A Talent for War

by Jack McDevitt

  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! 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 Conciliar 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 r
elatively 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: Millenium!

  Millenium: 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 Millenium 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.

  VII.

  In a sense, the raid (on Hrinwhar) constituted a victory far out of proportion to its direct military value. The myth of enemy invulnerability was forever shattered, and the Ashiyyur learned they could not continue their relentless advance without pausing occasionally to look back over their shoulders.

  —The Machesney Review, LXIV, No. 7

  THE HALL OF THE PEOPLE is the center of human government. The Council meets there; the executive offices are located, symbolically, on the lower levels; and the Court convenes in the West Wing. It dominates all surrounding structures, even the Silver Tower of the Confederacy at the opposite end of the White Pool.

  Adjacent to the Court, and physically accessible only on foot, the Confederate Archive sprawls across almost a square kilometer of prime parkland. It is a Romanesque structure, guarded by the celebrated Sharpley bronze of Tarien Sim, the scroll of the Instrument (which, in fact, he never lived to see completed) in his extended hand.

  The snow had vanished, the weather had turned unseasonably warm, and the assorted flags of the worlds snapped in the breeze, dominated by the green and white banner of Man. It was far too pleasant a day to spend within four walls, so I abandoned the headband and joined the considerable crowds that were taking advantage of the sunshine.

  Tourists lined the walks, and clustered around the monuments. One of the tour guides was holding forth on the Archive, which was the oldest government building in Andiquar, dating from the end of the Time of Troubles. It had been restored on several occasions, most recently four years before, during the summer of 1410. It was an antiquarian’s treasure trove: people were always finding valuable, long-lost documents in obscure places.

  Inside, the main gallery was relatively empty. A small knot of school children and a teacher hovered round the marble and glass case which contains the Instrument of Confederation and a few related documents. A few others from the group stared up at the Declaration of Intent, the joint decision by Rimway and Earth to join the war against the Ashiyyur. I passed the uniformed Companion, stationed at the South Arch, and descended into the library.

  Simulations of the major actions of the Resistance were available there. The Spinners. Vendicari. Black Adrian. Grand Salinas. The Slot. Rigel. Tippimaru. And finally Triflis, where, for the first time, the human race drew together.

  After two centuries, they were still names to conjure by. The stuff of legend.

  I checked out five: Eschaton, Sanusar, the Slot, Rigel, and the Spinners. The latter, of course, is the classic raid that some say turned the course of the war.

  On the way home, drifting lazily over the capital, I wondered what it had been like to live in a world of organized mayhem. There was still tension, and occasional shooting, but it was remote, far-off: it was hard to imagine an existence incorporating active everyday institutionalized slaughter. And it struck me that the last conflict fought exclusively among humans had occurred at the height of the Resistance. While the series of critical battles were being fought in the Slot, Toxicon, whose powerful fleets Sim desperately needed and courted, had seized the opportunity to attack the Dellacondan ally, Muri. Later, Sim would call it the darkest hour of the war.

  Today, for perhaps the first time in history, there is no man living who knows from personal experience what it is to make war on his brothers. And that happy fact is the real legacy of Tarien and Christopher Sim.

  Though no one realized it at the time, the attack on Muri might have been the best thing that could have happened, because it so outraged public opinion on Toxicon that, within a year, that world’s autocratic government collapsed. The interventionists, heartily supported by a rare alliance between the general population and the military, seized power, broke off the assault against their embattled victims, and promptly announced an intention to support the Dellacondans. Tragically, Toxicon’s ringing declaration of war was followed within hours by news of Christopher Sim’s death off Rigel.

  I went home to a leisurely dinner, and drank a little more wine than usual. Jacob was quiet. It had turned cold outside, and blustery. The wind shook the trees and the house.

  I wandered from room to room, paging through Gabe’s books, old histories and archeology texts mostly, accounts of excavations on the twenty-five or thirty worlds whose settlements had occurred deep enough in the past to allow for the collapse and interment of cultures.

  There were some biographies, a few manuals on planetary sciences, a scattering of mythological texts, and a few general reference books.

  Gabe had never shown much interest in literature for its own sake. He’d read Homer before we went to Hissarlik, Kachimonda before Battle Key, and so on. Consequently, when I came across additional volumes of Walford Candles in a remote corner of the house, I pulled them down, and stacked them alongside the material I’d brought from the Archive, added the volume of Rumors of Earth that had been in Gabe’s bedroom, and retreated with everything to the upstairs study.

  I didn’t know much then about Candles’s literary reputation. But I was learning quickly. He was preoccupied with fragility and transience: passions too easily dissipated; youth too easily lost in the trauma of war. The most fortunate, in his view, are those who die heroically for a principle. The rest of us are left to outlive our friends, to watch love cool, and to feel the lengthening winter in our vitals.

  It made for a depressing evening, but the books were well thumbed. Eventually, I went back and reread the “Leisha.”

  Lost pilot,

  She rides her solitary orbit

  Far from Rigel,

  Seeking by night


  The starry wheel.

  Adrift in ancient seas,

  It marks the long year round,

  Nine on the rim,

  Two at the hub.

  And she,

  Wandering,

  Knows neither port,

  Nor rest,

  Nor me.

  Rigel had only one association: Sim’s death. But what did the rest of it mean? The notes suggested that the poet had considered the work completed. And there was no evidence that the editors found anything baffling about it. Of course, one almost expects to be puzzled by great poetry, I suppose.

  According to the introduction to Dark Stars, the first volume of the series, Walford Candles had been a professor of classical literature, had never married, and was not appreciated in his own time. A minor talent, his contemporaries had agreed.

  To us, he is a different matter altogether.

  The poignancy of the sacrifices required by the men and women who fought with Christopher Sim shines everywhere in his work. Most of the poems in Dark Stars, News from the Front, and On the Walls purport to have been written in the Inner Room on Khaja Luan, while he waited to hear the inevitable about old friends who had gone to help the Dellacondans. Candles himself claimed to have offered his services, and been refused. No usable skills. Instead of fighting, his part became merely

  To stand and count the names of those

  Whose dust circles the gray worlds of Chippewa

  And Cormoral.