It was a curious remark, and I played it again. Welcome to try. “If I interrupt the power supply,” I said, “it’ll trigger. Right?”
His face gave him away.
“Get well away from it.” I waved him to one side. “We’ll just sit here awhile.”
He didn’t move.
“Back off,” I said.
“For God’s sake, Kindrel.” He held out his hands. “Don’t do this.”
“There’s a living world here, Matt. And if that’s not enough, there’s a precedent to be set.”
He took a step forward. Odd that a guy prepared to be subsumed in a nova would show fear in the face of a laser.
“Don’t, Matt,” I said. “I’ll kill you if I have to.”
The moment stretched out. “Please, Kindrel,” he said at last.
So we remained, facing each other. He read my eyes, and the color drained from him.
The eastern sky was beginning to lighten.
A nerve quivered in his throat. “I should have left it alone,” he said, measuring the distance to the keyboard.
Tears were running down my cheeks, and I could hear my voice loud and pleading as if it were someone else, someone outside. “Don’t do it. Just sit still, Matt. Or—.”
The entire world squeezed down to the pressure of the trigger against my right index finger. “You didn’t have to stay,” I told him. “It had nothing to do with heroics. You’ve been in the war too long, Matt. You hate too well.”
He took another step, tentatively, gradually transferring his weight from one foot to the other, watching me, his eyes pleading.
“You were enjoying this, until I came by.”
“No,” he said. “That’s not so.”
“Sure it is.” His muscles tensed. I saw what he was going to do and I shook my head no and whimpered and he told me to just put the gun down and I waited there looking at the little bead of light that had crept up to his throat.
When at last he moved, not toward the computer but toward me, he was far too slow and I killed him.
My first reaction was to get out of there, to leave the body where it had dropped and take the elevator down and run—
I wish to God I had.
The sun was on the horizon. A few clouds drifted in the east, and another cool autumn day began.
Matt Olander’s body lay twisted beneath the table, blood seeping out through the hole in his throat. His chair lay on its side, and his jacket was open. A pistol, black and lethal and ready to hand, jutted from an inside holster.
I had never considered the possibility he might be armed. He could have killed me at any time.
What kind of men fight for this Christopher Sim?
This one would have burned Ilyanda, but he could not bring himself to take my life.
What kind of man? I have no answer to that question. Then or now.
I stood a long time over him, staring at him, and at the blinking transmitter, with its cold red eye, while the white lights fled toward the outer ring.
And a terrible fear crept through me: I could still carry out his intention, and I wondered whether I didn’t owe it to him, to someone, to reach out and strike the blow they had prepared. But in the end I walked away from it, into the dawn.
The black ships that escaped at Ilyanda went on to take a heavy toll. For almost three more years, men and ships died. Christopher Sim continued to perform exploits that had already become legendary, his Dellacondans held on until Rimway and Earth intervened, and, in the heat of battle, the modern Confederacy was born.
The sun weapon itself was never heard from. Never used. Never mentioned. Whether, in the end, it wouldn’t work, or Sim was unable to lure a large enough force again within range of a suitable target, I don’t know.
For most, the war is now something remote, a subject for debate by historians, a thing of vivid memories only for the very old. The Mutes have long since retreated into their sullen worlds. Sim rests with his heroes and his secrets, lost off Rigel. And Ilyanda still entrances tourists with her misty seas, and researchers with her curious ruins.
I buried Olander outside the terminal, and used the same laser to cut his name and an epitaph into a nearby rock. There’s a monument there now. But the rock remains. And the epitaph: No Stranger to Valor. When the Dellacondans found it they were puzzled.
The epitaph led to a tradition that Olander died defending Point Edward against the Ashiyyur, and for that they honored his gallantry by burying him and leaving the marker. Today of course, he stands high in the Confederacy’s pantheon.
And I: I hid when the Dellacondans came back to find out what had happened. And I spent three years in a city pursued by an army of ghosts which grew daily in number. All slain by my hand. And when the Ilyandans returned at the end of the war, I was waiting.
They chose not to believe me. It may have been politics. They may have preferred to forget. And so I am denied even the consolation of public judgment. There is none to damn me. Or to forgive.
I have no doubt I did the right thing.
Despite the carnage, and the fire, I was right.
In my more objective moments, in the daylight, I know that. But I know also that whoever reads this document, after my death, will understand that I need more than a correct philosophical stance.
For now, for me, in the dark of Ilyanda’s hurtling moons, the war never ends.
KAMINSKY AT WAR
1.
The bride waited in the glow of the lanterns and lowered her eyes to the sheet that had been placed on the ground before her. Her husband stood still and straight, watching. The celebrants were gathered in a circle around the happy pair. They were long and spindly creatures, all eyes and husk and clicking jaws, with no sign of anything remotely resembling hair. They were the color of grass that had not gotten enough water.
They were Noks, a species mired in early twentieth century technology and endlessly at war with itself. They were the first offworld intelligence we had seen, and they’d helped shape the hands-off policy that was quickly formulated as the Barrin-Rhys Protocol, and eventually simply the Protocol.
Leave them alone.
Virtually everybody took an unsympathetic attitude toward them. I thought it was the faces that really did the damage. The Noks did not have flexible features. Nature had given them unmoving masks that always looked the same, regardless of whether their owners were partying or running for their lives. No emotion ever showed.
Except in the eyes.
The eyes were round disks, large by human standards, protected by nictitating membranes. The lenses, usually dark, floated in a green-tinted aqueous humor. They contracted or widened, and changed colors, according to the emotions of the moment. The eyes of the wedding guests were uniformly blue. At peace.
The guests all carried bells. As was the local custom, they received a signal from the bride’s father, and raised their eyes to the sky, pledging eternal friendship to the happy couple. Then they rang the bells. It was a soft jangling on the night breeze, an expression of the connubial pleasures that lay ahead. A warm wind blew in off the ocean, and the trees sighed in harmony with the celebration.
The bride, of course, was naked, save for a ceremonial cord hung loosely at her waist. Slim and polished and graceful, she awaited the climax of the ceremony. Noks were not mammals, and not at all close to humans, yet there was something in the way she stood, in her physical presence, that stirred me. Odd how that happened. It wasn’t the first time.
I was wearing a lightbender, and was consequently invisible to the Noks, except for my eyes. If the system blanked out your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to see. So I had to be careful.
I took the bride’s picture. Angled around and got the groom, backed off and caught the two sets of parents. I recorded the scene as, one by one, the bells fell silent. When the last tinkling had died away, the pair strode toward each other and embraced. In the time-worn tradition, he released the cord around her waist. She removed his ceremon
ial shirt, and then tugged at something on his leggings and they fell away.
I took more pictures.
Noks are all beak and shell. You look at them and what you see is straight-ahead, strictly business, don’t get in the way. Nevertheless, I knew what she was feeling. I could see pure joy in her eyes, and in her suppleness. I told myself maybe it was just empathy, that I was projecting on her precisely the reactions I’d expect to see had she been a woman.
She was a beautiful creature. When her groom closed on her, she reacted with grace and dignity, not easy when you’re sprawled on a sheet in front of a hundred witnesses. But it was the ceremonial first act, consummating the marriage, as people liked to say at home.
The bride’s name, as close as it could be reproduced in English, was Trill. I watched them, and I’ll admit I was embarrassed by my own rising heartbeat. Couldn’t help it. It was erotic stuff, and it didn’t matter they weren’t human. At the time I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone. Thought it was a perversion. I’ve found out since it’s a common reaction. So take it for what it’s worth.
I was still taking pictures when the raiders stormed out of the woods.
My name’s Arthur Kaminsky, and I’m an anthropologist. Although the term doesn’t really extend to everything we do nowadays.
There’d never been a time that I hadn’t had things my own way. I’d been born, if not precisely into wealth, then certainly into comfortable surroundings. I’d gone to the best schools, won a scholarship to Oxford where I performed, if not brilliantly, at least well enough to convince my father I was destined for something other than real estate. After I’d gotten my doctorate, I decided the frontiers of my specialty lay with the study, not simply of humans, but of intelligent species of whatever type we might encounter. My father rolled his eyes when I told him what I wanted to do, and my mother said she supposed it was my decision. Had it not been for a fortuitous circumstance, I would probably never have been selected for one of the few positions available to do offworld field work. I was only in my twenties, had no track record, and every anthropologist on the planet was pushing to get assigned.
The fortuitous circumstance was my linguistic ability, and especially the fact that I learned to speak three major Nok languages, which required vocal capabilities that were beyond the normal human larynx. Nobody could do it like me. Other than the AI’s.
Still, the people who signed me on were nervous. They put me through a longer training period than was standard. And I’d been on site more than six months before the director allowed me to do a solo mission. And that came with a lot of advice. Be careful. Take no chances. Keep the lightbender activated at all times so they can’t see you. Stay in touch with Cathie. If you start to feel ill, or anything like that, let us know right away and get back to the lander.
Cathie was Catherine Ardahl, the mission’s communication officer. She had dark hair and dark eyes and a smile that melted me into my socks. I’d never been a big hit with women, so I was relentlessly shy around her. In those early months, I was as invisible to her as if I’d been wearing a lightbender.
Watching the Nok bride, before the raiders arrived, I’d thought of her.
When the raiders came out of the woods, I needed a minute to figure out what was happening. I still didn’t know enough about local customs. Party crashers, maybe? A surprise visit by distant relatives? Even the first shots might have been noisemakers of some sort. Then the screams started, and the wedding guests scattered. Some went down as bullets tore into them and lay writhing on the yellow-tinted grass and the stone walkways. Others got into the forest and a few made it into the house.
The raiders were on foot, firing rifles and pistols indiscriminately. Killing technology was primitive, for the most part at a World War I level, although Noks had no heavier-than-air capability. I wasted no time scrambling out of the way. Got behind a tree. Two of the wedding guests, fleeing in panic, crashed screaming into me and knocked me flat. (There are hazards when nobody can see you.) Someone inside the house began to return fire.
The raid lasted, altogether, about seven minutes. No one was spared. The raiders moved among the dead and dying, shooting the wounded. Then they began rounding up survivors and herding them into a central area. I saw Trill lying beside a bench, with the sateen—her blood equivalent—leaking out of her shoulder. She was down near the trees, and I knelt beside her and lifted her in my arms and tried to stop the bleeding. She cried out and one of the raiders heard her and started toward us.
They were in uniform, dark green loose-fitting single-piece outfits. Like pajamas.
“Don’t let them find me,” she said. She was so terrified she never noticed what held her.
“I won’t.”
The lids had squeezed down over her eyes. There wasn’t much I could do. My stomach fluttered. I’d never witnessed serious violence. During my early months on Nok, they’d kept me away from the wars. In fact, everybody stayed away from the combat areas. They were dangerous. “Try not to make any noise,” I whispered. I carried her to the edge of the trees. Put her down behind a bush. But they were right behind us. One of them stopped, moved the shrubbery aside with the barrel of his rifle. Advanced a few steps. Listened.
I reached into a pocket of my vest and pulled out my tensor. It was designed to disable the nervous systems of the local wildlife. But it would also work on the Noks themselves.
Trill groaned softly.
The raider heard her.
“Help me,” she whispered, her voice faint. “Help me.”
He had a light, and it picked her out. He raised a rifle and pointed it at her. I could simply have stood aside. Let it happen. It was in fact what the regulations required.
But I couldn’t do it. I pulled the trigger on the son of a bitch. He sighed and went down, and in that moment I wished I had something lethal. It even crossed my mind to take his rifle and put a bullet in his brain.
The raiders collected their comrade. (I’d moved Trill by then.) They carried him off, making that odd whistling sound that was the Nok idea of displaying regret. Then they were gone.
Trill never woke. She made occasional gasping sounds. But there were no more cries of pain. And after awhile she grew still.
In the distance, I heard more gunfire.
“Art.” The voice on the commlink startled me. It was the boss. Paul McCarver. Northeastern United States accent. Classic Yankee.
“Hello, Paul.”
“We’ve picked up sporadic shooting in your area. Just wanted to check. You’re okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m good.”
“What’s happening? Can you tell?”
“They hit a wedding party. It looks as if they killed everybody”
“Yeah. That sounds like the way they operate. Okay. Be careful. Maybe you better come back.”
“I’m okay. I’ll be back in a bit.”
I retreated to the lander, which lay within its own lightbender field in a forest clearing about a kilometer off the road. I’d been hungry when the wedding started, but I had no appetite when I got back to it. I kept seeing the cool green eyes of the killers, saw them striding through the celebration. Enjoying the work.
I should mention that I’m not big on confrontation. Never was. I do compromise real well. And I was always willing to overlook stuff. But the raid on the wedding had entailed a level of disagreeableness and lack of reason that made me want to kill someone. I mean, what was the point of sending a military strike force—that’s what they were—against a wedding party?
“George,” I said to the lander AI as I buckled in, “lift off. Let’s see what else they did.”
In the west, a kilometer away, there was a glow in the sky. That would be Itiri, the town which had probably been home to most of the celebrants. Population about eleven hundred. No military targets. I’d been there all day, taking pictures, observing, enjoying myself.
“Very good, Dr. Kaminsky,” said George. “After we look around, will we be go
ing back into orbit?”
I thought about it. I had what I’d come for, the record of the wedding. Even if it hadn’t turned out exactly as planned, the mission was complete. Still, I wanted to make somebody pay for what I’d just seen. “George, where do you think the raiders came from?”
“Had to be by sea, I suspect. I would have detected a dirigible.”
Nok industrialization had risen and fallen several times. We now know they’d put forty thousand years of civilizations and dark ages on the scoreboard before anybody started laying bricks in Sumer. They had all but exhausted their fossil fuels even though their original supply had been almost triple the terrestrial stores. The Noks seemed incapable of establishing political stability. One of the objectives I’d set for myself was to figure out why. With few exceptions, the only gas-powered vehicles operating on Nok belonged to the various dictators and their military and political establishments, and the police. Everybody else walked. Or used beasts of burden.
The engines came on. There was no sound, only a slight vibration in the chair. Most of my weight, and that of the spacecraft, vanished. It began to rise, over the trees into a clear summer sky.
Itiri was ablaze.
A narrow winding road ran parallel to the sea. The raiders moved along it, a happy group, their weapons slung casually over their shoulders. More mob than military unit. They looked not at all worried about a counterattack. Two kilometers ahead, three small warships waited at anchor in a harbor. The ships were steam-driven ironclads. They showed no lights. “What can you tell me about them, George?”
“They are all of the same type. Approximately 2500 tons, six guns able to fire four-inch shells. Accuracy doubtful beyond a thousand meters.”
“Automatic weapons?”
“None. They haven’t been developed yet.”
“Not at all?”
“They had them a few thousand years ago, most recently during the Turullian Age. But they lost the technology.”
Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 37
