Enemy Papers

by Barry B. Longyear

  Zenak Abi wipes a hand over the top of its head, sighs, and says, “We have established, Yazi Ro, that I am insane, traitorous, and terribly ancient, However, at this pace we will both be too old to retain a coherent thought by the time you get to your point.”

  I halt my pacing and look down at the Jetah. “Then, here it is. I have heard two things in the camps. First, it is said that when Zenak Abi studied the paths it did not see all paths locking Amadeen into this war. It is said you found a talma to peace.”

  Abi rubbed its chin and held up a single finger. “Half true. All paths do not prove this war necessary. I proved no path to peace, however.”

  “There must be a way! There must be an end to this.”

  “I would like to think so, young one,” Abi says in a mocking tone. “Still, there is nothing that raises your fervent must to the level of scientific possibility.”

  I see Abi’s amused face and ask myself: is the world nothing but bloody games played with pain-filled living pieces? My frustration overcomes any pretense at old-fashioned courtesy. “You and your blue stripe have had thirty-two years, you old wheeze! What have you been doing all this time?” I find our faces only a handlength apart and feel something poking me in my middle. I look down and Abi is holding one of the human projectile hand guns. It is pointed at me. I stand and take a step back.

  “Sit down in the chair, Yazi Ro. You will find it much more comfortable.” I do not move, “Very well, I will find it more comfortable. Sit!” commands the Jetah, brandishing the pistol. I sit in the chair, my gaze on Abi’s eyes. The Jetah smiles, aims the gun at his own head, and pulls the trigger. A click, and nothing. “Out of ammunition,” it says in apology. “To answer your question, what I have been doing for the past thirty-two years is trying to keep myself and a few friends alive. We’ve spent the decades one step ahead of the agents of the Mavedah, the Amadeen Front, and their unruly siblings hiding in places such as this.”

  “I found you easily enough.”

  Abi smiles and says, “If you will invoke your vast powers of memory, Yazi Ro, you will, I think, recall that it was I who found you.”

  Abi gestures with its gun at the walls of the cave. “As for my work, Yazi Ro, where do I hang my charts? Where are my screens, my computers, my colleagues and assistants, my subspace link to the Talman Kovah? All of this time, young one, you had a better chance at achieving peace than did I.”

  “Peace?” I ask, even more confused.

  Abi nods as it tucks the useless weapon within its jacket. “You could have put down your weapon and stopped killing. That would have decreased the number of dead bodies you have been generating. I couldn’t even do that because I wasn’t killing anyone. What is the second thing you heard?”

  The rumors my comrades would pass among one another as we would sit talking around a faltering glow disk at night. Are they all only words? Audio blips with which we fill time until the next mission? Is this the monster, the thief of victory, of our discussions? “I heard, Zenak Abi, that you know a way through the blockade. You know how I can get off Amadeen.”

  Finally I get the old fool’s attention. It clasps its hands and crosses its legs after the manner of a human. “If I could perform such a miracle, Yazi Ro, where might you go? What would you do? A vacation? Go on rides at a theme park? Perhaps some shopping in Sendievu?”

  The answer came to me as I spoke the words. “I would go to Draco, stand before the Jetai Diea at the Talman Kovah, and demand they find an end to war for this sorry world.”

  “Ah, peace is it? And would you kill to achieve this, little Niagat?”

  Again I feel the heat coming to my face. “I am not here to trade myths from The Talman, you old…one. What I will do to achieve peace is my concern alone.”

  Again Zenak Abi mocks me with its smile. “There are many who would be clean of Amadeen, Yazi Ro. Parents, both human and Drac, who want their children safe. There are the wounded who cannot get the treatment they need. There are all of those who are starving, multitudes who no longer want to wallow in death. Supposing that I can perform this miracle, why should I ignore their pleas in favor of yours?”

  “Zenak Abi, the danger, the wounding, the starvation will all end come the peace.”

  “Come the peace.” Abi stands and walks until it is standing over me, its face no longer mocking. “And you, young killer, the blood of humans still on your hands, are you the one to convince the Ovjetah and the gentle masters of the Talman Kovah that they are mistaken? That their years of study, training, and experience are for nothing? That they simply overlooked a path that you in your youthful ignorance and brash pride have found? The Talman Kovah advises the political, business, military, scientific, and philosophical institutions of hundreds of worlds, and here comes a ragged Mavedah killer, barely an adult but bereft of adulthood, to demand that they accomplish that which they already know to be impossible. Tell me, Yazi Ro, why they would even allow you within sight of the front entrance?”

  I turn my face away from the Jetah and look into a deep shadow. A thousand times I am the fool. In the center of my being there is this conviction that the horror on Amadeen is so wrong, in itself that should force a path into existence, a talma along which Amadeen can achieve peace.

  A thousand times a fool.

  On the edge of my lips is the word “unfair.” This war, the horrors, the impossibility of peace, unfair, unfair. I do not say this aloud, for doing so would invite another little homily from The Talman. I do not remember the story or from which koda it comes. Something about one of Maltak Di’s little games. One of the lessons of the story, though, is that a belief in fairness is evidence of either brain damage or stupidity.

  Tears again. Perhaps there is no end to this. My parent, my friends, my comrades are dead, in a parade of corpses with many regiments yet to follow. Do I rejoin the parade or hide like Zenak Abi on some mountaintop? Can I live knowing so many are dead, so many are dying?

  My ghosts would sing too loudly in a place as peaceful as this cave. It is from the humans we learned about ghosts. No kovah, steeped in scientific path detection, would accept a fancy such as ghosts. Yet I have heard them. I see them now. I care for no one’s opinions on what I know until that one has carried its own blade on Amadeen.

  Abi places its hand upon my head, and it is warm. “Lean back,” he commands. “Lean back and relax. I’ll introduce you to a little something I picked up from a human.”

  I lean away from the Jetah’s hand and frown at its smiling face. “What are you going to do?”

  “There is a problem with you. Perhaps I can help.”

  “A disease?” I ask.

  Abi laughs, thinks for a moment, then says, “Perhaps something worse, Ro. First, I am going to relax you. Next I may find a way for you to achieve your greatest wish. Somewhere along this path I will probably get you killed. Now lie back and relax.”

  Peace or death. Either one is more attractive than the present. I lean back, close my eyes, and allow the soft strokes of the Jetah’s hand to lull me toward a strange sleep. Long before I get there I hear a strange noise: a motion of leather across paving stones. I try to move, to place myself at the ready, but I cannot move. I am helpless before my own thoughts.

  FIVE

  There is a gray light that becomes a mist swirling around the trunks of trees, reaching upward toward me. It surrounds me and the features of everything fade into oblivion. I try to call out, but there is no sound. There is a smudge of yellow deep within the mist. I stare at it and watch it grow until a horizon appears, the outlines of humble dwellings etched against the clouds.

  I am back in Gitoh, watching as the blades of green light reach to burn another human gunship from the sky. The grating sounds of the alarm blocks seem to vibrate my bones. “Ro! Ni tean! Ro!” My parent rushes into the room and jerks me away from the window. In the center of our home, Yazi Avo cries and speaks angrily to me. It pulls me to its chest, squeezes me tightly, and nuzzles my neck. “I am sor
ry, Ro. I was so frightened. Please listen. When the alarm blocks sound, you must stay away from the windows and doors.”

  I tell Avo that I am all right and nothing will happen to me. The fighting was far off. I will not get hurt in my own home. Later I learn that my friend Idoh watched almost the entire battle from its window before a stray pulse from the gunship turned Idoh into pulp.

  There are moments with my parent, reading and reading again our few books, an embrace, sleeping safe in the arms of Yazi Avo. On the edge of the new spring comes the Battle of Gitoh, so many Amadeen Front soldiers cutting through us because only a few Mavedah were there to serve the air defense weapons. The smoke, screams, and flames. The silence. Pushing Avo’s lifeless body off my own. Only a charred corner from one of Avo’s books remains.

  I cry my cries and I cannot understand how anyone, Drac or human, can listen and not take pity on the children. Long after my cries end, a soldier of the Mavedah comes and takes me to a track wagon. There are other children in it. All of us are alone. When the track begins moving, taking us out of Gitoh, no one says anything to us. A few of us huddle together and cry. Most of us, though, sit watching, waiting for the next horror, hoping the next time to be better prepared.

  The kovah for lineless children, the Selector before us. The terrors of training, the endless battles, fights, attacks, ambushes, maimed and dead comrades, the few I know and the multitude I do not. I carry my own knife into the cries of human children. I see them, their large dark eyes filled with tears, their faces twisted with grief. They cry their cries and they cannot understand how anyone, human or Drac, can listen and not take pity on the children. There is nothing to be served by trying to explain to them. Those who live will have to learn for themselves.

  There is a broken doll in the dust before the burning fortifications at Butaan Ji. A little girl a step away, her dead eyes staring up at the sun. A man sitting next to her, singing strange words in a cracked voice. The pain in the song’s words need no translator. He turns his head and looks at me, his eyes wet, pleading, his voice forcing out the song. He is not wounded and he has a weapon. The weapon remains on his lap. I lift my knife and give him a splash through his chest. He falls to the ground dead and I wonder why he did not try to save himself. In my mind I still hear the song he sang.

  The night mission to attack Steel Town on the Dorado, looking down from the exit bay of the ancient combat flyer. The surface below is covered with clouds. The clouds illuminate here, there, and here again as explosions below make the clouds glow with whites, oranges, and reds. In the distance there are other glows, and still more. Wherever I look down upon Amadeen it is exploding or burning, and we are to go into that. As we begin our dive, Pina reaches out and holds my hand. The nameless commander of another unit sees us and looks away, something guilty in its eyes.

  The woman at the bunker and her Drac infant. A field of death and destruction, a killer of the Mavedah who can no longer kill for a continuation of this madness. The infant’s name is Suritok Nan. The woman did not tell me her name. I let her go, no longer able to see what I had to see to kill. What will her little Drac infant become? Perhaps it will be the key to a future peace between the Dracs and humans. Perhaps it will invent a potion that renders all species into the same family. More than likely it and its human mother were killed within moments of leaving me.

  In my center I see things of mine. Love is a small thing. Pity smaller still. Hate is larger. It is a mountain, its crest black against a sky of fire. Towering above it, though, is this thing that makes me sick, the thing that makes me stupid, less than an adult. It is a lumbering, clumsy, raging monster bellowing, “Look at the suffering, the waste! Things should not be this way! It is unfair!”

  This is what makes Yazi Ro a fool. If I get to Draco and stand before the Talman Kovah, putting this planet’s pain on display for the masters, is there anything I can achieve other than laughter or impatience? I will only howl at reality and thrash myself bloody upon its disinterested plane.

  What can there be left, then, for Amadeen?

  The mist clears, returning me to Zenak Abi’s cave. There is an ache in my eyes, the taste of dust in my mouth. There is a man before me. He is short and very serious-looking. He stands next to the Jetah, both of them warming themselves at the fire. They are discussing me, yet their words come from very far away.

  A feeling fills my throat. The human. There is something very wrong with Zenak Abi talking with a human as if they are old comrades. The Jetah holds a small package. The human holds a smaller package.

  I sit up as the wrongness of what I see becomes clear. The human is standing there without guilt. He is not cowed, apologetic, filled with remorse, wary, nothing to suggest the weight of the crimes he carries or the awful debt he owes to the Dracs in the chamber.

  A part of my intellect knows that it is possible that this particular human might be innocent of any crimes. This particle of reason, though, cannot weigh against the universe of my hate. And still they talk. The sense of their words has to do with sending Yazi Ro―me―to Draco. There must be a confusion, but they repeat it: Yazi Ro to go to Draco.

  “Why?” I try to ask, but my word is slurred, sounding like the whimper of one of the dogs the humans brought to Amadeen. Abi faces me,

  “Eh, you are back on Amadeen, are you? Take a few deep breaths, Ro. Work your muscles. You’ve had a sedative.”

  “Sed―?” I push myself up from the chair, my arms and legs strangely heavy and slow to respond to my commands. “What sedative?” I grasp the back of the chair as the chamber seems to whirl. The feeling passes and soon my head clears.

  “This should be plenty,” says the man holding the smaller package, a thick envelope. “The price has been going down as the demand falls off.”

  “Yazi Ro,” says Abi, “this is Thomas. He is going to arrange for you to go to Draco.”

  The world takes on another spin and I drop back into the chair. “Draco?” The things that went through my mind are still with me. “Why?” I gesture with suddenly numb fingers toward my head. “This thing that happened, the dream, it showed me what a useless gesture going to Draco is.” I look around feeling that perhaps my head is none too clear. “What happened to me?” I point at the brown thing with the serious expression. “Why this human? What is he doing here?”

  “In answer to one of your questions,” says the human, “it’s called mind fusion. In an electro-chemical sense Zenak Abi’s brain and yours became one for a moment.” He removes a small silver disk from his jacket pocket and shows it to me. “This is the gadget. It’s a neural field amplifier.” Replacing the disk in his pocket, he says, “The sedative should wear off in a couple of minutes.”

  “I took nothing. No sedative.”

  Abi holds up its hand. “I applied it when I stroked your head.”

  I should feel outraged but I am too tired, too confused. The Jetah of peace carries a gun and drugs those who seek its help. When I want to go to Draco, I cannot. Now that there is no purpose, I can. Perhaps this is a test; some sort of examination to see if I am worthy to join their cult. If I pass the test I get to join some secret society of the fungus-brained.

  Abi and the human shake hands and upon the completion of the human ritual, Thomas leaves the chamber. The Jetah adds some wood to the small fire and speaks to me. “I apologize, Yazi Ro, for administering the sedative without your permission. It was necessary for me to see as you see. I needed to know if I can trust you.”

  “Trust me? For what? A voyage to Draco? There is no reason to go to Draco.” I hold my hands to my head. “Is that not the lesson in this dream you and the human thrust into my brain?”

  Abi turns from the fire and studies me for moment. As the Jetah thinks, it walks to its chair and sits. Abi clasps its hands together and leans forward, resting its elbows on its lap. “We put nothing into your head, Ro. The process does allow you to have singularly instructive dreams, however. What the amplifier allowed me to do was to take y
our neural event field and place it within mine. It enabled me to remember, see, and feel as do you. As to your question, it is pointless for you to go before the Talman Kovah and threaten to throw a tantrum if they don’t discover a path to peace. That is what your own brain told itself, and I agree.”

  “Then what?” I ask, gesturing with my hand toward the entrance through which the human withdrew. “Why would you and this friend of yours have me go to Draco?”

  Abi looks at the package in its hands. “There is a chance, Ro. I do not have the means to ascertain how slim a chance it is, but there is a chance for this peace you want. Before the quarantine cut me off from communication with the Talman Kovah, my work showed that there are event chains that are not proven to end in war.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know enough about anything to see any light in that.”

  The Jetah mentally pushes aside a mountain of explanation with a wave of its hand. “There is a chance for this peace. Bring my work to the kovah and suggest they consider it in the light of the new book of the Talman accepted by the Three Hundred and Eleventh Jetai Diea. There is a chance.”

  “The Talman? A new book?” I almost wanted to laugh. I waved my golden cube at the Jetah. “Here you are excited over one more myth being tossed on the pile. I thought I was a fool until I met you, you old wind.”

  Zenak Abi leans back in its chair and studies me for a moment. “This myth just might interest you, young one. It was written about us―those on Amadeen―and it was written by a human.”

  I look down at the golden cube of pages that I wear because of a weakness: a vague attachment to my parent. The Talman, book of paths, the stories of Dracs from the advent of a god of fire eleven thousand years ago to what? The Jetai Diea, the most brilliant Talman scholars and scientists that exist, have added a new story to The Talman. A story written by a human. On proper Drac worlds, where rites of adulthood still are conducted, the young have to memorize it and be able to recite this new koda as part of the rites of adulthood. What does a human have to say that is worth memorizing by countless future generations of Dracs?