiments to him…

Candles, whose masterpieces at this time lie just before him, begins to retreat often to the Inner Room. Tanner comes under pressure from interventionists to restructure her courses in Ashiyyurean philosophy and literature. Students and faculty members take up silent stations outside her classroom to protest the content of her programs. She receives death threats.

Meantime, the Board of Trustees, whose finances depend on an increasingly desperate government, wants to demonstrate its loyalty by supporting the official policy of neutrality. They do this by insisting that the Ashiyyurean studies program not only be maintained, but expanded.

Tension mounts: Randin’hal is occupied when her defenders, reinforced by four Dellacondan frigates, are overwhelmed after a short, desperate defense. The government acts to prohibit private citizens from engaging in foreign wars; and a prominent interventionist is assassinated in the middle of a speech on the Council floor. Three days after news comes of the fall of Randin’hal, there is an unauthorized public broadcast of a recording of radio transmissions among the ships that defended her. Tanner describes it as heartbreaking. A meeting called to demand intervention turns into a riot, and a Con-ciliar no-confidence vote miscarries by a margin of one!

Then Sim and a handful of Dellacondans surprise and rout a large enemy fleet off Eschalet!

In the midst of all this, news comes that Matt Olander is dead.

There are no words, Tanner writes.

"Killed during the action off Randin’hal, while serving on board the Confederate frigate Straczynski," the official dispatch says. We watched the statement on Candles’s projector, which doesn’t work very well The spokesman was a bilious green. "He performed with valor, in the defense of people he did not know, and in the highest traditions of the Service. Please be assured that you are not alone in mourning his loss. His sacrifice will not be forgotten." It was addressed to the physics department.

So Matt will not come home to us. I remember those last conversations, when he only shook his head while I argued the pointlessness of it all. "You’re wrong, Leisha," he’d said. "This is not a war in the casual human context. It’s a watershed. An evolutionary crossroad. Two technological cultures, certainly the only ones in the Arm, possibly in the entire Milky Way. If I were religiously inclined, I would tell you that we’ve been specifically prepared by nature . . . blah, blah, blah."

Goddam.

It’s been raining most of the day. The campus is heavy and sodden under the best of conditions. But tonight the trees and obelisks and giant afolia bushes are shadows from another world, a place without Matt, and without order. The few persons I can see hurry along wrapped in heavy jackets.

Death at a distance.

A few days later the Dellacondans ambush and scatter an Ashiyyurean battle fleet in the Slot. It is their second major victory in a week, and their biggest ever in terms of casualties inflicted: two capital ships, half a dozen escorts; while Sim’s small force loses only a frigate.

Then came the enigma.

It started innocently, and painfully. Personal holos inbound from the war zones were relatively low priority on the communication systems, so no one was surprised when another transmission arrived from Olander. They assembled at the Inner Room, Leisha and Candles and the others, many no longer on speaking terms, but drawn together by the common grief.

They were having a party, a bunch of officers, all young (except Matt), both sexes, in the light and dark blue uniforms of the Dellacondans. Smoky dancers gyrated through the background, and everyone was having a pretty good time. Matt kept trying to talk to us, through the noise and the laughter, telling us they’d all be home soon. And then there was the line that no one picked up at first, but which has since kept me awake at night: "You will by now," he said, speaking over a glass of bubbling wine, "know about Eschalet and the Slot. We’ve turned this damned thing around at last. Tell Leisha the sons of bitches are on the run!"

It was a few minutes later, when the holo had ended, that Candles grunted and glanced at me with a puzzled expression on his blunt face. "The Slot," he said. "Matt died during the defense of Randin’hal. The Slot hadn’t been fought yet!"

In effect, it ends there. The Notebooks restrict themselves afterward to the relatively mundane: a breakdown by a gardener who is employed by the University; an interview with Candles that would be of some literary interest; and some self-doubt resulting from Tanner’s lack of patience with a difficult student. My God, she complains, the world’s coming apart, and this kid’s upset because she has to try to comprehend how life and death appears to a telepath. But how else is she to understand Ashiyyurean literature?

A few weeks later, she records her resignation, and makes her final entry. It is a single word: Millennium.

Millennium: it was Sim’s first ally. The world that sent its ships to Chippewa and Grand Salinas and Rigel. The arsenal of the Confederacy during the great days of the Dellacondans. It was to Millennium that Sim took the refugees after his celebrated evacuation of Ilyanda.

So great is the affection on that world for Christopher Sim that the Corsarius is still carried on the rolls as an active warship. All fleet communications show her call sign.

I requested from the source library a list of others who had got access to the Notebooks. The information was on Jacob’s display before I retired for the evening. Six people over the last five years. I’d expected to find Hugh Scott’s name. I didn’t.

But I did find Gabe’s.