"The humans who asked me. I wrote it all."
DeFranco stared at the elf, at a face immaculate and distant as a statue. "I don't think I follow you. I don't understand. We're talking about the front. We're talking about maybe that wife and those kids being in danger, aren't we? About maybe my friends getting killed out there. About shells falling and people getting blown up. Can we do anything about it?"
"I'm here to make the peace. Saitas is what I am. A gift to you. I'm the payment."
DeFranco blinked and shook his head. "Payment? I'm not sure I follow that."
For a long moment there was quiet. "Kill me," the elf said. "That's why I came. To be the last dead. The saitas. To carry the mistake away."
"Hell, no. No. We don't shoot you. Look, elf—all we want is to stop the fighting. We don't want your life. Nobody wants to kill you."
"DeFranco, we haven't any more resources. We want a peace."
"So do we. Look, we just make a treaty—you understand treaty?"
"I'm the treaty."
"A treaty, man, a treaty's a piece of paper. We promise peace to each other and not to attack us, we promise not to attack you, we settle our borders, and you just go home to that wife and kids. And I go home and that's it. No more dying. No more killing."
"No." The elf's eyes glistened within the pale mask. "No, deFranco, no paper."
"We make peace with a paper and ink. We write peace out and we make agreements and it's good enough; we do what we say we'll do."
"Then write it in your language."
"You have to sign it. Write your name on it. And keep the terms. That's all, you understand that?"
"Two days. I'll sign your paper. I'll make your peace. It's nothing. Our peace is in me. And I'm here to give it."
"Dammit, we don't kill people for treaties."
The sea-colored eyes blinked. "Is one so hard and millions so easy?"
"It's different."
"Why?"
"Because—because—look, war's for killing; peace is for staying alive."
"I don't understand why you fight. Nothing you do makes sense to us. But I think we almost understand. We talk to each other. We use the same words. DeFranco, don't go on killing us."
"Just you. Just you, is that it? Dammit, that's crazy!"
"A cup would do. Or a gun. Whatever you like. DeFranco, have you never shot us before?"
"God, it's not the same!"
"You say paper's enough for you. That paper will take away all your mistakes and make the peace. But paper's not enough for us. I'd never trust it. You have to make my peace too. So both sides will know it's true. But there has to be a saitas for humans. Someone has to come to be a saitas for humans. Someone has to come to us."
DeFranco sat there with his hands locked together. "You mean just go to your side and get killed."
"The last dying."
"Dammit, you are crazy. You'll wait a long time for that, elf."
"You don't understand."
"You're damn right I don't understand. Damn bloody-minded lunatics!" DeFranco shoved his hands down, needing to get up, to get away from that infinitely patient and not human face, that face that had somehow acquired subtle expressions, that voice which made him forget where the words had first come from. And then he remembered the listeners, the listeners taking notes, the colonel staring at him across the table. Information. Winning was not the issue. Questions were. Finding out what they could. Peace was no longer the game. They were dealing with the insane, with minds there was no peace with. Elves that died to spite their enemies. That suicided for a whim and thought nothing about wiping out someone else's life.
He stayed in his chair. He drew another breath. He collected his wits and thought of something else worth learning. "What'd you do with the prisoners you learned the language from, huh? Tell me that?"
"Dead. We gave them the cup. One at a time they wanted it."
"Did they."
Again the spread of hands, of graceful fingers. "I'm here for all the mistakes. Whatever will be enough for them."
"Dammit, elf!"
"Don't call me that." The voice acquired a faint music. "Remember my name. Remember my name. DeFranco—"
He had to get up. He had to get up and get clear of the alien, get away from that stare. He thrust himself back from the table and looked back, found the elf had turned. Saitas-Angan smelled of something dry and musky, like spice. The eyes never opened wide, citrine slits. They followed him.
"Talk to me," the elf said. "Talk to me, deFranco."
"About what? About handing one of us to you? It won't happen. It bloody won't happen. We're not crazy."
"Then the war won't stop."
"You'll bloody die, every damn last one of you!"
"If that's your intention," the elf said, "yes. We don't believe you want peace. We haven't any more hope. So I come here. And the rest of us begin to die. Not the quiet dying. Our hearts won't stop. We'll fight."
"Out there on the lines, you mean."
"I'll die as long as you want, here. I won't stop my heart. The saitas can't."
"Dammit, that's not what we're after! That's not what we want."
"Neither can you stop yours. I know that. We're not cruel. I still have hope in you. I still hope."
"It won't work. We can't do it, do you understand me? It's against our law. Do you understand law?"
"Law."
"Right from wrong. Morality. For God's sake, killing's wrong."
"Then you've done a lot of wrong. You have your mistake too. DeFranco. You're a soldier like me. You know what your life's value is."
"You're damn right I know. And I'm still alive."
"We go off the course. We lose ourselves. You'll die for war but not for peace. I don't understand."
"I don't understand. You think we're just going to pick some poor sod and send him to you."
"You, deFranco. I'm asking you to make the peace."
"Hell." He shook his head, walked away to the door, colonel-be-hanged, listeners-be-hanged. His hand shook on the switch and he was afraid it showed. End the war. "The hell you say."
The door shot open. He expected guards. Expected—
—It was open corridor, clean prefab, tiled floor. On the tiles lay a dark, round object, with the peculiar symmetry and ugliness of things meant to kill. Grenade. Intact.
His heart jolted. He felt the doorframe against his side and the sweat ran cold on his skin, his bowels went to water. He hung there looking at it and it did not go away. He began to shake all over as if it were already armed.
"Colonel Finn." He turned around in the doorway and yelled at the unseen monitors. "Colonel Finn—get me out of here!"
No one answered. No door opened. The elf sat there staring at him in the closest thing to distress he had yet showed.
"Colonel! Colonel, damn you!"
More of silence. The elf rose to his feet and stood there staring at him in seeming perplexity, as if he suspected he witnessed some human madness.
"They left us a present," deFranco said. His voice shook and he tried to stop it. "They left us a damn present, elf. And they locked us in."
The elf stared at him; and deFranco went out into the hall, bent and gathered up the deadly black cylinder—held it up. "It's one of yours, elf."
The elf stood there in the doorway. His eyes looking down were the eyes of a carved saint; and looking up they showed color against his white skin. A long nailless hand touched the doorframe as the elf contemplated him and human treachery.
"Is this their way?"
"It's not mine." He closed his hand tightly on the cylinder, in its deadliness like and unlike every weapon he had ever handled. "It's damn well not mine."
"You can't get out."
The shock had robbed him of wits. For a moment he was not thinking. And then he walked down the hall to the main door and tried it. "Locked," he called back to the elf, who had joined him in his possession of the hall. The two of them together. DeFranco walked back again, trying
doors as he went. He felt strangely numb. The hall became surreal, his elvish companion belonging like him, elsewhere. "Dammit, what have you got in their minds?"
"They've agreed," the elf said. "They've agreed, deFranco."
"They're out of their minds."
"One door still closes, doesn't it? You can protect your life."
"You still bent on suicide?"
"You'll be safe."
"Damn them!"
The elf gathered his arms about him as if he too felt the chill. "The colonel gave us a time. Is it past?"
"Not bloody yet."
"Come sit with me. Sit and talk. My friend."
"Is it time?" asks the elf, as deFranco looks at his watch again. And deFranco looks up.
"Five minutes. Almost." DeFranco's voice is hoarse.
The elf has a bit of paper in hand. He offers it. A pen lies on the table between them. Along with the grenade. "I've written your peace. I've put my name below it. Put yours."
"I'm nobody. I can't sign a treaty, for God's sake." DeFranco's face is white. His lips tremble. "What did you write?"
"Peace," said the elf. "I just wrote peace. Does there have to be more?"
DeFranco takes it. Looks at it. And suddenly he picks up the pen and signs it too, a furious scribble. And lays the pen down. "There," he says. "There, they'll have my name on it." And after a moment: "If I could do the other—O God, I'm scared. I'm scared!"
"You don't have to go to my city," says the elf, softly. His voice wavers like deFranco's. "DeFranco—here, here they record everything. Go with me. Now. The record will last. We have our peace, you and I, we make it together, here, now. The last dying. Don't leave me. And we can end this war."
DeFranco sits a moment. Takes the grenade from the middle of the table, extends his hand with it across the center. He looks nowhere but at the elf. "Pin's yours," he says. "Go on. You pull it, I'll hold it steady."
The elf reaches out his hand, takes the pin and pulls it, quickly.
DeFranco lays the grenade down on the table between them, and his mouth moves in silent counting. But then he looks up at the elf and the elf looks at him. DeFranco manages a smile. "You got the count on this thing?"
The screen breaks up.
The staffer reached out her hand and cut the monitor, and Agnes Finn stared past the occupants of the office for a time. Tears came seldom to her eyes. They were there now, and she chose not to look at the board of inquiry who had gathered there.
"There's a mandatory inquiry," the man from the reg command said. "We'll take testimony from the major this afternoon."
"Responsibility's mine," Finn said.
It was agreed on the staff. It was pre-arranged, the interview, the formalities.
Someone had to take the direct hit. It might have been a SurTac. She would have ordered that too, if things had gone differently. High command might cover her. Records might be wiped. A tape might be classified. The major general who had handed her the mess and turned his back had done it all through subordinates. And he was clear.
"The paper, Colonel."
She looked at them, slid the simple piece of paper back across the desk. The board member collected it and put it into the folder. Carefully.
"It's more than evidence," she said. "That's a treaty. The indigenes know it is."
They left her office, less than comfortable in their official search for blame and where, officially, to put it.
She was already packed. Going back on the same ship with an elvish corpse, all the way to Pell and Downbelow. There would be a grave there onworld.
It had surprised no one when the broadcast tape got an elvish response. Hopes rose when it got the fighting stopped and brought an elvish delegation to the front; but there was a bit of confusion when the elves viewed both bodies and wanted deFranco's. Only deFranco's.
And they made him a stone grave there on the shell-pocked plain, a stone monument; and they wrote everything they knew about him. I was John Rand deFranco, a graven plaque said. I was born on a space station twenty light-years away. I left my mother and my brothers. The friends I had were soldiers and many of them died before me. I came to fight and I died for the peace, even when mine was the winning side. I died at the hand of Angan Anassidi, and he died at mine, for the peace; and we were friends at the end of our lives.
Elves—suilti was one name they called themselves—came to this place and laid gifts of silk ribbons and bunches of flowers—flowers, in all that desolation; and in their thousands they mourned and they wept in their own tearless, expressionless way.
For their enemy.
One of their own was on his way to humankind. For humankind to cry for. I was Angan Anassidi, his grave would say; and all the right things. Possibly no human would shed a tear. Except the veterans of Elfland, when they came home, if they got down to the world—they might, like Agnes Finn, in their own way and for their own dead, in front of an alien shrine.
1987
THE GIFT OF PROPHECY
A shuttle landed on Aneth, third of the three which daily landed on the world's surface. There was a stir about this arrival as there generally was not, whatever the rank of those who attended the shrine. These were Shantrans, off the powerful high-tech world of An Shant . . . the last major power which resisted the amphictyony of the shrine.
With appropriate ceremony, the Shantrans paused in the Hall of Arrivals long enough to sign the Pact and join the Amphictyony, the Neighbors of the Shrine. They did so with frowns and hesitations enough to indicate a displeasure in principle; An Shant made few agreements. But this signature was the sole and indispensable condition of consultation with the Oracle . . . a militarily harmless accord. The Shantrans read it in detail and failed to find fault in any pact so easily broken, so lacking in enforcements.
That they bar none from access to the Anethine Oracle, it read, on pain of being barred themselves in future; to come to the aid of the shrine with armed force should any attempt to gain entry by force.
They walked away openly smiling, for they were not believers in the Oracle. They had come, nevertheless, to consult it, for reasons which were their own.
And the Anethines hastened to make them welcome, making themselves as agreeable as they showed themselves to all comers, believers or not.
Aneth desired above all to please.
Visions . . . and patterns . . . endless questions.
A tapestry of patterns, interwoven. . . . The mythic fates were weavers too, lives their thread, empires their pattern, uncaring patterners, heedless who or why; the pattern was all, had ever been, and all was pattern.
To perceive . . . to know . . . the ultimate design which shifted between thread and colors, almost to grasp—the Whole . . .
Time to cease.
There was a danger, a point past which humanness slipped the mind, when the knowledge itself became all, and the Eye was more powerful than the mind which must hold what it saw, when mind diminished in the face of design . . .
There was a point past which . . . not, not at all.
Maranthe tired of waking, and dulled her senses deliberately; began the withdrawal from life to shadows.
"Maranthe," the Voices began, reminding her of humanity, which she chose to forget. They persisted. A cup came to her lips; she drank, obedient. When the Shadows took her in their hands she walked, moved, performed necessary functions. At their whispering reminder, she ate, and they bathed her and laid her in her bed.
Then was utter dark. She did not dream.
She did not wake until the morrow, when she sat again with hands outstretched over the cold plates of the machine . . . and the Vision resumed.
The old woman sat surrounded by her machine.
Maranthe was—wholly—the machine. She saw, and smiled, forever, maddeningly smiled, her aged face rapt and her dimmed eyes fixed, lost in the power of the Vision.
And Mishell envied.
Mishell did not speak of it. Possibly all the Servants of Aneth envied.
Surely they must, for there was nothing on Aneth which approached the glory, the importance of Maranthe. Servants came and went, living and dying and being carried away. Maranthe was all. And there was no exit from Aneth, least of all for those sealed within the inmost enclave of the Machine. Only the visitors, who were never within Aneth, came, asked their single questions, departed.
They went, and where they went Mishell could not imagine, could never imagine, sealed within white walls, silent, in silence. She had nothing of the Vision. They asked, these visitors, and what they asked Mishell could not hear. Only the Sibyl, only Maranthe—heard. Visitors went away to act, to pursue their lives and the fates the Oracle gave them—as Servants could never leave and never act, whose fate was to serve, tending Maranthe.
Mishell served. She guided the frail, bent woman from Machine to couch, from couch to Machine. With other Servants she fed her, bathed her, performed all minute and lowly things for her, who was the sole reason for their existence. Tiny, frail, blind, yet Maranthe smiled, constantly smiled while she waked . . . for long, long hours wrapped in the Vision, where Maranthe saw . . . and they could not.
In those hours, their own duty over, the Servants themselves must eat and sleep and dream.
And in her dreams Mishell sought life. Armed only with the gray and white sameness of the Enclave, she built colors, and beauty, and tried with all her senses to attain to the Vision which was Maranthe's, which hovered palpably in the Enclave, a presence which seized and shaped, and gave them what dreams they knew.
It ended with waking. The world was cold again, steel and white garments and white plastics, and Servants moved soft-footed and whispering within it, for they must not intrude their small reality into the greater. Gently Mishell bathed Maranthe's wasted limbs, and gently folded the skeletal body into soft garments, and gently tucked her to bed.
And daily sat (or was it night?) through Maranthe's sleep, waking while the Vision was numb, and the walls were void and stark, the dreams dead within the Enclave's waking.
There were other worlds; Maranthe saw them; they dreamed of them; the visitors came from them; but the worlds were dreams.
The Collected Short Fiction of C J Cherryh Page 69
