The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Thank you,” Calla said, happy to display her gratitude, though she was afraid this only confused them. They could see that Valk was more important to her than other considerations, even patriotism. They could not see why, because Calla was confused about that herself. Calla fetched the chair and looked for Valk.

  And there he was, in the last bed in the row, a curtain partially pulled around him for privacy. He’d been like this the first time she’d seen him, lying on a thin hospital mattress, well-muscled arms at his sides, his face lined with the worries of a dream. More lines now, perhaps, but he was one of those men who was aging into a rather heart-stopping rough handsomeness. At least she thought so. He would laugh at her thought, then wrinkle his brow and ask her if she was thinking true.

  An IV fed into his arm, a blanket lay pulled over his stomach, but it didn’t completely hide the bandage. He’d had abdominal surgery. Before settling in, she checked the chart hanging on a clipboard at the foot of the bed. She’d never really learned to read Gaantish, but could read medical charts from when she was at Ovorton and they’d put her to work. Injuries: Internal bleeding, repaired. Shrapnel in the gut. He’d been cleaned and patched up, but a touch of septicemia had set in. He was recovering well, but had been restricted to bed rest in the ward, under observation, because past experience showed that he could not be trusted to rest without close supervision. He was under mild sedation to assist in keeping him still. So yes, this was Valk.

  She settled in to wait for him to wake up.

  * * *

  “Calla. Calla. Hey.”

  She woke at her name, shook dreams and worries away, and opened her eyes to see Valk looking back. He must have been terribly weak—he only turned his head. Didn’t even try to sit up.

  He was smiling. He said something too quickly and softly for her to catch.

  “My Gaantish is rusty, Major.” She was surprised at the relief she felt. In her worst imaginings, he didn’t recognize her.

  “I’ll always recognize you,” he said, slowly this time. He switched to Enithi, “I said, this is like the first time I saw you, in a chair near my bed.”

  She felt her own smile dawn. “I wasn’t asleep then. I should know better than to fall asleep around you people.”

  “They tell me the cease-fire is holding. The treaty is done. It must be, if you’re here.”

  “The treaty isn’t done but the peace is holding. My diplomatic pass to see you only took a week to process.”

  “Soon we’ll have tourists running back and forth.”

  “Then what’ll they do with us?”

  His smile was comforting. It meant the bad old days really were done. If he could hope, anyone could hope. And just like that, his smile thinned, or became thoughtful, or something. She couldn’t tell what he was thinking. Never could, and usually it didn’t bother her.

  She said, “They—people have been very polite to me here.”

  “Good. Then I will not need to have words with anyone. Calla—thank you for coming. I’d have come to find you, if I’d been able.”

  “I worried when you told me where you were.”

  “I have been rather worried myself.”

  His telegram had said only two things: I would like to see you, and Bring the game if you can. A very strange message at a very strange time. Strange to anyone except her, anyway. It made perfect sense to her. She had explained it to the visa people and passport department and military attachés like this: We have a history. He had been her prisoner, then she had been his, and they had made a promise that if peace ever came they would finish the game they had started. If they finished the game it meant the peace would last.

  Calla suspected that none of the Enithi officials who reviewed her request knew what to make of it, but it seemed so weird, and they were so curious, they approved it. On the Gaantish side, Valk was enough of a war hero that they didn’t dare deny the request. Out of such happenstances was a peace constructed.

  She looked around—there was a bedside table on wheels that could be pulled over for meals and exams and such. Drawing the chess set from her bag, she set it on the table.

  “Ah,” Valk said. He started to sit up.

  “No.” She touched his shoulder, keeping him in place with as strong a thought as she could manage. This made him grin. “There’s got to be some way to raise the bed.”

  She’d moved to the front of the bed to start poking around when one of the nurses came running over. “Here, I’ll do that,” he said quickly.

  Calla stepped out of his way with a wry look. Gaantish hospitals didn’t have buzzers for nurses. It had driven her rather mad, back in the day. In short order, the man had the bed propped up and Valk resting upright. He seemed more himself, then.

  The chess set opened into the game board, painted in black and white alternating squares, and a little tray that slid out held all the pieces, stylized carvings in stained wood. Valk leaned forward, anticipation in his gaze. “I haven’t even seen anything like this since we played back at Ovorton.”

  Gaant did not have chess. They did not have any games at all that required strategy or bluffing. There was no point. Instead, they played games based on chance—dice rolls and drawn cards—or balance, pulling a single wooden block out of a stack of blocks, for example. And they never cheated.

  But Calla had taught Valk chess and developed a system for playing against him. Only someone from Enith would have thought of it. The two countries had approached the war much the same way.

  “I’m rusty as well. We’ll be on even footing.”

  Valk laughed. They’d never been on even footing and they both knew it. But they both compensated, so it all worked out.

  “I made a note of where the last game left off. Or would you rather start a new one?”

  “Let’s finish the last.” He might have said it because she was thinking it, too.

  She arranged the pieces the way they had been, and reminded herself how the game had gone so far. There was a lot to recall. She didn’t remember some of the details, but given the rules and given the pieces, she only had so many choices of what to do next. She considered them all.

  “It was your move, I think,” she said.

  He studied her rather than the board. The Gaantish didn’t have to see someone to see their thoughts—a blind Gaant was still telepathic. But looking was polite, as in any conversation. And it was intimidating, in an interrogation. This idea that they could see through you. Enithi soldiers told stories about how when a Gaantish person read your mind, it hurt. That they could inflict pain. This wasn’t true. Gaant encouraged the stories anyway, along with the ones about how any one of them could see the thoughts of every person in the world, when they couldn’t see much past the walls of a given room.

  Valk was going to decide, by seeing her thoughts, what move he ought to make, what move she hoped he would, based on her knowledge and experience. He would try to deduce for himself the best choice. And then he would know, almost as soon as she did herself, how she would counter. She kept her expression still, as if that mattered. He moved a piece, and she saw her thoughts reflected back at her—it was just what she would have done, if the board had been reversed.

  Next came her turn, and it was no good staring at the board, analyzing the rooks and pawns and playing out future moves in her mind. All such planning would betray her here. So, almost without looking, almost without thought, she reached, put her hand on a piece—any piece, it hardly mattered—and moved it. A bishop this time, and she only moved one square, and yet it was as if a bit of chaos had descended on the board and disrupted everything. No sane chess player would have made that move, and she herself had to pause and consider what she’d done, what new lines of play existed, and how she could possibly go forward from here.

  But, and this was the point, the telepathic Valk had not been expecting what she’d just done.

  Playing at random was no way to play chess, and she was sure her old teachers were turning in their
graves. Unless, she would explain to them, you’re playing with a Gaantish commander. Then the joy in the game became watching him squirm.

  “I am glad you are enjoying this,” Valk said.

  “I am. Are you?”

  “I am,” he said, looking at her. “This gives me hope.”

  She had traveled here because she had nothing left. Because she was unhappy. Because her whole life had been spent in this uniform, for all the pain it had brought her, so what did she do now? She hadn’t had an answer until Valk sent that telegram.

  And now he was frowning. She’d been able to keep up a good front before this.

  “We are all of us wounded,” he said softly.

  “It’s your move.”

  He chose his piece, a pawn, a completely different move than the one she’d been thinking of, which made her next choices more interesting. This time, she took the correct one, the one she’d do if she’d been playing seriously.

  “This isn’t serious?” he asked.

  “I’m never serious.” Which he’d know was a lie, but he smiled anyway.

  * * *

  She’d taught him to play when she was his prisoner, but he asked to learn because of what he’d seen when he was her prisoner. She’d had a game running in the prison ward with one of the other nurses. They’d slip in plays between their rounds, in odd down moments, to clear their minds and pass the time. This job wasn’t real nursing, when all they had to do was administer medications, make sure no one had allergies or bad reactions to the drugs, and keep their patients muzzy-headed. Their board had been set up in Valk’s ward that day. Calla had been grinning because her opponent was about to lose, and he was studying the board with furrowed brow and deep concentration, looking for a way out.

  A voice had said, “Hey. Hey. You.” He might have been speaking either Enithi or Gaantish. Hard to tell with so few words. Their handsome prisoner was waking up, calling for their attention. Because it wasn’t her turn, Calla had been the one to jump up and get her kit. They’d had trouble getting the dosage right on Valk; he had a high tolerance for the stuff. But they couldn’t have him reading minds, so she made a mark on his chart and injected more into his IV lead.

  “No,” he’d protested, watching the syringe with a helpless panic. “No, please, I just want to talk—” He spoke very good Enithi.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she really was. “We’ve got to keep you under. It’s better, really. I know you understand.”

  And he did, or at least he’d see what she understood, that it wasn’t just about keeping information from him. It also kept the Gaantish prisoners safe, when otherwise they’d be outnumbered and battered by hostile thoughts. He still looked very unhappy as he sank back against the bed and his eyelids shut inexorably. As if something fragile had slipped out of his hand.

  “Poor things,” Calla said, brushing a bit of lint off the man’s forehead.

  “You’re very weird, Cal,” her chess partner said, finally making his move. “They’re Gaantish. You pity them?”

  “I just think it must be hard, being so far from home in a place like this.”

  She found out later that Valk hadn’t quite been asleep through all that.

  * * *

  Valk made his next move and winced, just as a nurse came over with a hypodermic syringe and vial on a tray, sensing his pain before he even knew it was there.

  “No,” Valk said, putting up a hand before the nurse could set the tray down.

  “You’re in pain; this will help you rest,” he said.

  “But Technician Belan is here.”

  “Y-yes sir.” The man went away without administering the sedative.

  So much conversation didn’t need to be spoken when the participants could read each other’s minds. They would only say aloud the conclusion they had come to, or the polite niceties that opened and closed conversations. The rest was silent. Back at Ovorton it had often left her reeling, when she was meant to be working with a patient and two nearby doctors came to a decision, only ten percent of which had been spoken out loud, and they stared at her like she was some idiot child when she didn’t understand. She had learned to take delight in saying out loud, forcefully, “You have to tell me what you want me to do.” They’d often be frustrated with her, but it served them right. They could always send her back to the prisoner barracks. But they didn’t; they didn’t have enough nurses as it was. She had accepted an offer to trade the freedom of the rest of her unit for her skills—send the others home in a prisoner swap and she would work as a nurse for the Gaantish infirmary. They trusted her in the position because they would always know if she meant ill. Staying had been harder than she expected.

  The nurse lingered near the game. It made Calla just a little bit nervous, like those days at the camp, surrounded by telepaths, and she the only person who hadn’t brought a spear to the war.

  “This is a very complicated game,” the nurse observed, and that made Calla smile. That was why Valk told her he wanted to learn—it was very complicated. The thoughts people thought while playing it were methodical, yet rich.

  “It is,” Valk said.

  “May I watch?” the nurse asked.

  Valk looked to Calla to answer, and she said, “Yes, you may.”

  * * *

  Enithi troops told awful stories about what it must be like in Gaantish prisoner camps. There’d be no privacy, no secrets. The guards would know everything about your fears and weaknesses, they could design tortures to your exact specifications, they could bribe you with the one thing that would make you break. No worse fate than being captured by Gaant and put in one of their camps.

  In fact, it worked the other way around. The camps were nightmares for the guards, who spent all day surrounded by a thousand minds who were terrified, furious, hurt, lonely, angry, and depressed.

  As a matter of etiquette, Gaantish people learned—the way that small children learned not to take off their pants and run around naked just anywhere—to guard their thoughts. To keep them close. To keep them calm, so they didn’t disrupt those around them. If they often seemed expressionless or unemotional, this was actually politeness, as Calla learned.

  To the Gaantish, Enithi prisoners were very, very loud. The guards working the camps got hazard pay. They didn’t, in fact, torture their prisoners at all. First, they didn’t need to. Second, they wouldn’t have been able to stand it.

  When her unit had been captured, processed, and sent to the camp, she had been astonished because Lieutenant Valk Larn—now Captain Larn—had been one of the officers in charge. Her shock of recognition caused every telepath in the room to stop and look at her. They would have turned back to their work soon enough—that she and Valk had encountered each other before was coincidental but maybe not remarkable. What made them continue staring: Calla revealed affection for Valk. Not outwardly, so much. She stood with the rest of her unit, stripped down to shirts and trousers, wrists hobbled, hungry and sleep-deprived. No, outwardly she’d been amazed, seeing her former patient upright and in uniform, steely and commanding as any recruitment poster. Her expression looked shocked enough that her sergeant at her side had dared to whisper, “Cal, are you okay?”

  The Gaantish never asked each other how they were doing. She’d learned that back in the ward, looking after Valk. During his brief lucid moments she’d ask him how he was feeling, and he’d stare at her like she was playing a joke on him.

  The emotion of affection was plain to those who could see it—everyone in a Gaantish uniform. And she was, under all that week’s pain and discomfort and unhappiness and uncertainty, almost happy to see him. She was the kind of nurse who had a favorite patient, even in a prison hospital.

  He couldn’t not see her, not with every Gaantish soldier staring at her, then looking at him to see his reaction. She couldn’t hide her astonishment; she didn’t want to and didn’t try. She did realize this likely made the meeting harder for him than it did for her—whatever he thought of her,
his staff would all see it. She didn’t know what he thought of her.

  He merely nodded and waved the group on to continue processing, and they were washed down, given lumpy brown jumpsuits and assigned quarters. Later, she suspected he’d been the one to arrange the deal that won the rest of her unit’s freedom.

  Calla had always thought it strange that people asked if prisoners were treated “well.” “Were you treated well?” No, she thought. The doors were locked. The guards all had guns. Did it matter if they had food and blankets, a roof? The food was strange, the blankets left over from what the army used. Instead she answered, “We were not treated badly.” They were treated appropriately. War necessitated prisoners, since the alternative was slaughtering everyone on both sides, which both sides agreed was not ideal. You treated prisoners appropriately so that your own people would be treated appropriately in turn. That meant different things.

  She was treated appropriately, which made it odd the day, only a week or so into her captivity, that Valk had her brought to his office alone. It wasn’t so odd that the guards hesitated or looked at either of them strangely. But she had been afraid. Helpless, afraid, everything. They left the binders around her wrists. All she could do was stand there before his desk and wonder if he was the kind of man who enjoyed hurting his prisoners, who enjoyed minds in pain. She wouldn’t have thought so, but she’d only ever known him when he was asleep and the brief waking moments when he seemed so lost and confused she couldn’t help but pity him, so what did she know?

  “I won’t hurt you,” he said, after a long moment when he simply watched her, and she tried to hide her shaking. “You can believe me.” He asked her to sit. She remained standing, as he must have known she would.

  “You were one of the nurses at the hospital. I remember you.”

  “Not many remember their stays there.”

  “I remember you. You were kind.”

  She couldn’t not be. It was why she’d become a nurse. She didn’t have to say anything.

  “You were playing a game. I remember—two people. A board. You enjoyed it very much. You had the most interesting thoughts.”