A Talent for War (33 page)

On the screen, I was looking back along the hull of the bus. Several sets of hands gripped the sides of the aircraft around the opened door. "A little lower," said Hoch.

The line stretched tight out through my own door and over the leading edge of the wing.

Arms reached out of the bus, seized the man by his legs as soon as he was close, and hauled him inside. "Okay," said Hoch. "We've got him."

"I need the line back."

"You got it."

I lurched away. "Keep the door open," I said. "I've got another one in the water. Let's do it the same way."

"Okay," said Hoch. And then, somberly: "Hurry."

Hurry.

When I got back out on the wing, she was gone. I stood there, trailing the cord, calling her name, not even certain where she'd been, until the Patrol vehicles circled in and took station overhead.

They searched until dawn. But there never was any hope.

XVIII

To lack a grave matters little.

-Virgil, Aeneid, II

THERE WAS A gathering for Quinda on a hill outside Andiquar. It was advertised as a commemoration of her life rather than a memorial service. They set a table, and hired a band.

The guests sang loudly, if not particularly well, and everyone drank a good deal.

There were maybe two hundred people present, some of whom I recognized from the Talino Society. They toasted her frequently and energetically, and regaled each other with reminiscences. The wind played over the flickering gantner shield that protected them from the temperatures of the winter afternoon.

Chase and I stood off to one side. She leaned on a crutch, moodily silent. When most of the food had been cleared away, the guests gathered around a circular table. And they came forward, one by one, to sum up her life in quiet sentences: she was not known ever to have injured anyone, they said. She was a friend, she was unfailingly optimistic, she'd been a good daughter, and we would not see her like again.

All clichés. And I reminded myself that this was a woman who'd twice broken into my home, who'd shown a reckless disregard for my life, who'd damned near killed Chase, and who was, finally, a victim of her own ruthlessness.

Toward the end, I noticed Cole, Chase's rescuer and the man Quinda had saved, standing quietly off by himself, beside a tree. We walked over and stood with him.

A young man who looked startlingly like Quinda approached us, introduced himself (he was her brother), and thanked us for coming. He knew us, understood that we had been with her at the end, and asked whether I would speak to the assembly. I hesitated. Principle seemed to demand that I forego that particular hypocrisy.

But I agreed nonetheless, and walked through the crowd to take a place at the table. The brother introduced me by name.

"You've already heard all the important things there are to know about Quinda," I told them.

"I knew her only at the beginning, and again at the end, of her short life. And maybe the only
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thing I can add to what has been said here this afternoon is that she did not hesitate to sacrifice that life for a man whose name she never knew."

An hour later, in possession of a court order, I reluctantly visited Quinda's quarters accompanied by her executor, and searched for the Tanner file. It was not there.

I hadn't thought it would be. We never did learn what she'd done with it.

I inquired of the executor, and later of the family, whether I could have access to her private papers. It was a difficult request to honor, in light of the fact that I'd forced myself on them with a court order. They understandably refused, and a few days after her death, certain designated private documents, according to the wishes of the deceased, were burned.

I suspect they contained indirect evidence of her conniving: possibly some record of the preparation of the bogus simulations. In any case, I consoled myself with the knowledge that the location of the artifact was not being burned too: she obviously had known no more about that than I did.

That evening, there were two pieces of news. Patrols in disputed areas were being beefed up as a result of another clash near the Perimeter. Some observers thought the scare was being fanned by a government anxious to stem the political power of separatists throughout the Confederacy.

The other item came in the form of a message from Ivana: Hugh Scott's house on Fishbowl had been sold.

The proceeds had been deposited in an account on Dellaconda! What more appropriate for the driven Scott than that he be found at last on Christopher Sim's home world.

I was off again.

XIX.

The legend that Maurina was scarcely more than a child when she married Christopher Sim is demonstrably untrue. She was, in fact, his instructor in classical Greek and Platonic philosophy.

And her mastery of those difficult disciplines on a frontier world do not suggest extreme youth.

Their wedding took place in the shadow of sporadic clashes with the Ashiyyur. And when those clashes eventually flared into all-out war, Christopher left to join his brother Tarien, promising his bride that only God could prevent his return.

As events fell out, neither brother ever again saw the wintry peaks or the wide rivers of Dellaconda. When, after more than three years, news came of the disaster at Rigel and the loss of her husband, Maurina took to wandering the lonely mountain trails. She appears never to have lost hope that he still lived, and that he would return. Even when the war ended, and the men and women who had fought it, the handful of Dellacondan survivors, came home, she persisted.

Her family and friends lost patience and, in time, shunned her.

She became a familiar sight to nocturnal travelers, who were startled by her slim form, passing across the packed snow under the hard moonlight, wrapped in a long silver cloak.

And, as everyone had supposed would happen, there came a night when she did not return.

They found her in the spring, at the foot of the escarpment that now bears her name.

Today, townspeople claim that her spirit continues to wander the high country. And more than one villager, returning late to his home, has seen the lovely apparition. She stares at the sky, it is reported, and asks a question, which is always the same: "O Friend, is there news yet of the Corsarius?"

—Ferris Grammery, Famous Ghosts of Dellaconda

DELLACONDA Is A small, heavy, metal-rich world circling the ancient, brick-red star Dalia Minor. In relatively recent times—about twenty thousand years ago—it is believed to have been involved in a near-collision, possibly with the object that is now its moon. Today it describes an
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erratic looping orbit around its central luminary, much as its own satellite rolls in a wild ellipse.

(The moon will break free eventually, but that event is still ten million years away.) The orbit is gradually correcting itself, and current estimates are that within several hundred thousand years the world will have acquired a pleasant, backyard sort of climate.

In the meantime, the habitable parts of Dellaconda are afflicted with brutal winters, blazing summers, and a capricious weather machine punctuated by terrifying storms. People tend to live inland, well away from the cyclonic winds that regularly rake its coasts. It is a world of rock and desert, of vast plains frozen during much of the year, of impenetrable forests and impassable rivers.

The cities are protected by gantner fields, though some people still claim they prefer the old days ("when you got a real change of seasons"). It's all too predictable now, they say: every day is twenty degrees and pleasant. Ruins the young people. But the occasional measures introduced into Council to disconnect are always resoundingly defeated.

There were one hundred seventeen listings in various Dellacondan cities under the name

"Scott, Hugh." I called them all. If any of them was the Scott I was looking for, he didn't admit to it.

I tried the Grand Bank of the Interior, which held the account into which the proceeds from the sale of the house had been placed. They listened politely, and explained that they regretfully could not provide an address. Furthermore, it was against their policy to take a message.

So I was left to search a planetary population of thirty-odd million for a man who didn't want to be found.

The most likely place to start was Christopher Sim's home. It's a museum now, of course: a modest, two-level permearth house in Cassanwyle, a remote mountain town whose population during the Resistance was about a thousand. It isn't really a whole lot bigger today, excluding tourists.

Still, this tiny, exposed collection of well-kept but ancient buildings constitutes the lodestone of the Confederacy. The great symbols are here: the harridans haunt its forested peaks; the Signal glows forlornly in an upstairs window of Sim House; and (in Tarien's modest cottage across the wooded valley) a computer still carries within its memory early versions of the phrases that would eventually find their way into the Accord.

I got there late in the afternoon. To maintain old world charm, the Dellacondans had, at that time, refrained from erecting a shield over the town. That's no longer the case, as you may be aware; but when I visited it during the late spring, in the Dellacondan year 3231, it was exposed to the elements. It was a brisk day, as I recall, with a temperature that, in mid-afternoon, could get no higher than twenty below. There was a steady current of frigid air across the mountain slopes, and through downtown Cassanwyle.

But the visitors came, wrapped against the weather, and generally subdued in this holiest of Confederate shrines. The Dellacondans had built a tourist shelter several hundred meters downslope of Sim House. From there, people were ferried by airbus to all the major historical sites in the area.

But the wait at the holding station could be long. I was there almost an hour before a group of about twenty of us were taken the final distance over a field of hard-packed snow to our transportation.

Sim had lived in a three-story farmhouse with an enclosed veranda on two sides. Our bus circled the area while we looked down at the various points of interest: the little cemetery in back where Maurina was buried; Sim's own skimmer, now permanently moored beneath a gantner shield just north of the property; the Bickford Tavern, visible at the foot of the east slope, where the first strategy meetings had been held after the fighting broke out.

We stayed aloft until everyone in a previous airbus had loaded; then we descended to our
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assigned place on the landing pad. The guide informed us we would have ten minutes inside, and opened the exit doors.

We filed out and, despite the severity of the climate, most people paused along the walkway in front of the house to absorb the moment, and to look up at the bedroom windows. It was the middle of the day, so the Signal was not particularly evident, but the soft yellow glow was visible nonetheless in the curtains.

We moved inside. The veranda was heated, and furnished with rockers and thick-armed, heavily padded chairs. A chess board had been set up, and a bronze plate explained that the position had been taken from a recorded game actually played between Christopher Sim and one of the townspeople. I gathered from the comments of the visitors that Sim, who had the black pieces, had the stronger position.

The view from the veranda was stunning: the long valley with its wandering frozen river; broad white slopes broken only by occasional houses or patches of forest; the cold peaks, lost in wisps of cloud; and the warm defiance of Cassanwyle, its hundred or so buildings clustered against the wilderness.

The interior of Sim House is stiff and formal, in the manner of its era: richly embroidered rugs and vaulted ceilings and boxy, uncomfortable furniture. A central hallway divides the living room and library, on one side, from casual and dining rooms on the other. As so often happens in historical buildings, the intended effect of preserving a sense of another age, of how it must have been, is lost; instead there is only the mustiness of arrested time. Despite the photos and personal items and books placed carefully about to suggest that the owners had just stepped away

(perhaps to discuss the wisdom of intervention), there is no life.

A visitors' log had been placed in the library. I scrolled quickly through it, throwing its pages on the monitor, and drawing the attention of one of the security guards. He wandered over to ask whether he could be of assistance.

I replied pleasantly that, for me, the visitors' log was always the highlight of a visit. "You can learn a great deal from what people have to say about a place like this," I observed, searching the remarks columns for pithy comments. There were observations on the quality of the food at the various inns, and suggestions that the bathroom facilities at the tourist shelter were inadequate.

"Just married" appeared beside one couple's name, and "Kill the mutes" beside another's.

"I know," said the guard, losing interest.

Well back in the entries I found what I was looking for: Hugh Scott's name! How long ago had he been here? The dates were written in the Dellacondan calendar, which I cranked into my commlink: I was, at most, four months behind him.

In the section reserved for his address, he had marked "Dellaconda." And the comment block was blank.

I'd have liked to look around the house a bit, but the tour completed its rounds and headed for the door. The guide signaled me toward the exit, and I reluctantly fell in with my fellow visitors.

My next stop was Wendikys Academy, where Sim had been an instructor.

The school is a replica. A whiteout destroyed and scattered the original shortly after the war, and no building stood at the site for almost a century.

All but one of the classroom spaces are now devoted to other purposes: souvenir shop, washrooms, projection areas, restaurant. The one that remains is Sim's: displays are set up for a history lesson on the Persian wars, using materials and a lesson plan from his files. A holo of a fully armed Spartan hoplite, resplendent in polished armor, stood by the door.