For Honor We Stand (47 page)

The doctor had been watching the proceedings with intense interest, without saying anything, until now.  “What makes you so sure?  Why not in those other places?”  Max looked at DeCosta whose inquiring look communicated the same question.

“Remember what Sun Tzu said about knowing your enemy?”  Both men answered in the affirmative.  He looked at the a countdown clock on his console.  “We’re just over two hours away from the first of the zones we identified and not quite nine hours away from where I say we’ll be hit.  Time for you gentlemen to have a lesson on the Krag.”  He stood and looked at the Stealth console.  “Mister Sauvé, summon your relief.  You have CIC.” 

As the young officer acknowledged and logged the order, Max, DeCosta, and the doctor left.  They went up one deck and forward to one of the Midshipmen’s classrooms. Max went to the instructor’s console at the front of the classroom, fired it up, and spent about half a minute working his way down through the menus to find what he wanted.  He hit a key and the wall display at the front of the classroom lit up with several lines of text.  It appeared to be some kind of blank verse.

Out of the fog they came, by the hundreds.

By the thousands.

Their deadly swords glittering,

Thousands of stars in the distance.

The muted sun reflecting dimly from their bronze armor,

Golden.

Like candles shining through a multitude of far off windows.

Soon, I could see their eyes.

Eyes, like ours.

Like those of the hundreds, the thousands, who stand to meet them,

Our long lines like rows of ripe grain,

Soon to be cut down as war’s fatal harvest,

Ready to meet them. 

It is a surprise, this sight:

The enemy’s eyes like the eyes of friends, and loved ones, neighbors.

No different.

And yet, so very different.

Eyes contorted in rage and hatred,

Eyes that are the mirrors of hearts and minds set on killing:

Killing my comrades, killing my leaders, killing me.

Why?  I wonder.  Why?

Why did they choose to come?

What did we do to bring them?

Was there any path we could have traveled,

Or any turning we could have taken,

That did not end here on this field of death?

Why must we who are made from this very land

And who bring forth our food from it in rich harvest

Water it so abundantly with our hot life’s blood?

If I die today, will I learn the answer in the next world?

If I survive today, will I learn the answer while I live?

Or will I carry this question with me,

For all my life,

For all eternity?

They are near.

On command I draw my sword.

I will kill my enemy.

Or I will die.

There is no other way.

“Grim and dark, but very powerful,” said the doctor.  “I don’t recognize the piece, or even the style or school, but it is good.  Not very much to my taste, though.  Too stark.  Two little imagery.  I read a great deal of poetry and I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite like it.”

“XO, what do you think?”

“Skipper, like you, I’m a graduate of the University of Deep Space.  The only poetry I’ve read, other than stuff like ‘A girl on the Warship
Nantucket
,
’ was assigned in the Midshipman’s Literature Curriculum.  I’ve never seen anything like it, either.  When I try to think about the kind of man who would write it, I don’t come up with a clear picture.  You know, you read the Great Poets, like Poe or Chaucer or Cima, you get a feel for the personality of who the writer was, but I can’t get a sense of this man.”

“That’s because a man didn’t write it.”

The doctor snorted.  “I can assure you, my friend, those staves did not issue from the pen of a woman.”  

“You’re right.  They didn’t.  They issued from the calligraphy brush of a Krag.”  The two other men looked at him in frank astonishment.”  We have millions of words of Krag poetry and literature, you know.  Remember, before they broke contact with us, we exchanged with them whole libraries of literature, art, music, philosophy, religious writings, news and sports recordings, just about every form of culture you could imagine.  Our database is full of it.  Most of us avoid it, because we’re taught to think of the Krag as rapacious vermin who are little more than rats with big brains.  But it’s there, for anyone to read.  And, to anyone with eyes to see and an open mind, it shows that they are far, far more than rats with big brains. 

“That is a poem entitled ‘Eyes of the Enemy.’  We can’t pronounce Krag names, so the Krag Studies folks call the author ‘Poet 2723.’  According to our best estimate of the equation between the two dating systems, he wrote this about the time of the Battle of Marathon.  Short poetry is not their strength, though.  The poetic form at which they excel is the Epic.  They have works, written in dactylic decameter, half a million words long, mostly about the great wars about a thousand years ago that unified their planet under one rule.  Poetry experts say that they are so magnificent that they make Homer and Virgil look like Ogden Nash. 

“They are an amazingly creative species.  For example, the Krag have an art form that is a cross between Drama and Opera in which each character is played by two actors, one who portrays the logical and analytical side of the character and communicates only with the spoken word and another who portrays the emotional and intuitive side and communicates only by singing.  Which half of one character is speaking or singing to which half of another and where the halves are in relation to each other on the stage is a big part of this form.  In the case of Hamlet, for example, you might have the Hamlet who sings singing to the Ophelia who speaks, while speaking Hamlet is talking to the speaking half of his uncle, the King, and so on. 

“The literature experts also have lots of good things to say about the quality of their prose writing.  They have a literary form called the ‘Funerary Novel,’ in which the death of the protagonist prompts his best friends and closest family to tell each other about the key episodes of his life, from their point of view.  There are two sub forms.  One, is called the ‘Room of Mirrors’ in which each of the speakers tells about the same event, but their perspectives are so different that it is in effect six or seven or eight different stories.  The key question in these books is whether the differences in the stories are truly different aspects of the protagonist or whether they are purely the result of the different personalities of the speakers.  The other is called ‘Chain of Many Blacksmiths,’ I assume it sounds better in Krag, in which six or seven stories about different events from the life of the protagonist all illustrate one truly meaningful or distinctive feature of his personality or intellect. 

“Now, their visual arts aren’t any great shakes.  And their architecture and other design fields are weak compared to ours.  We would consider their homes and their furniture repetitive and bland, their paintings boring, they hardly have any sculpture to speak of, but they excel in all forms of music.  We can’t appreciate their music because many of the sounds are outside of our range of hearing, but experts say it puts the our best composers to shame.  As far as science goes, when the war started, they were our equals in biology and engineering, our inferiors in applied chemistry, astronomy, astrophysics, planetary geology, and decades ahead of us in fundamental physics and mathematics.”

“I had no idea you knew so much about them,” Sahin said.

“If you want to fight someone effectively, you have got to understand them.  I mean, really understand them.  Look at our three best fighting Admirals.  You know, you couldn’t find three men who are successful at the same thing and yet are more different than Litvinoff, Middleton, and Hornmeyer but they’ve got one thing in common:  they are all experts on the Krag.  They’ve read their books, studied their Opera-Drama, and dissected their poetry.  They’ve gotten inside their heads and understand the way they think, just like I know that there are Krag out there reading Shakespeare and Sophocles and Cervantes right now.

“There are all kinds of things you can learn about them from reading and studying these materials, lots of things that I have put to use, but one thing stands out.  The Krag mind is almost obsessed with the idea of concealment and hiding.  If you think about it from an evolutionary perspective it makes sense.  Now, it’s no surprise that we all—us and the Krag--evolved from scurrying little rodent-like creatures because that’s basically what mammals were before that huge rock hit the Earth and wiped out the Dinosaurs.”  He hit a few keys and caused the wall display to show a sequence of human ancestry, as best as can be determined from the fossil record.  “But take a look at this.”  He pointed to a small proto-ape.  “These guys, ancestors of us and many modern apes, went up into the trees tens of millions of years ago and these guys,” he pointed to a recognizably proto human primate, “came down to the grasslands a couple of million years ago, started walking on two legs full time, and became human beings.  Yes, I know I’m wildly oversimplifying, but stick with me.” 

He hit another key.  The apes and early humans disappeared to be replaced by a line of rodents, progressing from a tiny rodent-like animal through several intermediate stages to the upright, tool-wielding, starship building, nuclear weapons capable beings who so troubled humanity.  “On the other hand, look at this.  The Krag’s ancestors were no bigger than medium-sized rats until only a few million years ago when they started putting on size and brain mass, with this guy.”  He pointed to an animal about two thirds of the way through the sequence, four or five times larger than his forebears but only a fraction of the size of the modern Krag.  “He lived only five million years ago, and he’s only the size of Beagle.  They got to be the size of human children only two and a half million years ago, here.”  He pointed to a bipedal animal near the end.  “At an instinctive level, though, the Krag still react to danger as though they’re this big,” he said, pointing to the tiny creature at the beginning. 

“The result is that Humans and Krag have an entirely different instinctive response to many tactical situations.  Look at the response to being confronted by superior force.  You both know that one of the biggest problems we have with inexperienced warship captains is that when they are outgunned, they try to pull some kind of trick out of their sleeves to create what they think is a tactical advantage, then turn to fight.  We have a devil of a time getting people to run when they need to run.  Why is that?  My theory is that it’s because what I described is the perfect instinctive response for a monkey to have.  If you’re a monkey being chased by a lion, running for your life is the worst thing to do.  Lions, and practically every other predator out there, are faster than monkeys and there aren’t many places a monkey can hide from a lion.  Outcome:  if you run, you die.  No wonder retreat in the face of a superior force is such a hard thing to train people to do—it goes against every instinct.  What monkeys do is they climb a tree, there’s your tactical advantage, and then they throw sticks and rotten fruit and rocks at the predator to keep it from climbing after them.  There’s your turning to fight.  It’s a great instinctive response to have, if you’re a monkey.  Not so great when you’re commanding a warship.   

“We’ve seen that the Krag don’t do that.  The standard Krag tactical response when outgunned is to engage stealth and disappear, or to throw up some kind of smokescreen and disappear behind it.  Which happens to be the best response for a warship.  And, it’s just what you would expect from a species descended from rodents.  Their instinct is to go underground or into the underbrush or dash behind a clump of grass or whatever and scurry away.  If they stand and fight, they die.  Their only chance for survival is to burrow and hide, then escape.

“Now, both species make hard, rational decisions to engage in tactics that are different from what our instinctive response is—we train our skippers to run when they are outgunned, they train their skippers to look for advantage and fight when there is a reasonable chance of winning.  But, the instinctive responses are still there and that’s what a species is going to default to whenever it can. 

“And, it affects what we emphasize when we design our ships and develop our tactics.  That’s why their stealth is better than ours and their sensors not as good.  That’s why so many of their tactics involve blinding our sensors and getting away when ours involve confusing the enemy about our intentions and attacking from unexpected directions or in unexpected ways.  That’s why they prefer huge mass attacks with great disparity in numbers—because somewhere in the back of their brains they are still little rodents that could never take on another animal unless they came at it with a whole swarm.

“We are descended from primates.  Our whole mentality is about curiosity.  You can see it in our drama and literature—when you boil a lot of it down, our stories are often about finding things out, what you know and what you don’t know, what is told and what is hidden. 
Hamlet
is about the prince finding out whether his uncle really killed his father so he can know whether he has to kill the uncle to avenge his father’s death. 
Citizen Kane
is about a journalist interviewing people to discover who Charles Foster Kane was, really, and what he meant when he said ‘rosebud.’  We have a whole genre of fiction devoted to the process by which a professional discoverer, called a ‘detective,’ figures out who committed a crime.  The greatest novel of the last two centuries,
Bodyguard of Lies
, is about a young man’s diligent investigation in which he peels away the layers of deception his father had wrapped around himself, and discovers for the first time his father’s true name, his career, even—it turns out—his sexual identity.  Doctor, even that horribly tedious old film you made me watch,
2001:  A Space Odyssey,
was about discovering the meaning of the monoliths buried on the moon and in orbit around Jupiter.  Heck, the spacecraft that Bowman and Poole and HAL were on was
named
‘Discovery.’  Anyone with any sense could take a cursory look at our literature and our art and our music and learn in a heartbeat that curiosity lies at the heart of our nature.”