Heritage of Flight

by Susan Shwartz

  "Sir,” the woman drew herself up and saluted. At Neave's gesture—he still was ill-at-ease among the spit and polish of military rituals—she relaxed into the slightly crooked stance enforced by the fact that one of her legs was shorter than the other, probably from a badly healed break.

  Then her glance fell on the insignia he wore. “Earth,” she breathed. “Then the blockade's down."

  Neave nodded, answering the question she left unasked. “We survived the war intact, and now—"

  "And now you've come to take us all back into the fold, have you?” To Neave's astonishment, the plain, brown woman's eyes kindled, and her hands tightened on the records she had offered Becker. “Reunite the human race now, and clean up, is that it?"

  "Pauli, don't lose it now,” said Rafe.

  "I'm not going to, Rafe. So much for your seedcorn, Marshal Becker. You didn't really need us, did you?"

  Becker shrugged. “At the time, we saw no other options."

  The fight went out of the woman, and she held out the documents, not to Becker, but to Neave.

  "Then I take it, sir, that you represent authority here. Accordingly, I must present the results of my investigation to you and to your legal officer."

  He was not a soldier, had never been a soldier; and he knew he was missing something. “Why the legal officer?” he asked. “I should think that you might need medical officers more right now.” He gestured at the frail woman who staggered toward them, supported by the young man.

  "She was my chief medical officer,” Pauli Yeager murmured, distracted. “Her anti-agathics gave out. If you could help her ... but don't distract me, sir. I need your legal officer because"—again came the tone of rote learning—” ‘no charge shall be referred to a general court-martial for trial until it has been referred for consideration and advice to the staff judge advocate or legal officer of the convening authority.’”

  Neave looked around quickly. Some of the settlers had started forward, their hands raised. Neave's own guards hastened down the ramp, sidearms drawn to protect him.

  "It's not fair!” shouted the man on crutches, who lurched in his haste to draw closer. An Earth officer blocked his path. “Becker, you dropped us on a world where survey had done a half-assed job, assuming it looked at Cynthia at all, with limited supplies, and no transportation. ‘Fend for yourself,’ you told us. ‘Keep alive; you're our only hope,’ you said. How could we know..."

  "Know what?” Becker yelled back, goaded into anger in front of his commander and his former enemies.

  "That Cynthia was inhabited!"

  "Was inhabited,” gasped the medical officer who waved aside offers of help from her own people and Neave's staff to stagger between Pauli Yeager and Rafe Adams, whose grip, when she would have fallen, aided her to her knees.

  "You're a perceptive man, Commissioner,” she gasped in a voice that would have been cultivated if there had been any life to it at all. “You recognize anger. They have a right. You see, we were left here, told to be human, remain human—and now, along you come ... the war's over, you say. We'll unite humanity,"—she gasped for breath, her pale face turning whiter than Neave thought anyone could turn and still live—"but not us,” she bent her head. “Not us."

  "Get her inside,” the Yeager woman snapped the order at the young man and the heavily built, pregnant woman who stood close beside him.

  But when they tried to lift her, she fluttered one hand at them, warning them off. “Have to ... stay,” she gasped.

  If this went on much longer, Amory Neave truly thought that they might need another marker in that too-large graveyard. I haven't come all this way to die of curiosity, he told himself. Mutiny, assassination, or war, perhaps. But not curiosity.

  He stared at the woman standing in front of him, proffering whatever records she had compiled and kept secret even from her husband. “A general court-martial, Captain?” he asked. If he achieved a properly military tone of voice, perhaps it would help her to speak.

  "Quiet, everyone!” She turned and held up her hands at the settlers. “You know it has to be done. Now shut up and let me say it.

  "Begging the comissioner's pardon,” she turned back to him, formality set at maximum. “These are the charges. Violation of the Genocide Treaty. Genocide. Conspiracy to commit genocide. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide. An attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in its commission against the native Cynthian race. Effective immediately, I place myself under arrest."

  The shouting match that followed was the worst in Neave's memory; and he had had a lifetime of experience with faculty meetings, political negotiations, and a large, turbulent family. Hardly were Captain Yeager's accusations out of her mouth than her husband was demanding to be arrested, while half the colony either wanted to join them or to protest any action taken against them, then and there.

  For all of his experience, he was afraid he would have to let them shout themselves hoarse. Becker tried bellowing into the crowd and was silenced wretchedly when a thin, intense black woman stalked up to him with a list of errors in the initial survey report. He could promise her a decent survey; he had a crew full of junior officers who would probably ambush one another to win seats on such a mission—and thank God, it took his mind off the self-accusation Yeager and Adams had made. Genocides. And they looked so ... so human and normal. Somehow, naive though it was, Neave expected genocides to bear some Cain's mark, some taint of bestial fury that set them apart from humanity.

  The young man who had escorted the aged medical officer and who now knelt beside her raised his head. Satisfied? his lifted eyebrows seemed to ask. For a moment his face was hard, unforgiving. Then the woman he supported raised a hand, and his face gentled.

  "Ayelet?” she asked.

  "She's over with Dave, Alicia,” said the young man. Neave followed his glance and saw a barrel-chested man, his hair grizzled, standing away from the crowd, while the pregnant woman who was probably this boy's wife held his hands and tried to comfort him.

  "Good,” breathed the medical officer. “I want ... want to see Pauli and Rafe ... through this one, but—” abruptly her lips went blue, twisting in a sudden spasm of pain.

  "Get a doctor!” Lohr cried as he eased the woman down. Her hands clutched then, with appalling quickness, relaxed, palms upward, white against the vivid ground scrub. Where shouting failed, that movement silenced the colonists.

  "Dead?” breathed Pauli Yeager.

  A medical officer from Neave's ship pushed past her, scanners ready. “No,” he said, but the reassurance slipped out of his voice.

  Lohr rose to his feet. “I'm calling in Thorn,” he said.

  "No...” it was the merest thread of voice, but it stopped him in his tracks.

  "Alicia, don't you want to see him?” asked the girl named Ayelet. “He's like your son."

  "He ... is my son. Keep him ... keep him away..."

  "He's got the right to choose what risks he takes,” muttered Lohr. “I think he'll take this one.” He loped off, and the people circling the dying medical officer hushed her.

  Finally Pauli Yeager knelt beside her too, her log and whatever preposterous report she had prepared during years of isolation still clutched in her arms. “Lohr's right, Alicia,” she said, her voice wonderfully gentle. “Thorn's got to know it all. He's got a right."

  The older woman sighed and closed her eyes. “Get her inside,” Yeager told Neave's physician, ignoring such niceties as chain of command, and the fact that she had recently placed herself under arrest.

  Lohr came running back. “I reached Thorn!” he shouted.

  Tears seeped out from under Alicia's eyelids.

  "He's coming in, of course. On one of the newest fliers. He says they work fine.” He bent over the physician as she was being carried away.

  "I wanted ... him safe..."

  "You can't protect him from this,” Lohr said. “He's a man now, not a rehab case. And what's he going to do? Hide till these people go
away?” Abruptly his face twisted, and he looked like a much younger, wilder person. “I wish to hell they had never come!"

  "Thank God they did,” Pauli Yeager told him. “If they hadn't, it would have meant that there was nothing left ... up there.” She gestured at the sky. “That Becker was right, and we had to be seedcorn for the humanity that was no longer there."

  "But what's going to happen to you and Rafe..."

  "And David and all the others?"

  "Pauli ... Captain,” Becker cut in, “you've spent the past years in isolation; your people are angry about inadequate reporting of alien life. I honor your wish to be scrupulous, but aren't you confusing self-defense with..."

  "It was genocide!” Pauli snarled at him. “We had to kill the Cynthians to protect ourselves, but that makes no difference. If we'd had ships, we could have picked up and moved, but you took the ships. You grounded us. So we had to kill them."

  Becker's hands and lips moved as he tried to silence the woman. Neave observed how the Secess’ officers had moved in and were listening avidly.

  "Now you're here, the war's over, and everything is going to be wonderful: is that it? You've all been scared, and so now you're huddling together. The last thing you want is a trial for war crimes. It might open too many old wounds. But damn you, Becker, you dropped us on this world to be human for you. We haven't been, not since we killed the Cynthians. Do you expect us to like that?

  "I want to fulfill my mission. I want to be human again. If that means a trial, all right, then. You cannot do worse to me than anything that's happened, that we've done to ourselves since you left."

  Her husband laid his hands on her shoulders. She leaned her cheek against one of them.

  "I know. The children. All of them, not just ours. I've been happy despite what ... the Cynthians, but I always feared that this day would come. That's why I prepared that report. We were put here to be human; and humans cannot do what we did and hope to escape the consequences."

  She limped slowly toward Amory Neave, holding out her reports and log almost pleadingly. “The laws were written on Earth,” she told him. “'Persons charged with genocide or any of the other acts ... conspiracy, incitement, attempt ... shall be tried by a competent tribunal of the State in the territory of which the act was committed, or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction.’ You've got them all here, sir. Alliance, Secess', even Earth, after all these years."

  Neave found himself shaking his head. The war is over. Let the dead be dead. Let yourself be welcomed back into a common humanity, like the crew of my ship, he implored her silently.

  "I was put here to be human,” she repeated. “I can't let this go unnoticed and unpunished. I want to be clean again.” Her voice trembled uncontrollably. Neave sighed. Because he had no other choice left, he took the documents from her hands.

  22

  The same lines of text had glowed on Neave's terminal so long that by now he thought they could have been burnt onto a less advanced model. With a keystroke, he could erase those words. With a second one, he could stop anyone from recovering them. He could do that, he could. And then he could burn the hard copy, crossed out and, in many places, written over in the scrawl of someone who wrote as seldom as possible, who found the act painful. If he did that—erased the records, destroyed the paper—that would be the end of the report that Pauli Yeager called her “investigation” and had thrust into his hands, along with the responsibility to act on it.

  There would remain only her word. And his. He could, for example, allege that she was overstressed. Or he could deny ever seeing such a report.

  To destroy it was one possible action. But what he, unlike the innocent system that hummed and glowed in the privacy of his quarters, could not do was forget that such a report ever existed. He was a Franklin, therefore—he hoped—a reasonable man. He might erase the report, then the personnel file, of Pauli Yeager, but he could not unmake facts. He had met her. She had written the report that condemned herself, her husband, and their closest friends as genocides. And she had all but demanded to be arrested.

  To deny any of that was solipsism; and he had seen too much, since the blockade lifted, of what happened when people tried to make the universe over in their own images and—worse yet—their own theories even to toy with the idea. Franklin had lived in an age of reason and had helped to build a nation. He, Neave, surviving an age of war, must turn his longing for an age of reason into an attempt to re-create it.

  But he had also lived in an age of survivors; and the people whom he faced here, on whom—if they were allowed to have their stubborn way—he would have to sit judgment, were survivors.

  What a waste. If Neave had had a moment to waste, he would have sworn. But that was a waste of words. He turned with a sigh back to “Captain” Yeager's report. The report was long and not especially well-written. A pilot who had turned, reluctantly, to administration of a colony, she had turned even more reluctantly to the task of self-accusation. Her words were awkward, choppy—yet sometimes, the silences spoke more achingly than the ideas she actually managed to set down. Neave bent over the awkward text once more. She had collected evidence and precedents for years, it seemed, but she had no more idea of how to organize it into a damning case than he had of piloting.

  To do her justice, she didn't need to know the organizational tricks. Neave, steeped in the history of Earth, need not even access his records to remember the examples that Pauli Yeager had so laboriously culled from the colony's inadequate computer system ... probably in the loneliest watch of the night, when the system was not running at capacity, or in the scant moments she spared herself from her duties as commanding officer. No, it was not a well-organized document. But it was remarkable that it existed at all.

  Shaking his head, he scrolled back and forward in the text. Here were the words of a man who had been guard and officer at one such trial: “The Nuremberg Tribunal established for once and for all what had never been established before—that a person who committed an unlawful criminal act, even if he had done so while occupying an official position, was still responsible personally for what he had done."

  How must she have felt upon reading that line? There was no denying that Yeager and her associates felt personally responsible for the elimination of the Cynthians. He could hear that hoarse, matter-of-fact voice raised in outrage. “Elimination, Commissioner? That's a fine euphemism for murder, isn't it?"

  He could dismiss this entire case as irregular. God knows, it was, and God knew even better, he wanted to. Or he could cast about to find extenuating circumstances, including the one Yeager and her colleagues had dismissed: they had been charged with the protection of a colony.

  "What about it?” she had asked. “It doesn't matter that I must protect people, or that as an officer, my job is to obey orders. All lawful orders. I was a pilot, Commissioner. In a scramble, I could have taken out a ... Secess’ pilot,” Yeager paused, her eyes suddenly pained ... “assuming I was fast enough. That would have been all in a day's work. But there is a difference between that and exterminating the Cynthians. I know the difference. That's what makes me guilty."

  Had all the Cynthians been wiped out? The survey of this world was flawed—God knows, with every report Neave read, he realized that more and more fully. Already he had detached some of his younger crew to explore the continents that the colonists had lacked aircraft to visit. Would that matter?

  "What if some Cynthians survive?” He had asked Pauli Yeager that when he visited her in the dome that she and Rafe Adams lived in, and that was now their “prison.” A prison including children, friends, visitors—and accomplices.

  For a moment, hope flickered in Yeager's eyes, then subsided.

  "We cannot know that,” she told him.

  "In any case, does that matter?” countered the grizzled, barrel-chested man Neave had seen earlier talking with his daughter. “If we didn't kill them all, it was by the grace of God. Because we were desp
erate, and we might have tried. Probably would have tried. Besides, can you imagine looking at a Cynthian now, and knowing what we had done?"

  "When we first planned the idea, when we first thought of it...” Rafe let his words trail off, and Pauli had shaken her head emphatically.

  "We can never be free of it,” she said. “But I would like to"—she shrugged—"be clean again, if I can. To pay. To finish payment.” She shook her head. “After the last Cynthians died, I wanted to die too. I'm sorry, Rafe, but I did. It had nothing to do with you. But I didn't think I deserved to die, so I sentenced myself to life. Worse than that, I had to stay alive in such a way that the kids, all of them, would think of me as someone to admire. But it's over now, Commissioner. You're here, and I will not submit to this charade a moment longer."

  Here it was in her report, that same awareness of guilt that made a genocide hanged centuries ago declare, “It will take Germany one thousand years to repay its guilt."

  "It will take us forever,” Yeager had written in dark capital letters across the margin, “but is that any reason to avoid repayment or whine about its terms?"

  Neave buried his head in his hands. He had not wanted authority, much less authority over a case that, if referred back to Earth as some damnable regulation or other must surely demand, could shred the fragile accord between Alliance and Secessionists—very well, they called themselves the Republic—as easily as he could shred Yeager's report. He had only to watch the faces of his crewmembers. Becker walked small these days, his desire to bury the whole wretched matter obvious to anyone who had ever sat in on negotiations. He had, Neave knew, a career to rehabilitate.

  Just how far would he go to bury it? Neave wondered idly. There was no silence like the grave. And he knew Becker had a more pragmatic, therefore less ethical, bent than he.

  He massaged his temples with long, well-cared for fingers so unlike those of the woman who had produced this damnable mess. Becker probably wouldn't go that far, but Neave had a legal—hell, he had an ethical—responsibility to make certain. Yeager and her friends were guarded by Earth crew, men and women he had chosen and could trust. Factions. Neave shook his head at his own action. Factions led to secrecy, to dissension; they were dissension. He schemed where he feared to persuade.