Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “Ah. Are there many of you in Vellore?”

  She waved aside the question, preferring to speak of something she considered more important. “If you go out again in the next hour—walk clear of Middle Street. It would be your most direct route from here to the foreign ministry, should you be going that way. But do not take it.”

  He nodded. “All right. But why?”

  “Now I must go. They will soon be here to keep a watch on you again.”

  He nodded again.

  When the door had closed behind the girl, it would have been easy to imagine that she had never been here.

  He looked at his timepiece and sighed. His appointment at the foreign ministry was in just half an hour.

  A quarter of an hour later, he was given the chance to show his diplomatic card again. When the Condamine police had looked at it and had talked quietly on their radios to some invisible authority, they saluted and let him go on his way at once, brushing the dust of the recent spinbomb blast from his new clothing and shaking his head in an effort to dispel the ringing ache that the explosion had installed immediately inboard from his right ear.

  He assumed the thing had been a spinbomb because other kinds of explosives were now too easy to detect. He calculated that he must have been leaving his new hotel just about the time the nameless terrorist was setting down the bomb on Middle Street and quietly pulling its axis pin and walking on, colorless and invisible in the crowd. Shen-yang had just bypassed Middle Street and gone on around a comer when someone brushed the bomb in its no doubt innocent-looking container, or traffic shook the walk enough to make it wobble, and its tiny flywheels, counter-rotating inside their vacuum bottle with a rim speed equal to a substantial proportion of the velocity of light, disintegrated. If it had been a small nuke instead of a tiny spinner, Shen-yang supposed, the ministry three blocks away might have gone up with a sizable surrounding chunk of city, instead of a mere storefront or two. But certainly the police would have detected a nuke before it had been carried into the middle of the city.

  The blast seemed to have made no great impression on the vast majority of the folk hurrying busily through the streets. No one who was not bleeding seemed to take it all that hard. It was evidently something that happened from time to time, like rain, and the business of getting and spending had to go on.

  The foreign ministry was no bigger than a large house and tastefully ornate, set apart from the city around it only by a simple-looking fence and a narrow belt of lawn. There were uniformed guards at the door, keen-looking though they did not seem to be actually doing much. They gave Shenyang and his card a simple looking over and courteously directed him on his way; if he underwent any other inspection, the means by which it was accomplished were imperceptible.

  The elevator went down instead of up, down for almost twenty levels. Maybe, after all, a small nuke three blocks away would not have taken out the ministry’s most important parts.

  Only a little late, Shen-yang reached the proper office, where he had to wait about thirty seconds before being passed on in. His appointment was with Minister Hondurman himself, who came around his desk with hand outstretched to offer greetings. He was a large, dark man, very correctly dressed, with a handsome face beginning to go puffy.

  One of the first things Shen-yang said was: “I bring you personal greetings from Director Nicobar—she regrets that urgent business kept her from coming herself.”

  “Yes . . . we did know each other once, in school. How long ago that was . . . but how is Dr. Nicobar?”

  “In good health. Extremely busy. It sometimes seems that the whole galaxy is bringing the Peace Foundation jobs these days. We arbitrate, we investigate, we publish a great deal.”

  “I am well aware that great advantages can accrue from your endorsement. That was true even before we were cut off here.”

  “It is more true now, Minister Hondurman. We have more real power in the galaxy than do the governments of some small worlds. If, when we make our formal investigation of this war on Lorenzoni, we can report a reasonable settlement, it will in fact go a long way to help your government rejoin galactic society—which I understand you are eager to do.” Hondurman was waiting silently, and Shen-yang went on: “Frankly, while the war continues, I don’t see how any favorable report can be made.”

  The minister, unsurprised, nodded and took thought. Then he asked, “What did they tell you on Shearwater about the war?”

  “Next to nothing. They expected I would be going directly from there to Ungava, and I suppose they thought the High Leader would prefer to present his own case.”

  “We can make travel arrangements with Ungava, if you still wish to go on and see him.”

  “Of course I do.”

  Hondurman nodded again and made a note to himself on the surface of his desk, which seemed constantly awash with electronic projections of one kind or another. “Believe me, Mr. Shen-yang.” He coughed. “My government would like to end the war, when it can be done honorably and decently. We have not yet found a way.”

  Shen-yang gestured disagreement. “Why not simply end the bombardment and the raids?”

  “We have in fact several times suspended such activities. But Ungavan operations against us are out of our control, and while they persist, the war goes on. Did you hear the blast in the street not half an hour ago?”

  “Very well; in fact I am still hearing it.” He explained just how close he had been.

  The other rose and came around the desk, concerned. “But you should have said something. Do you need medical attention?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “My own physician is not far away. I wish you would allow me to call her.”

  “If you like, but later. Now, do these terrorist attacks really amount to a war waged against you? Do they compare to what your forces have done and are still doing to Ungava?”

  Hondurman shrugged. “I’ll show you some things. See if you think they add up to a war or not.”

  The charts and figures began to appear, like some conjurer’s props, projected on walls, spewed in printape from the desk. They detailed Ungavan attacks on fishing vessels, on shipping, on mining and drilling operations in all the oceans of the world. Terrorist bombs in Condamine cities. Condamine aircraft (unarmed recon ships and transports, Hondurman claimed them to be) shot down. Hit-and-run raids by small forces against the Condamine coast. Ungavan atrocities in the planet’s ministates, small societies trying to cling to independence and neutrality. More atrocities against any of the people dwelling in Ungava who cooperated in the least degree with Condamine. All in all, if it were true, it certainly added up to a lot of killing and a lot of damage. Not a hundred million dead, of course. Not the destruction of a great industrial society.

  At last Shen-yang broke into the flow of data with a question. “How do you suppose they can keep going, making such a war effort as you describe? After attacks like those you have made and are still making?”

  “Mr. Shen-yang, have you studied the history of strategic bombardment? It has never broken the will of any people to fight.”

  “Of course it has never before been applied quite so—thoroughly—has it? Minister Hondurman, I’d like to pass on for your comment some figures recently given the Peace Foundation by the first Ungavan envoy to the galaxy. They concern that first missile strike of yours.”

  The man across the desk nodded, poker-faced, and Shen-yang began to produce the data he had been carrying in his memory. How many missiles Condamine had delivered, without warning, in that first awesome blow. How many cities were roasted, how much land and water poisoned, how many tens of millions of the Ungavan people had died in the first ten minutes—and how many more in the next hour, the next day, the next year. . . .”

  “Let us suppose,” Hondurman interrupted coldly, “for the sake of argument, that all this is substantially correct. What is the point you wish to make from it?”

  “Simply this. The war is effectively over. You
won it a long time ago. How can that poor battered remnant of a people pose any real threat to you? Sure, as long as Shearwater supports them with material, they can burrow under the mountains, cling to life, to some kind of military organization. They can even carry on harassing operations against you. But what do you want of them before you will make peace?”

  “It is not what we want of them, sir, but what they want of us. Peace talks have been convened many times—I really forget how many. Talks are presently suspended, as long as our present government remains in office. That is the latest Ungavan condition for resuming peace talks, sir, that we replace our government!”

  “All right.” Shen-yang could picture the fanatic Ungavan leaders—utter, bitter fanatics they must be by now, and one could hardly blame them—making such demands, in sheer all-out defiance. “But why do you really need a peace conference at all? Why not simply stop?”

  “We could stop. But they would not. They would continue, a bombing here, a raid there. Sooner or later we would strike at them again.” Hondurman made a curiously helpless gesture.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I find that hard to believe. If you really let them know it was all over. Ceased building ICBMs or long-range cruise missiles. Offered them some reparations, which it would seem you can afford.”

  Hondurman was silent, listening attentively, and Shen-yang pressed on: “According to the Ungavans’ figures, which I notice you don’t deny, they can have very little left in the way of heavy industry and not a lot in the way of natural resources. I repeat, don’t you think the war is really over?”

  “They keep a war machine going,” the minister answered stolidly. “They have great help from Shearwater, whose government is bitterly opposed to ours, for historical reasons which you may or may not—”

  “I’ve read some of the history of your system.”

  “Good. However, an all-out interplanetary war remains unthinkable, in this system or elsewhere. There is simply too much—”

  “I’ve read the theories on that, too. What I have never read anywhere is any reason for the Ungavans’ fighting on if you stopped.”

  “Well—you will have to ask them about that, I suppose.”

  “I intend to.”

  “Excuse me, Mr. Shen-yang, you said a moment ago that you did not see what real threat they pose to us. Are you aware that they still have their own strategic missiles?”

  A silence began to grow. Shenyang fingered his aching right ear, wondering if it might have played him false. Then he understood, or thought he did. “You mean they are starting now to build some? Or to import some from Shearwater?”

  “No. I mean that the Ungavans still have more than a thousand of their own ICBMs emplaced, mostly in hardened sites—have had them since before the war. Some have been knocked out by our missiles, of course. I am not at liberty to quote you our best intelligence estimates of how many remain—but a thousand would be a good, fair, round figure.”

  There was silence again. Shen-yang noticed that his chair squeaked if he rocked in it.

  His ears were evidently working fine. Either something in his brain was badly askew, though, or something in this world. “Let me see if I understand. Your official claim is that Ungava still possesses a sizable strategic strike force, intact after more than forty years of pounding by nuclear missiles.

  “Excuse me.” The minister leaned forward. “It is important that you understand, there has not been forty years of continuous pounding, as you call it. If we had built missiles and fired them as fast as we could for forty years, both we and the Ungavans would long since have perished from radiation poisoning, and there would be no world of Lorenzoni to fight about—no world that anyone could live on.”

  “I understand that,” said Shenyang stiffly. “I have some military experience.”

  “Ah? Very good. Proceed.”

  “You say they have a sizable strategic strike force, still intact. But in more than forty years of war, in which you have hit them again and again with similar weapons, they have never fired even one of these missiles at you.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Can you explain why?”

  “They fear to tip the environmental balance. You see, it can be shown mathematically—or so my experts tell me—that the long-term effects of another mass launching of missiles will be worse for Ungava than for us, regardless of where the missiles land.” Was there, in the minister’s almost immobile face, a glint of some brand of humor? “Of course for a first-hand answer, you will have to ask the Ungavans themselves.”

  His trip began next day with a flight from Vellore to an advanced military base, set amid the chalky cliffs of the southern coast. The next leg of his journey passed aboard a fast courier-recon plane, which deposited him upon a barren ocean islet, then took off in a hurry, headed back the way it had come, and vanished in a moment.

  Surf pounded tranquilizingly, but then some wild sea creature screamed as if in torment. Waiting on the flat, lichen-spotted rock, Shen-yang studied the horizon and tried to use the time for thought. He still could not believe in the existence of the Ungavan strategic missiles—those utter, bitter fanatics would have used them, sometime in the past forty years. Themselves held on the rack of war, year after year, by a merciless enemy—they would have struck back as hard as possible. No claim had ever been made that they were superhumanly forgiving, and it was unreasonable that they should be so reluctant to add some pollution to the atmosphere.

  He could hear the Ungavan aircraft coming before he spotted it; it was moving somewhat more slowly than the Condamine courier. Shen-yang waved as the smooth metal shape made one leisurely pass overhead. He felt a little foolish for his wave when the aircraft had landed and he had walked to it and found it was unmanned.

  A glassy canopy had retracted, above an empty, spartan seat and a small space for luggage. Shen-yang climbed in, and as his weight came down into the seat, the glass slid closed again above his head. A moment later he was airborne. The plane flew at a good speed, close above the waves. It turned smoothly a couple of times, avoiding a line of squalls.

  In time a coastline grew, ahead. He thought his vehicle slowed somewhat as the land drew nearer—to give him a good look?

  There, just inland among rocky hills, was ground-zero of some horrendous blast, a decade or more old. Glassy and sterile hectares were surrounded by the stumps of crags and recent, tender life in the form of scattered, stunted-looking greenery.

  Farther from the central scar, the stumps of buildings, half-buried now in drifted sand, made a larger ring. This, then, had been a city, and probably a harbor. There were no signs that humans had ever tried to reoccupy the place.

  He rode on. His homework-reading had informed him that the whole Ungavan continent was hardly more than one great, wide range of mountains. Between the barren peaks and crests, long valleys, some still fertile, twisted or ran nearly straight, marked here and there by narrow lakes. Now he could see people and machines working in some of the sheltered lowlands, tending or gathering crops. As his aircraft bore him through one valley at low altitude, he could see how some of the farmers looked up at his roaring passage, while others kept their attention on the earth. A few times he passed small buildings, never large enough to house the numbers of people he beheld.

  The landing strip, he saw upon approaching it, looked like a plowed field too—no, it was a plowed field. Whatever his craft put down in the way of landing gear engaged the shallow furrows neatly, and the landing felt pleasantly slow and safe, if not exactly smooth.

  His canopy slid back. People in drab, ill-fitting uniforms were all around him, smiling, most of them talking at the same time in accents newly strange to Shen-yang’s ears. His ride had come to a stop under cover of a great tree. He was being helped out, and in a moment he was standing within a chest-high revetment between great rocks decorated with twin portraits of the High Leader. Leafy branches made a visually impenetrable cover overhead and hung on all sides in a shaggy vei
l. Welcome clamored on all sides, and there was no counting the hands held out for him to shake. The general impression was of youth, eagerness, and energy.

  When a girl handed him a hot drink and some simple food, Shen-yang noticed what he thought were radiation keloids on her arm and side. He thought the scars were not boldly enough undraped to be meant for intentional display. He supposed the whole countryside must be chronically hot. Well, before leaving home he had taken what medical steps he could in the way of radiation prophylaxis for himself.

  They led him to a car, a mass of twenty or more people all enthusing at the same time about the rare privilege that he was being granted. The privilege was a talk with the High Leader himself; the young folk dropped their envious voices to a whisper whenever they mentioned that old man by his title or his name.

  Four or five got into the car with him, and they were off. The road twisted and turned, seemed to be inside a tunnel as often as not, but still gave him a good chance to see the countryside. Not that there was anything much different from what he had already seen. Blast-marks, crops, workers, rocky hills. Here and there the entrance to some other tunnel, enigmatically unmarked. Once an organized gaggle of children pelted the speeding car with flowers and waved more pictures of the leader at it. The pictures and the flowers and some of the growing crops possessed the only bright colors to be seen below the sky. Everyone wore drab, and everyone looked busy.

  He was taken to the High Leader at once, and, despite all the awed foreshadowing, with practically no ceremony. He found that old man waiting for him in a simply furnished cave, a great chamber beneath an immensely beetling brow of limestone and about one third open to the air.

  There were two simple chairs and one small table in the cave, and a cluster of cables passing crudely through it at the back. Shen-yang found himself left alone there with a toughly stout and greatly aged man, whose long white sideburns, a personal trademark, looked exactly as they did in all the pictures. What the pictures could not show was in the eyes.