White Stars

5. In Which the Duke of Queens Seeks Instruction

As soon as it was evident that the soldiers had used up all their fire, My Lady Charlotina released the one called "sergeant", whose full name, on further enquiry, turned out to be Sergeant Henry Martinez, 0008832942. After listening in silence to their questions for a while he said:

"Look, I don't know what planet this is, or if you think you're fooling me with your disguise, but you're wasting your time. We're hip to every trick in the Alpha Centauran book."

"Who are the Alpha Centaurans?" asked My Lady Charlotina, turning to Werther de Goethe.

"They existed even before the Dawn Age," he explained. "They were intelligent horses of some kind."

"Very funny," said Sergeant Martinez flatly. "You know damn well who you are."

"He thinks we're horses? Perhaps some optical disturbance, coupled with…" Bishop Castle creased his brow.

"Stow it, will you?" asked the sergeant firmly. "We're prisoners of war. Now I know you guys don't pay too much attention to things like the Geneva Convention in Alpha Centauri, for all you —"

"It's a star system!" said Werther. "I remember. I think it was used for something a long while ago. It doesn't exist any more, but there was a war between Earth and this other system in the 24th century — you are 24th century, I take it, sir? — which went on for many years. These are typical warriors of the period. The Alpha Centaurans were, I thought, birdlike creatures…"

"The Vultures," supplied Sergeant Martinez. "That's what we call you."

"I assure you, we're as human as you are, sergeant," said My Lady Charlotina. "You are an ancestor of ours. Don't you recognize the planet? And we have some of your near-contemporaries with us. Li Pao? Where's Li Pao? He's from the 27th." But the puritanical Chinaman had not yet arrived.

"If I'm not mistaken," said Martinez patiently, "you're trying to convince me that the blast which got us out there beyond Mercury sent us into the future. Well, it's a good try — we'd heard your interrogation methods were pretty subtle and pretty damn elaborate — but it's too fancy to work. Save your time. Put us in the camp, knock us off, or do whatever you normally do with prisoners. We're Troopers and we're too tough and too tired to play this kind of fool game. Besides, I can tell you for nothing, we don't know nothing — we get sent on missions. We do what we're told. We either succeed, or we die or, sometimes, we get captured. We got captured. That's what we know. There's nothing else we can tell you."

Fascinated, the Iron Orchid and her friends listened attentively and were regretful when he stopped. He sighed. "Bad Sugar!" he exclaimed. "You're like kids, ain't you? Can you understand what I'm saying?"

"Not entirely," Bishop Castle told him, "but it's very interesting for us. To study you, you know."

Muttering, Sergeant Martinez sat down on the ground.

"Aren't you going to say any more?" Mistress Christia was extremely disappointed. "Would you like to make love to me, Sergeant Martinez?"

He offered her an expression of cynical contempt. "We're up to that one, too," he said.

She brightened, holding out her hand. "Wonderful! You don't mind, do you, My Lady Charlotina?"

"Of course not."

When Sergeant Martinez did not accept her hand, Mistress Christia sat down beside him and stroked his cropped head.

Firmly, he replaced the helmet he had been holding in his hands. Then he folded his arms across his broad chest and stared into the middle-distance. His colour seemed to have changed. Mistress Christia stroked his arm. He jerked it away.

"I must have misunderstood you," she said.

"I can take it or leave it alone," he told her. "You got it? Okay, I'll take it. When I want it. But if you expect to get any information from me that way, that's where you're wrong."

"Perhaps you'd rather do it in private?"

A mirthless grin appeared on his battered features. "Well, I sure ain't gonna do it out here, in front of all your friends, am I?"

"Oh, I see," she said, confused. "You must forgive me if I seem tactless, but it's so long since I entertained a time traveller. We'll leave it for a bit, then."

The Iron Orchid saw that some of the men inside the force-dome had stretched out on the ground and had shut their eyes. "They probably need to rest," she suggested, "and to eat something. Shouldn't we feed them, My Lady Charlotina?"

"I'll transfer them to my menagerie," agreed her hostess. "They'll probably be more at ease there. Meanwhile, we can continue with the party."

Some time went by; the world continued in pretty much its normal fashion, with parties, experiments, games and inventions. Eventually, so the Iron Orchid heard when she emerged from a particularly dull and enjoyable affair with Bishop Castle, the soldiers from the 24th century had become convinced that they had travelled into the future, but were not much reconciled. Some, it seemed, were claiming that they would rather have been captured by their enemies. No news came from Lord Shark, and the two or three messages the Duke of Queens had sent him had not been answered. Jherek Carnelian did not come back, and Lord Jagged of Canaria refused all visitors. Brannart Morphail bewailed the inconsistencies which he claimed had appeared in the fabric of Time. Korghon of Soth created a sentient kind of mould which he trained to do tricks; Mistress Christia, having listened to an old tape, became obsessed with learning the language of the flowers and spent hour after hour listening to them, speaking to them in simple words; O'Kala Incarnadine became a sea-lion and thereafter could not be found. The craze for "Cities" and "Continents" died and nothing replaced it. Visiting the Duke of Queens, the Iron Orchid mentioned this, and he revealed his growing impatience with Lord Shark. "He promised he would send me an instructor. I have had to fall back on Trooper O'Dwyer, who knows a little about knives, but nothing at all about swords. This is the perfect moment for a new fashion. Lord Shark has let me down."

Trooper O'Dwyer, ensconced in luxury at the duke's palace, had agreed to assist the duke, his sergeant having succumbed at last to the irresistible charms of Mistress Christia, but the duke confided to the Iron Orchid that he was not at all sure if bayonet drill were the same as fencing.

"However," he told her, "I am getting the first principles. You decide, to start, that you are superior to someone else — that is that you have more of these primitive attributes than the other person or persons — love, hate, greed, generosity and so on…"

"Are not some of these opposites?" Her conversations with her son had told her that much.

"They are…"

"And you claim you have all of them?"

" More of them than someone else."

"I see. Go on."

"Patriotism is difficult. With that you identify yourself with a whole country. The trick is to see that country as yourself so that any attack on the country is an attack on you."

"A bit like Werther's Nature?"

"Exactly. Patriotism, in Trooper O'Dwyer's case, can extend to the entire planet."

"Something of a feat!"

"He accomplishes it easily. So do his companions. Well, armed with all these emotions and conceptions you begin a conflict — either by convincing yourself that you have been insulted by someone (who often has something you desire to own) or by goading him to believe that he has been insulted by you (there are subtle variations, but I do not thoroughly understand them as yet). You then try to kill that person — or that nation — or that planet — or as many members as possible. That is what Trooper O'Dwyer and the rest are currently attempting with Alpha Centauri."

"They will succeed, according to Werther. But I understand that the rules do not allow resurrection."

"They are unable to accomplish the trick, most delectable of blossoms, most marvellous of metals."

"So the deaths are permanent?"

"Quite."

"How odd."

"They had much higher populations in those days."

"I suppose that must explain it."

"Yet, it appears, every time one of their members was killed, they grieved — a most unpleasant sensation, I gather. To rid themselves of this sense of grief, they killed more of the opposing forces, creating grief in them so that they would wish to kill more — and so on, and so on."

"It all seems rather — well — unaesthetic."

"I agree. But we must not dismiss their arts out of hand. One does not always come immediately to terms with the principles involved."

"Is it even Art?"

"They describe it as such. They use the very word."

One eyebrow expressed her astonishment. She turned as Trooper O'Dwyer shuffled into the room. He was eating a piece of brightly coloured fruit and he had an oddly shaped girl on his arm (created, whispered the duke, to the trooper's exact specifications). He nodded at them. "Duke," he said. "Lady." His stomach had grown so that it hung over his belt. He wore the same clothes he had arrived in, but his wounds had healed and he no longer had the respiratory gear on his back.

"Shall we go to the — um — 'gym', Trooper O'Dwyer?" asked the duke in what was, in the Iron Orchid's opinion, a rather unnecessarily agreeable tone.

"Sure."

"You must come and see this," he told her.

The "gym" was a large, bare room, designed by Trooper O'Dwyer, hung with various ropes, furnished with pieces of equipment whose function was, to her, unfathomable. For a while she watched as, enthusiastically, the Duke of Queens leapt wildly about, swinging from ropes, attacking large, stuffed objects with sharp sticks, yelling at the top of his voice, while, seated in a comfortable chair with the girl beside him, Trooper O'Dwyer called out guttural words in an alien tongue. The Iron Orchid did her best to be amused, to encourage the duke, but she found it difficult. She was glad when she saw someone enter the hall by the far door. She went to greet the newcomer. "Dear Lord Shark," she said, "the duke has been so looking forward to your visit."

The figure in the shark-mask stopped dead, pausing for a moment or two before replying.

"I am not Lord Shark. I am his fencing automaton, programmed to teach the Duke of Queens the secrets of the duel."

"I am very pleased you have come," she said in genuine relief.