The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (58 page)

“We never wanted to fight. It was a warning. Even animals, for God’s sake—understand a warning shot.”

The elf blinks. (And someone in another room stirs in a chair and curses his own blindness. Aggression and the birds. Different tropisms. All the way through the ecostructure.)

The elf spreads his hands. “I don’t know what you mean. I never know. What can we know? That you were there for the same reason I was? Were you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even know that.
We never wanted a war.
Do you understand that, at least?”

“You wanted us to stop. So we told you the same. We sent our ships to hold those places which were ours. And you kept coming to them.”

“They were ours.”

“Now they are.” The elf’s face is grave and still. “DeFranco, a mistake was made. A ship of ours fired on yours and this was a mistake. Perhaps it was me who fired. What’s in this elf’s mind? Fear when a ship will not go away? What’s in this human’s mind? Fear when we don’t go away? It was a stupid thing. It was a mistake. It was our region. Our—”

“Territory. You think you owned the place.”

“We were in it. We were there and this ship came. Say that I wasn’t there and I heard how it happened. This was a frightened elf who made a stupid mistake. This elf was surprised by this ship and he didn’t want to run and give up this jump-point. It was ours. You were in it. We wanted you to go. And you stayed.”

“So you blew up an unarmed ship.”

“Yes. I did it. I destroyed all the others. You destroyed ours. Our space station. You killed thousands of us. I killed thousands of you.”

“Not me and not you, elf. That’s twenty years, dammit, and you weren’t there and I wasn’t there—”

“I did it. I say I did. And you killed thousands of us.”

“We weren’t coming to make a war. We were coming to straighten it out. Do you understand that?”

“We weren’t yet willing. Now things are different.”

“For God’s sake—why did you let so many die?”

“You never gave us defeat enough. You were cruel, deFranco. Not to let us know we couldn’t win—that was very cruel. It was very subtle. Even now I’m afraid of your cruelty.”

“Don’t you understand yet?”

“What do I understand? That you’ve died in thousands. That you make long war. I thought you would kill me on the hill, on the road, and when you called me I had both hope and fear. Hope that you would take me to higher authority. Fear—well, I am bone and nerve, deFranco. And I never knew whether you would be cruel.”

T
HE ELF WALKED
and walked. He might have been on holiday, his hands tied in front of him, his red robes a-glitter with their gold borders in the dawn. He never tired.
He
carried no weight of armor; and deFranco went on self-seal and spoke through the mike when he had to give the elf directions.

Germ warfare?

Maybe the elf had a bomb in his gut?

But it began to settle into deFranco that he had done it, he had done it, after years of trying he had himself a live and willing prisoner, and his lower gut was queasy with outright panic and his knees felt like mush.
What’s he up to, what’s he doing, why’s he walk like that—Damn! They’ll shoot him on sight, somebody could see him first and shoot him and I can’t break silence—maybe that’s what I’m supposed to do, maybe that’s how they overran Gamma Company—

But a prisoner, a prisoner speaking human language—

“Where’d you learn,” he asked the elf, “where’d you learn to talk human?”

The elf never turned, never stopped walking. “A prisoner.”

“Who? Still alive?”

“No.”

No.
Slender and graceful as a reed and burning as a fire and white as beach sand.
No.
Placidly. Rage rose in deFranco, a blinding urge to put his rifle butt in that straight spine, to muddy and bloody the bastard and make him as dirty and as hurting as himself; but the professional rose up in him too, and the burned hillsides went on and on as they climbed and they walked, the elf just in front of him.

Until they were close to the tunnels and in imminent danger of a human misunderstanding.

He turned his ID and locator on; but they would pick up the elf on his sensors too, and that was no good. “It’s deFranco,” he said over the com. “I got a prisoner. Get HQ and get me a transport.”

Silence from the other end. He cut off the output, figuring they had it by now. “Stop,” he said to the elf on outside audio. And he stood and waited until two suited troopers showed up, walking carefully down the hillside from a direction that did not lead to any tunnel opening.

“Damn,” came Cat’s female voice over his pickup. “Daamn.” In a tone of wonder. And deFranco at first thought it was admiration of him and what he had done, and then he knew with some disgust it was wonder at the elf, it was a human woman looking at the prettiest, cleanest thing she had seen in three long years, icy, fastidious Cat, who was picky what she slept with.

And maybe her partner Jake picked it up, because: “Huh,” he said in quite a different tone, but quiet, quiet, the way the elf looked at their faceless faces, as if he still owned the whole world and meant to take it back.

“It’s Franc,” Jake said then into the com, directed at the base. “And he’s right, he’s got a live one. Damn, you should
see
this bastard.”

III

So where’s the generals in this war?

Why, they’re neverneverhere, my friend.

Well, what’ll we do until they come?

Well, you neverneverask, my friend.

“I was afraid too,” deFranco says. “I thought you might have a bomb or something. We were afraid you’d suicide if anyone touched you. That was why we kept you sitting all that time outside.”

“Ah,” says the elf with a delicate move of his hands. “Ah. I thought it was to make me angry. Like all the rest you did. But you sat with me. And this was hopeful. I was thirsty; I hoped for a drink. That was mostly what I thought about.”

“We think too much—elves and humans. We both think too much.
I’d have given you a drink of water, for God’s sake.
I guess no one even thought.”

“I wouldn’t have taken it.”

“Dammit, why?”

“Unless you drank with me. Unless you shared what you had. Do you see?”

“Fear of poison?”

“No.”

“You mean just my giving it.”

“Sharing it. Yes.”

“Is pride so much?”

Again the elf touches deFranco’s hand as it rests on the table, a nervous, delicate gesture. The elf’s ears twitch and collapse and lift again, trembling. “We always go off course here. I still fail to understand why you fight.”

“Dammit, I don’t understand why you can’t understand why a man’d give you a drink of water. Not to hurt you. Not to prove anything. For the love of God,
mercy
, you ever learn that word? Being decent, so’s everything decent doesn’t go to hell and we don’t act like damn animals!”

The elf stares long and soberly. His small mouth has few expressions. It forms its words carefully. “Is this why you pushed us so long? To show us your control?”

“No, dammit, to hang onto it! So we can find a place to stop this bloody war. It’s all we ever wanted.”

“Then why did you start?”

“Not to have you push
us
!”

A blink of sea-colored eyes. “Now, now, we’re understanding. We’re like each other.”

“But you won’t stop, dammit it, you wouldn’t stop, you haven’t stopped yet! People are still dying out there on the front, throwing themselves away without a thing to win. Nothing.
That
’s not like us.”

“In starting war we’re alike. But not in ending it. You take years. Quickly we show what we can do. Then both sides know. So we make peace. You showed us long cruelty. And we wouldn’t give ourselves up to you. What could we expect?”

“Is it that easy?” DeFranco begins to shiver, clenches his hands together on the tabletop and leans there, arms folded. “You’re crazy, elf.”

“Angan. My personal name is Angan.”

“A hundred damn scientists out there trying to figure out how you work and it’s that damn simple?”

“I don’t think so. I think we maybe went off course again. But we came close. We at least see there was a mistake. That’s the important thing. That’s why I came.”

DeFranco looked desperately at his watch, at the minutes ticking away. He covers the face of it with his hand and looks up. His brown eyes show anguish. “The colonel said I’d have three hours. It’s going. It’s going too fast.”

“Yes. And we still haven’t found out why. I don’t think we ever will. Only you share with me now, deFranco. Here. In our little time.”

T
HE ELF SAT
, just sat quietly with his hands still tied, on the open hillside, because the acting CO had sent word no elf was setting foot inside the bunker system and no one was laying hands on him to search him.

But the troopers came out one by one in the long afternoon and had their look at him—one after another of them took the trouble to put on the faceless, uncomfortable armor just to come out and stand and stare at what they had been fighting for all these years.

“Damn,” was what most of them said, in private, on the com, their suits to his suit; “damn,” or variants on that theme.

“We got that transport coming in,” the reg lieutenant said when she came out and brought him his kit. Then, unlike herself, “Good job, Franc.”

“Thanks,” deFranco said, claiming nothing. And he sat calmly, beside his prisoner, on the barren, shell-pocked hill by a dead charcoal tree.

Don’t shake him, word had come from the CO. Keep him real happy—don’t change the situation and don’t threaten him and don’t touch him.

For fear of spontaneous suicide.

So no one came to lay official claim to the elf either, not even the captain came. But the word had gone out to Base and to HQ and up, deFranco did not doubt, to orbiting ships, because it was the best news a frontline post had had to report since the war started. Maybe it was dreams of leaving Elfland that brought the regs out here, on pilgrimage to see this wonder. And the lieutenant went away when she had stared at him so long.

Hope. DeFranco turned that over and over in his mind and probed at it like a tongue into a sore tooth. Promotion out of the field. No more mud. No more runs like yesterday. No more, no more, no more, the man who broke the Elfland war and cracked the elves and brought in the key—

—to let it all end. For good.
Winning.
Maybe, maybe—

He looked at the elf who sat there with his back straight and his eyes wandering to this and that, to the movement of wind in a forlorn last bit of grass, the drift of a cloud in Elfland’s blue sky, the horizons and the dead trees.

“You got a name?” He was careful asking anything. But the elf had talked before.

The elf looked at him. “Saitas,” he said.

“Saitas. Mine’s deFranco.”

The elf blinked. There was no fear in his face. They might have been sitting in the bunker passing the time of day together.

“Why’d they send you?” DeFranco grew bolder.

“I asked to come.”

“Why?”

“To stop the war.”

Inside his armor deFranco shivered. He blinked and he took a drink from the tube inside the helmet and he tried to think about something else, but the elf sat there staring blandly at him, with his hands tied, resting placidly in his lap. “How?” deFranco asked, “how will you stop the war?”

But the elf said nothing and deFranco knew he had gone further with that question than HQ was going to like, not wanting their subject told anything about human wants and intentions before they had a chance to study the matter and study the elf and hold their conferences.

“T
HEY CAME,” SAYS
deFranco in that small room, “to know what you looked like.”

“You never let us see your faces,” says the elf.

“You never let us see yours.”

“You knew everything. Far more than we. You knew our world. We had no idea of yours.”

“Pride again.”

“Don’t you know how hard it was to let you lay hands on me? That was the worst thing. You did it again. Like the gunfire. You touch with violence and then expect quiet. But I let this happen. It was what I came to do. And when you spoke to the others for me, that gave me hope.”

I
N TIME THE
transport came skimming in low over the hills, and deFranco got to his feet to wave it in. The elf stood up too, graceful and still placid. And waited while the transport sat down and the blades stopped beating.

“Get in,” deFranco said then, picking up his scant baggage, putting the gun on safety.

The elf quietly bowed his head and followed instructions, going where he was told. DeFranco never laid a hand on him, until inside, when they had climbed into the dark belly of the transport and guards were waiting there—“Keep your damn guns down,” deFranco said on outside com, because they were light-armed and helmetless. “What are you going to do if he moves, shoot him? Let me handle him. He speaks real good.” And to the elf: “Sit down there. I’m going to put a strap across. Just so you don’t fall.”

The elf sat without objection, and deFranco got a cargo strap and hooked it to the rail on one side and the other, so there was no way the elf was going to stir or use his hands.

And he sat down himself as the guards took their places and the transport lifted off and carried them away from the elvish city and the frontline base of the hundreds of such bases in the world. It began to fly high and fast when it got to safe airspace, behind the defense humans had made about themselves.

There was never fear in the elf. Only placidity. His eyes traveled over the inside of the transport, the dark utilitarian hold, the few benches, the cargo nets, the two guards.

Learning, deFranco thought, still learning everything there was to learn about his enemies.

“T
HEN
I
WAS
truly afraid,” says the elf. “I was most afraid that they would want to talk to me and learn from me. And I would have to die then to no good. For nothing.”