A Talent for War

by Jack McDevitt

  “Our psychological reactions to each other are intense, but not so much so that they cannot be overcome. If we wish. If we insist! In any case, I implore you not to use them as a basis to form a moral judgment. If we commit that crime against each other, we shall bear a heavy burden before history.

  “I can not agree more strongly with Ambassador Sim’s remarks. For all our differences, of culture and physiognomy and perception, we share the one gift that really matters: we are thinking creatures. And on this day, under this sun, I pray that we will find ourselves capable of using that gift. I pray that we will pause in our headlong rush, and think!”

  The entry, I noted belatedly, was earmarked for another book which was to have developed the influences on Walford Candles’s early years. I was still thinking about it, wondering how events could have gone so wrong when everyone seemed to want to do the right thing. Weren’t perceptions worth anything at all?

  I have no answers, other than a suspicion that there is something relentlessly seductive about conflict. And that, after all these millennia, we still don’t understand the nature of the beast.

  Chase found more: a holo communication from Leisha, routed from Ilyanda, and dated thirty-two days after the earlier Millenium message. It was short: Wally, I’m forwarding separately a written statement by Kindrel Lee which has things to say about Matt. It’s a wild story, and I don’t know what to believe. We need to talk about it when I get home.

  “I don’t understand this,” I said. I stared at the date, and consulted a text. “This thing was sent from Ilyanda after the evacuation. And probably after the destruction of Point Edward. What the hell’s going on? Why would she have gone there?”

  “I don’t know,” said Chase, who was searching through the piles of documents that we’d assembled.

  “Where’s the statement?”

  “Forwarded separately,” she said. “It doesn’t seem to be included with this material.”

  XIV.

  The destruction of Point Edward (after it had been evacuated) was an act of puzzling barbarity. Nothing could have more readily demonstrated the gap between human reason and alien spasm. In the wake of that destruction, men were sufficiently horrified that, for a moment, they drew together and came very close to recognizing their own common humanity and the peril it faced. Unfortunately, the moment passed quickly.

  —Arena Cash,

  War in the Void

  THE CURIOUS THING about Matt Olander’s grave is that it was waiting for the refugees when they returned to Ilyanda after the war. They found it in a weed-choked field that had once been a lawn, not twenty meters from the main terminal at the William E. Richardson Spaceport. It was marked by a single oblate white slab which had been cut out of the front of the building with a laser.

  The slab was engraved, presumably with the same tool:

  Matt Olander

  died Avrigil 3, 677

  No Stranger to Valor

  The characters were crudely cut, the name and the last word written large. They tended a trifle toward the ornate, in the style of two centuries ago. The date, in Ilyanda’s calendar, corresponded with the Evacuation.

  The site lies within a grove. There are low hedges and flowering trees and seashell walkways. Overhead, a Dellacondan pennant, with its harridan sigil encased within the silver ring of the Confederacy, snaps fiercely in a cold stiff wind off the ocean. At the foot of the flagpole, the Point Edward Historical Society has erected a stone marker: a bronze plate, dated 716, carries Olander’s name, and a remark attributed to him, reportedly spoken to a comrade during the final moments of the evacuation: It is not proper that Point Edward should face the mutes without a defender.

  The base of the monument is engraved with a resolution of the Joint Chambers, that Matthew Olander never be forgotten by the City he would not desert.

  The site is the sort of place people go to on holidays, to sit on benches and watch seabirds and floaters. On the midwinter day we were there (I’d brought Chase along), a troop of kids were flying brightly colored gliders, and a large tourist group had debarked from an airbus and were milling about. Ilyanda’s white sun Kaspadei was breaking through a gray sky; and most of the older visitors were hurrying about, glancing at the inscriptions, and climbing back into the airbus, where it was warm.

  It’s a lonely place, despite its proximity to the Richardson terminal. Maybe the sense of isolation is spiritual rather than geographical. Standing beneath the canopy of shrub trees within an enclosure dedicated solely to one individual’s courage, I kept thinking about the slippery quality of truth. How would Olander’s comrades—the ones who had sneered at his memory and suggested to Leisha Tanner that he was a traitor—How would they have responded to all this? No Stranger to Valor.

  Where was the truth? What had happened on Point Edward?

  “Who put it here?” asked Chase. She looked solemn, thoughtful, almost oppressed. The wind pulled at her hair, and she brushed it back, out of her eyes.

  “The park commission.”

  “No. I mean, who buried Matt Olander? Who cut the inscription on the tombstone? It says in the Tourist Guide that the grave was here when the refugees returned from Millenium after the war.”

  “I know.”

  “Who cut the inscription?” She thumbed through the publication. “According to this, the legend is that the Ashiyyur did it.”

  “I don’t really know much about the Ashiyyur. But why not? Stranger things have happened in wars than people paying tribute to enemies.”

  A crowd gathered around the stone. Their breath was visible in the cold air. Some took pictures, others spoke hurriedly and moved on. “It is cold,” said Chase, sealing her jacket and adjusting the thermals. “Why wouldn’t the inscription be in their own written language?”

  Hell, I didn’t know. “What’s the guide book say?”

  “It says the experts disagree.”

  “Great. That’s helpful. But I can think of another possibility. One that accounts for the burial, at least.”

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “They tried to evacuate, what, twenty thousand people in a week? It couldn’t be done without overlooking a few. There’s always somebody who doesn’t get the word. Anyway, Olander stayed behind, found them, and probably was with them when he died during the bombing. Maybe he did something to earn their admiration, shot down a mute ship with a hand weapon, rescued a child from a burning building. Who knows? Whatever it was, they admired him for it, and they gave him a proper sendoff. In the proper language.”

  I stared at the slab. “Leisha Tanner knew the truth,” I said.

  “Yes, I suppose so. Do you believe your own theory?”

  “No. I don’t know why, but it doesn’t feel right. Neither does the notion that he didn’t want to desert the city. That’s pleasantly poetic. But it’s more likely he got left behind. The Dellacondans got out of here a bare few hours before the enemy fleet arrived. They would have been in a hell of a hurry, cutting it that close.”

  “But that doesn’t explain why his comrades reacted the way they did to Tanner.”

  We stood over the grave and tried to imagine what might have happened. “I wonder,” I said, “if anyone’s really buried here? Maybe the grave’s empty.”

  “No. I was reading about it on the way out, Alex. They’ve taken pictures. There is a body down there, and dental records show that it is Olander’s.”

  “Does it say how he died?”

  “Not in the plasma drop, apparently. I guess there’s evidence he got hit by a laser. They think a small, hand-carried weapon. Which supports one part of the legend.”

  “Which is—?”

  “That the mutes sent in a landing party to try to take him alive.”

  “Maybe he was caught and executed.”

  “That,” said Chase, “is a distinct possibility. But no one around here will accept it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s not very heroic. The image every
one prefers is Olander standing on the roof of the terminal with a pulser, surrounded by dead aliens, firing away until the bastards take him down. Anyway, how do you explain the inscription if he surrendered?”

  “I guess that eliminates suicide too. Okay. Another question: if he stayed behind voluntarily, did his C.O. know about it? Or did he jump ship? If it was the latter, it might explain some of the irritation that Tanner ran into.”

  “I don’t think Christopher Sim would have allowed anyone to stay behind to die. That wouldn’t sound like him at all.”

  “How do you know?”

  She looked momentarily confused. “We’re talking about Christopher Sim, Alex.” Our eyes locked, and she started to grin, but shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Nor do I. I think if we could find out why Olander didn’t leave with his ship, we’d be an appreciable distance toward understanding—” I hesitated.

  “What?” prompted Chase.

  “Damned if I know. Maybe Kindrel Lee can tell us.”

  We leased a skimmer at Richardson, keyed in the downtown hotel that had our reservations, and flew into Point Edward, which was a moderate-sized city of permearth, stone, and glass constructed over a dead seaside volcano.

  The first view of it was a shock. There were no sweeping walkways or malls; no webbed parks connecting the upper levels. Point Edward was a city of clearly defined individual structures, heavy on the facing, with square-cut arches and ramparts, and plenty of statuary. The central area was rebuilt after the destruction of 677, employing the same architectural style throughout. The Guide described this as Uniform Toxicate. It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, but the result was to create a downtown of numbing stability and sobriety, of sharp corners and immovable purpose. It was life at ground level, in a city that felt like a fortress.

  I wondered, as we settled onto the roof of our hotel, how much of this reflected the state of mind of a people who had barely escaped the fire.

  An hour later, from Chase’s room, we linked with the Bureau of Records and Vital Statistics. The clerk was an AI, cast in the appearance of an elderly male, with a full gray-black beard and sympathetic blue eyes.

  “It would be easier if we had her ID number,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I grumbled. “How many people named Kindrel Lee could have been living in a place with a population of, what, twenty thousand?”

  “Mr. Benedict,” he said, poking thoughtfully at his keyboard, “you understand, of course, that the records burned with the city in 677. We have very little preceding that date.”

  “Yes. But she—assuming Kindrel is a she—was still around after the attack. Must have been, if Tanner talked to her. So she might have married after that date. Or applied for some sort of exemption. Or got a job with the government. There should be something on her.”

  “Yes,” he said agreeably. “I’m sure there must be.” He bent to his task. “Are you sure of the spelling?”

  “No. Actually it’s guesswork.”

  “Is it possible she might have been born with a different name?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “You set a very difficult task, Mr. Benedict.”

  “Please do the best you can,” I said. I tried to offer him money, but he refused it. Government rules. I was still feeling clumsy.

  Chase took to prowling round the limited area allowed by the projector, while I watched the day’s news reports follow each other across a monitor.

  A recession had begun on Earth.

  Along the frontier, shots had been exchanged between Ashiyyurean and Confederate warships again. No damage to our side, probably none to theirs.

  “And forty years ago today—” A picture of a sailing yacht appeared on the terminal, “—the Andover, attempting to complete a round-the-world voyage, disappeared in southern seas.”

  “No,” said the clerk suddenly. “There simply isn’t any record. ”

  “There has to be,” I objected. “At the very least, she would have died.”

  “If she did, Mr. Benedict,” he said, with a broad display of even white teeth, “she didn’t do it on Ilyanda.”

  “I have another idea,” I said, back in the apartment. “The Andover.”

  “I think we have enough mysteries, Alex. And I doubt that the Andover is involved in any of this.”

  “Of course not. But that was a forty-year-old clip we saw in there. How far back do the local newsgathering organizations go?”

  Two syndicates were listed on the local net: Oceanic and Mega. Neither had been around much over a half century. That was Ilyanda time, where the years are about forty percent longer than at home, but it still wasn’t enough. “It doesn’t matter,” a commtech at Mega told us. “Everybody uses centralized data storage anyhow. We have access to records that go back damned near three hundred years.”

  We tied in with Datalink, a central processing facility. It gave us what we wanted: access to Ilyanda’s history, seen from a contemporary perspective.

  Chase activated a terminal and poked in LEE, KINDREL.

  The answer came back: NO ENTRIES.

  She reversed the names: KINDREL, LEE

  NO ENTRIES.

  We tried every other way we could think of to spell the names, with no luck.

  “What now?” Chase said.

  “Olander.” She punched in his name.

  DO YOU WISH TO SEE AN INDEX? OR SHOULD I RUN ENTRIES?

  “Entries,” I said.

  IN ANY PARTICULAR SEQUENCE?

  “Chronological. From most recent.”

  WESCLARK MAN PLAYS OLANDER IN SPRING PAGEANT

  “I don’t think that’s it,” suggested Chase, touching the keyboard.

  MATT OLANDER REMAINS POPULAR NAME FOR BOYS

  OLANDER WAS PROBABLY BORN IN NEW YORK

  MEDICAL ANALYSIS: OLANDER MAY HAVE BEEN DYING WHEN HE CHALLENGED ASHIYYUR

  Stories piled up. There were literally dozens of them:

  OLANDER ACADEMY SUED OVER CHILD’S DEATH

  STANTON’S ANNOUNCES OLANDER LINE OF FASHIONS

  MATT OLANDER AS SYSTEMS ANALYST: A MAN AHEAD OF HIS TIME, EXPERTS SAY

  I started working my way through the material, while Chase searched for references to Leisha Tanner. She eventually found a brief mention in a sixty-year-old book review.

  “Sim’s Lieutenants,” she said. “Ever hear of it?”

  “No. But it sounds like something we should get. Have them forward it to Jacob.”

  She shook her head. “It’s off-line. Nearest copies available, it says here, are believed to be on Penthume.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s a long way. It was the author’s home world. Maybe it doesn’t matter. The reviewer says he got everything wrong, and the book’s worthless. How are you making out?”

  She was looking over my shoulder, so I keyed in another item:

  MATT OLANDER TESTIFIES BEFORE DEFENSE COMMITTEE

  I don’t suppose she was in a mood for jokes: this Matt Olander was an expert in hyperspace stresses.

  The second morning we expanded our search.

  Late in the day we came across a curious entry, dated almost twenty years earlier:

  DID SIM PROVOKE ATTACK ON ILYANDA?

  The narrative argued that the Dellacondans had planned a trap at Ilyanda, but that a half-dozen battle cruisers, promised by Earth, had been withdrawn at the last minute.

  There were other wild stories, especially from the less reputable services that specialized in the sensational:

  OLANDER MAY HAVE BEEN A WOMAN, and

  OLANDER SEEN ALIVE ON TOXICON TWENTY YEARS AFTER WAR

  At the end of it, we still had nothing.

  The plasma weapon that fell on Point Edward during an early autumn evening (the exact date is uncertain) in 677 seared the rocky basin in which the city rests, destroyed forest halfway out to Richardson, and removed the city itself as surely as though it had never existed.

  The
fact that Point Edward was deserted at the time of the attack, and that there was no way the aliens could not have known it was deserted, rendered the act the single most chilling event of the war. It demonstrated a fury with, and contempt for, all things human that must have terrorized the frontier worlds.

  We were strolling listlessly along the waterfront area when I broke a long silence. “They were damned lucky there were so few people here. And Ilyanda’s still relatively small. What’s the population? Five, six million, tops. How many Lees can there be?”

  “Not many,” Chase agreed.

  “We’ve been going about this backwards. Let’s find a terminal.”

  There were fifty-six listings on the Ilyanda net for people named Lee, Leigh, Lea, and Li. We split them up.

  We found Endmar Lee almost immediately.

  One of his relatives described him as the family historian, and directed us to him. It was true: once he realized we shared his interest, his enthusiasm burgeoned. He brought out holos of individuals dressed in the somewhat stylized fashions of Resistance times on Ilyanda: Henry Cortison Lee, who had owned a souvenir shop at the Richardson terminal, and who had actually seen Christopher Sim; Polmar Lee, who would have stayed and faced the Ashiyyur in defense of his home, but who was drugged and taken off against his will. “And here’s Jina,” he said. “She was Kindrel’s niece.” Chase showed signs of impatience, but I frowned at her, and she sighed.

  Endmar Lee was a short, almost fragile, man, spare of body and speech. He was young, yet he seemed to lack the energies and certainty of youth. “Ah,” he said at length, projecting a holo into the middle of the room. “Here she is now. We think this was taken before the war.”