A Talent for War (34 page)

The title of the lesson flickered on one of the displays: LEONIDAS IN THE PASS.

A silver plaque is mounted on the wall outside the classroom. It lists those former students who eventually fought by their teacher's side. The names of twenty-seven are inscribed, only two of
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whom ever returned.

Like Sim House, Wendikys Academy maintained a visitors' log, and again Scott's name was there. Same date, and this time he'd added an observation that was pointedly disquieting: "In the end it made no difference. ..."

Assuming he would only sign in once at each site, I concluded he might be an occasional visitor.

I looked around, scanning the crowd: we stood jammed together in roped-off portions of the building. Some were watching the battle of Thermopylae, others tried to see Sim's control console, still others sat at terminals bringing up data that, according to the Parks Department, had been devised and entered by Sim himself.

Monuments and markers are everywhere. One can see Mora Poole's cottage, with the black harridan which she defiantly painted on her roof at the height of the Occupation; and the plaque containing Walt Hastings's response on learning that all five of his sons and daughters had died at Salinas: I count myself the most fortunate of men, to have known such children!; and the memorial to the nameless Ashiyyurean officer who was slain by partisans while participating in a midwinter search for a lost child.

But the most celebrated is the Signal.

At dusk each evening, it shines forth from the front window on the second floor of Sim House: a warm yellow cone glittering across the snow. It's Maurina's beacon to her lost husband, an ancient lamp which, according to legend, has burned every night since the news came from Rigel two centuries ago.

And Maurina Sim: there's a name that goes to the heart of the tragedy of those days. One always thinks of her as she appears in the Constable engraving, staring out at a wild quarter moon, lovely, young, black hair loose, dark eyes stained with agony.

Her wedding took place in the shadow of approaching war. She made no effort to dissuade her husband from joining Tarien and his volunteers, who were resolved to assist Cormoral. That expedition must have seemed suicidal at the time, though many thought the Ashiyyur would back off rather than slaughter a force that was more mob than navy.

But Cormoral burned before the Dellacondans got there. And that melancholy action changed everything. What was to have been little more than a demonstration became unrelenting war.

In time Maurina went to war herself. She was present at the defense of the City on the Crag and at Sanusar. She is known to have manned a weapons console at Grand Salinas. But she functioned also as an ambassador, traveling the neutral worlds with Tarien, pleading the cause of Confederacy. And it happened that she was on Dellaconda when that world was seized by the Ashiyyur.

She was stranded until the invaders withdrew near the end of the long struggle. Curiously, despite their telepathic abilities, they seem never to have realized the prize they had in their hands. Or if they did, they chose to ignore the fact.

She is said to have been in her bath when news came of her husband's death. A young townsman, whose name was Frank Paxton, was the carrier, pounding tearfully on the door until she understood what had happened.

The Signal was still burning in the upstairs window on the night that she left her home for the last time. The townspeople have never allowed it to die.

I picked up Hugh Scott's track again at the Hrinwhar Naval Museum, in Rancorva, Dellaconda's capital. I'd always been puzzled by the remark attributed to him that he was "going to Hrinwhar." He'd come to the museum, while I had gone a couple of hundred light years to look at the asteroid and battle site for which it was named.

He was listed as a supporting member of the Naval Society. No address was given, but there was a code. It was local, and I connected on the first try. "Mr. Scott?"

"Yes?" His voice was not unfriendly. "Who is this?"

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I felt a rush of elation. "My name is Benedict. Alex. I'm Gabe's nephew."

"I see." His tone flattened. "I was sorry to hear about your uncle."

"Thank you." I was standing in the members' room, looking through a glass panel at an exhibit of period naval uniforms. "I wondered if we might have dinner together? I'd enjoy an opportunity to talk with you."

"I appreciate the invitation, Alex. But I'm really quite busy."

"I read your remarks at the Talino Society. Were they all innocent?"

"All of whom?"

"The crewmembers of the Corsarius?"

He laughed, but the sound had a dull ring to it. "I know you don't take that place seriously," he said.

"How about dinner?"

"I really haven't the time, Mr. Benedict. Maybe we can get together at some future date. But not just now." He broke off, and I was listening to a carrier wave.

I gave him about ten minutes, and tried again. "You're being a nuisance, Mr. Benedict," he said.

"Listen, Hugh. I've been all over the Confederacy. My house has been robbed and my life threatened, a woman has drowned, the Ashiyyur may be involved, and I get stone walls everywhere. I'm tired. I'm really tired, and I want some answers. I'd like to buy you dinner. If you won't go for that, I'll find you some other way. It might take a while, but Rancorva isn't all that big."

He heaved a deep sigh. "Okay," he said. "If I see you, will you go away afterward and leave me alone?"

"Yes."

"You understand I will have nothing more to say to you than I did to your uncle?"

"I'll settle for that."

"All right then. Can you find the Mercantile?"

He was an old man. His face was deeply lined, and his movements were strained. His hair had grayed, and his frame sagged with the weight of too much roast beef over too many years.

He made no effort to look pleased at the tactics I'd used to get him to the table. He was already seated in a corner staring gloomily out at the city when I walked in. "No point delaying it," he said, when I commented on his promptness. He ignored my offered hand. "You'll forgive me if I pass on the food." A drink stood before him. "What exactly do you want of me?"

"Hugh," I said, as casually as I could manage, "what happened on the Tenandrome? What was out there?"

He did not react: he had known the question was coming, but I still caught a tremble of uncertainty in his throat, as though he'd decided to test the chemistry of the evening before deciding how to reply. "You've made up your mind there's a secret, I take it?"

"Yes."

He shrugged as one might when a conversation has taken a tiresome, and inconsequential, turn.

"You got this idea from your uncle?"

"And from other sources."

"All right. You've come all this way, I assume, to speak to me. And you will not believe me when I tell you that there was nothing unusual about that mission, except the breakdown of the propulsion system?"

"No."

"Of course. Very well, then: will you believe me when I tell you that we had good reason to keep the secret of what we found? That your persistence in asking difficult questions can do no good,
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and may do a great deal of harm? That the decision to say nothing was unanimously supported by the men and women on the mission?"

"Yes," I said carefully, "I can believe that."

"Then I hope you will have the good sense to break off your present course and go home and stay there. If I know anything at all about Gabriel Benedict, I suspect he left you a considerable sum of money. Yes? Go back to Rimway and enjoy it. Leave the Tenandrome alone." He'd stiffened while he was speaking, and the air had grown tense.

"Is this what you told my uncle?"

"Yes."

"You didn't tell him you'd found a Dellacondan warship?"

That hit home. He caught his breath and looked round to see if anyone might have been close enough to overhear. "Alex," he protested, "you're talking nonsense. Let it drop. Please."

"Let me try it another way, Hugh. Why are you here? What are you looking for?"

He stared into his drink, his irises round and hard and very black. "I'm not sure anymore," he said. "A ghost, maybe."

I thought of my long-ago conversation on Fishbowl with Ivana. He's a strange one. "Her name wouldn't be Tanner, would it?"

His eyes rose slowly and caught mine. There was pain in them, and something else. His big hands twisted into fists, and he pushed himself out of the seat. "For God's sake, Alex," he hissed.

"Stay out of it!"

XX.

Poetry is vocal painting.

—Attributed to Simonides of Ceos

ALWAYS IT CAME back to Leisha Tanner.

"She's the key," Chase observed. "Where was she during the missing years? Why is she at the center of whatever it is that's driving Scott? And she was significant enough that Gabe named the file for her." She was stretched out on the sofa with an electronic brace strapped to her leg. It hummed softly, stimulating the healing process. "The missing years," she said. "Why did she keep dropping out of sight for years at a crack? What was she doing?"

"She was," I said slowly, "looking for whatever it was the Tenandrome found."

Yes, that might fit: if the sun weapon had been hidden, lost, it might have been a nervous prospect. Both Sims dead, and no one knew where it was. So Tanner had led the hunt. "It's possible," she said. "Where do we go from there?"

"We have Tanner looking for a frigate, and two hundred years later, Gabe is looking for the same frigate. And he is extremely interested in Tanner. What does that suggest?"

"That she found it, and recorded its location somewhere?"

"But she couldn't have found it. Or it wouldn't still be out there for the Tenandrome to run across. I mean, what was the point of the hunt if she was just going to go away again and leave it?"

"Truth is," said Chase irritably, "after all we've been through, things still don't make sense."

I was up out of my seat and prowling the room. "Let's try it from a different angle. There must have been a piece of information of some kind to guide her. Otherwise, she's got an impossible job. Right?"

"Okay."

"What form would that piece of information have taken? Maybe she went along when they went out to the Veiled Lady. In that case, she would have known the length of the voyage. Or maybe she didn't go, but had a half-remembered heading from a crewman."

"Good," she said. "But where would Gabe have got hold of that kind of information? We've read through all the stuff we could find on her, and there's nothing. And anyhow, if we're right in
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assuming she was out there for years and never found whatever it was, then what good could her information be? I mean, if she couldn't find it, what could she tell us?"

What could she tell us? There was an echo in that remark, and I played it through again. Who had she told?

"Candles," I said.

"Pardon?"

"Candles. She'd have told Candles!" And, son of a bitch, I knew right where it was. I took down the copy of Rumors of Earth, with which I'd replaced the stolen volume, and opened it to

"Leisha." "It's even named for her," I said. "Listen: Lost pilot, She rides her solitary orbit

Far from Rigel

Seeking by night

The starry wheel.

Adrift in ancient seas, It marks the long year round, Nine on the rim, Two at the hub.

And she, Wandering, Knows neither port, Nor rest, Nor me!

"I've never been strong on poetry," Chase said, "but that sounds pretty bad."

I had Jacob display the critical work that had been done on the poem: discussions of the ancient mystical significance of the number nine (nine months in the birth process, nine knots in the Arab love whip, and so on) with the yin/yang implications of the dual stars at the axis. Leisha emerges as a symbolic representation of the all-mother, making (apparently) some sort of cosmic adjustment after the death of her equally symbolic son at Rigel. The hero becomes Man, enmeshed in the wheel of mortality.

Or something.

"Hell," said Chase, "it's a constellation. It's obvious."

"Yes. And I think we've got the answer to something else. Rashim Machesney had come through.

Gabe meant the databanks at the Machesney Institute! They must have run a search for him!"

A half-smile touched the corners of Chase's mouth.

"What's so funny?"

"Quinda."

"What do you mean?"

"When she stole your copy of Rumors of War: she had the answer in her hands."

Jacob set up an appointment with one of the administrators and we linked in within the hour.

He was a thin freckled youth with a long nose and a quiver in his voice. His shoulders were hunched in a defensive fashion, and he seemed unable to respond to any question without first consulting his monitor. He made no effort to rise from behind his desk to greet us; and he kept it between us like a fortification. "No," he said, after I explained the purpose of our visit. "I'm not aware that we've done any special projects for someone named, uh, Benedict. Which of our channels would it have come through?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Research requests are received from a variety of government, university, corporate, and foundation sources. Which would your uncle have used?"

"I don't know. Possibly none."

"We don't accept requests from individuals." He seemed to read that directly off his monitor.

"Listen," I said. "I've no way of knowing how he might have arranged it. But it's important, and I have no doubt he'd have been seen around here himself at one point or another. Somebody was working with him."

The administrator tapped his fingertips against the polished desktop. "That would be entirely
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against the rules, Mr. Benedict," he said. "I wish I could help." That was intended as a signal that the interview was ended.

"My uncle died recently," I said. "The reason I'm here is that he was quite pleased with the job that your people did for him, and he wished to express his appreciation in some substantive way." I flashed a congratulatory smile.