The Best Military Science Fiction of the 20th Century (59 page)

“How do you do that?”

“What?”

“Die. Just by wanting to.”

“Wanting is the way. I could stop my heart now. Many things stop the heart. When you stop trying to live, when you stop going ahead—it’s very easy.”

“You mean if you quit trying to live you die. That’s crazy.”

The elf spreads delicate fingers. “Children can’t. Children’s hearts can’t be stopped that way. You have the hearts of children. Without control. But the older you are the easier and easier it is. Until someday it’s easier to stop than to go on. When I learned your language I learned from a man named Tomas. He couldn’t die. He and I talked—oh, every day. And one day we brought him a woman we took. She called him a damn traitor. That was what she said. Damn traitor. Then Tomas wanted to die and he couldn’t. He told me so. It was the only thing he ever asked of me. Like the water, you see. Because I felt sorry for him I gave him the cup. And to her. Because I had no use for her. But Tomas hated me. He hated me every day. He talked to me because I was all he had to talk to, he would say. Nothing stopped his heart. Until the woman called him traitor. And then his heart stopped, though it went on beating. I only helped. He thanked me. And damned me to hell. And wished me health with his drink.”

“Dammit, elf.”

“I tried to ask him what hell was. I think it means being still and trapped. So we fight.”

(“He’s very good with words,” someone elsewhere says, leaning over near the monitor. “He’s trying to communicate something but the words aren’t equivalent. He’s playing on what he does have.”)

“For God’s sake,” says deFranco then, “is that why they fling themselves on the barriers? Is that why they go on dying? Like birds at cage bars?”

The elf flinches. Perhaps it is the image. Perhaps it is a thought. “Fear stops the heart, when fear has nowhere to go. We still have one impulse left. There is still our anger. Everything else has gone. At the last even our children will fight you. So I fight for my children by coming here. I don’t want to talk about Tomas anymore. The birds have him.
You
are what I was looking for.”

“Why?” DeFranco’s voice shakes. “Saitas—Angan—I’m scared as hell.”

“So am I. Think of all the soldiers. Think of things important to you. I think about my home.”

“I think I never had one.—This is crazy. It won’t work.”

“Don’t.” The elf reaches and holds a brown wrist. “Don’t leave me now, deFranco.”

“There’s still fifteen minutes. Quarter of an hour.”

“That’s a very long time…here. Shall we shorten it?”

“No,” deFranco says and draws a deep breath. “Let’s use it.”

A
T THE BASE
where the on-world authorities and the scientists did their time, there were real buildings, real ground-site buildings, which humans had made. When the transport touched down on a rooftop landing pad, guards took the elf one way and deFranco another. It was debriefing: that he expected. They let him get a shower first with hot water out of real plumbing, in a prefabbed bathroom. And he got into his proper uniform for the first time in half a year, shaved and proper in his blue beret and his brown uniform, fresh and clean and thinking all the while that if a special could get his field promotion it was scented towels every day and soft beds to sleep on and a life expectancy in the decades. He was anxious, because there were ways of snatching credit for a thing and he wanted the credit for this one, wanted it because a body could get killed out there on hillsides where he had been for three years and no desk-sitting officer was going to fail to mention him in the report.

“Sit down,” the specials major said, and took him through it all; and that afternoon they let him tell it to a reg colonel and lieutenant general; and again that afternoon they had him tell it to a tableful of scientists and answer questions and questions and questions until he was hoarse and they forgot to feed him lunch. But he answered on and on until his voice cracked and the science staff took pity on him.

He slept then, in clean sheets in a clean bed and lost touch with the war so that he waked terrified and lost in the middle of the night in the dark and had to get his heart calmed down before he realized he was not crazy and that he really had gotten into a place like this and he really had done what he remembered.

He tucked down babylike into a knot and thought good thoughts all the way back to sleep until a buzzer waked him and told him it was day in this windowless place, and he had an hour to dress again—for more questions, he supposed; and he thought only a little about his elf,
his
elf, who was handed on to the scientists and the generals and the AlSec people, and stopped being his personal business.

“T
HEN,” SAYS THE
elf, “I knew you were the only one I met I could understand. Then I sent for you.”

“I still don’t know why.”

“I said it then. We’re both soldiers.”

“You’re more than that.”

“Say that I made one of the great mistakes.”

“You mean at the beginning? I don’t believe it.”

“It could have been. Say that I commanded the attacking ship. Say that I struck your people on the world. Say that you destroyed our station and our cities. We are the makers of mistakes. Say this of ourselves.”

“I,”
THE ELF
said, his image on the screen much the same as he had looked on the hillside, straight-spined, red-robed—only the ropes elves had put on him had left purpling marks on his wrists, on the opalescing white of his skin, “I’m clear enough, aren’t I?” The trooper accent was strange coming from a delicate elvish mouth. The elf’s lips were less mobile. His voice had modulations, like singing, and occasionally failed to keep its tones flat.

“It’s very good,” the scientist said, the man in the white coveralls, who sat at a small desk opposite the elf in a sterile white room and had his hands laced before him. The camera took both of them in, elf and swarthy Science Bureau xenologist. “I understand you learned from prisoners.”

The elf seemed to gaze into infinity. “We don’t want to fight anymore.”

“Neither do we. Is this why you came?”

A moment the elf studied the scientist, and said nothing at all.

“What’s your people’s name?” the scientist asked.

“You call us elves.”

“But we want to know what you call yourselves. What you call this world.”

“Why would you want to know that?”

“To respect you. Do you know that word, respect?”

“I don’t understand it.”

“Because what you call this world and what you call yourselves
is
the name, the right name, and we want to call you right. Does that make sense?”

“It makes sense. But what you call us is right too, isn’t it?”

“Elves is a made-up word, from our homeworld. A myth. Do you know
myth
? A story. A thing not true.”

“Now it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Do you call your world Earth? Most people do.”

“What you call it is its name.”

“We call it Elfland.”

“That’s fine. It doesn’t matter.”

“Why doesn’t it matter?”

“I’ve said that.”

“You learned our language very well. But we don’t know anything of yours.”

“Yes.”

“Well, we’d like to learn. We’d like to be able to talk to you your way. It seems to us this is only polite. Do you know
polite
?”

“No.”

A prolonged silence. The scientist’s face remained bland as the elf’s. “You say you don’t want to fight anymore. Can you tell us how to stop the war?”

“Yes. But first I want to know what your peace is like. What, for instance, will you do about the damage you’ve caused us?”

“You mean reparations.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Payment.”

“What do you mean by it?”

The scientist drew a deep breath. “Tell me. Why did your people give you to one of our soldiers? Why didn’t they just call on the radio and say they wanted to talk?”

“This is what you’d do.”

“It’s easier, isn’t it? And safer.”

The elf blinked. No more than that.

“There was a ship a long time ago,” the scientist said after a moment. “It was a human ship minding its own business in a human lane, and elves came and destroyed it and killed everyone on it. Why?”

“What do you want for this ship?”

“So you do understand about payment. Payment’s giving something for something.”

“I understand.” The elvish face was guileless, masklike, the long eyes like the eyes of a pearl-skinned buddha. A saint. “What will you ask? And how will peace with you be? What do you call peace?”

“You mean you don’t think our word for it is like your word for it?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that’s an important thing to understand, isn’t it? Before we make agreements. Peace means no fighting.”

“That’s not enough.”

“Well, it means being safe from your enemies.”

“That’s not enough.”

“What is enough?”

The pale face contemplated the floor, something elsewhere.

“What
is
enough, Saitas?”

The elf only stared at the floor, far, far away from the questioner. “I need to talk to deFranco.”

“Who?”

“DeFranco.” The elf looked up. “DeFranco brought me here. He’s a soldier; he’ll understand me better than you. Is he still here?”

T
HE COLONEL REACHED
and cut the tape off. She was SurTac. Agnes Finn was the name on her desk. She could cut your throat a dozen ways, and do sabotage and mayhem from the refinements of computer theft to the gross tactics of explosives; she would speak a dozen languages, know every culture she had ever dealt with from the inside out, integrating the Science Bureau and the military. And more, she was a SurTac
colonel
, which sent the wind up deFranco’s back. It was not a branch of the service that had many high officers; you had to survive more than ten field missions to get your promotion beyond the ubiquitous and courtesy-titled lieutenancy. And this one had. This was Officer with a capital O, and whatever the politics in HQ were, this was a rock around which a lot of other bodies orbited:
this
probably took her orders from the joint command, which was months and months away in its closest manifestation. And that meant next to no orders and wide discretion, which was what SurTacs did. Wild card. Joker in the deck. There were the regs; there was special ops, loosely attached; there were the spacers, Union and Alliance, and Union regs were part of that; beyond and above, there was AlSec and Union intelligence; and that was this large-boned, red-haired woman who probably had a scant handful of humans and no knowing what else in her direct command, a handful of SurTacs loose in Elfland, and all of them independent operators and as much trouble to the elves as a reg base could be.

DeFranco knew. He had tried that route once. He knew more than most what kind it took to survive that training, let alone the requisite ten missions to get promoted out of the field, and he knew the wit behind the weathered face and knew it ate special ops lieutenants for appetizers.

“How did you make such an impression on him, Lieutenant?”

“I didn’t try to,” deFranco said carefully. “Ma’am, I just tried to keep him calm and get in with him alive the way they said. But I was the only one who dealt with him out there, we thought that was safest; maybe he thinks I’m more than I am.”

“I compliment you on the job.” There was a certain irony in that, he was sure. No SurTac had pulled off what he had, and he felt the slight tension there.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“
Yes, ma’am.
There’s always the chance, you understand, that you’ve brought us an absolute lunatic. Or the elves are going an unusual route to lead us into a trap. Or this is an elf who’s not too pleased about being tied up and dumped on us, and he wants to get even. Those things occur to me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” DeFranco thought all those things, face to face with the colonel and trying to be easy as the colonel had told him to be. But the colonel’s thin face was sealed and forbidding as the elf’s.

“You know what they’re doing out there right now? Massive attacks. Hitting that front near 45 with everything they’ve got. The Eighth’s pinned. We’re throwing air in. And they’ve got somewhere over two thousand casualties out there and air-strikes don’t stop all of them. Delta took a head-on assault and turned it. There were casualties. Trooper named Herse. Your unit.”

Dibs.
O God. “Dead?”

“Dead.” The colonel’s eyes were bleak and expressionless. “Word came in. I know it’s more than a stat to you. But that’s what’s going on. We’ve got two signals coming from the elves. And we don’t know which one’s valid. We have ourselves an alien who claims credentials—
and
comes with considerable effort from the same site as the attack.”

Dibs. Dead.
There seemed a chill in the air, in this safe, remote place far from the real world, the mud, the bunkers. Dibs had stopped living yesterday. This morning. Sometime. Dibs had gone and the world never noticed.

“Other things occur to the science people,” the colonel said. “One which galls the hell out of them, deFranco, is what the alien just said.
DeFranco can understand me better.
Are you with me, Lieutenant?”