To End All Wars

by David Tallerman

  There came a moment then different to any he’d experienced. No longer was the Guest holding its consciousness at bay, no longer were Abhaya’s memories not Forrester’s, and all of his past, down to the inky depths of prebirth, was open and comprehensible. One of them had been born toward the pole of a blue-green orb in one small system of a spiral galaxy, another close to that planet’s equator. The third had been birthed by communal reproduction in the molten heart of an aged star, many of their lifetimes ago, at a distance from their world they couldn’t hope to conceive of.

  Such disparities could not be bridged and didn’t need to be. The similarities were enough. Their memories could no more be owned or withheld than the air about them or the beams that slanted through interstellar space. In the Guest’s were recollections of other minds it had touched, older minds that had communed with those still older, a legacy spanning eon upon eon. And for an instant, Forrester imagined that somewhere in the shadows of his psyche could be traced his own posterity, a tenebrous current that stretched back and back, perhaps to the very origins of his race—perhaps further.

  Then the Guest withdrew. The shock of being released was like surfacing through an ocean of remembrance and impression, through the depthless mire of history and existence. Rolling hills melted into the tumult of distant stars. Green fields segued with the vastness of nebulae.

  The differences were unimportant. The differences were not differences. All was one, and had always been so.

  Forrester opened his eyes.

  The Guest was ascending: the gentlest of motions, barely perceptible and thoroughly unlike movement as Forrester knew it, in that everything else seemed rather to be shifting, the universe adjusting by degrees to accommodate the Guest’s desire to absent itself. Nevertheless, it was definitely drifting upwards.

  Then he realised what was happening, and the pain of that knowledge brought him to his knees. Tears welled uncontrolled in his eyes. When he looked at Abhaya, she too was crying, weeping like a child except for the terrible silence of her grief. Here was what he’d wanted, what he’d fought to bring about, and he had not for one fraction of a second understood, or tried to understand, what it would mean. He’d never admitted what he was relinquishing.

  The Guest was leaving.

  In a moment, it would breach their atmosphere, this ordeal reduced to memories among a countless multitude. It was beginning the search for its lost shoal, and once it found them, those memories would not even be uniquely its own. In a moment, the Guest would be gone, and it wouldn’t ever return, not when there were so few of its kind and entire galaxies waiting to be explored.

  Forrester reached with all that he was, with all of the strength left in him. When you find them , he pleaded, won’t you bring them back? Maybe we could learn. Maybe we could be better than we are. If we could know peace, true peace, just for a while...

  No answer came. By then, the only presence in his mind was his own. The Guest was already beyond his grasp.

  Forrester crumpled to the ground. Too late ... he’d recognised the truth too late. He couldn’t see for the tears that coursed from his eyes. He couldn’t feel through the pain. He was oblivious to the grass beneath his knees and palms, of heat and of cold, for inside he was combusting into nothingness. The weight of what he’d done, of what he’d given up, no one could bear that and live.

  “It could have saved us.” He didn’t know if he’d spoken out loud, and it didn’t matter. He would never speak to anyone again. His crime had separated him from humanity. It could have saved us , he repeated, certain this time that the cry was just a thought. From what we do, what we’ll always do, what we’re incapable of not doing—and how it must inevitably end.

  Forbes had been right. Forrester had let the Guest leave, had helped it to leave, and now there was blood on his hands, an ocean, an eternity of blood. All the young men dying in their hundreds and thousands in France and elsewhere, all the men and women in all the wars to come, death upon death and slaughter upon slaughter into the dusk of futurity, until humankind unlocked that fatal mystery it had perpetually sought, that final epiphany, the weapon that killed everyone and everything for all time.

  Forrester felt a touch on his shoulder and was surprised. He’d been so sure that he was insulated from sensation. When he opened his eyes, he saw a watery blur. He wiped them with a sleeve, his arm almost unbearably heavy. Abhaya was kneeling before him. Her own eyes were dry now and showed nothing but concern.

  “It could have saved us,” he told her. The words ached in his throat, each threatening to choke him .

  “No.” She said it softly, but without any doubt.

  Forrester stared at her. He was convinced she hadn’t understood, and suddenly it seemed vital that she should. In his weakness, he discovered that he hadn’t the courage to support this weight alone, that a sin of such magnitude could not be borne by a single person. He was in no state to rationalise his own motives, and the urge was too powerful to resist. He tried again: “It could have...”

  But Abhaya was shaking her head.

  Then the truth became clear. Her conviction made it so. He had been the one who’d failed to understand, not she. What could the Guest, or a thousand of its kind, ever have offered? Only a brief cessation, only the absence of a choice that if made would be made wrongly.

  “We have to go,” Abhaya said.

  Forrester took a last look around, at the disintegrating mine buildings, the retreating moorland, at the two lorries—one rendered useless, the other still fit for the purpose of escape—and then at the unconscious men lounging upon road and verge.

  “Yes,” he said, “it’s time we did.”

  Epilogue

  F orrester woke in darkness, as he generally did these days. He had become, by both situation and habit, an early riser.

  It was cool within the hut. Not quite ready to get up, he pressed closer to Kamalaksha, draping an arm across his narrow waist. The younger man stirred, murmuring indiscernibly. Yawning, he put his own hand upon Forrester’s and clasped tightly.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Forrester whispered.

  “You always say that.” He heard the smile in Kamalaksha’s voice. “Yet you always do.”

  Forrester slid from beneath the blanket, immediately missing the warmth of Kamalaksha’s flesh against his own. “Will I see you tonight?”

  “I should think so,” Kamalaksha agreed, the smile lingering.

  Forrester knelt to kiss Kamalaksha’s cheek. At the last instant, Kamalaksha rolled onto his back and their lips met instead. Kamalaksha tangled his outstretched fingers in Forrester’s hair and they hung like that, mouths pressed together, Forrester willing the moment not to end—wishing circumstances were other than how they were. Then he drew away. He gathered his clothes and dressed hurriedly. Peeking back as he left, he saw that Kamalaksha was up; the velvet brown of his skin was just visible against the pre-dawn murk.

  “Goodbye,” Forrester murmured, and slipped from the hut into the still morning air.

  He and Kamalaksha Dhawan, who had been a modestly successful doctor in Calcutta until he abandoned everything to come here, had been lovers for six months now. Forrester thought often about the two of them rising together, greeting the day together. He conjectured that their secret was not so secret as they pretended, that there were those who knew, or suspected, and turned a blind eye. However, he had come to learn that in India there was a significant difference between a thing known but unacknowledged and a thing out in the open for all to see. In his case, the former must suffice; the latter remained a dangerous impossibility. Yet if that grieved him, there was comfort in the fact that he had found someone to love who seemed to love him deeply in return, long after he had given up hope.

  Forrester plucked Middleton’s locket from his pocket and returned it to its customary position around his neck. Then he crossed the dusty ground that separated Kamalaksha’s hut from his own. The ashram was all but silent, with only the lapping
of the sluggish river nearby and the relentless clicking of insects to disturb the listless air. There was a low platform fronting Forrester’s hut, and he sat there, crouching with his knees tucked to his chest. He’d never quite grown used to the Indian climate and perhaps never would. This interval before the sun came fully up, though, with the slightest warmth in the air, reminded him of summer nights in England. Through no conscious effort, without desire to remember, he was transported.

  Forrester didn’t think about the past. Nevertheless, it had become like a second skin, an inescapable presence he was always somewhat aware of, and at particular times of the day, especially when he was alone, it clung closer than ever. This dawn hour was worst. He felt that if he turned his head too rapidly, his old life would be there before him, having lain in wait with all its infinite patience.

  A decade had passed since the war’s conclusion. Most, now, called it the Great War, but it had not taken long for a few to refer to that unprecedented conflict as the First World War, and the dreadful prophecy embedded in those words made him want to weep. There were many back home who argued that the enemy had not been sufficiently beaten, just as there were those in Germany who chafed under the weight of reparations. Other nations, too, rattled their sabres. Italy had given itself over to the fascists, Russia to Stalin. Everywhere leaders spoke of strength, and the strength they invariably meant was strength of arms, as though there could be no other kind.

  Ten years. Therefore, he had lived in India for more than a decade as well. The time seemed so much less. Yet, despite Kamalaksha’s assurances otherwise, Forrester felt that he was no longer a young man. Youth had passed without his noticing, and he had hardly missed it. Sometimes he thought he’d never known it at all, that he had progressed from boy to middle age with nothing in between, the minute he’d stepped off the boat onto French soil.

  They had been here, he and Abhaya—at Sabarmati, at the place called Satyagraha Ashram—for almost three years. The destination had been her idea and he had seen no reason to disagree. Poverty and scarcity had ceased to concern him; materially he required little, and rare were the days when he missed anything of his old existence, or of England. They lived together, since the story they’d travelled under for the last decade was that they were man and wife. In a fashion, he supposed, it had become the truth. He had encountered many a married couple less devoted than they.

  For all that, he occasionally found it strange that they’d never gone their separate ways. Objectively he knew, and had since that final day at Sherston, that they were bound forever. Yet the precise nature of their attachment defied his understanding. It wasn’t as if they discussed those times. Everything that had occurred, along with Abhaya’s marriage to Forbes and most of Forrester’s own history, had been consigned irrevocably to the past in the moment they’d left. It was truly another life, it had ended, and there was no more to be said than that.

  All that Forrester had retained, in fact, was the one thing he’d least have expected or desired to: his relationship with his father. Desperation had driven him home, not so much for himself, but he’d determined to keep Abhaya safe and there had been nowhere else to turn. The course had seemed hopeless, for the sole story he had to offer was a distorted version of the actual events, and though he’d seen no evidence, he was sure the authorities must be hunting them.

  Forrester still speculated idly as to why that pursuit hadn’t materialised. He imagined it had a lot to do with Forbes, who must have fallen from grace with a speed that only rebellious angels had ever bettered. Perhaps the shadowy organisation he’d given as his employer had preferred to keep the whole embarrassing debacle quiet. Perhaps, with the Guest lost and Abhaya and he of no further use, with evidence already to be covered up and a war to be fought, they’d chosen to accept that sufficient damage had been done.

  At any rate, Forrester never heard from them. Nor was he pursued as a deserter, as he’d worried he might be. To the government, he had apparently ceased to exist.

  The honourable choice, then, had been to do exactly that .

  He’d been right, he hadn’t been able to convince his father. Abhaya, however, had proven a different matter. The old man had been courteous to her from the outset, and after a day, downright affectionate, traits Forrester couldn’t recall having ever seen him display. It was for Abhaya’s sake and not his, he suspected, that his father had helped them in the end. Yet his doing so, and his kindness toward Abhaya, had gone some way to melting the tracts of ice between them. He’d put himself and his reputation at huge risk, Forrester knew, in aiding them to flee the country.

  They still conversed in occasional letters, and a small yearly stipend from his father was what had allowed Abhaya and Forrester to survive in India. His father’s health was fading now, and Forrester wondered frequently whether he should return for a short while, so that at least the old man might not die alone. He had to point out to himself the hazards that would be involved in his trying to re-enter England, and that, whatever their relationship might have become, his father had made his own decisions.

  From within, Forrester heard faint noises that could only be Abhaya stirring. The sounds contracted his heart, as often happened, with a feeling both of tenderness and melancholy. It saddened him sometimes—and more so since he’d met Kamalaksha—that she was alone, and that she’d shown no interest in finding another husband. He didn’t believe her motive was fidelity to Forbes, nor was it misplaced loyalty to himself. If anything, the truth was that her bond with the Guest had completed Abhaya somehow, making her self-contained in a way no lover could penetrate.

  Maybe that was why she had picked this place. In her staunch autonomy, she reminded him of Gandhi, whom she fondly called Gandhiji. Forrester had spoken to Gandhi just the once, soon after they’d come to Sabarmati, and they had talked about nothing consequential. Gandhi had requested Forrester’s word that he would devote an hour in the day to spinning, and Forrester had pledged to do so, a promise he’d dutifully kept. The Mahatma had also offered Forrester some advice on his diet, and asked a few questions about his background in England, none of them probing and or at all inquisitorial. He’d seemed profoundly uncurious as to Forrester’s motives for wishing to join the ashram. He had seemed, too, down-to-earth, somewhat distant, witty, and thoughtful. Forrester had liked him greatly.

  However, he had not been able to speak to Gandhi on the one subject he most wanted to, and it had burned in his breast so much that he had barely been able to make the polite answers and interjections required of him. Forrester couldn’t share what he knew of the Guest and its kind. Not for the usual reasons, not for fear of being disbelieved or because, at such a remove, to discuss them seemed almost blasphemous, not even because he was afraid that his final decision would not be understood. No, it was simply that he’d felt instinctively that the knowledge would hurt Gandhi. Forrester wasn’t afraid that he wouldn’t understand, he was afraid he would understand too well.

  So he had avoided the mahatma since then. It didn’t appear to trouble either Gandhi or his fellow ashramites that Forrester kept apart, that he didn’t attend prayer meetings or other aspects of their communal life. Perhaps they were satisfied that Abhaya had given herself over wholeheartedly, or that Forrester was clear and adamant in his support for Satyagraha beliefs. They recognised in him a man of peace, even if he was not also a man of faith.

  Yet he did pray. That, rather than the draw of the past or the lull of the night’s last darkness, was why he sat here now. His prayer was to no god in particular; there was none he believed in. And while he addressed his words to the sky and the stars, nor were they aimed at the Guest. Forrester did not expect it to return, could find no rational reason why it should, and so refused himself the luxury of hope.

  Arguably, then, his prayer was to the universe, though even that seemed fruitless if he paused to examine the notion. To the Guest, that boundless expanse had been a place of inestimable possibility and beauty. To Forrester, in his
memories, it was abysmal and cold and indifferent, and if there was genuinely an intelligence there, he couldn’t imagine it concerning itself with human affliction. To the universe as he’d witnessed it through the Guest’s perception, there could only be life and not-life, and he doubted it held much prejudice toward one or the other. All that was born died. A handful of dust might yield creation, given ages. Where in that did the suffering lie?

  Nevertheless, Forrester greeted each day with his prayer. He wasn’t willing to give in to despair.

  Save us , he thought, from the war that ends all wars.

  Was it so impossible a wish? He was convinced that another war would come in time, a conflict vast and terrible enough to eclipse even the monumental horrors he’d borne witness to. If the Great War had not immunised mankind to violence, maybe nothing ever would. Yet here at Sabarmati there was peace. In his heart and the hearts of those around him, these men and women who called themselves Satyagrahi, there was peace, however fragile and intangible.

  What existed in one place, in one heart, could exist anywhere—and so, perhaps, could exist everywhere. Each morning he comforted himself with this reflection, even if he could not quite accept it.

  From inside, he heard the definite sound of bare feet upon bare boards. A moment later, he felt Abhaya’s presence in the entrance behind him. Then she was beside him, sitting on the cool beams, and still he didn’t turn. Only when she laid her head upon his shoulder did he look round, obliquely. All he could see of her was the impression of dark hair falling.