by John M. Ford
“Yes,” van Diemen said, uncertain for only an [134] instant. “Well. We’ll be returning to our car now; there’s still a lot to do and not much time to do it in. Good night, Captain ... Mr. Ambassador.”
“Good night,” Dr. Tagore said. Krenn bowed slightly. The Admiral went out. “Peace,” the Colonel said, and followed.
When the door had closed, Krenn said in klingonaase, “Peace? Was that sarcasm? At you?”
“Not at all. It’s a common greeting, or exit line. I see your companion has retired; do you need to rest?”
“Not for some time.”
“Your day is longer than ours?”
“Somewhat.”
Dr. Tagore smiled. “I ask only as one who expects to live there soon. Shall we sit and talk, then? You said you drank coffee, so I brought some.”
Krenn turned the monitor off as Dr. Tagore filled cups. When they were settled, Dr. Tagore said, “You are vestai-Rustazh. Is the line a large one?”
“No. ... Only I am this line.”
“Then you are a founder.”
“You have authentic knowledge,” Krenn said, surprised that the Human had so quickly drawn the conclusion.
“There are reports, mostly from Vulcan. And there are books and tapes ... they filter from your space into ours, in Orion loot and Rigellian trading hulls. I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but a spy was captured on Argelius III, and the one had dozens of books and tapes, a closetful of them. Starfleet Intelligence was convinced the one was using them in an elaborate code scheme, and as the nearest available reader of klingonaase I was called in to read the lot.”
Krenn sipped the kafei—he found he was actually coming to like the stuff—and wondered that the Ambassador should so casually reveal his connection with the Intelligence service. “Were they a code?”
“Not at all. They were solely for his pleasure. As he said, as soon as the matter was found: but Intelligence [135] did not believe this. I told them, once he was discovered, and no longer a spy, the one would say nothing, or tell the truth. But I was not believed, either.”
Perhaps that was the point of the story: indirectly, the Human was discounting his tie to Intelligence.
Dr. Tagore said, “I’m pleased to find my knowledge is valid. There are some famous fictions about our history that I should not like an alien ambassador to take learning from. ... Though I confess I have become quite fond of Battlecruiser Vengeance. Is it still in production?”
“Yes,” Krenn said, trying not to choke.
“I was correct that you are founder of a line, Captain; do you have a sole consort, or many?”
At least this one asked in private, as one with a concern. “I have no consort at this time.”
Dr. Tagore paused, said, “I see. My own wife—” he used the Human word—“is dead.”
Krenn waited: every Human seemed to have a close relative killed by marauding Klingons.
“A disease of the nerve sheaths,” Dr. Tagore said, looking away from Krenn. “Quaker’s neuromyelitis. There is a chemical therapy, but one patient in twenty cannot tolerate it; that one dies in a few years.” The Human looked at Krenn, said in a very mild, almost apologetic tone, “I am told the symptoms are similar to the effects of your agonizer device. ... “In Human he added, “I’m sorry; I meant nothing by that.”
That made still another inflection of the word sorry.
Dr. Tagore said, still in Federation Standard, “I know your race has no tradition of ghosts or revenants, no rites for the dead. Ours has too many of them. I say this to explain certain of our actions, that might otherwise seem strange. I have a theory ... but this isn’t the time for it. Please, let’s find another subject.”
Krenn waited a moment. The Human’s eyes seemed even brighter than before, yet the face was older, more crumpled. At once Krenn also wished to change the subject. He pointed at the darkened monitor. “Those [136] people ... who hate us ... how many of them are there?”
“Enough,” Dr. Tagore said. “Always enough. The Klingon Empire has been a very convenient devil, these twenty-odd years. Whenever a ship vanishes in that general direction of space, someone claims, with or without evidence, that it’s ‘fallen prey to the savage Klingon.’ All too often the claim is made on the floor of the Solar Senate, or even the whole Federation.” He sighed. “From the Galactic Bermuda Triangle to the Klingon Twilight Zone.”
Krenn said, “Twenty odd years?”
“An idiom, pardon. In klingonaase, twenty-plus—which is also an idiom of ours; I must be sure to use that one from now on. First contact with the komerex klingon was, if I can unwind it from the Stardate system, twenty-two Standard years ago. That would be twenty years Klingon standard, if I have the ratios right.”
“Yes, that is the difference as I understand it.” Krenn was not really thinking about year lengths, but the fact that the first Federation ships had been taken by the Empire fully thirty years ago: thirty Klingon years. Obviously no prize had reported its fate for a long time.
“There was a novel, written long before we had starflight and even longer before warp drive,” Dr. Tagore was saying, “in which the accidental loss of some starships coincided with first contact with nonhumans—who had also lost ships. Both sides resorted to the communication that needs no translation. The war, in the story, lasted a thousand years.”
“A war of a thousand years ... ?” Krenn said. It was an astonishing idea, still more so from a Human. Yet Krenn could, thinking on it, see how it might be conducted: dynastic lines ruling over lines of battle, fifty generations born and dying in the pursuit of a single glory. A war like that would mark worlds deeply, so that if, a million years after, when all the warriors [137] were dust, a new race should come upon the space, they would know what had happened there.
Dr. Tagore said, “Perhaps we will not take so long to communicate. I do not have a thousand years left in this life, and I fear I have about used my karma up.”
“I do not know the word.”
“Neither do I.” The Human was smiling whitely; his teeth, Krenn saw, were square-cornered, without points. “At least, not so I could explain it properly, and that’s the same thing. My enlightenment is all of the immanent sort.”
Krenn wondered at this little Human, who seemed to think he could dismiss an idea as potent as a war of a thousand years in a single moment ... who would stand between two Empires, like waves of the sea, or colliding stars, and hold them apart. It was absurd; it was silly; perhaps it was insane.
Krenn thought then of the Willall, and the Tellarites, all hollow great words ... but no, he did not think this Dr. Tagore was kuve. He drank more kafei; it had gone cold. It was not good cold. Dr. Tagore saw Krenn’s grimace, tasted his own drink, said, “I see what you mean. I’ll get another pot.”
When the Human had gone, Krenn turned on the monitor again, set it to the channel that gave continuous news reports. There was a report of an industrial accident, a display of new clothing by “famous designers” that was little short of bewildering, and then more tape of the rioters. They were breaking windows of buildings, which seemed strange, since Krenn and Akhil were the only Klingons on Earth—at least, the only Klingons known to be on Earth. A group burned a wooden model of a D4 cruiser. Krenn laughed; no one had told him Humans believed in primitive magic.
Then the picture changed again, to two streaks of light in darkness, and Krenn leaped to the train window; slowly, he opened a curtain.
The train’s guideway was elevated on castrock piers, twenty to twenty-five meters above the ground: below, [138] as the train flashed by, were long dashes of light. With difficulty Krenn resolved them into Humans with torches, electric and flaming and cold chemical. He tried to calculate their number: Akhil said the train covered five thousand meters every local minute. Krenn looked at his communicator’s time display.
Krenn turned as the door opened. It was Akhil. He did not look rested at all. He pointed at the glass. “I saw them from the window. They’ve be
en with us for at least an hour.”
“How many, do you figure?”
“A hundred thousand, probably more. I suppose they could be relaying a smaller group, behind us to ahead; a flier could just outrun this train. But what I’m really thinking is what a couple of good shots into one of those support towers would do.”
“That is also Colonel Rabinowich’s thought,” Dr. Tagore said from the doorway. “She does tell me that the construction is very strong, and hand weapons would not serve, and they have sensor vehicles searching for any larger weapons.” In a smaller voice he said “She also says that a certain number of the demonstrators are actually her troops, disguised.”
“Kai Rabinowich,” Krenn said, impressed.
“Yes,” Dr. Tagore said, speaking klingonaase again. “Her family have been soldiers for more than ten generations, and I think your praise would please her, if it were properly explained.” He looked down at the torches streaming by. “It is the explanations which are hard ... especially in a culture which knows no difference between a machine translation and an understanding of language.”
He paused, filled two cups with kafei, then a third for Akhil, who seemed genuinely glad to have it. Dr. Tagore said, “You have noticed, perhaps, that in Fed-Standard klingonaase is pronounced a little strangely?”
“ ‘Klingoneeze,’ ” Akhil said.
[139] Dr. Tagore nodded. “That suffix is common in several of Standard’s root languages, including, dear me, Rigellian Trade Dialect, to turn a nation-name into the nation-language—which itself is a less than wholly useful notion. And so we have Japanese, Terchionese, F’tallgatri’itese, and, when the circuits got the word in their clutches, ‘Klingonese.’ The whole significance of the aase suffix, that the language is the tool for manipulating the embodiment of the klin principle ... all that is lost, in the leap of an electron across an Abramson junction.”
Krenn said, “What do the lights out there mean? The flames? Can you translate those? Or is it your language that needs no translation?”
“They need to say something,” Dr. Tagore said calmly, “but they do not know just what. Not yet.” He went to the monitor, which was showing close views of the chains of Humans, showing their faces, lit by torchlight and searchlight and the flash of the train’s passing. Krenn could see the strong emotions there, and knew that he must be seeing fear, and hate, and pain, because those were the only things he knew that could bend the face so, but he was not at all sure which was which, or what else might be there as well.
“You understand, now,” Dr. Tagore said in klingonaase. “You do not know yet, either, what to say. There must be a little time.”
Krenn said, “And if, in time, they still hate us?” He was aware, even as he spoke, that he said it only to get a little time to think.
Dr. Tagore put his thin-fingered hand across his eyes, as if to hide them from the faces on the screen; but at once he took it away, and looked at Krenn and Akhil. “I said that Colonel Rabinowich’s was a line of warriors. That line is rooted in a hate that ran deeper than blood runs in the liver, that many people of the best intention though could only end in the separations of walls and wire, or in the mass grave. And there were [140] those things. But the walls are down, and the graveyards ... they are remembered, and kept, which is a thing our race does.
“And Admiral van Diemen’s people had their war, too, for hate instead of territory. And the walls, and the graves. But finally the peace. The city of Atlanta, to which we are making a side excursion, was burned to nothing a hundred years before nuclear explosives made it so much less laborious a task. ... And my own ancestors were the second nation of Earth to use a nuclear explosive against an enemy, though not the last, not the last.
“We know what hate is, Captain, and we practice it with great finesse. But sometimes we achieve things in spite of it.”
Akhil said, without force, “But if they want the war?”
“If they do, Commander, I will oppose them. I am a public servant; I am not a servitor.”
Krenn saw Akhil’s eyes flick. He realized that he had failed to take this Human’s measure. And the advantage he had found was—at least with this one—gone: this one could have no concern with being made absurd. He might die—they all might, Krenn thought, as another hundred Human fires flashed by—but silly he would not be.
Wondering if he had now been twice maneuvered into changing the subject, Krenn said, “This diversion ... do you know this person we’re to see? This important person?”
“Maxwell Grandisson III,” Dr. Tagore said, stretching out the syllables. “I know of him, who doesn’t—sorry, Captain—but we’ve never met. I have only once been to Atlanta, and he never leaves the city. Which indirectly answers your indirect question: he is powerful enough that he does not have to leave. If he wishes to see a mountain, the mountain comes to him.” The Human smiled. “Figuratively speaking, of course. [141] Though I do not doubt he has the resources to move mountains. Small ones, at any rate.”
Akhil said, “How much wealth is concentrated with this Human?”
“Enough ... always enough, somehow. But faith is the power that moves mountains, and of that he has access to a great deal more than enough.”
Krenn said, “What does he want from us, then? Trade? Or just the satisfaction of his curiosity?”
“Certainly not the first, and not just the second.” Dr. Tagore hesitated. “Mr. Grandisson is a leader of a large—still growing, I regret to say—movement, spread throughout Human space. This ... movement is not known so much for what it wants, as what it does not want.”
“War?” Krenn said, and then remembered that Dr. Tagore had regretted.
“The stars,” Dr. Tagore said.
The sun was rising behind the city called Atlanta. The entire city seemed to be built of glass and crystal and bright metal, cylindrical columns and truncated pyramids endlessly reflecting one another, all tied together with flying bridges at every level. Morning light colored all the glass a pale red: Krenn thought of Dr. Tagore’s comment, of the city burning. A century before nuclears, the Human said, however long ago that was. It was a Vulcan calculation that a culture’s lifespan was either some fifty years after basic fission was discovered, or else indefinite.
There were still Humans at the base of the guideway as the train hurtled into the city, now holding colored flags instead of torches. Colonel Rabinowich said, “We’ll be going underground a few klicks before the terminal. And an identical train will come out of the southbound pipe. We’d have done it at the Baton Rouge shunt, but there wasn’t time.”
“And the change of course?” Dr. Tagore said.
[142] “Let ’em think we tried to fool ’em, and failed.”
“An excellent strategy,” Krenn said, careful to draw no comparisons with Klingon methods, though any Imperial officer would have hailed the trick. “You honor your craft and your line.” He understood well now which of the leader’s paths she had mastered: the way of greater cunning.
Rabinowich cast a side look at Dr. Tagore, who sat across the dining car, placidly drinking coffee. He had had no sleep, Krenn knew. Admiral van Diemen was in the sleeping car now.
The Colonel said, “Thank you, Captain,” in her customary soft-coarse voice. “That’s more than Starfleet usually gives us dirtballers.”
The terrain rose past the train. Interior lights came on, and then the windows went black, except for flashes of light that were gone before the eye could catch what was illuminated.
“Sit down, please, Captain, Commander,” the Colonel said, going to a seat herself; Dr. Tagore gulped the last of his coffee, held tight to the ceramic cup. “Gravitic braking,” Rabinowich said.
It was not a bad deceleration—certainly nothing like a combat maneuver when the deckplates were already straining—but Krenn was glad of the chair as invisible drag pulled him toward the front of the train.
In less than two local minutes they were at a full stop. Cool blue lights showed a
platform beyond the windows, and more soldiers.
“All out,” Dr. Tagore said lightly, “change here for the Southern Crescent.”
Colonel Rabinowich looked at the Ambassador for a moment, then said, “Your escort to the hotel’s on the platform. We’ll be meeting you at a different platform: right now we’ve got to get the numbers scraped off this train and a different set on. Enjoy your breakfast.”
“You aren’t coming with us?” Krenn said. “Or the Admiral?”
“Or the Ambassador,” Dr. Tagore said.
[143] Rabinowich paused. “You must—no, of course you don’t know. The invitation wasn’t to us. Grandisson doesn’t like Starfleet people.”
“You are not with Starfleet.”
“Never been off Earth, in fact. Max Grandisson doesn’t like me for a reason I thought was extinct until I was twenty-eight years old.” She gave a flat smile. “It goes a long way back. Unto the tenth generation, and then some. Shalom aleichem, Captain Krenn, Commander Akhil.”
“Aleichem shalom,” Krenn said, and as the Colonel’s mouth opened in surprise, and then a grin, Krenn caught Dr. Tagore’s nod in the corner of his eye.
The building was ancient, dull stone among all the bright glass, with new entry steps that led down where it had settled into the earth. The Klingons’ escorts—Humans in plain clothing, driving a vehicle that was like a dozen others on the street—surrounded Krenn and Akhil as all walked briskly inside.
Within, the hotel was a hollow box, balconies lining its interior; the roof, many floors above, was of an age-darkened glass that let only a few shafts of light through. Spindle-shaped lift cars rode up a central black pylon. The lobby was quite empty, and quiet. Bright green plants stood next to dying ones.
All this Krenn saw on the move. Within seconds they were at the glass-walled lifts, which more Humans in plain suits were holding ready; Akhil and half the guards went into one glass capsule, Krenn and the rest into another.
A young Human male in a red and white uniform walked past Krenn’s lift just then, carrying a tray. He looked up. Krenn looked back. The tray fell with a crash Krenn could not hear, as the car moved upward.