A Talent for War (30 page)

Some were clustered along the rim. I turned the navigator's telescope in their direction. Their branches were entwined, and their broad spined leaves extended for whatever gray light they could capture. But there was no sun, and no face. As I neared Sim's Perch, a repeating message turned up on the commlink. "Full tourist facilities are available," it said. "Please return your vehicle to controlled guidance. Manual navigation is not permitted within eight kilometers of the park." I complied. The skimmer immediately swung out to sea, gained altitude, and began a long slow turn back toward the escarpment.

Three of us were lined up on the approach. A couple of kids waved from the skimmer immediately ahead, and I waved back. We were above the cliff rim now, approaching a blue and scarlet landing pad complex, which was atop the summit. Sim's shelf was about a third of the way down the cliff face.

It was marked by a complex of structures, cut from the rock. Among them was a gold-domed hotel, with mush courts and swimming pools. In Sim's time, the ledge must have been of modest
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proportions, a strip of rock barely wide enough to support a skimmer. But it's been braced and extended and broadened and fenced.

The voice on my commlink was young, female, and syrupy. "Welcome to the Christopher Sim Perch," she said. "Please do not attempt to leave the vehicle until it has completely stopped.

Quarters are available at the Sim Hotel. Do you wish to make a reservation?"

"No," I said. "I only want to see the shelf."

"Very good, sir. You can reach the Christopher Sim Perch by following the blue markers. The Resistance Committee reminds you that refreshments may be consumed only in designated areas.

Please enjoy your stay."

I followed another vehicle onto a blue pad, turned the skimmer over to a service attendant, and took a tube down to the main level. That left me in the hotel lobby. But a blue arrow pointed toward a side door.

A few people, kids mostly, splashed in a fern-lined pool. There was a souvenir shop with Resistance Era dishware and glasses and pennants, models of the Corsarius, and a substantial array of crystals and books. Among the books was Man and Olympian, and a modest volume titled Maxims of Christopher Sim. Toldenya's magnificent On the Rock dominated the lobby. If you haven't seen it: Sim sits thoughtfully, and precariously, atop a rounded slab, peering out over an uneasy ocean, illuminated by a rising sun. Storm clouds are visible on the horizon.

He wears a loose jacket and floppy trousers, his gray-blond hair curling out from under a battered hat. His eyes are narrowed, and filled with pain. The green and white wing of his skimmer is visible on the left. (It was on this occasion that I learned the significance of the tree symbol on the aircraft: it is the Morcadian tree, and has been the official device of Ilyanda for four hundred years.)

I bought a copy of the Maxims and took it outside, onto the shelf.

I was almost alone. "Off season," one of the attendants told me. "We don't get many tourists this time of year. But a lot of people come out from the city for dinner and drinks. Tonight.

There'll be a good crowd tonight."

The shelf was open to the elements. Everything else was sealed and heated, including an observation deck, which lay at right angles to the face of the promontory. A few people had found their way to it, and were manning a battery of telescopes. A young couple, wrapped against the chill of the afternoon, followed me out.

A few kids played near, and sometimes climbed onto, the low mesh fence which was all that separated them from a happier world. The ocean was a long way down, and I cringed, watching.

Overhead, a variety of pennants flew. A few seabirds wheeled nearby, and a couple of floaters drifted just out of reach beyond the fence. Their filaments rippled in the moving air. Even in the shadow of the mountain wall, the daylight, reflected through their amoebic sacs, maintained a deliberate cadence of shifting hues. They exist on so many worlds, these peaceful, slow-moving creatures that seem endlessly curious about us. They'd been worth saving, I thought. They and the gulls and the broad sea that had been here for how many million years?

How could Sim have even considered destroying all this? How could he have stood up here, beneath these timeless walls, and contemplated that kind of act?

I found a bench on the observation deck, and opened the Maxims. It had been privately printed, through the Order of the Harridan. Much of the material had been derived from Sim's one published work. But there were also excerpts from letters, court documents, comments attributed to him, public pronouncements, and so on.

The crisis, he tells the congress of the City on the Crag, is upon us, and I would be less than candid if I did not admit to you that, before it ends, I fear we will have emptied many of the seats in this chamber. And, in a note to a senator from that same body: I have every confidence
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that whatever Power has brought us this immeasurable distance along the road from Akkad, it surely does not intend to abandon us now to this ancient, unimaginative race that so single-mindedly pursues our extinction.

Toldenya's slab is located at the north end of the ledge. It is the largest of a group of rocks, wedged into the cliff face, jutting precariously out over the void. No one really knows where Sim stood when he was here, and I have to think that the notion he actually climbed out there is purely an artist's conceit.

His shelf had been narrow. At its widest point, it would have been just wide enough for a good pilot to set a skimmer down. Given a surprise—a sudden downdraft, say—and skimmer and pilot could have fallen a half kilometer into the ocean.

Why?

And why before dawn?

Yet how better to contemplate the star and the world he was about to destroy, than to catch them together in the magnificent symbiosis of an ocean sunrise?

And I wondered, while I considered what must have passed through his mind on those bleak mornings, whether he had not hoped for the sudden downdraft that might have shifted the decision to someone else's shoulders.

Had he perhaps, in the end, come to fear his own weapon? Christopher Sim was first and last an historian. Standing out here, watching what he believed to be the last few sunrises this world would have, he must have been terrified of the verdict of history.

I felt the certainty of it in a sudden shock: the ultimate warrior had shuddered under that knowledge. No wonder we never heard again from the sun weapon.

XVII.

The measure of a civilization is in the courage, not of its soldiers, but of its bystanders.

—Tulisofala, Mountain Passes

(Translated by Leisha Tanner)

THE MIST BLEW off the sea in the late afternoon, and I retired to a table in a corner of the bar, to sit quietly sipping green lamentoes. After a while, as the sky began to darken and Ilyanda's rings took shape, I activated my commlink. "Chase, are you there?"

I heard it buzz, which meant she wasn't wearing it. I went back to my drink and tried again a few minutes later. This time I connected. "Shower," she explained. "It's been a long afternoon, but I've got some answers. Our boy's idea would work."

"The antimatter?"

"Yes. It should be anti-helium, by the way, assuming the target has a helium core. Which is the case here."

"Who'd you talk to?"

"A physicist at a place called Insular Labs. His name's Carmel, and he sounds as if he knows what he's talking about."

"But it would work?"

"Alex, he said, and I quote: 'A shipload of that stuff would blow the son of a bitch to hell!' "

"Then Kindrel's story is at least possible. Provided you can get the stuff into the core. Did you ask him about that part of the problem? Could Sim have found a way to navigate in hyper?"

"I didn't mention Sim. We were talking about a novel, remember? But Carmel thinks that navigation in Armstrong space is theoretically impossible. He suggested another way: ionize the anti-helium, and put it behind a powerful magnetic field. Then ram it into the sun at high velocity."

"Maybe that's the way they intended to do it," I said. "Could we do that now?"

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"He doesn't think so. The anti-helium would be easy to make and contain, but the technology for the insertion would be pretty advanced stuff.

"Theoretically, the only type of nonlinear space that permits physical penetration by three-dimensional objects is Armstrong. I still think it's a hoax."

"Yeah," I said, "Maybe. Listen, I'm at a nice spot. How about joining me for dinner?"

"The Perch?"

"Yes."

"Sure. Sounds good. Give me a little time to get myself together. Then I'll take a taxi out. See you in about an hour and a half?"

"Okay. But don't bother with the taxi. I'll send the skimmer back for you."

I tried to use my commlink to enter the return code into the skimmer's onboard computer. But the red lamp blinked: no connection. Why not? I made another unsuccessful effort, and patched through to the service desk. "I'm having problems with my automatics," I said. "Could you send an attendant to enter a code manually into my skimmer?"

"Yes, sir." It was a female voice, and it sounded vaguely annoyed. "But it'll take a while.

We're shorthanded, and this is our busy night."

"How long?"

"It's hard to say. I'll send someone in as soon as I can."

I waited about twenty minutes, and then went up myself to the hangar area, which was located underground at the summit. The temperature had plummeted, and the rings, which had brightened the sky a half hour earlier, were now only a pale smear against a heavy overcast.

Outside the hangar, I tried the service desk again. Still busy. Any time now, though.

"Can you tell me where my skimmer's located?"

A pause, then: "Sir, guests aren't allowed in the hangar area."

"Of course," I said.

A warning was posted on the door: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I pushed through it into a sprawling cave that would probably not have looked so big if I could have seen some walls. It was illuminated only by a string of yellow lamps burning morosely out in the gloom somewhere. While I tried to get my bearings, a set of overhead doors opened, and a vehicle descended through a shaft into the hangar. Its navigation lamps sliced across rows of parked vehicles. I got only a glimpse before the lights went out. But the skimmer's magnetics continued to whine, and its black bulk glided to floor level and accelerated. I felt the wave of cold air as it passed at high speed.

My own aircraft was green and yellow. A bilious combination, but one that would be easy to see if I could get reasonably close to it. I waited for my eyes to adjust, and then stepped cautiously through the door onto a permearth floor, and turned to my left, on the ground that there was a little more illumination in that direction.

Another skimmer dropped out of the shaft, lights blazing. I tried to get a good look around, but the lamps blinked off almost immediately. Then it accelerated down one of the corridors formed by the parked aircraft. I groped past a small airbus, and penetrated deeper into the hangar.

There appeared to be three shafts, and vehicles were coming in at an alarming rate.

Maddeningly, there was never quite enough time to organize my search during the few seconds of illumination that each provided. I became an expert on the placement of running lights that evening, and formulated Benedict's Law: no two sets on any consecutive vehicles will point in the same direction. In the end, they only added to the confusion.

In addition, once they reached ground level, the skimmers, now lost in the dark, moved at high speed. I had a bad time of it: I stumbled past wing struts and tail assemblies, banged a knee, and fell on my face.

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At one point, I was kneeling immediately in front of a skimmer rubbing a knee when I heard the magnets energize. I scrambled to one side as the thing rolled forward, but a wing caught me anyway and knocked me flat.

I was by then having a few misgivings, but I'd lost my fix on the door, so I couldn't retreat. I considered calling the service desk again to ask for help, and was about to do so—reluctantly—

when I spotted a green and yellow fuselage.

Gratefully, I hurried over, climbed into the cockpit, and called Chase to tell her the aircraft would be a few minutes late.

"Okay," she said. "Anything wrong?"

"No," I grumbled. "I'm doing fine. Just a minor problem with the skimmer. Stay with me a second until I make sure it works."

"Make sure it works?" She sounded skeptical. "Listen, maybe I better take the taxi."

I've thought since, many times, yes, there was my chance to head it all off. It's what I should have done in the first place. And I never even considered it. Now, of course, I'd gone to too much trouble to take the obvious solution.

You have to work at it to shut down a skimmer response system inadvertently. On the bilious special I had, it was necessary to take off a plastic cover and push a presspad. Simple enough, but you had to make a conscious decision to do it.

How had it happened?

Careless attendant, presumably. Odd, since the attendants don't enter the aircraft unless there's a problem. Still, there it was. I promised myself there'd be no tip. My God.

I turned the systems back on, enjoyed the swirl of warm air in the compartment, tapped instructions in for the topside pads, and listened to the magnets engage. The vehicle lifted off the floor, paused while something sailed past, and entered the corridor. Then the skimmer accelerated, stopped (throwing me against the harness), and rose almost vertically into an exit shaft.

I rode it up, out over the summit, and down again into the landing area. I got out and reset the guidance system for the roof of the Point Edward hotel. "On its way," I told Chase, over the commlink. It lifted again, and accelerated seaward.

"Good thing," she said. "I'm getting hungry."

I watched it climb, its running lights blurring against the underside of a low cloud cover. It circled toward the south, and was swallowed in the night.