“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?”
THE 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?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“So the Bureau went to the secretary, the secretary went to the major general on the com; all this at fifteen hundred yesterday; and they hauled me in on it at two this morning. You know how many noses you’ve got out of joint, Lieutenant? And
what the level of concern is about that mess out there on the front?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m sure you hoped for a commendation and maybe better, wouldn’t that be it? Wouldn’t blame you. Well, I got my hands into this, and I’ve opted you under my orders, Lieutenant, because I can do that and high command’s just real worried the Bureau’s going to poke and prod and that elf’s going to leave us on the sudden for elvish heaven. So let’s just keep him moderately happy. He wants to talk to you. What the Bureau wants to tell you, but I told them I’d make it clear, because they’ll talk tech at you and I want to be sure you’ve got it—it’s just real simple: you’re dealing with an alien; and you’ll have noticed what he says doesn’t always make sense.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t yes ma’am me, Lieutenant, dammit; just talk to me and look me in the eye. We’re talking about communication here.”
“Yes—” He stopped short of the ma’am.
“You’ve got a brain, deFranco, it’s all in your record. You almost went Special Services yourself, that was your real ambition, wasn’t it? But you had this damn psychotic fear of taking ultimate responsibility. And a wholesome fear of ending up with a commendation, posthumous. Didn’t you? It washed you out, so you went special ops where you could take orders from someone else and still play bloody hero and prove something to yourself—am I right? I ought to be; I’ve got your psych record over there. Now I’ve insulted you and you’re sitting there turning red. But I want to know what I’m dealing with. We’re in a damn bind. We’ve got casualties happening out there. Are you and I going to have trouble?”
“No. I understand.”
“Good. Very good. Do you think you can go into a room with that elf and talk the truth out of him? More to the point, can you make a decision, can you go in there knowing how much is riding on your back?”
“I’m not a—”
“I don’t care what you are, deFranco. What I want to know is whether negotiate is even in that elf’s vocabulary. I’m assigning you to guard over there. In the process I want you to sit down with him one to one and just talk away. That’s all you’ve got to do. And because of your background maybe you’ll do it with some sense. But maybe if you just talk for John deFranco and try to get that elf to deal, that’s the best thing. You know when a government sends out a negotiator—or anything like—that individual’s not average. That individual’s probably the smartest, canniest, hardest-nosed bastard they’ve got, and he probably cheats at dice. We don’t know what this bastard’s up to or what he thinks like, and when you sit down with him you’re talking to a mind that knows a lot more about humanity than we know about elves. You’re talking to an elvish expert who’s here playing games with us. Who’s giving us a real good look-over. You understand that? What do you say about it?”
“I’m scared of this.”
“That’s real good. You know we’re not sending in the brightest, most experienced human on two feet. And that’s exactly what that rather canny elf has arranged for us to do. You understand that? He’s playing us like a keyboard this far. And how do you cope with that, Lieutenant deFranco?”
“I just ask him questions and answer as little as I can.”
“Wrong. You let him talk. You be real careful what you ask him. What you ask is as dead a giveaway as what you tell him. Everything you do and say is cultural. If he’s good he’ll drain you like a sponge.” The colonel bit her lips. “Damn, you’re not going to be able to handle that, are you?”
“I understand what you’re warning me about, Colonel. I’m not sure I can do it, but I’ll try.”
“Not sure you can do it. Peace may hang on this. And several billion lives. Your company, out there on the line. Put it on that level. And you’re scared and you’re showing it, Lieutenant; you’re too damned open, no wonder they washed you out. Got no hard center to you, no place to go to when I embarrass the hell out of you, and I’m on your side. You’re probably a damn good special op, brave as hell, I know, you’ve got commendations in the field. And that shell-shyness of yours probably makes you drive real hard when you’re in trouble. Good man. Honest. If the elf wants a human specimen, we could do worse. You just go in there, son, and you talk to him and you be your nice self, and that’s all you’ve got to do.”
“We’ll be bugged.” DeFranco stared at the colonel deliberately, trying to dredge up some self-defense, give the impression he was no complete fool.
“Damn sure you’ll be bugged. Guards right outside if you want them. But you startle that elf I’ll fry you.”
“That isn’t what I meant. I meant—I meant if I could get him to talk there’d be an accurate record.”
“Ah. Well. Yes. There will be, absolutely. And yes, I’m a bastard, Lieutenant, same as that elf is, beyond a doubt. And because I’m on your side I want you as prepared as I can get you. But I’m going to give you all the backing you need—you want anything, you just tell that staff and they better jump to do it. I’m giving you carte blanche over there in the Science Wing. Their complaints can come to this desk. You just be yourself with him, watch yourself a little, don’t get taken and don’t set him off.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Another slow, consuming stare and a nod.
He was dismissed.
IV
So where’s the hole we’re digging end?
Why, it’s neverneverdone, my friend.
Well, why’s it warm at the other end?
Well, hell’s neverneverfar, my friend.
“This colonel,” says the elf, “it’s her soldiers outside.”
“That’s the one,” says deFranco.
“It’s not the highest rank.”
“No. It’s not. Not even on this world.” DeFranco’s hands open and close on each other, white-knuckled. His voice stays calm. “But it’s a lot of power. She won’t be alone. There are others she’s acting for. They sent me here. I’ve figured that now.”
“Your dealing confuses me.”
“Politics. It’s all politics. Higher-ups covering their—” DeFranco re-chooses his words. “Some things they have to abide by. They have to do. Like if they don’t take a peace offer—that would be trouble back home. Human space is big. But a war—humans want it stopped. I know that. With humans, you can’t quiet a mistake down. We’ve got too many separate interests…. We got scientists, and a half dozen different-commands—”
“Will they all stop fighting?”
“Yes. My side will. I know they will.” DeFranco clenches his hands tighter as if the chill has gotten to his bones. “If we can give them something, some solution. You have to understand what they’re thinking of. If there’s a trouble anywhere, it can grow. There might be others out there, you ever think of that? What if some other species just—wanders through? It’s happened. And what if our little war disturbs them? We live in a big house, you know that yet? You’re young, you, with your ships, you’re a young power out in space. God help us, we’ve made mistakes, but this time the first one wasn’t ours. We’ve been trying to stop this. All along, we’ve been trying to stop this.”
“You’re what I trust,” says the elf. “Not your colonel. Not your treaty words. Not your peace. You. Words aren’t the belief. What you do—that’s the belief. What you do will show us.”
“I can’t!”
“I can. It’s important enough to me and not to you. Our little war. I can’t understand how you think that way.”
“Look at that!” DeFranco waves a desperate hand at the room, the world. Up. “It’s so big! Can’t you see that? And one planet, one ball of rock. It’s a little war. Is it worth it all? Is it worth such damn stubbornness? Is it worth dying in?”
“Yes,” the elf says simply, and the sea-green eyes and the white face have neither anger nor blame for him.
DEFRANCO SALUTED AND got out and waited until the colonel’s orderly caught him in the hall and gave his escort the necessary authorizations, because no one wande
red this base without an escort. (But the elves are two hundred klicks out there, deFranco thought; and who’re we fighting anyway?) In the halls he saw the black of Union elite and the blue of Alliance spacers and the plain drab of the line troop officers, and the white and pale blue of the two Science Bureaus; while everywhere he felt the tenuous peace—damn, maybe we need this war, it’s keeping humanity talking to each other, they’re all fat and sleek and mud never touched them back here—But there was haste in the hallways. But there were tense looks on faces of people headed purposefully to one place and the other, the look of a place with something on its collective mind, with silent, secret emergencies passing about him—The attack on the lines, he thought, and remembered another time that attack had started on one front and spread rapidly to a dozen; and missiles had gone. And towns had died.
And the elvish kids, the babies in each others’ arms and the birds fluttering down; and Dibs—Dibs lying in his armor like a broken piece of machinery—when a shot got you, it got the visor and you had no face and never knew it; or it got the joints and you bled to death trapped in the failed shell, you just lay there and bled: he had heard men and women die like that, still in contact on the com, talking to their buddies and going out alone, alone in that damn armor that cut off the sky and the air—
They brought him down tunnels that were poured and cast and hard overnight, that kind of construction, which they never got out on the Line. There were bright lights and there were dry floors for the fine officers to walk on; there was, at the end, a new set of doors where guards stood with weapons ready—
—against us? DeFranco got that sense of unreality again, blinked as he had to show his tags and IDs to get past even with the colonel’s orders directing his escort.
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