by Ben Bova
Elly listened in silence as the light from the pyre faded. Stoner spoke as unemotionally as a computer, relating the facts of his return to life the way a chalkdust-dry instructor would report on the major events of the Industrial Revolution to a classroom full of freshmen. As the firelight dimmed and shadows darkened his daughter’s face, Stoner could no longer see her reaction to his tale. But he felt her stiffen when he mentioned the village where he and An Linh had nearly been killed.
“And you believe,” Elly asked, her own voice sounding strangely wooden, dead, “that the village was attacked because of you?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but that’s what I think,” Stoner replied.
“I agree,” said An Linh, sitting up on her cot. “There was no other reason to attack the village. It was not in a battle zone. It had no strategic value, except to challenge the Peace Enforcers.”
“Who responded just the way the attackers must have known they would react,” Stoner added. “Within a few minutes they obliterated the attacking force.”
“Yes, that’s the way they work,” Elly said, her voice still coldly distant. “Their mission is to prevent aggression by destroying the aggressors. If they are too late to prevent an attack, they will still annihilate the attackers after the fact.”
“They did that,” Stoner said fervently.
An Linh asked, “But that’s only part of their mission, isn’t it? The Peace Enforcers seemed to be teaching the villagers how to become self-sufficient.”
“The solar power system, yes,” Stoner agreed, remembering. “And the new agricultural methods they were learning.”
“And birth control,” An Linh added. “That’s the key to everything the IPF is trying to accomplish, isn’t it? You can’t raise people’s standard of living if they outpopulate their resources. Isn’t that right, Eleanor?”
But instead of answering, Stoner’s daughter asked him, “What was the name of the village? You haven’t told me its name.”
The tone of her voice sent a chill of apprehension through Stoner. In the darkness, it was like the creaking of a door that should have been locked. Or the click that might be the cocking of a pistol aimed at your heart.
“Katai,” An Linh answered. “The village was called Katai.’
Stoner heard his daughter’s breath catch. Then silence. The moments stretched agonizingly. In the darkness he could not see her face. Only the distant glowing ashes of the pyre. Elly seemed to have turned to stone, not moving, not even breathing. Stoner heard a baby crying weakly, off in the distance, and the incessant background hum of insects.
“What’s wrong, Elly?” he asked. “Why is the name of the village so important?”
For a few moments more she remained silent. Then she took in a deep breath and answered, “My husband, Wally…was killed a few weeks ago…flying a helicopter into a village in Chad….”
“Katai,” said Stoner.
“Katai,” Elly echoed.
Stoner closed his eyes and saw again the helicopter fluttering through the air, the streaking missile lancing toward it, the explosion and the human body hurled out and falling thousands of feet to the ground.
“He was killed because of you,” Elly said, her voice suddenly trembling. “Because of you!”
Stoner had no response.
Elly scrambled to her feet in the darkness. She did not raise her voice, but the pain and anger in it were all the sharper because she was not shouting. “Because of you!” she repeated. “You not only robbed me of a father and a mother, you’ve robbed me of my husband, too! You’ve taken everything away from me!”
She turned and fled into the darkness.
Stoner sat where he was, his back against the tree, unable to move.
“Go after her!” An Linh urged.
He shook his head. “I can’t. I never could….”
“Don’t leave her alone like this! She needs you. She needs someone to comfort her.”
“She hates me.”
“No, she doesn’t. She may think she does, but she really doesn’t.”
“I’m responsible for her husband’s death.”
An Linh swung her legs off the cot and stood up shakily. “She shouldn’t be alone.”
“She is alone,” Stoner muttered. “You’re all alone, every one of you.”
With a disappointed shake of her head, An Linh started off in the same direction Elly had gone, leaving Stoner sitting there in the darkness.
She has every right to despise me, he told himself. I stepped out of her life and left her without a father when she was just ten years old. She blames her mother’s death on me. And now, when I suddenly reappear, it costs the life of her husband.
But something forced him to get to his feet and start out toward the lighted tents where the medical staff lived. I didn’t kill her husband. He’s a casualty in a war that I’ve got to stop. I’ve seen enough of death. Now it’s time to find those who are responsible for all this misery and make them stop.
Stepping over the bodies of the sick and the dying, Stoner realized that he had remained in the camp too long. He had seen all that he had come to see, and then had been overwhelmed by the sense of helplessness that pervaded the camp. What can one man do? He felt his jaws clenching in a determined grimace as he approached the medical tent. I’m going to find out what one man can do. Starting right now.
The Stirling generator that provided electricity for the medical team whined annoyingly as Stoner came up to the tent. A radio somewhere was playing music that he did not recognize, a thumping, irregular beat overlain by screeching electronic strings. The harsh lights made him squint. The tent was nearly empty. The surgical table stood bare, unattended. Beyond it stood rows of metal cabinets, and beyond them a dozen cots neatly spaced. Four of the Red Cross workers were sleeping, sprawled exhausted on their cots despite the noise from the radio. The others were nowhere in sight. Elly and An Linh sat side by side, arms around each other, on the farthermost cot.
“What do you want here?”
Stoner turned and saw that it was the little red-faced martinet who had come in with Elly earlier that day. His white coveralls were soiled now, no longer fresh and crisp. The heat and toil had taken the starch out of them. And made his ill-humored disposition even testier. Stoner saw that his nametag said DeVreis. Apparently he was the new leader.
“Well, what are you doing here?” he repeated, his voice rising.
“I want permission to be evacuated in the next flight out,” Stoner said. “Myself and Ms. Laguerre.”
“Impossible! Evac flights are restricted to refugees who will die unless they are taken to hospital facilities.”
“I know that. Neither of us is a refugee.”
“Then there’s nothing I can do.” He spoke English with an accent that might have been German. Or Dutch.
Stoner looked into his angry eyes. Already the pain and futility of the camp were reflected in them.
“We must be permitted to leave,” he said softly. “I can do much more good outside this camp than inside it.”
“Good?” DeVreis snapped. “What good can you do?”
“Perhaps I can end this war.”
“End the…What nonsense! Who do you think you are?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Stoner said, stepping closer to him. “What matters is that you’ve got to give us permission to leave.”
“I can’t….”
Stoner laid a hand on the little man’s shoulder. Gently. Like a father speaking to a son. “I’ll carry two refugees with me, if you like. But we’ve got to leave. You can understand that, can’t you?”
DeVreis hesitated. “Yes, I see. But…”
“You’ll do it, then. You’ll give us permission to leave.”
The angry scowl left the little man’s face. He almost smiled. Stoner felt his body relax as he replied, “Of course. On the next flight.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll go and make out the necessary papers.”
Then he skirted around the surgical table, walked past the rows of cots, and stopped before An Linh and his daughter. Both of them were in tears.
“Elly, I’m sorry about your husband. If there were something I could do to bring him back, I would.”
She looked up at him, tears streaking her cheeks, and he remembered that same face streaked with tears on the day he told her and her brother that he was leaving their home, leaving their mother, leaving them. Inside him, Stoner knew that he should be feeling pain, or at least sorrow. But he felt nothing. It was as if he had been anesthetized.
Eleanor finally found her voice. “It seems that you’re the only one who can come back from the dead.”
He shook his head. “No, Elly. I’m merely the first one.”
Her head drooped again. He looked at An Linh, also tearful.
“We’re leaving tomorrow, Elly,” Stoner said. “An Linh and I. We’re going out on the evacuation helicopter.”
An Linh gasped. “But how…?”
“I want you to leave, too, Elly. As soon as your tour of duty is finished. Get back to your children in New Zealand. Start your life over again. You’re young enough to build a good life for yourself—and for them. I know I’m not much of a father, but that’s my advice to you.”
Eleanor said nothing, but her head bobbed in what might have been a nod of agreement.
“And call Douglas for me. I couldn’t locate him. Tell him that I tried. Tell him…” He hesitated, knowing that what he had to say was actually a lie. “Tell him that I love him. I love you both, Elly.”
It was as much as he could do. Inwardly, he knew that there was no love in him, no emotion at all. Or if there were, it was frozen as thoroughly as his body had been frozen through all the long years.
Turning to An Linh, he said, “I’ll take you as far as the hospital. Then I’ll have to leave you and go on.”
CHAPTER 30
An Linh refused to leave Stoner.
The helicopter brought them to the International Peace Force hospital near Mwanza, on the shore of Lake Victoria. There on the outskirts of the Tanzanian city, swollen to more than a million by the tide of war, the Peace Enforcers had erected a minimetropolis, prefabricated buildings of plastic and lightweight metals manufactured in the orbital factories a few hundred miles overhead. Crowded, busy, as impersonal as any big-city hospital, staffed by harried doctors and overworked nurses, abuzz with computers filing data and robots whisking along every corridor—still the hospital was infinitely better than the camp.
A brash young intern from Queens examined An Linh’s wound and pronounced it healed.
“She’s got a slight fever and a mild case of malnutrition,” he told Stoner. “It’s nothing compared to what we’ve been getting. A few days’ rest, antibiotics, and some real food, and she’ll be as good as new.”
He was smiling into An Linh’s wan but lovely face as she lay on the crisply clean sheets of a real hospital bed, in the long, noisy ward filled with black women who had been wounded, raped, starved, burned, who had miscarried or seen their babies killed, who had been too weak to fend off the diseases that lurked in the very air and turned virulent in the wake of war. Human nurses and robots answered their calls, tried to comfort their sobs, ease the pain, quiet the screaming. An Linh smiled weakly back at the young American and asked, “What about him, Doctor?”
“I’m all right,” said Stoner.
But the doctor insisted on examining him, too. Stoner put up with it and even submitted to the tests that the doctor ordered. For the remainder of the day he was subjected to needles, probes, and scanning machines. Stoically he endured it all, thinking, It’s just like the space agency’s prodding when they took me in for astronaut training.
By that evening the same doctor reappeared in the ward, stethoscope stuffed in a pocket of his white coveralls, a knowing grin on his long, horsey face.
“I thought I’d find you here,” he said to Stoner as he strode confidently up toward An Linh’s bed. “It’s where I’d be, if I had a choice.”
“You’re very gallant,” she said.
He made a surprising little bow, then turned to Stoner and said, “I’ve gotten a bed assigned to you, over in the men’s temporary ward. The only thing wrong with you is malnutrition, but I can’t let you out of here until you’ve gained ten pounds. Too big a risk of coming down with pneumonia or diphtheria or any one of the zillion other bugs floating around the area.”
Stoner argued, but only mildly. He stayed at the hospital for a week, gaining strength each day. And knowledge. He easily talked the nurses into letting him watch the television news broadcasts in their lounge. He learned how the war was going: the alliance of the rebels in Nigeria, Chad, Zaire, and Uganda had invaded both Kenya and the Sudan, but their onslaught had been ground to a halt by the Peace Enforcers—for the time being. Both sides seemed to be taking a breather, building their forces and waiting for the opportunity to renew the fighting.
He visited An Linh every afternoon and evening. After the first two days, they started taking dinner together at the walking patients’ cafeteria.
“I’ve got to get to this Colonel Bahadur,” he told her over dinner. “He’s the chief of the Peace Enforcers.”
“And where is he?” An Linh asked.
“Not far from here, in a place called Namanga, just over the border in Kenya. It’s near Kilimanjaro, from what I hear.”
An Linh chewed on her soyburger thoughtfully, then said, “I’ve always wanted to see Kilimanjaro.”
Before Stoner could shake his head, she went on, “I’ve nowhere else to go, Keith. I’ve got to stay with you.”
A thousand reasons why she shouldn’t come with him sprang into his mind. But one look at her trusting, vulnerable face took all the argument out of him. I can’t leave her alone, he told himself. And he tried to ignore the feeling that his other self, that observer buried deep inside his brain, wanted to see how their relationship would work out.
“You are an extraordinary man, Dr. Stoner,” said Colonel Banda Singh Bahadur.
Stoner nodded an acknowledgment of the compliment. “You are far from an ordinary person yourself, Colonel.”
They were walking across a grassy field, past a row of helicopters painted in blotchy jungle-green camouflage, bristling with gun ports and rocket tubes. The morning sun was not yet truly hot, and off in the hazy blue distance the flat, snow-covered summit of Kilimanjaro seemed to hang in midair, unsupported, disconnected from the mundane earth below. Stoner could understand why the local tribes worshiped the mountain. It was godlike, floating there in the distance, beautiful, unreachable, yet ever-present.
Colonel Bahadur was a Sikh, somewhat of a mountain himself, big in every dimension. His full, curly, iron-gray beard made Stoner’s dark growth look almost puny. He towered over Stoner and outweighed him by half again. Yet despite the man’s size, Stoner had the impression that Bahadur could move with blinding speed when he wanted to. The colonel wore a white turban and the duty uniform of the International Peacekeeping Force, light blue fatigues decorated only by a pair of silver oak leaves clipped to his lapels, his name stenciled over his left breast, and the Peace Enforcers’ shoulder patch: a jagged yellow bolt of lightning on a field of sky blue. Stoner wore similar coveralls, minus decoration.
The colonel’s duty, as he saw it, was twofold: to stop the fighting and to build self-sustaining communities in the areas that the war had devastated. His troops were few, but the Peace Enforcers’ style of fighting used technology more than manpower. They never initiated hostilities. They never launched an attack. Their task was to discourage others from attacking their neighbors, to stop aggression in its tracks. They were counterpunchers, by design, by doctrine, by training and equipment.
When surveillance satellites saw troops, tanks, artillery, trucks, supp
lies being massed for an attack, the Peace Enforcers warned the politicians and generals preparing the aggression. If they did not disband their operation, the attackers were met by swarms of drone missiles, either guided remotely by technicians in space stations and aboard highflying aircraft or running under their own automated guidance systems. The missiles sought out the implements of war—the lumbering tanks and phallic artillery guns, the supply depots and ammunition dumps, the sleekly deadly planes waiting in their revetments—and demolished them. The object of the Peacekeepers was to destroy the implements of war. Soon enough the aggressor’s troops learned that it was death to remain near those weapons once the Peacekeepers had spotted them.
The theory was simple enough. But the practice was difficult. Very difficult. Sprawled across a thousand miles of thick tropical forest, mountains, and grasslands, the Central African War was a confused struggle of rebels against central governments, of provinces seceding and guerrillas terrorizing villages. There was no battlefront, no organized confrontation of uniformed armies. The Peace Enforcers reacted where they could, devastated armed concentrations where they could find them. But the Enforcers’ numbers were few, and the blood-maddened fighting forces who made war on each other were legion. The carnage went on, mindlessly, it seemed.
“Too many young men,” said the colonel to Stoner. “It was a mistake to give these people the means to select the sex of their offspring. They opt for boys over girls, always.”
“That hasn’t happened in Europe or the Americas,” Stoner pointed out. “Or in Asia. Even in your own India…”
“We are members of a high civilization! Our religious teachings prevent us from tampering with the natural order of births. Even among a warrior race such as we Sikhs, we know better than to select a huge oversupply of male children.”
“But here in Africa…”
“They are villagers. Primitives. Still tied to the land, still an agricultural society.”
“So they pick boys whenever they have the choice,” Stoner said, “and end up with armies of young men who have no jobs and nowhere to go.”